Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  24 October. To Bath where before going down to the Forum for a reading I sign stock at Robert Topping’s new bookshop on the Paragon. Like his other shop at Ely, it’s astonishingly well supplied and scholarly as well as popular, a series of enticing rooms – and plenty of chairs. The reading had originally been intended for the abbey, but though I’d done more or less the same performance in Ely Cathedral, it was thought to be too secular for Bath. The Forum is huge and the sound system dodgy, so I end up relaying my thoughts about HMQ reading into a hand mike, which since I’m reading from the text is a bit of a juggle whenever I turn the page. Afterwards there’s a signing, which ends just in time to catch the London train.

  The station is only a few hundred yards away but on the other side of a vast building site, another of Bath’s ill-starred town planning ventures in the making, this time a vast shopping mall. Bath has been under siege all my life. When I first came here in the 1960s they had just set about demolishing streets and streets of early nineteenth-century housing, the service quarters for the grander buildings in the town. They were said to be of no architectural interest or significance, with no notion that they were part of an architectural whole. This, I think, was under the aegis of Hugh Casson, the deceptively mild-mannered and bien-pensant architect who in his time presided over many a planning disaster.

  And so it has gone on since, with acres of indifferent modern buildings all carefully constructed in Bath stone as if that was all that was necessary to bind the city together. I’d hold a show trial in Bath, a Nuremberg for all the perpetrators of its architectural atrocities, the money-grubbing councillors who sanctioned it, the mediocre architects who did their bidding, winkled out from their wisteria-covered vicarages for proper retribution. Many of them are of course dead but like Cromwell they could be disinterred and their remains stowed under some sort of monument in the centre of this coming mall, a reminder of the crime they have committed. Apart from the demolished buildings themselves, the other casualty is decent architecture with otherwise pleasing designs: the extension to the Holburne Museum, for instance, now badly compromised because even fans of decent modern architecture are nervous of championing it in Bath where fingers have been burned so often. ‘No more’ is the understandable reaction. But it’s too late. Under the arc lights the bulldozers grub away and the pile-drivers sink their shafts. On the flood plain one hopes.

  As the train pulls out I think this is not a city I want to visit again. Before they are artists, before they are craftsmen, be they genius or mediocrity, architects are butchers.

  29 October, New York. I almost bump into an aged New York lady as I come into the grocery store and she comes out. ‘Oh sorry,’ she says. ‘I zigged when I should have zagged.’

  30 October. At the Met (and largely thanks to a glowing account by James Fenton in the Independent) we visit the exhibition of tapestry. ‘Well,’ says one woman to another, coming out as we are going in, ‘that was a real bummer.’ While not quite as bad as that I don’t get much out of it though Rupert takes to the Gobelins – too grandiose for me and no glow to the colours. The new classical sculpture court has more appeal, particularly a bronze hollow headless statue, the himation (i.e. the wrap or mantle) incised with fast colour still after 2,500 years.

  The museum is teeming with visitors, a terminus of art, and what strikes one (particularly in the tapestry exhibit) is the stamina of older women, their worn-out men trailing in the wake of their wives still eager, still determined on self-improvement, still keen to know. ‘Moses in the bulrushes? Well that doesn’t look like Egypt to me.’

  1 November. I have been reading Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, which I’ve enjoyed (insofar as I can enjoy a novel about an incontinent, impotent, irascible old writer who is two years younger than I am). One of the ghosts who is making his exit is, as I understand it, Nathan Zuckerman himself, Roth’s eidolon or alter ego whose parallel life he has traced in half a dozen books. Another ghost laid to rest is that of Amy Bellette, who in The Ghost Writer was the much younger lover of the virtually forgotten writer E. I. Lonoff. In that book Zuckerman comes to identify Amy, mistakenly, as Anne Frank, who has survived the camp and lives on unrecognised. In Exit Ghost she turns up again and is now revealed not as Anne Frank but as a survivor nevertheless, only from Norway not Holland.

