Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  In spite of your suggestion and invitation to visit Paul Robeson, I found myself too shy to call on him. You may find this surprising, but I always am with great men and artists such as him. Not so much shy as frightened. The agonies I remember on first meeting with people I really admire, e.g. Ε. Μ. Forster (and Picasso and Winston Churchill, but not W. S. Maugham).

  There is some irony in these remarks, particularly with regard to Paul Robeson, when one recalls a quip of Burgess’s in happier days. When he was sent to Washington as Second Secretary at the British Embassy his former boss, Hector McNeil, warned Burgess to remember three things: not to be too openly left-wing, not to get involved in race relations and above all not to get mixed up in any homosexual incidents. ‘I understand, Hector,’ said Burgess. ‘What you mean is that I mustn’t make a pass at Paul Robeson.’

  I have put some of my own sentiments into Burgess’s mouth. ‘I can say I love London. I can say I love England. I can’t say I love my country, because I don’t know what that means,’ is a fair statement of my own, and I imagine many people’s, position. The Falklands War helped me to understand how a fastidious stepping-aside from patriotism could be an element in the make-up of characters as different as Burgess and Blunt. Certainly in the spy fever that followed the unmasking of Professor Blunt I felt more sympathy with the hunted than with the hunters. In the play it is suggested that Burgess was a spy because he wanted a place where he was alone, and that having a secret supplies this. I believe this to be psychologically true, but there is a sense too that an ironic attitude towards one’s country and a scepticism about one’s heritage are a part of that heritage. And so, by extension, is the decision to betray it. It is irony activated.

  In his essay ‘The Well of Narcissus’ Auden imagines Narcissus not as young and beautiful but as fat and middleaged. Drunk, he gazes at himself in the glass, and says, ‘I shouldn’t look at me like that if I were you. I suppose you think you know who I am. Well, let me tell you, my dear, that one of these days you’re going to get a very big surprise indeed!’ That seems a fair description of Burgess’s character, and one not unfamiliar to the people among whom he was to end up. ‘He exemplified that favourite type in the classical Russian novel, the buffoon; the man always playing the fool, not only for his own amusement and love of exhibitionism, but also with the object of keeping everyone in the dark as to his own inner views and intentions.’ Not Burgess, but the poet Yevtushenko as described by Anthony Powell.

  In the play Burgess says, ‘I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.’ The remark was actually made by the Oxford aesthete Brian Howard. The contradictions in the Cambridge Burgess turned him to treachery, the Oxford Howard to art. Howard’s drunken, outrageous behaviour flouted convention much as Burgess’s did, but with a conventional excuse: he was a failed writer. Burgess had no ambitions in that department, and, diplomacy being a less crowded field than literature, his failure turned out more of a success. As a second-rate poet or novelist, not a Second Secretary at the Washington Embassy, Burgess would have seemed, if not commonplace, at any rate not unfamiliar. He would also have been much easier to forget.

  So far as the general issues in the play are concerned, I find it hard to drum up any patriotic indignation over Burgess (or any of the so-called Cambridge spies for that matter). No one has ever shown that Burgess did much harm, except to make fools of people in high places. Because he made jokes, scenes and most of all passes (though not at Paul Robeson), the general consensus is that he was rather silly. It is Philby who is always thought to be the most congenial figure. Clubbable, able to hold his liquor, a good man in a tight corner, he commends himself to his fellow journalists, who have given him a good press. But of all the Cambridge spies he is the only one of whom it can be proved without doubt that he handed over agents to torture and death.

  Auden’s name keeps coming up. Burgess wasn’t a close friend, but the night before he left the country in May 1951, and before it became plain that he would have to go the whole hog and accompany Maclean, Burgess thought of lying low with Auden on Ischia. There would have been a nice appropriateness in this, secret agents and sudden flight being potent elements in Auden’s poetic myth (‘Leave for Cape Wrath tonight’). However, the projected visit didn’t come off. On the crucial evening Auden, then staying with Stephen Spender, failed (or forgot) to return Burgess’s call. And this omission was also appropriate. Auden’s poetry in the thirties often sounded like a blueprint for political action, but set against subsequent events some of his verse rang hollow. Or so Auden began to think while in America during the war. Burgess ‘running naked through Europe’ and turning up on Ischia would have been like a parody of early Auden, a reminder of a poetic past, some of which Auden was anxious to forget, or at any rate re-edit. Burgess on Ischia would have been an artistic as much as a social embarrassment. Though that too would make a nice play.

