The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  (1990)

  JOHN OSBORNE

  A BETTER CLASS OF PERSON

  John Osborne has always been a master of spoken diatribe, whether it is of the “bloody but unbowed” kind or the picturesque confessional of wounds given and received. In his vigorous autobiography A Better Class of Person he has the wound-licking grin of the only child who has been through the class mill and is getting his own back—very much a comic Mr Polly or a Kipps reborn in 1929, if less sunny and innocent than Wells was. Osborne adds to the rich tradition of English low comedy, which draws on the snobberies and vulgarities of lower-middle-class life, with its guts, its profligate will to survive despite its maudlin or self-pitying streak. He calls his people Edwardian, for manners drag on long after their presumed historical death; really his family were on the bohemian verges. Both the Welsh and the Cockney sides—the latter known in the family folklore as “the Tottenham Crowd,” with some sniffing of the nose—had a racy leaning towards pubs, music halls, and theatre. (All, except his sad father, lived to a tremendous age.) His two grandfathers were well-established if secretive rakes; one was the manager of a once famous London pub in the theatre district and had an early-morning spat with the lavishly seductive Marie Lloyd. Osborne’s Welsh father was a self-taught pianist who could sing a song. He earned his living as an advertising copywriter of sorts until his health collapsed. He first met Nellie Beatrice Grove, who was to be the playwright’s mother, when she was a barmaid in the Strand. She had left school at twelve to scrub floors in an orphanage, had quickly bettered herself as a cashier in a Lyons Corner House, and eventually went on to the bar of a suburban hotel. She resented her sister Queenie putting on airs because she had, by some family accident, been “educated” and worked in a milliner’s. (The class struggle has its nuances.) If one uncle was a stoker in the Navy, another had an admired connection with Abdulla cigarettes. Was he a director? Goodness knows, but he smoked the expensive things all day. Bids for gentility were natural in a family that, on both sides, took some pride in having “come down in the world.” Osborne writes:

  … the Groves seemed to feel less sense of grievance, looking on it as the justified price of profligate living or getting above yourself, rather than as a cruel trick of destiny … They had a litany of elliptical sayings, almost biblical in their complexity, which, to the meanest mind or intelligence, combined accessibility and authority. Revealed family wisdom was expressed in sayings like, “One door opens and another one always shuts” (the optimistic version—rare—was the same in reverse). “I think I can say I’ve had my share of sorrows.” Like Jesus they were all acquainted with grief. “I can always read him like a book”; “I’ve never owed anyone anything” (almost the Family Motto this); “You can’t get round him, he’s like a Jew and his cash box”; “Look at him, like Lockhart’s elephant.”

  The last was a characteristic piece of poetic fancy by which the Londoner draws on local history. The words meant that someone was relating the young Osborne to times before his own; he was “clumsy.” The elephant evoked a popular large bun sold at a cheap and now extinct eating-house in the Strand. I believe the American equivalent would be Child’s.

  Osborne was an only child, and for long years he was too sickly to be sent to school. No adult spoke to him much, so he listened, puzzling his way through the family babble. Religion was remote. Comfort in the discomfort of others, he remarks, was the abiding family recreation. “Disappointment,” Osborne adds, “was oxygen to them.” The Family Row at Christmas was an institution, the Groves shouting, the Osbornes calmer and more bitter in their sense of having been cheated at birth. Nellie Beatrice, the barmaid mother, mangled the language with her Tottenham mispronunciations—very upsetting to the precise and eloquent Welsh. As she complained, they “passed looks” when she spoke. Her genius shone at the bar:

  Quick, anticipative with a lightning head for mental arithmetic, she was, as she put it, a very smart “licensed victualler’s assistant” indeed. “I’m not a barmaid I’m a victualler’s assistant—if you please.” I have seen none better. No one could draw a pint with a more perfect head on it or pour out four glasses of beer at the same time, throwing bottles up in the air and catching them as she did so.

