LONDON LETTER
463
embodies certain ready-made attitudes of which one unthinkingly ap–
proves. Left-Wing or Right-Wing, the forces of reaction seem, funda–
mentally, one. They are united by the same stonewall resistance to
originality.
The Debutante-Intellectuals seem also to have been plaguing the
talented John Osborne in his musical
The World of Paul Slickey.
What–
ever Osborne does, the public response is bound to be excessive. This
time the daily press got together and performed on him the most vicious
and unanimous hatchet-job I can remember. As Mr. Osborne's musical
attacked everything, but above all the gutter press and the church, the
treatment-from the gutter press and from respectable, churchly papers
like
The Times-was
the least he could expect. In all fairness,
Paul
Slickey
is not good, though it might have been immensely improved
had Osborne not directed the thing himself. An outside producer could
have cut away much of the waste material with which the show was
cluttered without feeling, as Osborne must have done, that he was do–
ing some obscure injury to himself. But it is not nearly as bad as the
reviewers suggested, and a good deal better than the average Twenties–
and-water slop that is usually served up as musical comedy in this coun–
try. The wolfish vindictiveness with which the press turned on Osborne
was unpleasant enough in itself but, I suppose, inevitable; theatrical
malice comes off on everyone connected with the stage, even on the
journalists on the other side of the footlights. But it also shows the ex–
traordinary resentment which the old hacks harbour for the young man's
success. After all, the Osborne vogue was largely made and even more
largely used by the journalists. The myth of the Angry Young Man
was wholly their creation, a haphazard grouping-together of unlike, mu–
tually unsympathetic writers, for the convenience of the newspaper men.
They cashed in on the A.Y.M.s quite as much as the A.Y.M.s cashed
in on the free publicity. As Osborne's young success figure remarks to
a journalist. "You drink, therefore I am." Unfortunately, Osborne's
reputation, like his legendary income, was becoming a little unmanage–
able. He was clearly able to subsist without the help of the press. So he
was in for trouble. The interesting question is not why he was panned
but whether or not he would have been panned had
Paul Slickey
been better.
But to return to the Debutante-Intellectuals: the trouble with
Paul Slickey
was that in it Osborne appeared to have accepted their
image of himself. He gave the impression of playing a part he has been
willed into rather than writing to please himself.
In
Slickey
he is not so
much the dramatist as the mere attacker, the man who makes dis-
