[In the following essay, Goldstone addresses misconceptions about Osborne's life and work.]

I

I am writing about John Osborne, over twenty-five years after his first success Look Back in Anger, because, more than any other single playwright, he is most responsible for the great reinvigoration of British drama that has occurred since the 1950's—possibly the most important development in British literature since the end of World War II. Beginning with that play, the dramatization of the tormented life of an articulate, sensitive, working class intellectual, both isolated from and yet concerned about his society, Osborne has gone on to write some sixteen other plays, not to mention a translation, adaptations, television scripts, and movie scenarios, that in subject matter and form have significantly enlarged the range of experience of the modern theatre. He has written revues, “well made plays,” and Brechtian epic theatre—to mention just a few forms; he has written about historical figures, such as Martin Luther, Col. Redl of the Austrian army, and Coriolanus, and a variety of contemporary characters with different problems; he can be very funny and very serious and combine the two interestingly; he has written some of the great acting parts in the British theatre; and he has enriched dramatic language, particularly as a means of presenting the fascinating, painful, yet at times humorous, and intensely self aware efforts on the part of his expressive main characters to live with their complex selves, the people they need and care about, and their society with which they are often at odds and yet in which they are deeply involved.

At the heart of such efforts on the part of the main characters is their passionate and articulate interaction with those they care about in their personal lives and with the larger outside world that brings out into the open in escalating tensions so many of the strong pressures they are confronting.

As a result, Osborne's plays, however varied their format, the particular issues of most concern, and the range of emotions generated, make themselves readily accessible to audiences and readers. Yet their very accessibility has seemed to encourage gross oversimplifications and misconceptions about the nature and quality of Osborne's achievement to date.

The most obvious oversimplification is to label most, if not all, Osborne heroes as being angry. At first glance this may not seem important but, as J. W. Lambert points out in a review of Osborne's most recent play, this is not so. The reason is that such criticism only reveals half of Osborne's vision—the contempt that is present. However, it ignores the other half, which is the undeniable emphasis on love, friendship, and kindness that has pervaded his work from the beginning.¹ Moreover, even when Osborne characters are angry, they differ considerably. For example, three of Osborne's most recent main characters, Pamela, the talented actress heroine of Time Present, Frederica, the beautiful, intellectual daughter of Wyatt Gilman, the celebrity-writer major male character of West of Suez, and Sally Prosser, the novelist second wife of film director, Ben Prosser, the major male character of Osborne's most recent play, Watch It Come Down, are angry—if that can encompass being abrasive and outspoken. Yet whether this justifies lumping them all together merely as three Osborne bitchy females, as did one reviewer, is another matter.² Pamela's abrasiveness and outspokenness reveal themselves most characteristically in the vigorous way she expounds to friends (who ask her) her opinions of others in the theatre. She makes no bones how many of them are mediocrities who have fooled critics, but she also expresses some admiration for them. Through hyperbole, she is trying to show her highly ambivalent reactions as well as to express her pleasure in having an audience that appreciates her energy and awareness. Frederica's abrasiveness and outspokenness reveal themselves primarily by her terse, ironical comments and probing questions designed to force those she cares about most to be more honest with themselves and others. She does so not only because she feels that they are hurting themselves but others (including herself) by undermining some of their feelings of trust. Sally's abrasiveness and outspokenness come out most strongly in free wheeling put downs directed mainly against her husband whom she holds responsible for almost all that frustrates her—and that comprises a lot.

Clearly these women differ a great deal. Yet common to all of them and what helps provide focus and depth to Osborne's characterization is their desire to love and be loved and yet their self doubts which aggravate such desires. In turn, this underlying similarity, together with the differences I've emphasized, adds complexity to his portrayal of each.

Even worse than oversimplification of Osborne's characters, is a serious misconception of their real natures that turns on the meaning of self concerned. In this regard I am referring to a tendency to dismiss many of his characters as narrow and egotistical because they care about themselves a lot.³ However, as Willard Gaylin points out, we can't care a lot about others unless we care a lot about ourselves.⁴ When we look at Osborne's characters from this perspective and observe what they care about themselves, we get a very different impression of them, one that helps us see the large, vital human context in which Osborne views them and his strong concerns about them.

To begin with, (1) they care about participating in many facets of life in their society. Yet they also feel strongly that real injustices exist in this society that make them critical of many of its values. (2) They have a sense of themselves as different or non-conformist in some respects and they value such feelings. (3) They care about setting high standards for themselves, especially in areas of achievement, and try to live up to these, particularly because of pride and conscience. (4) They value being highly self aware and honest and yet recognize how difficult such efforts can be, even with people who are understanding and sympathetic. (5) But most of all, they care a great deal about their feelings which vary greatly in range and depth and reveal themselves most noticeably in their interaction with others. Consequently, they greatly value relationships of friendship, loyalty, and love for through the right feedback they not only feel a heightened sense of their own worth and the life around them, but they hopefully might stimulate such reactions in others.

Clearly what these characters care about is considerable and reflects their awareness of many of the great potentialities that can be realized in human beings lives. In doing so, they reveal a vitally important concern Osborne has about his characters that helps us understand the depth and complexity of his view of life. That concern is one that he shares with many modern dramatists, namely with the problem of self-realization or what we currently speak of as identity. By this, I mean at least two things, both interrelated: self awareness, or individuals' efforts to understand their own natures in their many ramifications, and self-fulfillment, or their efforts to come to terms with their natures through the dynamics of their interplay with those forces and persons who most strongly affect them. As Erik Erikson, who has contributed some of the most important pioneering research in this area has observed, “If the dominant problem of Freud's age was confronting our feelings of sexuality, that for our period centers on identity.”⁵ Even if we might feel that Erikson is overstating his point, there is no doubt, merely judging from the wealth of literature on the subject, that the problem has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Moreover, some compelling reasons exist as to why this should be so. In particular, I would emphasize the heightened pressures upon people because of rapid changes of many kinds (as in science and technology) and the resulting increasing complexity of many aspects of their lives; the weakening of older, established institutions, such as church and family that in the past have provided sources of values and stability; the liberating effects of changing attitudes, as in sexuality, but which also have created value conflicts; threats to community, intimacy, and sense of self because of the increasing depersonalization of many areas of life; and the stifling of opportunities for individual growth and the possibilities of a better life, especially for the underprivileged, because of various forms of oppression.

