by Alan Bennett
Keeping On Keeping On
ALAN BENNETT has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage.
One of the National Theatre’s most successful productions ever, The History Boys won numerous awards including Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier for the Best New Play and the South Bank Award. His collection of prose Writing Home was a number one bestseller. Untold Stories won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography, 2006. Recent works of fiction are The Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories. The film of The Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith was released in 2015, and a new edition of his book of the same name a number one bestseller for nine weeks.
by the same author
PLAYS ONE
(Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, Enjoy)
PLAYS TWO
(Kafka’s Dick, The Insurance Man, The Old Country,
An Englishman Abroad, A Question of Attribution)
THE LADY IN THE VAN
OFFICE SUITE
THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III
THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS
THE HISTORY BOYS
THE HABIT OF ART
PEOPLE
HYMN AND COCKTAIL STICKS
television plays
ME, I’M AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
(A Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, A Visit from Miss Prothero, Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Green Forms, The Old Crowd, Afternoon Off)
ROLLING HOME
(One Fine Day, All Day on the Sands, Our Winnie, Rolling Home, Marks, Say Something Happened, Intensive Care)
TALKING HEADS
screenplays
A PRIVATE FUNCTION
(The Old Crowd, a Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears, 102 Boulevard Haussmann, The Madness of King George)
THE HISTORY BOYS: THE FILM
autobiography
THE LADY IN THE VAN
WRITING HOME
UNTOLD STORIES
A LIFE LIKE OTHER PEOPLE’S
THE LADY IN THE VAN: THE COMPLETE EDITION
fiction
THREE STORIES
(The Laying on of Hands, The Clothes They Stood Up In, Father! Father! Burning Bright)
THE UNCOMMON READER
SMUT: TWO UNSEEMLY STORIES
Keeping On Keeping On
ALAN BENNETT
First published in 2016
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
AND
by Profile Books
3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way
London WC1X 9HD
www.profilebooks.com
All rights reserved
© Forelake Limited, 2016
The right of Alan Bennett to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights whatsoever in this work, amateur or professional, are strictly reserved. Applications for permission for any use whatsoever including performance rights must be made in advance, prior to any such proposed use, to United Agents, 12–26 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LE. No performance may be given unless a licence has first been obtained
A CIP record for this book
is available from the British Library
ebook 978-1-78283-255-3
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
The Diaries 2005–2015
Baffled at a Bookcase
Fair Play
The History Boys, Film Diary
Introductions to:
The Habit of Art
Hymn
Cocktail Sticks
People
Foreword to The Coder Special Archive
Art and Yorkshire
Nights at the Opera
Bruce McFarlane 1903–1966
John Schlesinger 1926–2003
The National Theatre at Fifty
On Nicholas Hytner
Introduction to Denmark Hill and The Hand of God
Denmark Hill
The Hand of God
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Index
Illustrations
1Yorkshire
2On the beach at Sizewell
3Tea with Anne in Café Anne
4With Rupert en route to our civil partnership, 2006
5Lynn Wagenknecht at L’Espiessac
6L’Espiessac
722700017 Private Bennett A. Skill at Arms Book, 1952
8Outside the Spider, Bodmin 1954. Michael Frayn, back row left; AB, back row right
9Bruce McFarlane
10With John Schlesinger, Caird Hall, Dundee, An Englishman Abroad, 1983
11Alex Jennings as Britten, The Habit of Art, 2009
12With Nicholas Hytner, The Habit of Art, 2009
13Richard Griffiths as Auden, The Habit of Art, 2009
14Jeff Rawle and Gabrielle Lloyd, Cocktail Sticks, 2012
15George Fenton, Hymn, 2012
16Filming The Lady in the Van, Gloucester Crescent, 2014
17Filming The Lady in the Van, October 2014
18On the terrace, 16th Street, New York, 2016
19Armley Public Library, 2016
20By the beck, Yorkshire, 2016
21En route to Leeds, 2016
22With Dinah Wood and Eddie
23Frances de la Tour and Linda Bassett in People, 2012
24With Dominic Cooper and James Corden, The History Boys, National Theatre Gala, 2013
25Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings filming The Lady in the Van, 2014
26One of my dad’s penguins, diary entry 6 December 2007
27Plumber by Wilfrid Wood, diary entry 6 August 2015
28My shoe depicted by Rupert as a birthday card, May 2010
29Lynn’s apartment, 16th Street, New York, diary entry 31 October 2015
30AB
Introduction
Since diaries make up the bulk of this book a diary entry is an appropriate start:
10 December 2015. Trying to hit on a title for this collection I pick up Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings … a presentation copy inscribed to me by Larkin at the request of Judi Dench back in 1969 when she and I did An Evening With … for the BBC. Looking at Larkin is a mistake as I am straight away discouraged: his poems are full of such good and memorable stuff that to plunder them just for a title seems cheap. Though it’s easier for Larkin, I think, as at eighty-one I’m still trying to avoid the valedictory note which was a problem Larkin never had, the valedictory almost his exclusive territory. I find nothing suitable though The Long Slide is a possibility, which seems valedictory but isn’t … The Long Slide is to happiness not extinction. Would Pass It On do, Hector’s message at the end of The History Boys? But pass what on … I’d still find it hard to say.
