Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  3 December. In the days when I wrote about spies, notably in The Old Country, An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, it was often assumed, though not by me, that being homosexual predisposes a person to treachery – a view implicitly endorsed by historians as diverse as A. J. P. Taylor and Richard Cobb, neither of whom believed homosexuals were to be trusted. This never seemed plausible to me nor did I feel my (as it would be called today) relaxed attitude to treachery was to do with my own sexual predilections. It was left to Genet whose Thief ’s Journal I am reading, to pin down what I felt when he says, ‘It is perhaps their moral solitude which makes me admire traitors and love them.’

  Long before his disgrace, Blunt was at one of the (many) parties at the Courtauld Institute where at one point a colleague saw him coming on to a female companion. Later on in the proceedings she saw him on the same sofa but now embracing a young man. He caught her eye:

  ‘Oh Anthony,’ she said, ‘you’re so fickle.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Blunt, ‘but remember, many a fickle makes a fuckle.’

  As the poet Gavin Ewart remarked, at least his jokes weren’t fake.

  Love is putting it a bit strongly and maybe admire too – but moral solitude is exactly right. Morals make you beholden – whether it’s to God or other people. To be a traitor is not to be beholden and it is to be alone.

  In the early days when I finished a play, I used to take extra care crossing the road lest I had an accident and wasn’t around to see it put on.

  24 December.

  Dear M/S Debo

  Christmas Eve and all

  Through the house

  Nothing is stirring not even a

  Mouse, though

  The Editor has just said I am going upstairs to wrap your (i.e. my) presents and, like Captain Oates I expected him to be some time, only he has returned almost instantly and having finished, so that doesn’t augur well for the morrow.

  We have received some pre-Christmas gifts including a parcel from S from a butchers in Dumfries. It is the most carnal parcel I’ve ever had, containing venison, pheasants, partridges, rabbits and many smaller and lesser known mammals. If S has sent similar parcels to all her acquaintance the countryside of S. West Scotland must be wholly denuded of wildlife, so nothing stirring there either.

  I don’t suppose you keep up with the pop scene but one current leading songster is Lady Gaga and one of her outfits consists entirely of meat (true) and not just beef skirt but a sirloin stole, mutton chop sleeves, the lot, so that she could easily run up a dress or two from S’s parcel alone. It’s not a dress in which you would want to walk the dog. You always say your outfits come from the Bakewell Game Fair or wherever where I’m sure Lady Gaga’s would go down a storm.

  On Wednesday the Editor and I went to a private view of the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery. You probably have three or four Leonardos tucked away in the attic so the National Gallery’s (rather meagre) show scarcely signifies. Not particularly star-studded though your friend Neal of British Museum fame was there looking older i.e. 18 rather than his usual 14½. Bamber Gascoigne of Your Starter for Ten fame and other personalities but nobs fairly thin on the ground otherwise. I actually don’t like Leonardo much and think the paintings are a bit creepy particularly the all-in wrestler babies. I made the mistake of saying I don’t find them very appealing whereupon there was an H. M. Bateman type reaction with art historians running screaming from the gallery and the editor of the Burlington Magazine having to be revived with a glass of Wincarnis.

  I’m sorry this silly letter won’t get to you by Christmas but we keep thinking about you and hope you won’t be snowed in. No chance of that down here where it’s positively balmy.

  Much love from us both

  Nibs

  2012

  3 January, Yorkshire. En route to Leeds we have lunch at Betty’s in Ilkley, packed with people stir-crazy after the holiday. We are sitting facing the car park and the row of shops beyond.

  Me: What is that shop called?

  R: Which?

  Me: It looks to me like ‘Hot Faeces’.

  R: It’s ‘Fat Face’.

  Between a shop calling itself Fat Face and one called Hot Faeces seems a difference of degree only, with both equally mysterious. Is it a shop where one gets a fat face (hence sweets and confectionery)? Or an outsize shop? Neither apparently, just a well-known fashion outlet. Still, the name seems quite odd to me, if not nearly as unlikely as what I thought it was. ‘Keep up’ I suppose the message.

  4 January. Heartened by the verdicts in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial and by the consistently dignified behaviour of the parents, particularly the mother – a woman who has had to be a heroine before she could be recognised as a mother. Hard not to think that the highest honours in the state should be given to such as her, if only because she has made the nation feel better about itself and rekindled belief in the ultimate triumph of justice.

  Both parents seem to have the ability to make people behave better around them; I’ve seldom seen plaintiffs so restrained and forbearing at the conclusion of a trial – and a trial that has gone on for seventeen years.

  12–13 January. Watch the second of two programmes on grammar schools on BBC4. I was asked to take part but didn’t, feeling my experience wasn’t typical. I never thought of Leeds Modern, the school I went to from 1946 until 1952, as a grammar school though I suppose it was. It wasn’t so self-conscious and pleased with itself as most of the schools that feature and the range of ability for which it catered seems in retrospect so wide it might well have been a comprehensive school before its time. Nor was it in the least bit snobbish as so many of the schools that figure in the programme seem to have been, though none as snobbish as the grammar schools that, on the introduction of comprehensives, turned themselves into direct grant schools as, for instance, Leeds Grammar School did. Another absentee from the programme is Tony Harrison, an old boy of Leeds Grammar School, the snobbery of which is pilloried in some of his poems. By rights all such schools should be free schools, as indeed in the light of their origins, should many public schools. The nearest public school to us in Yorkshire is Giggleswick which started off as the local grammar school. It’s certainly not free today, though like many public schools its exclusiveness shelters behind what is thought of as a generous allocation of scholarships and bursaries. These points are just about made in the programme, but what is more noticeable is how ex-grammar-school boys like Roy Strong are sentimental over their teachers, which ought to be sympathetic did not the camera go in vampire-like to catch the tears.

