Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  In the second half Pinter and I are to read, with an interlude about the novels by Julian Barnes. Riverside had earlier telephoned to ask what furniture we needed, and I had suggested a couple of reading-desks. These have been provided but absurdly with only one microphone so both desks are positioned centre stage, an inch or so apart with the mike between them. This means that when I read Pinter stands silently by and when he reads I do the same. Except that there is a loose board on my side and every time I shift my feet while Pinter is reading there is an audible creak. Were it Stoppard reading or Simon Gray I wouldn’t care a toss: it’s only because it’s Pinter the creak acquires significance and seems somehow meant.

  We finish at half-past ten and I go straight to Great Ormond Street, where Sam is in Intensive Care. See sick children (and in particular one baby almost hidden under wires and apparatus) and Larkin’s fear of death seems self-indulgent. Sitting there I find myself wondering what would have happened had he worked in a hospital once a week like (dare one say it?) Jimmy Savile.

  Apropos Pinter, I thought it odd that in the Selected Letters almost alone of Larkin’s contemporaries he escaped whipping − given that neither his political views nor his poetry seemed likely to commend him to Larkin. But Pinter is passionate about cricket and, as Motion reveals, sponsored Larkin for the MCC, so it’s just a case of the chaps sticking together.

  This must have been a hard book to write, and I read it with growing admiration for the author and, until his pitiful death, mounting impatience with the subject. Motion, who was a friend of Larkin’s, must have been attended throughout by the thought, by the sound even, of his subject’s sepulchral disclaimers. Without ever having known Larkin, I feel, as I think many readers will, that I have lost a friend. I found myself and still find myself not wanting to believe that Larkin was really like this, the unpacking of that ‘really’, which Motion has done, what so much of the poetry is about. The publication of the Selected Letters before the biography was criticized, but as a marketing strategy, which is what publishing is about these days, it can’t be faulted. The Letters may sell the Life; the Life, splendid though it is, is unlikely to sell the Letters: few readers coming to the end of this book would want to know more. Different, yes, but not more.

  There remain the poems, without which there would be no biography. Reading it I could not see how they would emerge unscathed. But I have read them again and they do, just as with Auden and Hardy, who have taken a similar biographical battering. Auden’s epitaph on Yeats explains why:

  Time that is intolerant

  Of the brave and innocent

  And indifferent in a week

  To a beautiful physique

  Worships language and forgives

  Everyone by whom it lives;

  Pardons cowardice, conceit,

  Lays its honours at their feet

  Time that with this strange excuse

  Pardoned Kipling and his views,

  And will pardon Paul Claudel,

  Pardons him for writing well.

  The black-sailed unfamiliar ship has sailed on, leaving in its wake not a huge and birdless silence but an armada both sparkling and intact. Looking at this bright fleet, you see there is a man on the jetty, who might be anybody.

  A. E. Housman, 1859–1936

  An Address given at the dedication of a memorial to A. E. Housman, Westminster Abbey, 17 September 1996

  FOR MY FUNERAL

  O thou that from thy mansion,

  Through time and place to roam,

  Dost send abroad thy children,

  And then dost call them home,

  That men and tribes and nations

  And all thy hand hath made

  May shelter them from sunshine

  In thine eternal shade:

  We now to peace and darkness

  And earth and thee restore

  Thy creature that thou madest

  And wilt cast forth no more.

  One thinks of buttons: the buttons on his boots; the buttons on his waistcoat; the four or five buttons on his Norfolk jacket. And in the middle of that funny little round cap, which A. C. Benson likened to a teacake, there was another button. And of course, Housman’s heart was buttoned too, and it’s an irony − though in the sepulchral congestion of this church hardly a unique one − that Housman’s window will look across to the pillar with Epstein’s bust of Blake, who was his very opposite and didn’t have much use for buttons and who said, ‘Damn braces. Bless relaxes.’ But both were very English − one poet of England’s mountains green; the other of those blue remembered hills − and both are now comprehended in this commodious place.

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From you far country blows.

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  This is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  (A Shropshire Lad)

  I’m not sure how comfortable Housman would be, finding himself here. While its popular image is of a cosy place, there is an element of ferrets in the sack about Poets Corner, literary folks not always being the nicest of bedfellows. There are very few classicists here − which would not displease him − one of the few being Gilbert Murray, with whom Housman used to go to music-halls. Hardy he admired, and he was one of the pallbearers at his funeral, but what he would make of Auden, not to mention Dylan Thomas, one doesn’t like to think.

  Some facts about him:

  It was said of him that he looked as if he came from a long line of maiden aunts, and yet this mildness was deceptive. Insults and cutting remarks that occurred to him he stored away, only later allocating them a target − generally one of his academic colleagues.

