Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  Two men in a park:

  A: Do you have the time?

  B: Sorry. I haven’t got a watch.

  A: Never mind.

  B: (walking away, then stopping and calling back) But thank you for asking.

  Too late, B had become aware that he was being asked not so much for the time as a way to spend it; his lack of a watch was neither here nor there. While he might quite properly wish to turn down A’s implied request, the last-minute reassurance of his ‘But thank you for asking’ showed that, while it might be right to leave someone disappointed, one ought not to leave them crestfallen.

  We must love one another or die − of embarrassment. Life is a perilous path across social quicksands, and no effort must be spared to save each other from the ultimate fate, when the swamps of confusion close over our heads leaving that last clutching hand clawing the air to the echo of an apologetic voice: ‘Sorry, did I say the wrong thing?’

  In the second essay, ‘Response Cries’, Goffman takes to pieces remarks of the nature of ‘Oops’, ‘Ouch’ and ‘Ugh.’ Under the heading ‘The threat startle, notably Eek! and Yipe!’, he writes, ‘A very high open stairwell, or a walk that leads up to a precipice, can routinely evoke yipes from us as we survey what might have been our doom … A notion of what a fear response would be is used as a pattern for mimicry.’ Goffman notes that these particular response cries may be ‘sex-typed for feminine use’, but my response would still be ‘Uh huh.’ I can’t offhand recall negotiating any very high open stairwells with a member of the opposite sex, but were I to do so I trust she wouldn’t come out with ‘Yipe!’ I’d prefer the non-sex-typed response ‘Shit!’ ‘Yipe!’ might find her five storeys down and the focus of some response cries herself. If I must needs be on top of Blackpool Tower in mixed company I’d prefer less modish ladies who would utter response cries typed for feminine use, like ‘Goodness me!’, ‘Heavens above!’ or plain, downright ‘Ooh!’ Certainly not ‘Eek!’ And the fact that the Goffman girls may, as he points out, be consciously imitating the language of comics is no excuse: I’d rather they didn’t.

  I don’t think it’s simply that ‘Eek!’ and ‘Yipe!’ are American terms that haven’t caught on here yet: an element of taste enters into the use of response cries, and this Goffman is missing. There is something suspect (and potentially ridiculous) about those in the vanguard of slang. (‘Far out!’) Goffman doesn’t actually discuss the currently fashionable response cry of disgust, ‘Yuk!’, but even when used as a pattern for mimicry I always find it wince-making. The nightmare would be to find oneself on the edge of Beachy Head with someone who, in the course of looking over, managed also to step in a cowpat and thus had occasion to say all three: ‘Eek!’, ‘Yipe!’ and ‘Yuk!’

  Maybe Goffman’s heavy-footed helpers are to blame: Messrs Carey, Draud, Fought, Galman, Grimshaw, Jefferson, Sankoff, Sherzer and Smith, who presumably (though not, I hope, in a body) haunted steep drops and precipitous stairwells logging the necessary shrieks. Of course, the sort of person who visits Niagara Falls or the top of the Empire State Building may be typified precisely by the fact that he or she does say ‘Eek!’ − as distinct, say, from those who ascend to high points requiring more character and effort. Walkers do not say ‘Yipe’ on the summit of Great Gable, for instance. Still less (ugh) ‘Wow!’ I personally associate such exclamations with ‘zeebs’ − a species I lack space to describe, but one of the characteristics of which is compulsive and inappropriate response cries. Enthusiasts for hi-fi, they frequently lapse into the accents of The Goon Show. More often men than women, they can be recognized by the battery of pens on display in their breast pockets. They say ‘Hail, friend’ instead of ‘Hello’, not ‘Goodbye’ but ‘Farewell’, and depart with an inappropriateness of gesture and a gangling uncoordinated gait that, to adapt Goffman, could be called ‘lack of limb discipline’.

  Forms of Talk is harder to read and less varied than some of the earlier books. The text is tough-going, and there are fewer truffles in the footnotes, with Goffman dodging up snickets, pressing himself into ever shallower entries, perhaps to evade his admirers.

