Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  I said his childhood was ‘unexpectedly’ rich, because to date there’s not much hint of it in his work. He quotes examples from The Entertainer and Hotel in Amsterdam that draw directly on members of his family, but not much of the personnel or atmosphere of his childhood has hitherto found its way into his plays, even on television. Speaking as one who has recycled his only two serviceable aunts so often in dramatic form they’ve long since lost all feature or flavour, I’m sure his restraint is to be commended.

  When he does start drawing on his later experience for the plays, it’s nice to find that the relation between Art and Life doesn’t unduly exercise him. In this narrative the real become the fictional almost in mid-sentence: characters are dragged struggling out of Life, allowed a quick visit to Wardrobe before being shoved breathless on to the stage. And no Brideshead rubbish about ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’ His first wife, Pamela Lane, becomes Alison at her ironing-board, and her hapless parents leap on to the stage with her. She is she: they are they: and he himself makes no bones about coming on as Jimmy Porter − in 1956 anyway. Newspapers won’t believe he’s come on as anything else since.

  Much of his childhood was spent in the more run-down bits of suburban Surrey, with spells at umpteen schools where he grew to expect to get beaten up as a matter of course on the first day. He was sent away to school at various times because of his health, the bills being paid by the Benevolent Society that had looked after his father. The account of the cold convalescent home in Dorset where he was sent at the end of 1942 makes grim reading, but for all that he doesn’t come over as ever having been desperately unhappy in the way sensitive boys sent away to school are supposed to be (if they have an eye on Art, that is). One has no sense of his looking for affection, though there is a beautiful account of his friendship with a self-assured and decidedly eccentric boy, Mickey Wall. ‘When he introduced me to his sister, Edna, a nice but slightly irritable nineteen-year-old, she was bending over the fire grate. “This is my sister, Edna,” he said … I was prepared to be impressed both by her seniority and attractive appearance, but not for his comment. “Hasn’t she got a big arse?” he said thoughtfully.’

  39 Prunella Scales (HMQ) and A. B. (Anthony Blunt) in A Question of Attribution, Royal National Theatre, December 1988

  40 With John Schlesinger on the set of A Question of Attribution, BBC Ealing, July 1991

  41 With Alan Bates on the set of 102 Boulevard Haussmann, BBC Elstree, July 1990

  42 Talking Heads, BBC, 1988: Julie Walters in Her Big Chance

  43 Talking Heads, BBC, 1988: Maggie Smith in Bed Among the Lentils

  44 Talking Heads, BBC, 1988: Patricia Routledge in A Lady of Letters

  45 Talking Heads, BBC, 1988: Setphanie Cole in Soldiering On

  46 Talking Heads, BBC, 1988: Thora Hird in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee

  47 The Wind in the Willows, Royal National Theatre, December 1990

  48 Michael Bryant (Badger) and David Bamber (Mole) in The Wind in the Willows

  49 Nigel Hawthorne in The Madness of George III, Royal National Theatre, December 1991

  50 Harold Innocent (Sir Geroge Baker) and Nigel Hawthorne (George III) in The Madness of George III

  51 A. B., January 1994

  There is something of Richmal Crompton’s William (and his more than slightly irritable sister Ethel) about Mickey Wall, and also of Saki’s Bassington − a boy too self-assured and finished ever to turn into an adult. I’ve no doubt there will be some research student, maybe one of those paid-up, card-carrying members of the London Library that figure on Osborne’s hit list, who will one day sift the plays for evidences of Wall. But on to sex.

  Convalescing in Cornwall after an operation for appendicitis, he finds himself alone on a beach. ‘I took off my bathing suit and began to cauterize my appendicitis wound with a stick, rather like a crayon, which I had been given for this purpose. It was six months since my operation but my scar had refused to heal and was still partially open with patches of wormy flesh protruding from it.’ The naked Osborne, poking away at his stomach, is espied by a handsome middle-aged man sunbathing in the next cove. He turns out to be a writer and asks him back to his cottage. They drink china tea out of nice cups, listen to a record of Arthur Bliss’s Miracle in the Gorbals and the author, J. Wood Palmer (that initial says it all), suggests Osborne stay the night. At the same time, he cheerfully warns our hero that a bit of the other is quite likely to be on the cards. Exit the author of A Patriot for Me, hot and confused. But the scar, the writer, the nice cups make it all straight out of the last writer one would ever associate with Osborne – Denton Welch.

  Mind you, this sort of thing is always happening to him. He’s able to drop his guard temporarily during a brief (and glorious) stint as a reporter on Gas World − not, one imagines, the most epicene of periodicals − but no sooner does he give up journalism than the word goes round and the forces of pederasty are on the qui vive. No rep does he join but at the first read-through the resident Mr Roving Hands is giving him the glad eye. One is even observed fumbling him under a café table by a private detective specially hired (in Minehead!) by his fiancée’s parents. Nothing ever comes of these approaches, despite the assertions of colleagues like Gerald at Ilfracombe that ‘I didn’t know what I wanted.’ Osborne knew what he wanted all right, and he’d been wanting it for years.