What is distinctive about Osborne's exploration of this problem and makes it so pertinent is the rich human perspective in which he views it and the dramatic contexts in which he places it because of his strong convictions about human beings and society and the many conflicts these engender. He creates this perspective by focussing on the main characters who are, as is apparent in my discussion of the wide range of their concerns for themselves and others, acutely aware of so many of the potentialities for such realization but, as will be evident, also aware of the pain and difficulties that result because of what I would call their heightened sensitivity or vulnerability. Nevertheless, the pain and difficulties can also impel such people to struggle to realize as much as they can of what they most value in themselves, those they care about, and the life around them.

As for the dramatic context, it is one in which the main characters and others are living at close quarters and concerned with their intimate lives and yet simultaneously reacting to other forces that are crucially affecting them, whether openly or internally. These forces include the impact of a larger world outside, both that of their peer group and society, which provides opportunities for realization but also creates tensions; aspects of their past life, particularly key relationships or crucial memories which surface as they do in Ibsen (but in different ways); and aspects of the recent or historical past which may still significantly affect some of their attitudes and behavior as well as those of their society. As for the dramatic structure, it may be an occasion, serious or even slight, which (just by the very meeting of people) may provide a catalyst to bring out into the open the various feelings and attitudes I have mentioned. As a result, through a series of reversals and discoveries, widely ranging conversations that touch on many exposed nerve ends, or the shifting consciousness of the main characters reacting to what is affecting them, a kind of pressure cooker force is generated that can't be contained. Or instead of an occasion there may be some crisis or near crisis, such as marital tension or the impending death of a loved one, that generates the pressure. Still a third possibility may be a crucial formative event in a person's early career, the dynamics of which (as well as those of other experiences), significantly affect other phases in his life as it unfolds at different stages. As a result, any Osborne play, however narrow its setting or slight its action, may create an atmosphere in which, to quote Donne's poem, “one little room becomes an everywhere.” As to the nature and quality of the explosions generated in this room, these will become more evident when we explore some of the reasons why the characters are so vulnerable.

To begin with, the list of concerns or cares I've emphasized is so impressive and exacting—living up to high standards, acting out of a good conscience, being deeply self honest and consistently self aware, daring to be different, and deeply involving themselves in many caring relationships of depth—that just to realize some of them under optimal conditions would be demanding. For example, wanting to have a good conscience could be almost a life time's effort in itself since a person could discover that he has a confused conscience, an overly demanding one, or just a minimal one. Furthermore, even under optimal conditions, some of these cares and concerns could conflict with one another. For example, valuing high achievements might mean trying to become successful in one's society. However, if a person has a critical view of many aspects of his society and values himself as being different or non-conformist, he can experience strong conflicts. These conflicts, in turn, can become more acute because of the character's self awareness and the need to be honest, not to mention a demanding conscience that insists upon weighing carefully the merits of conflicting demands. Conversely, not living up to high standards can generate comparable, but different, conflicts—and so on.

If, in the second place, some of these feelings of caring derive from earlier experiences that reflect considerable frustration and unhappiness, then the need to satisfy them may be all the greater. Yet by the same token the capacity for doing so may be severely limited. For example, if some of the feelings of differentness have resulted from considerable isolation, one consequence for such a person might have been that he didn't receive much love and therefore needs this all the more. As Gaylin also points out, “To care adequately for ourselves, we need others to care for us.”⁶ Consequently, under such conditions a person could feel differentness so acutely that he might experience what Eric Fromm describes as a “sense of separateness” that could be devastating. As Fromm has remarked in The Art of Loving, “The awareness of separateness without reunion by love is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.”⁷ It is also significant to point out that feelings of guilt and shame could make a conscience demanding in a punitive way and so create other areas of conflict. Or, to take still another example, if feelings of differentness are associated with those of inferiority as a member of a lower social class, then the difficulties of having an adequate sense of self worth become all the greater. Consequently, differentness can seem to be such a burden that a person may try to compensate by trying hard to conform in some areas of society. Yet doing this may militate against other values he esteems.

If, in the third place, one reason to set high standards results from a need to prove oneself in order to deserve love rather than feel it unconditionally, then these expectations can seriously affect a person's sense of self worth or his need to care adequately for himself. Since one of the strongest traits of an Osborne character is a capacity to love others and be loyal to them, then the effort to live up to standards of loved ones becomes all the greater. Yet again the capacity for feeling worthy to do so may become less, especially if the character's values differ from those of loved ones.

In the fourth place, the main character's acute sensitivity to others' feelings, which makes feedback so stimulating and the giving and receiving of love so enriching, can also greatly accentuate his sensitivity in a number of ways. If, for example, his doubts about self worth also comprise guilt or shame feelings from earlier experiences, then he may feel all the more intensely the need for feedback. Yet he may feel so apprehensive about his worthiness to receive such feedback that this causes him both to seek it and yet distrust it. As a result, he may strike out in self destructive behavior which, in turn, can hurt those whom he needs above all to understand and support him. Besides, persons so sensitive to others' feelings, as Osborne's characters are, may pick up from the latter many of their feelings and internalize them. If, for example, the latter also feel guilt, not to mention other emotions, as so many of them do in Osborne's plays, such feelings may so affect those of the main character, already burdened with conflicts from earlier experiences, that he will feel these all the more acutely in a present relationship. As a result, he may experience feedback that can make already painful feelings of low self worth and guilt almost unbearable. In this context and others, we could do well to remember R. D. Laing's observations in The Politics of Experience that the way others experience us significantly affects the way we experience ourselves.⁸ For characters so responsive as Osborne's are to feedback, such experiencing can accentuate vulnerability in many areas.

Just from the few examples of vulnerability I've cited, it is apparent how closely related, pervasive, and painful such feelings can be within a person. Consequently, we might at this point conclude how despairing the results might be. Yet need this really be the case? To be able to confront so many aspects of one's life forcefully and to feel the impact so acutely can also reveal strength, resilience, understanding, and determination. Moreover, if one also has, as most of these characters do even at their lowest point, energy and a sense of humor, then the outcome can reveal sources of hope.

