SOURCE: Langford, Larry L. “The Unsocial Socialism of John Osborne.” English Studies 78, no. 3 (May 1997): 237-57.

[In the following essay, Langford contends that critical opinions of Osborne’s plays were often intertwined with opinions of his political intentions and integrity.]

‘Socialism is an intellectual Proteus’.

(H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli)

For a playwright so often recognized as important, and perhaps great, John Osborne suffered particularly harsh criticism concerning his dramatic competency and his political integrity. To be sure, he has his defenders who see in his work ‘a theatrical vitality which … makes much adverse criticism seem petty and pedantic’, but his plays often met with sharply negative reactions that at times had a particularly bitter edge, as though his failure to fulfill certain expectations constituted a kind of betrayal.¹ In the enthusiasm that greeted the first production of Look Back in Anger, many saw in Osborne's work a new force they hoped would revitalize the British theatre and enable it to act as a ‘harbinger of the New Left’.² Today, many believe this potential went largely unfulfilled and that the theatrical and political sharpness Osborne honed with Jimmy Porter quickly dulled and became ineffectual.

Such disappointment has a number of causes, not the least of which was Osborne's consistent, and sometimes sarcastic, criticism of the British Left. His assertions, such as ‘I really don't have political affiliations, although I suppose I once did believe I must be a socialist’, cause some to believe that the development of his political beliefs mirrors that of Kingsley Amis.³ This conclusion, however, entails a misunderstanding both of Osborne and of the particular character of British socialism. If we put Osborne's work within the context of the history of socialism in Britain, and compare him to openly committed socialist writers such as Brecht and Shaw, we can better appreciate how his drama powerfully expresses anger not only at what Britain has become, but more specifically, at what it never became. For Osborne, that lost potentiality is tied to socialism as much as to anything else.

Engels observed that socialists in Britain regard their theory as a ‘credo and not a guide to action’,⁴ meaning their belief in such principles as class warfare and the redistribution of wealth rarely led to any revolutionary activities. This reluctance to participate in acts of violence or in any act that would immediately threaten the rule of capital became an increasingly prominent aspect of socialism in Britain, from the primarily ethical concerns of Morris and other late nineteenth-century socialists, through the Webbs and the Fabian policy of permeation, to the mid twentieth-century ascendency of the Labour party, when Herbert Morrison could confidently proclaim, ‘Socialism is what a Labour government does’.⁵

Ambivalence towards the idea of revolution and disagreement over how to define socialism have made the socialist tradition in Britain a diverse one, and it is within this tradition that Osborne finds a place. If it seems inaccurate to label him a socialist writer, he nonetheless showed a lasting concern for the possibility of socialism in Britain. In addition, if Osborne's socialism seems idiosyncratic, the British socialist movement itself has struggled with questions of self-definition for over a century and the political dimensions of Osborne's drama reflect the dynamics of that struggle.

In such a political environment, it sometimes becomes problematic to determine who qualifies as a socialist writer. Lukács brushed aside the whole question by asserting that regardless of an author's subjective intention, ‘any accurate account of reality is a contribution … to the Marxist critique of capitalism, and is a blow in the cause of socialism’.⁶ This politically ecumenical attitude offers only one criterion for defining socialist literature—the assumption that the contradictions within capitalism cannot stand exposure. Whether or not this criterion is sufficient, it has the virtue of shifting literary discussion away from an author's political commitment onto that of a work's compatibility with socialist tenets. In the case of Osborne, it also helps clarify how his work, with its apparent political ambiguity, compares with that of socialist writers such as Shaw and Brecht.

Osborne always resisted comparisons between himself and Brecht, seeing in the latter's work a type of theatre not readily amenable to the needs of the British stage. ‘The Brechtian bulldozer may not be our answer. We need to invent a machine of our own’.⁷ At one time, he also held Shaw's achievement as a dramatist in low esteem, calling him ‘the most fraudulent, inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to dull a timid critic or fool a dull public’, though he later significantly revised this assessment.⁸ Osborne's antipathy to both playwrights, however, should not blind us to how he reconciles their differences.

Brecht never maintained that the alienation effect requires a playwright to thwart every theatrical expectation held by an audience. For example, he wrote that a dramatist best influences his public by smuggling ideas into his plays along with fully-developed characters, thereby incorporating them ‘into the instincts of the spectator, flooding through his veins like blood in a transfusion’.⁹ This idea differentiates Brecht from Shaw just as it aligns him with Osborne. Whereas Shaw reasoned and debated with his audience, Osborne proclaimed his wish ‘to make them feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They can think afterwards’.¹⁰ As he understood his own work, its purpose was not to analyze social realities but to allow the audience access to the experience of living within them, with all of the anger, delusion, and false consciousness that often entails. In other words, like Osborne, Brecht saw the efficacy of encouraging an audience to feel before demanding it to think. They should feel, however, a certain unnaturalness in what they are viewing, a sense that disrupts the complacency which unquestioningly accepts what is presented.

According to Brecht, ‘What is “natural” must have the force of what is startling’.¹¹ In one sense, epic theatre must present what the audience expects to see. Yet in another sense, the fulfillment of that expectation must in some way startle us into awareness. The success of Look Back in Anger, for example, has been explained by the fact ‘that people were prepared to accept Osborne's fiction as real’,¹² but he explicitly warned against this type of response. Not only did he describe his technique in The Entertainer as one which ‘cuts right across the restrictions of the so-called naturalistic stage’, he also wrote that to see the language of Look Back as naturalistic is to miss the point of the play because the ‘language of “everyday life” is almost incommunicable for the very good reason that it is restricted, inarticulate, dull and boring’. Instead, Osborne saw the Jimmy Porter of both Look Back and Déjàvu in operatic rather than naturalistic terms and admonished actors that Jimmy's ‘inaccurately named “tirades” should be approached as arias’, with all the adroitness, invention, and timing such a performance requires.¹³ To approach them as such is to transcend the expectations of the naturalistic stage and to remind the audience they are watching a performance, not simply witnessing an individual's private despair.

What mattered to Osborne, as it did to Brecht, is not the detailed presentation of historical analysis on stage but the rearrangement of material ‘so as to allow the story-teller's ideas about men's life to find expression’. Even in Osborne's history plays, Luther, A Patriot for Me, and A Subject of Scandal and Concern, the focus on particular individuals acting in particular contexts does not, as some have charged, present only a vague or shallow historical understanding but one such as that advocated by Brecht, in which the ‘mysterious Powers’ at work in historical conditions can be seen as ‘created and maintained by men’.¹⁴

This emphasis on the individual is the key to understanding the place of socialism in Osborne's drama. The operative paradox in the work of both Shaw and Osborne is that even though neither wished to write the drama of the individual, each wrote plays with vividly-realized characters whose apparent reality makes strong demands on the audience's empathy. Through such characters, however, they both contend that whatever social and political forces may be brought to bear on the individual, he or she remains subject to them only to the degree that these forces are not resisted. Even something as impersonal and historically transcendent as the Life Force depends upon the active cooperation of certain individuals to achieve its end.

