Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  It’s getting near the day of Dad’s death, too, and before we leave on Sunday we pick some flowers from the garden and put them on the grave where Gordon must have planted some bizzy lizzies, or begonias maybe. Think of Mam and Dad standing there smiling and think also of Anne next door whose chest is bad and has to go for an X-ray on Monday. Easy journey back with the same towering high summer clouds. Between Newark and Grantham I always strain to see the towers of Lincoln Cathedral on the eastern horizon but never do, the only time I have when we were unexpectedly bussed from Retford to Grantham, when they were unmistakable in the last of the sun.

  2 August. Chris Langham is found guilty of downloading child pornography and remanded for sentencing next month, having been told to expect jail. To imprison someone for looking at or making a copy of something makes me uneasy, even though, as in this case, the facts are not in dispute. And not merely with pornography. Last month some Muslim young men were imprisoned for, among other things, looking at or having in their possession a handbook with bomb-making instructions. That makes me uneasy too. Looking is not doing however much a police-led morality would like to equate the two, and would like the public to equate them also. Repellent though child pornography is, I don’t find Mr Langham’s conduct especially repugnant and am only grateful when I read about such cases that my own inclinations don’t take me down that route. I don’t know Chris Langham but I find the policy of targeting such high-profile figures deplorable, the relish with which they are pursued in the tabloid press chilling. I hope Mr Langham gets a short sentence and that he will not become the pariah the authorities would like, and that the BBC, not these days noted for its courage, will shortly re-employ him. R. does not agree and unusually we argue fiercely over this.

  3 August. John Normington dies, an actor whose name didn’t mean a great deal to the public but who was much loved in the profession and who seldom gave a bad performance. In A Day Out (1971) he played Ackroyd, the kindly nature-loving cyclist who railed against farmers who nailed up the carcasses of moles to deter their fellows.

  In A Private Function he was the weaselly accountant Lockwood whose most memorable line was ‘He’s got us by the scrotum.’ He had a fund of stories, chiefly of disasters he had been involved in, some of the funniest at the National to do with Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980) in which he played, among other things, an ancient Briton who has to pretend to wrestle with a wolfhound (stuffed), a feat that reduced the much raped and otherwise put-on cast to helpless mirth. On some nights he scarcely managed to get beyond the play’s first line (‘Where the fuck are we?’) before he was on the brink of hysteria. He was the kind of actor who made you glad you were part of the same profession.

  Overhanging this week has been the X-ray Anne had at Airedale on Monday, the results to be given her when she visits the doctor today.

  She had called Gloucester Crescent but left no message so I ring her. She is still finding it hard to breathe and says slowly, ‘It isn’t good news. I’ve got lung cancer.’ The doctor had apparently called at the house yesterday afternoon, a thoughtful gesture though one which indicated the seriousness of the situation. Now as I sit in the garden this hot afternoon she will be waiting at the health centre to be told more – though more, I feel, can only be worse – and she is due back at Airedale on Monday presumably for a scan.

  7 August. A baby robin is about in the garden and each morning sitting out with tea, oats and raisins, I throw it a few oats. It eats one or two, almost out of politeness, then flies off, leaving the rest.

  8 August. The date I went into the army fifty-five years ago.

  Look at Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame (over my lunch) into which I’d tipped the note he’d sent me after I did the piece on Mam and Dad’s wedding for the LRB. I think he may have been ill already at that time when I was immensely touched, having thought he always disliked my stuff.

  11 August. On Saturdays the Guardian is running a series on writers’ rooms. Why any writer allows him or herself to be prevailed on to take part I’m not sure. Flattered to be asked, perhaps, though what would deter me would be, if nothing else, superstition: to allow a newspaper to photograph my desk runs the risk of never being able to do any more work there. None that I remember have been inspiring or even particularly pleasing: Colm Tóibín’s today is all books, though said to look over rooftops, which could be nice; Margaret Drabble’s faced the street, but with curtains so long and John Lewis-like I’d be frightened they’d get into the prose; Edna O’Brien’s had some relics of Samuel Beckett, hardly likely to unchain the imagination or get the words flowing. Most have had awful fireplaces. Can we see where you work? No fear.