  I have just been reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, recently reissued with a nice introduction by Bruce Chatwin. Byron’s book is made rather than marred by his unrepentant snobbery. Chatwin, who travelled the same road thirty years after Byron, in 1962, looks back with a different snobbishness that I found less engaging: he regrets, as travellers are wont to do, those who came after − in this case, the droves of young people who took to the road in the sixties and seventies, headed for Nepal. In ‘Where the Action Is’, one of his best essays (collected in Interaction Ritual), Goffman remarks, ‘When persons go to where the action is they go to the place where there is an increase, not in the chances taken, but in the chances that they will be obliged to take chances.’ These days it is true the chances are that one will be obliged to take more chances in wilder places than Nepal (Patagonia, say). And maybe the hippies are to be blamed for not perceiving that, or not perceiving it sooner. But Chatwin to Patagonia, a mod to Brighton on Bank Holiday − Goffman makes them kin.

  Some must escape his net. Dukes wouldn’t find much here to interest them, except some clue as to how the other half live. Or ‘die’ − which they never do, of course, being dukes: indifference to the impression one makes is a constituent of aristocracy and (in a different sense) of royalty. ‘There is only one man in the whole world who walks,’ said Diderot, ‘and that is the sovereign. Everybody else takes up positions.’ An actor must not forget his lines (or show distress, should he do so). Royalty must never seem to be embarrassed, because that would embarrass us. Except that democracy, or television, is altering this. Royalty must now be seen to be ‘human’. Or (since they are taking part in a performance) be seen to seem ‘human’. Still, blushes cannot be performed. Watching the Queen returning from the royal wedding, trying to manage the happy chatting of Earl Spencer on the one hand and acknowledging the frenzy of the crowd with the other, was to detect someone in grave danger of ‘flooding out’. And, though it is given to few of us to drive through the streets of London in an open landau to the cheers of a delighted throng, the situation elicited fellow-feeling because it was one we had all at some time or other experienced.

  Of Goffman himself I know nothing. I take it, as much from his first name as his second, that he is Jewish, which may be significant, in that so much of his work, like Freud’s, is to do with ‘passing’ or fitting in, and some of it is a gloss on Maurice Samuel’s remark that ‘the Jews are probably the only people in the world to whom it has ever been proposed that their historic destiny is − to be nice.’ About face we are all Jews. His footnotes, his followers and (I am presuming) his Jewishness link Goffman with another founder of a school, Namier. There is a passage in England in the Age of the American Revolution that bears on the interests of the Benjamin Franklin Professor: ‘A man’s status in English society has always depended primarily on his ownconsciousness … whatever is apt to raise a man’s self-consciousness − be it birth, rank, wealth, intellect, daring or achievements − will add to his stature; but it has to be translated into the truest expression of his sub-conscious self-valuation: uncontending ease, the unbought grace of life.’ Goffman would endorse the phrase ‘uncontending ease’, while having more to say about it being the ‘unbought grace of life’, since so much of his work has been to show how strenuously (and unknowingly) we do try to procure it.

  Death is all the rage at the moment, particularly in America, where whole sections are devoted to it in the more life-enhancing bookshops. Coincidentally, or not, capital punishment in America is being patchily resuscitated. Goffman hasn’t contributed much to the literature of physical as distinct from social extinction, but in Frame Analysis there is a fine passage (again relegated to a footnote) about the hypocrisy implicit in the expectation that a man should die well on the scaffold. It also makes nonsense of Goffman’s claim not to be a moralist.

&nbs
p; Such ceremonialization of killing is sometimes contrasted to the way in which savages might behave, although I think it would be hard to find a more savage practice than ours − that of bestowing praise upon a man for holding himself to those forms that ensure an orderly, self-contained style to his execution. Thus he (like soldiers in the field) is being asked to approve and uphold the action which takes his life, in effect setting the first above the second. That sort of line is fine for those who write or preach or legislate in one or another of the names given to society. But to accept death politely or bravely is to set considerably more weight on moral doctrine than is required of those who formulate it.

  It is not often that one gets such a clear moral note from the watcher at the bedside. A corresponding passage in fiction is the final scene of The Trial, when Joseph K. is about to die. His executioners pass a knife from one to the other until it dawns on K. that, in order to spare their feelings, he must grasp the knife and execute himself. He doesn’t, and feels guilty for failing to do so. It is his final failure, for he is then killed. He has ‘died’. Then he dies. Much of Goffman could be a commentary on Kafka. One puts it that way round, the artist before the academic, but the truth one finds in Goffman’s work is the truth one goes to fiction for.

