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Damn You England!: Collected Prose (Hardcover)

by John Osborne (Author)

4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Faber and Faber (18 April 1994)
Language English
ISBN-10: 057116921X
ISBN-13: 978-0571169214
Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,052,816 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#15 in Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > O > Osborne, John

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Product Description

John Osborne is famous not only for his plays but for his own particular brand of well-aimed attacks, and many people argue that he will be as much remembered for his prose, which includes the two volumes of autobiography already published by Faber, and a whole career's worth of diary columns, reviews of plays, books, films and letters to editors. This is anthology of the best of these pieces.

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4.0 out of 5 stars "Angry" doesn't cover it...shame there's not more like him , 1 April 2008

By	Mr. J. P. Young (Newcastle upon Tyne) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Damn You England!: Collected Prose (Paperback)

This fantastically addictive book of collected prose covers the iconoclastic playwright John Osborne's thoughts on almost every aspect of showbusiness, from the theatre in general to various other playwrights, actors and directors in particular, with each section topped off by one of his 'Dear Diary...' columns for the Spectator, which are often, it being the Spectator, curmudgeonly in the extreme but also uproariously funny. Given that he was an actor (though allegedly not a very good one) before turning his hand to writing, it makes sense that his writing is, as the back cover blurb also has it, intensely theatrical. His use of language is, in fact, flat-out incendiary and may even be the reason why so many of his plays are verging on the unperformable - the language used is too much for the players, and tears them apart. I did Jimmy Porter once, and I can tell you, it's a seriously exhausting role.

It's easy to get sidetracked by Osborne's flaws. He was a deeply unhappy man in life, and other people often bore the brunt of it, particularly four out of his five (!) wives. He was also painfully thin-skinned, and if you got on his wrong side, he was unlikely to forgive or forget. But it's necessary to look past this and try and work out what his problem was. It seemed he believed utterly in a kind of romantic vision of a less uptight England where people were free to express the bliss, horror, joy and agony of simply being alive. Time and time again throughout this book, he rails at priggishness, busybodies, committees (check out his devastating slam at Sir Peter Hall, whom he sees as a soulless committee man to the core), quangos, working-class inverted snobbery - anything that constrains creativity. ("There are blundering armies of nosy and interfering 'caring' maniacs...") The key is when he says that teaching other countries to 'feel' more might be a bad idea - but teaching England something like this is entirely necessary. We are, let's face it, world leaders in repressed emotions.

It's easy to mistake this sort of individualism for being right-wing in some fashion. It's easy to imagine him and say, Jeremy Clarkson in agreement on a number of things. But there's a mischievous streak to him as well. He shared with his contemporary and rival Kingsley Amis an irresistable urge to wind people up, and of course liberals are easier to wind up than libertarian Tories. So when he maintains schoolteachers nowadays are wishy-washy milksops, or that women groped by work colleagues ought not to seek legal action for sexual harrassment but pull themselves together and wallop their groper in the face, he is doing it in part purely to annoy.

No one else would be as petty-minded or self-pitying as to keep a list of all the journalists who had ever given him a bad review *and* all journalists who have given playwright friends of his bad reviews, and then form the ridiculous 'Playwrights' Mafia' where they plan terrible revenge (one of the funniest sections herein). No one else would call Nabokov a "displaced bulls**t artist" for the sheer wicked hell of outraging the literati. (It's a shame his infamously scathing review of Martin Amis' "Other People" isn't included - one possible reason Kingsley Amis disliked him.) On the other hand, no one would write with such strange tenderness and poetry about the lives and works of Noel Coward, Joe Orton, Brendan Behan, Ingmar Bergman, or British music hall. The latter was Osborne's first love in a way, and his section on it is him trying to express the inexpressible - why it sums up everything good, and everything bad, about this strange and ridiculous little country of ours. He doesn't quite manage it, but the piece connects emotionally. Good thing too, for he says at its conclusion: "If you don't understand that, you will never understand anything."

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Cutting Edge Of Prose, 20 Mar 2004

By	Mr B G Reifer (Velez Malaga, Malaga, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Damn You England!: Collected Prose (Paperback)

'Damn You, England' by John Osborne is an absolute joy. If you were born and raised in England during the lifetime of this prolific writer of acerbic reviews, open letters and playwright much that is here will strike a chord and open many a drawer in your memory bank. For those who entered the scene later here is a history lesson that is uproariously funny, yet shrewd in it's assessment of the life and times of the fifties and sixties. Osborne will either delight you or infuriate you. He will not bore you. It is required reading.

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