Obviously, just from this brief discussion, some compelling reasons exist for writing about Osborne's work. Yet at least one other reason I haven't mentioned exists. That is, that all of the books written about his plays to date were completed in 1969 or shortly thereafter. Consequently, they have little, if anything, to say about his most recent works. Nevertheless, Osborne has written three plays, in particular, that have received highly mixed reviews and certainly need more sustained attention than they have received to date. These are West of Suez, a play about an aging writer and his four daughters spending Christmas reunion at a West Indian villa belonging to one of them; A Sense of Detachment, a free wheeling, Hellzapoppin' revue that spoofs social mores and facile role playing; and most recently Watch It Come Down, a play about the failure of a marriage and of a commune supposedly based on mutual need. Mary Holland in reviewing West of Suez felt that she was seeing the play only because she had been sent to do so and out of loyalty to Osborne's earlier work.¹⁰ On the other hand, Helen Dawson spoke of the play very favorably as “brave and loving and providing an impressive evening in the theatre.”¹¹ In reviewing A Sense of Detachment, Benedict Nightingale spoke of the “Disintegration of John Osborne.”¹² In contrast, Michael Billington described the play as inventive and masterful, an original work.¹³

To come nearer to home, almost all of the reviews of Osborne's newest play, Watch It Come Down, have been unfavorable and markedly so. J. W. Lambert begins one of the few moderately favorable reviews by acknowledging that the faults of the play are too obvious to mention.¹⁴ One such is high flown language.¹⁵ For example, Ben Prosser (Sally's husband) eulogizes a dead writer homosexual friend of his (modelled on Lytton Strachey) in these words: “But he didn't trim, he didn't deceive himself, he preserved his precious English personality and grinned at everyone—”. Here the alliteration and phrasing create a combination that is ornate and stilted. But, since Ben is being portrayed as both a sentimentalist and snob, such language might be appropriate here.

Moreover, even if we should still prefer earlier Osborne to his later work, we may appreciate the former all the more pointedly when we realize how consistent and yet varied his work has been from the beginning.

Clearly, Osborne's concerns, as I've been describing them, have great relevance for us today, aware as we are of how much the pressures and insecurities he describes pervade many areas of our lives. Osborne helps make us understand how much we can hurt ourselves and one another, particularly when we live in societies that do considerable damage to our potential for caring. This awareness of where we may be hurting most at a particular time in the present may explain what Frank Marcus had in mind at the end of his review of Watch It Come Down. After acknowledging many reservations, he concluded that, nonetheless, the play may be important because Osborne again, as in the past, may be taking our current moral temperature accurately.¹⁶

But equally important, Osborne also shows us how much we can do to find sources of strength arising out of these needs, particularly if we remain vital, honest, judiciously self aware, able to trust ourselves and others, and willing to assume as much responsibility for our lives as we can.

While almost all Osborne plays have the kind of format I've described so that they might seem to lend themselves to some kind of common approach or grouping, they differ significantly because each presents its particular areas of vulnerability, its distinctive characters and society, and its own dramatic shape, emotional tones, and even language. For all these reasons, it is best to explore each play separately in depth and in a way appropriate to each. This is what I propose to do by focussing on the plays I consider Osborne's best to date: Epitaph for George Dillon, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Luther, Inadmissible Evidence, A Patriot For Me, A Bond Honoured, Time Present, The Hotel in Amsterdam, West of Suez, A Sense of Detachment, and Watch It Come Down. In some cases this means that I have relied more on certain aspects of the play than others, and that proportionately I have gone into more detail in discussing Osborne's three most recent plays, not necessarily because they are his best but because they depend on many rapidly shifting contrasts of varying dimensions that don't easily lend themselves to compression or selectivity.

However, before exploring each play separately, I want to point out some details of Osborne's life as we know of them, some of his values as a writer that emerge from his occasional journalistic pieces and interviews he has granted over the years, and some features of the post World War II England that affect his work, for these help us better understand some of the features I have been stressing about his plays.

II

So far as Osborne's life is concerned, we are particularly fortunate now, because in addition to interviews and occasional pieces that have come out since 1956, there has just appeared Volume I of his autobiography, A Better Class of Person,¹⁷ which in roughly chronological form presents the first twenty-six years of his life up through the acceptance by George Devine and the English Stage Company of Look Back in Anger. A Better Class of Person is important not only because of what it reveals about some of the major forces that have shaped Osborne's life, but also as a literary work in its own right for its sharply focussed detail, its striking contrasts in tone, especially from wry humor to stabbing pain, and its compelling, if also disquieting, insights into human nature.

John Osborne was born on December 12, 1929, in Fulham, London, where he spent the first five years of his life before his family moved out to more suburban Stoneleigh, near where his father's parents lived. His mother, Nellie Beatrice Grove, came from an upper working class background, her father having been a fairly prominent publican, and Mrs. Osborne herself has worked most of her life as a bar maid. Osborne's father, Thomas, came from a family of impoverished gentility, his father having lost his jewelry business because he spent too much of his time playing cricket. During the years that Osborne knew the latter, he was little more than a flunkey, since he kept busy doing errands for his wife, and he subsisted on pittances she gave him from money she earned in alternate years by taking care of the son of her nephew, a civil servant in Africa who was able to have his wife but not child stay with him every other year. Osborne's father from early life on was sickly. When he was sixteen, he won first prize in a contest, the award for which was a free trip to South Africa. Despite strong family objections, young Osborne accepted the prize. Unfortunately he suffered such a severe asthma attack en route that at Gibraltar he had to be removed from the boat, hospitalized, and then sent back by train to England, all at his family's expense. Mr. Osborne's mother not only never forgave her son for incurring such expenses but badgered him so much that he agreed to will over to her his estate, such as it was, to repay the debt. Osborne saw little of his father during his youth since the latter was away much of the time convalescing from tuberculosis. Moreover, even when Mr. Osborne was able to work at his job as an advertising copy writer, he wasn't around the house a lot since he and his wife apparently didn't get along too well and so for considerable periods of time remained unofficially separated. When Osborne was eleven, his father died. At this point I should add that Osborne had a sister a year younger than himself who died, also of tuberculosis, when she was two.

Because of the details I've mentioned, Osborne not only grew up as an only child but a heavily burdened one. He accompanied his father on visits to the latter's parents where he had to listen to reproaches heaped upon his father because of what happened at Gibraltar. In addition, Osborne had to serve as a sounding board for his mother as she poured out many of her complaints about her life.

