The Uncommon Reader: A Novella

by Alan Bennett

  Shy and even timid though authors had generally seemed to be when she had met them individually, taken together they were loud, gossipy and, though they laughed a good deal, not, so far as she could tell, particularly funny. She found herself hovering on the edge of groups with no one making much effort to include her, so that she felt like a guest at her own party. And when she did speak she either killed conversation and plunged it into an awful pause or the authors, presumably to demonstrate their independence and sophistication, took no notice at all of what she said and just went on talking.

  It was exciting to be with writers she had come to think of as her friends and whom she longed to know. But now when she was aching to declare her fellow-feeling with those whose books she had read and admired, she found she had nothing to say. She, who had seldom in her life been intimidated by anyone, now found herself tongue-tied and awkward. ‘I adored your book’ would have said it all, but fifty years of composure and self-possession plus half a century of understatement stood in the way. Hard put for conversation, she found herself falling back on some of her stock stand-bys. It wasn’t quite ‘How far did you have to come?’ but the literary equivalent. ‘Where do you get your ideas from? Do you work regular hours? Do you use a word-processor?’ – questions which she knew were clichés and were embarrassing to inflict had the awkward silence not been worse.

  One Scottish author was particularly alarming. Asked where his inspiration came from, he said fiercely: ‘It doesn’t come, Your Majesty. You have to go out and fetch it.’

  When she did manage to express – and almost stammer – her admiration, hoping the author would tell her how he (the men, she decided, much worse than the women) had come to write the book in question, she found her enthusiasm brushed aside, as he insisted on talking not about the bestseller he had just written but about the one on which he was currently at work and how slowly it was going and how in consequence, as he sipped his champagne, he was the most miserable of creatures.

  Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met with in the pages of their novels, and as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

  To begin with she had thought she might hold such gatherings on a regular basis, but this soirée was enough to disabuse her of that. Once was enough. This came as a relief to Sir Kevin, who had not been enthusiastic, pointing out that if ma’am held an evening for the writers she would then have to hold a similar evening for the artists, and having held evenings for writers and artists the scientists would then expect to be entertained, too.

  ‘Ma’am must not be seen to be partial.’

  Well, there was now no danger of that.

  With some justification, Sir Kevin blamed Norman for this evening of literary lack-lustre, as he had encouraged the Queen when she had tentatively suggested it. It wasn’t as if Norman had had much of a time, either. Literature being what it is, the gay quotient among the guests was quite high, some of them asked along at Norman’s specific suggestion. Not that that did him any good at all. Though like the other pages he was just taking round the drinks and the nibbles that went with them, Norman knew, as the others didn’t, the reputation and standing of those whom he was bobbing up to with his tray. He had even read their books. But it was not Norman around whom they clustered, but the dolly pages and the loftier equerries who, as Norman said bitterly (though not to the Queen), wouldn’t know a literary reputation if they stepped in it.

  Still, if the whole experience of entertaining the Living Word was unfortunate, it did not (as Sir Kevin had hoped) put Her Majesty off reading altogether. It turned her off wanting to meet authors, and to some extent off living authors altogether. But this just meant that she had more time for the classics, for Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and the Brontës.

  Every Tuesday evening the Queen saw her prime minister, who briefed her on what he felt she ought to know. The press was fond of picturing these meetings as those of a wise and experienced monarch guiding her first minister past possible pitfalls and drawing on her unique repository of political experience accumulated over the fifty-odd years she had been on the throne in order to give him advice. This was a myth, though one in which the palace itself collaborated, the truth being the longer they were in office the less the prime ministers listened and the more they talked, the Queen nodding assent though not always agreement.

  To begin with, the prime ministers wanted the Queen to hold their hand, and when they came to see her it was to be stroked and given an approving pat in the spirit of a child wanting to show its mother what it has done. And, as so often with her, it was really a show that was required, a show of interest, a show of concern. Men (and this included Mrs Thatcher) wanted show. At this stage, though, they still listened and even asked her advice, but as time passed all her prime ministers modulated with disturbing similarity into lecturing mode, when they ceased to require encouragement from the Queen but treated her like an audience, listening to her no longer on the agenda. It was not only Gladstone who addressed the Queen as if she were a public meeting.

  The audience this particular Tuesday had followed the usual pattern, and it was only when it was drawing to a close that the Queen managed to get a word in and talk about a subject that actually interested her. ‘About my Christmas broadcast.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’ said the prime minister.

  ‘I thought this year one might do something different.’

  ‘Different, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes. If one were to be sitting on a couch reading or, even more informally, be discovered by the camera curled up with a book, the camera could creep in – is that the expression? – until I’m in mid-shot, when I could look up and say, “I’ve been reading this book about such and such,” and then go on from there.’

  ‘And what would the book be, ma’am?’ The prime minister looked unhappy.

  ‘That one would have to think about.’

  ‘Something about the state of the world, perhaps?’ He brightened.

