A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography

...Dutton/I13.75 Herb Greer I t all seems very Jurassic now, that fifties fuss about the Angry Young Men (some of whom were over forty...

...He swayed and quivered . . . This amazing punch, delivered by a weedy teenager, evokes memories of Jungle Jim, Terry and the Pirates, or perhaps Rip Kirby (the British equivalent of the day was Dan Dare...

...The families have bar: fled far better caseworkers for years and years...

...The time, effort, ingenuity, dedication, and generosity that impel government and the foundations to establish programs such as Basic Typing with Life Skills Training are remarkable...

...Jimmy Porter's boorish manners were taken for working-class discontent (the character is petty bourgeois...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982...

...Eliot, and Angus Wilson...

...The real historical exchange of slaps seems to have had less to do with "spontaneous" brutality than with the future author's deliberately provocative habit of making sneering remarks about the Royal Family...

...It expresses hostility to a male authority figure, for example, and portrays the author as a righteous, if ungentlemanly, sort of chap...

...Osborne himself appears as a tepid, more or less spineless child a d r i f t in an irredeemably shabby family and social environment, thoroughly infected with the corrosive, foul snobbery of the lower middle class...

...As a matter of fact Look Back in Anger had a mixed reception, and its first run in the spring was quite unremarkable...

...Osborne smirks back at him " w i t h open scorn...

...Berryman jumped from a bridge and J a r r e l l threw himself into the path of a truck on a highway...

...They found ample opportunity for "achievement" in the new challenges of a burgeoning consumer society, and in the peculiarly destruc...

...His father was a tubercular copywriter, his mother a child of pub-keepers...

...It is worth noting, however, that the story which earned him early recognition challenged comparison with Yeats...

...his Tory nostalgia for good old c a u s e s - - a middle-aged sentiment at the time--was accepted as the voice of mutinous left-wing youth in principled rebellion against the state of society...

...The anecdotes are often ribald...

...As a society ages and its leaders (and more particularly their children), safe from economic pressures, begin to worry about their scores on a compassion test, the spurs that moved the survivors of the underclass of previous generations are dulled...

...My mother was just visible, frozen to the lavatory seat...

...He makes great play of his supercilious attitude toward others, of his sneakiness and petty moral turpitude, and caps it all with t r e a t m e n t of his mother that borders on the psychopathic...

...About the doomed Delmore Schwartz we have now heard more than we really wanted to hear--from Saul Bellow (Humboldt's Gift), J ames Atlas (Delmore Schwartz), and William Barrett (The Truants...

...They starve the boy of affection, ignore him, shuffle him about like a piece of f u r n i t u r e , are beastly to their husbands even when the husbands are dead, and constantly embarrass Osborne _9 with their clumsy or t r i t e handling of the Queen's English...

...Its first article of faith was that every new hope for society, for politics, for literature, art, and the theatre, lay in the surging and thrusting vitality of an unspoiled working-class youth, held down in previous generations by a selfish and oppressive Establishment...

...There were new plays by Graham Greene, Robert Bolt, T.S...

...In 1956 about 400 plays were professionally produced in Britain...

...Osborne, as one of the icons of the postwar British theatre, is now respected less in his own country than in the rest of the world where Western-style plays are staged...

...Genuine "proles" (as the radical chic liked to call them) preferred the excitements of soccer, rugby, the cinema, and the pub...

...With some astute defiance of the Lord Chamberlain (then Britain's censor), and a certain amount of help from literary hustlers like Tom Maschler--now a British publishing executive--the Angry Young Men, the Royal Court Theatre, and especially John Osborne were turned into superbly salable products and topics of chic conversation...

...A few legends of the period linger on in the mythology of the arts, includ...

...and one extraordinary staging of a work which has held its savor far better than the "angry" shows of the period: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas...

...The family foraged in the 1930s and 1940s on the grotty underside of the British middle class...

...All these years later, s e t t l e d and plump with success, he sneers and sneers at the wretched woman, though he tells nothing about her to justify such Orestian loathing...

