Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  My additions and alterations to The Wind in the Willows are, I am sure, as revealing of me as the original text is of Grahame. Grahame knew this very well. ‘You must please remember,’ he wrote:

  that a theme, a thesis, is in most cases little more than a sort of clothes line on which one pegs a string of ideas, quotations, allusions and so on, one’s mental undergarments of all shapes and sizes, some possibly fairly new but most rather old and patched; and they dance and sway in the breeze and flap and flutter, or hang limp and lifeless; and some are ordinary enough, and some are of a private and intimate shape, and rather give the owner away, and show up his or her peculiarities. And owing to the invisible clothes line they seem to have some connexion and continuity.

  Peculiarities or not, I imagine most writers are gratified that there is an invisible clothes line, if only because it suggests there are things going on in their heads that they are unaware of. Who knows, these unintended recurrences might amount if not to Significance then at least to Subtext. The only other piece of mine that has been performed at the National Theatre was my double bill Single Spies in 1988. However, it was not until I was adapting The Wind in the Willows that I remembered that Guy Burgess, the protagonist of An Englishman Abroad, had, in his final rumbustious days at the Washington Embassy, acquired a twelve-cylinder Lincoln convertible in which he had frequent mishaps. ‘He drove it’, said Lord Greenhill, a fellow diplomat, ‘just like Mr Toad.’ Poop-poop.

  The King and I

  I’ve always had a soft spot for George III, starting all of forty years ago when I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the nineteenth century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions. On the Whig interpretation, historical characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view Butterfield had helped to discredit, so a question on George III was thought likely to turn up in the Cambridge examination, which it duly did. Sitting in the freezing Senate House in December 1951, I trotted out my Butterfield and, though I didn’t get a scholarship, counted myself lucky to be offered a place at Sidney Sussex – that Christmas when the college letter came the best Christmas of my life.

  Before university, though, there was national service to be got through, regarded at best as a bore, but for me, as a late developer, a long-dreaded ordeal; it was touch and go which I got to first – puberty or the call-up. I served briefly in the infantry, then, like many university entrants at that time, was sent on the Joint Services Language Course to learn Russian, first at Coulsdon, then at Cambridge. So what I had dreaded turned out a happy time and, although I didn’t realize it till later, far more enjoyable than my time at university proper. However, I began to think that, since I was now spending a year at Cambridge studying Russian, the gilt was off the gingerbread so far as Cambridge was concerned and I might get the best of both worlds if I were to go to Oxford. This wasn’t altogether the beady–eyed career move it might seem, in that I had a hopeless crush on one of my fellow officer cadets, who was bound for Oxford – that his college was Brasenose, then a mecca of rowing and rugger, somehow exemplifying the futility of it. Still, I suppose I ought to have been grateful: he might have been going to Hull – or even back to Leeds.

  So now in the evenings, after we’d finished our Russian lessons, I started to read for a scholarship again, biking in along Trumpington Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second entrance. Sometime that autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of eighteenth-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I mugged it up. Like the good examinee I always was I realized that to know one book well is a better bet than having a smattering of several. A year in the army had made me more flash too, so this time I did get a scholarship, to read history at Exeter College, where I went when I came out of the army six months later.

  The Oxford history syllabus takes in the whole of English history, beginning at ‘the Beginnings’ and finishing (in those days) at 1939. This meant that one didn’t get round to the eighteenth century until the middle of the final year. Seeing that Pares, of whom I knew nothing other than his book, was lecturing at Rhodes House, I went along to find only a sparse attendance, though, curiously for a general lecture, I saw that quite a few of the audience were dons.

  When Pares was brought in it was immediately plain why. Propped up in a wheelchair, completely paralysed, nodding and helpless, he was clearly dying. Someone spread his notes out on a board laid across his knees and he began to lecture, his head sunk on his chest but his voice still strong and clear. It was noticeable even in the eight weeks that I attended his lectures that the paralysis was progressive and that he was getting weaker. I fancy that in the final weeks, as he was unable to turn his head, someone sat beside him to move his notes into his line of vision.

  Now, the eighteenth century is not an inspiring period. Whether by the Whig interpretation or not, there are none of those great constitutional struggles and movements of ideas that animate the seventeenth and dramatize the nineteenth. The politics are materialistic, small-minded, the House of Commons an arena where a man might make a name for himself but where most members were just concerned to line their pockets. That Pares, with death at his elbow, should have gone on analysing and lecturing on what I saw as such a thankless time made a great impression on me – the lesson put crudely, I suppose, being that if a thing is not worth doing it’s worth doing well. As it was, these must have been the last lectures Pares gave – he died the following year – and, when I found I was able to stay on after taking my degree to do research and teach a little and possibly become a don, the memory of those lectures cast for me a romantic light on what is a pretty unromantic profession.

