Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  Never quite Kafka’s wife, after Kafka’s death Brod’s role was that of the devoted widow, standing guard over the reputation, authorizing the editions, editing the diaries, and driving trespassers from the grave. However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.

  Kafka was a minor executive in an insurance company in Prague. In Kafka’s Dick this fact is picked up by another minor executive in another insurance firm, but in Leeds seventy-odd years later. Sydney, as the insurance man, decides to do a piece on Kafka for an insurance periodical. (I imagine there are such, though I’ve never verified the fact.) As he works on his piece, Sydney comes to resent his subject, as biographers must often do. Biographers are only fans, after all, and fans have been known to shoot their idols.

  ‘Why biography?’ asks his wife.

  Sydney’s answer is less of a speech than an aria, which is probably why it was cut from the play:

  I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men, their fears and their failings. I’ve had enough of their vision, how they altered the landscape (we stand on their shoulders to survey our lives). So. Let’s talk about the vanity. Read how this one, the century’s seer, increases his stature by lifts in his shoes. That one, the connoisseur of emptiness, is tipped for the Nobel Prize yet still needs to win at Monopoly. This playwright’s skin is so thin he can feel pain on the other side of the world. So why is he deaf to the suffering next door; signs letters to the newspapers but holds his own wife a prisoner of conscience? The slipshod poet keeps immaculate time and expects it of everyone else, but never wears underwear and frequently smells. That’s not important, of course, but what is? The gentle novelist’s frightful temper, the Christian poet’s mad, unvisited wife, the hush in their households where the dog goes on tiptoe, meals on the dot at their ironclad whim? Note with these great men the flight and not infrequent suicide of their children, their brisk remarriage on the deaths of irreplaceable wives. Proud of his modesty one gives frequent, rare interviews in which he aggregates praise and denudes others of credit. Indifferent to the lives about him, he considers his day ruined on finding a slighting reference to himself in a periodical published three years ago in New Zealand. And demands sympathy from his family on that account. And gets it. Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages − just don’t catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

  Death took no chances with Kafka and laid three traps for his life. Parched and voiceless from TB of the larynx, he was forty, the victim, as he himself said, of a conspiracy by his own body. But had his lungs not ganged up on on him there was a second trap, twenty years down the line, when the agents of death would have shunted him, as they did his three sisters, into the gas chambers. That fate, though it was not to be his, is evident in his last photograph. It is a face that prefigures the concentration camp.

  But say that in 1924 he cheats death and a spell in the sanatorium restores him to health. In 1938 he sees what is coming − Kafka, after all, was more canny than he is given credit for, not least by Kafka himself − and so he slips away from Prague in time. J. P. Stern imagines him fighting with the partisans; Philip Roth finds him a poor teacher of Hebrew in Newark, New Jersey. Whatever his future when he leaves Prague, he becomes what he has always been, a refugee. Maybe (for there is no harm in dreams) he even lives long enough to find himself the great man he never knew he was. Maybe (the most impossible dream of all) he actually succeeds in putting on weight. So where is death now? Waiting for Kafka in some Park Avenue consulting-room where he goes with what he takes to be a recurrence of his old chest complaint.

  ‘Quite curable now, of course, TB. No problem. However, regarding your chest, you say you managed a factory once?’

  ‘Yes. For my brother-in-law. For three or four years.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘A long time ago. It closed in 1917. In Prague.’

  ‘What kind of factory was it?’

  ‘Building materials. Asbestos.’

  This is just a dream of Kafka’s death. He is famous, the owner of the best-known initial in literature, and we know he did not die like this. Others probably did. In Prague the consulting-rooms are bleaker but the disease is the same and the treatment as futile. These patients have no names, though Kafka would have known them, those girls (old ladies now) whom he described brushing the thick asbestos dust from their overalls, the casualties of his brother-in-law’s ill-starred business in which Hermann, his father, had invested. A good job his father isn’t alive, the past master of ‘I told you so.’

  In the last weeks of his life Kafka was taken to a sanatorium in the Wienerwald, and here, where the secret of dreams had been revealed to Freud, Kafka’s dreams ended.

