Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 2

by Alan Bennett

  Father Don’t go. I want you to test me. Ask me any question you want about this Czech novelist or his father. I think you’ll find it’s all at my fingertips.

  Hermann Κ What was his father like?

  Father Dreadful. And a shocking bully. Made his son’s life a misery. The root of all the trouble. Is that right? It is. Ten out of ten. Father goes to the top of the class. Now at last I can reveal the name of the Prime Minister …

  Hermann Κ Sorry.

  Father What?

  Hermann Κ You’re wrong.

  Father I never am. I looked in all the books.

  Hermann Κ The books are wrong. Kafka’s father was a normal parent.

  Father A normal parent? How am I expected to remember a normal parent: I’m a normal parent. Nobody remembers me.

  Hermann Κ He was an average father.

  Father But the world’s full of average fathers. Average fathers are two a penny. An average father? I’m never going to remember that.

  Father goes off leaving Hermann K pensive.

  Hermann K Hermann Kafka, you want your head examining. You’re trying to come over as a nice parent and get into all the books. What for? Nice parents don’t get into the books. With nice parents there are no books.

  Kafka enters.

  Listen, son. A change of plan. I want you to do as I tell you.

  Kafka Haven’t you finished torturing me? You’ve destroyed my character, lost me my best friend …

  Hermann Κ And now I’m going to do you a good turn.

  Kafka No, please. Not that. Not a good turn.

  Hermann Κ Can I have your attention please? That’s everybody.

  Father returns to the stage.

  No, not you.

  Father You said everybody.

  Hermann Κ I mean everybody who matters.

  Father exits again as Linda, Sydney and Brod enter.

  Linda Do we matter?

  Sydney (with his manuscript) We certainly do. This isn’t just an article, Linda. It’s going to be a book. And when it’s finished I shall dedicate it to you.

  Linda Yes? To the wall on which I bounced my ball. To the tree against which I cocked my leg.

  Sydney Linda. I shan’t be an insurance man any more. I shall be a literary figure. You’ll be the wife of a famous man.

  Hermann Κ (gleefully) Oh no she won’t.

  Sydney Well, not famous exactly, but …

  Hermann Κ Not famous at all. Because there isn’t going to be an article. There isn’t going to be a book.

  Sydney But… why not?

  Hermann Κ Because I’ve decided to come clean. I’m every bit as bad as the books make me out. Worse.

  Sydney I don’t understand.

  Hermann Κ You’re an insurance man. You must be familiar with false claims. This was a false claim. Both parties were lying.

  Kafka Father.

  Hermann Κ Shut your face, you wet dishcloth.

  Linda I knew you were lying.

  Sydney But why deceive me?

  Hermann Κ I’m human. Just. I wanted to be liked.

  Linda But why did you lie?

  Hermann Κ Blackmail.

  Kafka Dad!

  Hermann Κ Don’t you Dad me, you dismal Jimmy. Do you want to know how I made him toe the line?

  Kafka You promised!

  Hermann Κ You know me: I’m your terrible father. When did I ever keep a promise? Besides, I owe it to posterity. I don’t know how to put this delicately …

  Brod It’s never been a problem before.

  Kafka puts his hands over his ears.

  Hermann K The long and short of it is: my son is ashamed of his old man.

  Brod We know that. That’s what all the books say, starting with mine.

  Hermann Κ No, not me. He’s ashamed of his old man.

  Kafka Don’t listen. Please don’t listen.

  Hermann Κ Putting it bluntly: his old man doesn’t compare with his old man’s old man. His. Mine. (He makes an unequivocal gesture.)

  Sydney But I know that. Everyone knows that.

  Linda Even I know that.

  Kafka You? How?

  Sydney (finding the book) Dreams, Life and Literature. A study of Kafka by Hall and Lind, University Press, North Carolina.

  Linda So you see, your private parts have long been public property.

  Kafka He’s won again. When will it ever stop?

  Hermann Κ Stop? Stop? Mr World Famous Writer with the Small Dick, it won’t ever stop. Literature goes on. You are one of its big heroes and I am one of its small villains.

