Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  INTERVIEWER: So this is the writer in mid-career, in the mid-sixties − lonely, dedicated, determined.

  WRITER: What, above all, I’m primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that’s it, really. I’m taking the pith out of reality.

  I wrote that parody of a television arts documentary ten years ago, and, in the naivety of what I now realize was my youth (a season that eluded me while it was actually going on), I imagined that, at one stroke, I had disposed of the form. Nobody would dare do it quite like that any more. But, of course, they would. And they have. And what is more, they do.

  Can there be a slag-heap north of the Trent up which ardent young directors from Omnibus, Aquarius or 2nd House have not flogged their disgruntled camera-crews, in pursuit of that forward-retreating figure, the artist? One half expects to see Ivy Compton-Burnett herself stumbling up the slurry with her reticule between her teeth, on the strength of having spent a fortnight in Halifax when she was five. They would have filmed Proust down a cork-lined coalmine, had he lived. And always, of course, it is art as struggle, art as pain, art as redemption and transcendence. Not art as a relatively easy way of keeping the wolf from the door. Or art as actually quite a nice thing to be doing. Always it must be torture: ‘Can you zoom in on the eyes, Brian love? I want to get the pain behind the eyes, if I possibly can.’

  Even L. S. Lowry must needs be described as a sad and embittered man because he happened to say, at eighty, that he was not sure there was much point in doing paintings any more. A fairly mild and understandable doubt to creep in at the end of a lifetime of intense production, but wolfishly seized on and brought up at the time of his death to indicate how, such is the tyranny of art, this mild, lovable and industrious man should think his life-work without point. No matter, of course, that a similar doubt might occasionally creep into the mind of someone working for the Leeds Permanent Building Society. Or that an employee of the Midlands Water Board might occasionally ask himself whether he was doing anybody any good. Or that even the traveller in Skefko ball-bearings goes through an occasional dark night of the soul. No. It is this demon art, demanding so much from its practitioners that they are destroyed. And if one says it is like many another job, that it helps to pass the time and brings home the bacon, you are being shy and self-effacing. Art is pain. It must be. Otherwise it is not fair.

  ‘Look, we have come through’ is the stock version of the northern artist’s life, though why a childhood in the industrial North or any other outlandish place should be thought to handicap anyone writing novels, poems or plays seems to me to be odd. Rather see it as a stroke of luck. True, if you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way. Or think of Dame Ivy, wrestling with a novel called A Pit and Its Pitfalls. But what if one was born in Hendon? How do you wrench life in Basingstoke into the stuff of art? Or Canberra?

  The fact is, northern writers like to have it both ways. They set their achievements against the squalor of their origins and gain points for transcendence, while at the same time asserting that northern life is richer and, in some undefined way, truer and more honest than a life of southern comfort.

  I suppose, though, I should declare an interest, or maybe confess a lack of one. I was born and brought up in Leeds, in what I suppose must have been a working-class family. When I say ‘I suppose’, I do not mean that I did not actually notice, but simply that it all seemed perfectly satisfactory to me at the time. I had, after all, nothing to compare it with. My friends lived similar lives in similar houses and talked in a similar way. I was educated at elementary school, then secondary school and, eventually, university, but never with any great sacrifice on anyone’s part. If I was deprived, it was only in point of deprivation. Nor did it ever seem that great hopes were set upon me.

  What I do recall of my childhood was that it was boring. I have no nostalgia for it. I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.

  There are fashions in childhood as in anything else. A nice, middle-class background was no longer in vogue by the time I started to write. No longer in Vogue, either. Early in 1960, when my colleagues and I were writing the revue that was to end up as Beyond the Fringe, we were photographed for that magazine. We sped in a large Daimler to North Acton, where the photographer spent some time finding a setting appropriately stark and gritty for the enterprise on which we were to embark. We ended up gloomy and purposeful against a background of cooling-towers and derelict factories.