  On the window-sill the night before he died Dora Dymant found an owl waiting. The owl has a complex imagery in art. Just as in Freudian psychology an emotion can stand for itself and its opposite, so is the owl a symbol of both darkness and light. As a creature of the night the owl was seen as a symbol of the Jews, who, turning away from the light of Christ, were guilty of wilful blindness. On the other hand the owl was, as it remains, a symbol of wisdom. It is fitting that this bird of ambiguity should come to witness the departure of a man who by belief was neither Christian nor Jew, and had never wholeheartedly felt himself a member of the human race. He had written of himself as a bug and a mouse, both the natural prey of the bird now waiting outside the window.

  Comfortable Words

  An Address to the Prayer Book Society, Blackburn Cathedral, 12 May 1990

  When Canon Williams asked me to address this meeting I thought it would be a relatively easy task. He had sent me some of the contributions of my distinguished predecessors in this place, and what seemed to be required was a celebration of the merits and qualities of the Book of Common Prayer as opposed to such versions as have succeeded (though not superseded) it, plus some personal thoughts or reminiscences along the lines of ‘The Prayer Book and Me’.

  I take it that these occasions are in some sense rallies, and, since like most people here I am convinced of the superiority of the BCP, the only difficulty in demonstrating its abiding virtues would be to select from so much abundance. As easy, or as hard, to enumerate the virtues of Shakespeare.

  That the style of the Prayer Book has permeated English prose for five centuries hardly needs saying again, except to point out that this is not just confined to the serious stuff. Frivolity owes Cranmer a debt too.

  Cranmer and P. G. Wodehouse would seem a peculiar twosome, but I’m sure there is a paper to be written on the evidence of the Prayer Book in the world of Bertie Wooster, and another on the influence of the Prayer Book on English detective fiction. Phrases from the Prayer Book turn up in the silliest places. I was once in a Ben Travers farce, Cuckoo in the Nest, which is set in a village pub. As she locks up for the night, the landlady, Mrs Spoker, interrogates the potboy: ‘Alfred. Have you done all the things you ought to have done?’ ‘Yes, mum.’ ‘And have you left undone those things you ought not to have done?’ ‘Yes, mum.’ It’s not actually a joke, and it didn’t do very well back in 1964. Twenty-six years later the exchange would probably be cut, and if the director is under thirty-five he or she wouldn’t recognize the quotation anyway. Jokes depend on shared reference, and anyone like myself who thinks making jokes is a serious matter must regret the eclipse of the Book of Common Prayer because it has diminished the common stock of shared reference on which jokes − and of course it’s not only jokes − depend.

  But I have already strayed into reminiscence, and the second requirement of your speakers – notes under the heading of ‘The Prayer Book and Me.’ I didn’t anticipate any difficulty here either, as I had a religious upbrin
ging and one of the two books of which I have large sections by heart is the Book of Common Prayer (the other being Hymns Ancient and Modern). Knowing we would all be of one mind, my concern was simply not to be dull; a playwright likes, perhaps ought, to take his audience on a journey, even if it’s only from A to B, and this I thought might be a problem as I knew I would be preaching to the converted. That apart, though, talking about the Prayer Book would be a pushover.

  How wrong I was. No sooner did I try to write this address than I began to struggle. I thought I knew what I wanted to say, only to find doubts beginning to creep in and other, less comfortable, words demanding to be spoken. For a writer, of course, this is not a novel experience. One seldom sits down knowing exactly what one wants to say, the knowing very often coming out of the saying. ‘One draws’, says Lichtenberg, ‘from the well of language many a thought one does not have.’ A writer does not always know what he or she knows, and writing is a way of finding out. The surprise to me in this matter of the Prayer Book was that I thought I did know, and writing has shown me that I didn’t. I began in one mind and ended up in two.

  I begin with a poem by Stevie Smith. I won’t attempt to sing or intone the piece, as Stevie Smith often did with her poems, and it may not sound much like a poem at all but more like a letter to the Telegraph. It’s called ‘Why are the Clergy …?’

