Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  7 July. The baby robin, now being fed by its mother on the fence, is the ugliest creature one could imagine: its feathers are scraggy and almost greasy, it has fierce black eyebrows and such a cross expression one wonders that even its mother can see any charms in it at all.

  8 July. Two boys in Gloucester Avenue coming home from school, the same age but one boy big, the other small. The small one seeing a pile of dog turds on the pavement picks up a sprig of leaves and delicately garnishes the pile. While the big one claims to be disgusted (shouts, ‘What did you do that for?’) the other is hysterical with laughter and they go on.

  28 July. To the National where we see half a dozen young actors for the rent boy role in The Habit of Art. None of them are quite right – one is too finished, another too tall – though why a rent boy shouldn’t be tall I don’t know, it just isn’t a tall profession. There’s one possibility but he looks a bit like a squirrel – and none of them can do the bravura speech at the finish.

  Afterwards at home (and still, I suppose, hoping for Russell Tovey who’d now be too old – and too sought after) it occurs to me that the actor who plays the part could be too old and know it and spills out his insecurities to Kay, the stage manager, just as the others do. I could see how this could be funny – and add to the overall picture of a group of differently fractured people coming together to present something whole.

  29 July. A piece in the Independent by Charlotte Philby, Kim Philby’s granddaughter, prompted by the publication of Anthony Blunt’s apologia released by the British Library. Not surprisingly she draws an unfavourable comparison between Blunt and Philby, bolstered by happy family pictures of her grandfather in Moscow. There’s not much point, it seems to me, in apportioning guilt between them and anyway the treason side of it has never counted for much with me, though Philby does seem to have been responsible for the betrayal and presumed torture and death of a network of agents in a way that’s never been proved of Blunt. What counted though, against Blunt, and Burgess too, was that they weren’t journo-friendly. Journalists look after their own and Philby masqueraded as a devil-may-care drunken newspaperman and so was treated more indulgently by those in his profession. Blunt, who was an austere homosexual, a Marxist and a toff, got no such consideration. Though his character is still hard to fathom I’ve never had any difficulty believing Blunt and to a certain extent Burgess spent their lives paying for the mistakes of their Cambridge youth. Charlotte Philby thinks her grandfather was more honest, but it’s a saloon-bar honesty. Philby was a chap. ‘Let’s have another drink on it, old man.’ Good old Kim.

  1 August. This is Yorkshire Day, so designated apparently since the 1970s, though the festival had hitherto passed me by. This year I am rung by several newspapers for my comments on this joyful day, with them hoping, I imagine, for some jolly ee-ba-gummery. I suggest Yorkshire might be celebrating its distinction as the only county to have elected a fascist MEP, but nowhere is this printed.

  5 August. This afternoon after a lengthy and wholly unsatisfactory visit to the English Heritage café at Belsay we intend to have a look at Warkworth and particularly its castle. But this week the Heritage has scheduled three days of medieval jousting at its castle so not fancying that (and the town very crowded) we walk instead on Druridge Bay sands which are less crowded and here at least the families look happy as they don’t trailing round the town. Boys are skimming pebbles across the placid sea, reminding me of yet another non-accomplishment of my boyhood – the ability to throw stones whether across a pond, up in the air or at (not that I dared) other boys.

  Then, for some reason I think of Updike – not long dead but a boy seventy-odd years ago who was skilled in all such boyish accomplishments – throwing things, hitting things and, in due course, fucking things but who yet managed to find in this intact and immaculate boyhood stuff that he could write about that wasn’t just shame and failure – and maybe unlike with the rest of us it was even the shame and failure that was hard to find. Lying on the sand in the sun (still with my tie on) I think of Updike sunning his psoriasis which I would have found tragic or at least a stigma but which he what – triumphed over? No – maybe just discounted – didn’t let it put him off his stroke. Such my thoughts aged seventy-five on this fairly grubby North Sea beach where the boys who were skimming stones are now building a sand castle.

  20 August. Lucy, a donkey at Thistleyhaugh, the farm where we are staying, has never recovered from the death of her mate. We walk down the lane in the dusk after supper and see her ghost-like form glimmering in the trees; we call but she does not respond. One of the real regrets of my life is that I have never kept a donkey.

