A lacerating sense of sin
“I have sinned.”
These were, apparently, the last words English playwright John Osborne wrote. His wife found them scrawled on a cigarette pack beside his bed when he died in 1994.
He was not exaggerating. Look Back in Anger‘s Jimmy Porter accurately channeled his creator’s rage, as did Inadmissible Evidence‘s Bill Maitland. Both Maitland and Osborne disowned their teenage daughters for no discernible reason.
Here is what Maitland says to his:
I can’t connect to you, I don’t understand your taste or your generation. I don’t understand anything about you. … Do you want to get rid of me? Do you? Because I want to get rid of you. … I don’t know what you have to do with me.
And here is what Osborne wrote to his daughter on Jan. 5, 1982, shortly before her 17th birthday:
Your heart — such as that is — is irretrievably elsewhere, a place without spirit, imagination or honour. … A life of banality, safety, mediocrity and meanness of spirit is what you are set on. … I suggest you make arrangements about getting some suitable accommodation. … Happy 1982: This is where the long road really starts — On Your Own.
When Osborne’s mother, whom he called “the grabbing, uncaring crone of my childhood,” died, he began an article for the Sunday Times by noting that “a year in which my mother died can’t be all bad.” The Times declined to run the piece.
When his fourth wife, the actress Jill Bennett, committed suicide, Osborne said — among other, even less kinder things — that “everything about her life had been a pernicious confection, a sham.”
Small wonder that a “lacerating sense of sin ran through the latter part of Osborne’s life,” as John Heilpern puts it in his splendid 2007 biography. Heilpern is actually able to place Osborne’s often monstrous behavior in perspective and provide a portrait of a man every bit as tormented as he was tormenting. Here is an entry in one of Osborne’s notebooks, written before he was 30:
I am governed by fear every day of my life. Sometimes it is the first sensation I have on waking. . . . I am afraid of the dark hole and the pain from it which grips me every day: That clenched warning which tightens the dark hole of my inside. It is fear, and I cannot rid myself of it. It numbs me, it sterilizes me, and I am empty, dumb and ignorant.
Inadmissible Evidence wasn’t the only play of Osborne’s to prefigure his life. So, in a sense, did Luther. The words Osborne gave the reformer — “the truth is that the just shall live by faith alone. I need no more than my sweet redeemer and mediator” — came to express Osborne’s own feelings. Though he was capable of great acts of kindness and generosity, Osborne seems never to have thought that those good deeds made up for his bad ones.
I doubt if many people have the sense of sin that Osborne seems to have ended up with, but then probably not many people behave as outrageously as he often did. Most of us — myself included — are small-time sinners. As the Button Moulder tells Peer Gynt:
A sinner of really grandiose style
is nowadays not to be met on the highways.
It wants much more than merely to wallow in mire;
for both vigour and earnestness go to a sin.
Peer doesn’t make the grade, either: “You, friend, on the other hand, took your sins slightly.”
The sins I committed during my “wild years” were mostly ones of indulgence — over-indulgence, actually. They did more harm to me than to anyone else, and I honestly can’t say I worry over them much or feel much guilt about them. The sins of the flesh are neither as glamorous nor as serious as armchair moralists like to think.
On the other hand, there are some grievous unkindnesses I committed in childhood that still bother me and always will, I suspect, because they seriously hurt people’s feelings. Sin regarded as a transgression of rules is just another way of worshipping the idol of certainty, the conviction that if one does this and not that one will be saved. But I have found that it is the failure to be kind — or, worse, to be deliberately unkind — that leaves a stain on the soul that no effort of one’s own can erase. A whiskey too many or an inappropriate tumble in the hay reveal only that one is human. Unkindness reveals that one has fallen short of the human.
Recently, I was listening to Delius’s Florida Suite. I have known and loved the piece since I was in my teens. This time, though, the final movement simply made me realize bleakly the degree to which I had fallen short in living up to the dreams and aspirations I had when I first heard that music. I recalled the last line of Whitman’s poem “A Hand-Mirror”: “Such a result so soon — and from such a beginning!” And I remembered those words John Osborne scribbled as he died.
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“On the other hand, there are some grievous unkindnesses I committed in childhood that still bother me and always will, I suspect, because they seriously hurt people’s feelings. [. . .] I have found that it is the failure to be kind — or, worse, to be deliberately unkind — that leaves a stain on the soul that no effort of one’s own can erase.”
Yep. I live with that too. But I now know why I was that way as a child. Do you?
i have lately been afflicted by memories of some of my ill deeds – deeds of thoughtless cruelty and arrogance, generally. But i take heart – for i see that i have also made some redress, that situations recur (sometimes with the same people, sometimes with others) and the second time round i often do the right thing. i suspect if we saw our lives aright we would see that very often we are reliving earlier situations, and very often we do the right thing 2nd time around (or 3rd, or 4th, etc.!)
The two incidents from childhood that bother me were caused mostly because I was a child and simply didn’t realize at the time – to the extent I should have and did later on – how grievous their effect would be. But they were the kind of thoughtless things that could really hurt someone and in both these cases doubtless did. Oddly, my later realization of their effect and of my thoughtless helped make me a person who does not do that sort of thing. Which does not excuse them. Those who were hurt have the right to forgive me. And God does. But I do not.
Yeah, I know how you feel.
Michael Haneke made an excellent film on guilt and childhood cruelty a few years back, called Cache: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caché_(film)
If you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend you rent a copy forthwith. It’s probably his best work.
Sorry, a problem with that link. I’ll try again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caché_(film)
Still a crap link, alas. Still, well worth a viewing.