by David Lodge
Of Bennett’s two prose collections, Writing Home is probably funnier, but Untold Stories is more revealing. As he tells us in the introduction to the latter, he did not intend to publish several of the pieces it contains when he wrote them, but two events caused him to change his mind. One was being diagnosed with cancer of the bowel in 1997, and given only a 50 per cent chance of surviving for more than a year or two, which made any need to protect his privacy and dignity seem superfluous, and also generated a fresh stream of introspective writing. Then, when happily he was cured of the cancer, the appearance a few years later of an unauthorised biography (Backing into the Limelight: The Biography of Alan Bennett, by Alexander Games) ‘made me press on with my own autobiographical efforts and start thinking of them as pre-posthumous’.
Anyone who has achieved Alan Bennett’s level of success in the territory where literature meets show business is axiomatically defined in our culture as a ‘celebrity’ and must deal with the intrusive interest of the media in his private life which that status brings with it. For most of his professional career Bennett defended his privacy with considerable determination and cunning, deflecting speculation about his sexual orientation by assuming the persona of a celibate bachelor and screening his relationships from public view. When, in 1980, he began to publish extracts from his diary annually in the London Review of Books, a feature that soon became an eagerly awaited New Year institution, his friends and companions were usually concealed behind cryptic initials; and when the actor Ian McKellen publicly challenged him to declare whether he was gay, at a charity concert supporting protest against the notorious ‘Section 28’ of the 1988 Local Government Act, Bennett wittily evaded the question by saying it was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water.
The diary sequence 1980–90, reprinted from the LRB in Writing Home, contained several references to doing things in the company of ‘A.’, but not until near the end was this person identified as female, and that was all the information vouchsafed about her. When Bennett revealed in an interview with Stephen Schiff of The New Yorker, published in September 1994, that he had been in a sexual relationship with a woman called Anne Davies for more than a decade, he provoked a feeding frenzy in the British press. She was revealed as the daughter of Hungarian refugees, some ten years younger than Bennett, divorced with three children, whom he had first met when he employed her to clean his London house, and later set up in business running a café next to his country cottage in the village of Clapham, in the Yorkshire Dales, which he had inherited from his parents. According to Alexander Games, Bennett went to ground after the interview appeared, leaving the somewhat puzzled and troubled Anne to field the journalists’ questions. Untold Stories does not explain why he chose to make their relationship public at this point in time; indeed it contains no direct reference to Anne at all. It does, however, describe other phases of his sexual life with more openness than ever before, and with characteristically droll, self-deprecating humour.
In 1950, when he was sixteen, he came to the conclusion that, ‘all things considered’, he was homosexual, but his desires then and for some time afterwards were essentially emotional rather than physical and steeped in romantic despair. He was invariably attracted to ‘straight’ young men who could never reciprocate his feelings, and this seemed to him his inevitable doom. He was unwilling to admit his orientation, least of all to his parents, though they seem to have harboured suspicions. When, as an undergraduate, he tapered his trousers to a fashionably tight narrow fit:
‘You can’t go out like that,’ Mam said. ‘People will think you’re one of them.’
Whereupon Dad, who was even more shocked than she was, said (and the question must have had a long gestation), ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’
‘Oh Dad,’ I think I replied, as if the question was absurd. ‘Don’t be daft.’
But I never wore the trousers.
The exchange, like many others, later found its way, slightly changed, into the script of a TV play – entitled, Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
At the time of Beyond the Fringe, he had ‘occasional flings, all of them straight, two of them with the same slightly depressing outcomes: shortly after going to bed with me, my partners announce their engagement (to someone else) and are briskly married’. In the next decade he becomes more relaxed about looking for sexual pleasure with men. The ones he falls for are still straight, but ‘sex in the seventies is not so particular about gender and boundaries and so I find myself less often rebuffed and even having quite a nice time . . . I also find myself being led back from the paths of deviancy to what becomes, in the eighties anyway, a pretty conventional life’. This is the only, very oblique, allusion to his relationship with Anne Davies in the book. In other places Untold Stories describes a happy relationship in recent years with a new partner, Rupert Thomas, the young editor of a design magazine, first mentioned in the diaries as ‘R.’ in January 1996. So perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, the New Yorker interview was a way of bringing the relationship with Anne Davies to an end, even though he paid warm tribute to her there (and according to Games they ‘remained extremely close’). Bennett admits that ‘homosexuality is a differentness I’ve never been prepared wholly to accept in myself’. That may have complicated his life, but it ensured that he avoided the sometimes limiting categorisation of ‘gay writer’. In later dramatic work, The History Boys and a play about W.H. Auden, The Habit of Art, he ‘pushed the envelope’ as regards the explicit and often bawdy treatment of homosexual behaviour, almost as if he had decided to test the tolerance of his broadly based audience. Those plays, and the two comic-erotic tales published in 2011 under the title Smut: Two unseemly stories, one straight and one gay in subject matter, seem to be part of a late urge to renounce the diffidence and reticence that characterised Bennett’s attitude to sexuality earlier in life.