  She was known as Bobby, and was noted for shouting out her wartime catch phrases: “Get up them stairs”; “The second thing he did when he come home was to take his pack off”; or “I couldn’t laugh if I was crafty.” At home, her energies were restless. She was a relentless cleaner, whether she lived in digs in dreary Fulham or in a snobby suburb, and never stopped stripping and cleaning the few rooms they lived in, taking up all the carpets and taking down all curtains once a week. She loved moving house. Meals, such as they were, were made to be washed up rather than to be eaten. She was a mistress of the black look. She was hungry for glamour, not for bringing up children, and certainly not a sickly boy who caught every illness going. Her ideal—after the father died and the war filled her purse with wartime tips—was to “go Up West,” walk round the big London stores without buying anything, complaining of her feet, and have a lunch at the gaudy Trocadero, where she could look suitably stand-offish. She was deeply respectable. This is the half-cruel portrait by her son, who was to become a “better class of person.” He confesses to a struggle against a shame of her:

  My mother’s hair was very dark, occasionally hennaed. Her face was a floury dark mask, her eyes were an irritable brown, her ears small, so unlike her father’s (“He’s got Satan’s ears, he has”), her nose surprisingly fine. Her remaining front teeth were large, yellow, and strong. Her lips were a scarlet-black sliver covered in some sticky slime named Tahiti or Tattoo, which she bought with all her other make-up from Woolworth’s. She wore it, or something like it, from the beginning of the First World War onwards. She had a cream base called Crème Simone, always covered up with a face powder called Tokalon, which she dabbed all over so that it almost showered off in little avalanches when she leant forward over her food. This was all topped off by a kind of knicker-bocker glory of rouge, which came in rather pretty little blue and white boxes—again from Woolworth’s—and looked like a mixture of blackcurrant juice and brick dust. The final coup was an overgenerous dab of California Poppy, known to schoolboys as “fleur de dustbins.”

  What froze him was that she was incurious about him.

  The frail short-lived father had been white-haired since his twenties. His skin was extremely pale, almost transparent. He had the whitest hands I think I have ever seen; Shalimar hands he called them. (“Pale hands I love beside the Lethe waters,” of Shalimar. It was one of his favourite Sunday ballads.)

  But his long fingers were stained by nicotine. His clothes were unpressed and his bowler hat and mac were greasy, but he was particular about his cuffs and collars and his highly polished, papery shoes. A gentle, sad creature, he is oddly described as being like a “Welsh-sounding prurient, reticent investigator of sorts from a small provincial town.” For some reason unknown—not only because of his long spells in hospital—the couple were mostly apart.

  For the only child, schools were places of pain and humiliation. Certainly they were often rough. He had to discover cunning. At one mixed school, the adolescent girls turned out to be the thumping bullies of the smaller boys, preparing them for the sex war. Still, in the suburbs, there were sympathetic, literate families who helped the backward autodidact. He was nothing more than a nuisance to his energetic mother, and by now they almost hated one another. He was luckier than he thinks to be sent to a third-rate boarding school, for he did at least read a lot and did pretty well with his belated education. But he was laughed at for saying he wanted to be a historian and go to a university. All he was fit for, he was told, was journalism. He was sacked for hitting a master who had slapped him and for writing love-letters to a girl there. Schools took a stern line on that. The sexual revolution, though rife elsewhere, did not easily penetrate the semi-genteel regions of provincial life. So journalism it
was. The Benevolent Society to which his father had subscribed and which had paid for his schooling completed its obligations by getting him introduced to a publisher who produced trade journals like the Gas World. He had to prepare himself for this by going to typing and shorthand classes.

