by Alan Bennett
It would be a nice joke if she had ever made it, which she hotly denies and seemingly rightly as today I came across the same joke in a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon by L. Ravenhill, the vehicle the lady was trying to get into then a horse-drawn omnibus.
10 August. Any war that is fought these days, in the Falklands, the Gulf, the Balkans or wherever, must as a matter of course become straight away the subject of tactical analysis, seminars at Sandhurst and a general post-operational picking to pieces. This is for the benefit of both the military and the armaments manufacturers and it is not new. I am reading Alabaster Tombs by Arthur Gardner, who, discussing the representations of fifteenth-century armour on church monuments, writes: ‘It is recorded that after a battle the squires and armourers held a sort of inquest over the bodies of the slain in order to discuss how best to prevent or ward off the blows that had proved fatal in the fray.’ So among the camp followers finishing off the dying and stripping the dead there would be a more purposeful and professional group making notes. And as with the increasingly sophisticated developments in today’s armaments, so the adjustments consequent on these medieval inquests were a mixed blessing: ‘The results of their conclusions were not always satisfactory as armour became so heavy that in some fighting the knights were found dead from exhaustion without any sign of blow or wound.’
Gardner’s book was sent to the publishers in November 1939, and like the excavation at Sutton Hoo earlier that year must have seemed an almost quixotic gesture of faith in permanence and continuity at a time when general destruction was in prospect and alabaster tombs and Saxon burial ships were hardly top priorities.
26 August. Switch on the radio after supper and catch most of Elgar’s First Symphony, music which invariably transports me back to boyhood and walking up Headingley Lane on a summer evening after a concert in Leeds Town Hall. The evocative power of music is, I suppose, greatest when heard in live performance. This is a recording but it still casts a spell because I have come on it by accident. Had I put on the recording myself the spell would have been nowhere near as powerful because self-induced. Why this should be I can’t think, though doubtless Proust would know.
7 September. Alan Clark dies. I never met him, though I saw him once in the street, noting then that he shared a walk with Denis Healey, both of them swinging their arms laterally as they walked in the manner of Soviet soldiery. Except I fancy Clark swung his arms more slowly than Healey, this putting him in a slightly King of the Apes mode.
10 September. Catch part of the revamped Round Britain Quiz, none of the contestants a patch on the team of Eric Korn and Irene Thomas with their personalised and often over-informative answers. There is a question on the trivium, the discipline of the Latin schoolmen, which takes in Oedipus. Had Eric Korn been on the team I’m sure he would have been the one to point out that the earliest recorded victim of road rage must have been Laius, Oedipus’ father.
15 September. Having finished the rewrites on the dramatisation of The Lady in the Van, I begin reading through Larkin for a selection of his poems I have agreed to do for Faber. Instantly I feel like hanging up my pen. Even in the turgid and sometimes incomprehensible early poems phrases demand to be noted (‘even slovenly grief’, ‘the dingy hospital of snow’) so that one’s tempted to include the whole poem, if only to preserve the phrase. Not that Larkin would thank one for saying so (or saying anything), the awareness of his contempt, even though it’s posthumous, a real deterrent.
Cars abandoned by the road nowadays often bear a notice saying ‘Police Aware’. Maybe one could slap ‘Poet Aware’ on a beauty spot or even on some particularly touching vagrant.
1 October. Finish reading The Jew of Linz by Kimberley Cornish, ‘an investigation of what may prove to be the century’s most significant coincidence, the hitherto overlooked fact that its most evil politician (Hitler) and its most brilliant philosopher (Wittgenstein) were at school together’. Not overlooked by me, as it occurs in Kafka’s Dick (1986), where it’s almost thrown away since I assumed, I’m sure rightly, that this wasn’t much of a revelation.