Bennett writes very honestly about himself, or he creates the effect of doing so. He is never vain or pretentious, always wryly observant of the weaknesses and contradictions of his own character, ready to confess to ignoble or selfish feelings with a candour that sometimes makes the reader wince. But it is inevitably a selective self-portrait, a rhetorical construction, that emerges from these anecdotes, memories and journal entries. He presents himself as a shy loner at high school, crippled with self-consciousness about his unusually late puberty (his voice did not break until well after the age of sixteen, and the other physical manifestations were equally late in arriving), and there is no reason to doubt the agonies of embarrassment and anxiety this caused him. But he omits to mention that (according to his unofficial biographer) he was much in demand as an actor in school plays, and particularly praised for his performance as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, where his unbroken voice and smooth cheeks would have been an asset. Learning this resolved a paradox which had long puzzled me: how was it that someone who presents himself so convincingly as shy, repressed and awkward could be such a successful actor (and without the benefit of professional training) not only in satirical revue, but later in West End productions of his own plays and in television drama and feature films by other hands? Obviously he used acting, in which a licensed fictional frame is put around behaviour, as a way of overcoming and turning to good account what he perceived as crippling abnormalities and inhibitions in adolescence. Later it was his success as writer and performer in student revue during his postgraduate years at Oxford that catapulted him out of an unpromising start as a medieval historian and into the fame of Beyond the Fringe, but he has said very little about that phase of his life – or indeed about the moments of triumph and euphoria that must have been quite frequent in the course of his distinguished professional career. He presents himself for the most part as diffident and depressive, someone who has never entirely freed himself from the psychological shackles of a dim, provincial, lower-middle-class upbringing, and never therefore quite believed in his
own success. Hence his delight in relating stories that confirm this pessimistic self-assessment, like the receipt of a complimentary copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary for 1997, in which the birthdays of various contemporary writers are recorded, but the date of his own, 9 May, is blank except for the note, ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949’. Bathos is Bennett’s favourite trope.
He was born and brought up in Leeds, but deduces from his date of birth that he was conceived during an August holiday in some cheerless seaside boarding house, imagining his parents’ lovemaking constrained by their consciousness of the thin bedroom walls and the adjacency of other guests, ‘so much of my timorous and undashing life prefigured in that original circumspect conjunction’. His mother was painfully shy – so much so that she couldn’t face her own wedding, and was married privately by a kindly and co-operative clergyman, early enough in the morning for the groom to go punctually to work immediately afterwards. (Reading Bennett’s memoirs the Yorkshire proverb ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’ often comes to mind.) Mr Bennett Sr was a butcher by trade, and eventually had his own shop, but never much enjoyed the occupation. From time to time he entertained various schemes for making money by more enjoyable means, like brewing herbal beer, or becoming a double-bass player in a dance band (he was musical, and played the violin), but they never came to anything. In Alan’s memory the little family was resigned to its dullness and marginality when he was growing up, a feeling that ‘other people made more of their lives than we did’. Even the Second World War brought no drama into their existence. Mr Bennett was in a reserved occupation and therefore not conscripted; he served as an air-raid warden, but among British industrial cities Leeds suffered relatively little bombing and his duties were light. ‘War, peace, it makes no difference, our family never quite joining in, let alone joining up, and the camaraderie passes us by as camaraderie generally did.’ Entertainment consisted of listening to the radio, and a twice-weekly visit to the local cinema, whatever was showing; on other evenings his parents retired at nine o’clock to bed, where the schoolboy Alan brought them a cup of tea on returning from his customary solitary walk to the public library.
Mrs Bennett had two sisters, Kathleen and Myra, who were more extrovert, and brought some noise and excitement into the muted Bennett household, though generally to the parents’ displeasure and disapproval. Myra used the war to escape the drab confines of Leeds, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and married an RAF serviceman in India. When her husband died Alan witnessed her ill-advised attempt to scatter his ashes on Ilkley Moor on a windy day, remarking ‘He didn’t want to leave me’, as she dusted herself down afterwards. The older sister Kathleen, the dominating and loquacious manageress of a shoe shop, surprised everybody by marrying late in life. But she too was widowed, and succumbed to dementia, which ‘unleashes torrents of speech, monologues of continuous anecdote and dizzying complexity, one train of thought switching to another without signal or pause, rattling across points and through junctions at a rate no listener can follow’. Kathleen ends her days in the same mental hospital to which her sister was originally admitted, goes missing and is found in wasteland nearby – dramatically by Alan Bennett himself – dead from exposure.
A dark thread runs through the family history on Bennett’s mother’s side. After she was admitted to the mental hospital for the first time, his father revealed that her father, Alan’s grandfather, committed suicide by drowning. Bennett admits that he was rather excited by this revelation. ‘It made my family more interesting . . . I had just begun to write but had already given up on my own background because the material seemed so thin.’ In fact much of his best work was to be distilled from the memory of what seemed at the time dull ordinary experience, and like most writers he suffers occasional qualms of conscience about exploiting his nearest and dearest in this way. Bennett’s uneasiness about his last encounter with his father (described above) was compounded by the circumstance that he had just written a television play, then in pre-production, about a man who has a heart attack on the beach at Morecambe, the same beach where Bennett’s own parents took their last walk together, making him feel that in some uncanny way he had caused his father’s death. Six years later he returned to the same emotional nexus, another TV play about a man who visits his father in intensive care to be with him when he dies, but is in bed with a nurse at the crucial moment.
