Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  She had faced death with her usual lack of fuss, writing to me in August: ‘I have taken to my bed hence perculiar [sic] writing. I wish Alec were here to read that bit’ – her spelling always caused him pain – ‘I think I shall stay in my bed now for the duration. It saves a lot of trouble.’

  She made it, as she had wanted, to her eighty-sixth birthday. It was two days before she died and with the dogs strewn across her bed she raised a glass of champagne, saying, ‘Chin, chin.’

  28 October. Cutting across from the M40 to Chipping Norton, we find ourselves passing the road to Rousham. Surprisingly this wet Saturday the gardens are open though apart from a young Japanese couple, who look to be honeymooners, we are the only visitors. We find a summer house by the bowling green, where we eat our sandwiches, then wander round the kitchen garden. The house itself is quite bleak and the garden front, grey and sash-windowed, and altered in the nineteenth century, almost institutional. The gardens are by William Kent but what delights is less the design than the beautiful cambered yew hedges (and hedges inside hedges and doors in walls that open onto hedges). In another kitchen garden is a pigeon house dated 1683, with an espaliered pear growing round it and doves and pigeons still in residence.

  14 November. Alan Tyson has died. Of his work in psychoanalysis and musicology I know nothing and even his jokes and his silliness only by report. But he was good value and known to be. Once in the 1980s he rang the LRB and, passing on the call, someone said: ‘How long before he makes his first pun?’ It was in the first sentence. ‘Hello! And what is it this morning, belles lettres or Belgrano?’

  18 November. Various letters about Telling Tales, some of them chiding me for putting Francis L. Sullivan alongside Leslie Howard in Escape to Happiness when it should have been in Pimpernel Smith. It might as well have been 49th Parallel so far as my memory is concerned as all the escape films of the early 1940s have run together in my mind. I had mentioned that I once saw Sullivan walking down Thornton’s Arcade in Leeds some time during the war, a progress that was of necessity stately on account of his bulk and made more impressive by a camel-hair overcoat slung over his shoulders. The coat as cloak (and particularly a camel-hair coat) was standard dress, at any rate in the provinces, for anyone who wished to come on as ‘artistic’. I seem to remember Anton Walbrook similarly garbed as the impresario in The Red Shoes, though I’ll probably be deluged with letters telling me it was in Dangerous Moonlight.

  1 December, New York. We go up to the Dakota to look at Sydney W.’ s apartment. A group of middle-aged tourists on the other side of the street are being talked through the Dakota’s history.

  ‘Too old for John Lennon,’ I think, whose anniversary is coming up, but of course these dumpy middle-aged women in their plastic rainhoods and their pork-pie-hatted husbands are his contemporaries. Not a speck of dust on the immaculate driveway on this building that I last went into nearly forty years ago for a party given for Judy Garland. She obligingly performed, to be followed after she had left by a drunken Shelley Winters, who lurched to her feet saying, ‘I’m now going to sing ya all the songs Judy never sang’, and launched into some striptease numbers. The saddest person there was Judy Holliday whom I tried to talk to but could think of nothing else to say other than how much I’d loved her in Born Yesterday, which was one of the reasons, presumably, why she was sad in the first place.

  3 December, New York. I had forgotten how bleak American theatres are, the auditoriums seldom carpeted or even warm, the lobbies grey and functional and with none of that gilded Edwardian extravagance that frames the theatrical experience in England. One reason Americans go on about English theatre is just that it’s comfier. It’s a ballet we’re seeing and to piped music, the dancers doing a good deal of running about as much to keep warm as anything else as I can’t see a lot of artistry to it and with not even a smile. At the first interval we escape and join the crowds strolling down Fifth Avenue looking at the lights this Saturday night. The open-air skating rink is crowded. Most of the skaters are proficient except for one young businessman, who looks as if he’s come straight from the office (carrying his briefcase): he knows how to skate but not how to stop so just has to sail straight for the barrier, thereby causing havoc. It’s bitterly cold but the atmosphere is friendly and festive as it wouldn’t be, I’m sure, on Oxford Street; people’s faces are lit up and excited with no evidence of the famous surliness of New Yorkers, only pleasure and, I suppose, pride. Besides which nobody is drunk or even drinking.

