Universities & Left Review 7 Autumn 1959

A Look Back At Osborne Graham Martin

"Why should I care?"—Archie Rice in THE ENTERTAINER ask the wrong question. "Osborne is certainly one of the most brilliant of our young writers, but I can't help feel- THE dates of the first productions of Look Back In ing : has he really got it in him to create a complete work Anger and The Entertainer span almost exactly twelve of dramatic art. Scenes, yes, of original power and effec- months: May, 1956, to April, 1957; without question, a tiveness, but that's not quite enough, don't you see? for watershed year. How does Osborne fit in? Does he fit serious artistic consideration. Sociologically fascinating, in? or is his connection with the politics and culture of of course, an angry Coward so to speak. I hope his next that particular annus mirabilis merely chronological? That play really does the trick. I'd like to be convinced." I.e. is the question I want to explore. What follows is not beta-plus-query, and try next year for your alpha. The meant to be a full account of his plays, his other ventures, second view, more subtle than this, is that of the social- or his influence. On the other hand, any account which realist. The principle here was to butter the man up, not ignores this question is likely to miss the mark of his with a faint but with misleading praise. "Osborne is the importance. truly significant writer of our time. His plays reflect the Krushchev's remark about the Hungarian writers ("I'd significant social and political stresses of the contemporary have had a few of them shot") argues at least a serious view scene." Of course, this looks pretty good, the exact opposite of culture; one which may be thought to reflect upon the of the formalist view. Both of them, in fact, nullify, West's philistine indifference to the threat of the pen. But because neither recognises the uniqueness of an artistic the West has Reviewing, a method so much more flexible insight. The formalist escapes into the ambiguous notions and sensitive in its discriminative power, that there is even of "art" over against "sociology"; and the social-realist a certain melancholy beauty about its fine adjustment to entangles the work in the events on which it comments. particular occasions. In the case of the "dangerous" This is the perfect red herring of criticism. A writer's value Osborne, if you put aside the gossip and the slanging, this lies not in the fact but in the nature, above all in the un- elaborate machine fostered two views. The first can be obstructed freshness with which he responds to "the signifi- described as the formalist position. Its principle was to cant social and political stresses of the contemporary 37 scene." That is where he is subversive, where his art affects formance. Qualify the term "folk-art", and recall that the our awareness of ourselves and of the world we live in. music-hall was originally and in its hey-day a working-class What could be more dangerous? We need the weekly creation, and it is only a short step to the view that the reviewers for our own safety. source and inspiration of The Entertainer was The Uses of The real situation, though, is a good deal more insidious. Literacy. Well, the dates allow it (just), and in case this The formalist, the social-realist, are not lackeys of the pros- fact excites a rash ambition in some learned breast, the titute capitalist press, not literary hatchet-men set to work difficulties had better be put as well. by the Home Office. They represent ways of reacting, habi- First, Billy Rice, Archie's father: he is an attractive tual interpretations, rooted so deeply in much thinking figure, but for this thesis, awkward. While he symbolises about art that they confuse both the expression of our the one-time health of music-hall very successfully, he also feelings, and sometimes the very sources of feeling them- brings back other memories of those good old Edwardian selves. That is why I want to introduce these remarks days: jingoism, xenophobia, "the Empire" (satirised by about Osborne's plays by some comparatively graceless Archie, what's more), a general view of the period that demolition work. The social-realist case for their import- would suit a loyal royal servant, a sort of male Crawfie. ance is influential and persuasive—not, I think, because it "They were graceful, they had mystery and dignity. Why stands upon the meaning of the plays, but because it is the when a woman got out of a cab, she descended. Descended, commonest way of interpreting and misinterpreting etc." Do we ignore these views as the touching sentimen- socially-meaningful work. The social relevance of art lies talities of an old man? Even if we do, there are Archie in a different direction. If it did not, it would be a great and Jean to account for. If Archie is a dreadful warning waste of time. (equals death of community sense, especially in working- The dust-jacket of Osborne's plays prints a quotation class communities), then Jean is the only hope. And in a from Tynan's original review of Look Back In Anger which sense, she is. She stands, at some personal sacrifice, for illustrates one claim for the play's social-realism. The play, the opposite of modern jingoism, i.e., Suez; she admires it reads, "represents post-war youth as it really is, with Frank for his pacifism, despises Mick for the conformity special emphasis on the non-U intelligentsia who live in that makes him a dead hero; also she resents the patronis- bedsitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, ing way Archie's successful brother gave Phoebe money; 'posh' and 'wet' ". Possibly so; but of the value of the play and she takes a strong moral line about Archie's proposals this tells us nothing; and it introduces questions which for a new wife. She has all the right responses. Yet Archie unavoidably lead farther and farther from Look Back In and Phoebe are