  I have never done one of those filmed portraits I started off by parodying, though the urge is strong. It is always gratifying to be asked to explain yourself, if only because it makes you feel there is, perhaps, something to explain. I admit, too, that from time to time I catch myself slightly overstating my working-class origins, taking my background down the social scale a peg or two. It is a mild form of inverted snobbery, which Richard Hoggart might dignify by calling it ‘groping for the remnants of a tradition’. As the man says in the sketch, it is a question of belonging. You would like to think you belong somewhere distinctive, whether it is a place or a class, but you know you are kidding yourself. However, I see that opens up another vast area of humbug and self-indulgence, namely, the writer as rootless man, so I think I had better stop and go home − wherever that is.

  Say Cheese, Virginia!

  Review of Lady Ottoline s Album: Snapshots of Her Famous Contemporaries, with an Introduction by Lord David Cecil (Michael Joseph, 1976).

  ‘Dilys!’ I called to my wife, who was in an adjacent room, ‘You’ll never guess what’s just plopped through our letter-box!’

  ‘Oh, Duggie! ‘she cried, with a hint of annoyance, ‘I’m in the middle of the cat’s tea. What is it, precious?’

  ‘Only Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Photograph Album,’ I rejoindered. ‘Snapshots and photographs of her famous contemporaries photographed by Lady Ottoline herself.’ Then I played my trump card. ‘With an introduction by Lord David Cecil.’

  ‘Ottoline Morrell,’ cried Dilys. ‘Teamed with Lord David Cecil! Bugger the cat!’ And before you could say Saxon Sydney Turner we were leafing through these magic pages.

  Dilys and I have been dedicated fans of Bloomsbury ever since Dilys’s dandruff and my appliance finally put paid to the ballroom dancing. Together we travel the length and breadth of the country, spending a fortune on fares simply for the thrill of meeting other Bloomsbury groupies.

  Billingham, Prestatyn, Loughborough − scarcely a town of any size but does not boast one, sometimes two, Woolf Clubs. This last Tuesday, for instance, saw us both at Garstang, a fork supper prior to Kevin Glusburn’s thought-provoking paper ‘Lytton Strachey: An Hitherto Unrecorded Incident in the Slipper Baths at Poulton-le-Fylde’. Need I add that Carrington fans were out in force?

  However, to our text, le livre des photographies. Aficionados of Bloomsbury, that much abused postal area, will need no reminding that Ottoline Morrell was the chatelaine of Oxford’s Garsington Manor, famed rendezvous of artists, intellectuals and anybody who was anybody who happened to be passing. No Nobel Prize-winner was ever turned away.

  Well-to-do and six foot two, Ottoline was never a beauty, but no one can deny she was possessed of a certain dignity. On page 52 is a picture of the painter Henry Lamb. Ottoline was very smitten with Henry, and one afternoon they were in the front room at Garsington and Ottoline was giving Henry a very French kiss when who should walk in but hubby Philip! Ottoline never turns a hair. She just wipes her mouth on her stole and says, ‘Henry has a temperature. I was just giving him an aspirin.’ As Dilys says, I think quite rightly, ‘What Bloomsbury had, Duggie, which we’ve lost subsequently, was style.’

  Here, on page 53, is Katherine Mansfield. This was before sh
e had the shoe shop. Bertrand Russell and Dora on page 60, Dora wearing a lovely frock which Dilys swears is by Adèle of Romford only the index doesn’t say; Lord David doesn’t seem to have done his homework there. Augustine Birrell, on page 59, is pictured with the economist Maynard ‘Sugar’ Keynes.

  Dilys and I are so genned up on Bloomsbury that Leonard and Virginia Woolf are just like friends of the family to us.

  ‘I don’t think Virginia would like that,’ says Dilys − ‘sitting in front of the fire cutting your toenails.’

  ‘Toenails nothing,’ I retort. ‘If we had Morgan Forster coming round to his tea, you might invest in a new brassière.’

  And so the battle is joined.

  Of course it’s all fun. That’s the good thing about Bloomsbury − no hard feelings.