  A final word, on book-reviewers. Goffman is summarizing (in a footnote in Frame Analysis) an article by Walter Gibson from College English. (Not quite a backyard but certainly a sub-basement of the stack.) Gibson, he says,

  took up the case in regard to book-reviewing, suggesting how much of that literary form consists in using the works of others as a target of response which will confirm for the reader that he has found a brilliant, many-sided critic who appreciates that the reader is the appropriate recipient for this response. Writing, then, breeds a presumed (Gibson calls him mock) writer who, in fact, is likely to be vastly different from the actual writer, and a presumed reader who on the same grounds is likely to be vastly different from the actual one. The posturing of the writer, Gibson argues, calls out a posturing from the reader − a mutually affirmed affectation.

  So there we both were, this presumed reader and me, just having a nice little zizz of mutually affirmed affectation, when in creeps this American guy, sits down, and starts watching. The first click of his ballpoint and, I tell you, we didn’t get another wink.

  * Most recently in A View from Goffman, edited by Jason Ditton.

  Bad John

  Review of A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography,1929–1956, by John Osborne (Faber and Faber, 1978)

  One of John Osborne’s Thoughts for 1954: ‘The urge to please above all. I don’t have it and can’t achieve it. A small thing but more or less mine own.’ This book does please and has pleased. It is immensely enjoyable, is written with great gusto, and Osborne has had better notices for it than for any of his plays since Inadmissible Evidence.

  Books are safer than plays, of course, because (unless one is a monk at lunch) reading is a solitary activity. A play is a public event where, all too often these days, for the middle-class playgoer, embarrassment rules, oh dear. Especially where Osborne is concerned. Nor does reading his book carry with it the occupational hazards of seeing his plays, such as finding the redoubtable Lady Redgrave looming over one ready to box one’s ears, as she did to a vociferous member of the audience at A Sense of Detachment. The book as a form is safe, even cosy, and I suspect that critics, who have given Osborne such a consistently hard time for so long, heaved a sigh of relief at this autobiography, since it was something, to quote another John’s spoof of Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘to be read behind closed doors’. Though without necessarily taking Orton’s other piece of advice − namely to ‘have a good shit while reading it’.

  Osborne, like Orton, had a bleak childhood (or would like us to think so). Both had weak chests, and both spent a brief period learning shorthand at Clark’s Colleges. There the resemblance ends. At the outset of his career Orton changed his name from John to Joe, lest the public confuse him with Osborne − and tar him with the same brush. For Joe, unlike John, did very much want to please. But do playgoers mind very much if they’re pleased? I never do. Boredom is my great terror. ‘All I hope is that the dog hasn’t been sick in the car’ is the epitaph on too many a wearisome evening in the theatre. I have never been bored by Osborne − well, by Bill Maitland a little, but that was meant. I often disagree with his plays, but I invariably find his tone of voice, however hectoring, much more sympathetic than the rage or the patronizing ‘Oh dear, he’s at it again’ he still manages to provoke in an audience. (At Brighton, the stage carpenter used to greet him in mock-despair: ‘Oh blimey, it’s not you again!’). I actually enjoyed the frozen embarrassment of the glittering house that packed the Lyttelton when his Watch it Come Down opened the National Theatre, and at A Sense of Detachment was told off for laughing too much (or laughing at all) at the catalogue of pornographic films, recited in nun-like tones by the said Lady Redgrave, her title an important ingredient of the audience’s resentment, their fury fuelled by a touch of class.

  Osborne thinks those days are past: ‘Most of my work in the theatre has, at some time, lurched head on into the milling tattoo of clanging seats and often quite beefy booing. The sound of baying from dinner-jacketed patrons in the stalls used to be especially sweet. Nowadays one is merely attacked by a storm cloud of pot and BO.’ Another way of saying that the audience is (Gr-rr-r) young.

  It’s hard to see who made Osborne a writer. In working-class childhoods the Curtis Brown role generally falls to the mother, but not apparently in this case. A colleague of his mother’s, Cheffie, cast him as a future ‘thousand-a-year man’. This was in Surrey in the forties. In much the same class and period in the North aspirations were approximately half this. My mother thought £10 a week the salary of a successful man in the profession she had picked out for me, the unlikely one of ‘gentleman farmer’. Osborne’s mother had no aspirations for him at all: ‘My mother always made it clear to me that my place in the world was unlikely ever to differ from her own.’ Nellie Beatrice was a barmaid, almost an itinerant one she changed her job (and their accommodation) so often − thirty or forty times during the first seventeen years of the boy’s life. Flitting flats, changing schools: Osborne’s life was like a rep long before he became an actor.