Not only did Osborne witness a lot of illness, he also experienced a great deal himself, as well as other sources of pain. Since early childhood, he was sickly and scrawny and had a long siege of rheumatic fever which necessitated his lying on his back for almost a year and then recuperating for two years in a grubby public convalescent home. In addition, Osborne frequently had to change schools since his mother constantly kept moving from one apartment to another because she was perennially dissatisfied with every place to which she insisted on moving. One consequence was that Osborne, as a newcomer, was forced into fights which he always lost. Nor was being beaten up the only painful consequence of Osborne's relations with people his own age. During these years he had just two friends his own age, and one of them, a girl named Joan Buffen, treated him, as I want to show later, with great disdain.

As for Osborne's schooling itself, it was desultory since, except for one brief period he spent at a third rate public school, St. Michael's, to which he was sent as a follow up from his convalescence from rheumatic fever, his teachers paid him little attention and were boring to listen to. Although Osborne did receive some encouragement from the headmaster at St. Michael's and did well on some preparatory examinations, he was expelled for hitting the headmaster when the latter slapped him hard and unexpectedly in public. Embarrassing as the dismissal was, it did provide Osborne with the opportunity for a freer, more varied life than he had previously known.

Even though Osborne had few vocational skills, he was able on his return home to get a job for some trade journals as a reporter. Here he made friends with one of the journal editors, a Canadian named Arnold Running, who liked Osborne and encouraged him to write. At the same time Osborne decided to do something to overcome his feelings of social backwardness and began taking dancing lessons. Not only did he discover that he was a good dancer but that he had made quite an impression on an attractive, sincere young woman in the neighborhood, Renee Shippard, who was also taking lessons. Before Osborne quite knew what has happening, he found himself encouraged by Renee's parents to become engaged. However, almost as quickly, he became aware of how narrow and stifling such a projected life as a lower middle class suburbanite could be. Besides the entrapment of marriage, Osborne also felt that he was, like so many other young men of his age, doomed to two years of military service as a draftee. However, much to his surprise, Osborne discovered that his physical disabilities, for which he was not responsible, disqualified him once and for all from military service of any kind. Therefore he was free to begin establishing a life of his own away from Renee, even if this meant hurting her and her parents. At this point Osborne had some more luck because his dancing teacher praised him for what she regarded as his innate acting talent and encouraged him to join a local amateur theatre company. On the strength of this experience and his obvious desire to take more control of his life, Osborne got a job as Assistant Stage Manager with a touring theatrical company. Not only did the position give Osborne experience in assuming varied responsibilities, but it provided him with an excuse to use as a basis for terminating his engagement to Renee (in a letter which he describes as “long winded, dishonest, and evasive, larded with banalities about Life, Art, and God”). Nevertheless, the letter achieved its purpose, and Osborne was free to devote himself to the theatre and a more diversified and exciting personal life. Professionally, from this point on, except for brief periods of unemployment or temporary jobs, Osborne spent the years up to the writing of Look Back in Anger working in a variety of companies as Assistant Stage Manager, getting some acting experience and, most important, writing in collaboration plays of varying quality.

His first such effort was a play entitled The Devil Inside Him, which he did with Stella Linden, an attractive, sexually overpowering actress in one of the companies in which he worked and with whom he was having an affair that at least for a while did wonders for his ego (until Stella terminated it, as she warned that she would, when it began interfering with her career and personal life). As for the play itself, it was based on a melodramatic script Osborne had begun about a romantic young Welshman, and it was eventually put on for one performance at Huddersfield. Whatever originality the play might have had, despite its obvious crudeness, was eliminated by Stella's ruthless play doctoring based on her rigid and simplistic ideas of commercial audience expectations.

Much more important artistically were two plays that Osborne did in 1954-55 with Anthony Creighton (with whom he was involved in a repertory company at Hayling Island in 1950 and with whom he became friendly). The first, entitled Personal Enemy, derived from Osborne's interest in Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunting which was then at its height. Osborne, aided by Creighton who supplied a melodramatic plot framework of a thriller, wrote dialogue apparently based on actual testimony that showed how destructive such tactics could be. Although Osborne was unsuccessful in getting the American actor Sam Wanamaker (who was then appearing in London and was one of the targets for McCarthy's attacks) to put on the play because the latter feared that British audiences wouldn't tolerate its anti-American politics, he did have the satisfaction of knowing that Wanamaker was impressed by the work. The other was Epitaph for George Dillon which derived from an experience that happened to Creighton (while he was working as a bill collector) when two middle aged women took a strongly maternal interest in his career. For now it is enough to say that Osborne found this collaboration in Epitaph for George Dillon more satisfying than either of the others because he could concentrate even more on what he liked best, character development and confrontation, while Creighton willingly restricted himself to exposition and minor plot details. Just as important, Osborne could control the pace of the writing, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that Creighton, unlike Sheila, accepted his standards.

So far as Osborne's personal life with women is concerned, just the brief description of his affair with Stella shows how much more exciting it was than that with Renee. However, in addition, Osborne had two other involvements with actresses. The first was with Sheila, a romantic and expressive actress younger than Stella, who resisted all of Osborne's attempts to seduce her by exhibiting hysterical symptoms at just the right time.

The second, which was much deeper and more painful, was Osborne's marriage to Pamela Lane, a young actress whom he met when both were members of a repertory company in Pamela's home town of Bridgwater. While all of the women with whom Osborne was involved impressed him from the beginning, none affected him as strongly as did Pamela. From the moment that he first saw her when they were playing minor parts in one of the company's productions, Osborne was so stricken that he felt virtually helpless. In part he felt drawn to her as a fellow rebel since she had cut her hair to the bone to show her defiance of her local public that expected her to live up to their conventional expectations of how an actress should look and act. In part she made such an impression because of her large green eyes which, as he remarks, “… must mock or plead affection, preferably both at least.” Still another reason may have been Osborne's misunderstanding of Pamela's temperament. “Pamela's emotional equivocation,” he observes, “seemed so unstudied that I regarded it as ineffable passion.” If all the foregoing reasons weren't enough, the strong opposition to his involvement that came from local residents and Pamela's family (who hired a private detective to watch his movements) made Osborne all the more determined to have Pamela as his own. He proposed; she accepted, as he states, “warmly and casually”; and despite opposition and intrigue that almost seemed like comic opera, they were married.