  The young man on page 59 is Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewitt. Now he is not hard-core Bloomsbury. In fact neither Dilys nor I had any gen on him at all, but we got on to the grapevine (in the person of the indefatigable Pauline Lucas of Huddersfield) and came up with a few facts. Turns out Frank was Canadian, and half Red Indian. Thanks, Pauline, for that valuable info. Aught you want to know about Maynard Keynes’s undies, just give us a tinkle.

  The other gentleman in the photograph is fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Now I don’t think I’m treading on anybody’s corns when I tell you that what he used to like was his friends to stand on him in their highly polished boots. This used to disturb Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s mother, Lois Lowes Dickinson: ‘Give over, Goldsworthy’ she used to shout. ‘Don’t let your friends wipe their feet on you. Is that what they teach you at King’s College?’

  And on page 65 we’ve got Ε. Μ. Forster. What a sweet person. But look at those trousers. Talk about half-mast! I said to Dilys, ‘Only connect? The person who measured his inside leg wants his head examining.’

  Of course, as you might expect, Ottoline’s album is full of pictures of the uncrowned queen of Bloomsbury, our own Virginia Woolf. And you know Virginia, she always seemed to have a cig in her mouth. It’s smoke, smoke, smoke. No wonder hubby Leonard called his autobiography Dunhill All the Way.

  I hope I’ve told you enough about this book to make you want to rush rush rush to your nearest bookseller. You may be too late. It’s already unobtainable in Barnsley, and in Huddersfield they’re fighting over copies.

  Something, though, bothered me about this book. As Dilys and I scoured its pages I was tormented by a resemblance I couldn’t pin down. ‘It’s Ottoline, Dilys,’ I said. ‘Who does she take after? She’s got a look of somebody.’

  And then I remembered.

  ‘Dilys,’ I said. ‘Cast your mind back. Batley. The Ace ofClubs. Summer of ’67, was it?

  ‘Oh Duggie,’ she said. ‘Those were the locust years.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Batley. Dusty Springfield live on the stage of the Ace of Clubs. That’s who Ottoline is. She’s the spitting image of Our Dusty!’

  So if Ken Russell’s got any ideas about giving Ottoline the treatment then think on, Ken − this is Dusty to a T.

  It isn’t one for Glenda.

  Christmas in NW1

  In 1966, after eighteen months ‘sketch-writing for Ned Sherrin’s Not So Much A Programme and The Late Show, I put together a television comedy series of my own, On The Margin, for BBC2. A regular spot in these programmes was Life and Times in NW1, a saga of the dilemmas – moral and aesthetic – encountered by a young media couple, the Stringalongs. (’But darling,’ I hear Joanna breathe − ‘aren’t a moral and aesthetic really the same thing?’)

  Like me, the Stringalongs had taken up residence in Victorian Camden Town and, along with so many other buyers of the still relatively cheap former rooming-houses, had ‘knocked through’ their basements to make a commodious kitchen/dining-room, shoved the au pair in the attic, and crammed the house with collectable items gleaned from the many junk stalls of the neighbourhood.

  Rather sooner in life than they had expected, and not altogether in accordance with their liberal principles, the Stringalongs suddenly found themselves property-owners.These days the process is called gentrification and involves no soul-searching (few troubled consciences in Docklands, I imagine) but we were genuinely uneasy about it − or there would have been no need for jokes − and, though our unease could be handily recycled into resentment of those who bought into the area later than we had, there was a definite sense that we were shoving the indigenous population out.

  A nice instance of this came one evening in 1965 when a dinner party in one of our newly knocked-through kitchens was interrupted by an old man, not quite a tramp, who rang at the door asking for the landlady. The last time he had been in London he had rented a room in this house, and was there one available now? It was hard to explain how things had changed, and it was again bad conscience that made us put him in a car and tour round Camden Town looking for a rooming-house that had retained its integrity and was still a going concern.

  Later I wrote a sketch based on the incident which we filmed for one of the Sherrin programmes, coarsening it in the process, with the old man becoming quite definitely a tramp and my Mini a Rolls Royce (partly, though, to accommodate the camera-crew) and the social implications nowhere. Still, it was this that gave me the idea for Life and Times in NW1, no episodes of which now survive (nor any from On the Margin either), as in those days programmes were wiped as easily as dishes, and scarcely had the series been transmitted before it was obliterated.

