Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  Visiting Byland we’d remarked, coming away, on the variety of lichens growing in the ruins, the stones blotted with their grey patches. In Durham I notice similar lichens, particularly on the paths leading up to the south door, only later realising it wasn’t lichen but chewing gum.

  Back down the A1 and across country to Ramsgill and the Yorke Arms, the sun so low and bright I often have to stop as driving directly west, I can’t see – exactly the sort of journey the late Roger Warner hated, the direction of his antique-dealing trips determined by having the sun behind him in the morning (so driving west) and behind him until evening when he’s coming back driving east.

  13 March, Yorkshire. Warm today for the first time and though I’m in my overcoat I sit out and read the papers in the bright sunshine. In the afternoon we drive to Ingleton where R. tries (and fails) to get a red Roberts Revival radio (it has to be red) from Tooby’s; nor does he find one in the (increasingly boutiquified) Kirkby Lonsdale.

  Then we walk along the Fell Road track above Brownthwaite, lambs in the field, a buzzard soaring about the sky. The walk is measured out in the sheep pen installations of Andy Goldsworthy – as far one way as the second of his pens, then as far the other way taking in two more. The sun comes and goes but coming out suddenly we see on the horizon, still snow-covered and like a vision of paradise, the Lakeland fells, lying like a great white whale across the horizon.

  Lambs in the lower fields some so young and frail they must be tempting to the buzzard, the innocence and playfulness of lambs to me a recurrent mystery. We are about to stop the car and talk to half a dozen looking at us through the gate but then they get up and off, jerky and jumping and dashing about the field.

  Tea in front of the fire now, Rupert reading Edmund White and me, I’m sure, about to doze off.

  17 March. I’d forgotten until I was turning over some papers today that Stuart, the rent boy in The Habit of Art had had a previous incarnation in an early play that I began. He was still a rent boy booked by Auden but this was before the poet had returned to England, when he was living in St Marks Place in the East Village. The boy was more cultured than his English counterpart and may even have been at college, being a rent boy part of paying his way. Auden grows suspicious of the young man’s background as he seems uncharacteristically well informed as to Auden’s work and modern literature in general. It turns out that his previous clients make quite a distinguished list, numbering among them Spender, Isherwood, Thom Gunn and Truman Capote with fellatio or whatever really a more sophisticated (and arduous) form of autograph hunting. It’s a less likely scenario in London than in New York where celebrities in those days anyway counted for more.

  Tuft-hunting I suppose it would be called.

  23 March. That Ted Hughes should have got into Poets’ Corner ahead of Larkin wouldn’t have surprised Larkin, though he must surely have a better claim. Two deans back, and not long after Larkin’s death, I remember Michael Mayne saying that Larkin had earned his place on the strength of ‘Church Going’ alone. Though Hughes fits the popular notion of what a poet should be, many more of Larkin’s writings have passed into the national memory.

  26 March. A punk young blackbird, feather on its head stuck up and spiky, pecking about in one of the pots while a jay finds something – a snail maybe – on the fence.

  31 March. Remember – I’m not sure why – when I was at school and doing the (somehow obligatory) amateur dramatics I was in William Douglas-Home’s The Chiltern Hundreds with one of my lines ‘That’s the cross I’ve got to bear.’ A devout Christian at the time I felt I couldn’t say this line, my notion of piety having much more to do with dubious issues of conscience like this than with practical Christian conduct. Anyway I made my protest and the producer ‘Charlie’ Bispham, the chemistry master (dapper figure, pencil moustache), was gratifyingly sarcastic, thus assuring me I was a martyr for my faith. But I didn’t say the line – and probably a lot of others as I was never very sure of the text. Twerp, I think now, marvelling at how I could survive the embarrassment, not my own (I was a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast.

  2 April. Notes on Ian Hamilton’s Against Oblivion:

  Of Randall Jarrell: ‘he had in 1952 – and with stunningly abrupt efficiency – exchanged an insufficiently worshipful first wife for one who was prepared to dedicate herself to Randall’s adoration.’

  ‘Insufficiently worshipful’ such a good phrase and so apt:

  The insufficiently worshipful wives (and families) of writers.

  7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.