  I notice this again on Sunday when we cut through the main hall of Grand Central en route for Brooks Bros. The coved ceiling has been rigged for a Christmas laser show and travellers are standing about the vast hall gazing up at the lights flickering and dancing across the roof. And again there is that sense of fun and occasion so seldom generated in London except when licensed by the passage of royalty.

  10 December. Watch the last of Richard Eyre’s Changing Stages, which readily concedes that the stage for most people nowadays is big musicals and that whatever the magic of theatre might be for Peter Brook, say, to the average theatre-goer it’s Cats or Phantom of the Opera.

  I don’t have many theories about what theatre is or what a play should be, never having got much beyond the notion of a play as a journey, even if it’s only from A to B. And it would be comforting to be able to grade plays in terms of the distance travelled, particularly if at the lower end of the scale were the plays and musicals on in the West End and at the top end productions at the subsidised theatre and on the fringe.

  But this is far from being the case and an audience at Edward Bond can sometimes travel no further in its head than the audience at Cats. Last year I went to a matinee of Theatre de Complicite’s Street of Crocodiles where the audience were all fans and a journey that should have taken place in the theatre that afternoon had happened long before.

  In part this comes about because the role of the audience has altered in the last twenty years and been infected by the pop concert. There the fans make themselves part of the event, helping to create the experience they have come to see. And so it is more and more with the theatre. Which is fine if you’re in that particular club but if you’re not (as I wasn’t at Street of Crocodiles) and have just come to see the play it can be pretty depressing.

  Peter Brook thinks, I imagine, that he is immune from such tendencies, and that his audience is a blank canvas; that he purveys a purer theatre. I doubt this or that his audience comes with fewer preconceptions than go to other productions. Give him an audience that thinks it’s going to see Ray Cooney and he would be put to the test. As it is, an audience goes to Brook expecting magic and gets it – just as a different audience does from Andrew Lloyd Webber. I’d just like to see those audiences switched round; that would be real theatre.

  23 December. A good documentary on Channel 4 about Humphrey Jennings in which one of the conclusions is that Jennings’s work deserves consideration because at a time when we are uncertain of our identity it helps to tell us who we are (or were).

  Over the credits the next programme is announced, self-examination as it has since become: yet another round-up of the Big Brother series. No irony, I imagine, is intended.

  2001

  8 January. Note how personalised and peopled the material world is at a level almost beneath scrutiny. I’m thinking of the cutlery in the drawer or the crockery I every morning empty from the dishwasher. Some wooden spoons, for instance, I like, think of as friendly; others are impersonal or without character. Some bowls are favourites; others I have no feeling for at all. There is a friendly fork, a bad knife and a blue and white plate that is thicker than the others which I think of as taking the kick if I discriminate against it by using it less.

  Set down this seems close to insanity but it goes back to childhood when the entire household was populated with friends and not-friends and few objects were altogether inanimate, particularly knives and forks. Both shoe brushes had characters, the bad brush with w
hich the polish was put on, the good brush that brought out the shine. This was true of clothes, too, with a patchwork blouse I had to wear as a toddler thought of as unfriendly and which I always disliked. Sticks had characters, too, and cushions. Sixty years later more traces of this animistic world persist than I would like, making a mockery of reason and sense.

  23 February. To look at a house in Sharpleshall Street. It isn’t right but, empty though it is, still has lots of interesting books lying about which I have to resist looking at. There is some furniture, too, heavy William IV stuff, and dominating the ground-floor front room (which might once have been a shop) is a huge formal portrait of Lord Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor who plays a part in The Madness of George III. It’s in a frame with a coronet built into it which suggests it may have been one of a series or hung once in the Inns of Court. When we were making the film of George III there was some thought that Alec Guinness might play Thurlow and as part of the wooing process that one always had to go through with Alec we went to Windsor to look at the Lawrence portrait of Thurlow in the Royal Collection. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as this less ‘artistic’ one which might have taken A.G.’ s fancy as the Lawrence portrait didn’t. Still, it’s odd to find Thurlow installed in this empty house so close to where Nicholas Hytner and myself both live. I ask David Burkett, the estate agent, how it comes to be there and he thinks it may have been an ex-stage prop from the Old Vic. Thurlow isn’t someone I’d want to import into my front room. House priced at £1m.

