Of things withheld and banished: Osborne’s ‘Inadmissible Evidence’
While Look Back in Anger may be playwright John Osborne’s most widely-known work, it is a later offering, Inadmissible Evidence, that truly rang the bell of the literary giant’s heart.
For much of his life, Osborne maintained around himself a certain air of mystery. Described with great fondness by those who knew him, Osborne behaved the gentle giant when in close company, and was described by many as a self-effacing man. As with many a great artist, it was only through his writing that Osborne unveiled his true self. And while for some, he may forever remain the mascot of the angry young men, 1964’s Inadmissible Evidence proves Osborne moved on… and out of control.
Where Look Back in Anger’s 25-year-old Jimmy Porter lives a life of jaded frustration, Inadmissible Evidence’s middle-aged Bill Maitland has swapped resentment for terror. 39-year-old Maitland lives in continuous fear of two things — one, of being swindled,
I have never really been able to tell the difference between a friend and an enemy and I have always made what seemed to me at the time the most exhausting efforts to find out. The difference.
Throughout the play, Maitland tries and fails to trust in his co-workers and many mistresses, and it’s perhaps all the more interesting to note that he himself is deeply untrustworthy. He betrays his wife’s trust by sleeping with any woman he can cajole into bed, and does so under the guise of the status quo.
Many of the play’s comedic moments stem from Maitland’s marital impasse — should he abide his wife’s wishes, and attend their 17-year-old’s birthday this weekend, or go away for a few days with his official mistress?
The other thing that terrorizes Maitland is, of course, being found out. In the dream-like beginning, as Maitland tries and fails to defend himself before an imagined judge and courtroom, he eventually admits:
I have always been quite certain that this is where I should end up, here. […] I never hoped or wished for anything more than to have the good fortune of friendship and the excitement and comfort of love and the love of women in particular. I made a set at both of them in my own way. With the first, I hardly succeeded at all. […] With the second, with love, I succeeded, I succeeded in inflicting, quite certainly inflicting, more pain than pleasure.
According to Osborne himself, the character of Bill Maitland was actually inspired by an Agony Aunt letter he happened to read. Penned by a woman, worried over her husband slowly disappearing under the scorn and derision of all those around himself that he tried to offer kindness to, a motif that appears verbatim in the play. And though that may have been the spark that lit Osborne’s creative fuse, the “overpowering desolation” of that letter clearly resonated with something very deep and dark in the playwright himself.
In 1985, in his private notebook (most released to the public post-mortem, Osborne confided:
I was born with a sense of loss, a feeling of things withheld and banished.
It seems he worked his whole life in pursuit of those unreachable objects. Of Osborne’s private life, we can only guess at his success in finding them. His plays, however, offer a ringside view into the struggles and private efforts of this deeply tormented genius.
Of five marriages, four ended in bitterness and drama. His unhappy marriage to actress Pamela Lane was closely related in Look Back in Anger, a play where the two main characters have come to a place of such profound resentment that they use each other as punching bags, cheat like it’s no big thing, and only feel they can truly be themselves behind the veil of woodland personas.
His marriage to Mary Ure (whom he met during the production of LBIA), rather than being one of love, was merely a physical convenience.
I was not in love. There was fondness and pleasure, but no groping expectations, just a feeling of fleeting heart’s ease. For the present we were both content enough.
His third marriage — to writer Penelope Gilliatt — is, perhaps, the most telling of Osborne’s official liaisons. Though greatly troubled by alcoholism on both sides, what truly rocked the couple was Osborne’s incessant need for Gilliatt’s care and “feminine intimacy”. Admittedly, he demanded that she move with him to a foreign place, where she dedicate herself entirely to his needs, something Osborne’s mother so blatantly failed to do.
Like Bill Maitland, Osborne was a lifelong womanizer who claimed he enjoyed the game of flirtation for its own sake, and whose several marriages were all marred by serial infidelity. Yet all can, in almost textbook Freudian style, be traced back to the writer’s mother, whom he described as “the grabbing, uncaring crone of my childhood”.
Perhaps it’s not a stretch of the imagination to suggest that the thing withheld and banished from Osborne’s life was maternal affection. The love and protection of a strong woman might’ve finally laid to rest the spectres haunting Osborne in the corner of his eye.
And perhaps, even more than protection itself, Osborne craved to be seen as only a parent can see a child — with that seemingly inexhaustible gentility and interest in the most mundane and trivial aspects of the child’s life.
While the first part of Inadmissible Evidence is spent on detailing the many wrongdoings of the protagonist, the second half sees in the verdict. By play’s end, all — from his clerk, to his secretary-turned-mistress, to his wife have deserted Maitland. The “law” is coming for him, presumably to punish him for his professional misdeeds, though perhaps also for his philandering. And Maitland welcomes it. As he attests at the beginning of the play, he always knew he’d end up here.
Maitland gives voice, perhaps, to Osborne’s own desire to be seen, and perhaps punished for his misdeeds, in the hope that that may yet cure him of them, and turn him on a better path. Could this be Osborne’s own furtive dream of redemption?
Perhaps. Maitland’s encounter — a searing monologue, and in my view, the highlight of the play — with his own teenage daughter certainly suggests so.
I’ll be with her [his mistress] for three whole days or something, if she’ll have me. I’ll be with her instead of you on your seventeenth — is it seventeen? — anyway, birthday.
The parental indifference, here, almost flaunted, then masked under guise of too much love may well hearken back to Osborne’s own upbringing.
Nothing can match what I feel for you. Or any of those who are more and more like you. Oh, I read about you, I see you in the streets. I heat what you say, the sounds you make, the few jokes you make, the wounds you inflict without even longing to hurt, there is no lather or fear in you, all cool, dreamy, young, cool and not a proper blemish, forthright unimpressed, contemptuous of ambition, but good and pushy all the same. […] No one before has been able to do such things with such charm, such ease, such frozen innocence as all of you seem to have, to me.
Maitland’s longing, perhaps even envy, towards his daughter and her youth turns almost violent in the play, and no doubt speaks to Osborne’s own idealization of youth. Though is this the classic middle-aged cry for lost youth, or is it the whelp of the hurt adult, longing for a redo of his traumatised childhood? Does our author, like his own fictive solicitor, confuse his voice for that of his creation?
Is it Maitland who speaks here, or Osborne? And was there ever, really, much difference?
Thank you for reading. Guess what. I am actually publishing my first novel this fall. Wild, I know. Meanwhile, I’m gonna be documenting my process/journey/slow descent into madness on here, while also dropping the occasional opinion piece.
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