Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  ‘You strange man,’ she calls out. ‘Why do we never see you? I so liked your last.’

  ‘You won’t like my next,’ I say ungraciously, and hurry by.

  ‘Why are you so sure?’ she wails after me.

  The audience thick with actors – Ralph Richardson, Richard Pascoe, Ba Leigh Hunt, T. Nunn and co.

  The nobles wear long-skirted overcoats, part boyar, part Regency buck, and the whole thing is done at tremendous pace and with great panache. Richmond is big and young and looks straight out of the Liverpool team; the rest are like taxi-drivers. It’s difficult sometimes to assess what’s happening, but it’s easier to take Shakespeare done over like this when it’s in a foreign language. Office chairs are wound in rags and bandages, a café orchestra plays silly lilting melodies, and in the exciting bits there’s a rock accompaniment, the cast striding off the stage at high speed. The actor playing Richard III is hypnotic – all eyes and boots – and gets an enormous ovation at the end, when, as Ron Eyre had told me, one stands without constraint to shout and applaud, though doing so I note that it’s some Russians in the audience who stand first, possibly on cue, and the ecstatic audience is filmed applauding, which makes one think uneasily of the pickets outside.

  24 February, New York. Rose, the eighty-two-year-old lady in the apartment next door to K., is ill, maybe dying. Not much more than four feet tall, she has varicose ulcers on her legs, which are thick and stocky and generally bound in loose, telescopic bandages. Now she has taken off the bandages to let the ulcers heal, which they never will, two huge holes in her legs almost to the bone. ‘I’m sick,’ she shouts through the wall, ‘I’m a sick girl.’

  In this stronghold of private medicine there is a nurse who comes every day, probably paid for by the church. The doctor from St Vincent’s brings his students, and most days she has a gentleman caller who announces his presence by crooning outside the door ‘Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes’.

  ‘Aw, quit fooling around,’ shouts Rose through the door. ‘I’m a sick girl. I can’t talk to you. I’m too sick to talk to myself.’

  Because she can never remember anybody’s name, K. gives his friends nicknames and I am Blackie. ‘Bye, Blackie,’ she says and kisses me on the lips, rubbing her head on my chest, which is as high as she comes. Rose de Nisco, who has never been more than three or four blocks from her building, an urban peasant.

  ‘Pray for me,’ someone has written up in the subway. ‘Sure,’ someone else has added.

  6 March, London. I come through Heathrow and in the queue parallel to mine an Indian family is held up at Immigration, the father, thin, dark, with burning eyes, being questioned by a woman so stone-faced she could be at the East German border rather than at Heathrow. There are several sons, looking languid and beautiful, and the mother with a small child in her arms.

  ‘Who are all these people?’ says the official, jabbing at the passport. ‘I want to see all these people.’ Whereupon the father swiftly rounds up his family and marshals them in front of her. She does not even look up.

  15 March. Finish a draft of my piece for the Larkin Festschrift, Larkin at Sixty.* Parts of it I like and are what I want to say, but I detect a note of Uriah Heep-like self-abasement, which could be taken to denote (and maybe does denote) arrogance. I seem always to be saying ‘What am I doing here? I’m not a literary person at all.’

  Apropos of this I have just ordered a book I saw reviewed, a translation of Ernest Kris and Otto Kurz’s Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, the main point of which is that there is a tradition, in which the artists themselves conspire, of making a painter’s beginnings humbler and less sophisticated than in fact they were. The public liked to believe an artist had no training, that he astonished his elders, who picked out his skill when he was in lowly or unlikely circumstances. This has always been the case, and K. and K. demonstrate it from many periods.

  I suspect this is also true of literature. My contribution to the Larkin book discusses his poem ‘I Remember, I Remember’, in which he recalls what elsewhere he called the ‘forgotten boredom’ of his childhood and Coventry ‘where my childhood was unspent’. He is trying to appear an artist without a past. And so am I in my piece, claiming I had little reading and no literary appreciation until I was in my thirties. This conveniently forgets the armfuls of books I used to take out of Headingley Public Library – Shaw, Anouilh, Toynbee, Christopher Fry. Many of the books, it’s true, I took for the look of them, and lots I didn’t even read, and those I did I’ve forgotten. Still I did read, though without knowing what I liked or was looking for, and certainly umpteen plays, but without ever thinking of becoming a playwright. This was the period from thirteen to sixteen, just before puberty, and I always wipe it from my mind.