  Why are the clergy of the Church of England Always changing the words of the prayers in the Prayer Book? Cranmer’s touch was surer than theirs, do they not respect him?

  For instance last night in church I heard (I italicize the interpolation) ‘The Lord bless you and keep you and all who are dear unto you’

  As the blessing is a congregational blessing and meant to be This is questionable on theological grounds But is it not offensive to the ear and also ludicrous? That ‘unto’ is a particularly ripe piece of idiocy Oh how offensive it is. I suppose we shall have next ‘Lighten our darkness we beseech thee Ο Lord and the darkness of all who are dear unto us’

  It seems a pity. Does Charity object to the objection? Then I cry, and not for the first time to that smooth face Charity, have pity.

  The poem is pretty self-explanatory apart from the last two lines: ‘Does Charity object to the objection? / Then I cry, and not for the first time to that smooth face / Charity, have pity.’ I think what Stevie Smith means is that living in fellowship with other believers might seem to require her to be silent. Don’t rock the boat, in other words. Whereas she begs to be allowed, as you in this Society beg to be allowed, to differ.

  Stevie Smith brings me to the first of my difficulties: God, put bluntly. Stevie Smith regarded God much as she regarded producers with whom she worked at the BBC: He had to be kept in His place, not allowed to go too far, and on occasion needed to be taken down a peg or two. But, though she and God didn’t always get on, she undoubtedly believed in Him and so was entitled to weigh in with her opinions and objections, including her opinions about the Prayer Book. I’m not sure that I do believe in God. If I don’t, it could reasonably be objected that I shouldn’t be talking about the Prayer Book at all. Those who rewrote the Prayer Book complained very much at the time − and understandably − that many of the protests came from those, such as myself, whose connection with the Church was tenuous, the argument implicit in this being that the clergy know what is best for their congregations. This is the same argument that is advanced by farmers in answer to protests about the grubbing-up of hedges and the destruction of field patterns. The land is the farmer’s bread and butter, the argument goes, and so he must therefore have its welfare more at heart than the occasional visitor. So in their own field the liturgical reformers grub up the awkward thickets of language that make the harvest of souls more difficult, plough in the sixteenth-century hedges that are hard to penetrate but for that reason shelter all manner of rare creatures: poetry, mystery, transcendence. All must be flat, dull, accessible and rational. Fields and worship.

  The folly in the reform of institutions is to fix on an essential or a primary function. The land is there to produce food. The Prayer Book is there to net souls. Once one function has been given priority, all other considerations go by the board. But there is an ecology of belief as well as of nature. Poetry, mystery, the beauty of language − these may be incidental to the primary purpose of the Church, which is to bring people to God, but one doesn’t have to be Archbishop Laud to see that these incidental virtues of the Prayer Book are not irrelevant or dispensable. If they were, architecture would be irrelevant too; the logical end of rewriting the Prayer Book being that serious-minded congregations would worship in Nissen huts. And a small voice says, ‘Well, perhaps that is what they do.’

  Of course in the Anglican Church whether or not one believes in God tends to get sidestepped. It’s not quite in good taste. Someone said that the Church of England is so constituted that its members can really believe anything, but of course almost none of them do.

  One of the aims of the liturgical reformers was to make God more accessible; but that didn’t mean that they weren’t also a little embarrassed by Him, and I think it’s this embarrassment that has got into their language. God is like an aged father taken in by his well-intentioned children. They want to keep him presentable and a useful member of society, so they scrap his old three-piece suit, in which he looked a little old-fashioned (though rather distinguished), and kit him out instead in pastel-coloured leisurewear in which he looks like everybody else. The trouble is, though, they can’t change the habits of a lifetime. It’s not so much that he spits in the fire or takes his teeth out at the table but that, given the chance, he is so forthright. He’s always laying down the law and seems to think nobody else exists, and his family might be servants the way he treats them. It’s a bit embarrassing − particularly when those warm, friendly people from the religion next door come round. Still, it’s only a matter of time. Father’s old. He may die soon.