  12 August. On Sunday, Anne comes in and sits quietly talking, first to Rupert and then to both of us, the only time she’s been able to open her heart. She’s so composed – or seems so – resolved not to worry until the full extent of the problem is known. When we go, she is sitting in the sun on the bench outside the café, looking so pretty and cheerful – the highest form of courage there is, it seems to me, to take away the burden of concern from friends and family who are departing, so that they can go away feeling better about you – and how bad you may feel meanwhile kept to yourself. I’m not sure I ever achieved this myself.

  Back in London we have our usual Sunday supper of cheese on toast, bacon and a carrot and apple salad only with some broad beans we’ve brought back from the garden – and so delicate and delicious they’re a different vegetable from the frozen variety and even the loose beans you get from a shop – so tasty I find myself rationing them as I’m eating so that I still have one or two left for my final mouthful. The inside of a bean pod, shaped to the bean and furred like the inside of a violin case has always seemed to me an instance of the prodigality of nature, a thing that is beautiful in itself and suited to its function. In Yorkshire the pods would go on the compost but here only into the bin.

  15 August. When I was a child and we were living in the Hallidays I used to watch Mam going through the terrible ritual of blackleading the kitchen range, the finishing touch being when she cleaned the enamelled tin in the hearth with milk. Why I never knew, though it always seemed to me a wicked extravagance – a mealtime equivalent would be when Dad occasionally put sugar on his lettuce.

  29 August. Rupert: ‘You look like you’re having some sort of episode.’ (I think I was singing.)

  30 August. When we met the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire aka Debo at Andrew Wilson’s a few months ago I said I’d send her a copy of The Uncommon Reader when it came out. Today comes a letter (and a postcard for Rupert) thanking us both and bubbling over with enthusiasm and good spirits. She now lives at the Old Vicarage, Edensor and very much in the Mitford tradition she refers to it as the Old Vic, the ability and the delight in making up nicknames common to all the sisters. It was true even of the least lauded one, Pamela Jackson, who, when she lived next door to Hugh and Joan Stalker in Duntisbourne Leer, used to shop at the same Cirencester butcher, Mr Barron, nicknamed by P.J. ‘Robber Barron’.

  1 September. To Cambridge where we do all the things we usually do – taxi (grim unsmiling driver) to the Catholic Church where we go in Jess Aplin’s shop opposite, then walk along past the Polar Institute and down the street and the (stone) plaque on the house where Darwin lived to the Fitzwilliam. A nice lunch of (very fat) mushrooms and cheese on toast then while Rupert looks at the ceramics I go to the first two or three rooms where I used to go when I was on the Russian course fifty years ago. I’d never walked round the top gallery of Room 3 where there are some lovely small pictures – the Henry Lamb of Lytton Strachey, a good Augustus John of one of his children but not his portrait of Hardy, which used to be here.

  The woman attendant in the gallery below very pleased to see me and promises to look out for Rupert who I tell her ‘looks very young but has grey hair’ while I go and read under the portico before we go across the road to Gabor Cossa. Then along tourist-crowded King’s Parade and th
rough the back streets hoping to cut through Trinity Great Court but of course it’s closed as it never would have been once and up the hill past Magdalene to Kettle’s Yard.

  As restful and reassuring as it always is, though I just sit in the available armchairs while R. does the proper round. Ideal though it is I see for the first time how some of it could be done better – or differently, always the enviable thing its low rambling rooms, the result of it being two or three cottages knocked into one. Judging from the visitors’ book most people who come have been before, like a tall curly-haired boy, no older than an undergraduate who is showing it to his girlfriend. ‘Come for a top-up?’ says one of the ladies who oversee the rooms.