  10 April. Make potatoes dauphinoise for supper to a recipe by Nigel Slater – and it’s delicious, like proper cooking.

  16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that triggered the American War of Independence. In 1776 the rallying cry was no taxation without representation whereas with Lord Ashcroft (and the other non-doms) it is no representation without taxation, i.e. why should he or anyone have a voice in the making of legislation if he or she does not pay taxes.

  18 April. I love the Van Gogh letters as objects partly because they’re small, manageable and delicate. Some of the larger paintings, e.g. the Alpilles mountains near Aix, I still find hard to take, though obviously wonderful pictures. Similarly his boiling skies.

  Surprised by his use of different techniques – dabs and hatchings in one picture, smooth matt application of paint in another – paintings that are virtually contemporary though the last pictures – in Auvers – one a day for seventy days – are, in a way, the most encouraging. He’s painting so fast and so recklessly that any sense of painterly self-preservation is abandoned in the fever of getting it down. I feel – again absurdly – that this has a message for me at this late stage in my life – though Van Gogh was painting as wildly as this when, though near to death, he was still a relatively young man.

  19 April. A propos the transport shutdown due to the volcanic cloud there have been the inevitable outbreaks of Dunkirk spirit, with the ‘little ships’ going out from the Channel ports to ferry home the stranded ‘Brits’. It’s a reminder of how irritating the Second War must have been, providing as it did almost unlimited opportunities for bossy individuals to cast themselves in would-be heroic roles when everybody else was just trying to get by. ‘Brits’ – so much of what is hateful about the world since Mrs Thatcher in that gritty hard little word.

  29 April, New York. Picture taken for Vanity Fair in a bar on Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn, a desolate area now being colonised as most of lower Manhattan has been in the thirty years since I started coming here. Thus on Thompson Street years ago there was an establishment advertising live chickens for slaughter – an unlikely enterprise even in the poorest quarters of London. But there’s one still on Greenpoint Avenue, which is a Polish quarter – rows of shut shops which are gradually opening up again, the shoot in one of the first of the smartened-up bars, plain huge-windowed, like a bar painted by Hopper. Opposite is a late nineteenth-century four-storey apartment block in granite and terracotta, with vast semi-circular studio windows. This is run-down too but is characteristic of its period and as grand as any Renaissance palazzo.

  The photographer is easy to chat to saying how he learned photography by watching his father with the family camera and he was well into college before he realised that something he enjoyed doing could earn him a living.

  As he photographs me, a huge truck laden with clapped-out cars slowly edges round the corner, followed by a community bus from a geriatric home.

  Opposite is a tailor, the sign saying, starkly, ‘Alter’, and a few doors up a cash and loan facility open twenty-four hours. The car arrives to take me back, the driver thinking of going home to Hungary. ‘This place, finished.’ He switches on some rubbishy news programme. ‘BBC World Serv
ice is the only one worth listening.’ I don’t say to him that come a week on Thursday (and the election), that may not be for long.

  Normally in the late afternoon I’d walk over to Union Square to buy the Guardian. Today, having seen on the front page of the New York Times the row over Gordon Brown (quite properly in my view) calling a questioner ‘bigoted’, I give it a miss. Of course, if Rupert Murdoch gets his way there will be no more New York Times or anything liberal that matters. Murdoch here, Murdoch everywhere; Murdoch with the government in his pocket. Instead I sit outside in the sun, the sky empty of clouds and wind, watching the boats edging down the Hudson and the glitter of cars on the Jersey turnpike.

  30 April. I’m sitting on the terrace – the north-west terrace I suppose it is, facing the monumental (thirty-storey or so) building in greyish-brown pleated brick, topped off with an Escher-like summit of ornamental-seeming staircases, the corner of which I have just walked round to find it is the Bell Telephone Building on 17th Street. It’s blank-windowed and devoid of all life except that unusually an hour or so ago a man and two women came out onto one of the crenellated balconies seeming to be measuring something, occasionally looking over down the vertiginous front.

  Yesterday I went into the almost featureless lobby where there was a cubbyhole and a barrier but with no clue as to what the building is for – whether it is indeed a telephone exchange still (built c.1930) or whether it nowadays has a more sinister purpose.

  A hawk (maybe) flies across the cavernous air to roost (or nest) on top of the telephone building. I watch to see if it takes flight again but see only a plane high in the flawless sky.