  ‘Possibly, though they get quite enough of that from the newspapers. No. I was actually thinking of poetry.’

  ‘Poetry, ma’am?’ He smiled thinly.

  ‘Thomas Hardy, for instance. I read an awfully good poem of his the other day about how the Titanic and the iceberg that was to sink her came together. It’s called “The Convergence of the Twain”. Do you know it?’

  ‘I don’t, ma’am. But how would it help?’

  ‘Help whom?’

  ‘Well,’ and the prime minister seemed a trifle embarrassed actually to have to say it, ‘the people.’

  ‘Oh, surely,’ said the Queen, ‘it would show, wouldn’t it, that fate is something to which we are all subject.’

  She gazed at the prime minister, smiling helpfully. He looked down at his hands.

  ‘I’m not sure that is a message the government would feel able to endorse.’ The public must not be allowed to think the world could not be managed. That way lay chaos. Or defeat at the polls, which was the same thing.

  ‘I’m told,’ and now it was his turn to smile helpfully, ‘that there is some excellent footage of Your Majesty’s visit to South Africa.’

  The Queen sighed and pressed the bell. ‘We will think about it.’

  The prime minister knew that the audience was over as Norman opened the door and waited. ‘So this,’ thought the prime minister, ‘is the famous Norman.’

  ‘Oh, Norman,’ said the Queen, ‘the prime minister doesn’t seem to have read Hardy. Perhaps you could find him one of our old paperbacks on his way out.’

  Slightly to her surprise, the Queen did after a fashion get her way, and though she was not curled up on the sofa but seated at her usual table, and though she did not read the Hardy poem (rejected as not ‘forward-looking’), she began her Christmas broadcast with the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities (‘It w
as the best of times. It was the worst of times’) and did it well, too. Choosing not to read from the autocue but from the book itself, she reminded the older ones in her audience (and they were the majority) of the kind of teacher some of them could still remember and who had read to them at school.

  Encouraged by the reception given to her Christmas broadcast, she persisted with her notion of reading in public, and late one night, as she closed her book on the Elizabethan Settlement, it occurred to her to ring the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  There was a pause while he turned down the TV.

  ‘Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?’

  ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’

  ‘In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It’s not laid down, is it? It’s not off-limits?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware, ma’am.’

  ‘Good. Well in that case I’m going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight.’

  The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing.

  But thereafter, particularly when she was in Norfolk, or even in Scotland, Her Majesty began to do a regular stint at the lectern. And not merely the lectern. Visiting a Norfolk primary school, she sat down on a classroom chair and read a story from Babar for the children. Addressing a City banquet, she treated them to a Betjeman poem, impromptu departures from her schedule which enchanted everyone except Sir Kevin, from whom she hadn’t bothered to get clearance.

  Also unscheduled was the conclusion of a tree-planting ceremony. Having lightly dug an oak sapling into the reclaimed earth of a bleak urban farm above the Medway, she rested on the ceremonial spade and recited by heart Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’, with its final verse:

  Yet still the unresting castles thresh

  In fullgrown thickness every May.

  Last year is dead, they seem to say,

  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

  And as that clear and unmistakeable voice carried over the shabby wind-bitten grass, it seemed it was not just the huddled municipal party she was addressing but herself, too. It was her life she was calling upon, the new beginning hers.

  Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else. It’s true that at the prospect of opening yet another swimming-baths her heart didn’t exactly leap up, but even so, she had never actually resented having to do it. However tedious her obligations had been – visiting this, conferring that – boredom had never come into it. This was her duty and when she opened her engagement book every morning it had never been without interest or expectation.

  No more. Now she surveyed the unrelenting progression of tours, travels and undertakings stretching years into the future only with dread. There was scarcely a day she could call her own and never two. Suddenly it had all become a drag. ‘Ma’am is tired,’ said her maid, hearing her groan at her desk. ‘It’s time ma’am put her feet up occasionally.’

  But it wasn’t that. It was reading, and love it though she did, there were times when she wished she had never opened a book and entered into other lives. It had spoiled her. Or spoiled her for this, anyway.

  Meanwhile the grand visitors came and went, one of them the president of France who proved such a let-down on the Genet front. She mentioned this to the foreign secretary in the debriefing that was customary after such visits, but he had never heard of the convict-playwright, either. Still, she said, drifting rather from the comments the president had made about Anglo-French monetary arrangements, dead loss though he had been on Genet (whom he had dismissed as ‘a denizen of the billiard hall’), he had proved a mine of information about Proust, who had hitherto been just a name to the Queen. To the foreign secretary he was not even that, and so she was able to fill him in a little.

  ‘Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, “Oh, do pull your socks up.” But literature’s full of those. The curious thing about him was that when he dipped his cake in his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all. The real treat when I was a child was Fuller’s cakes. I suppose it might work with me if I were to taste one of them, but of course they’ve long since gone out of business, so no memories there. Are we finished?’ She reached for her book.