As for their married life, which was spent mainly in and around London where both continued their careers, what stood out was its continuing precariousness and their growing estrangement. In part, such consequences were difficult to avoid because they were forced to remain apart from each other so much. Yet to a greater extent these consequences resulted because Osborne discovered how increasingly lonely and insecure he felt while Pamela was away, and yet how easily she accepted such separations, especially as she was getting better parts and improving her acting noticeably.

It is true that Osborne sensed that they were drifting further and further apart. Yet he continued to resist such awareness, all the more so when Pamela managed to get her company, then playing in Derby, to hire him, and he, upon arriving, noticed how well she was looking. However, when they were finally alone, she let the truth out as she told him “uncomplainingly that she found marriage and a career difficult.” Osborne was so stunned by what he regarded as her hackneyed and superficial answer that he couldn't reply. “Sweet reason,” he remarks, “was unanswerable, demoralizing as it did unconfident reason or passion.” Under these circumstances, he couldn't feel any malice on either side. “Almost soothingly,” he concludes, “she had wiped our slate out.” It is true that they remained together for a while at Derby, and Osborne continued to hope, despite his learning that Pamela had been unfaithful to him earlier and was going on holiday with someone else, that she might come back. However, for all practical purposes, their relationship ended that first night in Derby.

What seems almost like a footnote, I might add, is Osborne's brief notation, some twenty pages later in A Better Class of Person and one year later chronologically, that he wrote Look Back in Anger in just over a month. Yet this very terseness might indicate how far he had progressed in coming to terms with the experience, since some of it, as he freely admits (especially Pamela's coolness and parental opposition), underlies Look Back in Anger.

III

Just from these details I've emphasized, at least three strong impressions emerge. The first is how much of Osborne's life before he became famous involved the theatre. In particular, he consistently saw the differences between mediocrity or hackneyed commercialism, such as that of Stella and others, and honest efforts to have standards and a voice of one's own, even if these were not recognized immediately. Yet even Osborne's disdain for mediocrity didn't keep him from appreciating good acting wherever he found it and of entertainment as a source of energy, joy, and shared human experience.

The second, as the accounts of illness and schooling for example show, is how much pain Osborne experienced. Yet the details I've mentioned represent just the tip of the iceberg. The feelings, attitudes, and behavior of his family, as well as the social environment in which he grew up, created, if possible, even more anguish.

To begin with, Osborne received very little attention from the people around him. At the end of the first chapter of his autobiography, he observes, “Throughout my childhood no adult addressed a question to me …” even though a few pages later, he notes, “… but then I was the only one who seemed to listen to anybody. They didn't talk to each other so much as barrack themselves.” What is more, the kind of attention Osborne did receive from adults often constituted outright rejection. For example, immediately after stating that no adult addressed a question to him, Osborne goes on to say:

When I was at boarding school, when I went out to work, until the day she died when I was thirty, my father's mother never once asked me anything about myself. I think she had a glancing fondness for me. If I volunteered information, she would smile a thin winter of contempt and say nothing. Or change the subject firmly. To how well my cousin Tony was doing at Sandhurst. How her niece Jill was engaged to such a nice young man. Who had been to Blundells School and had a very high position in Lloyds Bank in Lombard Street. I was convinced that her dismissive smile was aimed only to chill my father's coffin yet again.

Yet painful as the foregoing, as well as other comparable incidents must have been, it doesn't compare to the impact that resulted because of the kind of attention that he did receive from his mother (about whom I also want to say more later). For now it is enough to call attention to what Osborne continually calls the “Black looks” that she gave him for almost anything that he did. Even as an adult, he could expect them as soon as he came in the door. To make matters worse, after his father's death, his mother not only would give him one of her Black looks but also would let him know that his behavior was also affronting his father's memory, even though the opposite was probably true, since, after his father's death, he frequently made choices by ascertaining what he thought his father would do in such a situation.

Just as members of Osborne's family could hurt him emotionally, so could people on the outside, especially those who came from a higher class or fancied themselves, to paraphrase the title of his autobiography, ‘a better class of person.’ A very good example of such social cruelty would be some of the treatment Osborne received from Joan Buffen (a young girl I've already referred to), with whom at the age of nine he became friendly. It is true that Joan, to whom he was was attracted because she was vigorous and daring, did initiate him into some mysteries of sex and invited him to her home a number of times. Nevertheless, Osborne felt deeply hurt when Joan's cousin (who went to one of the right schools) appeared for a visit. Although Joan still saw Osborne during this time, it was clear to him where her preference lay and how deeply inferior he came to feel:

I began to see that my longing for any scrap of affection, friendliness or even tolerance would come to nothing. The crumbs would diminish and be given with less and less grace until they were withdrawn altogether. I was a makeshift, and a poor and fleeting one at that. When her cousin left, I would be reprieved. For a day or two she would smile on my enthusiasm until her patience broke again. Seeing my misery only urged her on to throw me back to whence I came, like an amusing mongrel who quickly proves his dull breeding, untrained, untrainable, and ultimately unrewarding.

To add to Osborne's pain, he had to listen to his mother telling him regularly that such treatment was what he should expect in life. “My mother,” he points out, “always made it clear that my place in the world was unlikely to differ from her own. There was no reason why Mrs. Buffen or her daughter should care to speak to me. I had nothing to offer the Buffens, therefore why should they bother to acknowledge my existence …”

Besides feeling the pain of inferiority (accentuated, I might add, by his awareness of how undesirable he was because of his “weak body, blemished skin, ugly limbs, teeth, and dandruff”), Osborne had to spend many years around people, mostly his family, who led joyless, narrow lives. For one thing, almost all of them filled their days with petty routine. His mother spent every Friday cleaning so angrily and noisily that his father preferred remaining at his parents' home during this time, despite the rebukes he would experience there. As for Grandmother Osborne, every afternoon she ate chocolates, read one newspaper and a novel by Warwick Deeping, and then dozed off, although stoutly denying that this was taking place; as for Grandfather Osborne, all that he did was to take a nap until tea time. Although these and other examples I could mention seem harmless enough, yet the tragedy is, as Osborne points out, that such routine repressed whatever vitality and sexuality they may have felt: “Grandfather Osborne, poor neutered old dog, was to die in 1941, going without his oats for thirty eight years. I thought of them in their feather bed, of the old man lying upstairs alone every afternoon, Annie [his wife] downstairs reading the South Wales Argus. What were his thoughts. Denied affection, sex, respect, even the work he shunned …”

