Reviewed by: John Osborne: A Patriot for Us Luc Gilleman John Heilpern . John Osborne: A Patriot for Us. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. Pp. xv+528 , illustrated. £25.00 (Hb); American edition: John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man. New York: Knopf, 2007. $35.00 (Hb). Recent scholarship is demanding a re-evaluation rather than a dismissal of John Osborne's work. Dan Rebellato, in 1956 and All That, points to the many external factors that helped build Look Back in Anger's reputation: an extract was shown on television, for instance, and the newly established Royal Court Theatre needed a creation myth and a controversy to get off the ground financially. Rebellato also mentions more sinister reasons for the play's success: its vitality was hailed as an authentic masculine energy, a breath of fresh air after the closeted daintiness of Binkie Beaumont productions. The reputation of gay playwrights such as Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan suffered as a consequence — undeservedly so, as Rebellato has shown in his superb introductions to new editions of Rattigan's work. Ten years in preparation, John Heilpern's authorized biography of John Osborne is a defence of both the work and the man against what the biographer sometimes wrongly perceives as their enemies. The book's argument in defence of Look Back in Anger is a passionate but familiar one: with Look Back in Anger, the drama of evasion made way for one of confrontation. Inadvertently, this defence gives fuel to Rebellato's argument — even as Heilpern admits that, while George Devine, artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, insisted on a breach rather than a continuity with the past, Osborne admired Rattigan's and some of Coward's plays. Indeed, with Time Present (1968), The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), and West of Suez (1971), Osborne returned to the tradition that Look Back in Anger was said to have replaced. Osborne pre-empted much of the biographer's work in two autobiographical volumes, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1992), the first containing some of his best prose. To these, Heilpern's biography often and perhaps inevitably reads like an appendix. Heilpern, who worked for The Observer with Helen Dawson, Osborne's last wife (his "Numero Cinque," as he fondly referred to her), [End Page 292] has used considerable journalistic skill in tracking down and interviewing major and minor figures in the autobiographies. He has also made good use of Osborne's archives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. While others have perused this impressive collection, Heilpern is the first to be granted permission to quote verbatim from the private notebooks and correspondence kept there. Among the letters Osborne sold for cash is his devastating repudiation, in 1982, of Nolan Osborne, his sixteen-year-old daughter with novelist Penelope Gilliatt. It eerily resembles Bill Maitland's rejection of his daughter in Inadmissible Evidence (1964). The theatre is a gossipy kind of world, and this is a pleasantly written, gossipy kind of book. Not everyone is pleased with this kind of approach, however. For example, the book received a devastating review from Ferdinand Mount in the Spectator (6 May 2006), for many years home to Osborne's "Diary" column. However, a biography of Osborne cannot avoid dealing with sex, not when its deliberately camp subject is on the record, gloating, "Whatever else, I have been blessed with God's two greatest gifts: to be born English and heterosexual." According to David Hare, what was so "revolutionary" about Look Back in Anger was that it was all about sex (127) — and so is every other Osborne play, most notably A Sense of Detachment (1972), that strange medley of porn and poetry that sent an outraged public in murderous pursuit of the playwright. Moreover, Osborne never let go of a chance to reveal a sexual indiscretion, especially other people's, so it should have come as no surprise that some of his victims retaliated. Shortly after his death, Nicolas de Jongh outed the playwright in an infamous series of newspaper articles, claiming that Osborne and his early collaborator Anthony Creighton had been lovers. In the...