  ‘Sex was the most unobtainable luxury in the winter of our post-war austerity.’ What passed for sex in 1947 was ‘a few snatched pelvic felicities during the quickstep, what I came later to know as a Dry Fuck on the Floor’. For the boy who, at school, did not know what a twat was, opportunity finally knocked in Llandudno, on tour with an actress called Stella. Knocked and knocked and knocked. He was nineteen, and to read back from Art to Life (A Sense of Detachment again), he ‘could do it nine times in the morning’. And, what is nice, five wives later he still thinks it a very worthwhile activity. ‘If I were to choose a way to die it would be after a drunken, fish-eating day, ending up at the end of the Palace pier … To shudder one’s last, thrusting, replete gasp between the sheets at four and six o’clock in Brighton would be the most perfect last earthly delight.’ Even this last, putative fuck is due for a matinée performance.

  Little mothered but much married, Osborne has a complicated relationship to the opposite sex, pointed up by a happy printer’s error. For his first performance with Stella he had invested in a pair of yellow poplin pyjamas from Simpson’s. Stella, however, jumped the gun and ‘began to make love to me with alarming speed, but I was still sober and self-conscious enough to insist on going to my own room to get my pymamas.’ Once in his ‘pymamas’, he came back to bed and Stella, and burst into tears. It was some considerable time before he ceased crying, took off the pymamas and got down to the serious business of sexual intercourse.

  This is a lovely book. It has jokes (‘Handing over the Hoover to my mother was like distributing highly sophisticated nuclear weapons to an underdeveloped African nation’). It is not mellow. And it constantly brings alive that remotest of periods, the recent past.

  Instead of a Present

  Written for Larkin at Sixty, edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber and Faber, 1982)

  My first thought was that this whole enterprise is definitely incongruous. A birthday party for Philip Larkin is like treating Simone Weil to a candlelit dinner for two at a restaurant of her choice. Or sending Proust flowers. No. A volume of this sort is simply a sharp nudge in the direction of the grave; and that is a road, God knows, along which he needs no nudging.

  And why now in particular? Apparently he is sixty, but when was he anything else? He has made a habit of being sixty; he has made a profession of it. Like Lady Dumbleton, he has been sixty for the last twenty-five years. On his own admission there was never a boy Larkin; no young lad Philip, let alone Phil, ever. And I’m not going to supply the textual references: there’ll be enough of that going on elsewhere.

  Beside
s, why a book? He must be fed up at the sight of books. It’s books, books, books every day of his life, and now here’s another of the blighters. Why not something more along the lines of a biscuit barrel? Because that’s all this collection is, the literary equivalent of an electric toaster (or a Teasmaid perhaps) presented by the divisional manager at an awkward ceremony in the staff canteen, and in the firm’s time too. Still, any form of clock would have been a mistake. Better to have played safe and gone for salad-servers or even a fish-slice. I had an auntie, the manageress of a shoe shop, who every birthday gave me shoe-trees. They were always acceptable.

  These are some of the reasons why I feel ill at ease in this doleful jamboree. Added to which there is the question of his name. Without knowing Mr Larkin, what do I call him? I feel like the student at a dance, suddenly partnered by the Chancellor of the university, who happened to be Princess Margaret. Swinging petrified into the cha-cha, he stammered, ‘I am not sure what to call you.’ The strobe was doused in the Windsor glare: ‘Why not try Princess Margaret?’ A bleak smile from Hull could be just as disconcerting. Philip he plainly is not, though Larkin is overfamiliar too, suggesting a certain fellow-footing. Being a librarian doesn’t help: I’ve always found them close relatives of the walking dead.

  Of course this book is presumably not addressed to the librarian. I imagine all librarians get at sixty is piles. If they’re lucky. No, we are addressing the real Larkin, the one who feels shut out when he sees fifteen-year-olds necking at bus-stops. But that’s risky too: authors resent the knowledge of themselves they have volunteered to their readers, and one can never address them in the light of it without turning to some extent into a lady in a hat.

  Whether as Larkin, Philip Larkin or plain Philip, his name is bound to turn up on every page of this book. Names strike more than they stroke, and I would like to think of him wincing as he reads, staggering under repeated blows from his own name, Larkin buffeted not celebrated. I should be disappointed in him, too, did he not harbour doubts about the whole enterprise, echoing Balfour’s remark: ‘I am more or less happy when being praised, not very uncomfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained.’

