London Calling (16 page)

The speech that made George Devine stage the play was in the last act. Jimmy Porter: ‘There aren’t any good, brave causes
left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It’ll just
be for the Brave “New-nothing-very-much-thank-you…”’ It was the first articulation of a questioning new attitude by the new,
post-war generation.
¹⁰

Kenneth Allsop gave us a description of John Osborne in 1958:

tall and slender with wavy hair and a feminine, delicately horsy face which is given a satanic edge by an amused, malicious
mouth. He dresses in a somewhat démodé foppish manner (hound’s-tooth check ‘sports’ jacket and paisley scarf in open neck
white shirt) which suggests the pink clean-limbed character who strides on at the start of British drama and cries: ‘Who’s
for tennis?’
¹¹

Though hardly a bohemian, Osborne had an unconventional sense of humour. In 1951, when the parents of Osborne’s first wife,
Pamela Lane, objected to the marriage they went as far as to recruit her friend from drama college days, Lynne Reid-Banks,
to attempt to persuade Pamela that Osborne was in fact gay. There was no truth in the accusation; Osborne’s sometimes camp
manner was designed to shock, not to communicate a sexual preference. He got his own back on Reid-Banks years later when her
novel
The L-Shaped Room
had made her famous and he was a successful playwright. Reid-Banks gave a house party to which he was invited and, in the
course of the evening, he offered her a cream cheese and smoked salmon sandwich, which she accepted. He had gone to some considerable
trouble to insert a used condom into the sandwich and Osborne remembered with delight the result when she bit into it: ‘The
unbelieving repulsion on her face, the prig struck by lightning, was fixed forever with me.’
¹²

Christmas Day, 1954, was overcast and gloomy. It barely got light at all. In a bedsitter in South London, a tall, thin 23-year-old
man with tousled hair and pale blue eyes sat on his bed with an eiderdown wrapped around his feet to keep out the penetrating
cold. He wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles and a roll-neck sweater. His girlfriend had returned to her parents for Christmas
but he couldn’t afford the train fare to Leicester to see his own family. He had eaten a Christmas meal of tinned tomatoes
and fried bacon and began leafing through his journal, glancing at his notes. It occurred to him that they were
all on one theme. ‘It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky’s
Raskolnikov, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer from Hamsun’s
Hunger
: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society.’ Suddenly, he saw that he had the makings of a book:
‘I turned to the back of the journal and wrote at the head of the page: “Notes for a book
The Outsider in Literature
”.’ Inspired he began to rapidly scribble notes, and in little more than an hour he had outlined chapters on Sartre, Camus,
Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Blake, Ramakrishna, Gurdjieff and others. ‘It seemed one of the most satisfying
Christmas days I’d ever spent.’
¹³

Colin Wilson moved to London from Leicester in 1951 with his new wife Betty. He was twenty and she was pregnant. London landladies
in those days were notorious in their prejudices: signs on boarding house windows read ‘No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish, No Children.’
After living in four dingy rooming houses in eighteen months, Betty and baby Roderick returned to Leicester in January 1953.
It was the end of the marriage.
¹⁴

Wilson decided to save rent by buying a tent and sleeping outdoors. His friend Jonathan Abraham gave him a bicycle and suggested
that he buy a waterproof sleeping bag that would cover an ordinary kapok sleeping-bag so that it wouldn’t matter if it rained.
He bought a huge ex-paratrooper rucksack from one of the many war surplus shops that filled London at the time and a groundsheet.
After a night on the edge of a golf course near the plastics factory where he worked he thought his tent was too conspicuous,
so he relocated to Hampstead Heath. His job at the factory ended so he devoted his entire time to study and writing, spending
the day in the British Museum reading room and his nights on the Heath. His evenings were a problem. The library closed at
eight o’clock and there was nowhere he could go to spend a few hours in warmth and quiet until midnight, when he retired.
‘I always felt exhausted and ill at ease as I cycled around London with my sleeping bags rolled up on the back; it was a strange
sensation, having nowhere to go, nowhere to retire to at night, nowhere to spend the evening reading.’
¹⁵