  Linda I’m a little confused.

  Brod That’s nothing fresh.

  Linda You didn’t like your son?

  Hermann Κ No.

  Linda But then you said you did.

  Hermann Κ Yes.

  Linda And now you say you didn’t.

  Hermann Κ Yes.

  Linda Sydney. (Pause.) Is that what they mean by Kafka- esque?

  Hermann Κ I thought I wanted to be a good father.

  Linda Yes.

  Hermann Κ Now I don’t.

  Linda Why?

  Hermann Κ Because, snowdrop, a good father is a father you forget.

  Brod You had a good father. You haven’t forgotten him.

  Hermann Κ I have.

  Brod But he could …

  Linda and Hermann Κ (together) … lift a sack of potatoes with his teeth.

  Hermann Κ Yes. But that’s all I can remember about him. Whereas bad fathers are never forgotten. They jump out of the wardrobe. They hide under the bed. They come on as policemen. Sons never get rid of them. So long as my son’s famous, I’m famous. I figure in all the biographies, I get invited to all the parties. I’m a bad father, so I’m in the text.

  Brod Same old Hermann.

  Hermann Κ Anyway I couldn’t change things now. My accountant would never forgive me.

  Hermann Κ goes.

  Father enters, just missing Hermann K.

  Father Has he gone? Damn. I was wanting to bring him abreast of the latest turnaround in Kafka studies. Whereas we have all been brought up to suppose that Kafka and his father were at daggers drawn, recent research has been revealed that they both got on famously.

  Brod Wrong.

  Father You can’t have me taken away when I’m in touch with the latest developments in Kafka studies. What did you say?

  Linda You’re wrong.

  Father No. No. You’re trying to confuse me. They were like you and me – friends.

  Sydney No, Dad. They couldn’t stand one another.

  Father I give up. Put me away. My limited studies of Kafka have convinced me that being a vegetable is not without its attractions.

  He retires.

  Kafka Thank God I was never a father. It’s the one achievement nobody can take away.

  Brod You don’t need to have children in order to be a father. You were so dedicated to writing, so set on expressing yourself even if it killed you, which it eventually did, that, like the best and worst of fathers you have been an example and a reproach to writers ever since. (Meaning Sydney.) Take him. He loves you. He hates you. So do I.

  Linda You’re not sorry?

  Brod How should I be sorry? If I hadn’t been Kafka’s friend I wouldn’t have been in the play.

  Sydney If you hadn’t been Kafka’s friend there would have been no play. There would have been no Kafka.

  Kafka is about to speak.

  Brod Now don’t say it.

  Kafka puts his hand on Brod’s shoulder and smiles.

  Be content. We will meet at that posthumous cocktail party, posterity.

  Brod goes.

  Kafka Shall we see you there?

  Linda Who says we’ll be invited?

  Sydney (picking up the manuscript) This is our invitation.

  Linda Is it? Fifteen thousand books and articles about Kafka. What’s one more? Poor Sydney. Anyway you hate parties.

  Sydney This one might have been d
ifferent.

  Linda That’s what one always thinks, every, every time.

  Kafka You are so like Dora.

  Linda Enjoy yourself. Be miserable.

  Kafka I will. You know me.

  They touch fingers as they touched before.

  Kafka vanishes.

  Sydney You see, try as we will, we can never quite touch Kafka. He always eludes us. We never do know him.

  Linda I know him better than you.

  Sydney Really? So what’s this? (He takes the quiche out of the bookcase.)

  Linda (hurt) His lunch. My quiche. Oh, Sydney.

  Sydney (consoling her) I’ll eat it.

  They share it.

  Linda Who was Dora?

  Sydney His last girlfriend. The only one who made him happy. She got him to eat, wrap up warm. Nursed him, I suppose. She wasn’t interested in his work at all. When he told her to burn some of it, she did. (Pause.) You’d better burn this, I suppose.

  Linda Are you sure?

  Sydney Yes.

  She gathers it up briskly and is going.

  Wait. What do you think?

  Linda Since when does it matter what I think? (She is going again.)

  Sydney Linda. Do you think I should burn it?