  23 March, Bristol. This evening Mam is convinced there are people outside the house and that they are waiting to take me away. I get her off to bed but she keeps coming down, anxious to be taken away in my place. At one point she gets outside in the bitter cold, and eventually I go to bed in order to stop her coming downstairs. I drift off to sleep three or four times, but each time she wakes me wanting to know if I am all right. I then put the camp-bed up in her room and sleep at the foot of the bed so as to stop her getting up and wandering about. But my presence in her bedroom now transforms me into Dad, and she keeps saying ‘Walt, why don’t you come to bed?’ The next day she vaguely remembers I spent the night in her room and thinks that something ‘went on’, so that becomes another reason why there are people outside the house. And so we go on.

  1 May, Yorkshire. W. and I walk from Buckhaw Brow over the fells to Smearsett to look at the Celtic wall. I had only read about it in Wainwright, but W. had come across it years ago without being sure where it was. We struck too far north at first, then saw it against the skyline to our right, running for about thirty yards; a thick wall, put together in a different way from the other drystone walls, almost woven, and much broader across the top, as if it were some sort of fortification. The thought that it is two thousand years old and more is duly impressive, and I put my hand on it and think conventional thoughts like ‘This wall was new when the census was being taken in Judaea, already ancient when the Normans came,’ and so on. But then so were the unshaped rocks, the earth we are standing on.

  We walk to the top of Smearsett, and on to Feizor, where far away to the north-west there is a faint fuming haze that is the sea, which I first saw from here, or from the top of Ingleborough anyway, in 1953, when I was on leave from the Russian course. And for some reason it makes me smile, this glimpse of the sea, just as coming out at night and unexpectedly seeing the moon will make one smile.

  17 June. All morning auditioning at the Queen’s on the set of The Dresser, Ronald Harwood’s new play and a much more popular evening than Enjoy is likely to be. I hate auditions and all the chat one has to go through; Ron explaining the play, tells the actors (wrongly to my mind) that the action could be thought to take place in their head – a direction that helps nobody. Then there is the putting of them at their ease, the enthusiasm one manages to squeeze out after they have read, all so that these young men can leave, as they are entitled to, with their self-respect intact. We see nine actors, and by the end of the morning I’m shattered.

  I bike to the Royal Academy to look at the Wyeth exhibition, which is unexpectedly crowded, partly with the overflow from the Summer Exhibition but also, I suspect, with people hungry for naturalism. Some of the pictures are wonderfully delicate, particularly an open window with a curtain blowing through done in 1947 and a sexy nude boy. But the crowds in the gallery repel, and as always I wonder what they are there for and what I am there for. The blown-curtain picture is reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s Evening Wind, and I come away thinking I like his paintings more, raw and unfinished though they seem by comparison with Wyeth’s. Two myths of America here, though: Wyeth’s rural America, weatherboarded barns, grey New England shores, models who turn their faces from the p
ainter and search across empty fields for unseen visitors; Hopper’s the world of ? pictures, singles bars, lonely people in diners, middle-aged women waiting for love with a drink and a cigarette, bored usherettes, and lonely gas stations.

  10 July, New York. Why American is a foreign language: we lunch in a café near Gramercy Park, sitting out on a heavy, overcast day. I order a screwdriver and drink it quickly and ask for another.

  ‘I guess it’s kind of hot,’ the waiter says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Lynn, ‘and the glasses are kind of small.’

  ‘Yes,’ says the waiter. ‘That’s true also.’

  No Englishman would say ‘That’s true also’ (although it’s a perfectly grammatical sentence), because it’s written not spoken English. Only Ivy Compton-Burnett would write it as dialogue.

  21 July. Mary-Kay rings from Geneva to tell the children their grandfather has died. Sam answers the phone, is told the news, and then immediately announces to the room in his gruff eight-year-old voice, ‘He’s dead.’

  William (six) now comes to the phone. ‘Can I pretend that I don’t know and you tell me all over again?’