He cycled each morning to Chalk Farm where there was a busman’s café on Haverstock Hill that did a breakfast of bread and
dripping and a cup of tea for tuppence ha’penny, and from there he went to the British Museum. The cloakroom attendant made
some fuss over the rucksack but nothing came of it except ill-feeling. When he told his friend Bill Hopkins that he was sleeping
on the Heath and writing each day in the Museum he responded: ‘That’s the idea, Col. Build up the legend!’ It was at the Museum
he met Angus Wilson, author of
Hemlock and After
, who worked there. He encouraged his
namesake and offered to read his book when a draft was ready with an eye to suggesting a publisher. When Wilson ran short
of cash he took a job at the Lyon’s Corner House in Coventry Street but continued to sleep on the Heath to save money. Towards
Christmas the weather made sleeping out impossible so he took a cheap room in New Cross. All this time he had been working
on a novel, which was finally published as
Ritual in the Dark
. However, it was that Christmas that he had his epiphany, when
The
Outsider
suddenly appeared to him as a separate book, rather than notes towards his fiction.
¹⁶

In May 1956, Colin Wilson was living at 24 Chepstow Villas in Notting Hill with his girlfriend Joy. It was a two-room slum
overlooking an overgrown garden. He lived on sausages, beer and chocolate biscuits. His sleeping bag had been exchanged for
an inflatable green rubber mattress. The walls were lined with rows of secondhand books and the door had an Einstein formula
and Egyptian hieroglyphics graffitied on it. Wilson never read newspapers, and did not own a television or listen to the radio.
The normal political and social debate of society passed him by as he studied long-dead thinkers. However, knowing that the
Sunday papers intended to review his book, Wilson went to the corner newsagent and bought the
Observer
and
Sunday Times
and hurried home without opening them:

I gave Joy the
Sunday Times
, while I read the
Observer
. Philip toynbee’s review was splendid, comparing me to Sartre, and saying that, on the whole he preferred my style and method.
Joy read aloud bits from Connolly’s review in the
Times
; it was as good as toynbee’s. At this point someone from downstairs came up to compliment me on my review in the
Evening News
.
¹⁷

John Connell’s review in the
News
was headed: ‘A Major Writer – and he’s only twenty-four’. The phone downstairs began to ring as friends began to call in
their congratulations. Wilson was famous overnight. The first edition sold out on Monday. The
Sunday Times
offered him book review work at £40 a review: ‘I gasped at the sum.’ Radio and television producers called to ask if he was
available for appearances. Reporters banged at the door at a rate of four a day.
¹⁸
His ubiquitous polo-neck sweater, corduroy trousers and brown leather sandals became a uniform for the young intellectuals
of the period. Though Toynbee and Connolly later repudiated their views, the astonishing thing was that they all, without
collaboration, were considerably impressed upon first reading the book. It was only later, with all the newspaper and radio
attention surrounding Wilson and the Angry Young Men, that Toynbee and Connolly felt they should distance themselves from
the media circus.

This was caused mostly by Wilson’s frequent announcements of his own
talent. He told Kenneth Allsop that he began to write seriously when he left school at the age of sixteen because ‘I hadn’t
the faintest doubt of my genius, and could see no good reason why I shouldn’t become either the greatest writer or greatest
scientist the world has ever known. Sometimes a feeling of my talent so overwhelmed me that it gave me a headache!’
¹⁹
This was an attitude that the English found intolerable.

Daniel Farson met Wilson at David Archer’s bookshop on the Saturday the first review of
The
Outsider
appeared in the
Evening News
. They got on well and Wilson invited him back to his flat at Chepstow Villas. Farson described the chaos, the graffiti, a
‘pin-up’ of Nietzsche, a table covered with a plastic cloth with sauce bottles, unwashed plates and chocolate biscuits. Wilson
cooked on a small stained Primus stove, the sort you had to pump up first and carefully light with meths. Over this he would
heat a dirty saucepan filled with week-old fat, into which he would dunk sausages. Farson: ‘A parade of vague young girls
came in and out. I visited this room constantly over the next few weeks, infected by his excitement, and amusement over his
success.’
²⁰
Farson took Wilson to see
Look Back in Anger
but he disliked it and in the middle of one of Jimmy Porter’s tirades he leaned over and whispered to Farson: ‘I’d give him
a good clout.’ Farson also brought Osborne and his wife, the actress Mary Ure, to a party at Wilson’s where Wilson’s criticism
of the play reduced Ure to tears. However there was enough cheap drink for the party to be a success with everyone going suitably
out of control.
²¹