able to accuse her of lacking some essential Anger the more intensely you pursue them. Drama is not human warmth. This is not quite true, of course, but true sociology, even when it squares with, even when it initiates, enough to disqualify her for any strongly affirmative role. sociological findings. Not many people would see the Rices According to the play, Jean's principles will bring no new as representative of post-war non-U family life as it really dispensation to birth. Which leaves Archie, and if he can is, but The Entertainer continues to make its comment on represent something Jean is not, then he must mean more a post-war Britain that includes family life. than "the death of the community sense". Either Osborne is pulling his punches, or the play doesn't have the straight- Another form of the argument finds the value of Look forward allegorical pattern a social-realist might claim. Back In Anger in the fact that Jimmy and Alison's quarrel This second view is worth considering. expresses itself as a struggle between class-attitudes, held to be peculiarly typical of welfare Britain. At first sight The answer to the social-realist is therefore something persuasive, this view at once entails two pretty damaging like this. Osborne uses contemporary social issues, not as criticisms. First, do the attitudes of Alison and her family the themes, but as the material of his plays. The Jimmy fairly represent the contemporary class-reality? These Porters, lower/upper middle-class tensions, the decay of attitudes are certainly the visible part of the iceberg. But folk-art, commitment . . . Osborne has an ear for these what does the play's conflict of manners suggest of the things as a journalist for news. But in the plays, he makes deeply-consolidated power, of the modern forms of class- them over to his own purpose. At best, his characters dis- privilege? So little, that "superficially-observed" seems a play an intense but extremely narrow reaction to contem- mild comment. Second, a writer who dramatises a class- porary Britain. In that sense, they can be said to be "about" conflict through the tensions of a particular marriage, and it. But the plays are about them, and on this basis, a much approves the solution Jimmy and Alison arrive at, could sounder basis for their importance can be proposed: reasonably be described as frivolous. It is not as if Osborne sounder because it begins and ends with the plays as such, is saying: "Take warning! people like these with only and because it links their comment with social insights personal affiliations and responsibilities, inevitably end in from very different sources. feeble escapism". We are certainly meant to feel that the conclusion, however tenuous, affirms a new beginning, new life of a kind. It isn't easy to reconcile this with the judg- Epitaph for George Dillon ment that Jimmy and Alison escape into an irresponsible There is, so far as I know, no published evidence about fantasy without abandoning either the play, or the view Antony Creighton's share in Epitaph for George Dillon, that its theme is a class-conflict. Which is it to be? but I take it that the heart of the play, George himself, is For The Entertainer, the social-realist case is equally off Osborne's work. George's tragedy is simple: knowing what the mark, though more persuasive still because Osborne's he is doing, he sells out for the crudest kind of success. preface seems to invite it. "The music hall is dying, and, Essentially, he commits two betrayals. He exploits the with it, a significant part of England. Some of the heart good nature of a woman he despises (Mrs. Elliot); he fails of England has gone; something that once belonged to in his ambition to write serious plays, and concludes in a everyone, for this was truly a folk-art." Archie's character thorough-going prostitution of his talent for easy money. and career portray the human failure which underlies the George is therefore a variant of a familiar figure. He is a death of a communal art-form. The callousness which drags romantic artist—(his protest, such as it is, is in that tradi- Billy Rice into the debacle is only equalled by the degraded tion)—who betrays his vocation. He has attached to the lethargy of the modern "communities" who watch the per- successful practice of his art, the idea of a finer quality of

38 life than he finds in himself or in his environment. His criti- I let it touch me?" . . . Archie's motto; but at the end of cism of his environment fixes on the vulgarity of its decor the play he offers it to the audience as theirs. (See pp. 88-9, ("Those bloody birds!"), the poverty of its amusements especially the final stage direction.) His right to do this ("Classics on Ice"), and the dull stupidity of its inhabitants. lies in the fact that, for all his failings, he does care—about (See his discussion with Ruth in Act II.) So stated, his rot caring. That is something. The play asks: do we? position is not very impressive, but in the play, humanly, it The Entertainer is a better play than Dillon because convinces. The urgency of his feeling, the poignancy of his Osborne has this clearer grasp of his theme. Another, and self-betrayal support any incidental confusion or imma- not separate reason is that he invented in the later play a turity. And whatever the actual source of his failure, satisfactory theatrical expression for his theme. In Dillon, whether in his lack of ability, or in the paralysis of his George plays two parts which do not easily unite. He is the ability by various human failings, his sense of failure is protagonist of a simple moral scheme, and he is the spokes- a moral experience. man of certain general views. This is the aspect of his Now this situation was imagined by its author not in character most fully developed in Jimmy Porter, and it 1958 when it was staged, but in 1954, and the date is inter- exists in Archie Rice, but now in