  I have taken a few liberties with the facts as Coral Browne told them to me. The scene in the British Embassy, for instance, did not occur; but since the Shakespeare Company were warned by the British Ambassador to ‘shy away from that traitor Burgess, who’s always trying to get back to England’ it seemed no great liberty.

  When I wrote the script I had no idea where it would be filmed, and while I included some exterior shots I kept them to a minimum, thinking that, without going abroad, Moscow-like settings would be hard to find. In the event the film’s designer, Stuart Walker, came up with some very convincing locations in Glasgow and Dundee, enabling John Schlesinger to open up the film and include many more exteriors. We see the outside of the theatre (Caird Hall, Dundee) and the front of the British Embassy (back of Glasgow Town Hall), and the final shot of the film, vaguely described by me as ‘Moscow streets’, has Burgess strolling in his new togs across the Suspension Bridge in Glasgow, luckily in a snowstorm.

  Searching for locations educates the eye. The Suspension Bridge on Clydeside doesn’t look particularly Russian in itself. What makes it seem authentic is a long Georgian building on the far bank of the river, which is in the very back of the shot. This building happens to have been painted in two shades of pink in a way that maybe looks more like Leningrad than Moscow but which certainly suggests Eastern Europe. The exterior of Burgess’s flat was filmed at Moss Heights in Glasgow, an early post-war block of flats, and the interior was built in the small concert room at the Caird Hall. The magnificent marble staircase of the British Embassy is in Glasgow Town Hall, but when Coral Browne leaves the two young diplomats and goes down the staircase she travels five hundred miles between frames, as the room in the Embassy is actually at Polesden Lacey in Surrey.

  A poignant exchange occurs as Coral and Burgess are coming away from Burgess’s flat and he casually enquires whether she had known Jack Buchanan, whose record he has been playing her. ‘Yes,’ says Coral. ‘We nearly got married.’ Burgess gives her a second look, not sure that she isn’t pulling his leg. She isn’t. It had come out casually in conversation with Coral just before we started filming. Slipped in right at the end of the sequence it focuses what has gone before, both of them listening to a record that to Burgess means something general and to Coral someone very particular. It’s the kind of coincidence which, had it been invented, would have seemed sentimental.

  It was pointed out, appropriately in the Daily Express, that it was not in Coral’s dressing-room that Burgess was sick, but in that of Michael Redgrave next door. This is true and was part of the story as Coral originally told it to me, Redgrave having called her in to help clean up an Englishman who was being sick in his room, but without introducing him. In an article about the Moscow visit in the Observer in 1959 Redgrave mentioned Burgess coming round, but did not mention him being ill. The kernel of our film is the meeting in the flat, and, wanting to centre the story on Coral and leave Hamlet out of it as far as possible, I transferred the incident entirely to her dressing-room. In Sir Michael’s autobiography, In My Mind’s Eye, whi
ch came out in 1983, after the film had been made, he recalled the incident as it actually happened, which might suggest that Coral had plagiarized the story. She hadn’t. I had rearranged it for dramatic reasons.

  There was only one point in the interpretation of the script where John Schlesinger and I differed, and that was at the conclusion of the scene in the pyjama shop. Snobbish though I’d made the salesman, I felt he did have a point and that the balance of the scene ought in the end to go his way. When he revealed that the shop was Hungarian I wanted the tone of the scene to change and for it suddenly to cease to be about snobbery and to reveal real issues. The film is set after all in 1958, only two years after the Hungarian uprising. John felt that an audience would not grasp this. We argued and left it open until the last moment, when I deferred and gave the scene a jokier ending. On reflection I still think I was right and that those Mayfair scenes should end on a sourer note. But it was an amicable disagreement, and our only one on what to make was a very enjoyable film.