  19 August, Yorkshire. Wake at 5.30 a.m. and hear a cock crow. A cock, unaware that it has turned into a cliché, unselfconsciously goes on maintaining a rustic tradition, fulfilling its role in the environment. The corn mill is restored, the drystone-waller demonstrates his craft, the thatchers bind their reeds and the cocks crow. Country craft.

  And somewhere between sleeping and waking G. knocks at the door. I had the chain on and look at him standing there in the dawn. But I am not surprised, and he comes in and sits in one of the green chairs in the living-room and talks. And he tells me, or I know, that he has murdered all his family. And, gentle and friendly as ever, he has come, I know, to murder me.

  8 September, Leeds. ‘Las Vegas,’ says my cousin Arnold. ‘Then in November it’s Mombasa.’ We are waiting outside the crematorium at Cottingley, where his father, Dad’s brother Bill, is to be cremated. He’s telling me about his retirement, the package holidays he and his wife go on. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been to Majorca.’

  All crematoriums are built on the loggia principle; long open corridors, cloisters even, the walls lined with slips of stone printed with the names of the burned. ‘Reunited’, ‘Loved’, and in one case ‘He was kind’, which is the sort of thing women who don’t like sex say of a forbearing husband. Among the names I spot Mr and Mrs Holdsworth, who lived opposite us in the Hallidays during the war and from whose nasturtium border we used to collect caterpillars.

  Now the vicar arrives in beige frock and rimless glasses and bounds out of his car to shake our hands.

  Two women wait in the sunshine. They are from Mount Pisgah, the chapel Uncle Bill used to go to. ‘Well, we still call it Mount Pisgah, only Mount Pisgah’s actually a Sikh chapel now.’ One is very tall, the other tiny, with kali legs. ‘He was a grand feller, your uncle,’ one of them says. ‘And he had beautiful handwriting.’

  The hearse and the attendant cars are grey and low-slung, so that it looks more like the funeral of a Mafia boss than of an ex-tram-driver. As we come out of the chapel cousin Geoff, who always takes the piss, shouts at my Uncle Jim, the last surviving brother, and who’s deaf, ‘Head of the clan now, Uncle’.

  ‘Aye,’ Uncle Jim shouts back. ‘There’s nobbut me now.’

  ‘Nay, Jim,’ somebody says.

  Geoff nudges me. ‘Give us your autograph.’

  The funeral tea is held in the functions room of Waites, at the top of Gledhow Street. Cousin Arnold, who’s a retired police photographer, tells me about a visit by the stripper Mary Millington to Blackpool, where he now lives, and how she committed suicide soon afterwards. ‘I can’t understand why she committed suicide. She had a lovely body.’

  I call at Uncle Bill’s house, 72 Gledhow Street, partly to refresh my memory as it’s what I imagine the set of Enjoy should look like. But it’s not as I remember it, all chrome and leatherette and the knight in armour holding the fire tongs on the hearth; now just a dull, cream-painted room that could be anywhere.

  I take the train back. Through county after county the fields are alight. It’s like taking a train through the Thirty Years War.

  14 September, Supper with the Waltons and Russell Harty. William Walton has asked me to write a companion piece for his one-act opera The Bear, and I bring the synopsis along. Lady W. thrusts it unread into her bag and only extracts it when Russell asks to read it. It’s quite funny, but it transpires that Walton didn’t want a funny piece so back it goes into her bag.

  Walton is good for gossip, saying how badly Sargent conducted the first performance of Troilus and Cressida, how he had not read the score and conducted the second act at sight. Heifetz had been at supper with the Waltons and when the ladies had retired revealed he had been to rehearsal at Walton’s invitation and had seen that Sargent was trying to wing the whole thing. Sargent was about to do his first American tour, and Heifetz warned him that he would personally see it was a disaster unless Sargent made more of an effort to present this new work properly. Whereupon Sargent wept. But it was still an indifferent production and, though well received, took an hour longer than it should have done. I actually saw it given by a Co vent Garden touring company at the Leeds Grand in 1951 and remember being taken through some of the themes in a lecture by Ernest Bradbury. I heard my first operas that week, and a very odd trio they were: Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Walton’s Troilus and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Walton also says that Sargent had the original score of Belshazzar’s Feast, which he kept after the first performance at the Leeds Festival in 1931 and which has never been seen since.