  The name Nellie Beatrice seems odd. It took me some time to get used to the fact that this was his mother, not his aunt. It is an aunt’s name, and, according to him, an aunt was pretty much what she was − unsmiling, given to sulks and Black Looks, not at all the jovial lady smiling, if Osborne is to be believed, an almost unique smile to face page 144. Other people’s mothers are always easier to swallow than one’s own, and Nellie Beatrice is funnier than her son will allow. He conned her into going to see him in Hamlet: ‘I’ve seen it before,’ she remarked to her companion. ‘He dies in the end.’ Osborne lovingly records her make-up:

  Her lips were a scarlet-black sliver, covered in some sticky slime named Tahiti or Taboo… She had a cream base called Crème Simone, always covered up with a face powder called Tokalon… topped off by a kind of knickerbocker glory of rouge, which … looked like a mixture of blackcurrant juice and brick dust. The final coup was an overgenerous dab of Californian Poppy, known to schoolboys as ‘fleur des dustbins’.

  She lives on, Mrs Osborne, ‘hell-bent’ on reaching her century.

  Osborne’s father, Godfrey, was the more sensitive of the two, living apart from his mother, though Osborne does not remember why (‘I have a vague remembrance of them hitting each other’). A copywriter in an advertising agency, he died of consumption when John was about twelve. (I say ‘about’ because dates are quite hard to come by in this book: nowhere, for instance, is Osborne’s date of birth plainly stated.) His father came home to die at Christmas 1939:

  I was sitting in the kitchen reading… when I heard my mother scream from the foot of the uncarpeted staircase. I ran to see what was happening and stared up to the landing where my fat
her was standing. He was completely naked with his silver hair and grey, black and red beard. He looked like a naked Christ. ‘Look at him!’ she screamed. Oh, my God, he’s gone blind.’ He stood quite still for a moment and then fell headlong down the stairs on top of us. Between us we carried him upstairs. She was right. He had gone blind.

  This gentle wraith had some literary ambitions, writing short stories, two of which his son submitted as his own work when taking a correspondence course at the British Institute of Fiction Writing Science. The stories were extravagantly praised, but when Osborne started his own work the reaction quickly became ‘reproachful, impatient and eventually ill-used and sorrowful’. It’s a progression he must have got used to since. But if one were to ask (as presumably his multitudinous relatives did and do ask), ‘Who is it Osborne “takes after”’ or ‘Where does he get his brains from?’ then I imagine it is his father who would take the credit. His father was born on 8 May 1900. And it was on 8 May 1956 that Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court. Osborne notes that it is the one unforgettable feast in his calendar.

  I generally assume that childhoods more or less ended with the First World War − halcyon childhoods certainly − and that most of them since have been the ‘forgotten boredom’ of Larkin’s poem ‘Coming’. Anyone born after 1940 got the Utility version, childhood according to the Authorized Economy Standard. But Osborne (unexpectedly) seems to have had a childhood of Dickensian richness and oddity, divided between his mother’s relations, ‘the Grove Family Repertory’, based in Fulham, and his father’s, who made up ‘the Tottenham Crowd’. There are relatives and relatives of relatives, and Osborne remembers them all, together with their small claims to fame: his grandfather’s Uncle Arthur, ‘said to be a director of Abdulla’ (of ‘cigarettes by’); his grandmother’s sister, ‘Auntie Min’, whose life revolved round milk bottles; her husband, Uncle Harry, with his ferocious cockatoo. His great-grandmother, Grandma Ell, was laid out in the front parlour. The undertaker, who doubled as her son, Osborne’s great-uncle Lod (the names!), lifted up the baby John to see his aged forebear lying in her coffin ‘in what seemed unthinkable luxury’. Another uncle threw himself under a tube train en route for the cobblers, and a grandma chucked Marie Lloyd out of the pub she ran, the Duncannon, off St Martin’s Lane, with the first lady of the music-hall screaming, ‘Don’t you fucking well talk to me! I’ve just left your old man after a weekend in Brighton.’ All these, not to mention a strong supporting cast that features a proper quota of nancies and at least one of what in our family used to be referred to as ‘them man-women’. ‘Oh,’ one is tempted to exclaim with the Radlett children, ‘the bliss of being you!’ Or at any rate the bliss of being him now, remembering (and being able to remember) it all. Of course, it wasn’t much fun at the time. ‘There was no cachet in youth at that time. One was merely a failed adult. I sought the company of people like my grandparents and great aunts and uncles: they were infinitely more interesting. And I was an eager and attentive listener.’