a much more satisfactory esting in two ways. The then newly-hailed representative of way. The double-staging convention of the play gives post-war non-U intelligentsia was Lucky Jim Dixon, and Archie two distinct relationships with the audience. As a the contrast between his views on culture and money and music-hall comedian, he is a satirical commentator on the those of George Dillon is worth remarking. Moreover, two attitudes of his audience who become for the time being social critics were then elaborating the arguments that were the music-hall audience. As a family man, he is the demon- to appear in The Uses of Literacy and Culture and Society. strated illustration of his own satirical comment. Gradually, Osborne's comment on post-war Britain belongs in that the two identities merge, finally meeting in Archie's long context, and not at all in that slough of Ambiguous speech to Jean (see pp. 70-72) and in the final transitions Despond into which reviewers keep pitching every "protest" between scenes 10-13. (See especially the last transition.) novel, play or poem that comes their way. The argument Having pointed (and acted) his own moral, Archie hands stated by Williams, and (in a modified form) invoked by it over to the audience, and retires from the scene. Hoggart, that the idea and practice of culture is one of the Now this problem of form seems to me the one Osborne ways in which we define a social protest against the quality failed to solve in Anger. Jimmy is admittedly not a corrupt of life in industrial-capitalist society . . . this argument is artist . . . One of our troubles with him, serious in a the staple of the play's theme. George's (and Osborne's) naturalistically-portrayed situation, is that we don't quite formulation of the case is admittedly crude, and the tone know what he is ... but his positive alignment is recognis- of delivery is over-vehement. Nothing is gained by deny- ably with George and Archie. Osborne expresses it in two ing that. But the outline is familiar. ways: in Jimmy's speeches about modern life, and in the relationship he wants with Alison. But just because he says not "why should I care?"—a self-confession of failure— "Why Should I Care?" but "I do care, and so ought everyone else", we naturally The relation of this to The Entertainer is immediate. test his own opportunities for caring with some closeness. George is a sketch for the completed figure of Archie Rice: From this test, he emerges less well. It may take "muscle failed artist of a failed art, and corrupt man. One element and guts" to live. It also takes other human qualities Jimmy of the advance is important: the new meaning given to art. doesn't seem in a hundred miles of possessing. Because With George, art is a means of personal ambition, as well of this, some people argue that Jimmy is the resentful vic- as a life-standard. He values creative power almost as a tim of his weakness, a kind of "case", as his wife is a personal possession. In The Entertainer, art is communal "case". But that destroys the unambiguous force of his and public; a social means to the affirmation of what Billy idealism, the very thing that makes it worth listening to. calls "life". Billy is not a top-liner, but he is a "success"; After all, a dramatist claims to show what his ideas mean because he has truly served his art, and as a man he has in human experience, not merely to say what they are. And lived. That is what "success" means in this play. Corres- the best gesture Jimmy can make still leaves a question pondingly, "failure" is lack of humanity. "You see this about his ability to live through the relationship he says he face," says Archie, "you see this face, this face can split wants. The total effect is one of over-anxiously insistent open with warmth and humanity ... It doesn't matter comment, and of very uncertain demonstration. This im- because—look at my eyes. I'm dead behind these eyes. balance accounts, I believe, for those interminable argu- I'm dead just like the whole inert shoddy lot out there. It ments about the plays as a whole. If you admire it, you doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do point to what Jimmy says; if you don't, to what he does, or they. We're just as dead as each other." Archie is dead, doesn't. Look Back In Anger is a striking play, but I and he knows this because he has a memory of life. ". . . If believe there is this failure to realise its most serious aim. ever I saw any hope or strength in the human race it was in the face of that old fat negress getting up to sing about Jesus or something ... I wish to God I could feel like that Osborne's Artistic Seriousness old black bitch with her fat cheeks, and sing. If I'd done Paradoxically, the flaw turns out to be a mark of one thing as good as that in my whole life, I'd have been Osborne's artistic seriousness. It means that his theme has all right . . . But I'll never do it. I don't give a damn about pressed him to three distinct expressions of it, the last one anything, not even women or draught Bass." The con- fully successful. This kind of artistic success is the very nexion of this with the songs Archie does sing, the way he opposite of trivial. The ideas had to be formulated in plays. sings them, and with "the inert shoddy lot out there" who They were an artist's ideas: i.e., demonstrations of notions listen, provides the essential link in the argument. The which appear to other minds as the necessary language of corruption of the art is a dramatic metaphor for a contem- argument and persuasion. To an artist, art is not an idea, porary social failure: not of the music-hall, or of working though he may use it as an idea, but an instance that class communities, but of the willingness to give a con- succeeds or fails. Osborne's plays are the positive answer vinced damn about life. "Why should I care? "Why should to the kinds of failure contained within them.