Nothing else done today except a trip over to Profile Books to sign copies of The Lady in the Van. The driver who takes me there is a big nice-looking young man with close-cropped hair and curling eyelashes. He is also a noticeably courteous driver. When we get to Clerkenwell I compliment him on his courteous driving but not (the subtext) on his eyelashes though it’s something at eighty-one I’m probably allowed to do. No danger. Not that I ever have been.
In one particular respect the valedictory is not to be sidestepped as it was in 2006 that Rupert Thomas and I said farewell to Gloucester Crescent, the street in Camden Town where I had lived for nearly forty years, moving (though only a mile away) to Primrose Hill. It’s said that newcomers to London often settle near the point o
f arrival and this was certainly true of me, who could be taken to have arrived from Leeds at King’s Cross and been a denizen of North London ever since.
I started off my life in London in 1964 when I had a top-floor flat for £10 a week in Chalcot Square not far from where we have moved to. I was nervous about the move. In Gloucester Crescent I’d worked in a bay window looking onto the street where there was always enough going on to divert me in the gaps of my less than continuous flow of composition. In Primrose Hill I was to look out over a tiny back garden where the only excitement would be the occasional squirrel and I was nervous lest the spell of the Crescent such as it was, would be broken. Could I actually work there? This was such a real concern that for a month or two I kept office hours, cycling back to the old house and the table in the window that I was used to. But this soon palled so saying a reluctant farewell to the vibrant street life of Gloucester Crescent (drunks, drug dealing, snogging by the wall and the occasional stop and search) I embraced the tranquillity of the back garden in Primrose Hill and just got on with it.
In another respect, too I was hoping it would be a new beginning. Having failed in our old house to turn back the rising tide of paper I looked forward to a new start. I wasn’t yet ready for a computer but I resolved to make fewer notes, not write so many drafts and generally keep paperwork to a minimum. This has not happened and having fled one nest I now have made another. I am not proud of being computer-illiterate and this too I hoped to alter so we did get a computer. However its sojourn was brief as it was the single item stolen in a break-in one afternoon and in this respect Primrose Hill proved hardly more law-abiding than Camden Town: my bike, chained to the railings outside was soon stolen, a would-be burglar tried to con his way into the house and a neighbour was badly mugged on our actual doorstep. Still it’s a friendly neighbourhood and a socially mixed one and even if I can’t quite cosify it as ‘the village’ as some do, most people speak or pass the time of day though whether it will survive when HS2 senselessly rips the guts out of it remains to be seen.
Shortly after we moved house in 2006 we entered into a civil partnership. Rupert and I had first got together in 1992 though we didn’t live in the same house until 1997 after I was operated on for bowel cancer as is related in Untold Stories. We had now been together for fourteen years, our partnership domestic long before it was civil, so the ceremony was hardly a landmark. And even less so, thanks to me.
It was a rainy morning in Camden Registry Office, with the registrar performing the rites in the presence of Rupert’s parents, his brother and a few friends and with scant ceremony, so scant in fact that even the registrar felt it a bit of a let-down, with the happy couple and everyone else doing nothing more celebratory afterwards than adjourning for some coffee on Great Portland Street. This was entirely my fault as, never keen on parties, had a more festive occasion been envisaged I might have jumped ship. It was only later that I realised how closely our ceremony mirrored the early morning marriage of my parents which is also described in Untold Stories. They, too, had had only a few relatives present with my father immediately afterwards dashing off to work where he was a butcher at the Co-op. Their only concession to the occasion was a visit that evening to the Theatre Royal and The Desert Song. We didn’t even do that (or its equivalent). It’s something (if only occasionally) that I am never allowed to forget.
In the ten years covered by this book politics has impinged more than I care for and like the woman in the fish shop the day after the 2015 election I fear that there will be a Tory government for the remainder of my life. And with it England dismantled. As the government continues to pick the state clean one marvels at its ingenuity in finding institutions still left unsold. And why should it stop? If there is money to be made out of the probation service why not still exhibit the insane? How long before even the monarchy is sponsored and government itself put out to tender? Is there any large corporation nowadays which one wholly trusts and which doesn’t confuse honesty with public relations?
Some of these sentiments I more moderately voiced in King’s College Chapel in 2014 in the sermon printed here. I could have suggested then that taking a leaf out of the government’s book the Church of England too should be run solely for profit, parsons given targets and made to turn up at Epiphany with statistics of souls saved. Except that the trouble with such jokes is that they are a joke no longer and in this senseless world in which even the bees find government arrayed against them, moderation is hard to hold onto.