  I had been reading this when we go into EAT on Madison and 81st for a cup of tea and a piece of (very unsatisfactory) coconut cake. An oldish woman in a red coat and beret (and looking not unlike how Enid Starkie used to look) beckons me over, having read and enjoyed some of my stuff. She particularly liked A Question of Attribution, the play that dealt with the Queen and Anthony Blunt. She has an accent which I don’t identify, but she says she spent her childhood in occupied Europe and what she liked about the play was all the lies that were being told, ‘Both of them lying. Him lying, her pretending. That was my childhood,’ she says. She doesn’t say whether she’s Jewish or whether the lies were vital and necessary to survival, and in my typical unwriterly fashion I fail to ask, perhaps because it’s so like a scene from Roth’s novel. As we go she calls out: ‘Stay alive!’

  The whole episode is a reminder of what an archaeological site the Upper East Side is, with skeletal old ladies pushed (by their black minders) in wheelchairs up Madison Avenue, all with their stories to tell. It’s like a long-lost city in some Middle Eastern wilderness where shards of history are lying about waiting to be picked up – or, in this case, talked to. But not by me, who is at a loss for words. ‘He could have been a writer but he was at a loss for words.’

  2 November. A young shop assistant in the (now differently located) J. Press: I had asked for one of their poplin shirts with the narrow collars, which he told me they didn’t do.

  Me: But they did once.

  Assistant: Yeah. Back in the day.

  4 November. Back from NY today and answering a bunch of letters I hear a programme on Radio 3 like the Talking About Music programmes Antony Hopkins used to do, dissecting a masterwork, in this case Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. I haven’t heard it for a while so it comes back to me with almost the smell of Leeds Town Hall where I first heard it in 1948, played by the young dashingly handsome Alan Loveday – an Australian whom time has confused with another dashing Australian, Ken Rosewall the tennis player.

  Very clear too is the feeling of transcendence such music inspired in me then: I knew I was never going to be happy but if the music was anything to go by I knew I would rise above it and lead a higher life and a more exalted existence than the happiness to which everyone else could look forward.

  7 November. A young father and his son in the organic shop in Camden Town. ‘This is a boy’, he announces at the check-out, ‘who prefers coriander to chocolate. Isn’t that so?’ And the boy – seven or eight, I suppose – confirms this unlikely preference, though more one suspects out of consideration for his father’s feelings than any distaste for Kit Kats – or, as it would be in this context, Green and Black’s.

  10 November. Anne heartbreakingly pretty still, today in some spotted pyjamas and her floppy black raincoat and with her hair pinned up looking so lovely. I take her to her door and kiss her and hug her as about twenty cyclists come up the street. Finding the café closed they stop nonplussed, and call out to us, ‘We’ve come from Burnley.’ I say Anne is poorly though standing on the steps she looks anything but – just a beautiful woman – and of thirty not fifty-six.

  15 November. Abu Hamza, the radical cleric, loses his appeal, the only obstacle between him and extradition to the United States the decision of the home secretary. The judge in the case, Judge Workman, admits that the conditions under which Hamza is likely to be held in the United States are offensive to his ‘sense of propriety’, thus briefly raising the hope that his judgement is going to be less workmanlike than it turns out to be.

  Hamza is not an attractive figure and his case is difficult to defend, but it should be defended and extradition rejected on Karl Popper’s princip
le that arguments should be rebutted at their strongest point. Nobody likes Hamza: his opinions are reprehensible and there is no question that he broadcasts them. But he is a British citizen and he should not be extradited to the United States under a non-reciprocal treaty which allows that country to extradite British subjects without due process. Let him be tried here and if found guilty imprisoned here, not in some supermax institution (offensive even to Judge Workman) where he will disappear without trace. Because next time the person the United States decides on may not have one eye and hooks for hands, disabilities which make him such a joke to the tabloid press. Next time the person chosen might be thought to be innocent and undeserving of such ridicule, and extradition might even be thought to be unfair. But it won’t matter. The precedent has been set and gets stronger with every person so supinely yielded up to American so-called justice. Jacqui Smith, the vibrant successor to such champions of liberty as Jack Straw, David Blunkett and John Reid, is potentially a bigger threat to our freedoms than Abu Hamza has ever been. ITV News reports all this as ‘Britain has won the right to extradite Abu Hamza’. Translated this means Britain has lost the right not to extradite anyone whom the United States chooses.