  24 February. Larkin’s companion, Monica Jones, dies; met once, the only time I met Larkin, at his sixtieth birthday party at Faber. I cut out her obituary and ‘tip it’, as booksellers say, into Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin, reflecting that ‘Tipping In’ would be a good title for a Larkin poem, with its implications of a life completed and reduced to a few columns of newsprint, the sort of subject he might have picked up on. While, of course, resenting that you would think this was the sort of subject he might have picked up on. To be tipped into a life of Larkin, though, was what Monica Jones feared her fate was always likely to be.

  Condemning some unfortunate for a sex crime yesterday, a judge uses the word ‘loins’ … ‘with lust in your loins’, I think it was. I’d have him off the bench for that alone. Bad language, I suppose.

  25 February. To Yarnton on the outskirts of Oxford. Have our sandwiches in the warm sunshine on the edge of an empty undulating road running over to Woodstock, with the primroses already out. Yarnton Church is at the gates of what was Colonel Kolkhorst’s manor house, which is a little too neat now and with more of the conference centre about it than it presumably had when Betjeman used to come here as an undergraduate.

  The church itself is a delight, seemingly the pet project of the eighteenth-century Oxford antiquarian Alderman Fletcher, who is buried here in a tomb rescued from the ruins of Godstow Priory. He filled the windows with his collection of medieval glass, some of it superb, including one window with fragments of medieval birds straight out of Edward Lear. There are other artefacts including a series of fine Nottingham alabaster panels disinterred from St Peter in the East; no traces of colour left but the detail of the carving sharp and fresh down to the points of the Magi’s crown and the fold of the donkey’s ears. Almost uniquely for me I experience a warmth towards this Alderman Fletcher of whom I’ve never heard and dead now 200 years, whose eccentric enthusiasm preserved all this to give us such pleasure this sunny February afternoon.

  6 March. Catch Sean Rafferty on Radio 3 talking to the 101-year-old Mary Ellis, Ivor Novello’s leading lady (Novello dead fifty years ago today). She’s bright as a button with brisk, common-sense opinions and is, as she points out herself, entirely unimpressed by glamour, of which, of course, Novello had a hefty dose. But she points out how it was the combination of Novello’s looks and his tunefulness that got him underestimated so that he became a joke, as she says, almost to his face when he was much more of an artist than he was ever given credit for.

  9 March, Venice, Palazzo S. Justina. We arrive in torrential rain, all the bells having rung half an hour before to warn of rapidly rising water so that the taxi bringing us from the airport cannot get under the bridges and leaves us in the Campo S. Justina huddled under umbrellas. Here Luigi, a lovely elegant English-sports-coated and flannelled Italian young man rescues us and takes us to the Palazzo … which is indeed a Palazzo and not the glorified boarding house I feared it might be. In the courtyard indeed is an arcaded staircase like the Ca D’Oro, broad shallow steps leading up to the piano nobile, where in the warm dining room are set out rice and meatballs, a takeaway from Harry’s Bar. And it’s cosy, comfortable and friendly and all the things I’d feared its grandeur would preclude.

  10 March. R. is doing a recce for a feature on a creeper-covered house built in the fifties next to the Salute, but first we go to what is not much more than a cottage in an alley near the Palazzo Grassi. This belongs to the Sitwells and houses some of the furniture from Montegufoni, Sir George Sitwell’s Tuscan castello that features in Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography. And house the furniture is about all it manages to do as it’s a tiny place, the furniture vastly too large for the rooms so that one wonders how they managed to cram it all in. There are huge gilt four-poster beds, caissons and sideboards in these odd up and down little rooms which I suppose are part of some holiday home but which exude gloom. I’ve never seen R. in action, as it were, and it’s interesting that, though he doesn’t care for it himself, he looks for ways in which an article can be made out of it … close-up shots of the elaborate beds, for instance, with some sort of view through an open door behind; details of some marquetry; a view of the tiny roof garden. Still, it’s a relief when we finish and are cruising back down the Grand Canal to the Salute.