  Folly is often a salvation in such dreary circumstances. Osborne was eighteen, spotty, shy, and longing for friends, especially girls. It occurred to him that a course of dancing lessons at a school that put on amateur theatricals was a likely chance. He became a dim star and sent his photograph to a theatrical agent; the bohemian traits of his upbringing sprang up in his sullen, slightly flashy being. He had first to disentangle himself from the usual sentimental suburban engagement to a nice enough girl who took her reluctant boyfriend (earning two pounds a week) to the windows of furniture shops. The warning was clear. He jilted her, wrote her remorseful, high-minded letters, was tormented by guilt and by threats and denunciations from the parents. But he was soon out on tour with a third-rate company and learned about theatre without training from the bottom, starting with the job of assistant stage-manager and understudying the five actors, aged between twenty-five and seventy. What is clear from the long picaresque experiences with this down-at-heel and hungry company is that he was really a writer and, despite poetising ambitions, had a marvellous ear for real speech. The book is punctuated by passages from his plays that hark back to what he heard “on the road.” The “real” life is in fact the overflow of theatrical life evoking people outside. On that first long tour, sexually starved, he simpered after a fluttering actress called Sheila but soon had the simper knocked out of him by a formidable actress called Stella, an aggressive thirty-year-old, with “the shoulders of a Channel swimmer” and a body that “looked capable of snapping up an intruder in a jawbone of flesh.” She was “arrogantly lubricious” and had “an almost masculine, stalking power.” She was not put off by his sickly appearance and his acne; she expertly detected the writer in him, and was after him to revise his first attempt as a collaborator, on a play that she and her husband wanted to put on. When she and Osborne became lovers, they quarrelled incessantly about dramatic construction; she was out for the commercial success of another Autumn Crocus or Dinner at Eight—what he calls “a Nice Play” about middle-class gatherings. She in fact woke up his independent intelligence. He discovered he had his own ideas about the theatre. She said he was a lazy, arrogant, dishonest amateur—not only that but ungrateful to her complaisant husband, who tolerantly rescued them when the company’s run stopped and the money ran out. She had to take a job as a waitress and Osborne became a dishwasher. She eventually left him for a job in the north, and he admits that he spitefully left her door unlocked and her electricity turned on when he left the flat she had lent him. Rightly, she never forgave him. Years later, the play did run for a week, with Osborne trying to recognise some lines of his own in it.

  The knockabout theatrical chapters tend to be repetitive, but they are rich in sharp, short portraits, especially of the theatrical landladies. They end with his runaway marriage with one Pamela, a capable young actress. He was tactless enough to carry on this passion when the company got to her own home town, in the face of her hostile family. They were well-established drapers. The correlative scripture of what went on in real life will be seen in the quotations from Look Back in Anger, notably Jimmy Porter’s speech about the wedding:

  Mummy was slumped over her pew in a heap—the noble, female rhino, pole-axed at last! And Daddy sat beside her, upright and unafraid, dreaming of his days among the Indian Princes, and unable to believe he’d left his horsewhip at home.

  Osborne says that this is a fairly accurate account of the wedding, except for the references to the Indian Princes. They seem unlikely in the life of a local draper. Daddy has in fact been elevated socially by the “angry” exposer of class consciousness. Osborne is safer as a guide to congealed suburban or theatrical snobberies. He now writes about the episode:

  I was aware that I had left behind the sophistication and tolerance of the true provinces. Sprung from Fulham and Stoneleigh, where feelings rarely rose higher than a black look, the power of place, family, and generation in small towns was new to me. In the suburbs, allegiances are lost or discarded on dutifully paid visits. The present kept itself to itself. In such a life there was no common graveyard for memory or future. The suburb has no graveyard.

  Just before the end of the book there is a collection of extracts from Nellie Beatrice’s letters. Years have passed, but she’s still on the move, saving up gift stamps for a new carpet-shampoo cleaner, washing down the ceiling, though “I never did like Housework.” She just wanted things clean. And then comes her crushing phrase:

  I’ll say that for him—he’s never been ashamed of me. He’s always let me meet his friends—and they’re all theatrical people, a good class all of them, they speak nicely.

  And to his notebook Osborne groans:

  I am ashamed of her as part of myself that can’t be cast out, my own conflict, the disease which I suffer and have inherited, what I am and never could be whole.