  11 September. To the British Museum for the opening of The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army. There are speeches in the Great Court – Neil MacGregor as always the best, no one that I’ve ever heard ‘turning’ a speech as well as he does and giving it a flick at the finish. There’s also what is billed in the programme as a ‘Special Guest’. This turns out to be Gordon Brown, who makes a decent speech too and one which, as R. says, must be impromptu as he repeats himself. Flattered to be gathered up by Neil and taken in past the explanatory displays (‘You don’t want all this foreplay, do you?’) to the figures themselves. Though obviously the sheer size of the site must be staggering and can scarcely be imagined, what compensates here is being able to see the figures at such close quarters. The detail of them is extraordinary. No more so perhaps than in English alabaster tomb figures (1,500 years later) but those were often standard archetypes whereas these are individuals and perhaps portraits. The stance of the figures is so natural – a young man slightly slumped, a neckless wrestler and, as Neil points out, the generals always fatter than the soldiers. One damaged figure of an acrobat is like a Degas or a Marini and, maybe because it’s damaged, is the only figure that seems not entirely naturalistic. And it’s the humanity of the detail that is so touching. As we’re coming out we pass behind the kneeling figure of an archer, whose meticulously modelled hair catches R.’s eye and the weave of his stockinged foot mine. Seldom have I felt so immediately satisfied by an exhibition or so unmystified. The social circumstances of the times and the nature of the whole society, that is a mystery, but not the objects themselves. It’s Proust in plaster (except it’s terracotta).

  15 September. Discover a good bookshop, Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh, a street opposite the Cut near the Old Vic, where I buy Henry James’s The Lesson of the Master. It’s a short story in which Henry St George, a famous novelist, supposedly Daudet but resembling James himself, gives the benefit of his experience to a young writer, Paul Overt. St George, we are given to understand, has ‘sold out’, and in order to make money and keep up his position has fallen away from the artistic perfection to which he once aspired (and occasionally achieved). He now produces if not potboilers, then certainly inferior stuff – a declension brought about by too many worldly encumbrances, particularly his ambitious wife. He rather portentously advises Overt against marriage, whereupon the young writer sacrifices his love for the vivacious Marian Fancourt, goes off to Switzerland and writes a masterpiece. There’s a twist in the tail (and in the tale) as St George ends up marrying Ms Fancourt himself, but the whole thing strikes me as a pretty formulaic exercise and not at all convincing, partly because it’s suffused with such an extravagant notion of Art. Art makes both novelists throb with love and thrill with excitement, while at the same time (and of necessity) leaving what it is in their respective works that they’re thrilling and throbbing about vague and unspecified. This is always the trouble with stories or plays about writers (or films about painters): the actual material that they produce can only be described; if it’s shown or set down plainly for the reader to judge it invariably turns out to be poor or pretentious stuff. And why not? If one could write a story about a masterpiece and include the masterpiece why bother to put it in a frame in the first place? What I particularly don’t buy is the notion of self-denial leading (in the story inevitably) to greatness.

  16 September. Stuff cut from The Habit of Art.

  A.: Do you pee in the washbasin?

  B.B.: No.

  A.: Everybody does.

  B.B.: Not in Aldeburgh.

  A.: Do they still adore you?

  B.B.: (considers) The women do.

  A.: I was in Milwaukee a few months back. They adored me.

  What about the boys? Do they adore you?

  Britten smiles.

  A.: I think that is what is known as a thin smile.

  B.B.: You shouldn’t despise Aldeburgh.

  A.: I don’t.

  B.B.: I gave them a concert hall. Two.

  A.: But they’ve given you much more.

  B.B.: The sea, you mean.

  Those I teach …

  Do you teach? Not composing but conducting is teaching.

  Teaching the singers, teaching the orchestra. Teaching the chorus.

  Teaching teaches – that’s one thing I’ve learned.

  Auden as prophet:

  Struggling in vain to understand Auden’s poem The Sea and the Mirror I come across a speech for Caliban addressed to the audience:

  Ladies and gentlemen, please keep your seats,

  An unidentified plane is reported

  Approaching the city. Probably only a false alarm

  But naturally, we cannot afford

  To take any chances.