Considering how empty these people's lives were, it isn't surprising that they should be bitter, unhappy, and resigned. Whatever the reason may be, such feelings became most articulate and disquieting at Christmas time in what turned out to be the most important and yet distressing ritual of all, the annual family row when all the accumulated bitterness of so many years would, as Osborne put it, “claim its victims long before the Christmas wrappings had been thrown away.” It is true that the rows differed in some ways. That of the Grove family was more violent and often used religion for its fuel. In comparison, that of the Osborne family was more subtle and enduring in its effects. Nevertheless, as Osborne makes clear in one of the most powerful descriptions in the book, profound disappointment dominated both:

Disappointment was oxygen to them. Their motto might have been ante coitum triste est. The Grove despond was all chaos, shouting and tearful rebukes. Their battle cries were: ‘You've always had it easy.’ … ‘You didn't have to go out to work like I did when I was twelve.’ … ‘You were always Dad's favourite.’ … ‘What about you and Mum then?’ … ‘I've worked hard for everything I've ever had.’ The Osborne slough was full of sly casual strokes, all the more wounding to my mother because no one said openly what they meant, not about money and certainly not about property, but about emotional privilege, social advantage, hypocrisy and religiosity against ordinary plain dealing. The Osbornes appeared to preserve calm while being more succinct and specific. Their bitterness and sense of having been cheated from birth were certainly deeper. If my mother tried to wade in to an Osborne Row she was soon made speechless by the cold stare of Grandma and the passing looks of amusement between her and Nancy as my mother mangled the language and mispronounced words and became confused at their silences. ‘Did you see that?’ she'd say afterwards. ‘They were passing looks.’ She would flush through her flaking Tokalon powder, bite her nails and turn to my father for support, which seldom came.

For Boxing Day, Grandma Osborne had perfected a pumpkin trick which turned all the cold Christmas pudding and mince pies suddenly into funeral baked meats. She did it almost on the stroke of five and in one wand-like incantation. Lying back in the Hymnal position, she would close her eyes, smile her thin gruel of a smile and say, ‘Ah, well, there's another Christmas over.’ I dreaded the supreme satisfaction with which she laid the body of Christmas spirit to rest. In this one phrase she crushed the festive flower and the jubilant heart. On New Year's Eve she used less relish in confirming that there was little reason to feel good about the year passing and certainly less about the coming one.

Undeniably such infighting could well provide Osborne with rich dramatic material, but at what a human cost so far as it could affect belief in trust, goodness, and the joy of life!

Yet even more distressing than the fall out connected with the family row was that which resulted from the feelings about love that dominated Osborne's mother (and to a lesser extent members of her family). While Osborne points out many examples of this attitude perhaps none is more revealing and devastating than the very first mention he makes of it, namely when he comments about the reasons that his mother's family strongly disapproved of Auntie Winnie, one of Grandmother Grove's sisters:

… Her affectionate nature didn't seem to be returned by her sisters who dismissed her with, ‘Poor old Auntie Winn, she'll never leave that place.’ No one made any effort to see that she might. They were all pushy in their way, tolerating one another peevishly rather than having any actual exchange of feelings. If one of them died, fell ill or short of money it was something to be talked about rather than experienced in common. It was as if they felt obliged to live within the literal confines of their emotional circumstances. The outlet for friendship or conviviality was narrow in spite of the drunken commiseration, endless ports and pints of beer and gin and Its. This may in part explain my mother's stillborn spontaneity and consistent calculation that affection had only to be bought or repaid in the commonest coinage. ‘He doesn't owe you anything,’ or ‘You don't owe him anything.’ ‘What's she ever done for you?’ These were the entries that cooked the emotional and filial books. They were chill words, flaunting their loveless, inexorable impotence.

It would be difficult to imagine a harsher, more despairing description of cold heartedness than “flaunting their loveless, inexorable impotence,” unless it would be a later passage which comes after the comment I've already quoted about Mrs. Osborne's insistence that because her son had nothing to offer people like the Buffens, he could hardly expect them, as indicated, to acknowledge his existence. Immediately afterwards, Osborne goes on to say, “It was consistent with her [his mother's] view of affection or friendship as a system of rewards, blackmail, calculation, and aggrandizement in which people would only come off best or worst. Nothing ever strikes me with such despair and disbelief as the truly cold heart. It disarms utterly and never ceases to do so. I wish it were otherwise.” Although Osborne in the first passage quoted recognizes why his mother and people like her react as they do, he still tries to shield himself from the impact of such behavior. However, such efforts on his part became increasingly difficult, as two other examples pointedly show.

The first centers on his mother's behavior at the time of his father's death and its effect on Osborne who was then eleven. Despite his mother's insistence that Osborne should stay with her when it became obvious that his father's death was imminent, Mr. Osborne's doctor mercifully arranged that Osborne should stay with friends who lived nearby. However, immediately after her husband's death, Mrs. Osborne insisted again that her son should return at once. Although Mrs. Osborne was prevailed upon to let her son stay away one more day, as soon as he returned she took him to view his father in the coffin. Osborne describes this scene, like that of the family row, in stark detail:

… The smell in the room was strong and strange and, in his shroud, he was unrecognizable. As I looked down at him, she said, ‘Of course, this room's got to be fumigated, you know that, don't you. Fumigated.’ Frumigated was how she pronounced it. With my father's body lying in the bedroom across the landing, I had been obliged to share my briefing room with my mother, who spent hour upon hour reading last Sunday's News of the World, the bright light overhead, rustling the pages in my ear and sighing heavily. For the first time I felt the fatality of hatred.

It is no wonder that from this point on Osborne could never again refer to his mother as “Mum” or “Mummy,” as he used to, all the more so since she apparently had no idea as to why the change occurred.