...Such British admiration as he still enjoys is based mainly on his early work...

...Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate...

...If the reader can stomach the book's large dose of this he will find an interesting and pretty graphic account of what it _9 was like to inhabit the lower middleclass garbage heap of British society a g e n e r a t i o n ago, and of the life endured by an aspiring actor/,~,riter in the seedy realm of British repertory t h e a t r e in the fifties...

...But the success rate is not...

...Those earlier, rather chummy accounts of humble family cheer are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 31 nowhere to be found in this narrative...

...Her face sagged, powdered and gaping black, her mottled chest heaving with her moans...

...The scene is interesting, however, because it is untypical of the book in so many ways...

...But the story unfolds against a backdrop of tragedy...

...The adjectives apply as easily to his casual behavior with other people...

...The sight of a scruffy young fellow being sophomorically coarse to everyone around him, snarling at the use of French in the literary columns of the Sunday papers, and making uncivil remarks about his wife's well-to-do parents, seems to have tickled the fancy of London's modish fringe...

...None of it makes sense of such treatment, and there are passages which contradict the impression of hatred...

...But beyond Schwartz, these young writers marched themselves across a Verdun-like psychic battlefield...

...The status of these plays as expressions of working-class anger remains as puzzling as ever...

...A Better Class of Person provides the definitive answer: He never did, for the very good reason that he was not born into it...

...This ripens like a boil during his account of an air raid in which their house suffers a near miss...

...Look Back in Anger and Inadmissible Evidence have become set texts for the study of contemporary drama in British schools...

...As it happened, very few of the era's younger generation went to the theatre in London or anywhere else, and almost none of those who did were working class...

...During a 1968 Observer interview with Tynan, this proletarian hero of the arts remarked in passing: "The working class isn't what it was when I got the hell out of it . . . . " This was one more nod to Britain's special form of radical chic, which had sprouted in the fifties...

...Yeats, and also Eliot, these were the standards against which such young writers were compelled to measure themselves...

...Blackmur, Jean Stafford, and others...

...John Osborne, with his harsh new work, was touted as the harbinger for a tough working-class invasion of British culture's bourgeois tea-party...

...So far, at least, hunger and cold have been far more effective in moving the underclass to social usefulness...

...The predominant tone is venomous spite...

...Sons of bitches have always been the b e s t - s e l l i n g line of his stock in trade, just as the center of his talent has been a flair for resentful abuse, driven by a compulsion to $pater les bourgeois...

...But in this book--to put it bluntly but accurately - - h e smears her with excrement like a disturbed adolescent: an ugly son by his own account, i:ruel, ungratefial, ill-bred, vindictive, and so on...

...A BETTER CLASS OF PERSON: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY John Osborne/E.P...

...Osborne admires his mother's real talent for the difficult profession of barmaid (though he does mock her pretension in calling h e r s e l f a " v i c t u a l l e r ' s a s s i s t a n t " ) . He.has also kept the letters which she wrote and presumably still writes to him...

...Laboring under these gigantic misapprehensions and led at last by Kenneth Tynan, the media and the fashionable took the play and its author to their hearts...

...He produced more plays which were carefully calculated to outrage, and himself assumed the role of the bad boy of drama...

...The play and Osborne became famous during the second run of the production in the autumn of that year--when an excerpt was broadcast on television...

...They Herb Greer is an American writer and playwmght living in Europe...

...One unfortunate side-effect of all this was that gossipy excitement outside the auditorium became more important than theatrical excitement inside, giving cachet to a lot of mediocre work...

...He went flying over two trestle tables, which collapsed in a pile at the end of the room . . . . Slowly, dripping blood and cocoa, he rose to his feet, to my infuriated dismay, helped by several boys...

...It was called "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities...

...I drew back my fist, not a straight gentlemanly left this time, and smashed my wild right into his moustache...

...The son staggers out of his refuge under the stairs to the sound of a scream from his mother, who is in the toilet on the floor above: All the doors and windows had been blown out and the ceilings had collapsed...