More controversial is Cornish’s assertion that Hitler and Wittgenstein were actual classmates at the Linz Realschule c.1904. This may have been true, but even if they weren’t and were just in the school at the same time it seems likely that Hitler would have heard of the philosopher-to-be, whose schooldays sound to have been pretty disastrous. Socially and intellectually he was a cut above his fellows, while being unhappy for the conventional reasons, not being good at games and so on, and it seems probable that the ‘one Jewish boy’ mentioned early on in Mein Kampf was, as Cornish asserts, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The trouble is Cornish makes his case in such a tendentious and overheated fashion, and utterly without humour, that he invites scepticism. To add to all his other problems the young Wittgenstein had a double rupture so if Hitler really did only have one ball it’s tempting to think of the pair of them behind the bike sheds comparing notes.
Cornish goes on to suggest that (while at Cambridge) Wittgenstein may have been the master spy who recruited for the Soviets, this line of reasoning having much to do with Wittgenstein’s homosexuality. So we have lists of Trinity men who were Apostles, which of them were homosexual and so on, Cornish dodgily assuming, as did Andrew Boyle and John Costello before him, that homosexuality is itself a bond and that if two men can be shown to be homosexual the likelihood is that they’re sleeping together. So we trail down that road looking for cliques and coteries with even G. M. Trevelyan’s sexual credentials called into question because he happens to have recommended the homosexual Guy Burgess for a job at the BBC.
I wonder apropos of this whether hunting the spies would have taken the same turn if it had not been for Lewis Namier. His work on the eighteenth-century Parliament pioneered the study of friendship and connection as the building blocks of eighteenth-century Parliamentary politics, a method that was quickly taken up and adapted for other periods, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries included. Sussing out who slept with whom in the thirties, sex and friendship as a preliminary to recruitment, looks like the Namier method debased, less spy mania than spy Namier.
It’s hard to believe that the author of the Tractatus was a master spy, though not much harder than accommodating to the known fact that he was a big fan of Betty Hutton and Carmen Miranda (Judy Garland one would have understood). And even though Wittgenstein was never big on small talk, he must have been tempted in those dark days of the war to drop the name of his former schoolmate, which he never seems to have done – or not to anyone who mattered. But who knows? Say, when Wittgenstein is doing his stint as a hospital porter at Guy’s and he’s wheeling some wretched casualty of the Blitz back from the operating theatre. Still dozy from the anaesthetic the patient comes round and is alarmed to find the frail porter with the burning eyes bending over him.
‘Air raids nothing,’ he whispers. ‘What do you expect from that Adolf? I used to see him in the playground and he was Mr No-Good then already. Still’ – he spies Matron approaching – ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
11 October. The Larkin selection falls through, a casualty of Larkin’s early connection with George Hartley and the Marvell Press, which originally published The Less Deceived, the rights in which Hartley has understandably hung onto ever since. Sometimes he gives permission for the poems to be reproduced, sometimes not: this time not.
Writing an introduction has forced me, reluctantly, to think about Larkin again. His gloom has to be faced and sometimes, I’ve come to think, faced down. It gets under the skin as Hardy’s never does. Though this may be because he’s our contemporary, it’s also that where melancholy is concerned Larkin is such a missionary. It’s not enough that he sees the world as he does: we must see it, too, and feel as depressed about it.
My perspective on this is of someone who has had to stand on the stage and read the poems, when it becomes a predicament. Declaiming lines like ‘Life is first boredom then fear’ or ‘Courag
e is no good/ It means not scaring others’ and sensing an audience happily concurring, I feel a tart: it’s just giving them a cheap thrill. The despair is too easy.
24 October. In an interview for the Observer this morning Robert McCrum congratulates Michael Frayn on being more of a free spirit than others of his generation, ‘Michael Winner and Alan Bennett being prisoners of their own celebrity’.
Prisoners possibly but I hope we’re not in the same cell.