Unlike Shaw, Osborne had no use for the optimism afforded by a belief in the Life Force or by the commitment to a specific agenda for a socialist restructuring of Britain, which makes his work a negative image, as it were, of the Shavian theatre. The nostalgia which tinges the despair of so many of Osborne's characters harkens back to a Britain which no longer exists, but empire and Edwardian sunsets constitute only a small part of this longing. Instead, the old socialist dream of a truly free and egalitarian Britain drifts through these plays, never fully articulated, but never far from the surface either. The angry invective and cynicism of Osborne's work has its origin in the sense of something that has been lost and cannot be regained, or more accurately, a sense of having never really possessed what now has been lost. This something means one thing if we read the plays only in terms of their psychopathology of personal relationships. However, if we adopt the kind of perspective on character and event that Shaw and Brecht advocated, it becomes possible to bring the political concerns of Osborne's work into proper focus.

Those who take issue with Osborne over the supposed Tory politics of his drama misunderstand that the anger of his work is not only a rejection of things as they are but an expression of bitter disappointment over how they have never been. A policeman says of Coriolanus, ‘No one can hate so spectacularly without being tied up by love somewhere’,¹⁵ and so it is with many of Osborne's characters.

As Jimmy Porter looks back over his life, he confirms that his anger, all anger, originates in a sense of loss. Anger does not arise from spite or a desire for vengeance; it ‘comes into the world in grief not grievance’. To ask what anger is about, he continues, is to miss the point:

It is mourning the unknown, the loss of what went before without you, it's the love another time but not this might have sprung on you, and greatest of all, the deprivation of what, even as a child, seemed to be irrevocably your own.¹⁶

His anger does not come from having lost what he once possessed but from having never possessed what he intuitively feels should have been his, and in a sense, his particular kind of loss holds true for Britain as well.

Osborne claimed he was ‘more concerned with private grief than public sorrow’,¹⁷ but his focus on the one does not preclude the importance of the other. However engulfed in their private griefs his characters may be, they stand in the shadow of that larger public sorrow over the unfulfilled promise of a particularly British tradition of socialist thought.

I

Osborne always actively refused the label of political writer and maintained from the beginning of his career that he held no theory or dogma;¹⁸ nevertheless, he was often vociferous in his condemnations of the Conservative and Labour parties. He described Tories as ‘always detestable’ and as being a party of those who ‘wield enormous power without responsibility to anyone but themselves’.¹⁹ If these statements seem sharply partisan, then consider his response to the Conservative government's decision, with Labour's connivance, to develop a nuclear arsenal for Britain: ‘There is murder in my brain, and I carry a knife in my heart for every one of you. Macmillan, and you Gaitskell, you particularly’.²⁰

Whatever the depth of his disdain for the Tories, this pointed invective against Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell shows the real focus of Osborne's political anger. His point is not the simplistic one that Labour can act as despicably as the Tories, but that in some ways it has acted even more so. In their unimaginative selfishness, the Tories have at least been consistent with their principles. To Osborne, however, Labour had abandoned its own principles and thereby betrayed those whom it should have most ardently defended. If the working people of Britain supported the Conservatives during the Suez crisis, he wrote, they did so because ‘after fifty years of talking cant about brotherhood and ethics, the Labour Party still had not managed to tell anyone what Socialism meant’. And what does it mean? According to Osborne, ‘Socialism is about people, and the Labour Party has forgotten it’.²¹

This definition may be rather vague, but it goes to the heart of how the British Left has struggled to define itself and its principles. Osborne's derision of the Labour party for talking cant does not cast aspersions on concepts such as brotherhood and ethics but on their emptiness as terminology in Labour's rhetoric. These terms are vital to his own conception of socialism, as they have been to British socialists since the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, what Stanley Pierson has termed ‘ethical socialism’ predominated in Britain and sought to oppose capitalism by means of an often vaguely defined humane social structure.²² Though later supplanted by the Fabians, and in turn by the Labour party, ethical socialism has exerted an influence on all subsequent socialist movements in Britain, even the Communist Party. It can be seen today in the principles of the New Left and, as Julian Barnes notes, even in the political agenda of Labour leader Tony Blair.²³ But it can also be seen in the drama of Osborne.

The tradition of ethical socialism sees itself as more than just a political option and more than just a blueprint for restructuring society, which is precisely the attitude Osborne took in defining his own political stance. ‘I am not going to define my own socialism’, he wrote:

Socialism is an experimental idea, not a dogma; an attitude to truth and liberty, the way people should live and treat each other. Individual definitions are unimportant. The difference between Socialist and Tory values should have been made clear enough by this time. I am a writer and my own contribution to a socialist society is to demonstrate those values in my own medium, not to discover the best ways to implement them.²⁴

Osborne here distances himself from Shaw, but beyond that, his definition of socialism as an experimental idea establishes it as an organic process rooted in the priority of individual initiative and experience, not as a structure to be erected or implemented.

Shaw writes, ‘Socialism is from beginning to end a matter of law’,²⁵ but for him and many others, it was more than this and entailed, as it later would for Osborne, certain intangibles vital to a socialist state which cannot be legislated into existence. In fact, the individualist tradition in British socialism has always shown a fear of regimentation by the power of the state, even a socialist one. This fear denotes a particular characteristic of British socialist thought from its beginnings to the present day: the desire to balance the political need for collectivization with a commitment to the moral priority of the individual.²⁶

In the late nineteenth-century, liberal ideals of individualism found apparent affirmation in the philosophy of vitalism. In the work of Nietzsche and Bergson, socialists and non-socialists alike sought confirmation that freedom and creativity were the defining characteristics of human existence. My point is not that Nietzsche and Bergson in particular were of importance to socialism but that they were representative of generally held views of human nature and experience that found their way into socialist thought.²⁷ In other words, Bergson and Nietzsche each expressed the general philosophical optimism of his time, with the result that socialists such as Shaw could readily adapt the principle of creative freedom to the socialist dream of human emancipation.

If this Bergsonian and Nietzschean vitalist tradition remains marginal in the overall history of British socialism, it is central to Osborne's drama. He read widely as a youth, but of the socialist writers he read, he emphasizes only three—Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells—and although this might seem a rather unusual grouping of socialists, it directly evokes the vitalist tradition and indicates that Osborne's socialism has an aesthetic as much as a political origin.