In interviews Wilson often talked in terms of the need for a strong leader and he and his followers were sometimes accused
of neo-fascism, so he was jumped on when he mentioned that he had taken lunch with Sir Oswald Mosley and thought him a ‘rather
decent chap’. When questioned by a journalist about Mosley it turned out that there were many gaps in his wide reading. Kenneth
Allsop:

It emerged that Wilson had no knowledge whatsoever of the history of Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and, even more
amazing, nothing but the vaguest notion of the big political issues of the thirties and Forties… I think it has often been
his genuinely innocent ignorance of the complex, dangerous forces of publicity he has blunderingly stirred up which has been
mistaken for arrogance and impudence.
²²

Angry Young Men was a good sobriquet; there were few women involved. Aside from Doris Lessing, who was regarded as an Angry
Young Woman on the strength of her play,
Each His Own Wilderness,
appearing at the Royal Court, Shelagh Delaney was the only one to be recognized by the public.
Delaney was only nineteen when she wrote
A Taste of Honey
. At first she constructed it as a novel, but then realized that it would work better as a play. It was accepted by Joan Littlewood
for the Theatre Workshop and opened at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East on 27 May 1958. It transferred to Wyndham’s in
the West End, where it enjoyed a long run, and to the Lyceum on Broadway. Set in the north of England it features a dissatisfied
teenage girl who refuses to conform to her surroundings. Colin MacInnes hailed it as the first play to portray a black man
and a homosexual young man as perfectly normal characters.

If it can be said that any benefit accrued to London from the rise of the Nazis then it was that they caused a group of young
European Jews to flee to London to avoid persecution and death who, when they reached maturity, were to transform Britain’s
literary scene with a series of independent publishing houses: George Weidenfeld arrived in London in 1938 from Vienna; Peter
Owen, whose original surname was Offenstadt, came from Nuremberg in 1933; Paul Hamlyn, born Paul Hamburger, was born in Berlin
and moved to London with his family in 1933, Fred Warburg started Secker & Warburg, and André Deutsch came from Budapest and
started his own imprint.

Tom Maschler came to London from Vienna with his parents at the age of six. After the war, he took a job with André Deutsch
at five pounds a week and learned the trade. He moved to McGibbon & Kee and, inspired by all the publicity that the AYM were
getting, decided to cash in with an anthology of their views. Called
Declaration
it was for the most part not very interesting. Most of the contributors did not see themselves as part of any movement and
John Braine refused to contribute altogether. Doris Lessing recalled how Maschler became friends with them all. She wrote:
‘Some of us gave him advice. Since he wanted to be a publisher, then it would be a good thing if he read some books. He should
also try to read a newspaper a day…’ He was the type of publisher, rather like Tambimuttu before him, who operated more from
instinct, flair and publicity; who would get a feeling about a book by weighing the manuscript in their hands.
²³

Declaration
was launched at the Pheasantry on King’s Road. It had been originally intended to have the launch party at the Royal Court,
but when they saw the book, the management refused on the grounds that John Osborne had insulted the Royal Family when he
wrote: ‘My objection to the Royalty symbol is that it is dead, it is a gold filling in a mouthful of decay.’
²⁴
The party filled the huge club, mixing Labour politicians such as Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot with the Royal Court set
and actors such as Rod Steiger, though
Doris Lessing amusingly recalled the roar of the crowd being silenced by the icy, disapproving, aristocratic tones of a young
woman, standing at the top of the stairs, who demanded of her escort: ‘And who
are
all those furry little people?’ The Chelsea Set did not yet mix with the working class as it would in the sixties; there
was still shock value in the encounter.
²⁵