  This was written in 1943.

  20 September. I’m reading Robert Craft’s memoirs, which are sometimes almost comically bad and just a joined-up engagement book. At other times, though, he writes vividly and well. The book includes an account of the first night of Beyond the Fringe in New York in October 1962. Arnold Weissberger, the showbiz accountant, had procured seats for Craft and for the Stravinskys, with Craft not at his usual post by their side but sitting some distance away with Rita Hayworth (who was moderately pissed). There was much laughter, Craft reports, but with Hayworth laughing louder and longer than anyone else, much to Craft’s embarrassment. Seeing that people in the audience were looking at them, Craft contrived to leave with Ms Hayworth at the interval. I never even knew Rita Hayworth was in the audience not to mention Stravinsky. Though Craft may not be the most reliable witness, as he also notes the presence of Charles Addams ‘and his wife, Deborah Kerr’ (sic).

  24 September. Marcel Marceau dies. Much hated by Peter Cook (‘Marcel Arsehole’), who couldn’t stand the reverence with which mime was treated. Still it gave him a good joke: ‘I was there,’ he used to say, ‘the night Marcel Marceau dried.’

  2 October. Ned Sherrin dies who very much figured in the second period of my life after Beyond the Fringe, when he worked on the late-night shows Not So Much a Programme and The Late Show. He was an ideal producer in that no production problems or censorship difficulties were ever allowed to reach the performers – in this respect (and only in this) resembling another producer of mine, Innes Lloyd. Both of them protected the writers and actors from the BBC hierarchy. John Bird used to do a very good Harold Wilson and after one show Ned was summoned by Hugh Carleton Greene, the director-general, and told that the prime minister was threatening legal action. ‘Tell him to go ahead,’ said Ned. ‘Say that just because he’s prime minister he shouldn’t feel he ought not to sue.’ No more was heard of the matter. Ned was a gent, too, always sending you a note if you’d been on one of his programmes or he’d seen something you’d done. He made no secret of being gay or of the fact that he availed himself of the services of escort agencies and rent boys, about which he would teasingly drop hints in one of the several columns he wrote and at a time when the tabloids were going to town over similar celebrity shock horrors. ‘Airily’ is the adverb one associates with Ned and a refusal ever to be disconcerted, looking, with the top-heavy figure of his latter years, like a genial Lady Bracknell.

  15 October. Talk to Peter Gill, who is bringing out a book on acting, Actors Speaking. He thinks that what
has always been the shortcoming of American actors, namely, that while superb at naturalism they find artificiality difficult, is now the case here: and that paradoxically actors from lower down the social scale find it hard to imitate toffs (and so to play Wilde or mannered comedy) whereas Etonians, say, have no problem being ordinary or working class. It’s partly that today’s generation of actors are better at imitation (and so can do dialect) but what they lack is fantasy, with few of them able to indulge in what he calls ‘the erotics of speaking’. He instances Edith Evans, an odd-looking girl and a shop assistant, who had a notion of herself as a beautiful and talented woman and who made her audience share that vision. And she was not alone: Peggy Ashcroft came from Croydon, Noël Coward from the suburbs and Alec Guinness was the son of a barmaid. But all of them had some sense of their proper position in life, a fantasy of what they wanted to be which these days would probably be disapproved of or discouraged, fantasy frowned on as some sort of escape.

  21 October. One piece of slightly cheering news is the departure of the terrible Kaczynski twins in Poland. They had been child actors, a profession ideally suited to tyrants in the making, and the one photograph I’ve seen of them in character makes them look fittingly like cousins to the Children of the Damned. Years ago there used to be a set of twins in Spotlight called Imp and Mischief Champneys. They remained a fixture of that volume for years, it seemed, eternally young and in unfailing spirits, though I never saw a production in which they actually appeared. Thinking about it, David Cameron could have been a child actor. And Blair, who always had a ‘Who’s for tennis?’ air about him.