In his autobiography, Osborne recounts his grandfather's condemnation of Wilde's immoral behavior, yet when he later read The Soul of Man for himself, that work struck him as ‘surprising and intriguing and seemed to contradict the flabby voluptuousness of the fairy tales or my grandfather's judgement of his life’. As a youth, he considered Shaw's novels dull, but he ‘enjoyed the Prefaces to the plays almost more than the plays themselves. They were both frowned upon, unread, by most adults which made them essential reading’. He also enjoyed Wells's novels and histories, though in other ways considered him to be ‘too much like a scrimping schoolteacher’.²⁸ Despite their many differences, the particular importance of these writers to Osborne's socialist attitudes is their implicit conviction that only a vitalist collectivism could break the chains of capitalist exploitation and make the socialist dream a reality.

Shaw always had an ambiguous faith concerning the potential of socialism to meet its goals. Although until the end of his life, he presented detailed arguments in support of socialist government, he remained impatient with the slow and methodical political work needed to achieve that goal, instead pinning his hopes on the concept of Creative Evolution and its principle agent, the Superman. Shaw's belief in collective order and organization constantly struggled with his skepticism concerning those concepts and with his conviction that only the efforts of the individual can save humanity.

The Bergsonian and Nietzschean roots of the Shavian Superman and its implications for socialism have been extensively studied. Less noted, however, are its parallels in the work of Wilde. Wilde might seem somewhat out of place among socialist writers, for as Richard Ellmann notes, socialism for him ‘did not mean any specific variety, but a general hatred of tyranny’,²⁹ an attitude quite common among ethical socialists of his day. In effect, Wilde advocates a socialism similar to that of Shaw, one that has its basis in a special type of individual who lives without the benefit of illusions and without a fear of honest self-understanding.

Wilde, like Osborne, shows no interest in the details of social administration but advocates a socialism that would make it possible for individuals to ‘realize sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously’. The solution to the problem of private property is not ‘Authoritarian Socialism’ or ‘an industrial-barrack system’ but one that establishes individualism as its preeminent value, which in part explains why the figure of Christ epitomizes the highest human aspirations for Wilde. As with Morris, Ruskin, and so many of the Christian and ethical socialists of his day, Wilde's Christ ‘had no patience with dull lifeless mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat everybody alike: for him there were no laws’.³⁰ Rather than a restructuring of the state, socialism would alleviate the very need for laws because one of its effects would be the creation of a race of such Christs.

Although he apparently never read Nietzsche or Bergson, Wilde's aestheticized Christ clearly combines the most attractive elements in the writings of both as the way to achieve a socialism defined by creativity rather than by structure.³¹ Even more so than Shaw, he saw collective organization as only part of the answer to the problem of human misery. With the advent of Wilde's Christ, as with Shaw's Superman, state-administered programs must give way to a world of individuals who can sustain each other by the power of their own self-sufficiency.

The importance of Wells to an understanding of Osborne's work is his lingering sense of futility at the prospects for a successful transition to socialism. Whatever political optimism Wells may display in his essays and utopian novels, in the scientific romances he downplays the possibility that humanity can find the means to bridge the abyss that separates this world from a socialist millennium, a sense of futile longing which also characterizes so much of Osborne's work.

The conclusion of The Food of the Gods illustrates the problem Wells could never fully resolve. As the giant children build their fortifications, Redwood despairingly cries, ‘What else indeed was life but that—always to be a prisoner locked in! This was the culmination and end of his dream’. In contrast, one of the giants exhorts his comrades, ‘We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on forever. Tomorrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us’.³² V. S. Pritchett notes that Osborne's work reflects the Wellsian comedy of limitations and condition of England novel, for like Wells, he uses limitations, whether self-imposed or not, as a metaphor for the state of the nation.³³ The difference between them is that despite such misgivings, Wells nonetheless wants to believe in the hope of the young giant, just as Shaw and Wilde place their hopes in the Superman or the aesthetic Christ. But Osborne found it harder to blunt his pessimism and in many of his plays implicitly sides with Redwood by presenting a world where the giants, such as they are in modern Britain, can do little but berate others from within the prison-house of their despair. In effect, many of Osborne's characters are ghosts of a socialist past Britain has largely abandoned, and as such, they seem to have rejected all forms of collectivism in favor of a destructive individualism.

We should remember, however, that Osborne's socialism, like vitalistic, ethical, and even Christian socialism, begins with individual autonomy rather than collective action. The pessimism of Osborne's work may differentiate his sense of history from various types of Marxist and socialist historicism, and may even lead him to reject the idea that ‘human history is in harmony with a progressive improvement of human existence’.³⁴ It does not, however, lead him to reject the idea of historical progress itself or even of progress through revolutionary change, a fact which becomes clear in a comparison of his three history plays, Luther, A Patriot for Me, and A Subject of Scandal and Concern.

Osborne asserted that in Luther he was not attempting to take sides in regard to the Reformation but to treat it as ‘an historical fact’ which ‘has no external dialectic imposed upon it’,³⁵ a strategy he also adopted in the other two plays. This refusal to present any historical dialectic necessarily gives his plays a narrow focus which some have interpreted as a proclivity to blame society ‘without taking the trouble to look at it’.³⁶ Society, however, is not the historical focus of his drama. Rather, he looks at history as the culminative effect of individual experiences and tries to present them to us as a material reality.

As we saw, Brecht warned against presenting historical conditions as mysterious powers, explaining that it is ‘the actions taking place before us that allow us to see what they are’.³⁷ Osborne's emphasis on the individual affords just such a perspective on history, one that pulls him away from Shaw even as it draws him nearer to Brecht. Julius Caesar may be assassinated and Saint Joan burned at the stake, but for Shaw their individual fates are irrelevant to the larger scheme in which they participate. Osborne saw no larger scheme, only individuals struggling against their historical conditions, and only through these singular struggles can such conditions be understood. As a result, these plays present a pessimistic socialist vitalism, though not a cynical one, for in them he shows why that vitalism often fails and why it occasionally succeeds.

In A Subject, dramatic convention could well have turned historical fact into a sentimental appeal for the audience to identify with George Holyoake. Instead, Osborne sidesteps sentimentality and presents only emotionally subdued scenes which offer little melodramatic potential. He does not dramatize events such as the death of Holyoake's young daughter or his abuse at the hands of prison officials but merely reports them, while devoting most of the play to speeches, court testimony, legal opinion, theological discussions, and the narrator's exposition. Rather than presenting Holyoake's story as primarily a conflict among individuals, Osborne presents it as a demonstration of how the various aspects of the nation's superstructure, working through specific individuals, coordinate to meet any challenge to its power, even one as trivial as Holyoake's.

It should not be forgotten that though Holyoake stands trial for blasphemy, his socialism is the unspoken charge the state brings against him. As he tells the court, his prosecution ‘is no more than the poor rags of former persecutions’,³⁸ insofar as socialism can now be suppressed under the guise of suppressing religious dissent. Perhaps more than anything else, Osborne's treatment of this story makes clear the obfuscation of the fact that behind the ideological rhetoric of law and religion lies a more fundamental ideology, an intolerance toward even the most benign expressions of socialist thought and a willingness to stamp them out whenever possible. The play's framing device of the narrator as lawyer, visiting a prison and in the presence of the police, only underscores the fact that of the many things Holyoake represents, his socialism is first among them, and that perhaps Britain is not quite as accepting of it as many would like to believe.