  Linda How do I know? I haven’t read it.

  Sydney Will you read it?

  Linda That depends. I may not have time. Now Father’s off our hands I’m going back to nursing. (Pause.) Anyway I couldn’t have burned it.

  Sydney is touched. She hands back the manuscript.

  We’re in a smokeless zone.

  Sydney You’re not stupid.

  Linda No. After all, I know that Auden never wore underpants and Mr Right for Ε. Μ. Forster was an Egyptian tramdriver. Only some day I’ll learn the bits in between.

  Sydney (a cry of despair) Oh Linda. There’s no need. This is England. In England facts like that pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect.

  Linda What I don’t understand, she said, like the secretary in the detective story when the loose ends are being tied up, what I still don’t understand is why people are so interested in a writer’s life in the first place.

  Sydney You like fairy stories.

  Linda If they have happy endings.

  Sydney This one does, every, every time. We are reading a book. A novel, say, or a book of short stories. It interests us because it is new, because it is … novel, so we read on. And yet in what we call our heart of hearts (which is the part that is heartless) we know that like children we prefer the familiar stories, the tales we have been told before. And there is one story we never fail to like because it is always the same. The myth of the artist’s life. How one struggled for years against poverty and indifference only to die and find himself famous. Another is a prodigy finding his way straight to the public’s heart to be loved and celebrated while still young, but paying the price by dying and being forgotten. Or just dying.

  During the following the Lights concentrate on Sydney and music starts in the distance.

  This one is a hermit, that one a hellraiser but the myth can accommodate them all, no variation on it but it is familiar even to someone who has never read a book. He plunges from a bridge and she hits the bottle. Both of them paid. That is the myth. Art is not a gift, it is a transaction, and somewhere an account has to be settled. It may be in the gas oven, in front of a train or even at the altar but on this side of the grave or that settled it must be. We like to be told, you see, that you can’t win. We prefer artists to die poor and forgotten, like Rembrandt, Mozart or Beethoven, none of whom did, quite. One reason why Kafka is so celebrated is because his life conforms in every particular to what we have convinced ourselves an artist’s life should be. Destined to write he dispenses with love, with fame and finally with life itself so that it seems at the last he has utterly failed. But we know that in the fairy story this is what always happens to the hero just before his ultimate triumph. It is not the end.

  Sydney and Linda go.

  As the Lights come up we are in Heaven, which is a big party going on offstage.

  Kafka enters through the french windows, which have become the Pearly Gates, and finds the Recording Angel, played by Brod.

  Kafka I don’t know what I’m doing here. I shouldn’t be in Heaven.

  Angel Good. That proves you’re in the right place.

  Kafka I don’t feel I deserve it.

  Angel That proves you do. The worse you feel, the better you are, that’s the celestial construct.

  Kafka Will I be allowed to be as despairing here as I was on earth?

  Angel You can be as gloomy as you like so long as it makes you happy. Look at Ibsen. He can just about manage a smile for Strindberg but nobody else. Now who don’t you know? The gentleman over there with the shocking beard, that’s Dostoevsky. Who’s he talking to? Oh. Noël Coward! They’ve got a lot of ground to cover. There’s Wittgenstein and Betty Hutton. Got it together at last! There’s Proust (Hi, Marcel!) trying to con one of the waiters into making him a cup of tea so that he can do his act. (Kissy kissy!) Oh, and there’s the Virgin Mary.

  Kafka She looks sad.

  Angel She never got over not having grandchildren. I say to her, well, look on the bright side. What about Gothic architecture? With two thousand years of Christianity to your credit what are grandchildren? But, as she said to me in a moment of confidence, ‘You can’t knit bootees for the Nicene Creed.’

  Kafka Are there Jews here?

  Angel Mais oui! In droves.

  Kafka And there’s no quota?

  Angel Not officially. Though God is quite keen on them, naturally.

  Kafka I was fond of animals. Are they here?

  Angel Sorry, love. No animals. Well, they don’t have a moral life.

  Kafka No mice, beetles or birds?

