The Pritchett Century (101 page)

What froze him was that she was incurious about him.

But his long fingers were stained by nicotine. His clothes were unpressed and his bowler hat and mac were greasy, but he was particular about his cuffs and collars and his highly polished, papery shoes. A gentle, sad creature, he is oddly described as being like a “Welsh-sounding prurient, reticent investigator of sorts from a small provincial town.” For some reason unknown—not only because of his long spells in hospital—the couple were mostly apart.

For the only child, schools were places of pain and humiliation. Certainly they were often rough. He had to discover cunning. At one mixed school, the adolescent girls turned out to be the thumping bullies of the smaller boys, preparing them for the sex war. Still, in the suburbs, there were sympathetic, literate families who helped the backward autodidact. He was nothing more than a nuisance to his energetic mother, and by now they almost hated one another. He was
luckier than he thinks to be sent to a third-rate boarding school, for he did at least read a lot and did pretty well with his belated education. But he was laughed at for saying he wanted to be a historian and go to a university. All he was fit for, he was told, was journalism. He was sacked for hitting a master who had slapped him and for writing love-letters to a girl there. Schools took a stern line on that. The sexual revolution, though rife elsewhere, did not easily penetrate the semi-genteel regions of provincial life. So journalism it was. The Benevolent Society to which his father had subscribed and which had paid for his schooling completed its obligations by getting him introduced to a publisher who produced trade journals like the
Gas World
. He had to prepare himself for this by going to typing and shorthand classes.

Folly is often a salvation in such dreary circumstances. Osborne was eighteen, spotty, shy, and longing for friends, especially girls. It occurred to him that a course of dancing lessons at a school that put on amateur theatricals was a likely chance. He became a dim star and sent his photograph to a theatrical agent; the bohemian traits of his upbringing sprang up in his sullen, slightly flashy being. He had first to disentangle himself from the usual sentimental suburban engagement to a nice enough girl who took her reluctant boyfriend (earning two pounds a week) to the windows of furniture shops. The warning was clear. He jilted her, wrote her remorseful, high-minded letters, was tormented by guilt and by threats and denunciations from the parents. But he was soon out on tour with a third-rate company and learned about theatre without training from the bottom, starting with the job of assistant stage-manager and understudying the five actors, aged between twenty-five and seventy. What is clear from the long picaresque experiences with this down-at-heel and hungry company is that he was really a writer and, despite poetising ambitions, had a marvellous ear for real speech. The book is punctuated by passages from his plays that hark back to what he heard “on the road.” The “real” life is in fact the overflow of theatrical life evoking people outside. On that first long tour, sexually starved, he simpered after a fluttering actress called Sheila but soon had the simper knocked out of him by a formidable actress called Stella, an aggressive thirty-year-old, with “the shoulders of a Channel swimmer” and a body that “looked capable of snapping up
an intruder in a jawbone of flesh.” She was “arrogantly lubricious” and had “an almost masculine, stalking power.” She was not put off by his sickly appearance and his acne; she expertly detected the writer in him, and was after him to revise his first attempt as a collaborator, on a play that she and her husband wanted to put on. When she and Osborne became lovers, they quarrelled incessantly about dramatic construction; she was out for the commercial success of another
Autumn Crocus
or
Dinner at Eight
—what he calls “a Nice Play” about middle-class gatherings. She in fact woke up his independent intelligence. He discovered he had his own ideas about the theatre. She said he was a lazy, arrogant, dishonest amateur—not only that but ungrateful to her complaisant husband, who tolerantly rescued them when the company’s run stopped and the money ran out. She had to take a job as a waitress and Osborne became a dishwasher. She eventually left him for a job in the north, and he admits that he spitefully left her door unlocked and her electricity turned on when he left the flat she had lent him. Rightly, she never forgave him. Years later, the play did run for a week, with Osborne trying to recognise some lines of his own in it.

The knockabout theatrical chapters tend to be repetitive, but they are rich in sharp, short portraits, especially of the theatrical landladies. They end with his runaway marriage with one Pamela, a capable young actress. He was tactless enough to carry on this passion when the company got to her own home town, in the face of her hostile family. They were well-established drapers. The correlative scripture of what went on in real life will be seen in the quotations from
Look Back in Anger
, notably Jimmy Porter’s speech about the wedding:

Osborne says that this is a fairly accurate account of the wedding, except for the references to the Indian Princes. They seem unlikely in the life of a local draper. Daddy has in fact been elevated socially by the “angry” exposer of class consciousness. Osborne is safer as a guide
to congealed suburban or theatrical snobberies. He now writes about the episode:

Just before the end of the book there is a collection of extracts from Nellie Beatrice’s letters. Years have passed, but she’s still on the move, saving up gift stamps for a new carpet-shampoo cleaner, washing down the ceiling, though “I never did like Housework.” She just wanted things clean. And then comes her crushing phrase:

And to his notebook Osborne groans:

About that time, 1955, George Devine rowed out to Osborne, who was living on a barge on the Thames, and offered him a twenty-pound option on
Look Back in Anger
. English theatre changed in a night. I look forward to Volume Two.