A Subject demonstrates the limits of vitalistic socialism, showing the ineffectiveness of individual resistance without the supporting efforts of a collectivity. Holyoake's isolation may not have been his fault, but it remains the principal reason for his weakness. This isolation, however, also provides an explanation as to why he fails in his opposition to civil and religious authority whereas Martin Luther succeeds.

Osborne's approach to history in Luther differs markedly from A Subject in that he heightens the emotional pitch and utilizes fewer documentary-type scenes. Osborne characterized Holyoake in a very ‘public’ manner so that we know him primarily through his speeches, testimony, and interviews with officials.³⁹ In Luther, he takes the opposite approach and uses Luther's private agony as the prism through which we view his public struggles. The significance of this difference is in its implicit definition of the driving force of history. A Subject makes the point that without collectivism, the individual can make little revolutionary headway against the hegemony of the ruling classes. Luther makes essentially the same point, but it also emphasizes that the existence of collectivism is a consequence, and not the cause, of individual initiative and assertion. In Osborne's historical view, the Reformation would never have occurred without a Luther to forge it.

A Patriot for Me might also seem to have little to say about socialism, but it shows the maturing political stance Osborne will take in his plays about contemporary Britain. A Subject deals directly with the socialist as moral hero and warns that the nation ignores, at its own peril, his message and his fate. Luther dispenses with warnings and shows how an individual, no matter how doubt-stricken or limited he may be, can create the historical circumstances that make revolution possible. Both Holyoake and Luther recognize the moral choice that confronts them and act upon it, regardless of the personal consequences. A Patriot, however, presents a more common theme in Osborne's work, the individual who, because of cynicism, self-interest, or fear, will not or cannot act in a politically consequential manner. These individuals hate the social and political systems which enmesh them, but their resistance can only express itself in morally and physically destructive ways.

Redl in A Patriot is similar to Coriolanus in A Place Calling Itself Rome, Osborne's adaptation of Shakespeare's play, in that both are traitors because their respective countries cannot accommodate who they are. Coriolanus will not hide his contempt for the mob, whereas Redl wishes to keep his homosexuality hidden. Thus, one betrays his country out of spite, the other out of fear. Both men are destroyed, however, not so much because of their treason, but because of their isolation. Ultimately, each has no community to include and protect him. Menenius tells the Roman mob, ‘We must be a true community’,⁴⁰ yet this ideal remains unrealized in both plays because neither man has Luther's ability to bring it into existence, and the communities which do exist have no use for any potential Luthers.

Luther feels he must assert himself against the world, and even against God, in order to preserve some sense of self-integrity. Many of Osborne's characters lack ‘the power to alter the scheme of things or even their own small part in that scheme, [so] they establish some kind of repetitive pattern in their lives, which in turn drives others away’,⁴¹ but Luther does not share this failing. His revolution literally changes the world by making collectivism possible rather than imprisoning himself and others in futile isolation. He would find Archie Rice's words, ‘We're all out for good old number one, / Number one's the only one for me!’ to be morally incomprehensible.⁴² If, as Osborne implies, Luther ultimately betrays this revolution, it is not in itself diminished. When the Knight confronts Luther over his betrayal of the peasants, he shows, by using the logic of the Reformation to condemn its founder, how successful Luther has actually been:

Don't hold your Bible to my head, piggy, there is enough revelation of my own in there for me, in what I see for myself from here! (Taps his forehead.)⁴³

In short, Luther succeeds almost in spite of his limitations, whereas Redl fails because of them. His clandestine homosexuality isolates him within the heterosexual ethos of the Austro-Hungarian army; as the drag ball scene demonstrates, however, there are many homosexuals in the army, but their numbers afford him no protection. Redl belongs to a community that cannot collectively function, so he lives in isolation even though surrounded by individuals very much like himself.

The pessimism which so marks the historical perspective of A Patriot and A Place also defines Osborne's political stance in his plays about modern Britain. If Osborne's criticism of socialism in Britain has led to charges of his being ‘nostalgic, reactionary or blimpish’,⁴⁴ it is from a failure to understand the tradition of British socialism his work reflects, a vitalism which remains skeptical of collective organization and sees the individual who can gain communal support as the ultimate solution to social and political ills. As Osborne seems to imply in Luther, a revolution that furthers the cause of human liberation requires the action of a vital individual at the right historical moment, but the pessimism of his plays of modern Britain also implies that such a juncture may not currently exist. Shaw's Supermen, Wells's giants, and Wilde's Christs all appear in these plays, but the vitalism that once made them seem real possibilities for the future of socialism has become the tormented isolation that so afflicts Redl and Coriolanus, and displays as much pathos as it does heroism.

II

By the mid-1950s, it had become evident that many of the hopes connected with Labour's victory in 1945 would go unfulfilled regardless of who held office, and that despite all the expectations raised by propagandistic appeals for national unity during the Second World War, ‘the effect of the war was not to sweep society on to a new course, but to hasten its progress along the old grooves’.⁴⁵ For Osborne and others, this realization brought with it a sense of lost or aborted opportunities that in many ways left Britain the same as it had always been, and in other ways, had diminished it. With the election of Labour, said Osborne,

people like me thought the world was going to change, but instead it became more drear and austere. It was a dull time, joyless and timid. This was followed by the collapse of the Empire and the Suez Crisis. We became very disillusioned, and out of this feeling came our writing.⁴⁶

Osborne's disillusionment originated, however, in the perceived failure of Attlee's government to follow through completely on the socialist reforms it initiated, and the persistent failure of subsequent Labour governments to develop them.

Osborne's themes of friendship, loyalty, and marriage lead some to defend him as ‘a poet rather than a committed political figure’, or to explain his work as an exploration of ‘social inequities in terms of personal relationships’.⁴⁷ While not inaccurate, such analyses tend to reduce his work to the truism that the personal is an extended metaphor for the political, whereas for Osborne, as for the ethical socialists, no politics of any moral authority can fail to take the personal as its first priority and as the necessary prerequisite for political action. Many of his characters are ‘lapsed’ socialists, politically detached and discouraged but not converted to any conservative ideology because their discouragement stems from a faith in socialism which the politics of postwar Britain has betrayed.