The second example is one of a number of entries from Osborne's diary (dated 1955) that he includes in the text of A Better Class of Person. After he notes what must have been a standard response that his mother made about theatre acquaintances that he brought home (“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”) there follows this entry: “I am ashamed of her as part of myself that can't be cast off, my own conflict, the disease which I suffer and have inherited, what I am and never could be whole. My disease, an invitation to my sick room.” Despite all of Osborne's efforts to the contrary, such as the quotations I've cited about the effort to deny the impact of cold heartedness, he feels that his mother has profoundly, if not irrevocably, affected his life because, to restate Willard Gaylin's observation to which I've already referred, the way that others care about us affects the way we care about ourselves. Clearly Osborne's journal entry expresses profound disappointment that verges on self punishment.

Although he may regard such feelings of self punishment as unfair, unlike members of his family for whom disappointment was oxygen, Osborne realizes that he has so deeply internalized feelings he is describing that they are uniquely his. However, unlike members of his family on Christmas day, he can't escape by projecting them onto others. This awareness leads to the third strong impression that emerges from reading A Better Class of Person—the necessity to assume full responsibility for one's life and to cope with all its limiting conditions as hopefully as one can, however difficult, complex, and even misunderstood such efforts may be.

In this regard the one person in Osborne's family who honestly made such efforts, restricted as they were, was his father. This constitutes a strong reason why Osborne admired the latter so much. Significantly, the very first episode Osborne recalls in A Better Class of Person is that of his father waving goodbye to his mother and himself from the window of a train that was taking him to a sanitarium from which all three knew that he was unlikely to return. Nevertheless, his father leaned out the window, smiled, gave Osborne a ten shilling note, and said, “Take your mother to the pictures, son, and then go to Lyons Corner House.”

An incident such as this helps make clearer Osborne's comments that he made in an interview with John Freeman in a volume called The Playwrights Speak (edited by Walter Wager). In the interview Osborne acknowledged that while his father always seemed to be in the control of other people, he was “a man of tremendous strength, tremendous integrity.”¹⁸ As for other incidents that would also corroborate Osborne's admiration of his father, I would mention these: 1) He was honest and thoughtful in expressing his feelings for others. For example, while in the sanitarium Mr. Osborne wrote only brief post cards to his son, as well as including post scripts to his wife. He did so obviously not to upset them but also to avoid writing the proper but dishonest letters that a dutiful father might be expected to send home. 2) He made some efforts to modify the conditions of his life as shown by the unofficial separations from his wife. Yet he continued to show a sense of responsibility towards his wife and his son. 3) Unlike other family members, Mr. Osborne interested himself in a larger world outside as shown by his extensive reading, his appreciation of song and social companionship, and his insistence on formulating his own careful opinions about religion, politics, and the character of those around him. 4) He was, as the train episode shows, affectionate and cheerful in his relationship with his son, and to the extent that this was possible, with his wife and parents.

As for Osborne's own behavior, A Better Class of Person clearly shows how much it resembles that of his father. 1) Osborne did try to enjoy his life, even in his isolated, painful childhood, as shown in his frank appreciation of whatever happy times he experienced. 2) He was honest, as shown in his admission of the way he treated Renee, his fiancee. 3) His careful efforts to understand others' motives and to that extent limit their responsibility for their effect on him, as shown in his insights into his mother's and grandparents' behavior and the absorbing attention he showed to the lives of those around him. 4) His devotion to his father, especially the way he remained close to the latter and spent many hours reading to him before his death, and his appreciation of those few people who treated him kindly and encouraged him.

At the same time Osborne seemed better able than his father, even before the success of Look Back in Anger, to bounce back as shown in his reaction to the break up with Pamela. Perhaps one reason that Osborne could do so was that he profited from his father's example. But, in addition, Osborne may have done so because, from a very early age, as we have seen, he was so much on his own that he became tougher and more resilient than perhaps he realized.

IV

Finally, I would emphasize a fourth impression that emerges, partly from Osborne's autobiography, but even more so from early occasional pieces and interviews, and that is a strong social conscience. Actually, in pointing out Osborne's awareness of class snobbery I've revealed part of this concern. Yet, in addition, I would point out Osborne's comments on the convalescent home to which he was sent to recuperate from rheumatic fever, particularly the dismal surroundings and the insensitive responses of staff members to the shame and embarrassment felt by some of the boys.

However, other works provide stronger evidence of Osborne's social concern. In “They Call It Cricket,” Osborne's contribution to a collection of essays (Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler) by “angry young writers,” he insisted that it wasn't his job as a writer to propose solutions to problems.¹⁹ Nevertheless, his angry tone and the precise questions that he raised about specific problems indicate that he was more of an activist than he admitted. For example, Osborne proposed that writers should ask questions about the kinds of housing and education that people should have, the kind of political leaders they need, and the intellectual and cultural environment required to develop as freer, happier human beings.²⁰

Even stronger evidence of Osborne's concern and his belief that a writer, although not active in specific political action or programs will try to affect what happens, reveals itself in his well known, if greatly misunderstood, “A Letter to My Fellow Countrymen” (1957).²¹ Osborne wrote this because he greatly admired Bertrand Russell's efforts to make the British people aware of the disastrous consequences of British nuclear policy as it was then being formulated by Harold Macmillan and Hugh Gaitskill, then leaders of, respectively, the Conservative and Labour Parties, without any real effort to involve the British people, or even Parliament, in the decision making process. If anything, the leaders were avoiding doing just that. Since Osborne felt that Russell wasn't reaching either the public or the leaders directly, he decided that he would deliberately adopt a tone of cold hatred towards the leaders to provoke them to answer in such a way as to expose their real purposes to the public and therefore arouse the latter to mobilize opposition. Unfortunately, Osborne's efforts backfired so that many people thought that he was just expressing spiteful personal hostility rather than outraged general concern.²² That “A Letter” didn't succeed doesn't invalidate Osborne's efforts to stir people up politically, the counterpart to what is still his best known statement about his purpose as a writer, namely his assertion in “They Call It Cricket,” “I want to give my audiences lessons in feeling.”