  Postscript

  An Englishman Abroad was transmitted in 1983. In A Question of Attribution (1988) I wrote about Anthony Blunt and a suspect Titian, put the plays together as a double bill under the title (suggested by Simon Callow) Single Spies, and they were put on at the National Theatre and later at the Queen’s. Although the preface I wrote for Single Spies in 1989 was substantially the same as the one printed here for An Englishman Abroad, I note that it ended more harshly. The five years that separated the two plays were also the prime of Mrs Thatcher, and my attitudes had hardened:

  It suits governments to make treachery the crime of crimes, but the world is smaller than it was and to conceal information can be as culpable as to betray it. As I write, evidence is emerging of a nuclear accident at Windscale in 1957, the full extent of which was hidden from the public. Were the politicians and civil servants responsible for this less culpable than our Cambridge villains? Because for the spies it can at least be said that they were risking their own skins, whereas the politicians were risking someone else’s.

  Of course Blunt and Burgess and co. had the advantage of us in that they still had illusions. They had somewhere to turn. The trouble with treachery nowadays is that if one does want to betray one’s country there is no one satisfactory to betray it to. If there were, more people would be doing it.

  The real solution for Burgess would have been to live until he was eighty; then he would have been welcomed back with open arms. You only have to survive in England for all to be forgiven. This was more or less what happened to Oswald Mosley, whose offence seems to me much greater, and would have happened to Burgess, had he lived. He would have gone on chat shows, been a guest on Desert Island Discs, and dined out all over London. In England you only have to be able to eat a boiled egg at ninety and they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.

  The Wind in the Willows

  Some time in 1987 Richard Eyre, newly appointed Director of the National Theatre, asked me if I’d think about writing a play that would combine The Wind in the Willows with some account of the life of its author, Kenneth Grahame. I had one or two similar approaches around that time, including a proposal for a film in which Bob Hoskins was to play Rat and Michael Caine Toad. Kenneth Grahame died in 1932, so this flurry of interest could be put down to money and managements waking up to the fact that, fifty years on, here was a best-seller that was now out of copyright.

  Cut to December 1990, a week before the opening of the play I eventually wrote. Passing the British Museum, I ran into Bodley’s Librarian, David Vaisey, who was taking a gloomy breather from some unending committee on the impending transfer to the new British Library. As I told him about rehearsing The Wind in the Willows, he became gloomier still. What I had not known was that Kenneth Grahame’s long love-affair with Oxford had led him to bequeath the copyright in the book to the university, and a good little earner it had proved to be. Now the National Theatre’s gain was about to be the Bodleian Library’s loss.

  I don’t recall reading The Wind in the Willows as a child, or indeed any of the classics of children’s literature. This was partly the library’s fault. In those days Armley Junior Library at the bottom of Wesley Road in Leeds bound all its volumes in heavy maroon or black, so that The Adventures of Milly Molly Mandy was every bit as forbidding as The Anatomy of Melancholy. Doubtless The Wind in the Willows was there somewhere, along with Winnie the Pooh and Alice and all the other books every well-brought-up Children’s Hour-listening child was supposed to read. Actually, I think I do remember looking at Alice and being put off by the Tenniel illustrations. ‘Too old fashioned,’ I thought – ‘looks like a classic,’ and back it went on the shelf.

  It was only in the sixties, when I was rather haphazardly reading round the Edwardians with some vague idea of writing a history play (which eventually turned into Forty Years On), that I read Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age and Dream Days. I left The Wind in the Willows until last, because I thought I had read it already – this being virtually the definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and which they often assume they have read themselves.

  One consideration that had kept me away from the book for so long, that gave it a protective coating every bit as off-putting as those black and maroon bindings of my childhood, was that it had fans. Fans are a feature of a certain kind of book. It’s often a children’s book – Winnie the Pooh, Alice and The Hobbit are examples – or it is a grown-up children’s book such as those of Wodehouse, E. F. Benson and Conan Doyle. But Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope are nothing if not adult and they have fans too – and fan clubs – so children are not the essence of it.