This sense of failed expectations, on the part of Attlee's government and of British socialist policies in general, lies at the heart of the sometimes vociferous criticism and mockery of socialism that pepper Osborne's plays. He had no patience for a romantic socialism that would seek to liberate the down-trodden masses from their capitalist oppressors. He often portrayed the narrow-minded complacency of the lower and middle classes as one of the greatest barriers to progressive change in Britain, and the almost total absence of working class characters in his drama indicates his belief that the pervasiveness of bourgeois values has blurred, and thus diminished, the importance of class distinctions as a tool for social analysis. For example, the racist and xenophobic sentiments of the Rice family in The Entertainer; the violent, rural middle class in Watch It Come Down and Try a Little Tenderness; the reactionary rural folk and the repeatedly disparaged LMC (lower middle class) in Déjàvu; the islanders in West of Suez who commit the politically absurd act of murdering an aged British writer; and the middle-class jury in A Subject that sentences the harmless Holyoake to prison—all make clear that Osborne had no sentimental attachment to the idea of the lower and middle classes as simply innocent victims of an exploitative political and economic system.

Osborne's work, therefore, reflects the basic premises of ethical socialism, that political failure originates in the moral failings of groups and individuals. The masses slumber in self-satisfied and sometimes brutal complacency, while the individual with insight, passion, and, especially, imagination succumbs to a bitter despair which negates any promise he or she had. ‘Moral good’, wrote Osborne, ‘which is what Socialism is about, is club-footed without the imagination’, but an imaginative public policy depends upon the initiative of those individuals who can spark a wide-spread rethinking of the purpose of the state.⁴⁸

We see an equivalent attitude in Morris's dislike of what he called artificial systems for regulation and control, in place of which he would substitute ‘a public conscience as a rule of action’, rather than the authority of state institutions.⁴⁹ This attitude towards the state, however, lacks theoretical rigidity; therefore, it remains open to a wide range of possible interpretations. A politics that incorporates it must accept a certain ambiguity as to the determination of what constitutes socialist practice, an ambiguity which is both the great strength and the Achilles's heel of British socialism. Whereas it can aid in the resistance to authoritarianism, it can also lack the determination to restructure society decisively along egalitarian lines, and this lack, which seems to have been the particular dilemma of British socialism since the Second World War, provides the unifying theme for Osborne's work.

Perhaps surprisingly, his emphasis on the historical importance of the individual has an implicit parallel with Leninism. Lenin had no patience for Fabian efforts to help capitalism evolve into socialism. Instead, he felt the party must act as a catalyst for revolutionary change and seize power on behalf of the proletariat. Osborne's general disdain for the lower classes as possible instigators for revolution has led him to look for a moral elite to take up this responsibility, those modern Luthers who might make a difference. The Communist Party, in his view, had nothing to offer, and neither did the Conservatives, with their conviction that ‘human nature cannot be changed or improved beyond a material level’.⁵⁰ Instead, Osborne looked to the country's intelligentsia, its writers, actors, journalists, film makers, college graduates, even lawyers and again finds little reason for hope. Osborne was an ethical socialist in search of a cadre that can take the initiative to transform British society, but he could not find one.

The British intelligentsia found itself in a peculiar state of inertia after the fall of the Attlee government. By the late 1950s, the nation had become ‘an archaic society trapped in past successes, [and] for the first time aware of its lassitude, but as yet unable to overcome it’, while the intelligentsia itself had largely become ‘parochial and quietist: adhering to the established political consensus without exercising itself greatly to construct or defend it’.⁵¹ Many of Osborne's characters fall into this category—Jimmy Porter, Ben and Sally Prosser, Pamela Orme, George Dillon, Archie Rice, Laurie—all who, in one way or another, hate the ruling political consensus in Britain but who cooperate with it insofar as they can conceive of no effective way to oppose it. They are fully conscious of their moral and political lassitude, however, and live in a state of ‘enlightened false consciousness—the endless self-ironizing or wide awake bad faith of a society which has seen through its own pretentious rationalizations’.⁵² They no longer believe in who they are, as individuals or as a society, but since they cannot believe in becoming anything else, they remain inert in their critical self-awareness.

Inadmissible Evidence marks a transition in Osborne's examination of this problem. His earlier plays of Britain sharply historicized the nation's dilemma in the 1950s of trying to bridge the gap between modern Britain and its idealized past, where imperial glory and military triumph supposedly contributed to a strong sense of national purpose. With Inadmissible Evidence, however, Osborne's plays of Britain turn sharply away from such historicizing and become more overtly metaphoric in their presentation. The settings of these plays are certainly recognizable as Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, but they are not as directly tied to historical specifics as his earlier work. Epitaph for George Dillon, Look Back, and The Entertainer all examine contemporary Britain's break with some of its political, cultural, and moral traditions, but the later plays concern themselves with what might be termed the spiritual mediocrity and aridity that results from this break. Although Archie Rice, Jimmy Porter, and George Dillon are certainly mediocre in their ways, theirs is the mediocrity of the failure and the outsider. However, in the later plays, this spiritual mediocrity emanates primarily from the most prominent and successful members of the British intelligentsia, which now prefers co-optation by the power establishment to angry resistance against it. In their enlightened false consciousness, they understand their predicament, and that of the nation, but in their cynicism and despair, they can do nothing about it.

The differences between Archie Rice and Bill Maitland clearly show Osborne's change of focus. Rice's struggle to preserve not only his livelihood but a way of life in the music hall has its tragically heroic aspects, despite his personal shortcomings. The world has changed and, as a result, pulled away from him, leaving him stranded and isolated in the past. Maitland is also isolated but only because he has pulled himself away from the world and into an alcoholic miasma of his own making. Osborne makes us aware of the depths of Maitland's anguish, but it does not come from having been swept aside by an historical process that renders him anachronistic. It comes from his having stood aside and abandoned his place in the world, as solicitor, father, husband, and, by implication, citizen.

Maitland also makes for a striking contrast with Luther. In Osborne's early plays, his protagonists all had been defeated, to some degree, by their circumstances. With Luther, Osborne shows that he does not see history merely as an arena of impersonal forces that sweep the individual along in their wake, but one in which an individual can harness them or change their course to a significant degree by forging a community committed to political action. When Osborne returns his focus to modern Britain, however, this tempered optimism completely vanishes, and he presents an individual who cannot maintain any communal bonds, either personal or professional. Maitland is the individual who has no ties to any collective entity, primarily because he chooses not to have them. He is the existential opposite of Luther, and as the opening dream sequence indicates, he is on trial for being so. His adaptation in his defense, however, of Harold Wilson's 1963 speech to the Labour Party Conference suggests that in addition to this one man, an entire political tradition may also be on trial, in Osborne's view, for its own form of moral disintegration.

As the opposite of Luther, therefore, Maitland is also the opposite of those Supermen, Christs, and giants that the vitalistic socialists once envisioned in their dreams of the coming socialist world. In effect, he severs all human ties, thus negating all his potential, but in this regard he differs only in degree from Osborne's later protagonists. If Maitland cannot or will not accommodate the world in any manner, the failure of these other protagonists is a willingness to accommodate in the wrong manner. If Luther's example seems an impossibility, and Maitland's despairing solipsism an unacceptability, then Osborne's characters choose a third way by accommodating themselves to a society they despise in exchange for the prestige and financial rewards it has to offer. As Osborne felt the Labour Party has done, they find a way to coexist with what they should oppose but at a tremendous price to themselves and the nation.