Eschew the valedictory though one tries to do, anything one writes at this age is bound to be to a degree testamentary, with the writer wondering what of anything he or she has written will survive and for how long. I can’t say I much care since I shan’t be around to see it though I hope that any posthumous assessment will at least be comprehensive, taking in not just what I’ve written but what I’ve said about it myself and this collection includes the preface and programme notes for four plays – The Habit of Art (2009), Hymn, Cocktail Sticks and People (all 2012). The introductions to my plays often say as much as the plays themselves, including as they often do cherished passages cut from the playing text, generally on grounds of length. But I have always written too much and one of the reasons why my collaboration with Nicholas Hytner has been so long and fruitful is that he is among other things a ruthless surgeon with no hesitation about wielding the scissors or pressing whatever key it is on the computer.
I have also been fortunate in my writing life that the London Review of Books has been prepared to print what prose I have written and the National Theatre produce my plays. I have been edited by both but rejected by neither and seldom put under pressure. Of course I might have written more had I been less complacent about finding a market for my work but I wouldn’t have had such a good time.
One of the diary entries for October 2015 is about doing Private Passions, Michael Berkeley’s always excellent programme for BBC Radio 3. It was nicely edited so that after my final choice, ‘Softly and gently’, the final passage from Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, I was allowed a little coda. As a boy at concerts in Leeds Town Hall I used to sit behind the orchestra. The music I heard seemed to hold out a vision of love returned, of transcendence and even triumph. But that was just the music and life wasn’t like that. What was to become of me? Could I slip into the seat behind I would put a hand on my young shoulder and say, ‘It’s going to be all right.’
And it has been all right. I have been very lucky.
Alan Bennett
The Diaries 2005–2015
Preface to the Diaries
I am not a conscientious diarist. I don’t sit down every evening, say, and review the day as all too often nothing of note has occurred. Except when I’m rehearsing or, more occasionally, filming I don’t stray far from my desk and even if from time to time I record a breakthrough in something I’m working on, the diary is generally a tale of frustration and dissatisfaction which, though it may help me, is no fun to read. Still a diary does have a point. Nothing is ever quite so bad that one can’t write it down or so shameful either, though this took me a long time to learn with my earliest diaries reticent and even prudish. I remember when I first came across Joe Orton’s diaries in the eighties marvelling (and being depressed) at how while he was still in his teens he was unabashed at himself and unshocked by his fellows, a faculty he seems to have been born with but which took me half a lifetime to learn.
Diaries involve waste with much of what one records perhaps of posthumous interest but tedious to read and often bad-tempered, the diary getting one’s ranting and resentment literally at first hand. Publishing an annual diary as I have done for thirty years in the London Review of Books I still find it lowering how little of what I have written in a past year is worth printing. It’s never a good ratio. Still, there is more in this book than was printed in the LRB. Once upon a time I used to think that the paper edited my diary to chime in with their preconception of my character, a form of benign censor
ship designed to save me from myself. Thus I seldom got away with anything gay or particularly self-revealing, whereas nowadays no one seems to mind, the staff of the LRB so young and bright they probably have better things to think about.
I do rant of course, chiefly about the government so I make no excuse for that. We maybe go into too many old churches for some readers and country houses as well, though it was traipsing round the latter which led to me writing People, my play about the National Trust. These sightseeing trips often used to involve sandwiches which I lovingly delineated and even dismembered in the diary (especially after Christmas). I say ‘used to’ because my partner is now gluten-free so that’s put a spoke in the sandwiches. This won’t displease some readers who felt that we ought to do more to patronise local retail outlets. ‘Why do you bother to take sandwiches to Byland Abbey?’ wrote one reader. ‘There’s a perfectly good pub opposite.’ A more serious casualty than the sandwiches is that in this volume we say goodbye to the Gers, that out-of-the-way part of France between Condom and Nérac where our friend Lynn Wagenknecht had an idyllic house, the demise of which is recorded in June 2008. There is nowhere abroad with the possible exception of New York where I have been as happy.
‘Yorkshire’ is the village in Craven to which my parents retired in 1966 and where Rupert Thomas and I still have the cottage. Unless otherwise stated most other entries are in London which, as I explain in the Introduction, used to be Camden Town but in 2006 became Primrose Hill.
2005
9 January. To Solopark near Cambridge, a vast but highly organised architectural salvage depot where (with unexpected ease) we find four suitable blond flagstones for the hallway. Something of the abattoir about such places and still there are the half dozen pepperpot domes from Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster which we saw when we were here last and which were taken down by Rattee and Kett in the course of their restoration of the chapel in the 1990s. They are, I suppose, late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century and so less numinous than their predecessors would have been – though even these will have witnessed the fire that destroyed the House of Commons and the original Palace of Westminster.