  Pares kept cropping up in subsequent years. As the memoirs and letters of the twenties began to be published, it turned out that as an undergraduate he had been one of the group round Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. But, whereas most of that charmed circle went down without taking a degree, Pares turned his back on all that, took a First in Greats and was elected a fellow of All Souls. Thirty years later, in December 1954, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford:

  I went up to Oxford and visited my first homosexual love, Richard Pares, a don at All Souls. At 50 he is quite paralysed except his mind and voice, awaiting deterioration and death. A wife and four daughters, no private fortune. He would have been Master of Balliol if he had not been struck down. No Christian faith to support him. A very harrowing visit.

  My vision of myself pursuing an academic career did not last long, though as a postgraduate I was supervised by the medieval historian Κ. Β. McFarlane, who had, incidentally, shared a flat with Pares when they were both drafted into the Civil Service during the war. McFarlane was a great teacher, and yet he scarcely seemed to teach at all. An hour with him and, though he barely touched on the topic of my research, I would come away thinking that to study medieval history was the only thing in the world worth doing. McFarlane himself had no such illusions, once referring to medieval studies as ‘just a branch of the entertainment business’, though when with the onset of Beyond the Fringe I eventually abandoned medieval studies for the entertainment business this did not make him any less d
ispleased. Still, it meant that when a couple of years ago I began to read about George III it was the first systematic historical work I’d done in twenty years.

  In the meantime I found that George III’s rehabilitation had proceeded apace. No longer the ogre, he had grown altogether more kindly – wiser even – and in his attachment to his people and his vision of the nation over and above the vagaries of politics he had come to seem a forerunner of a monarch of the present day. But it was a joke that made me think of writing about him – just as when a few years ago I thought of writing about Kafka what started me off was a joke that Kafka had made on his deathbed. Less poignant, George III’s joke also occurred during his illness. He had an equerry, Colonel Manners, who, bringing him his dinner one day, discovered the King had hidden under the sofa. A Jeeves before his time, Manners imperturbably laid a place for His Majesty on the carpet and put down the plate. He was retiring discreetly when the King said (still sous bergère), ‘That was very good … Manners.’ The pun was thought to signal a further stage in the King’s recovery. The anecdote hasn’t found its way into the play, but it did make me think that George III might be fun to write about.

  My interest in the King’s story had also been rekindled by reading some of the medical history that was being published in the eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also read George III and the Mad Business by the mother-and-son partnership Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, who first put forward the theory that the King’s illness was physical not mental and that he was suffering from porphyria. I found it a difficult book to read, convincing about George III himself but less so about the other historical cases the authors identify, the slightest regal indisposition being seized on to fetch the sufferer under porphyria’s umbrella.

  From a dramatist’s point of view, it is obviously useful if the King’s malady was a toxic condition, traceable to a metabolic disturbance rather than due to schizophrenia or manic depression. Thus afflicted, he becomes the victim of his doctors and a tragic hero. How sympathetic this would make him to the audience I had not realized until the previews of the play. I had been worried that the climax came two-thirds of the way into the second act, when the King begins to recover, and that there was no real dramatic development after that. What I had not anticipated was that the audience would be so wholeheartedly on the King’s side or that when he does recover it would prove such a relief of tension that the rest of the play, in which little happens except that various loose ends are tied up, would go by on a wave of delighted laughter. ‘The King is himself again’ means that the audience can once more take pleasure in his eccentricities and enjoy the discomfiture of the doctors until in a nice sentimental conclusion Mr and Mrs King are united in regal domesticity.

  Having been working on the play for a year or so, I had eventually got it into some sort of order by April 1991, when, knowing it was far from finished, and in some despair, I put it through Nicholas Hytner’s door. Coming away from the house, I felt rather like one of those practical jokers who arrange for an unsuspecting victim to be landed with a load of slurry. That Hytner was then enthusiastic about the script and with him the Director of the National Theatre, Richard Eyre, cheered me up so much that I forced myself to reread it. No, I had been right: slurry at that moment it was. Later I discovered that Hytner had a gap in his schedule and Richard Eyre had a gap in his, so that the script had come as the answer to both their prayers.