  Were he sitting here now he would be scanning the order of service for misprints and errors of punctuation − a misplaced comma all that would be needed to render the commemoration hollow and offensive.

  At Cambridge, where he was Professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear − a habit he shared with Swinburne.

  For all his austere appearance he had a liking for rich food, and introduced crème brûlée to the menu of Trinity College high table.

  He was a pioneer of air travel, flying often and fearlessly to France, where he went on lone gastronomic tours, seeking out in provincial cellars the relics of great vintages.

  He shared the same staircase in Whewell’s Court in Trinity with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Housman had a lavatory in his set, which Wittgenstein didn’t. Taken short one day, the philosopher knocked at the poet’s door and asked permission to use it. On the grounds that he disagreed with Wittgenstein’s philosophical theories, Housman refused. In many respects, though, the two were not unalike − particularly in the austerity of their intellect. Wittgenstein’s most famous aphorism is ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ And that might well serve as an epigraph for the poetry of Housman, for he is the poet of the awkward silence.

  Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all’s over;

  I only vex you the more I try.

  All’s wrong that ever I’ve done or said,

  And nought to help it in this dull head:

  Shake hands, here’s luck, good-bye.

  But if you come to a road where danger

  Or guilt or anguish or shame’s to share,

  Be good to the lad that loves you true

  And the soul that was born to die for you,

  And whistle and I’ll be there.

  (More Poems)

  Girls in Housman’s poems are really only there as an excuse for the deaths of boys. Women didn’t seem to register with him in any department; when he was lecturing at University College, London, his elaborate sarcasm would sometimes reduce his women students to tears, but what really upset them was that the following week Housman couldn’t re
member whom he had offended or even tell them apart.

  Still, the poems are not a masculine preserve, nor should they be, for, though many of them are about love between men, they are all, gender aside, poems about the ineluctable inequity of loving: how there is no symmetry in affection − that one loves more, or differently, truer or longer than the other. They are poems about the difficulty of speaking, about stammering and how hard it is to avow affection; about shyness, which, God knows, is not gender-specific. With their awkward partings and their burden of love undeclared, Housman’s characters are not far from Chekhov’s, aching to reveal themselves but just a handshake having to say it all. It’s what Keats, another of Housman’s companions here, called ‘my awkward bow’.

  He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?

  He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.

  I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder

  And went with half my life about my ways.

  (Additional Poems)

  It’s fitting that Housman’s fenestral neighbour should be Oscar Wilde, from whom he could scarcely have been more different but whose predicament he shared. As a critic has said, from Wenlock Edge one can see as far as Reading Gaol. Wilde was in prison when A Shropshire Lad was published, but his friend Robert Ross learned some of the poems by heart and recited them to him there. Housman’s boldest poem, though not his best, was occasioned by Wilde’s imprisonment, though it only makes explicit what is implicit in so much of his other writing:

  Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

  And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?

  And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

  Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

  ’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;

  In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;

  Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair

  For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

  Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid

  To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;

  But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and

  stare,

  And they’re haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.

  Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet

  And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,

  And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare

  He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

  (Additional Poems)

  To end, though, Housman as the poet of the English countryside:

  When summer’s end is nighing

  And skies at evening cloud,

  I muse on change and fortune

  And all the feats I vowed

  When I was young and proud.

  The weathercock at sunset

  Would lose the slanted ray,

  And I would climb the beacon

  That looked to Wales away

  And saw the last of day.

  From hill and cloud and heaven

  The hues of evening died;

  Night welled through lane and hollow

  And hushed the countryside,

  But I had youth and pride.

  And I with earth and nightfall

  In converse high would stand,

  Late, till the west was ashen

  And darkness hard at hand,

  And the eye lost the land.

  The year might age, and cloudy

  The lessening day might close,

  But air of other summers

  Breathed from beyond the snows,

  And I had hope of those.

  They came and were and are not

  And come no more anew;

  And all the years and seasons

  That ever can ensue

  Must now be worse and few.

  So here’s an end of roaming

  On eves when autumn nighs:

  The ear too fondly listens

  For summer’s parting sighs,

  And then the heart replies.

  (Last Poems)

  Stocking Fillers

  Tit for Tatti

  We were a small (but distinguished) party that climbed out of Florence that summer morning to call upon Berenson at I Tatti. Logan was there, who was of course Mary Berenson’s brother, Bertrand Russell, the mathematical philosopher and brother-in-law of Mary Berenson, Alys, his first wife, her sister, together with Karin Costello, who had married Adrian Stephen and was, of course, the stepdaughter of Berenson. Queen Helen of Romania excepted, we were just another family party.