  1 May. The image of bliss as a child was on the Big Dipper at Morecambe when towards the end of the ride there were no more climbs and falls, the screams and suspense over and just the gentle coasting home.

  2 May. Several of the obituaries of Alan Sillitoe who died last week mention how, when as a child he was being hit by his father, his mother would beg, ‘Not on his head. Not on his head.’ My father was a mild man and seldom hit my brother or me but when he did my mother would make the same anguished plea. ‘Not on their heads, Dad.’ It’s a natural enough entreaty, though one that might be taken to have premonitory undertones: if these small boys were ever to climb out of this working-class kitchen and make something of themselves a good, undamaged head was what they were going to need.

  10 May. For much of the day it has looked as if, inconceivably, the Liberal Democrats were going to fall in with the Tories and form a government – a prospect that so depressed me I felt (fanciful though this may seem) as some (though only some) people felt after Munich. Not having dared watch the TV news I knew nothing of Gordon Brown’s resignation and the later talks between Labour and the Lib Dems and this at once raises the spirits. It’s extraordinary to me that politics can so radically affect my mood. Now it seems to hang in the balance, the anger of Lib Dem supporters at their leaders even considering an alliance with the Tories surely one of the factors. The press and TV don’t help. As in so many disputes the outcome would be easier if it coincided with a newspaper or a communications strike, a shutdown (and a shutting up) of the commentating voices. But a gloomy day.

  Meanwhile every politician who speaks begins by making a ritual affirmation that their party’s first priority is firm and stable government and the sooner that is achieved the better. Whereas it’s all too plain that so far as stable government is concerned the politicians are largely superfluous and that the civil service can carry on with the firm and stable government just as they usually do – temporarily relieved of the interference from their ministers.

  The metaphor is I suppose of the ship of state which, deprived of crew and captain, is rudderless. Except it isn’t. Let it drift or ride at anchor. Who cares? The answer (in hushed tones) despite the experience of the last year still: ‘The markets.’

  12 May. For all the Lib Dems are in the cabinet I imagine there will be another cabinet somewhere which does not include them and where, once on their own, the Tories can come clean … or talk dirty. But then, this is what cabinet government has always been like: the cabinet and the real cabinet; it doesn’t need the excuse of a coalition.

  As always at signings when I’m faced with a seemingly endless line of nice, appreciative readers, most of them women, I come away thinking the writer I most resemble is Beverley Nichols.

  14 May. Obituary in today’s Guardian of Gerald Drucker, veteran double bass player and for the last thirty years principal bass of the Philharmonia. When I was a boy Leeds had its own orchestra, the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra, which gave concerts every Saturday in the town hall. A group of us from the sixth form used to sit behind the orchestra (seats sixpence) and always behind the double basses. Drucker was a young man then but quite heavily built, a cross between Alfred Marks and the actor who played One-Round in The Ladykillers, he and his instrument well suited. According to the Guardian he’d already had a varied career before he landed up in Leeds, including playing for Xavier Cugat at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Cut to forty years later, when I saw him in the Festival Hall bookshop. I went up to him and stammered out my appreciation of that time in the 1950s, saying how much the orchestra had meant to me then. For someone who’d gone on to become principal bass of the Philharmonia and probably a good deal else, his time in Leeds can hardly have been a notable episode in his musical career, and thinking that this earnest middle-aged man babbling about Leeds must be wanting his autograph (though hardly a common occurrence in the lives of bass players) he took fright and fled the shop. I’ll remember Drucker, though, together with other basses laying into the opening of Gustav Holst’s ballet music for The Perfect Fool, one of the rare opportunities when they could briefly take centre stage.

  15 May. We have robins nesting just over the wall and with a cat skulking around and a pair of magpies I invest in a water pistol. The cat so insolent and impervious to threats I feel it deserves it. Other birds include a pair of jays, two collared doves and a younger hanger-on, several blackbirds, a couple of starlings, who are newcomers, an occasional wren, and various blue tits.

  16 May. Spend part of the afternoon hiding in the gazebo with a (water) pistol on my knee hoping to surprise the squirrel rifling the (squirrel-proof) bird feeder.