  23 August. Penelope Wilton’s just (last night) finished after thirteen weeks at the Donmar playing Gertrude to Jude Law’s Hamlet. The production was going on (with Geraldine James in her part), first of all visiting Elsinore and then doing a season at the Broadhurst in New York. I’m glad I’m not a theatregoer living in Elsinore. All they must ever get are productions of Hamlet, while what they’re probably longing for is Move Over, Mrs Markham or Run for Your Wife.

  29 August. York as always a disappointment and each time I vow never to come again, the best bit the cafeteria at the Spurriergate Centre which is friendly, lively and not tourist-driven. Earlier as we walk from the station along by the river we call briefly at All Saints North Street to look at the glass. It’s like a scene from a Powell and Pressburger movie with a group of amateur players getting into costume for a dress rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, various (very high church) chapels with their matchless medieval glass doubling as dressing rooms. Oddly there seems less glass than I remembered, though last time we came we had to rush round as they were setting up for another kind of performance, the midday Mass. Then, having eaten (our own) sandwiches in Spurriergate café – something I’m as nervous of doing at seventy-five as I was at seven in Harry Ramsden’s – we make our way through the throng of shoppers and tourists to show Lynn Holy Trinity Goodramgate. Here, too, a performance is going on with a character in a battered top hat performing some monologue about the Black Death to a group of blameless tourists whom he has corralled in the pews. The performer has a loud sergeant-majorly voice compounded by his over-acting so that box-pewed though it is the church provides no escape. We give up on Holy Trinity and try the Minster – where nowadays there is no entrance at the west door or the north transept, everyone funnelled in at the south transept door opposite the Roman column at the top of Stonegate. We get just inside the door to a scene like Waterloo in the rush hour, the crossing packed with people, aimlessly milling about, some (like me) reluctant to pay and so not going through the turnstile, others staring vacantly round and the crowd robbing the space of all its wonder and (what I found as a child its particular attribute) the acoustic.

  30 August, Yorkshire. Another ideal spot, empty of visitors this Sunday morning, is Jervaulx up beyond the head of Nidderdale and into Wensleydale. Some walkers using the café as a stepping-off point but the ruins otherwise deserted – nature and the building’s decay having fashioned the place into a series of rooms that would have suited Vita Sackville-West.

  No particular planting, though – valerian everywhere, crab apple trees and comfortable-looking sheep, the nicest detail the stone trough in the grass into which an underground spring burbles with the overflow disappearing back into the ground – presumably one of the water sources used by the monastery (whose last abbot Henry VIII had hung, drawn and quartered).

  Remember at seventy-five Ariel Crittall’s remark, ‘What is it that I don’t need to do any more now that I’m eighty? Oh yes, I remember, tell the truth.’

  (She also, I think, answered the question differently: ‘Oh I know. Wear knickers.’)

  From Jervaulx to Byland where the nice attendant in the kiosk shows us the few very faintly incised lines on the inside of the west wall, and which were presumably a guide to the masons building the rose window. Plus some more clearly incised lines down the all
ey with the carrels where the monks used to read.

  With the abbey now at 5 p.m. wholly empty, we look at what to me is the most numinous object of the Dissolution, namely the green pottery inkwell, unearthed in the chapter house, which was presumably used when the monastery was signed over to the king’s commissioners in 1540.

  31 August. R. having spent most of the evening (and yesterday’s) watching Wuthering Heights turns to me at the finish and says: ‘You’re rather like Heathcliff.’

  Me (gratified): ‘Really?’

  R.: ‘Yeah. Difficult, Northern and a cunt.’

  2 September. I am reading the second volume of Michael Palin’s diaries, which regularly feature the film producer Denis O’Brien. He produced A Private Function, which was made on a shoestring, the funds promised for the film regularly siphoned off for a more favoured O’Brien production, Water, which was set in the Caribbean and starred Michael Caine. O’Brien’s partner was George Harrison, who didn’t like the pig film either, and it’s evidence of Michael Palin’s generosity that he remained on good terms with the pair of them. At one point in the book my spirits rise when I read: ‘Denis is in a very bad way.’ Alas it turns out to be Denis the cat.