  What is common to all these authors, though, is the capacity to create self-contained worlds; their books constitute systems of literary self-sufficiency in ways that other novels, often more profound, do not. It is a kind of cosiness. Dickens is not cosy; he is always taking his reader back into the real world in a way that Trollope, who is cosy, does not. So it is Trollope who has the fans. In our own day the same distinction could be drawn between the novels of Evelyn Waugh and those of Anthony Powell – Powell with fans, Waugh not. And though exceptions occur to me even as I write – the Brontës? (fans of the lives more than the books) Hardy? (fans of the scenery) – I have always found fans a great deterrent: ‘It’s just your kind of thing.’ ‘Really? And how would you know?’

  Back in 1988, I set to work trying to interweave Grahame’s real and fictional worlds, but I soon ran into difficulties. Grahame’s life had not been a happy one. Born in 1859, he never had (as he put it) ‘a proper equipment of parents’, and was effectively orphaned at the age of five when his mother died of scarlet fever and his drunkard father packed him off to Cookham in Berkshire to live with his grandparents; he never saw his father again. He was sent to St Edward’s School in Oxford, where he did moderately well, and was looking forward to going up to university there when the family – or the ‘grown-ups’, as he thought of them all his life – decided he should go into the City as a clerk (‘a pale-faced quilldriver’) in the Bank of England.

  Disappointed though he was (and it was a disappointment that did not fade), Grahame did well at the Bank, and eventually became Secretary at the early age of thirty-nine. Still, for all his conventional appearance (and despite the ‘Kitchener Needs You’ moustache), he was hardly a conscientious clerk, and even in those relaxed days he soon acquired a reputation for sloping off early. When he was at his desk he was often not doing the Bank’s work but writing articles for the National Observer and The Yellow Book. Pretty conventional for the most part, his pieces deplored the creeping tide of suburbia and extolled the charms of the countryside, sentiments that have been familiar and fashionable ever since, although nowadays Grahame’s style is somewhat hard to take.

  Grahame himself comes over as a sympathetic character who, even when he begins to acquire a literary reputation, still has about him the air of a humble clerk, tied to his desk and longing to escape – li
ke those little men on the loose that crop up in Wells or, later, in Priestley and Orwell. Of course, it is easier if you are an animal: his draper’s shop has to burn down and his death be assumed before Mr Polly can escape; with Mole, it is just a matter of flinging aside his duster and brush, saying, ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’, and then up he comes into the sunlight and finds himself in ‘the warm grass of a great meadow’ – and a new life.

  A new life of a different sort began for Grahame in 1899, when he was forty. Hitherto very much the bachelor, he suddenly – and to the surprise and consternation of his friends – became engaged to Elspeth Thompson, whom in due course he rather resignedly married. A Scot like himself, she was fey as well as formidable – insisting, for instance, on wearing a daisy chain to their wedding – but though their courtship had been conducted largely in baby talk there does not seem to have been much talk about babies afterwards. Sex did not come up to the expectations of either of them, but before it was discontinued they had one quick child, Alastair, who was born premature and half-blind.

  He was a precocious boy, though – Elspeth, in particular, insisting on his charm and ability – with the result that he was much spoiled and given to tantrums, during which he would beat his head on the ground in fits of grief and rage. When his father started to write letters to him telling the stories that, in 1908, became The Wind in the Willows, Mr Toad’s tantrums were intended to ring a bell.

  The book was far from being an immediate success (‘As a contribution to natural history,’ wrote the Times critic, ‘the book is negligible’), but at least this saved Alastair Grahame from the fate of A. A. Milne’s son Christopher Robin, dogged always by his fictional counterpart. Still, there was not much else that went right for Alastair. Since his father had longed to go to Oxford, Alastair was sent there, but as the child of eccentric parents and lacking any social skills he was as unhappy as he had been at Eton, and in 1920 he was found dead on the railway line that runs by Port Meadow.