  But before we adherents (I almost said fans) of the old Prayer Book congratulate ourselves on not being so silly, or trendy or however else the reformers are characterized, it’s worth remembering that we have a corresponding dilemma. They are dodging God in one way, we in another. The majesty of the Prayer Book, the resonance of its language and the grandeur of its architecture, might seem to echo the qualities we attribute to the deity. But centuries of use have made it an accommodating majesty, a familiar grandeur; the sonority does not intimidate. W. H. Auden made the same point:

  Those of us who are Anglicans know well that the language of the Book of Common Prayer, its extraordinary beauties of sound and rhythm, can all too easily tempt us to delight in the sheer sound without thinking what the words mean or whether we mean them. In the General Confession, for example, what a delight to the tongue and ear it is to recite ‘We do earnestly repent and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.’ Is it really intolerable? Not very often. (Secondary Worlds)

  Moreover, the Prayer Book is so bound up, as P. D. James said here a couple of years ago, with memories − memories of childhood, of marriages and baptisms, births and deaths. And that is as it should be; but its very familiarity enables congregations to domesticate God. So when we hear what comfortable words Cranmer wrote, should we (and I am saying ‘we’ I suppose out of politeness, lest I seem to be lecturing you), should we not consider whether these well-worn liturgical paths down which we tread, the aisles and cloisters in this great cathedral of a book, while they are a way of praising God might also be a way of evading Him?

  I suppose what I’m saying is that the Prayer Book gives pleasure, is enjoyable, satisfies, in a way that the Alternative Service Book doesn’t. But whether that’s anything to do with true religion I’m not sure. But it does give pleasure. Even at a funeral it’s hard not to feel a quickening of the heart as the coffin passes into the churchyard and the great tolling words of ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ begin the stately rit
ual progress that will end in the grave. I think too of services caught by chance, sitting on winter afternoons in the nave of Ely or Lincoln and hearing from the (so-called) loudspeaker a dry, reedy, unfleshed voice taking evensong. And one was grateful that the voice was without feeling − no more emotion than from an announcer giving the times of the departure of trains: the words themselves so powerful that they do not need feeling injected into them, any more than poetry does. Or, as T. S. Eliot said, who had that style of delivery himself, ‘Speak the word, speak the word only.’

  Talk of long-gone winter afternoons in Ely and Lincoln seems to associate the Prayer Book with Ancient Monuments, or, as we must now call it, the Heritage. I think it was Prince Charles who referred to the Prayer Book under this heading, and with no disrespect I have to say that makes me very nervous. The monarchy is part of the Heritage too, but that is not why we maintain it, but because it works. Start thinking of the Prayer Book as part of the Heritage and the next thing you know they will be putting up those ubiquitous brown signs pointing the visitor to heritage-conscious churches that still use the old forms; tourists will be coming in to watch congregations that still go through these quaint but outmoded rituals, much as they watch corn ground at the original mill or members of the Sealed Knot re-enact the Battle of Naseby. I was going to suggest as a joke that there might even be a Good Service Guide − Real Prayer, like Real Ale, something to be sought out − but I’ve an awful feeling there already is one. No, the word ‘heritage’ should be avoided at all costs.

  I fear I’ve already trod on a great many toes, which I did not expect to do when I agreed to talk but which is the result, as I said, of being in two minds. I’d worry, if I were a member of this Society, about some of my fellow-travellers. I’d worry that I was somehow associated with the ‘Don’t let’s mess about with Shakespeare’ brigade, and, going down the scale a bit, with those devotees who believe that shortly after God handed down the tablets to Moses the proper way of producing Gilbert and Sullivan was vouchsafed to the D’Oyly Carte. More seriously I’d worry about the Spectator, which sponsors the Thomas Cranmer prize, because on social issues its elegant common sense often seems to me to mask a brutal indifference. I’d worry about the Daily Telegraph, another champion of the Prayer Book, but which is always the first to jeer if the clergy undertake a role the paper feels should be properly confined to social workers (not that they don’t get jeered at too), and which will always weigh in with some ponderous ‘Render to Caesar’ stuff if the clergy, individually or on commissions, dare to suggest that this government is not entirely perfect.