  Angel No. But if St Francis of Assisi can get used to it, I’m sure you can. You didn’t really like them anyway. They were only metaphors. No metaphors here. No allegory. And nobody says ‘hopefully’ or ‘at the end of the day’ or ‘at this moment in time’. We’re in a presence of God situation here, you see. Talk of the Devil here comes God.

  God (who is, of course, Hermann K) enters.

  God My son!

  Kafka Who are you?

  God Well, I’m all sorts of things. The BBC, Harrods. The Oxford English Dictionary. The Queen. The Ordnance Survey Map. Anything with a bit of authority really.

  Kafka You’re my father.

  God Of course. What did you expect? Enjoying yourself?

  Kafka No. It’s like a terrible party.

  God It is a party. And I’m the Host. (He should plainly be itching to dance, looking over his son’s shoulder and waving at other (invisible) guests, all the time he’s talking.) There’s Gandhi. Go easy on the cheese straws, Mahatma! You’re going to have to watch that waistline! Can you dance?

  Kafka No.

  God I can. Mind you, I can do everything. Nuclear physics, the samba … it’s all one to me.

  Kafka Oh God.

  God Yes? Come on. Just be happy you’re invited. I bet you never thought you’d see Leonard Woolf doing the cha- cha.

  Sydney crosses.

  Sydney I’m not doing the cha-cha. It’s Virginia. She’s just put a hot cocktail sausage down my neck.

  God (calling after them) You could have fooled me, Len. He couldn’t of course. I know it all.

  Kafka Father. Did you ever get round to reading my books?

  God Are you still on about that? No, of course not. No fiction here anyway. No writing. No literature. No art. No need. After all what were they? Echoes, imitations. This is the real thing. Son. Try not to disappoint me this time. And there’s no shortage of time. We’re here for ever, you and me.

  Kafka Yes, Father.

  God Listen, unless I’m very much mistaken (and that’s a theological nonsense) that sounds to me like the rumba and I’ve promised it to Nurse Cavell.

  Linda comes on in a nurse�
�s costume but with a Carmen Miranda headgear.

  Kafka Nurse Cavell didn’t look like Carmen Miranda.

  God I know. Why do you think they shot her?

  Father has come on playing the maracas.

  And now, as the magic fingers of Bertrand Russell beat out a mad mazurka on the maracas, I must go and move in my well-known mysterious way. Ciao, son.

  Kafka Ciao, Father.

  The music swells as God and Carmen Miranda dance.

  The stage is suddenly dark and Kafka comes forward.

  I’ll tell you something. Heaven is going to be hell.

  Curtain

  THE INSURANCE MAN

  Diary: July–August 1985

  The Insurance Man is set in Prague. It begins in 1945 with the city on the eve of liberation by the Russians, though the main events of the story, told in flashback, take place before the First World War. The film was shot in Bradford, where every other script I’ve written seems to have been shot, and also in Liverpool, a city I didn’t know and had never worked in. Bradford was chosen because among the few buildings the city has elected to preserve are some nineteenth-century warehouses behind the cathedral. From the nationality of the merchants originally trading there this neighbourhood is known locally as Little Germany. The trade has gone but the buildings remain, the exteriors now washed and sandblasted but the interiors much as they were when the last bolt of cloth was despatched in the 1960s. Liverpool likewise has many empty buildings and for the same reason, and there we had an even wider choice. I found both places depressing, Liverpool in particular. Work though it is, a play, however serious, is play, and play seems tactless where there is no work.

  Tuesday, 9 July, Connaught Rooms, Bradford These masonic chambers on what’s left of Manningham Lane serve as part of the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, the office in Prague where Kafka was a conscientious and well-thought-of executive. It is only the first day of shooting and already I feel somewhat spare. We are filming scenes in the lift, which is just large enough to contain the actors and the camera crew. There’s no hope of hearing the dialogue so I sit on a window sill and read, wishing, after writing nearly a score of films, that I didn’t still feel it necessary to be in attendance at the birth. Just below where we are filming is Valley Parade, Bradford City’s football ground where two months ago dozens of fans perished in a fire. Glance down a back street and there is the blackened gateway.