  14 September. John Bird calls to ask where I found the phrase ‘the habit of art’. I came across it in Mystery and Manners, a book of the incidental writings of Flannery O’Connor: ‘The scientist has the habit of science, the artist the habit of art.’ John, who is more widely (and rigorously) read than I am, had come across the phrase in the correspondence between Stravinsky and Jacques Maritain in the 1920s, making him think it came from St Thomas Aquinas. Since Flannery O’Connor was nothing if not Catholic that might be the link. I tell John Bird the story of Dudley Moore and me seeing Stravinsky and his wife Vera in the Hotel Pierre in New York in 1963, saying how the name Vera has always seemed to me to humanise Stravinsky. ‘Not so much as Stockhausen,’ says John. ‘His wife’s name was Doris.’

  15 October. Across the river to the National for a rehearsal of some of the early scenes from The Habit of Art and in particular the crucial scene between Auden and Britten. In the afternoon Michael Gambon calls by, still full of regrets and apologies that he wasn’t able to do the play. We all have a cup of tea and there’s a lot of laughing, particularly as the actors from David Hare’s The Power of Yes begin to drift out after their matinée. One of them is Simon Williams, a tall distinguished figure, handsome throughout his life just as was his father, whom I remember from a film I saw as a child, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.

  Simon is a Harrovian and says languidly: ‘Yes. Character acting for me is playing an Old Etonian.’

  20 October, New York. A limo picks me up at nine thirty to drive to Princeton, the driver (whose face I never see until we reach Princeton) looking from the rear like Lloyd Bridges in Airplane with lank grey hair, fidgety, shifting in his seat to the extent that as we speed along the Jersey turnpike I think he is about to have a heart attack and begin looking for where the key is located in the ignition ready in an emergency to switch it off. It’s a hot morning, the industrial desolation along the Jersey shore shrouded in smoke and fumes, the real desolation of pollution not in New York – or not in Manhattan anyway – but in its surroundings. And even as we get beyond the worst of the industry it’s still a desolate soulless environment with gas stations, hotels, out-of-town shopping centres, the occasional clapboard house just seeming to point up the tawdriness of what has developed around it. Princeton though is a different matter, a tree-lined road leading to a small and seemingly prosperous little town, too many boutiques and bijou restaurants maybe but a main street pleasant enough to sit out in and have coffee which we do until Carol Rigolo, head of French, arrives to escort us up across the road to the university proper.

  And it’s an attractive place, the architecture exuberantly Gothic with quadrangles flowing into each other, the buildings themselves as might have been drawn or designed by F. L. Griggs. Very few students and those we see quite laid back – a late Henry Moore sculpture on one of the lawns and curled up inside it (and fitting it perfectly) a boy reading. Friendly, too, some of them – an elegant black guy strolling through says (presumably having heard me speak), ‘You don’t get many days like this in England.’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘With us it’s a rarity.’ ‘Quite. A rarity is what it is.’

  22 October. Back in Manhattan, we sit on the terrace watching the sun go down over the Jersey shore – downtown skyscrapers against a sky that in the afterglow is almost green. Then there are buildings so tall and tumbled they might be in India, many-storeyed, many-windowed and with the cluster of water towers like turrets on the roof. Feel so privileged and lucky to be able to stay in this enchanting place that Lynn makes so comfortable – a twentieth-storey penthouse that is cosier and yet more spectacular than the grandest apartment on Park Avenue or Central Park.

  Lights coming on now with the last of the sun, two big office buildings flying the flag though what about I don’t know.

  A plane crosses the sky and dips down to Newark – all framed in the wisteria and creeper Lynn has grown over this many-arboured terrace – tables and loungers at every corner and the table outside the kitchen where we have breakfast and lunch.

  Sky peach and warm still – this noisy, dirty heedless city one of the most blessed places of the earth.

  The skyline now so spectacular it is almost vulgar, one of the posters on sale in a souvenir shop.

  One of the moments that Cheever describes – the old lady in The Wapshot Chronicle standing to at the sun’s setting. And – another recurrence – the urge in the presence of natural beauty to stay and to go at the same time.

