The Plays of John Osborne: An Assessment by Simon Trussler (review)

lIS l\fODERN DRAMA l\lay many valid new insights, it also misleads him at times, in my opinion, into overloading an episode or character or bit of dialogue with more significance than seems warranted. And in his quest for deeper and deeper meanings, he occasionally falls overboard into misinterpretation. This tendency is nowhere more apparent than in his elaborate deductions from the Harker-Shaughnessy story in A Long Day's Journey Into Night. As I see it, the story of the confrontation between the pig farmer and the landed gentleman serves several purposes in the play: it establishes the relatively cheerful atmosphere at the start and provides contrast for the shadows that will shortly begin to darken among the self-tortured Tyrones; through its graphic description of crude, ribald, sharp-tongued Shaughnessy, it extends the gallery of Irish-American prototyPes on view within the play; and, as Professor Tornqvist properly notes, it "helps to characterize the Tyrones in ... that their reactions to it reveal something" about themselves. But this aspect is only the start of Professor Tornqvist's observations, for he considers the humorous anecdote to be "the story of the Tyrone ,[that is, O'Neill] family in disguise. Thus the poor farm bordering on the rich estate illustrates Tyrone's transition from poverty to wealth," etc. It is impossible to summarize briefly the professor's argument, for he draws so many analogies that it would take pages to dispute them; all I can say here is that practically all of his parallelisms strike me as far-fetched. Nevertheless, if he sometimes errs, he errs in the right direction, for his painstaking study locates subtleties and profundities in O'Neill's work that have escaped prior notice. The value of his estimable book is enhanced by a good bibliography and a detailed chronology of the playwright's both published and unpublished plays. LOUIS SHEAFFER Brooklyn Heights, New York THE PLAYS OF JOHN OSBORNE: AN ASSESSMENT, by Simon Trussler. London : Victor Gollancz, Ltd. (Distributed in the U.S.A. by Humanities Press, New York), 1969. 252 pp. $3.00. In a picture on the back of this book, John Osborne displays a casual posture and an insouciant expression calculated, it seems, to deride the formality of his suit and tie. One is reminded of the studied, old-school nonchalance of Oscar Wilde. (For there to be any self-possession in the modem world, perhaps it must be slightly strained and assertive.) Seemingly placid, Wilde was, in Edc Bentley's memorable phrase, an "agonized witness of aristocratic decay," and Osborne, the seediness of some of his characters notwithstanding, is his spiritual heir. Once Osborne had proven himself as a playwright, he felt free to claim membership in an aristocracy composed of writers willing to defy society'S demand that everyone be possessed with its purposes. In an essay on what theater should be in the sixties, he wrote, "The element of play seems to have gone out of life, but artists have the right to relax, to be frivolous, to indulge themselves in their work:' (P. 205) Sounding very much like Wilde, Osborne dreams of a time when men knew how to play at living and, one might add, how to forget the self sometimes. Osborne has no faith in the idea of Progress toward Utopia, but he has responded sympathetically to the rival notion of Decline from a Golden Age. In his assessment of Osborne's dramaturgy, Simon Trussler draws attention to the importance of "that era of certainty before the first world war which has so consistently and incongruously attracted" Osborne (p. 149), but he upholds the 1971 BOOK REVIEWS 119 the playwright in his refusal to be identified in a direct way with nostalgic Jimmy Porter, who laments, "there aren't any good, brave causes left." According to this study, Osborne's main theme in Look Back in Anger and in most of the other plays has been the inability of the characters to be lovers or even friends, not the failures Df society at large. But the public and private dimensions Df selfhood are not so, easily separated. In a climate Df Dpinio,n that Dffers little...