  17 May. A week after Mr Hague is appointed foreign secretary the police presence (two heavily armed patrolmen) has not been withdrawn from David Miliband’s house just up the road. I pass the house nearly every day and could have asked, but fear the police might shoot me in the interests of health and safety. It was never clear to me whether the force was protecting the property or the person, as Miliband could be seen, seemingly untailed, striding round Primrose Hill (and indeed the world) while the brace of bobbies still hung doggedly about his doorstep. When they do eventually depart the first casualties will be among the cyclists of whom, judging from the bikes leaning on the railings, there are many in the street. Having had my own (locked) bike recently nicked from outside my house (which has no police presence) I’d advise them to get their bikes inside sharpish.

  23 May. I’m coming to the end of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s novel, the first of two about Thomas Cromwell. Rich and vivid and teeming with life it’s a monumental work and some, at least, of one’s admiration is for Mantel’s sheer industry. Presented as very much a modern sensibility Cromwell recoils from, or is anxious to avoid, cruelty, a restraint he learned in the service of his first master, Wolsey. He’s particularly concerned about the penalties inflicted on those of his own reformist way of thinking. But cruelty is indivisible. Though he is repelled by Thomas More for the torture he personally inflicts on heretics, Cromwell is made to dismiss the Carthusians butchered at Tyburn just as ‘four treacherous monks’.

  More is the villain of this first volume. Mantel admits to being a contrarian, and is unwilling to give More any credit at all for moral courage so that one begins to feel the portrait of Cromwell is as skewed as Robert Bolt’s (or Peter
Ackroyd’s) is of More and for the same reason, both men human and therefore venial when embosomed in their respective families.

  Set against this massive work one’s objections seem petty, and it’s a tribute to the power of the novel that one discusses it as if it were history or at least biography, with one’s misgivings elusive and lost in the undergrowth of the novel’s intimate conjecturing. Still, one keeps coming up against inequities: Clerke and Sumner, two heretic scholars, starved to death in the cellars of Wolsey’s Cardinal College; ten of the Carthusians who were not executed at Tyburn were starved to death in Newgate; Clerke and Sumner get a mention but not the monks. This is perhaps an author’s privilege and one has to keep reminding oneself this is a novel, but time and again Mantel seems to let her hero (and so far he is a hero) down lightly. A little further along the road will come the punishment of Friar Forrest, roasted slowly to death in a gala ceremony at which Cromwell presided. One waits to see how Mantel deals with this.

  I have to admit, though, that I find it hard to read about the middle years of the sixteenth century certainly with any pleasure any more than I can enjoy a history of the Third Reich, say, or a programme on Stalin’s Terror. One element in Wolf Hall’s success is the regular and unflinching presentation of horror. There may be cornflowers on Cromwell’s desk but this is a novel about torture, tyranny and death.

  11 June. Drive round to Camden Town to shop and go to the bank where I draw out £1,500 to pay the builders. I put the money in an envelope in my inside pocket and then cross the road to M&S where I shop for five minutes or so. At which point two middle-aged women, Italian by the look and sound of them, tell me somebody has spilled some ice cream down the back of my raincoat. I take off my coat and they very kindly help me to clean it up with tissues from one of their handbags and another man, English, I think, big and in his fifties, goes away and comes back with more tissues. The ice cream (coffee-flavoured) seems to have got everywhere and they keep finding fresh smears of it so that I take off my jacket too to clean it up. No more being found I put my jacket on again, thanking the women profusely though they brush off my gratitude and abruptly disappear. I go back to the car, thinking how good it is there are still people who, though total strangers, can be so selflessly helpful, and it’s only when I’m about to get into the car that I remember the money and look in my inside pocket to find, of course, that the envelope has gone. The women or their male accomplice must have seen me in the bank or coming away from it and followed me into the store. I go back to M&S, tell security, who say they have cameras but are not sure if they were covering that particular spot (they weren’t). They ring the police while I go back to the bank, who also have CCTV which the police will in due course examine. I give my details, and my address and phone number, to a constable who, when I get back home, duly rings with the incident number. Ten minutes later, less than an hour after it has occurred, the doorbell rings and on the doorstep is a rather demure girl: ‘My name is Amy. I’m from the Daily Mail. We’ve just heard about your unfortunate experience.’