  Marvel at the Viking graffiti on the flanks of the left-hand lion outside the Arsenal, looted by the Venetians complete with graffiti from Athens in the seventeenth century. The graffiti were only recognised for what they were (and translated) by some visiting Danish dignitaries in the nineteenth century. I hope the left-hand lion is the right one as the graffiti is very blurred and more graffiti has been added since, notably a painted D on the chest. But it’s the right-hand lion that looks the most ancient and the most Greek (or Cretan anyway). Still, I run my hands over the supposed runes and marvel.

  Spend Saturday morning scouring Venice for a shop where R. can buy the chocolate-brown Wellington boots he sees everybody wearing. (‘How do I say, Do you have a pair with the little yellow stripe?’)

  While in Venice read Simon Gray’s Enter a Fox, his account of how his plays get (or don’t get) produced. He sent The Late Middle Classes to Trevor Nunn at the National when after a lengthy delay he got a letter back in which Nunn explained his reasons for turning the play down, in spite of his having enjoyed reading it. No, not in spite of … that was actually his reason for turning it down, that he’d enjoyed reading it – indeed so enjoyed reading it that he was convinced it didn’t need ‘the production environment of the National’. This was approximately the same letter I had thirty-odd years ago from the National (or the Old Vic as it was still) from Kenneth Tynan. I suspect it’s a stock excuse for the subsidised theatres and one that comes readily to hand. ‘You don’t realise what a good play it is you’ve written! It’s commercial!’ Whereas if it was truly commercial the National would snap it up straight away.

  17 March. The OED is appealing for help in finding the earliest use of, among others, phrases like ‘I could murder a curry’, the earliest date they have at the moment being 1986.

  I don’t know about curry but ‘I could murder a (whatever)’ was a phrase certainly current in Blackburn in the late sixties and early seventies. On holiday in Bardolino in 1972 a group of us made an expedition to Padua which proved barren of tea shops, my friend Madge Hindle (who is from Blackburn) scouring its ancient precincts saying, ‘I could murder a Kunzle cake.’ There may be some hesitation about including this as a reference point
in the OED as it might involve explaining what a Kunzle cake was, namely what in the north is called ‘a fancy’ … a small rectangular individual iced cake, plentifully layered with cream. Kunzle cakes were wrapped in cellophane to make them long-life versions of fancies and were thought rather superior and on sale, for instance, at Fuller’s tea shops alongside their (much more delicious) walnut cake. Who or what Kunzle was I have no idea but the cakes (and Fuller’s) disappeared c.1980, or maybe earlier. They were certainly not to be had in Padua in 1972. The OED is welcome to this information.

  24 March, Inverary. Sophistication hasn’t reached this corner of Scotland. At Inverary, a pretty and, I imagine, fairly tourist-ridden place, we go into one of the half-dozen or so cafés. Gourmets should not make a beeline for the Paddle Wheel where there is a blackboard advertising the menu, which includes toast and (a separate item) baked beans. I ask for baked beans on toast. ‘We don’t do baked beans on toast,’ says the unsmiling girl. ‘But you do baked beans?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And toast?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘But not baked beans on toast?’ ‘No.’ I can’t help laughing but she doesn’t see this as a joke. There are two courses open … to order toast and baked beans and combine them under one’s own steam, as it were, or to take our custom elsewhere, which we do, ending up in an equally dispiriting establishment trying to eat a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich. ‘Could I have it on brown bread?’ ‘No brown bread. All white.’ So much for Inverary.

  27 March, Ardkinglas. Books in our bedroom at this Scottish country house. My Memoirs of Six Reigns by Princess Marie Louise; novels by Ian Hay, George A. Birmingham and John Buchan, the covers all bleached to the same shade, which is hardly a colour even but is characteristic of all the bookshelves I’ve ever liked and which I’ve never managed to achieve on stage or on film. Getting On, The Old Country and An Englishman Abroad all had bookshelves which ended up looking like caravan sites, not the faded sun-bleached greyish-brownish hue I’d specified in the script.