The measure of this price is closely associated with each protagonist's function in society. One important cultural development in the post-industrial capitalist states has been the increased identification of the intelligentsia with the media and entertainment industries and the mass culture they generate. His protagonists directly participate in these industries, and for the most part, do so quite successfully, for not only do they make comfortable incomes, many have also achieved a celebrity status. The failure of Archie Rice and Jimmy Porter in part results from their unwillingness or inability to market themselves and their ideas in a manner that would grant them these rewards. George Dillon almost makes the same mistake, until he puts aside his Shavian-like drama and writes more commercially viable works of lewd banality. Wyatt Gillman, Ben Prosser, Pamela Orme, Ted Shillings, Laurie and his companions, and even the middle-aged Jimmy Porter follow Dillon's example. Because they are not politicians, they do not formulate public policy, but as celebrities and artists within a mass culture, they do have an influence on the formation of popular opinion. They despise this mass culture and often voice their wish for something to supplant it, but the commodification of their ideas in the consumerism of this culture makes their discontent politically impotent and irrelevant. They support, and are supported by, what they hate because they cannot conceptualize an alternative, despite their talent, imagination, and access to the market of ideas.

The moral distaste they have for themselves and for Britain in part accounts for the occasional nostalgic tone of Osborne's work, which some have mistaken for the sort typical of conservative ideology. Ian Buruma describes the nostalgia of the Right as driven ‘by a fear of disorder, of change, of uncertainty’, with a longing for lost imperial glory and an authoritarian aristocratic rule.⁵³ These fears certainly beset some of Osborne's characters as well, but the predominant tone in his work is not a reactionary retreat into an idealized past but a sad longing for a lost age that never really existed, as, for example, in Laurie's longing for some kind of transformation that will release him and his friends from K. L. and the world he represents. He imagines something akin to a socialist community as Morris might have envisioned it—a rural, non-industrial locale, where labor entails a sense of creativity and self-fulfilment—a utopian refuge where they could share a happy, communal existence that would include ‘People who would fit in with everyone’:

I would learn carpentry … And brick laying. I would work on the house. Gus knows all about electricity. Margaret could drive … Annie's the great horse expert. We could use them and maybe hunt if we got over our green belt liberal principles. And Dan could, well he could just paint.⁵⁴

It is significant that in many ways these characters reflect the constituency of the New Left—educated, middle-class, and intolerant of anything that smacks of Stalinism or even trade union socialism. The New Left had little interest in socialism as political dogma or social science, and instead viewed it as a philosophy of humane and non-exploitative individualism, as did the ethical and vitalistic socialists. This similarity, however, means that New Left socialism shares the weakness of its predecessor, a theoretical flexibility that often undercuts its effectiveness as a weapon against capitalism. For example, its emphasis on racial and gender equality has been largely appropriated by the power structure of capital, once again turning an oppositional critique into a self-critique which modifies that structure without fundamentally altering it. As a result, class conflicts in society continue, though in an ideologically perverted form.

Osborne's recurrent use of the theme of civil war illustrates this point. The racism of the Rice family implicitly directs the violence of colonial wars against their fellow countrymen; Jimmy Porter facetiously imagines himself being put up against the wall and shot in the coming revolution; and, in Déjàvu, a local newspaper likens vandalism to an invasion ‘by a new model army intent on what must appear to us to be unmotivated reprisal on an innocent, law-abiding community’.⁵⁵ Civil war becomes reality in Tenderness and Watch it, two plays whose endings echo that of Shaw's On the Rocks.

These two plays represent the two sides of the moral failure of the intelligentsia of modern Britain: a manipulative form of leadership which serves only its own selfish ends, and a willingness to stand passively by while society tears itself apart. Ted Shillings and Ben Prosser exhibit a milder form of the solipsism of Bill Maitland in that neither really cares for anything beyond the small confines of his private self. A politically active and imaginative collectivity is something neither can or wants to envision. As with Maitland, their political and moral isolation leads to personal relationships that mirror the destructiveness of their public activities and carries the theme of civil war into the private sphere.

This conjunction of the public and the private accounts for the Laurentian priority of the marriage relationship in Osborne's work. With perhaps two exceptions, The End of Me Old Cigar and Under Plain Cover, his entire body of work is devoid of marriages, or even relationships, that have the equilibrium we find in Lawrence. In Osborne's work, his characters' disappointment has given way to a psychological tearing and rending without mercy. Repeatedly, and usually in moments of exhaustion, these couples voice a nostalgia for what has never been and contemplate a different sort of relationship that would nurture rather than destroy the other, but then they fall back into the accepted reality of their lives and the pattern of destruction begins anew.

Always, however, the implication is that if one relationship could be set right before the damage becomes irreparable then, in effect, the world would change. That is, the achievement of a Laurentian equilibrium could well have a ripple effect on those around them. On this point, Osborne's work returns to the philosophical point from which it began, the importance of the individual to any possibility of improving the quality of human existence. As with the ethical and vitalistic socialists, all else follows from this belief. In their view, the purpose of socialism was to institute some form of humane co-existence between people that did not entail a forced collectivism, and as long as this goal was met and economic exploitation eradicated, they were not overly concerned with blueprints for a future socialist state.

And neither was Osborne. Instead, he repeatedly made the point that only the individual can be the catalyst for imaginative change. However, he also made clear, and perhaps never more clearly than in his last play, Déjàvu, his sense of the remote possibility of this change. His return to Jimmy Porter, now referred to simply as JP, brought Osborne's career full circle in more than one way, so it is instructive to compare his last condition of England drama with its predecessor.

If JP seems to have changed little in the intervening years, it is in part because neither has Britain. There are, of course, important differences between the Britain of the 1950s and the 1990s, but in both decades the nation was a liberal welfare state under Conservative rule, a combination guaranteed to keep reform in check and, under Thatcher, to roll it back significantly. In addition, from JP's point of view, both decades share a smug and intolerant complacency that makes them equally contemptible, though they express it in markedly different ways. One gauge of this difference can be seen in the respective Bishops of Bromley in each play. In Look Back, the Bishop appeals to all Christians to assist in the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb and believes the working classes have fomented the rumor he supports the rich against the poor. In Déjàvu, the newly installed Bishop, the Reverend Ted, prefers jeans and opennecked shirts to ecclesiastical garb, has written a theological book on teenage unemployment, and blames the Establishment for the plight of the inner cities.

Though JP despises both Bishops, of the two he finds the first preferable, but not because his politics are more palatable. Nor does he differentiate between them on the basis of their hypocrisy, since the first believes in both God and the hydrogen bomb, and the second believes in neither. In fact, despite their differences, both combine politics with religion and regard the poor as a threat to be dealt with, even if by different means. The first, however, has the advantage, from JP's perspective, of being an enemy one cannot possibly mistake for a friend. With regard to the working classes and whoever would fight on their behalf, he wore his ideological heart on his sleeve, and it had quite obviously never bled for them.