  24 October. A press release from the Bodleian Library:

  The author and playwright Alan Bennett is presenting his papers as a gift to the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. This remarkable and comprehensive archive comprises materials relating to a distinguished literary career which began with the revue Beyond the Fringe in 1960 and has spanned nearly five decades.

  The archive includes original manuscripts, typescripts, handwritten notes and drafts for all his stage and television plays including the plays written for the National Theatre, the autobiographical books Writing Home (1994) and Untold Stories (2005) plus the manuscripts of his novellas and short stories, the latest being An Uncommon Reader (2007).

  What will also come to the library in due course are his own annotated editions of his published writing, together with letters and other materials arising and his own afterthoughts. There are diaries in an unbroken series from 1974 onwards only a selection of which has already been printed.

  Alan Bennett writes:

  I re-write quite a bit so whatever I do tends to go into three or four versions all of which I keep and since I don’t have a computer this does make for a fair amount of paperwork. The fact that a good deal of it is handwritten seems to delight the archivists at Bodley but it’s always dismayed me and there’s so much I’m quite glad to see the back of it. I just pity the poor research student who may have to make sense of it all.

  More seriously I would like to emphasise that these accumulated writings come at no cost to the library or indeed to the tax-payer because I see the gift as an obligation repaid. I was educated at Oxford at Exeter College and I was fortunate in my time in that my education was entirely free. I say proudly that I had a state education, school, university … none of it cost me or my parents a penny. It’s a situation which young people in higher education today can only dream of and this is wrong. I believe that free education is a right and would dispute the notion that unless one pays for one’s education it will be undervalued. I hope I never undervalued the education I had here and though not to seem over-pious I see this gift such as it is, as some small recompense both to the University and also, though it is unfashionable to say this, to the state … or the Nanny State as it is disparagingly called. Well, as I say, I was lucky in my time and I’m grateful to have been nannied.

&n
bsp; I think it’s appropriate too that my stuff should be here in Oxford. My writing is nothing if not English and however universal and unboundaried scholarship may be these days I wouldn’t want my stuff to be lodged in some Mid-Western university. At Bodley I shall be rubbing shoulders with Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin. They might not be all that pleased but I am.

  26 October. A Francis Bacon Evening on BBC4, i.e. Adam Low’s excellent documentary and the (less excellent) film with Derek Jacobi as Bacon and a (much diminished) Daniel Craig as George Dyer – diminished, that is, from the hunk that emerged from the waves in the Bond film. Also glimpsed is Adrian Scarborough as one of the Colony Club crowd and in an unshown interview from 1965, a schoolboyish Julian Jebb – soft-faced, unlined and less the gnarled cherub he became later.

  Briefly we switch over and catch some of Flash Gordon (1980) where hovering in the background while some sacrifice is prepared is in the robes of a high priest the unmistakable sardonic face of John Osborne – too long to wait for the credits to have his identification confirmed – but it is he – though whether as a joke or from dire necessity hard to say. [I ask John Heilpern – who confirms it is indeed Osborne.]

  4 November. At one point during The Habit of Art tech, Nick Hytner asks how many of the score or so people in the auditorium have seen the play before. Only one person raises a hand. ‘Good,’ and he addresses the rest. ‘How many of you realised that that was the words of Auden talking to the music of Britten?’ All the hands go up and Nick is much relieved. This is one of his (endearing) habits: direction by plebiscite.

  7 November. It’s at this point, a couple of days into previews, that the author begins to take his or her leave of the play. It’s nothing to do with a sense of work completed, which I seldom have anyway, or now the play is up and running a desire to get on with something else. Fat chance. No. While it’s psychologically healthy (no sense in hanging around after all), it’s because at this point the cast have been allotted their dressing rooms. Previously the rehearsal room has been the meeting place where besides work you gossip and have coffee and, if you’re like me and are used to working on your own, have a nice, gregarious time. Now everyone except the playwright has a room to go to and a couch to lie on, the real meeting place henceforth the stage on which every night the actors rendezvous to do the play. For the author it’s over.