14 November. Watch part of the Remembrance Day ceremony with the usual mixed feelings, hating the seven-foot-tall, never-cheating, never-doubting generals stalking onto the parade (the Army always harder to take than the Navy) and the hard-faced high-ranking veteran (younger than me, I note) who marches out on behalf of the British Legion. Untelevised is the planting of pink triangles on behalf of the gay dead, the consequence, it seems, of a refusal by both the British Legion and the MoD to allow surviving same-sex partners of the dead to take part in the parade. I find myself out of sympathy with both sides, though more angered by the intransigence of the old guard from whom only a small effort of the imagination is required. The dead would have more sense, a great posthumous shrug the proper answer. (And a shout from somewhere in the ranks of ‘What the fuck does it matter now, anyway?’)
Untelevised, too, is the protest of Mr John Hipkiss, a dedicated Geordie pensioner who is, shamefully, having to campaign for the pardon of those shot for cowardice on the Western Front, and in particular for the boy soldiers who were executed, some as young as sixteen. Shown in tonight’s Everyman programme is Dr John Reid, the Armed Forces Minister who is still managing to pretend that there was some justice in these executions, no doubt because one of the seven-foot-tall generals in the MoD has bullied him into compliance. So Dr Reid presumably knows more about cowardice than some of the boys who were shot. Shown on the programme is one of the death sentences passed by a court martial on a seventeen-year-old carrying with it a recommendation of mercy. Except that the recommendation is personally countermanded by Field Marshal Earl Haig, that old brute whose descendants are still (despite his earldom, his country estate and a grateful nation’s pension) complaining how unfairly history has treated their papa.
18 November. In one of the scenes in The Lady in the Van Nicholas Farrell, playing me, is briefly interviewed at home by a visiting journalist, the scene beginning with her returning from the loo and saying: ‘Pictures in the lavatory! That to me spells civilisation!’
Watching today’s dress rehearsal at the Queen’s through a haze of flu, I think I hear: ‘Victor’s in the lavatory! That to me spells civilisation!’
Well, I fluily think, it could have been, as this was in 1974 and at the time V. S. Pritchett was living round the corner and I suppose the presence of our leading literary critic and short-story writer in one’s loo would testify to some degree of sophistication. Or, I doze, perhaps there’s no apostrophe and it’s ‘Victors in the lavatory!’ – a successful skirmish in the war against constipation, a war Miss Shepherd fought virtually on my doorstep.
Meanwhile the play has moved on and Maggie Smith as Miss Shepherd is now driving the van onto the stage and as it were into my garden. That I can’t actually recall this happening I put down to my assumption that it was only going to be for three months. Had I known at the time that it would be for fifteen years the moment must surely have etched itself on my memory.
25 November. Multiplied on the stage I now seem to be multiplying in life. At rehearsal today Ben Aris, who plays Miss Shepherd’s brother, asks me about my time as a chorister at King’s, Cambridge, some of my memories of which are printed in December’s Gramophone. He shows me the magazine and there is my photograph and an account of my time as a chorister (and indeed senior chorister) from 1937 to 1941 when, nothing if not precocious, I would have been all of three years old. It turns out to be a mix-up between words and pictures: there is an Alan Bennett, an ex-chorister whose reminiscences these are, and seeing the name, the picture editor has slapped on my photograph. I imagine the singing Alan Bennett gets more grief from his name than I do but it does leave me with a small regret as I would have liked to have taken part in the ceremony of the Nine Lessons and Carols during the darkest days of the war along with Dadie Rylands, perhaps, E. M. Forster and Maynard Keynes. As it was, come 1941 and all I was doing was giving my shepherd abiding in the fields in the Upper Armley National School nativity play.
27 November. The wife of Nicholas Farrell is having a baby and it had been agreed before rehearsals started that he should have time off to attend the birth. This ought to have been a fortnight ago, well before the start of previews, but the baby is overdue and labour began last night and looks like going on throughout the afternoon. His understudy has had no chance to rehearse and I therefore go on with the book at the matinee and play myself.