...Robert Lowell was frequently committed to mental hospitals, and clearly suffered from the burden of a New England aristocratic and Calvinist ancestry...

...Those who trooped down to Sloane Square to see Look Back in Anger were, as the saying goes, A Better Class of Person: the middle-class trendy fringe or those who aspired to join it...

...What he actually wrote was that it was "likely to remain a minority taste," a view similar to that of several other critics...

...a number of imports were influential, among them five plays by Bertolt Brecht, of which one was The Threepenny Opera...

...There are visits from an older group: T.S...

...The repulsive trimmings, I suspect, have less to do with truth--for what that is worth--than with Osborne's instinct 'for his market...

...Not the Humiliation of Suez, not the Lost Empire, not the "good old c a u s e s , " but plain oldfashioned getting and spending were the under thirties orders of the day...

...The lost days of summer were recompensed for a few joyous moments as I looked on at the funniest, most enjoyable sight I had ever s e e n . That, at least, is the way he tells it now...

...Her knickers [i.e., panties] were flounced below her knees in a collapsed silky bag...

...It is a grim and ironic matter that the intrinsic characteristics of an aging, increasingly compassionate society make inevitable the spread of social disturbance that can only be kept in check by measures that affront that same compassionate urge...

...A t the source there is the "working class" writer, Osborne himself...

...This shocked me, as I had never seen" him do anything so unconsidered .and spontaneous...

...her malice, where it occurs, is p e t t y enough...

...His play's rage, eloquence, and proletarian energy was supposed to have " r e v i t a l i z e d " a parochial, effete, and exhausted tradition ruled then by the Coward-Rattigan anyonefor-tennis school of dramaturgy...

...tive British form of militant trade unionism...

...Both Berryman and Jarrell committed saicide...

...There were also works by Arthur Miller, Camus, and Sartre, plus an adaptation of The Good Soldier Scbweik...

...Both of these characters bring to mind an earlier creation of James Thurber, in his story "Something To Say": Elliot Vereker, a pseudo-writer who slopes about being violently rude to his passive friends while bawling prolix and abusive nonsense...

...Their battle cries were: "You've always had it e a s y " . . . "You didn't have to go out to work like I did when I was t w e l v e " . . . "You were always Dad's f a v o u r i t e " . . . "I've worked hard for everything I've ever had...

...It is hard to believe that Life Skills Training does as much to stimulate the progress of the students of Basic Typing as the fear that they might really go hungry...

...After an early success based upon a couple of short stories, Schwartz, who had more problems than talent, destroyed himself through booze, drugs, and mania...

...Osborne rode this wave of enthusiasm with great skill...

...Oddly enough, the person who comes out worst in the sordid tale is Osborne himself, and he gives the impression that this is deliberate...

...Feminine" betrayal comes in every imaginable form except the rather appealing vice of promiscuity...

...Unlike Osborne's heroes he ends up with his head bashed in by a blunt instrument: autres temps, autres moeurs...

...Here we reach the bottom line, more or less: Osborne is bragging about what a l i t e r a l and f i g u r a t i v e son of a bitch he is...

...But this facet of events, which might have introduced an awkward element of ambiguity, is not mentioned in the book...

...And so, in the long run, much more rigid and unforgiving patterns of social control --more police, more prisons, more asylums--may be the only choice left to a society that by its very compassion has seen the underclass enlarged until it seems likely to endanger the safety of everyone else...

...The incident of the slapping schoolmaster r e a p p e a r s , reminding the reader that Osborne is something of a dramatist...

...Part of the legend says that Kenneth Tynan, bucking universal hostility, championed the play and assured its success...

...the anecdote of choice is the one in which he slips a used condom into a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich and then hands this to the lady writer Lynn Reid-Banks...

...POETS IN THEIR YOUTH: A MEMOIR Eileen Simpson / Random House / $15.50 Jeffrey Hart E i l e e n Simpson was married to the poet John Berryman, who committed suicide in 1971, and this is her memoir not only of Berryman but of an important group of American poets who aspired to greatness during the period beginning around 1940...