  The Stringalongs, though, did have a continuing life thanks to the late Mark Boxer, who in 1967 was trying out a cartoon strip for the Listener and asked if he might develop my characters. The Stringalongs became so associated with Marc’s cartoons that I would be reluctant to mention it, feeling as if I’m stealing flowers from his grave, had not he himself always been careful and gracious enough to acknowledge their origins. I only wish I could have invested them with as much life and wit as he did.

  This sketch did not appear in the original On The Margin but was written for Tatler.

  Scene: the North London home of Simon and Joanna Stringalong. Simon is on the telephone. Joanna is on the gin. Neither is happy.

  SIMON: She must be out.

  JOANNA: A schoolteacher? Where? Stoned, more likely. Let it ring.

  SIMON: Rock concert, wholefood restaurant … she could be anywhere − oh hello. Is that Jessica’s teacher? This is Simon, Jessica’s father. I’m sorry if I’m ringing at an impossibly late hour …

  JOANNA: It’s only half past eight!

  SIMON: … I just hope I’m not interrupting a candlelit dinner à deux. But what I’m ringing about, Miss … Pru. (To Joanna.) She says I’ve to call her Pru.

  JOANNA: Pru!

  SIMON: What I’m ringing about, Pru, is that we’ve just put little Jessica to bed in what quite honestly was a very distressed condition. She came home from school with this letter …

  JOANNA: Letter!

  SIMON: … about the nativity play. All pretty straightforward. I probably wouldn’t even have read it …

  JOANNA: No.

  SIMON: … only Joanna, my wife, gave it to me so I idly glanced through it to see what part Jessica was playing. But I couldn’t seem to find her. I couldn’t find her at all. It was only when I got right to the very end, the bottom of the bill as it were, that I came across her name: ‘Pauline Greenwood, Kevin Strutt, Charlotte Hindle and Jessica Stringalong − Icicles’. Now Joanna, my wife, and I may be getting hold of the wrong end of the stick, Pru, and it may be these icicles have a sizeable part to play in the action, but just judging from the billing it doesn’t look like it.

  JOANNA: (snatching the phone) What the hell do these icicles do,

  Pru?

  (SIMON snatches it back.)

  SIMON: Sorry. That was my wife. The icicles do what? They drip. I see. (To JOANNA.) They drip.

  JOANNA: Oh God.

  SIMON: Do they drip verbally? No? Ah.

  What is
worrying Mrs Stringalong and myself, Pru, is that in last year’s show Jessica had quite an interesting part as …

  JOANNA: A Bethlehem housewife.

  SIMON: A Bethlehem housewife.

  We hear a great deal about falling educational standards and, as you probably know, Pru, my wife and I only decided to put Jessica into the state system after a great deal of heart-searching and now we find that last year she played a housewife and this year she just drips. What kind of progress is that?

  JOANNA: Jessica had a long speech last year. Tell her.

  SIMON: Last year she had quite a bit to say. What was it, Joanna?

  JOANNA: ‘You can’t move in the middle of Bethlehem. I understand there’s not a bed to be had.’

  SIMON: ‘You can’t move in the middle of Bethlehem. I understand there’s not a bed to be had. ‘And there was a bit more (and I’m not sure this didn’t come off the top of Jessica’s little head):’ Next thing you know they’ll be sleeping in the stables.’ That was about the gist of it, ‘You can’t move in the middle of Bethlehem. I understand there’s not a bed to be had. Next thing you know they’ll be sleeping in the stables.’ Quite an interesting part, with a significant piece of plot-laying. Which Jessica did superbly. Very clear. Very sharp. ‘You can’t move in the middle of Bethlehem. I understand there’s not a bed to be had. Next thing you know they’ll be sleeping in the stables.’

  And this year she just drips. It’s so disappointing. We, who so much enjoyed her performance last Christmas, were looking forward to this Yuletide to see what she made of a more taxing role. I’m sure she’ll make a good icicle … a superb icicle. Knowing Jessica she’ll throw herself heart and soul into the part.