It’s a salutary experience. I tend to underestimate the energy required by acting, my own efforts on the stage fitting well with Gerald du Maurier’s definition of acting as ‘overpaid casual labour’. I stand at the van door, a foot or so from Maggie Smith, who is in full flow, her face working, her eyes popping, grimy hands clenching and unclenching, and the force and energy coming off her so palpable that were I not required to stand there in the script I would certainly move back out of range. I am thankful I have the book to shield me and let me occasionally look away from this fierce, demented, deluded woman.
In other respects the performance seems gentler than normal with Kevin McNally, who plays my other half, often putting his hand on my shoulder or stroking my back. This is an illusion. The arm round my shoulder grips me with fingers of steel and steers me to where I should be standing on the stage and the stroking of the back firmly pushes me out of the way.
Luckily it is not an experience I have to repeat as Baby Farrell has been born just as the curtain goes up for the matinee and her proud father is back on stage for the evening performance.
11 December. Tidy my desk, going through piles of paper accumulated during the rewrites and rehearsals of The Lady in the Van and feeling, as I often do when a play has been mounted, that it’s slightly to the side of the play I wanted to write and that, now it’s on, here among the cuts and alterations is the real play.
There are odd lines I have forgotten to include. ‘I know the difference between urine and honeysuckle’ (my anguished retort when Miss S. attributed the smell from the van to the creeper on my neighbour’s wall) and a remark of my mother’s: ‘By, you’ve had some script out of me!’ I find a note about my fear of Catholic churches as a boy, which I always entered warily and with some sense of a spell cast. They were exotic places, tasteless and vulgar, the incense and images and explicit devotion making me nervous of stopping long in such an idolatrous lair.
‘Try and get some silliness in’ is another note.
And a vision of Miss Shepherd on some dream outing, stood sentinel by her van on top of the Sussex Downs. The light shafts through the clouds and she gazes across the Channel like a figure from a Shell poster in the pioneer days of motoring.
2000
5 January. A lorry delivers some stone lintels at No. 61. The driver is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading, she humps pallets up and down the lorry and does everything a male (and younger) lorry driver would do, with only a certain doggedness to her actions an indication of her gender. One or two passers-by look twice and a neighbour posting a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job.
8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I used to take into Cambridge when I was doing National Service. These days, the populousness of the place apart, the big difference is not being able to wander at will, ‘The college is closed to visitors’ always o
n the gate. By luck we manage to get into Trinity and Trinity Great Court, which R. has never seen and which still seems to me one of the sights of Europe. The chapel is notable chiefly for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like.
We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one of his voluptuous court ladies, compared to which it’s almost a sketch with Laud looking tetchy and impatient, as if resentful of having to spend time on such fripperies. He looks entirely humourless and more administrator than cleric with no hint of the beauty of holiness. But scrappy and almost unfinished, it’s a superb character study; why it wasn’t in the recent RA exhibition is hard to understand.
17 January. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker Bowles come to The Lady in the Van. Normally royalty is guaranteed to put a frost on an audience but their presence peps things up and it’s a very good house. This is because, unlike most royal persons, the Prince of Wales actually laughs and loudly too and so gets the audience going. Their arrival at the theatre comes shortly after that of Barry Manilow, who is puzzled to find press and paparazzi abruptly deserting him as they go in pursuit of grander quarry. The Prince is very enthusiastic about the play when he goes round afterwards, though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’
19 January. I know very little opera, the few operas I have seen, mostly when I was a boy, consisting of those productions that occasionally turned up at Leeds Grand Theatre when put on by the touring company of Covent Garden or the Carl Rosa. Thus in one week in 1951 I saw Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim’s Progress and La Bohème. None of these bowled me over, but standing in the gallery at the Grand again in 1951 I heard Der Rosenkavalier for the first time (and saw it for the only time) and I felt I had known the music all my life. It was so hot at the top of the theatre that the gold paint from the guard rail came off on my hands.