  The Queen’s ignorance of Proust was, unlike the foreign secretary’s, soon to be remedied, as Norman straightaway looked him up on the Internet and, finding that the novel ran to seven volumes, thought it would be ideal reading on Her Majesty’s summer holiday at Balmoral. George Painter’s biography of Proust went with them, too. And seeing the blue- and pink-jacketed volumes ranged along her desk, the Queen thought they looked almost edible and straight out of a pâtisserie window.

  It was a foul summer, cold, wet and unproductive, the guns grumbling every evening at their paltry bag. But for the Queen (and for Norman) it was an idyll. Seldom can there have been more of a contrast between the world of the book and the place in which it was read, the pair of them engrossed in the sufferings of Swann, the petty vulgarities of Mme Verdurin and the absurdities of Baron de Charlus, while in the wet butts on the hills the guns cracked out their empty tattoo as the occasional dead and sodden stag was borne past the window.

  Duty required that the prime minister and his wife join the house party for a few days, and though not a shot himself he was at least hoping to accompany the Queen on some brisk walks through the heather, where, as he put it, ‘he hoped to get to know her better.’ But knowing less of Proust than he did even of Thomas Hardy, the prime minister was disappointed: these would-be heart-to-hearts were never on the cards.

  Breakfast over, Her Majesty retired to her study with Norman, the men drove off in their Land Rovers for another disappointing day and the prime minister and his wife were left to their own devices. Some days they trailed through the heather and over the moors to eat a wet and awkward picnic with the guns, but in the afternoon, having exhausted the area’s shopping potential by buying a tweed rug and a box of shortbread, they could be found in a distant corner of the drawing-room playing a sad game of Monopoly.

  Four days of this was enough, and making an excuse (‘trouble in the Middle East’), the prime minister and his lady determined to depart early. On their last evening a game of charades was hurriedly organised, the choice of each well-known phrase or saying apparently one of the lesser-known prerogatives of the monarch, and well known though they may have been to her, they were a mystery to everyone else, including the prime minister.

  The prime minister never liked to lose, even to the monarch, and it was no consolation to be told by one of the princes that no one but the Queen could hope to win, as the questions (several of them about Proust) were set by Norman and taken from their reading.

  Had Her Majesty resumed a raft of long disused prerogatives the prime minister could not have been more put out, and on his return to London he wasted no time in getting his special adviser onto Sir Kevin, who condoled with him, while pointing out that currently Norman was a burden they all had to share. The special adviser was unimpressed. ‘Is this bloke Norman a nancy?’

  Sir Kevin didn’t know for certain but thought it was possible.

  ‘And does she know that?’

  ‘Her Majesty? Probably.’

  ‘And do the press?’

  ‘I think the press,’ said Sir Kevin, clenching and unclenching his cheeks, ‘are the last thing we want.’

  ‘Exactly. So can I leave it with you?’

  It happened that upcoming was a state visit to Canada, a treat that Norman was not down to share, preferring to go home for his holidays to Stockton on Tees. However, he made all the preparations beforehand, carefully packing a case of books that would see Her Majesty fully occupied from coast to farthest coast. The Canadians were not, so far as Norman knew, a bookish people, and the schedule was so tight that the chances of Her Majesty
getting to browse in a bookshop were slim. She was looking forward to the trip, as much of the journey was by train, and she pictured herself in happy seclusion whisked across the continent as she turned the pages of Pepys, whom she was reading for the first time.

  In fact, though, the tour, or at least the beginning of it, turned out to be disastrous. The Queen was bored, uncooperative and glum, shortcomings all of which her equerries would readily have blamed on her reading, were it not for the fact that, on this occasion, she had no reading, the books Norman had packed for her having unaccountably gone missing. Despatched from Heathrow with the royal party, they turned up months later in Calgary, where they were made the focus of a nice if rather eccentric exhibition at the local library. In the meantime, though, Her Majesty had nothing to occupy her mind, and rather than focusing her attention on the job in hand, which had been Sir Kevin’s intention in arranging for the books’ misdirection, being at a loose end just made her bad-tempered and difficult.

  In the far north what few polar bears could be assembled hung about waiting for Her Majesty, but when she did not appear loped off to an ice floe that held more promise. Logs jammed, glaciers slid into the freezing waters, all unobserved by the royal visitor, who kept to her cabin.

  ‘Don’t you want to look at the St Lawrence Seaway?’ said her husband.

  ‘I opened it fifty years ago. I don’t suppose it’s changed.’

  Even the Rockies received only a perfunctory glance, and Niagara Falls was given a miss altogether (‘I have seen it three times’) and the duke went alone.

  It happened, though, that at a reception for Canadian cultural notables the Queen got talking to Alice Munro and, learning that she was a novelist and short-story writer, requested one of her books, which she greatly enjoyed. Even better, it turned out there were many more where that came from and which Ms Munro readily supplied.

  ‘Can there be any greater pleasure,’ she confided in her neighbour, the Canadian minister for overseas trade, ‘than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen.’