The Plays of John Osborne, Part II: Experiments in Individuality

The playwright at rest, 1965. (Heilpern)

Part One here.

By 1959, John Osborne occupied an exalted cultural position. Having demolished notions of respectable theater, he inspired a new generation of writers from Alan Sillitoe to Edward Albee. "Come and help us make history," said Kenneth Tynan, inviting him to the National Theatre. "I've already made history," came Osborne's retort. His notorious "Damn You England" letter and arrest at CND's 9/17/61 demonstration established Osborne as a political pugilist. Then he moved into films, writing Tom Jones (1963) for Tony Richardson. Matched against his professional successes, however, were several failed marriages: Pamela Lane, Mary Ure and Penelope Gilliatt.

This post dissects 1960s Osborne, a playwright experimenting with diffuse dramatic forms. Now comfortable in his talent, Osborne tries several genres: musicals, historical pieces, a surreal character study. Yet the same anguish, penetrating insight and lacerating introspective remains - if anything, it's enhanced within new contexts. Despite a few missteps, it's Osborne's most interesting period as a writer.

The World of Paul Slickey (1959)

"One must be careful at all times not to hurt other people's feelings... Only an extremely vulgar mind pokes fun at such things."

Nothing's so perversely fascinating as an overachieving flop. Sometimes an artist at the height of their power crafts an ambitious, inexplicable failure, so grandiose in conception that it can't possibly work. The World of Paul Slickey has this in spades: a musical satire of the public's appetite for scandal, it's so top heavy with ideas that it bombs spectacularly.

Journalist Jack Oakham moonlights as Paul Slickey, a feared gossip columnist targeting the rich and powerful. His latest assignments include Lesley and Michael, two rich, pea-brained youths; out-of-touch aristocratic families the Mortlakes and Giltedge-Whytes; and pop singer Terry Maroon. But Jack comes to question the value of his work, even as his marriage falls apart.

Slickey was a notorious flop; opening night reportedly climaxed with actress Adrienne Corri flipping off the audience. The show hasn't improved with age. If its attack on media sensationalism remains evergreen, other aspects feel grounded in their time. The title character evokes '50s society writer William Hickey, while the story and music draw laboriously on contemporary events like German rearmament and Timothy Evans. One song even incorporates Anthony Eden's proclamation that Suez was not a war but an "armed conflict" as a lyric!

That contrived awkwardness characterizes Osborne's songs. The inspired ditties from The Entertainer give way to indigestible, inscrutable nonsense. This tortured song from a tour guide discussing an aristocratic family should suffice:

"If you don't want to be an unidentified mess
You must make yourself someone and be a success
You've got to understand the mechanics of success
If you've meaning to express you must spell it like success
If you're going to impress you must pander to the press
They'll want you to asses how much money you possess."

Just scan that verse and wonder what Osborne was thinking. Sour rhymes, indiscernible meter, painfully forced "wit." Not to mention Paul/Jack proclaiming himself "newspaper cold" and rhyming phlegm with apothegm, or Lesley singing about raping the tax man. (Glenn Beck, is that you?) Sure, it's words on a page - but what musical accompaniment could possibly sell it? Given the universal opprobrium leveled against Slickey (even John Heilpern calls it "wincingly off the mark"), I feel safe dismissing it at face value.

As for story... what story? Osborne conceives Slickey as a shotgun blast against modern England: the media, the aristocracy and political establishment, the facile public. He aims for so many targets that he scarcely nicks any. The characters are ludicrous cartoons: Lesley and Michael debate solving bad marriages with sex change operations, a joke that sounds funnier than it plays. More and more characters complicate the narrative, until Slickey collapses in a pointless non-climax.

Osborne's ambitions evaporate long before then, leaving only venom. George Wellwrath calls Slickey "pure spit and vomit thrown directly into the teeth of the audience." He fancies that a complement; I don't. Without focus, Slickey becomes meaningless spew rather than scathing satire.

Luther (1961)

Albert Finney as Luther, 1961 production. (source)

"Some interests are furthered by finding truth, others by destroying it."

Having failed at contemporary satire, Osborne retreated to historical drama. Luther proved a popular success on both the West End and Broadway, featuring Albert Finney in the title role. Superficially the play resembles familiar dramas of conscience like A Man for All Seasons. Yet Luther's no saturnine period piece, casting the founder of Protestantism as a tormented rebel against Catholic dogma - and his personal demons.

The play depicts Martin Luther's emergence as leader of the Protestant Reformation. He defies his father to become a priest, but quickly proves unsuited for monastic life. After a violent, unexplained outburst ("I am not!") Martin grows increasingly skeptical towards Catholic teaching. He attacks the system of indulgences, earning him Rome's ire. Soon Luther's the head of a religious and cultural upheaval, staring down the Diet of Worms and inspiring a peasant uprising against the Holy Roman Empire.

Luther draws on Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther (1958), a psycho-biography framing Luther's theological struggle as an identity crisis writ large. Hence Luther's obsessive fretting over his bowels - he complains of being constipated, flatulent and uses scatological language to describe the Pope. "If I break wind in Wittenberg," he muses, "they might smell it in Rome." His mind's too inquisitive to fit into Church structures; taught to revere scripture, he cannot reconcile God's teachings with Rome's temporal corruption.

Osborne tries to frame the context in which Luther operated. Act II features John Tetzel, a priest happily hawking indulgences and holy relics to gullible believers. Here Osborne most strongly resembles Brecht, stopping the action cold for a digressive vignette. This imaginative sequence says more about Catholic corruption that any of Luther's eloquent disquisitions:

"My friend, the Pope himself has sent me with indulgences for you! Fine, you say, but what are indulgences? They're only the most precious and noble of God's gifts to men, that's all they are! Before God, I tell you I wouldn't swap my privilege at this moment with that of St. Peter... because I've already saved more souls with my indulgences than he ever could have done."

Unfortunately, he's less successful showing Luther's impact. Luther's confrontation with the Diet rings with stark clarity, but the resulting chaos remains ephemeral. His dealings with assorted German princes go unmentioned. Act III features a rushed scene with The Knight, a blood-soaked nobleman describing the Peasant's Revolt within Germany. These scenes are dramatically forced and historically inadequate, providing audiences a patchy understanding of the Reformation.

Osborne being Osborne, however, the personal portrait dominates. The play's most palpable scenes feature Luther butting heads with his father Hans. Hans expected Luther to become a "great man" within the temporal system, a lawyer or politician perhaps. Given subsequent events, he may have been right. Luther assumes its most roundly autobiographical element when the protagonist unleashes a cri de coeur against his father's presumed neglect:

"I loved you the best. It was always you I wanted. I wanted your love more than anyone's, and if anyone was to hold me I wanted it to be you. Funnily enough, my mother disappointed me the most, and I loved her less, much less. She made a gap which no else could have filled, but all she could do was make it bigger, bigger and more unbearable."

This becomes especially pointed if one's read Osborne's A Better Class of Person, or Heilpern's biography. The death of Osborne's father cast a long shadow over his life, while he expressed a venomous contempt towards his low-born mother. Osborne boldly invests his personal demons in an historical figure, remaining deeply felt as anything in Look Back in Anger or Inadmissible Evidence.

And throughout, it's Luther's dilemma that drives the story. He becomes a rebel not of choice or even passivity - it's his nature that drives him to doubt Rome's strictures. Like Redl in A Patriot for Me, he does everything he can to suppress his nonconformist streak, whether cleaning monastery privies or protesting that "I want to be still, in peace, and alone." But the Church won't brook even token criticism, forcing Luther into open defiance. Unlike Redl, Luther's dilemma has a happier personal outcome, but with more far-reaching (and destructive) consequences.

Luther's staging explicitly recalls Brecht's Galileo, the template for most similar dramas. Hence the episodic plot, the elaborate staging (Luther's appearance before the Diet backgrounded by a political cartoon!),  characters breaking fourth wall and the emphasis on tableaux over narrative. But Osborne's no Marxist, downplaying Luther's individual achievements for their effect. Nor is he Robert Bolt, whose Sir Thomas More is deliberately established (via the fourth-wall breaking Common Man) as a Great Man above us mere mortals. Martin Luther remains the play's focus - a living, thinking, suffering human being, who shapes history yet remains identifiable.

Plays for England: The Blood of the Bambergs and Under Plain Cover (1963)

Osborne returned to the Slickey vein with two short plays attacking English society. With weightier works to consume, we'll dispense succinctly with these.

Anyone nauseated by 2011's Royal Wedding might appreciate The Blood of the Bambergs. A loose reworking of The Prisoner of Zenda, it details the marriage of Bamberg's Princess Melanie to Prince Willy, heir to a foreign throne. But Willy dies driving to the wedding, leaving officials in a bind. The solution: swap Willy with Russell, an uncouth Australian who bares a striking resemblance to Willy. Russell's reluctant at first, until exposed to the job's perks - especially the gorgeous Princess.

Bambergs provides rather sophomoric satire of the hysteria surrounding royal pageantry. It's central conceit isn't bad, with all corners of society (from the press to the Socialist Prime Minister) conniving in the coverup. And it must be said that Russell provides some laughs, especially when he admits changing mind due to "the long, thrusting, sexual stimulus of the Crown." But in short form, it's too superficial to make much impact. The play's nothing more than an amusing trifle.

But that makes it superior to Under Plain Cover, little more than a fleeting skirmish against good taste. Osborne shows a reporter investigating a seemingly normal couple, Tim and Jenny, who turn out to be brother and sister. There's nothing more to it, and this V.C. Andrews twist seems an improbable vehicle for social satire. Osborne probes again the press's intrusion into private lives and misguided public morality, but elicits few laughs or shock, only mild surprise. For Osborne completists only.

Inadmissible Evidence (1964)

Douglas Hodge as Bill Maitland in Donmar Warehouse's 2011 revival. (Source)

"I succeeded in inflicting, quite certainly inflicting, more pain than pleasure. I am not equal to any of it."

Osborne returned to vitriolic introspection with Inadmissible Evidence. Heilpern calls it "a dreamplay of grubby futility and self-loathing in the losing battle against irredeemable mediocrity." Long, rambling and bursting with indigestible bile, it makes Look Back in Anger look like Coward's Private Lives. Yet for all its off-kilter structuring, it's more gut-wrenchingly effective than that earlier play.

Bill Maitland experiences a crippling midlife crisis. A mildly successful barrister, he's grown stale in cases of fraud and divorce, which considers a waste of talent. His flagrant womanizing jeopardizes his marriage, his domineering personality isolates friends and colleagues. Indeed, everyone seems eager to leave Maitland: favored secretary Shirley goes on maternity leave, his assistants entertain job offers, his wife Elizabeth finally prepares to leave him. Haunted by delusions and very real abandonment, Maintland's driven over the edge.

From page one, Evidence bleeds existential rot. Consider Maitland's monologue to the Judge in the opening dream sequence, admitting his sins:

"This can't hide the fact from me, and never has done, that I am by nature indecisive...I am almost 40 years old, and I know I have never made a decision which I didn't either regret, or suspect was just plain commonplace or shifty or scamped and indulgent or mildly stupid or undistinguished... I have depended almost entirely on other people's efforts. Anything else would have been impossible for me, and I always knew in my own heart that only that it was that kept me alive and functioning at all..."

This extends beyond self-deprecation to psychosis. It's a cry for a help from someone who's seen his ambition and dreams turn to ash, who's destroyed everything good in his life. He'd be a monster if he weren't so cripplingly self-aware. Even the few moments of hope - assistant Hudson, considering Bill's offer of a partnership; wife Liz trying, against all odds, to patch things up - drive Maitland further into despair. He makes George Dillon and Jimmy Porter look George Bailey.

"There were girls like Maureen, and even with you there were difficulties but not revolting or upsetting. At least, not much, I don't think so. You weren't reluctant, you should be happy, you didn't cling on to it like it was the crown jewels. You were generous, loving, bright, you should have been able to cope. I should have been able to cope."

Osborne vomits his neuroses upon the page. As in Epitaph of George Dillon, the middle-aged fear of accomplishing nothing dominates the story. How palpable are such feelings emanating from a successful writer! Maitland's neuroses about disappointing women drives him to despair - this from a man with five wives, whose prickly personality alienated even close friends. Osborne feared isolation most of all: two years after Evidence, triggered by the loss of loved ones, he experienced a comparable nervous breakdown (of which more later). It's ugly to watch or read, but darkly compelling.

Osborne borrows from Strindberg not only his vulgar nihilism but an air of despairing unreality. Highlighting his paranoid state, Maitland drifts between reality and fantasy. He starts the play asleep, dreaming of prosecution by a universal Judge who finds him lacking. In Act II carries on phone conversations, ostensibly with his various lovers - though Osborne's directions emphasize "a feeling of doubt as to whether there is anyone to speak to at all." This disconnect reaches its extreme form when Bill, meeting with his clients, talks past them, as if the divorcees describe his life. It's The Ghost Sonata reshaped into a character study

Inadmissible Evidence is stifling in a way that neither vulgar innuendo ("You could stick a bus ticket in there!") nor Maitland's ludicrous clientele (selfish hausfrau Mrs. A, shamed homosexual Marples) can alleviate. Few plays match it for depressive, soul-consuming nastiness. The converse of individualism is loneliness - uniqueness can be a blessing or a curse. For Bill Maitland, it's hell on Earth.

A Patriot for Me (1965)

Mark Crook plays Redl in The Actor's Company's 2008 production. (Source)

"We all play parts, are doing so now, will continue to do so...Perspiring gaiety and pointlessness."

Osborne finished destroying traditional theater with A Patriot for Me. This play about Alfred Redl, notorious Austrian traitor, so infuriated the Lord Chamberlain that he refused to license its performance. The Royal Court rebranded itself a private club, hence beyond the government's reach - an act of defiance which destroyed the Lord Chamberlain's censorship power. Critics were divided, while the show (starring Maximilian Schell and Jill Bennett) did lukewarm box office. A 1983 revival with Alan Bates proved more successful.

A Patriot for Me is Groggy's favorite Osborne play. Far more than Luther, it uses the trappings of the historical pageant (familiar names, faraway settings, fancy costumes) to tell a deeply personal story. It's explores the cost of conformity, mixing baroque satire with personal tragedy.

Alfred Redl is a promising officer in the Austrian Army circa 1900. By all outward appearances he's a model soldier: punctilious, disciplined, class conscious, loyal. But Redl hides damaging secrets: his Jewish ancestry, profligate spending - and homosexuality. While Colonel in charge of Austria's military intelligence, he moonlights in Vienna's gay society and gains the attention of Russian spies. Redl's blackmailed into sending Russia military secrets, disastrously confronting the contradictions between his public life and private desires.

A Patriot for Me came after plays like A Taste of Honey and films like Victim punctured holes in censorship. Gay rights became a public issue in England following Lord Montagu and John Gielgud's arrests for sodomy; 1967's Sexual Offences Act effectively demolished existing legal strictures. Yet homosexuality remained identified with crime and subversion, heightened by exposure of the Cambridge Five: queers selling out the Empire. Osborne's provocative Patriot provided the final nail in the Lord Chamberlain's coffin. Yet we must tread warily before proclaiming Osborne a cultural hero.

Like many of his generation, Osborne campaigned for nuclear disarmament, the issue which provoked his "Damn You England" letter. He was arrested during CND's 9/17/61 protest in Trafalgar Square, alongside Robert Bolt, Vanessa Redgrave and others. But Doris Lessing opined "he didn't understand politics at all... he was just a natural rebel." He gradually drifted from anti-establishment posturing to Little England conservatism. More relevant here: Osborne peppered friends Tony Richardson and George Devine with homophobic slurs, while denouncing sodomy laws as "pointless, stupid and vindictive." A cynic wonders whether Osborne held genuine convictions or merely enjoyed playing the contrarian.

Today, Patriot's gay content seems rather tame. In its day however, the outre decadence and language led some crass critics to question if Osborne drew from personal experience. ("You just wonder... where he acquired all this information," James Fenton insinuated.) Consider Redl's sensual snarl to the Countess marrying his past lover, which surely raised the Lord Chamberlain's hackles as much as the infamous drag ball:

"I'll tell you this. You'll never know that body like I know it. The lines beneath his eyes... And the scar behind his ear, and the hairs in his nostrils, which has the most, what color are they in the light? The mole on where?.... You'll never know like I know, you can't... His thick waist, and how long are his thighs, compared to his calves, you've not looked at him, you never will."

Again, one shouldn't focus excessively on Redl's proclivities. Patriot's point isn't championing gay rights but lauding the individual against conformity, Osborne's hobby horse. The Austro-Hungarian Empire exemplifies this: in a polyglot state with dozens of nationalities, a lower peg like the Galician Redl is expected to not only display extraordinary merit, but act with appropriate deference to his Austrian betters. This drives the play less than Istvan Szabo's Colonel Redl, but Redl's ethnicity marks him as an outsider as surely as his sexuality.

Hence the second act drag ball, a mirror society embracing the misfits cast off by bourgeois society. Some characters even joke about forming a "queer empire" to oppose Austria's heterosexual conformity. As The Baron, the formidable transvestite nobleman, observes:

"This is the celebration of the individual against the rest, the uses and the thems, the free and the constricted, the gay and the dreary, the lonely and the mob."

Yet Redl's out of place even here. Tellingly, he arrives at the ball in full uniform, drawing disapproval from his cross-dressing compatriots: "I'm surprised they let you in," the Baron scolds. Unlike others, Redl's uncomfortable with his desires even when he gives in. He knows an improper word, indiscreet liaison or untoward glance could destroy his life's work.

Patriot teaches us the nonconformist never wins. Act I sees Redl seconding a young officer, Siczynski, in a duel where the latter's mortally wounded. The doomed man represents Redl's Id: unabashedly Jewish, openly gay and self-confident. His death imparts a cruel lesson to Redl: quoting biographer Robert Asprey, he learns to "[impart] humility, lofty ambition, duty, loyalty and honor" in everything. His utter obsequiousness marks him for advancement as a "a damned fine officer." No room for gratification or honesty. When confronted by superior officers at a society ball, Redl protests his adherence to class strictures:

"I am proud to be despised by some men, no perhaps most men. Others are to be tolerated and ignored. And if they do the same for me, I am gratified, or at least relieved."

And Osborne repeatedly shows honesty being punished. Act I ends with soldiers finding Redl in bed with another man, then savagely beating him. After giving into his desires, Redl's almost immediately blackmailed by Russian spymasters. (These scenes recall Terence Rattigan's Ross, where Turkish officials plot to expose T.E. Lawrence's latent tendencies.) Redl less resents being blackmailed into treachery than his inability to fit in anywhere. It's a palpable portrait of individualism crushed by social pressure.

Against such richly textured drama, Patriot's flaws are minor. One awkward thread has a Freudian psychologist lecturing on homosexuality, an aside which serves little purpose. The Countess, a foxy villainess working for the Russians, shows again that Osborne's women are either passive simps or malicious whores. And the build-up to Redl's suicide feels perfunctory and rushed. I happily acknowledge these flaws while proclaiming A Patriot for Me John Osborne's greatest achievement.

* * *

For anyone who's read this far, I'm keen on hearing your opinion. Do you find these articles entertaining and informative? Or merely long-winded and boring? Let me know in comment or email!

The Plays of John Osborne, Part I: Angry Young Man

John Osborne (source)

Lately, Groggy's strayed from movie reviews into more diffuse cultural analyses. As last fall's looks at Robert Bolt and Terence Rattigan germinated from Lawrence of Arabia, so our present article stems from May's analysis of The Charge of the Light Brigade. In upcoming posts, we'll examine playwright John Osborne (1929-1994), the enfant terrible who decisively reshaped English theater.

Osborne's a challenging writer. Volume is one reason: Osborne authored 19 stage plays, excluding ephemeral lost works like The Great Bear, unproduced scripts like Jack and Jill and classical adaptations (including A Place Calling Itself Rome, a modern-dress update of Shakespeare's Coriolanus). Compared to Bolt, who penned just eight extant plays, Osborne requires considerable legwork and planning.

Osborne contrasts with Bolt and Rattigan, too, in that his work was revolutionary. When tasteful comedies and staid dramas dominated the English stage, Look Back in Anger (1956) was a revelation both in its youth focus and visceral rage. The Entertainer (1957) proved equally subversive, casting Laurence Olivier as a stand-in for post-imperial ennui. A Patriot for Me's (1965) homosexual content destroyed the Lord Chamberlain's censorship power. George Devine labeled Osborne's work "the bomb that [blew] a hole in the old theater and leave a nice-sized gap, too big to be patched up."

Finally, it's not easy to digest the plays themselves. Even Osborne's strongest works are deeply flawed, from his idiosyncratic style to near-nihilistic pessimism. His raw emotion and self-evisceration often overwhelm his literary gifts: one sympathizes with the critic who called Anger "a self-pitying snivel." Unpleasant too is Osborne's misogyny, rivaling August Strindberg in his unbridled hatred of women. Biographies of Osborne bear this out, from his contempt towards his mother to his disastrous marriages to Penelope Gilliatt and Jill Bennett.

Yet great art is often frustrating, frequently repulsive and always challenging. Osborne's plays are hard to "like" in the sense of enjoying, say, Shakespeare or Noel Coward. There's little catharsis in watching Jimmy Porter or Bill Maitland tear themselves apart. But underneath the nastiness lies a penetrating, often-perceptive look at personal dissatisfaction and cultural malaise. We can't ignore Osborne for being unpleasant.

Without further adieu, let's plunge into Osborne's plays. I'll sketch in biographical details where appropriate, but this will remain principally a literary analysis.

The Devil Inside Him (1950)

Iwan Rheom in Cardiff's New Theatre production, 2010. (source)

"When others are at peace with God and asleep, you are fighting at the crumbling edges of the Earth."

Popular repute labels Osborne an overnight success with Look Back in Anger. Yet Anger was actually his fifth play. One, The Great Bear, remains lost to posterity; from available descriptions it sounds like an embryonic Anger. Another, Epitaph for George Dillon, wasn't produced until after Anger's success. Two others, The Devil Inside Him and Personal Enemy, were also believed lost until 2008, when the University of Sheffield's Theatre Archive Project uncovered their manuscripts among the Lord Chamberlain's Archive.

Osborne wrote The Devil Inside Him (1950) as a 21 year old struggling actor, with the help of theater director Stella Linden. Predictably, it's a formative work, identifiably Osborne for all its crude craftsmanship. Its main asset is remarkably powerful language, which commands attention even when the story doesn't hang together.

Huw is a working class Welshman scorned as an outsider. He befriends Dilys, the pregnant servant of the Prossers, a respectable couple who loathe him. Huw's only real friend is Burn, a medical student. Hounded by the Prossers and religious zealot Gruffyud, Huw confides his thoughts in a diary. Glancing through the book, Dilys discovers the truth: that Huw isn't merely discontent but a perverted maniac.

On one level at least, The Devil Inside Him impresses. Osborne produces reams of cutting dialogue, scarcely a dull or cloying phrase among them. If this makes his characters unreasonably articulate, it at least provides literary appeal. Gruffuyd's rants about atheist Huw facing a "black, terrible nothing," Mrs. Prosser denouncing her husband's complacent sexism ("I am your wife, but I am still myself") and especially Huw's climactic monologue all provide delicious phrasing. The play's worth reading if only for Osborne's denunciation of bourgeois morality:

"You have all been the devil inside me. Ever since I was a little boy... You make all the dirtiness and the meanness, you made ugliness out of the lovely things. You told me that the things I knew were inside me were wrong... You want the devil. The bad things."

Conversely though, this speech highlights Devil's puerility. The characters are too broadly drawn, even Huw; Prosser and Gruffuyd, in particular, say nothing that doesn't mark them as pious villains. However eloquent the language, the dramatic structure doesn't work. True, the murder scene is a shock, but the only payoff is raving about society's blame for Huw's psychoses. If Osborne's prose evinces youthful passion, the denial of personal responsibility smacks of callowness. Even as allegory, The Devil Inside Me is a shaky construction.

Personal Enemy (1953)

Karen Lewis and Peter Clapp in a 2009 off-Broadway revival. (source)

"I demand the right to be just as wrong as I want... The biggest minority of all is me!"

Osborne next teamed with Anthony Creighton on Personal Enemy (1953). It's an explicit "issue" play, examining America's Cold War fear of deviancy political or sexual, more directly than domestic works like The Crucible. The play barely saw release, with the Lord Chamberlain protesting its implications of homosexuality. Again Osborne's authorial voice is firmly established, though the drama frequently sags.

The Constants are a middle class American couple. Their son Don flirted with left-wing politics but became a war hero in Korea; he's been captured, and soon to be repatriated by the Chinese government. But Don refuses to return home, shocking everyone and drawing the attention of government agents. Mrs. Constant takes out her rage on Ward Perry, a "subversive" librarian who might be gay - especially after her second son Art follows Don's lead.

Stylistically at least, Personal Enemy is far inferior to The Devil Inside. There's plenty of articulate speechmaking, especially in the final act as characters confront issues directly. But the oft-ludicrous dialogue reads suspiciously like Osborne using bad Western movies as a template for American speech. When Mrs. Constant announces she'll "rustle up some cookies" it's hard not to cringe.

That said, Enemy fits snugly within Osborne's oeuvre. It reads as a dry run for Luther and A Patriot for Me, showing individuals rebelling against sociopolitical forces. Indeed, Don anticipates Patriot's Redl, subsuming "deviant" behavior to military service. Osborne explicitly conflates McCarthyist witch hunts with England's 1954 prosecution of Lord Montagu for sodomy. To Osborne they're one and the same, punishing an individual for being different. Reiterating Devil's main argument, Osborne suggests that society's bullying conformity pushes people like Don and Art to deviancy.

Enemy also follows Devil in its tepid plotting. John Heilpern suggests Creighton was primarily responsible for the story, with Osborne contributing dialogue and characterizations. Whatever the case, Enemy neuters its incipient. The most important events occur offstage; only the brief appearance of a HUAC investigator provides a tangible threat. Beleaguered Mrs. Constant provides the only well-rounded characterization; she's easily the strongest woman in Osborne's work. Others are flat, with Constant's children screeching ciphers and Weber little more than a plot catalyst. Osborne still hasn't found his muse.

Epitaph for George Dillon (1955)

Joseph Fiennes as George Dillon in Comedy Theatre's 2005 revival. (source)

"Youthful promise doesn't look too well with receding hair."

Osborne and Creighton collaborated again on Epitaph for George Dillon. Though written in 1955, the play wasn't produced until 1958, after Anger and The Entertainer proved huge successes. Notices were enthusiastic, with Richard Watts Jr. calling it "Osborne's best play." It's certainly his first fully realized show, injecting personal elements into this tale of a frustrated artist.

36 year old George Dillon is an aspiring actor and playwright whose ambition outraces his talent. His wife Ruth grows tired of George's promises, while George begins an affair with family friend Josie. George tries to sell his latest play while auditioning for roles, but remains unsuccessful. The family falls into debt, driving Ruth further away from George.


Epitaph for George Dillon features the first of Osborne's lacerating self-portraits. Few playwrights are as self-critical as Osborne, his alter egos decidedly unflattering. Besides evincing Osborne's enthusiasm for vegetarianism and atheism, he's also obsessed with an image of success. He boasts of landing acting roles and that he's "polishing off" his seventh play - none of the previous six, of course, being published. Yet George hasn't deluded himself; he offsets boasting with moments of palpable self-doubt, as when he denounces acting as "hideously trivial and self-important."

By making George a writer, Epitaph allows Osborne to directly project his anxieties on stage. Just by writing four plays at age 26 Osborne achieved a great deal, yet this play evinces a man still in a hurry, unsatisfied by his output. One scene features George pitching a manuscript to Barney, a gregarious impresario who prods George to make his work as commercial as possible:

"Dialogue's not bad, but these great long speeches - that's a mistake. People want action, excitement. I know - you think you're Bernard Shaw. But where's he today? Eh? People won't listen to him."

Here we get a humorous look at not only the verities of the entertainment market, but the letdowns faced by budding "geniuses." One of adulthood's cruel lessons: some dreams aren't attainable, no matter how talented you are or how hard you try. Even then, success doesn't guarantee contentment. This motif recurs throughout Osborne's work: Anger, Inadmissible Evidence, Hotel in Amsterdam, Watch It Come Down.

This much Epitaph achieves; its weaknesses lie elsewhere. Like Anger, the play's so dominated by its protagonist that other characters scarcely have room to breathe. Percy and Mrs. E and Josie are so superficial they make no impression. Ruth gets wonderfully barbed dialogue, but even she functions mainly as a sounding board for George's anxieties. Again, the plotting feels awkward: there's an overlong opening and a limp finale, with Act II providing the meatiest drama.

It's true, as Ronald Hayman notes, that Osborne's preoccupations and awkward style "quite literally pull the play apart." But Epitaph's also a skillful character study presaging better work to come.

Look Back in Anger (1956)

Anger's original cast: Kenneth Haigh, Alan Bates and Mary Ure. (source)

"I hope you won't make the mistake of thinking for one moment that I am a gentleman.” 

When Tony Richardson staged Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre, reviews were mixed. Some saw a masterpiece: Kenneth Tyann thought Anger "the best young play of its decade." It also engendered fierce critics like Philip Hope-Wallace, who called it "frenzied preaching in an empty conventicle." Terence Rattigan remarked that if Anger was successful, it meant "I know nothing about plays"; producer George Devine retorted "you know everything about plays, but you don't know a fucking thing about Look Back in Anger." Posterity proved Devine right.

57 years removed, one handles Anger with kid gloves. It's claustrophobic, nasty and cluttered, and not always to its benefit. Its sloppiness keeps it far removed from Osborne's best work. But, influence aside, Anger gained its reputation for a reason. Unpolished and unpleasant though it may be, it is John Osborne.

Jimmy Porter is a frustrated 20-something, living in a cramped flat with wife Alison and friend Cliff. Jimmy and Alison constantly fight, sometimes playfully, sometimes more serious. Alison's friend Helena doesn't understand why Alison's such a doormat for her abusive husband. Nonetheless, Helena grows attracted to Jimmy, just as Alison discovers she's pregnant. Tragedy results and the distance between them grows insurmountable.

As Osborne's first solo work, Anger lacks the refinement expected from a fifth play. Its plot development seems forced, when it happens at all: after Epitaph mocking plays that get women "in a family way," what should we make of Alison's plight? Mainly the play's so suffocating in its one-room nastiness that watching or reading it feels like an exercise in self-flagellation. Again we're left with Osborne's pointed verbiage and characterization to salvage the drama.

Anger succeeds through Jimmy Porter, one of British theater's definitive characters. Jimmy functions as another author avatar, this time more personal than professional. Jimmy losing his father at an early age is one obvious echo: at age 10, Osborne lost his father to tuberculosis. In A Better Class of Person, Osborne juxtaposes dialogue from Anger with his first wife Pamela Lane, saying: "Perhaps I interpreted what might have been bland complacency for the complaisance of a generous and loving heart." Jimmy and Alison's affection manifests itself in silly pet names ("squirrel and bear"), and Jimmy usually recognizes when he goes too far. After burning Alison with an iron, Jimmy repents with this heartfelt speech:

"There's hardly a moment when I'm not watching and wanting you. I've got to hit out somehow. Nearly four years of being in the same room with you, night and day, and I still can't stop my sweat breaking out when I see you doing - something as ordinary as leaning over an ironing board... Trouble is you get used to people. Even their trivialities become indispensable to you.  Indispensable and a little mysterious."

Though soon after, Jimmy crosses the line with this prophetic peroration:

"Oh my dear wife, you've got so much to learn. I only hope you learn it one day. If only something - something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep. If you could have a child, and it would die.... I wonder if you might even become a recognizable human being yourself. But I doubt it."

More often, Jimmy's simply an articulate hooligan - the archetypical "angry young man," standing in for a generation of disaffected young Britons. He works as a candy grocer, taking out frustrations on friends and family. Unlike similar heroes in Kingsley Amis and Harold Pinter, he's not driven by class or ideological resentment; his anti-establishment pose is general, nihilistic bitterness. Jimmy's unfocused passion doesn't amount to anything constructive, letting him flounder in economic destitute and broken dreams. As Alison tells her father, a retired Army Colonel:

"You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it."

Hayman writes that Osborne's plays are one-man shows, contrasting a formidable protagonist with weak support. Anger epitomizes this, with Jimmy's nastiness smothering everyone else. Cliff's too anemic drawn to be a true foil, trading silly comedy routines but no substantive talk. I won't harp unnecessarily on the misogynist element in these reviews, but it's hard to avoid with Anger. Alison's a pathetic loser without motivation; Helena's pretensions as a strong woman melt when she encounters feral, sexy Jimmy. Even when Jimmy's not onstage, other characters discuss him exclusively.

One regards Look Back in Anger with wary respect. It's undeniably powerful, but too flawed to be a masterpiece.

The Entertainer (1957)

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice. He'd reprise the role in a 1960 film adaptation. (source)

"Let me know where you're working tomorrow night - and I'll come and see you!"

Osborne rejoined Tony Richardson for The Entertainer (1957), whose success nearly eclipsed Anger. This thanks largely to Laurence Olivier; the Shakespearean idol sent up a career of patriotic roles playing Archie Rice, a seedy comedian embodying England's postwar decline. The best of Osborne's early plays, Entertainer recasts his preoccupations within a broader context.

Musical hall entertainer Archie Rice ekes out a living on a rather pathetic. He lives with father Billy, a much-beloved vaudevillian, his wife Phoebe and daughter Jean. Archie claims to carry on Billy's tradition, when he's really a seedy hack. Jean detests Archie; Phoebe seems ready to leave him. Further tension arises with the arrival of Frankie, an aspiring musician, and the death of Archie's son Mick, serving in the British Army during the Suez Crisis.

The Entertainer shows a more comfortable Osborne, eager to experiment with dramatic form. Jimmy and Cliff's silly routines morph into Archie's music hall act, seamlessly contrasted with the Rices' fraught home life. Archie mixes bawdy songs and hackneyed puns, juxtaposing sex and patriotism (a topless Britannia forms the backdrop to one scene). Later plays stretched form further: the musical World of Paul Slickey, the Brecht-inflected Luther and Inadmissible Evidence, the absurdist A Sense of Detachment.

The Entertainer uses this dissonance to brilliant effect. "Thank God I'm normal!" goes one of Archie's songs, as he inveighs against the welfare state and National Service. Off-stage he's a philandering busybody, who takes great pride in 20 years avoiding income tax. Archie represents England's complacent postwar ruling class, outward patriotism and normalcy obscuring cynical decadence. His self-satisfaction earns him the contempt of both his old-fashioned father and youthful characters. One imagines Archie seconding Harold Macmillan's oblivious comment that "most of our people never had it so good."

The inter-generational tension provides Entertainer's meat. Billy Rice, Archie's not-so-beloved father, boasts a formidable reputation his son exploits. Yet he's a doddering old man raging against Polish laborers and singing Christian hymns, embarrassing everyone. The young generation, related to rebellious daughter Jean and Frankie, an aspiring vaudevillian himself, see Archie as a sham, an example to be avoided - even when Archie tries to take Frankie under his wing. Even Archie sees the hollowness of being caught between them:

"You see this face... this face can split open with warmth and humanity. It can sing, and tell the worst stories in the world to a great mob of dead, drab erks and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because - look at my eyes. I'm dead behind these eyes. I'm dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there. It doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do they. We're just as dead as each other."

Osborne's play also incorporates 1956's Suez Crisis to brilliant effect. Anthony Eden's standoff with Egypt's Abdel Nasser over the Suez Canal culminated in an Anglo-French-Israeli conspiracy to "knock Nasser of his perch." Its failure thanks to international opprobrium proved deeply traumatizing for a nation weakened by World War II, decolonization and austerity economics, yet still imagining itself a superpower. Osborne makes Mick a victim of the conflict. Like Don in Personal Enemies, he becomes more important as a symbol than a person.

Entertainer's greatest achievement, though, is its structuring. Osborne's interplay between plot and musical hall ditties works wonderfully, and the supporting cast finally makes a strong impression. If it lacks the cutting dialogue of earlier works, it's far more dramatically felicitous. I second Kenneth Tynan in applauding "the big and brilliant notion of putting the whole of contemporary England onto one... stage."

* * *

Expect the next Osborne piece sometime this week. We'll move from The World of Paul Slickey through A Patriot for Me, covering the most experimental (and, in my view, successful) phase of Osborne's career. Movie reviews in the meantime!

A Note on Sources:

For background info on Osborne's life and plays, I draw primarily on John Heilpern's 2006 biography John Osborne: A Patriot for Us. For anyone seriously interested in Osborne, or modern theater generally, it's an essential work. I've also consulted Osborne's two autobiographical volumes, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1994); Tony Richardson's memoir The Long Distance Runner (1993); and Ronald Hayman's John Osborne (1972). Online sources will be linked where appropriate.

Book Review: The Reason Why (1953, Cecil Woodham-Smith)

The historian and her work.

Note: An early version of this article originally appeared on Amazon.com. My reason for posting this here will become apparent, if a) you noted my recent hints about researching a larger, in-depth article; b) you know the book's connection with a certain movie.

Cecil Woodham-Smith (1896-1977) was born of an Irish family in Wales. Marrying a London solicitor, Woodham-Smith busied herself raising children and writing potboiler novels, before becoming an historian. After finishing an acclaimed biography of Florence Nightingale (1950), she remained fascinated with the Crimean War, especially the Charge of the Light Brigade. Several years of further research resulted in The Reason Why (1953). An instant critical and popular success, the book's rarely been out of print in the past 60 years. Today it remains the most decisive influence on the public's perception of the Crimean War.

The Reason Why recounts the Light Brigade's fate at Balaclava (October 25th, 1854) with unparalleled style. Not a truly objective history, Woodham-Smith's book is an eloquent, sweeping condemnation of the Victorian class system. Using two officers - Lords Cardigan and Lucan - as a prism on British society, she shows the combination of arrogance, bad judgment and miscommunication that led to the sacrifice of the "Noble 600."

James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan proves singularly representative of aristocratic shortcomings. The only son in a family of daughters, he grew spoiled by parental dotage, generating an egotism mixed with dreams of military glory. By adulthood Cardigan was an almost caricature nobleman: handsome and gallant, but arrogant, snobbish and short-tempered. Woodham-Smith's claim that Cardigan's "glorious golden head had nothing in it" (15) is unfair; biographer Saul David shows that Cardigan was both intelligent and a good student. Her general assessment of Cardigan's character, however, feels more accurate (p. 40-41):

Lord Cardigan.

"He was genuinely surprised to encounter opposition. His nature had a curious simplicity, so that, but for his violence, he would have been childlike and naive. He was completely absorbed in one object, himself.  It was not... that he deliberately disregarded other men's opinions and feelings - they simply did not exist for him. Like a child playing in a corner of a nursery with his toys, he was wholly absorbed in himself, the rest of the world was an irrelevance." 

Commanding first the 15th, and later the 11th Hussars, Cardigan proved harshly exacting. His stringent standards made the 11th Hussars England's premiere cavalry regiment, but they also engendered the loathing of his officers and men. He certainly kept England's press abuzz with sundry scandals. Minor breaches of etiquette sent him into apoplexy: he scandalized the Army by blackballing John Reynolds, a young captain who dared serve Moselle at a champagne dinner (the famous "black bottle" affair), and flogging a soldier on Easter Sunday. Cardigan himself violated societal mores repeatedly: among other incidents, he shot a subordinate in a duel and eloped with Fanny Paget, sister-in-law of a fellow cavalryman. He was booed at public gatherings, becoming a perennial headache for his superiors. An exasperated Duke of Wellington proclaimed "he had never known the time of the staff... to be taken up in so useless a manner" (100).

Profiled in parallel is George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan. Lucan bested Cardigan in sheer bloody-minded nastiness. He gained infamy for cruelly managing his Mayo estates during the Irish potato famine. Consolidating land holdings and evicting tenants en mass, he caused untold suffering among his subjects and intense hatred: "it is doubtful if he considered the Irish as human beings at all" (113). Like Cardigan, he was also a martinet of the worst sort, a brutal taskmaster "perpetually entangled in trifles" (33) in commanding his troops and often contemptuous of superiors. Lucan found increasingly petty and bizarre ways of exerting authority: at one point, he ordered his cavalry drilled in antiquated Napoleonic tactics against Lord Raglan's express orders.

Lord Lucan.

Not surprisingly, these two men loathed each other. Lucan married Cardigan's sister and by all accounts mistreated her, igniting a deeply-felt vendetta. Naturally, when the Crimean War broke out Cardigan (heading the Light Brigade) found himself serving under division commander Lucan. Commanding general Lord Raglan exacerbated things by separating Cardigan from Lucan's main body, thus undermining Lucan's authority. Even in the field, the two men never missed an opportunity to spite or undermine each other, with disastrous results.

Woodham-Smith forcefully attacks the British military that spawned them. The purchase system, by which officers could literally buy a higher rank, had its benefits. It forestalled the establishment of a powerful, Prussian-style military class, and forced officers to take personal responsibility for their regiment's upkeep. In practice however, it populated the Army with dilettantes and adventurers, seeing military service as a stepping stone to easy prestige. Nominally officers could advance by merit; in practice men without experience or qualification leapfrogged over seasoned career soldiers. Lord Palmerston proclaimed that "it was very desirable to connect the higher classes of Society with the Army" (30), whether or not they were fit to lead.

The lack of a major war since 1815 ensured an antiquated senior staff. Commanding the Allied armies was Fitzroy Somerset, Baron Raglan. Wellington's longtime secretary, Raglan's bravery (he had lost an arm at Waterloo), amiability and organizational skills were unquestioned. His greatest achievement was ensuring smooth relations with his French and Turkish allies. Yet Raglan had never led troops in the field, and proved a spectacularly inept tactician. "Without the military trappings... one would never have guessed him to be a soldier," Woodham-Smith says (161). He proved frustratingly absent-minded, constantly confusing his French allies with the Russian enemy. An exasperated junior officer complained that "everything [is] old at the top. This makes everything sluggish."

Lord Raglan.

The Crimean disaster becomes tragically predictable. Horses crowded into transport ships die en route to the Crimea. Raglan botches the Allied attack at the Alma, forcing British troops to take and retake the same ground repeatedly. Over-caution prevents a complete victory when Raglan refuses Lucan's request to launch a follow-up attack. Raglan ill-advisedly shifts his supply base to Balaclava, a tiny village ill-suited for supplying two massive armies. Finally, administrative muddle ensures inadequate supplies and medical treatment, causing thousands of troops to die of disease and exposure.

In fairness, most officers shared their men's misfortunes. Both Raglan and his French counterpart Marshall St. Arnaud ultimately succumbed to dysentery. Lucan was wounded at Balaclava and even his detractors granted him personal bravery. Cardigan however spent evenings on his yacht in Calamita Bay, entertaining civilian friends and distancing himself from his brigade's hardships. Lest this seem unduly extravagant, military buffs may remember American General George McClellan lunching while the Battle of Malvern Hill raged, Boer War commander Charles Warren stopping his division's advance for a bath, or Charles Townshend dining on plum duff at Kut while his troops starved. This mixture of sang froid and self-indulgence seems unfortunately prevalent in military history.

Woodham-Smith hits her rhetorical stride with Balaclava. She recounts the stirring stand of Colin Campbell's "Thin Red Line," and the gallant Charge of the Heavy Brigade, where 300 cavalrymen under James Scarlett defeated 2,000 Cossacks in a wild uphill charge. Woodham-Smith captures the excitement and fleeting glory of these skirmishes. Against all odds, the British seemed poised to win a spectacular victory. Yet Cardigan stood by, using a discretionary order from Lucan as an excuse not to attack the routed Russians. Had Cardigan followed up on Scarlett's success, the third phase of the battle might never have occurred.

Instead, a classic example of mismanagement follows. Raglan dictates an unclear order to quartermaster Richard Airey, instructing Lucan to attack Russian troops taking capture guns away from the Causeway Heights. Captain Louis Nolan, Raglan's impulsive aide, delivers the message to an agitated Lucan, emphatically pointing at the nearest guns. Neither man recognizes Nolan's fatal mistake: that Lucan cannot see the Heights from his position. Nolan instead gestures towards a mass of Russians supported by artillery in the valley ahead. Stung by accusations of "looking on" in earlier engagements, Lucan does not ask Nolan to clarify his order, and Cardigan protests halfheartedly. Before anyone realizes it, the Light Brigade initiates its fateful charge (p. 242):

"And now the watchers on the heights saw that the lines of horsemen, like toys down on the plain, were expanding and contracting with strange mechanical precision. Death was coming fast, and the Light Brigade was meeting death in perfect order; as a man or horse dropped, the riders on each side of him opened out; as soon as they had ridden clear the ranks closed again. Orderly, as if on parade ground, the Light Brigade rode on, but its numbers grew every moment smaller and smaller as they moved down the valley... It was at this moment that Bosquet, the French General, observed 'C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la guerre'."

The Charge of the Light Brigade by Cecil Doughty. (source)

Historians still dissect the Charge in hope of assigning blame, following the footsteps of Cardigan and Lucan's vicious press feud. Woodham-Smith dodges the issue of individual guilt, viewing Balaclava instead as the logical conclusion of an entire system. For all their gallantry, the British cavalry could not achieve the impossible, and find themselves decimated by well-placed cannon and overwhelming numbers. With so many egotists and incompetents staffing the Army, the Light Brigade's fate seems inevitable. If the British Army was reformed after Crimea, it came at great cost and only grudgingly. The purchase system was not abolished until the Cardwell reforms of 1868-1874, largely at the impetus of Crimean veteran Garnet Wolseley.

If The Reason Why isn't definitive, it's because of its limited portrayal of the Crimea (the book mostly ends at Balaclava), occasional niggling errors (eg., claiming Captain Nolan was half-Italian) and its editorial tone. More recent works (Terry Brighton's Hell Riders, Saul David's The Homicidal Earl) eschew Woodham-Smith's polemical approach for more balanced analysis. Still, Woodham-Smith's passionate anger and vivid prose make it the most readable account of the Light Brigade's sorry fate, and a classic account of military incompetence.

Best & Worst Books Read in 2012

This year Groggy looks at his best and worst 2012 reads. Usually I post these lists on Facebook, since this is after all a film blog. But glitches in Facebook's Note system deleted at least one of my previous lists, so this seemed a safer alternative.

Despite having a full-time job (and hence next to nil free time) I still managed over 100 books this year. Sure, many of them were re-reads, which is why you won't see any Flashman books on this list. And yeah, a handful of Goosebumps books pad out the list. So it's not like I'm reading Crime & Punishment 100 times. Still it's enough for a list.

Anyway, without further adieu:

Best Ten Books Read in 2012:

Groggy reads 99% percent history and other nonfiction these days. Back in college of course there was more time and hence more variety of subjects; now I have to be pickier. Nonetheless, even within this narrow confine I found a lot of worthwhile books this year, a few classics and a few recent volumes.

10. Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations - Georgina Howell

Gertrude Bell is a truly remarkable woman: Alpine adventurer, explorer, archaeologist, Arabist, intelligence operative, Middle East Kingmaker. Howell's sprawling biography does her justice. The book explores Bell's myriad talents, unique, vivacious personality, her personal frustrations and public achievements. Its main success, perhaps, comes in illumniating an incredible personage shamefully overlooked.

9. Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century - Mark Mazower

 

Mazower's provocative book eschews traditional 20th Century narratives for barbed analysis of European politics. His sociopolitical dissection points up uncomfortable facts: the differences between Nazism and "old right" Fascism, appeal of totalitarian movements to interwar Europeans, Stalin's remarkable economic achievements coupled with political oppression, Thatcherism's inherent unworkability, the USSR as Europe's last traditional empire. Mazower's chapters on Nazi imperialism and internationalist idealism presage more recent volumes. The European Union has proven more successful than Mazower suggests, but the book remains a remarkable volume.

8. Bloom County: The Complete Collection, Vols. 1-2 - Berke Breathed

Berkeley Breathed's brilliant '80s satirical comic strip, part Doonesbury and part Calvin & Hobbes, now comes in beautifully-packaged compilations, complete with Breathed's commentary. True, many jokes are very dated: who remembers James Watt or Joan Jett? But Breathed's playful art, lovable characters and colorful sense of humor remain timeless.

7. The White Nile - Alan Moorehead

Aussie author Moorehead was a brilliant narrative historian, mixing colorful prose with a warm human touch. Moorehead chronicles European exploration and exploitation of the Nile, the 19th Century's greatest frontier. His subjects are a diverse lot: the contentious Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, the glamorous adventure couple Stanley and Florence Baker, Henry Stanley and Dr. Livingstone, the messianic Mahdi, the enigmatic Gordon of Khartoum. Moorehead ties them splendidly together, crafting a vivid, compulsively readable epic. His complementary volume The Blue Nile is a bit sloppier but also highly recommended.

6. A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914-1948 - James Barr

Much has been written about Britain and France's conniving to divide the post-WWI Middle East. Less often told is the resultant imperial rivalry. In this fascinating chronicle, Barr analyzes the fissures in the Anglo-French alliance, as the two powers jealously jockeyed for power, influence and oil. Both powers used regional nationalism, be they post-war Arab movements or the rising tide of Zionism, to undermine each other, with disastrous results. Barr's account is lucid, eye-opening and compellingly written.

5. The October Country - Ray Bradbury

The literary world lost a giant with the passing of Ray Bradbury. This story collection is one of his best, here leaning towards overt horror. Some of Bradbury's scariest stories are here: the killer baby of "The Small Assassin," the pitiless fate of "The Scythe," the shocking image which concludes "Skeleton." For Bradbury fans whose tastes skew darker, this is invaluable.

4. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner

Foner delivers an invaluable account of Abraham Lincoln's views on race. In Foner's view, Lincoln underwent a painful personal evolution, from a "moderate" Whig accepting white supremacy while restricting slavery's spread, to an abolitionist advocating resettlement of freed blacks, to a full-throated advocate for equality. Honest Abe comes off as extremely flawed but admirable, seeking to sublimate his prejudices to the greater good. Foner treats Lincoln with admirable delicacy, avoiding modern value judgments to show a statesman both very much of his time, yet undeniably revolutionary.

3. The Siege: The Full Horrifying Account of the Kut Disaster - Russell Braddon

Braddon's account of the Siege of Kut bests even Woodham-Smith's The Reason Why as a study in military failure. Braddon seethes with anger at this masterpiece of mismanagement, when arrogant British generals sent 6th Division to do an army's job, underestimating logistics and numerically-superior Turkish opponents. At book's center is Charles Townshend, a self-proclaimed genius who launched a disastrous campaign against impossible odds, trapped his division in a disease-ridden village, panicked his superiors into ill-advised rescue attempts and enjoyed a cushy captivity while his men endured forced labor. True, it's not objective: Braddon makes his contempt for Townshend plain, and his own POW experiences color his empathy for the soldiers' plight. Faced with a craven villain like Townshend though, who could blame him?

2. The Destruction of Lord Raglan: A Tragedy of the Crimean War, 1854-1855 - Christopher Hibbert

For readers unwilling to slog through Kinglake's nine-volume history, this is the best popular account of the Crimean War. Hibbert gives a brilliant grunt's-eye view of the conflict, mixing blow-by-blow battle accounts with the terrifying monotony of life in the trenches. His main point, that Lord Raglan's been unfairly smeared from 1855 onwards, is highly debatable; Raglan still comes off as a decent man with no business leading an army. Contextualizing his performance amidst bureaucratic muddle, poor weather and a military completely unprepared for a major war makes it more understandable, and Raglan himself sympathetic.

1. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 - Gordon S. Wood

Wood's entry in the Oxford History of the United States never fails to impress. It's a truly remarkable tome, overwhelming the reader in its sheer breadth and depth. Wood touches on every conceivable topic - the rise of evangelical religion, women and minority roles, attitudes on slavery, the contrast between America's high ideas and low culture - with skill and sensitivity. He couples these microhistories with shrewd analyses of the Federalist-Republican split, Hamilton's financial system, the Revolution's international impact and the Republic's hesitant early foreign policy. A masterpiece.

Honorable mentions: Glory Road (Catton), The Arab Awakening (Antonius), Quartered Safe out Here (Fraser), (Kabaservice), The Great Anglo-Boer War (Farwell), Founding Brothers (Ellis), The Fierce Pawns (Macrory), Rule & Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party (Kabaservice)

Worst Ten Books Read in 2012:

I also found time for some truly wretched works. Their sins range from sublimating history to a political agenda, to tackling an impossible subject, to intellectual laziness and sloppy construction, to just plain bad writing. And yes, there's an R.L. Stine book included.


10. Chitral Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Major General Charles Townshend - N.S. Nash

This biography sets about the thankless task of rehabilitating Townshend, the antagonist of Kut. Soldier-turned-journalist Nash tries his hardest to be fair, approaching his subject with brusque humor and inside knowledge of armed forces social climbing. For all Nash's pleading, Townshend still comes off as an arrogant twit who needlessly sacrificed his men in pursuit of selfish glory. Not a bad book, just a fatally misguided one.

9. The Crimean War: A Reappraisal - Philip Warner 

After reading some really great Crimean War histories this year - not only Hibbert but Orlando Figes' The Crimean War - it was inevitable I'd find a bad one. Warner presents interesting arguments that our understanding of the Crimea is flawed, and that it was really a success and credit to the Anglo-French-Turkish alliance. Unfortunately they're couched in a dull, dry, meandering book that becomes too saturated in details to see the big picture. When a 200 page book takes four months to read, it probably hasn't succeeded.

8. Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 - Dominic Green

One of the pitfalls of narrative history is it forsakes analysis for storytelling. Woe then to the historian who can't tell a story. Green ties together several related topics - the collapse of Khedivist Egypt, Urabi Pasha's nationalist coup d'etat, the Mahdist Wars. Unfortunately he presents each story in spectacularly superficial and uninteresting fashion, providing zero insight into this epochal clash of imperialism, Islamism and nationalism. Attempts to equate the Mahdists with al-Qaeda do its author no credit, either. With so much ink spilled over the Mahdi already you're well-advised skipping this one.

7. Military Blunders: The How and Why of Military Failure - Saul David

There are some things you don't expect from a book written in 1997 and reprinted in 2012. For instance, the author referring to Russians as "Asiatics of low intelligence." Or repeating the canard that Singapore fell to Japanese troops because all its guns faced the sea. Or confusing Matthew Ridgeway with Maxwell Taylor. Even the accurate bits are just regurgitation of Geoffrey Regan's work - pretty damning in and of itself, considering Regan's been recycling himself for years. A shame as I enjoyed David's biography of Lord Cardigan.

6. Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East - Karl E. Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac

Ostensibly a look at how British and American policymakers shaped the last 150 years of Middle Eastern politics. In reality it's a scatter-shot, meandering collection of biographical essays, some scarcely connected to the topic. Fiona Shaw and Lord Lugard are interesting figures but how on Earth do they relate? Last time I checked South Africa wasn't part of the Middle East. A longish chapter on the CIA in Beirut rambles without divulging any points-of-interest. Chapters on T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Paul Wolfowitz border on superficial. The book's only interesting in the margins, and the margins aren't worth it when most of these figures have biographies of their own.

5. Planet of the Lawn Gnomes - R.L. Stine

Picking on Goosebumps books, especially the new Horrorland series, is like shooting fish in a barrel. But childhood nostalgia compels me to read them, so here we are. Glance at the title and spend about 30 seconds shaping a story around it. You've given it more thought than R.L. Stine did.

4. The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud - Brian Garfield

Novelist Garfield vindictively destroys Richard Meinertzhagen, one of England's most eccentric heroes of the 20th Century. He's admittedly convincing in spots, deflating some of Meinerzhagen's more egregious anecdotes (the "Heil Meinertzhagen" silliness) and showing him an ornithological fraud (an argument made before). But Garfield goes beyond into extreme nuttiness, for instance hinting with Glenn Beck-ish "just asking questions" delicacy that Meinertzhagen murdered his wife. It's a tiresome screed, bloody-minded in its willingness to promote any nonsense that reflects negatively on its subject.

3. American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us - Jesse Ventura

This semi-literate rant, courtesy of America's favorite wrestler-turned-politician, is more funny than offensive. While reading, I couldn't help remembering Ventura's appearance as a Man in Black (with Alex Trebek!) on The X-Files. "Mr. Ventura, your scientific illiteracy makes me SHUDDER!"

2. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire - H.W. Crocker III

The PIG Guides never cease to amaze with their vacuous demagoguery. Groggy readers know I'm an unrepentant Anglophile, but even I blanch at Crocker's high Victorian jingoism. Given the plethora of recent pro-empire books by Niall Ferguson, Lawrence James and Saul David its premise of an intellectual conspiracy to slander Britain is dubious to begin with. But Crocker's reactionary racial and political attitudes - calling the Irish "shiftless, ignorant, stubborn, contumacious and cruel," deeming the Maori genocides "fun with muskets," claiming the Opium Wars a "defense of free trade" - are shocking in a book published last year. All wrapped in a smug, self-satisfyingly contrarian attitude that reflexively deems dissenters part of a liberal-Marxist-Muslim conspiracy to hide the truth. Charming.

1. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda and an Unnecessary War - Thomas DiLorenzo

This mendacious piece of garbage makes the PIG Guide look like Sir John Fortescue. Not only does it slander America's greatest President to promote an extremist neo-libertarian agenda; that would be obnoxious enough. But it's painfully obvious that DiLorenzo is a hack who can't even keep his propaganda straight. He arrogates states the right to secede and repudiate the Constitution, then chastises Lincoln for claiming seceded states outside Constitutional protection. He claims that Lincoln ignored chances for "peaceful abolition" when the South rejected precisely that. Or selective facts: He cites Andrew Jackson as a guru of small government, ignoring how Jackson overrode the Supreme Court re: expelling the Five Civilized Tribes, or his decidedly Unionist reaction to the Nullification Crisis. Or brazen lies, like saying the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free a single slave. Or paranoid rants about the "Marxist" Lincoln cult. The result? A book that commits every conceivable sin: it's poorly argued, ideologically slanted, inaccurate and painfully unreadable.

An equivalent film-related list will come in the next week. There are still some year-end theatrical releases to catch so stay tuned!