  Draft libretto for William Walton, 14 September 1980

  A grand seaside hotel in the twenties.

  A young woman in black sits in the window, in sharp contrast to other guests in blazers and shorts on their way to the beach.

  The hotel manager come in and tells the woman that unless her bill is paid that day she must leave the hotel. There is an argument.

  Meanwhile waiters come in with very expensive luggage, belonging to a millionaire whose yacht has just anchored in the harbour. The millionaire comes in and takes a seat while his room is got ready.

  The young woman summons a waiter and tells him to move her seat further away from the millionaire. The millionaire is intrigued. He summons the same waiter, who is noticeably more polite to him than to the woman, and tells him to move his seat closer to her. The process is repeated. The increasingly disgruntled waiter has to move the chairs again.

  The millionaire asks why she is moving. She says it is because she can smell money. She is allergic to the sight and smell of money.

  The millionaire cannot smell money. He smells his hand but cannot detect it. He offers the young woman his hand to smell, and she very gingerly does so, and promptly collapses. The millionaire summons the waiter for some champagne. A glass revives her, but the sight of the millionaire tipping the waiter promptly makes her swoon again.

  The millionaire asks her how she came to be like this. She says that she married a poor man, and they were very happy, but he worked very hard and gradually became rich. Making money took over his life. He used to come home smelling of money. They lived in a house that smelled of money. He dressed her in clothes, gave her jewels – all smelling of money. She began to suffer from asthma, rashes, fainting fits – all brought on by the sight and smell of money. Even signing a cheque fetched her out in spots.

  Eventually her husband died, leaving her very rich. But, valuing her health, she could not touch the money, and besides it nauseated her.

  The millionaire is overjoyed. He has spent all his life looking for someone who would love him for himself, regardless of his fortune. He approaches her, but she begins to feel faint.

  Suddenly the manager appears with her bill. The millionaire orders the manager to strip, so he can put on his clothes. The manager, obsequious
to a fault, does so and the millionaire, now dressed in the manager’s clothes, which do not smell of money, is at last able to kiss the young woman’s hand.

  She says she cannot stand the hotel and wants to leave. Despite being in his underpants, the manager still insists that her bill be paid, but at the very mention of it the young woman collapses again.

  The millionaire is furious with the manager, saying that he will settle her bill. She begins to revive, and as she does so the millionaire begs her to come away with him on his yacht.

  ‘Will it,’ she asks fearfully, ‘will it smell of money?’

  ‘No,’ says the millionaire. ‘It is a very petite yacht, and all it will smell of is the sea and freedom.’

  The couple leave hand in hand, and as the yacht sails out of the bay the waiter clears away the champagne, complaining that neither of them has left him a tip.

  18 September, Kenneth Tynan’s memorial service. I wasn’t intending to go. I never knew him well, and when we did meet, during Beyond the Fringe for instance, I was generally in the shadow of J. I sent him Forty Years On in 1967, when he was dramaturge at the National, but he sent it back saying he thought it was for the commercial theatre (this was before the National went commercial). After Habeas Corpus he asked me to adapt Willie Donaldson’s autobiography and we had a meeting, but I was never easy with him or one of his fans. So I would have given the occasion a miss, only Kathy T.’s secretary phoned, ostensibly to inquire if I knew the time of the service had changed, which I took to be a three-line whip. So for the third time in three weeks I put on my grey suit, get on my bike, and go down to St Paul’s, Covent Garden.

  Hoping I’m not early, I find the church packed and a scrum in the doorway. Peter Hall and Peter Shaffer go in ahead of me and march boldly down the centre aisle, but spotting a seat in the back row I slip in as Michael White moves up and down the aisles like an usher at a wedding. Note Kingsley Amis across the way, Larry Adler sitting in front, and then see Larry Adler also walking down the aisle and realize one of them must be Bert Shevelove. Tom Stoppard stands up at the front and surveys the house, and just before we kick off a little figure in black is escorted down the far aisle – Princess Margaret, seemingly attended by Christopher Logue.