  Reading the play for the first time and knowing only a little of the period, Nicholas Hytner had been surprised when the King recovered. With this in mind, his first suggestion was that I should make the play more of a cliff-hanger, relying on the fact that most people would know there was a Regency without quite knowing when it began or that the Prince of Wales would have to wait another twenty years before he finally got his hands on the government. This was just the first of many invaluable suggestions he made, and in the course of the next three months the play was completely reshaped. The role of a director at this stage of a play is more like that of an editor, and directors who can fill this role are few and far between.

  Though it began and ended much as it did in the finished version, the original manuscript meandered about quite a bit, so the two rewrites I did between April and August cut out a good deal in an effort to make the progress of the King’s illness and his recovery more clear. In August 1991 a reading of the text was set up in the National Theatre Studio, actors working at the National taking the various parts almost on a first-come-first-served basis, the purpose being for us to hear the text and see how it played. The only actor already cast was Nigel Hawthorne, and it was plain from his reading how he would transform the part. That said, to sit and hear the play read, knowing it was unfinished, was both depressing and embarrassing, and I fear that some of the actors, who seldom see a play at this stage, must have wondered why we were bothering. But I then began a third rewrite, which solved many of the problems the reading had thrown up and gave the play more dramatic thrust: this was the script we began to rehearse at the end of September.

  That we were able to rehearse for ten weeks was a great luxury, and one only possible in a subsidized company. However, in that time Nicholas Hytner had also to rehearse the new production of The Wind in the Willows, so it was Pitt and Fox in the morning, Rat and Mole (and Fox) in the afternoon. When at the end of the seventh week we were able to run the play, it was immediately clear that, while the course of the King’s illness and recovery was plain and worked dramatically, the political crisis it brought with it lacked urgency. So the final bout of rewriting was only a couple of weeks before the play went on stage. I have never worked on a play where so much reconstruction has been required. That it was unresented by the actors, who by this stage in rehearsal are naturally anxious for a finished text, says a good deal both for their forbearance and for the atmosphere in which the rehearsals were conducted. Not since Forty Years On, which is, I suppose, my only other historical play, have I enjoyed rehearsals so much.

  One casualty of the rewrites was strict historical truth. In the early versions of the play I had adhered pretty closely to the facts: the Prince of Wales, for instance, was originally a more genial character than presented here, and more reluctant to have it admitted in public or in the press that his father might be mad. However, the play works only if the antipathy between father and son, never far below the surface with all the Hanoverian kings, is sharpened and the Prince made less sympathetic. In the original Fox, too, was a more ambiguous character, much troubled by his own lack of scruple, and the votes in the Commons were not so narrow, the government majority never as low as ten. In other respects, though, events needed no sharpening, the King’s recovery, for instance, being only slightly less dramatic than it is in the play; certainly it took the politicians by surprise. This was because the King’s illness was such a political football that no one was quite sure what information was to be trusted. Even when the King was plainly on the mend the doctors could not guarantee that he would maintain the improvement (and there were some alarming lapses).

  In this process of recovery the ‘what-whatting’ was crucial. This verbal habit of the King’s was presumably the attempt of a nervous and self-conscious man to prevent the conversation from flagging – always a danger in chats with the monarch, since the subject is never certain whether he or she is expected to reply or when. The onset of the King’s mania delivered him from self-consciousness and so the ‘what-whatting’ went; the King was in any case talking too fast and too continuously for there to be need or room for it. When he began to calm down and come to himself again he came to the ‘what-whatting’ too, the flag of social distress now a signal of recovery. As Greville wrote, ‘though not a grace in language, yet the restoring habits of former days pr
escribed a forerunner of returning wisdom.’

  I have no experience of royal persons, some of whom I think may still ‘what-what’ a little. Today, though, it’s easier. What royalty wants nowadays is deference without awe, though what they get more often than not is a fatuous smile, any social awkwardness veiled in nervous laughter so that the Queen moves among her people buoyed up on waves of obliging hilarity. How happy we must all seem! Such tittering would have been unthinkable at the court of George III, reputedly the dullest in Europe, where no one laughed or coughed, and where it was unthinkable ever to sneeze.

  Had the King insisted on such formality outside the court he would not have been as popular as he was. A stickler for etiquette at home, he and the Queen remained seated while his courtiers stood for hours at a time, drooping with boredom: but outside the court, often riding unattended, the King would stop and chat with farm labourers, road-menders and anybody he came across. When they went to Cheltenham he promised the Queen, with a lack of formality that not so long ago was thought to be a modern breakthrough, that they would ‘walk about and meet his subjects’.