Bennett has based several of his female characters on his mother and recalls a remark of hers, ‘By, you’ve had some script out of me!’ which obviously struck home. But typically he explored its implications creatively in a different context – the play he wrote about Miss Shepherd, The Lady in the Van. This was based on one of the more bizarre episodes in Alan Bennett’s life, when he allowed a crazed, filthy, smelly, aggressive, bigoted vagrant of genteel origins to live in an insanitary camper parked in the front garden of his London house for fifteen years. Why did he put up with her, and for so long? Altruistic compassion alone cannot explain it. Perhaps, as some lines in the play suggest, he was compensating for guilt at neglecting his mother in illness and old age (for though he visited her regularly, it was often with impatience and ill-grace) by being kind to the ungrateful Miss Shepherd, who did not take him away from his metropolitan life. Almost certainly he felt from an early stage of their acquaintance that she would make interesting copy. He made several attempts to write a play about their relationship, but significantly it was only when he split his own character into two dramatis personae – Bennett the decent private individual, exasperated by the demands of his ungrateful tenant, but unable to extricate himself from her toils, and Bennett the anarchic, ego-driven writer fascinated by her extraordinary character and outrageously transgressive behaviour – that the play took off, and became a kind of parable of the way writers turn life into art.
Bennett is gratefully aware that, ‘For a writer nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people because, however dreadful, it may be of use’. This is well illustrated by the account of his treatment for cancer, ‘An Average Rock Bun’ (the title refers to the size of his tumour), and by an alarming story of being the victim of an unprovoked homophobic attack in a small Italian town. In both pieces he manages to find humour in even the grimmest circumstances, and avoids any hint of self-pity or self-dramatisation. The same scrupulous honesty characterises his treatment of more trivial plights and dilemmas. He declines an honorary degree at Oxford in protest against the university’s recent acceptance of an endowment from Rupert Murdoch, but then wonders if he hasn’t ‘slightly made a fool of myself’, thus denying himself any satisfaction from the gesture. He analyses in exquisite and amusing detail the reasons why he declined a knighthood, but adds ‘lest it be thought that this refusal has much to do with modesty, when the list of those who had turned down honours was leaked in the newspapers I cared enough to note (I hope wryly) how obscurely placed I was on the list and that sometimes I wasn’t even mentioned at all’. But even Bennett’s candour has its limits. ‘I hope wryly’ – if he doesn’t know, who does?
When Bennett left school he was a practising Anglican, nurturing vague ideas of becoming a minister, and politically conservative. Now he seems to have no religious belief and supports the left on most political issues, but he enjoys visiting old churches, cathedrals and ruined abbeys, about which he is knowledgeable, and admits that the destruction of stained glass and statuary at the Reformation still moves him to more indignation than recent atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone. His socialism too is personal and nostalgic rather than ideological. The only time he voted Conservative was when a Labour government threatened to extend the motorway network – a bad move, since the Tories have been much more enthusiastic supporters of motorised transport, at the expense of railways and the English countryside. Because he benefited from free university education himself Bennett opposes the introduction of tuition fees, refusing to take into account that quite
different socio-economic conditions now obtain. (In his day – and mine – only 5 per cent of the age group got a university education, so the state could afford to educate those lucky few for free, whether they needed the subsidy or not; now it’s about 40 per cent.) His opposition to the war in Iraq is unqualified, and strongly felt, but not really argued. When the news of Saddam Hussein’s arrest breaks, he notes in his diary, 15 December 2003: ‘Whatever is said it does not affect the issue. We should not have gone to war. It has been a shameful year.’
Some readers, especially American ones, may find the diary entry for 11 September 2001 somewhat perfunctory. It reads in its entirety:
Working rather disconsolately when Tom M. rings to tell me to switch on the television as the Twin Towers have been attacked. Not long after I switch on one of the towers collapses, an unbearable sight, like a huge plumed beast plunging earthwards. I go to put the kettle on and in that moment the other tower collapses.
It seems surprising that there is no reflection here, or in the days that follow, on the significance of the event, no speculation about what fanatical conviction and chilling indifference to death drove the perpetrators of this unimaginable deed, no sense that possibly the human world had changed for ever in consequence. It is of course possible that Bennett wrote about all these things but decided his thoughts would seem redundant when reproduced much later. That is the danger of publishing a diary: leave it unedited and you risk being boring; edit it and you may leave a misleading impression. The characteristic bathos of missing the collapse of the second tower while going to make a cup of tea seems out of place here, and the ‘plumed beast’ simile neglects the human suffering involved. But it’s a rare and uncharacteristic lapse of judgement. The fact is that Alan Bennett is more at ease with the homely, the private, even the trivial than he is with big historical ideas and epic events. Again and again in this book he demonstrates that almost anything that happens to a person can be interesting, moving and entertaining if you write about it well enough.