39 If "why should I care?" is the germ of Osborne's com- The charge that Osborne's message is too simple now ment on welfare Britain, it remains to answer the charge resolves into a question. Having made their first point in that he merely exhorts to what Auden called "a change of the available way, do his plays also suggest a capacity for heart"; and that this is less than enough. This charge can going beyond the injunction to care, into the difficult terri- be put in the form of a question: what sense do the plays tory of what, in the detail of human experience, this communicate of the human qualities of character and in- means? On the basis of his published work, there is some telligence needed for caring in an adequate way? Jean's reason to doubt. Not all the obviousness of the message, feelings about Suez are "caring" of a kind. Have they no the stridency of the tone, the sharp impatient violence of relation to Archie's private symbol of the good life? Even the prose are the results of deliberate artistic choice. Even granting its appropriateness to him, this symbol seems to in The Entertainer, the focus occasionally blurs, and Archie exclude too much. Where in the play do we find the more shifts from his status as a specially-created type into that inclusive awareness denied to Archie and Jean? In a word, of a naturalistically-portrayed character about whom the isn't Osborne's exhortation admirable enough, but uselessly author hasn't wholly made up his mind. There is, for all simple? There is enough force in this question to need an answer, but the grounds of both need to be carefully stated. three heroes in fact, a disturbing sense of special pleading. Writers do not work to precept, they respond to situations And if that is so, it means that the successive shapings of as they find them. And dominating Osborne's response the theme in the three plays is less progressive than I have to post-war society, there was the special situation been suggesting. Such an artistic uncertainty implies some of the social art he wanted to practise: the condition of residual uncertainty in the playwright's grasp of and atti- the British theatre. The simplified message, the exhortatory tude towards his theme. (This might bear upon the diffuse- tone—these presuppose theatre audiences so stupefied by ness of Slickey.) But one thing is sure: the plays that con- their customary pleasures as to be almost beyond the centrate on the reality of caring which Osborne may go serious exercise of any wits a charitable observer might on to write, will be very different from those that tell us we grant them. (The comparison of Osborne with Shaw has must. Yet, if A Taste of Honey and Roots show some- some point here.) That judgment is severe, probably partial. thing of the qualities most strikingly absent from Osborne's The audiences were not alone responsible for the condition plays, that is itself a situation for which he has a right to of British theatre. But they played (and play) their part. some of the credit. Without his success, how would these And one other piece of evidence supports the view that in plays have reached the West End stage? So, on the counts Osborne's situation, no other tone could stir their lethargy. of achievement and of immediate influence, he claims our This is the response amongst post-war "youth" which admiration, and, with whatever qualifications in the long Anger awakened and still awakens. The vehemence of the run, our respect. His own plays may very soon date in speaker, the roughly-defined idealism, the simple urgency their tone, because they have helped to bring about a new of the protest (in a sense whatever the protest): here is the situation in which another tone is possible; but in the out- characteristic tone of the fifties in that one-to-one corres- line of their argument, and in the urgency with which they pondence looked for by the social-realist. (Leave it to the convey it, I do not believe that they will. "Up came the social historians to say exactly why. Enough that it was rousing and the strong reply"—it is not an accident that so.) It should be added, I suppose ... it always is ... that Look Back In Anger and The Entertainer belong with those that tone, and the position it implies is immature. Begin- other rousings of 1956-57. Osborne's protest, formulating nings are. In this, Osborne, himself a beginning, seemed in the bleak early 'fifties, found a pertinent language. As the authentic voice of many others. long as the language applies, so should the plays.

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