...This has evidently led him to follow (on paper) Oscar Wilde's classic recipe for life as an imitation of art...

...were supposed to have cast off these chains of bondage...

...Apart from the anecdotal information it provides, which is rich, often hilarious, and frequently sad, the central subject of the book is the failure of these writers to achieve greatness, and their own awareness of that fact...

...As I have already pointed out, Jimmy Porter and his views are unmistakably lower middle-class and Tory...

...Eric," annoyed (apparently) by the music and the screaming fans, bursts in, turns off the radio, and glares at the boys...

...Osborne's protagonist, we were (and still are) told, uttered a "call to arms" for a younger generation who were "bored, and had little opportunity for achievement...

...That is how a thin, poorly crafted, peevish, and finally mawkish play like Look Back in Anger and its author came to be first lionized and then apotheosed...

...John Osborne's first volume of autobiography stops at the point where this soi-disant revolution begins--advisedly so, because almost the whole of the myth is pure rubbish...

...When was it, exactly, that he "got the hell out" of the working class...

...Childhood and early teenage years are now described as an awful ordeal of meanness, t a t t y living conditions, and down-at-heel relatives who lack any emotional resource except a raw p e e v i s h n e s s , v e n t e d first on everything around them and then on each o t h e r , expressed in a stream of ghastly cliches: _9 . .all chaos, shouting and tearful rebukes...

...Eliot, Jeffrey Hart is professor of English at Dartmouth College and author, most recently, o f When the Going Was Good: American Life in the Fifties...

...T h e n . . . . . . h e lunged forward and slapped me very hard across the face...

...He sets the scene with some of the schoolboys sitting together, listening to Frank Sinatra on the radio...

...Nellie Beatrice Osborne seems to have done her best for this difficult little boy, though she did i r r i t a t e and sometimes hurt him with an exuberant and horn-hided vulgarity (taking him to see his father's body, she remarks that the room will have to be "frumigated...

...They have remorselessly (and sometimes inaccurately) kept its numbers under control...

...Implicit in the n a r r a t i v e is t h e i r lethal, literally lethal, disability: The idea of the poet had been defined for them by Eliot and Yeats, and by the authoritative criticism of the period 1930-1960...

...The women are the worst part of all this, beginning with his chilly grandmothers and finishing with his adulterous first wife...

...included one Rattigan revival and two badly received works by Noel Coward...

...In its foreground, this superbly stylish memoir is absolutely gorgeous gossip--the kind of book you pick up and cannot possibly put down, anecdotes about Berryman, of course, but also about Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Ted Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, R.P...

...Bill Maitland (the protagonist of Inadmissible Evidence) is articulate enough, but a self-pitying, pretentious, and thoroughly bourgeois lawyer...

...He also laid claim to the working class credentials which had been bestowed on him by the media...

...But the idea of continuing to deprive the hungry of food and the cold of heat when an abundant society can satisfy these needs is repulsive, at least to people who have passed their early acquisitive phase...

...He published brief accounts of his childhood and its vigorous, cozy family life, and put about the story of how he was expelled from a public (i.e., private) school when a brutal schoolmaster slapped him, " s o I slapped him back...

...ing the belief that in 1956 Look Back in Anger burst like a left-wing nova inside the British theatre and blew it apart...

...Elsewhere, what little respect and affection there is in these pages is focused almost exclusively on men, most of them fairly pallid and wan figures: the t u b e r c u l a r f a t h e r who died when Osborne was a boy, a raffish uncle, a foul-mouthed Canadian journalist, a homosexual writer who takes a liking to the lonely teenager (but fails to seduce him), and a few others...

...Again and again he implies and sometimes says outright that family, f r i e n d s , ambiance, or school are simply not good enough for him...

...She moved forward to the head of the stairs, bent at the knees, like a crazed gymnast, arms outstretched...

...Osborne and his fellow Angries "In particular the tedious, pretentious, and very over-rated products of Edward Bond...