  News of our arrival had preceded us and Berenson was immediately on the defensive and had to be coaxed out from under a large (Renaissance) bed, whither he had retired at our onset. It was twenty years since I had last been at I Tatti, and B.B. looked much older than when I had last seen him. But perhaps that was only to be expected. He must have been eighty at the time of our visit, yet in many not uncharacteristic ways his habits were those of a much younger man. As my wife sat beside him on the couch his hand brushed lightly against her thighs. ‘Tactile values,’ I heard him murmur. ‘How very life-enhancing.’ But then, he had such beautiful hands.

  We talked for a while about Art, a subject in which he had evinced some interest. But he was not an easy conversationalist as his mind dwelt very much in the past. ‘Just fancy,’ he said, ‘Goethe would have been 190 today, had he lived.’ I asked him about people he had known. Did he remember Proust? Or Wilde? Of Proust he retained a vivid memory, for he had once seen him running down the Boulevard Haussmann, cramming cake into his mouth and shouting at the top of his voice Thomas Hood’s poem ‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born’.

  I wanted to know more. Had he known Queen Victoria? Or Prince Albert? Not well, he said shortly. Or Pitt the Younger, or even Fox? But alas, he could not remember, and seemed weary of such questions. By now the room was beginning to fill up. Hemingway had come in with a trophy of his visit, a tortoise he had shot in the grounds. The Windsors were there, the Duff-Coopers, Kenneth Clark as he then was, and the Berlins, Irving and Isaiah. And there, right at the back, was Toscanini, perched like an organ-grinder’s monkey upon the shoulders of the King of Sweden (an eminent archaeologist).

  I saw B.B. get hold of C.C. (Cyril Connolly) together with M.M. (Marianne Moore) and M.M. (Margaret Mead) and begin to conduct them upstairs in order to show them his little P.P. (Pablo Picasso). I realized it was time to go. I kissed B.B.’s shaking hand as it reached unerringly into my wife’s blouse. ‘Ah, B.B.,’ I murmured, ‘où sont les amitiés amoureuses de ta jeunesse dorée?’ But he was already fumbling with Nancy Cunard.

  I remember pausing that sultry summer evening in 1939 as the storm clouds gathered, to look back to the white villa on the hillside. ‘Ta ta, I Tatti,’ I called, ‘Last Bastion of a Vanished World.’

  The Pith and its Pitfalls

  Ten years ago, I had some thoughts, first aired on television, about a fairly well-ventilated topic − the writer and his roots.

  WRITER: For me, at any rate, speaking personally, writing is a kind of love-affair. One is wooing words, isn’t one? Seducing them on to the page. But it’s absolute hell. Sheer total hell, like nothing else on earth. Yet I must do it.

  INTERVIEWER: This is a writer. In mid-career. This is his world. He sometimes goes back to the Doncaster he knew as a boy, and where his first novel was written.

  WRITER: I don’t know why I go back. Why did Joyce go back to Dublin? Or Brenda to Colchester? I suppose it’s a question of belonging, really. I love this landscape, the hills spreading wide their great thighs, and the pits thrusting their gaunt, black fingers into the sky.

  When I die, I don’t want to be buried in Ibiza; I shall want to be buried here beside my Auntie Cissie Turner,
who kept us all out of six bob a week. Mind you, six bob was six bob in them days. You could buy three pennyworth of chips and still have change from sixpence.

  We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner’s hands. But we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had this urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface. But, under the skin, I suppose I’m still a miner. I suppose, in a very real sense, I’m a miner writer. Miners are very strong, very tough, but, in a way, very gentle creatures. But because they’re very strong and very tough, they can afford to be very gentle. Just as, being very gentle, they can also be very tough. It’s a vicious circle, really, but with all the viciousness taken out of it. I don’t know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes − for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen. I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.

  INTERVIEWER: I asked him how success had changed his life.

  WRITER: Hardly at all, really. Whereas, before, I would have been sweating away at the coalface in Doncaster, now I’m sweating away in London talking to Peter Hall.

  At the moment, I’m working on a novel set entirely in the mind of a cinema usherette during a festival of Anna Neagle films in Fleet wood. This girl is at the crossroads, desperately trying to come to terms with herself and the demands of her career. We explore her reverie, which is broken in on occasionally by the film and by patrons wanting to be shown to their seats. We see how deeply she has identified herself with the personality of Anna Neagle and how tragic the inevitable outcome. It takes in, en passant, the eternal themes − love, death, birth − and some of the less eternal ones − her love-hate relationship with the ice-cream girl, for instance. If I can sum up, it’s everything Virginia Woolf failed to do, plus the best of Naomi Jacob.