  26 November. An obituary in the Guardian of Reg Park, the body-builder and sometime film star who (and this is news to me) was the mentor (if that is the word) of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Reg Park was at my school, though gone by the time I got there. However, at one point on my journey through the school I sat at Reg Park’s old desk, his name carved on the lid. He’d been one of those boys who could do backflips and somersaults over the horse and was already famous, certainly in Leeds, as a body beautiful. Outside the pages of Health and Efficiency there wasn’t much of a future for men in this, posing as an art still confined to the motionless statuesque nudes (‘We Never Clothed’) who regularly adorned the stage of the City Varieties. Leeds’s loss, though, was Italy’s (and eventually Hollywood’s) gain, where Park became a star of classical epics. And, oddly, he was not the only one, as twenty years later another old boy of my school, Martin Potter, played the lead in Fellini’s Satyricon.

  28 November. R. is reading Brideshead Revisited for the first time, my browning-at-the-edges Penguin that must be fifty years old.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says plaintively, ‘is it meant to be snobbish or am I missing the point?’

  Which is better than me who, reading it for the first time, in 1957, say, didn’t spot the snobbery at all – I just took it as an entirely proper account of a world from which I was (rightly) excluded. Though I think I sympathised with Hooper (as Waugh probably did, too, not being much of a soldier himself).

  1 December, Versailles. Having been informed by the hotel that we would be able to hire bikes to go round the grounds of the palace we find that this facility ceased on the last day of November. This turns out a blessing as we then decide to hire a sort of golf cart, an electrically powered trolley for four on which we trundle up the pleached alleys and ceremonial avenues of these vast grounds, a pleasure that recalls the first thrill of being able to drive. It’s the ideal mode of transport and not merely it seems to me for the domain of Louis XIV. I would be happy to go at this speed (and in similar silence) about the streets of London. Indeed it surprises me that no city has been enterprising enough to declare itself a trolley cart zone.

  6 December. During the war my father eked out his Co-op butcher’s income by making fretwork toys which he sold to a smart toyshop down County Arcade in Leeds. His speciality was penguins mounted on little four-wheeled carts, of which during the war years he must have made many hundreds. Since then I’ve only come across two, one in the window of a junk shop in Harehills that was closed and when I went back it had gone; the other the property of someone who came to a reading I did in Muswell Hill but who, under the foolish impression that the toy was of immense value, refused to part with it.

  Last week comes a letter from a woman in Mitcham to say that her husband, who has recently died, collected penguins and enclosing a photograph of one he’d found in an antique shop in Tickhill near Doncaster. Was this one of my father’s efforts? She wasn’t offering it for sale, just letting me know out of interest, but I write back confirming the attribution. Today cocooned in bubble wrap the penguin arrives, livelier in design than I’d remembered, but almost certainly from the Bennett atelier. It actually belongs to her son, Tom, who has waived all rights in it with a generosity that overwhelms me and out of all proportion to this simple little toy which now stands cheerfully on the mantelpiece, one of the few relics I have of my father.

  20 December. I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual. I make no apology for that, nor am I nervous that it will make a jot of difference. I shall still be thought to be kindly, cosy and essentially harmless. I am in the pigeon-hole marked ‘no threat’ and did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear.