(1990)

In Salman Rushdie, the author of
Midnight’s Children
(Jonathan Cape, 1981), India has produced a great novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual story-telling. Like García Márquez in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, he weaves a whole people’s capacity for carrying its inherited myths—and new ones that it goes on generating—into a kind of magic carpet. The human swarm swarms in every man and woman as they make their bid for life and vanish into the passion or hallucination that hangs about them like the smell of India itself. Yet at the same time there are Western echoes, particularly of the irony of Sterne in
Tristram Shandy—
that early non-linear writer—in Rushdie’s readiness to tease by breaking off or digressing in the gravest moments. This is very odd in an Indian novel! The book is really about the mystery of being born. Rushdie’s realism is that of the conjuror who, in a flash, draws an incident out of the air and then makes it vanish and laughs at his cleverness. A pregnant woman, the narrator’s mother, goes to a fortune-teller in the Delhi slum:

And the fortune-teller goes on, sing-songing:

Outside the room, monkeys are throwing down stones on the street from a ruined building.

This is pure
Arabian Nights
intrigue—for that son, Saleem Sinai, now thirty-one, is writing about what he is making up about his birth; he is dramatising his past life as a prophecy, even universalising his history as a mingling of farce and horror and matching it with thirty years of the Indian crowd’s collective political history. The strength of a book that might otherwise be a string of picaresque tales lies in its strong sense of design. Saleem claims that it is he who has created modern India in the years that followed Indian independence—has dreamed into being the civil strife and the wars—as a teller of stories, true or untrue, conniving at events and united with them. Central to this is the fantasy that the children born at midnight on the day of liberation, as he was, have a destiny. The Prime Minister himself pronounces this: “They are the seed of a future that would genuinely differ from anything that the world had seen at that time.” Children born a few seconds before the hour of what Saleem calls Mountbatten’s “tick-tock” are likely to join the revelling band of conjurors and circus freaks and street singers; those born a few seconds after midnight, like Parvati, the witch, whom Saleem eventually marries, will be
genuine sorcerers. Saleem himself, born on the stroke of the hour, will be amazingly gifted but will also embody the disasters of the country. The novel is an autobiography, dictated by a ruined man to a simple but shrewd working girl in a pickle factory—to this Saleem’s fortunes have fallen. (She is addressed from time to time as if she were Sterne’s “dear Eliza.”) The fortune-teller’s words “washing will hide him” point to Fate. The prophecy was not a joke.

The rich Delhi Muslims who raise him are not his parents: he is a changeling, and not their son. The wrong ticket has been tied to his toe by a poor Goanese nurse, who, demented by the infidelity of her husband, a common street singer, had allowed herself to be seduced by a departing English sahib. Saleem is ugly, dwarfish, with a huge snotty nose, and is brought up rich; the real son is Shiva, brought up poor. Years will pass before the nurse confesses. The point of the political allegory becomes clear. Shiva, like the god, will become the man of action, riot, and war—the bully, cunning in getting to the top. Saleem’s gift will be the passive intellectual’s who claims the artist’s powers of travelling into the minds of people. The rival traits will show in their school days. Proud of being midnight’s children, the boys form a privileged gang. Saleem sees the gang as a gathering of equals in which every one has the right to his own voice. Shiva, brought up on the streets and refusing to be a whining beggar, rejects Saleem’s democratic dream:

The effect of Indian independence on the rich family is to give them the opportunity to buy up the property of the departing British cheaply, and speculation drives Saleem’s “father” to delusion. When he ages, he shuts himself up to fret about getting the words of the Koran in the right order. Then the riots of partition begin; there is the war in Kashmir; identifying himself with mass-consciousness, Saleem declares the war occurred because he dreamed it; Gandhi is assassinated;
there is the war between India and Pakistan. In Bombay, where Saleem’s family have migrated to make money, the bombing smashes their houses and kills off several of them. These events are evoked in parodies of news-flashes from All India Radio. Saleem, indeed, sees himself as a private radio sending out his satirical reports; once they are issued, the narrative returns to his story. He has a strange sister—a delightfully mischievous girl, known as the Brass Monkey, whose main sport is setting fire to the family’s shoes. When Saleem discovers the truth about his birth, he falls in love with her; she turns him down and becomes pious, and Saleem henceforth believes all his failures in love are due to the sin of a metaphysical incest. The girl eventually becomes a superb cold-hearted singer and is “the darling of the troops” in the war. Failure in sexual love haunts all the family. The more his “parents” disappoint each other sexually, the more they apply themselves to loving each other. Saleem grows up to be something of a voyeur or vicarious lover.