The Reverend Ted's concern for making religion less pompous and more humane might seem just what the Jimmy Porter of Look Back would have wanted from the church. It only deepens JP's anger, however, because he sees it as a betrayal that masquerades as deliverance. The issue is not simply one of church policy and doctrine. The Reverend Ted represents the pervasive condition of Britain as a whole. JP does not despise the new Bishop because of his support of liberal and socialist programs, but because he and those like him are willing to accept partial answers and call them whole and to deal only with problems that lend themselves to facile solutions. For JP, the Reverend Ted has a dishonesty more disgusting than the earlier Bishop's spiritual brutality, a dishonesty made all the worse because the current age shares it.

The dishonesty of this age, however, differs from that of the 1950s. In that decade, Jimmy Porter aimed his invectives at a nation determined to hang on to its imperial past and rest complacently on cherished certainties. By the 1990s, Britain has transformed itself but not, believes JP, to a degree that makes much difference. If he attacks various movements of social reform and protest, he does so not because he now believes, or because Osborne believes, in empire and aristocracy. He attacks them because these movements are only those of reform and protest and not the vehicles of revolution they presume to be. For Osborne, the Reverend Ted and those like him, both in and out of the church, fail where Luther succeeded because they tinker with an unjust system that was morally bankrupt thirty-five years ago and remains so today. They offer accommodation and call it liberation, thus leaving the fundamental causes of human unhappiness in place even as national leaders and the issues they attempt to address supersede one another.

JP would agree with the Reverend Ted that society does indeed suffer from spiritual and political failure, but in an ‘age of privatized selfishness’, he says, where the government ‘raises temples to the greater glory of greed and the sanctification of profitability’,⁵⁶ a complacent intolerance that assumes the trappings of socialism might well be the worst response to post-industrial capitalism because it co-opts and neutralizes what Osborne saw as the best hope we have. Although, as happens in the play, vandalizing churches, naming a shopping district after Winnie Mandela, and smashing the memorial to a Victorian war hero might serve some political purpose, in themselves they are little more than trivialities that undermine the cause of socialism by claiming to be more than the revolutionary gestures they actually are.

Jimmy Porter and JP, therefore, stand as Osborne's great socialist spokesmen because they will not cheer on a revolution that fears its own potential and has settled into a complacent satisfaction over its accomplishments. In this refusal, the precepts of ethical and vitalistic socialism become particularly important. Any socialism that cannot be determinedly self-critical cannot fully liberate the individual because it will eventually solidify into collective dogmas and their accompanying bureaucracies that offer the security of structure in place of the responsibility of freedom. As Osborne intimated, Jimmy is a flawed character because he can find no common ground with other people. Though bad enough in itself, he nonetheless sees this failure as no worse than blindly insisting that only one form of common ground exists. To be able to say, as does JP, ‘I see the present paucity of my own motivation, my incomprehension of the future’,⁵⁷ is to refuse the false comfort of rationalization and at least to make change possible, even though JP himself cannot achieve it.

If Jimmy Porter and JP are failed socialists who in other historical circumstances might have succeeded, the moral power they nonetheless exude comes from the reality of this potential. Even if they do not consider themselves to be socialists and will have nothing to do with any socialist politics, their commitment to this British tradition of individualism makes them implicit advocates of that parallel tradition of British socialism. Just as Lukács believed any writer who accurately describes the realities of capitalism contributes to the cause of socialism, so Sidney Webb felt ‘the progress of Socialism is to be sought mainly among those who are unconscious of their Socialism, many of whom, indeed, still proclaim their adherence to Individualism’,⁵⁸ and the individualism of Jimmy Porter and JP is of a particularly uncompromising sort.

Once, Osborne's grandfather pointed out another man on the street and asked,

‘Do you know who that man is?’ ‘No’, I said. ‘That man is a Socialist. Do you know what a Socialist is?’ ‘No’. ‘Well, a Socialist is a man who never raises his cap to anyone’.⁵⁹

Without regard to dogma, the refusal to raise one's cap marks the individual's resistance to those social forces which would demand such obeisance. As a dramatist, Osborne never gave it except to those who had the courage to doubt accepted certainties, and for him, any politics that would presume to deliver us from oppression must begin at this point, whether we recognize it as socialism or not.

Notes

1. Michael Anderson, Anger and Detachment: A Study of Arden, Osborne, and Pinter (London, 1978), p. 23. See also Alison MacLeod, letter to Encore 34 (1961), 44-6; Benedict Nightingale, ‘Osborne's Old Times’, New Statesman 27 Aug. 1971, 277; File on Osborne, ed. Malcolm Page (London, 1988); Michael Billington, review of Watch It Come Down, The Manchester Guardian 15 Dec. 1973, 24; and Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990 (Cambridge, 1992).

2. John Trussler, The Plays of John Osborne: An Assessment (London, 1969), p. 55. See also John Peter, ‘Reviving the Domestic Drama’, Sunday Times 15 June 1986, 49.

3. John Osborne, ‘Dear Diary …’ Spectator 20 June 1992, in Damn You, England: Collected Prose (London, 1994), p. 204.

4. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence 1846-1895, ed. Dora Torr (New York, 1942), p. 450.

5. Quoted in Clive Ponting, Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964-1970 (London, 1989), p. 400.

6. Georg Lukács, Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle, trans. John and Necke Mander (New York, 1964), p. 101.

7. John Osborne, letter to the Sunday Times 30 Sept. 1956, in Damn You, England, p. 6 (author's emphasis). Osborne also denied any Brechtian influences in The Entertainer. A theatrical memory from childhood, he wrote, ‘was to nudge me towards The Entertainer; not, as I was told authoritatively by others, the influence of Bertolt Brecht’. See John Osborne, A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography, Vol. I, 1929-1956 (London, 1981), p. 27. Innes makes a similar point, noting that the roots of the play lie in such works as the 1956 BBC radio series ‘The Boy in the Gallery’, J. B. Priestley's Lost Empires, and Shaw's Heartbreak House (p. 105).

8. John Osborne, letter to the Guardian 23 June 1977, in Damn You, England, p. 52. After reading Holroyd's biography of Shaw, Osborne concluded that ‘what seemed to me examples of Shavian banalities and chilly posturing reveal themselves as the weapons of a lifelong struggle against loneliness and imperfection, of heroic persistence and courage’, and that he could now admire what he called ‘the G.B.S. trick of being a Puritan but not a prig’. See his review of Michael Holroyd's Bernard Shaw, Spectator 24 Sept. 1988, in Damn You, England, pp. 55 and 57.