  24 December. Watch the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s, broadcast on BBC2. Except that it isn’t Nine Lessons any more but four or five maybe and the rest poems, devotional poems admittedly – Herbert, Drummond, Chesterton – and ones which ‘echo the message of the Gospel’ – but not the Gospels nevertheless and one suspects this is the point: it’s an attempt to make the service less exclusive (or less exclusively Christian), more ‘accessible’ so ends up diluting it. Nor do the readers finish up by saying ‘Thanks be to God’ except when they have been reading from the Bible – which is, I suppose, correct but it’s also a dilution. Aged eight or so, I once had to read a lesson in Christ Church, Upper Armley and was deeply embarrassed at having to end up saying ‘Thanks be to God’. I pretended to forget it and came away from the lectern but was brought back in order to say the obligatory words – so ending up more embarrassed than ever, a connoisseur of embarrassment long before I got into double figures.

  2008

  1 January, Yorkshire. Having felt previously that John Bayley is too much ‘in books’, I am nevertheless cheered by the end of a piece on Larkin in The Power of Delight: ‘His popularity, like that of many great idiosyncratic artists, rests on various sorts of misconception where the critics are concerned, and on the sound unexamined instincts of a more general public.’

  A grey dark day and raining still, as it has been for the last week. Around four it eases off and we walk up by the lake. The waterfall at the top of the village is tumultuous, though the torrent has never been as powerful as it was in 1967 when (perhaps melodramatically) I envisaged the lake dam breaking and engulfing the whole village. The lake itself is always black and sinister, the further cliff falling sheer into the water. It was once more exotically planted than with the pines that grow here now, as the Edwardian botanist Reginald Farrer used to sow the seeds he brought home from the Orient by firing them across the water into the cliff with a shotgun. The church clock is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again.

  8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to carrying a notebook in my pocket in which I used to jot down scraps of overheard conversation, ideas for plays or sketches and (very seldom) thoughts on life. I stopped around 1990, by which time I’d accumulated thirty or so of these little hardbacked books with marbled covers. Today, barren of inspiration or any inclination to do anything better, I start to transcribe and even index them. In the process I’m reminded of one of the reasons I stopped, which was that so little of what I noted down ever found its way into print or into a play, the notebooks becoming a reproach, a cache of unused and probably unusable material and a possible testimony to the sort of thing I really ought to have been writing.

  Some examples:

  ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember).

  A.: I’ve been salmon
fishing.

  B.: It’s not the season.

  A.: No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise.

  ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when she and my father were sitting on the sofa in front of the fire.

  ‘They have one of them dogs that’s never got its snitch out of its backside.’ My father.

  I get a kick out of my stuff being liked abroad … in Italy, for instance, where I always do well and in Germany. Of course the Queen story [The Uncommon Reader] did well everywhere … Taiwan, South America, Iceland … but that was because of the Queen not me.

  It’s always a bonus when young people like me. The History Boys obviously appeals and I can understand that but I wouldn’t have thought Talking Heads would be much liked, though it was a set book for O or A levels, which mightn’t necessarily be in its favour. At that time I used to get lots of letters from school students, questionnaires really, larded with compliments but actually wanting me to do their homework for them. I used to write back telling them to treat me like a dead author and so unavailable for comment. Make it up: nobody would know.

  11 January. To Cambridge, where I talk to students about my medical history. It’s part of a course run by Jonathan Silverman, director of communications at Addenbrooke’s and himself a Cambridgeshire GP. As so often when I’ve spoken in schools I find I’m of more interest to the staff than I am to the students, and I don’t do it very well, haltingly recounting the more noteworthy episodes in my medical life without drawing out many lessons from them. As usual girls ask more questions than boys, though once I point this out the boys kick in. One story I tell is to do with the importance of language. Years ago I saw a specialist about a troublesome knee. Having examined me, he asked whether I had any trouble with my stomach. I hadn’t, but the question was alarming; my knee and my stomach: whatever I’d got must be more widespread than I’d imagined. What in fact the doctor was asking was whether I had a delicate stomach: had he said that, the answer would have been ‘yes’. Given the all-clear he then prescribed Feldene, a vicious anti-inflammatory drug which there was later a campaign to ban after it had killed off numerous pensioners. It wasn’t the doctor’s fault: he’d just phrased his question wrongly. Still, it meant that as a result of the havoc wrought by Feldene I had to be put on the acid-suppressant pills that I’ve been on ever since.