Nevertheless, the most powerful early statement of Osborne's social awareness is this comment in the Preface to the Evans Acting Edition of Look Back in Anger: “People who believe that the setting of Look Back in Anger is unutterably squalid are simply unaware of the facts of life, that there is a housing shortage, that a great many houses are not only old, dirty, and hideous, but are unaware of the ugliness of their own surroundings, ugliness they have helped create themselves.”²³

Yet precisely because of the force of this criticism, it is difficult not to feel in reading later comments, such as those Osborne made in a two-part interview with Kenneth Tynan in The Observer (June 30 and July 7, 1968), that his position had changed, at least for a while. The most obvious thing to say, and to some extent Osborne himself would agree, is that at this time he became somewhat conservative in his politics and social attitudes. Not only did he admit to Tynan that he “got the hell out of the working class” but that he looks critically on working class political action.²⁴ “The trouble is,” he told Tynan, “that history has rather pulled the carpet out from under [the working class as a political force]. The Labour Party has appealed to cupidity and the appeal has been answered by technology.” Nor does Osborne just limit his attacks to the working class, for he also looks critically at the student radicals of the Sorbonne (who were then, as we know, pressing for major changes in many areas of French life). While he frankly admits that, if the student radicals came to power, they would threaten his security, he also expresses strong reservations about their ideology. “But a lot of left wing feeling,” he insists, “strikes me nowadays as mashed potato radicalism. It hasn't been felt through and worked through. I find it easy and superficial and tiresome.”²⁵

On the other hand, much more recent evidence suggests that Osborne may be reverting back to his earlier more anti-establishment position. In an interview on his fiftieth birthday, he had these strong words to say about present day England. “I'm not so much angry as passionate. I am passionate about the way this country has changed since I wrote that play Look Back in Anger. We used to be the gentlest nation on earth. Now we've become brutal, aggressive, and competitive. People do not care about each other.”²⁶ Certainly in this comment Osborne expresses stronger, more open concern for a better life for people than seems evident in the Tynan interviews. Still this concern seems less sharply focussed on particular social and economic problems than was true of the earlier statements that I've quoted.

V

That Osborne should express a strong concern for a more humane and just society is understandable. Just the most cursory glance at some of the underlying social, political, and economic problems confronting Great Britain since 1945 makes clear how necessary such concern is, for, although much has changed for the better, real grounds for dissatisfaction still exist.

It is true that even the most reactionary Tory government won't dare touch the National Health Program that provides almost totally free medical care to anyone in the United Kingdom or denationalize more than a few industries that have been put in the public sector. Moreover, some class barriers have been weakened, as shown in the adoption of the comprehensive school, to begin to replace the public (or what we would call private) school system and the increasing democratization of the arts, as Osborne's own career attests. Furthermore, many social attitudes, particularly those involving sex and divorce, have become much more liberal, and efforts are being made to update some features of the judicial system.

Nevertheless, real grounds for enduring dissatisfaction remain. To cite just a few of these, I would emphasize the following: 1) the loss of national self esteem and sense of identity that resulted from the long overdue liquidation of the Empire and the failure of any real national sense of community to emerge to compensate. 2) The continuing technological obsolescence, managerial incompetence, and low worker productivity that still keep British industry in a disadvantageous position in comparison to that of Japan and some of the western European countries. 3) The continuing existence of strong class barriers in many areas. 4) The rise of Fascist groups such as the National Front and the noticeable increase in racism, as shown most recently in violent clashes in the summer of 1981 between whites and non-whites in Brixton and other areas of London. 5) The continued violence and political and social oppression in Northern Ireland that have taken such a toll in human lives. 6) Pervasive hardcore poverty and marginal subsistence as shown most dramatically in the current unemployment figures of 11.7 percent (as of January 1982) that represent the highest since the 1930's.

Notes

1. J. W. Lambert in a review of Watch It Come Down, Drama, No. 121 (Summer 1976), p. 41.

2. Robert Cushman in his review of Watch It Come Down in The Observer Review, 29 Feb. 1976.

3. Although I could cite many such articles or reviews, here are three that make Osborne's characters sound like chronic complainers—and little else: John Simon's review of Luther in The Hudson Review, 16 (1963), 584-585; Philip French's review of Time Present in The New Statesman and Nation, 76 (31 May 1968); and Hilary Spurling's review of the same play in The Spectator, 220 (31 May 1968), 752.

4. Willard Gaylin, Caring (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 164.

5. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 7.

6. Gaylin, op. cit., p. 164.

7. Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), p. 9.

8. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. 10.

9. These include the following: Martin Banham, Osborne (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969); Alan Carter, John Osborne (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969; rev. ed., 1971); Harold Ferrar, John Osborne (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973); Ronald Hayman, John Osborne (London: Heinemann, 1968; rev. ed., 1972); and Simon Trussler, The Plays of John Osborne (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1969). The revisions consist only of brief, summary discussions of West of Suez, and three of the books—Banham's, Ferrar's, and Hayman's—are intended only as brief introductory studies.

10. Mary Holland, Plays and Players, 19 (Oct. 1971), p. 38.

11. Helen Dawson, The Observer Review, 22 Aug. 1971.

12. Benedict Nightingale, The New Statesman and Nation, 84 (8 Dec. 1972), 875.

13. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 7 Dec. 1972.

14. J. W. Lambert, The Sunday Times, 22 Feb. 1976. However, in a later review, Drama, op. cit., pp. 40-43, Lambert speaks more favorably of the play.

15. Robert Cushman, The Observer Review, op. cit., 29 Feb. 1976. B. A. Young, The Financial Times, 25 Feb. 1976.

16. Frank Marcus, The Sunday Telegraph, 29 Feb. 1976.

17. John Osborne, A Better Class of Person (London: Faber and Faber, 1981; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981).

18. John Freeman, edited version of interview in “Face to Face” on BBC, 21 Jan. 1967. In Walter Wager, ed., The Playwrights Speak (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), p. 98.

19. “They Call It Cricket,” in Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1957), p. 84.

20. Ibid.

21. “A Letter to My Fellow Countrymen,” Tribune, 13 May 1960. (Reprinted in John Russell Taylor, ed., Look Back in Anger: A Casebook, op. cit., pp. 67-69.)

22. Osborne explains his purpose in an interview with Terry Coleman, The Guardian, 8 Aug. 1971, as well as in that with Freeman, in Wager, op. cit., pp. 107-108. Cf. also Osborne's letter to The Times, London, 3 Sept. 1968, in which he apologizes for having written this piece.

23. John Osborne, “Foreword” to Look Back in Anger. Evans Acting Editions (London, n.d.) p. 3.

24. Interview with Kenneth Tynan, The Observer Review, 7 July 1968.

25. Ibid.

26. Quoted in The Chronicle, Willimantic, Connecticut, 12 Dec. 1979, p. 2.