9. Quoted in Ronald Spiers, Bertolt Brecht (New York, 1987), p. 39.

10. John Osborne, ‘They Call it Cricket’, Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (New York, 1958), p. 47. Osborne later offered a characteristically severe judgment of this collection of essays. ‘Prophetic heroism’, he wrote, ‘proclaimed by self-educated lower-middle-class upstarts, pronounced in English and with dodgy Nietzschean flourishes, never stood a chance’. His own contribution, he believed, ‘deserves some if not most of the scorn heaped upon it’. See Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Vol. II, 1955-1966 (London, 1991), pp. 91-2.

11. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York, 1964), p. 71.

12. Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War 1945-60 (Oxford, 1981), p. 135.

13. John Osborne, The Entertainer (London, 1958), p. 8; and John Osborne, ‘Introduction to Collected Plays’, in Damn You, England, pp. 46-7.

14. Brecht, pp. 278 and 190. On a related point, Brecht writes that the epic theatre ‘uses the simplest possible groupings, such as express the event's overall sense’ (p. 58). In responding to a question as to whether his plays are conventional in form, though revolutionary in context, Osborne mentioned the criticism he received for having only five people on stage in Look Back, even though twenty-seven characters are mentioned in the course of the play. ‘It is a convention’, he said, ‘that hasn't been won in a way’. See Mark Amory, ‘Jester Flees the Court’, The New York Times Magazine 24 Nov. 1974, 34 and 36.

15. John Osborne, A Place Calling Itself Rome (London, 1973), p. 40.

16. John Osborne, Déjàvu (London, 1991), p. 36.

17. Quoted in Polly Devlin, ‘John Osborne’, Vogue June 1964, 98-99, 152, and 160.

18. See Richard Findlater, ‘The Angry Young Man’, The New York Times 29 Sept. 1957, II, 3.

19. John Osborne, ‘The Socialist Once Angry’, Daily Herald 16 Mar. 1962, and ‘Fighting Talk’, Reynolds News 17 Feb. 1957, both in Damn You, England, pp. 195 and 188.

20. John Osborne, ‘A Letter to My Fellow Countrymen’, Tribune 18 Aug. 1961, in Damn You, England, p. 194. Osborne later offered a harsh critique of this letter, calling its style ‘deliberately overheated’. ‘If this tone was misjudged’, he wrote, ‘it was because my soft-headed liberal analysis of the political realities of international Communism was pitifully naive’. See Almost a Gentleman, p. 210.

21. John Osborne, ‘Fighting Talk’, p. 190

22. Stanley Pierson, Marxims and the Origins of British Socialism: The Struggle for a New Consciousness (Ithaca, New York, 1973).

23. Julian Barnes, ‘The Modernizer’, The New Yorker 22-29 Aug. 1994, 70.

24. Osborne, ‘They Call it Cricket’, p. 65.

25. Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 128.

26. For example, see H. M. Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (London, 1883); Bernard Shaw, ed., Fabian Essays in Socialism (New York, n.d.); J. R. MacDonald, The Socialist Movement (London, 1911); and R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York, 1920).

27. Shaw notes that the ideas of Nietzsche and others were part of ‘a world movement, and would have found expression’ even if each one ‘had perished in his cradle’. See Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York, 1957), p. 49n. Similarly, he writes that ‘Bergson and I would have written everything as we did, word for word, each if the other had never been born’. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 4 vols. (New York, 1989), II, p. 73. See also The Crisis in Modernism, eds. Fredrick Burwick and Paul Douglas (Cambridge, 1992); and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983).

28. Osborne, A Better Class of Person, pp. 82-3.

29. Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York, 1987), p. 121.

30. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man and Other Essays (Oxford, 1990), pp. 6, 33, and 122.

31. See Epiphiano San Juan, Jr., The Art of Oscar Wilde (Westport, Connecticut, 1967); Katharine Worth, Oscar Wilde (New York, 1983); and Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge, 1989).

32. H. G. Wells, The Food of the Gods (New York, 1925), pp. 304-5. On Wells's similarities with Nietzsche, see G. K. Chesterton, ‘Mr. Wells and the Giants’, H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London, 1972), pp. 103-9; H. L. Mencken, ‘The Late Mr. Wells’, Prejudices: First Series (New York, 1919), pp. 22-35; and John Reed, The Natural History of H. G. Wells (Athens, Ohio, 1982).

33. V. S. Pritchett, ‘Getting Your Own Back’, The New Yorker 15 Mar. 1982, 139-143. Concerning A Better Class of Person, Pritchett writes that Osborne ‘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 born in 1929, if less sunny and innocent than Wells was’ (136).

34. Rudiger Ahrens, ‘History and the Dramatic Context: John Osborne's Historical Plays’, Fu Jen Studies 16 (1983), 49-75.

35. Quoted in Stephen Watts, ‘Playwright John Osborne Looks Back—And Not in Anger’, The New York Times 22 Sept. 1963, II, 1.

36. Ronald Hayman, John Osborne (New York, 1972), p. 94.

37. Brecht, p. 190.

38. John Osborne, A Subject of Scandal and Concern (London, 1961), p. 32.

39. See Alan Carter, John Osborne, 2nd, ed. (New York, 1973) for an analysis of Osborne's work on the basis of its public and private aspects.

40. Osborne, A Place Calling Itself Rome, p. 18 (author's emphasis).

41. Carter, p. 47.

42. Osborne, The Entertainer, p. 32.

43. John Osborne, Luther (London, 1961), p. 90.

44. Benedict Nightingale, ‘John Osborne's Hatred’, Encounter 58 (1982), 63-9.

45. Angus Calder, The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 (New York, 1969), p. 17.

46. Quoted in W. J. Weatherby, ‘Middle Age of the Angry Young Men’, The Sunday Times Magazine 1 Mar. 1981, 30-42.

47. Michael Billington, ‘A Patriot for Me at the Watford Palace’, The Manchester Guardian 15 Dec. 1973, 24; and Susan Rusinko, British Drama 1950 to the Present: A Critical History (Boston, 1989), p. 36.

48. Osborne, ‘The Socialist Once Angry’, p. 195.

49. Quoted in May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford, 1936, reissue 1966), II, p. 96 (author's emphasis).

50. Osborne, ‘Fighting Talk’, p. 189.

51. Perry Anderson, English Questions (London, 1992), pp. 43 and 194.

52. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991), p. 39. The concept is derived from Paul Sloterdijk.

53. Ian Buruma, ‘Action Anglaise’, The New York Review of Books 22 Sept. 1994, 71.

54. John Osborne, Time Present and The Hotel in Amsterdam (London, 1968), p. 124.

55. Osborne, Déjàvu, p. 43.

56. ibid., pp. 15 and 17.

57. ibid., p. 31.

58. Sidney Webb, ‘Socialism in England’, British Socialism: Socialist Thought from the 1880s to 1960s, ed. Anthony Wright (London, 1983), p. 62.

59. Osborne, A Better Class of Person, p. 45.