  It’s very gingerly, therefore, that I say my thank you. For what? Often simply because his poems happen to coincide with my own life. And, yes, I know that is what one is supposed to feel, and that is Art. But it’s not art that stood me for the Two Minutes’ Silence on the parade ground at Coulsdon one November morning in 1952 when the Comet came looming low out of the fog, as in ‘Naturally The Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses’. Or put me in a Saturday train from Leeds on a slow and stopping journey southwards, the only empty seats reserved for a honeymoon couple who got on at Doncaster. One of the first of his poems I read was ‘I Remember, I Remember’, and it was this sense of coincidence, even collocation, that made me go on to read more. It isn’t my favourite among his poems, but it’s the one that made me realize that someone who elsewhere admitted his childhood was ‘a forgotten boredom’ might be talking to me.

  I had always had a sneaking feeling my childhood didn’t come up to scratch, even at the time; and when I began at the usual age to think there might be some question of becoming ‘a writer’ (I do not say ‘writing’) the want of this apparently essential period seemed crucial. In all the books I had read childhoods were either idyllic or deprived. Mine had been neither. In point of memories I was a non-starter. I had not spent hours in the crook of a great tree devouring Alice or Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read (and even then patchily − I never devoured anything) Hotspur, Wizard, Champion and Knock-Out, not quite the ore of art. It’s true that for a long time I too went to bed early, but most children did in those days, with no effect on the percentage turning out to be Proust. I scanned my childhood for eccentrics, and found none. I had an aunt who had played the piano in the silent cinema − her music is still in the piano stool today (snap again) − but there was nothing odd about her, apart from her large, elderly bust; and there was no shortage of those either.

  My school was dull too. It wasn’t old. It wasn’t new. There was not even a kindly schoolmaster who put books into my hands. I think one may have tried to, but it was not until I was sixteen, and a bit late in the day. Another boy had shown me Stephen Spender’s World Within World, or at any rate the bits dealing with homosexuality, the references to which (while pretty opaque by today’s standards) were thought rather daring in 1951. Spender had been befriended by the music master, Mr Greatorex, who had told young Stephen that, although he was unhappy now, there would come a time when he would begin to be happy and then he would be happier than most. I took great comfort from this, except that I wasn’t particularly unhappy (that was the trouble); but the thought that I was about to get the Greatorex treatment, that a master in my dull day-school had divined beneath my awkwardness the forlorn and troubled essence, produced in me a reaction of such extravagant enthusiasm and wanting to be ‘brought out’ that the master in question (who had merely suggested I might like to read his New Statesman from time to time) scuttled straight back into his shell. It was further proof that literature and life (or my life at any rate) were different things. For the time being, anyway. At Oxford I was sure it would be different.

  So to Oxford I duly went, changing stations at Sheffield and probably taking for a train-spotter that balding man at the end of the platform eating a pie. That I had still not acquired a past hit me the minute I entered the lodge of my college. It was piled high with trunks: trunks pasted with ancient labels, trunks that had holidayed in Grand Hotels, travelled first-class on liners, trunks painted with four, nay even five, initials (that’s another sympathetic thing about Larkin, the bare essentials of his name). They were the trunks of fathers that were now the trunks of sons, trunks of generations. These trunks spoke memory. I had two shameful Antler suitcases that I had gone with my mother to buy at Schofields in Leeds − an agonizing process, since it had involved her explaining to the shop assistant, a class my mother always assumed were persons of some refinement, that the cases were for going to Oxford with on a scholarship and were these the kind of thing? They weren’t. One foot across the threshold of the college lodge and I saw it, and hurried to hide them beneath my cold bed. By the end of the first term I hadn’t acquired much education but I had got myself a decent second-hand trunk.

  It didn’t stop at the trunk either. Class, background, culture, accent − all that was going to have to be acquired second-hand too. Had I read ‘I Remember, I Remember’ in 1955, when The Less Deceived came out, I might have been spared the trouble. Though I doubt it. Poems tell you what you know already, and I still had it to learn. Besides I didn’t read poetry. I thought I read Auden, but to tell the truth − except in the shortest poems − I never got beyond the first dozen or so lines without being completely lost. One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county. I heard Auden give his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956. That put the tin hat on any lingering thoughts of Literature (one of my problems was that I still thought of both Literature and Life as having capital letters). Here were ‘blinding theologies of flowers and fruits’, a monogrammed set of myths and memories carried over from a bulging childhood, and not in Antler suitcases either. Obsessions, landscapes, favourite books, even (one’s heart sank) the Icelandic sagas. If writing meant passing this sort of kit inspection, I’d better forget it.

  Dissolve to 1966. Life, love and literature were all long since in the lower case and I had drifted into show business. I was looking for ideas to beef up a comedy series. It was practically a clause in the BBC charter at that time that comedy sketches should be linked only with vocal numbers. I was after something that bit classier. My producer, Patrick Garland, suggested filming poems, g
ave me The Less Deceived, and I read ‘I Remember, I Remember’. I think I had realized by then that to write one doesn’t need credentials, but I must be the only one of his readers who came to Larkin as an alternative to Alma Cogan.