  About that time, 1955, George Devine rowed out to Osborne, who was living on a barge on the Thames, and offered him a twenty-pound option on Look Back in Anger. English theatre changed in a night. I look forward to Volume Two.

  (1990)

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

  In Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight’s Children (Jonathan Cape, 1981), India has produced a great novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual story-telling. Like García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, he weaves a whole people’s capacity for carrying its inherited myths—and new ones that it goes on generating—into a kind of magic carpet. The human swarm swarms in every man and woman as they make their bid for life and vanish into the passion or hallucination that hangs about them like the smell of India itself. Yet at the same time there are Western echoes, particularly of the irony of Sterne in Tristram Shandy—that early non-linear writer—in Rushdie’s readiness to tease by breaking off or digressing in the gravest moments. This is very odd in an Indian novel! The book is really about the mystery of being born. Rushdie’s realism is that of the conjuror who, in a flash, draws an incident out of the air and then makes it vanish and laughs at his cleverness. A pregnant woman, the narrator’s mother, goes to a fortune-teller in the Delhi slum:

  And my mother’s face, rabbit-startled, watching the prophet in the check shirt as he began to circle, his eyes still egglike in the softness of his face; and suddenly a shudder passing through him and again that strange high voice as the words issued through his lips (I must describe those lips, too—but later, because now …) “A son.”

  Silent cousins—monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter—cobras coiled in baskets—and the circling fortune-teller, finding history speaking through his lips.

  And the fortune-teller goes on, sing-songing:

  “Washing will hide him—voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him—blood will betray him … jungle will claim him … tyrants will fry him … He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die … before he is dead.”

  Outside the room, monkeys are throwing down stones on the street from a ruined building.

  This is pure Arabian Nights intrigue—for that son, Saleem Sinai, now thirty-one, is writing about what he is making up about his birth; he is dramatising his past life as a prophecy, even universalising his history as a mingling of farce and horror and matching it with thirty years of the Indian crowd’s collective political history. The strength of a book that might otherwise be a string of picaresque tales lies in its strong sense of design. Saleem claims that it is he who has created modern India in the years that followed Indian independence—has dreamed into being the civil strife and the wars—as a teller of stories, true or untrue, conniving at events and united with them. Central to this is the fantasy that t
he children born at midnight on the day of liberation, as he was, have a destiny. The Prime Minister himself pronounces this: “They are the seed of a future that would genuinely differ from anything that the world had seen at that time.” Children born a few seconds before the hour of what Saleem calls Mountbatten’s “tick-tock” are likely to join the revelling band of conjurors and circus freaks and street singers; those born a few seconds after midnight, like Parvati, the witch, whom Saleem eventually marries, will be genuine sorcerers. Saleem himself, born on the stroke of the hour, will be amazingly gifted but will also embody the disasters of the country. The novel is an autobiography, dictated by a ruined man to a simple but shrewd working girl in a pickle factory—to this Saleem’s fortunes have fallen. (She is addressed from time to time as if she were Sterne’s “dear Eliza.”) The fortune-teller’s words “washing will hide him” point to Fate. The prophecy was not a joke.

  The rich Delhi Muslims who raise him are not his parents: he is a changeling, and not their son. The wrong ticket has been tied to his toe by a poor Goanese nurse, who, demented by the infidelity of her husband, a common street singer, had allowed herself to be seduced by a departing English sahib. Saleem is ugly, dwarfish, with a huge snotty nose, and is brought up rich; the real son is Shiva, brought up poor. Years will pass before the nurse confesses. The point of the political allegory becomes clear. Shiva, like the god, will become the man of action, riot, and war—the bully, cunning in getting to the top. Saleem’s gift will be the passive intellectual’s who claims the artist’s powers of travelling into the minds of people. The rival traits will show in their school days. Proud of being midnight’s children, the boys form a privileged gang. Saleem sees the gang as a gathering of equals in which every one has the right to his own voice. Shiva, brought up on the streets and refusing to be a whining beggar, rejects Saleem’s democratic dream: