George Dillon: First Of Osborne's Angries

After Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer had made John Osborne famous, he raided his trunk and came up with Epitaph for George Dillon, a product of his early, hungry years. Though it was written in collaboration with Anthony Creighton, Dillon shows unmistakable signs of being Osborne's work, and as such it was produced in London and New York. (If Creighton does not receive his due from audience or critics, it is because most of them have never heard of him, and have no way of knowing what his due is.)

On Broadway it got mixed reviews and died in three weeks, leaving behind it a small but fervent group of admirers, some of whom, according to The New York Times, may resuscitate it this month in another Broadway house. In any case, it has also infiltrated the bookstores. Anybody interested in the theatre, anybody who likes to read plays, would do well to have a look.

In the Osborne canon, this play ranks as 'prentice work. Its virtues are mostly those that Look Back in Anger has to a greater degree. But because of them, it is improbable that any play of Osborne's will ever be lacking in interest.

Some of these qualities, of course, are the skills in construction, characterization, and dialogue that distinguish playwrights from ordinary people, but Osborne has others that distinguish him from ordinary playwrights. One of the greatest of these is a fervent seriousness and integrity. I do not call this a virtue out of some vague feeling that high-mindedness is a Good Thing. It means that in all probability Osborne will never write a cheap or sleazy sentence in his life.

One of its forms is a concern with important social questions which insures that he will always write about something worth reading about; since Rome burns every day, a cry of "Fire!" has a certain sort of interest that simple fiddling can never attain. And it means that even the least of his plays has a vitality, an urgency, that could not exist if the author were not passionately involved with every line. "Passion" is a frequently debased word in our time, but Bernard Shaw has reminded us of the existence of a moral passion that can be no less strong than any other kind. Osborne has an almost unique ability to make moral passion into dramatic intensity.

Of course any clod can be a crusader, but Osborne is no literary Peter the Hermit. His fervor is complemented by a first-rate independent mind. For all the obvious intensity with which he holds his beliefs, he has no all-embracing doctrine that makes his views on every question predictable, and that serves him as a fetter as well as a crutch. He is a confirmed socialist, but he has acknowledged that "Socialism is an experimental idea, not a dogma." (I quote from a published symposium entitled Declaration, which contains essays by Osborne and Kenneth Tynan which are worth reading for anybody who cares about contemporary theatre.)

Osborne's mental stature also keeps him from the necessity of wholesale borrowing of stock characters and themes from other playwrights. American dramatists, by contrast, tend to be astonishingly inbred: Tennessee Williams produces William Inge; Inge mates with his parent to produce a frail and sickly creature like, say, Speed Lamkin, who can also show O'Neill and Miller and Heaven knows who-all in his family tree.

Though Osborne shows clearly perceptible influences, including Williams, Miller, and Shaw, his own originality has kept them in their proper places. (And, though several American dramatists are still his superiors, he has for the moment an advantage over them, in that he has no descendants of his own to stale his freshness.) These are in a sense negative virtues, but the absence in his work of abrupt stone walls of ideological limitation and piercing false notes of literary imitation is refreshing in the theatre of Maxwell Anderson and Ketti Frings.

Epitaph for George Dillon is the first of Osborne's attempts to jolt British drama out of the drawing rooms in which it has lived and dozed for many years. It is set in an utterly drab and ugly middle-class house in a London suburb--and a complicated setting it is too, with sitting room, kitchen, hall, stair, and bedroom all simultaneously visible.

This allows for some interesting contrapuntal effects when two areas are lit and two actions go on simultaneously, and it shows that the authors had an eye towards maximum use of the resources of the stage. On the other hand, these effects are difficult to follow in the reading, and it must be difficult in the theatre to keep the eye and the attention focused in two directions at the same time.

The background of the play consists not only of the Elliots' drab and ugly house, but of their drab and ugly lives. George Dillon, who comes to live among these simple, honest, somewhat somambulistic folk, is eloquent about their mindlessness at great length:

Have you looked at them? Have you listened to them? They don't merely act and talk like caricatures, they are caricatures! That's what's so terrifying. Put any one of them on a stage, and one would take them seriously for one minute! They think in cliches, they talk in them, they even feel in them--and, brother, that's an achievement! Their existence is one great cliche that they carry about with them like a snail in his little house--and they live in it and die in it!

If they seem not nearly so dull and small as they are supposed to (next to, say, Willy Loman they are a riot of color), it is probably because they are English. Their very ordinariness has the charm of the foreign and strange and picturesque; perhaps, also, English vulgarity is simply not so vulgar as ours.

Dillon himself is an artist, an actor-playwright to be specific--and a thorough second-rater. Like Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, he is suffering from "the pain of being alive," and it stings him into delivering tirades, presumably on the authors' behalf, concerning such matters as religion, the middle-class mind, and the relationship of life to art. These tirades are neither so long, so frequent, nor so good as Jimmy Porter's similar tirades, but they are well on the way.

Dillon is suffering from the particular pain of being an artist, and the even more poignant and particular pain of not being a good one. "What is worse," he says, than the "disease" of talent,

What is worse is having the same symptoms as talent, the pain, the ugly swellings, the lot--but never knowing whether the diagnosis is correct. Do you think there may be some kind of euthanasia for that? Could you kill it by burying yourself here--for good? ...Would the warm, generous, honest-to-goodness animal lying at your side every night, with its honest-to-goodness love--would it make you forget?

In order to find out, Dillon first seduces and then gets engaged to the Elliot daughter, Josie, a member of the English equivalent of our local rock-'n'-roll-hair-curlers-and-chewing-gum set, who is neither warm, generous, nor particularly honest-to-goodness.

Taking Josie to bed and to wife is not a rational act on Dillon's part, but an admission of defeat; a retreat into the ghastly middle-class morass that he describes so frequently and with such emphatic relish; a form of suicide. Having effected this mock-death, he speaks his own epitaph, in which he convicts himself of total futility:

Shall I recite my epitaph to you? Yes, do recite your epitaph to me. "Here lies the body of George Dillon, aged thirty-four--or thereabouts--who thought, who hoped, he was that mysterious, ridiculous being called an artist. He never allowed himself one day of peace...He achieved nothing he set out to do. He made no one happy...he loved no one successfully. He was a bit of a bore, and, frankly, rather useless. But the germs loved him."

All this raises the question, "What's eating George Dillon?"--the same question that is asked about Jimmy Porter, and about Osborne himself. Curiosity on this point, at least so far as it concerns Dillon, is never entirely satisfied; perhaps Osborne does not entirely know the answer (not to mention Creighton). But if Dillon's fury and hatred are not completely explained, they are convincingly dramatized; and we are let in on certain factors that help to account for them.

His failure as an artist is one of these factors: he had been condemned to dreary poverty and drudging jobs for many years. His eventual "success" comes only when he sells his play--and himself--to a greasy promoter who cuts out all the idealism and long speeches (two constituents, of course, of Osborne's own power), and changes the play's name to Telephone Tart. Another factor is his rejection by Mrs. Elliot's sister Ruth, the only other character in the play who thinks and talks and understands on his level.

Ruth is a dramaturgic necessity. Soliloquies are unworkable in the realistic convention within which this play is written, and Dillon must have someone to talk to who will greet his outbursts with something other than scandalized incomprehension. But the authors have attempted to make something of her besides a confidante for Dillon. They have equipped her with some plot-material of her won, and her own bag-full of points to make.

It is hard to know exactly what to make of Ruth. For a time she appears as a disillusioned Leftist intellectual: she says she has just quit the party, after "seventeen years. It's rather like walking out on a lover." She and Dillon discuss this major crisis in her life for half a page or so, and then drop it, permanently.

Ruth has man trouble too. There is a shadowy divorce in her distant past, and when she enters for the first time she has just broken off with a lover, whom we do not see. We are told that she likes hungry artists, that she disburses money as well as love, and that she acts as "a kind of emotional soup kitchen." Perhaps this line of characterization is put in to explain why, though it is a near thing, she refuses to enter the same kind of relationship with Dillon. But Ruth's situation is never adequately described or explained. Though as far as we know her she is interesting as well as plausible, she emerges as a collection of loose ends. Moreover, she tears the play apart. Her story and Dillon's never coalesce into one. As a result, the play is somewhat formless and wandering. It takes two readings, I found, in order to get a thorough notion of what is going on.

Another of George Dillon's problems is also a fault in construction. Certain