  Maybe my parents were just undemonstrative as I remember nothing comparable to the pride of the parents of Neil Kinnock, for instance, when he passed the eleven plus (and so wouldn’t have to go down the mine). I can’t even remember taking the exam except that my friend (and alphabetical neighbour on the school register) Albert Benson passed it with me but was too poor to go on to what we then called secondary school.

  As it was put together, the programme tended to confirm Anthony Powell’s thesis that documentaries aren’t based on the evidence but are simply scenarios dreamed up by the director, the conclusions known in advance with the facts arranged accordingly.

  I’ve never been particularly concerned about the end of the grammar schools, seeing it as nothing compared with the continuing offence of the public school. On this I’m as big a bore as (if less worthily) Hockney is on smoking. The only person in the programme waving that flag – rather uncharacteristically – is Edwina Currie, who is, as she puts it, a Scouse Tory who acknowledges the continuing unfairness of public-school education while knowing her party will do nothing to alleviate it.

  Notes for Judy Egerton, Last Word, Radio 4, broadcast on Sunday 22 April:

  Art historians can be quite snooty, their pleasure in pictures not always obvious with not much delight. Judy loved pictures and wasn’t pretentious about them. She lived in a small two-storey mid-nineteenth-centur
y house near the Oval rather like a Cambridge house, the walls of which were full of pictures with scarcely a space – and pictures of all sorts and periods, one or two quite good – she had an early Thomas Jones for instance – others by young artists who had taken her eye – and she had an eye, the house a lovely assembly.

  She was a very good cook. I remember having three helpings of a Moroccan lamb dish she made though most meals I had with her were lunches at a little Italian restaurant in Store Street near her office in Bedford Square and where they always made a fuss of her. It was good but it wasn’t posh.

  When she was working on her definitive book on Stubbs, she used to tell me stories of visits to country houses where the owners claimed to have one of his paintings and how even in this day and age she was treated as a social inferior, no arrangements made to take her back to the station particularly when she’d given the horse-rider or whatever the thumbs down. At one point and through Stubbs she got interested in portraits of servants and when I used to find an example I’d draw it to her attention but she’d always been there first. Still she never made you feel a fool as art historians have been known to do.

  The first time I remember speaking to Judy was in 1995 when we’d both been at a memorial service at St George’s, Bloomsbury, for Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber. It hadn’t been much of a service – some of the eminent speakers wholly inaudible and she caught me up as I came out and talked about this in a way that was typically Judy, how deplorably they had read, being unimpressed by the great and the good. I found this sympathetic. I’d just been made a trustee of the National Gallery, which I enjoyed but was rather overawed by and Judy was quick to show me there was nothing to be overawed by at all and cutting most of the board down to size.

  I don’t know whether she caught this sceptical tone from Larkin, whose lifelong correspondent she was, or whether it chimed in with something in both their personalities but it’s what made her a lively person to talk to – and something of an outsider. If that’s Australian, which she was, I never detected anything else Australian about her, even in her voice, though maybe those two most English of painters, Hogarth and Stubbs, had to do with this.

  24 January. ‘Well, love, the call’s going on,’ is what my mother used to say in the early 1960s when I phoned from London, meaning that telephoning to them was still a luxury. On the rare occasions when I was at home and wanted to make a private call it had to be on the shop phone, which was mounted on the wall with a separate mouth and earpiece. So some of one’s intimate moments were played out amid sawdust and blood.

  2 February. An environmentally sensitive bus named after me in Leeds. I just wish it could have been a tram.

  16 February. What people were doing at eleven o’clock on the morning of 3 September 1939:

  Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings (Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams) – rowing down the Thames

  Hugh Trevor-Roper and Gilbert Ryle – walking across Northumberland

  John Piper and Geoffrey Grigson – en route for lunch at the Betjemans

  The Bennetts – on a No. 16 tram going down Tong Road, Leeds 12

  9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea.’ This was in 1932. At Calverley on the outskirts of Leeds seven years previously my grandfather folded his jacket neatly too before stepping into the canal.

  11 March. The crowded train from Oxford makes its last stop at Slough where a Sikh gets on – in his twenties, tall, distinguished, black-suited, black-turbanned. He sits there unsmiling, a princely figure, seemingly impervious to his surroundings, the aura only broken when at one point he briefly texts. Otherwise he might be a head of state.

  17 March. A new robin – hatched last year I imagine and much about the garden. A very dapper little bird.

  18 March. R. to Cardiff to see his grandmother on a potentially difficult day as it’s also the day of the Grand Slam rugger match between Wales and France. The train is very crowded and he sits in Weekend First opposite a middle-aged French couple whom he assumes to be fans, but with nothing in their behaviour that gives any clue. However, just before the train arrives at Cardiff the very proper bourgeois lady takes out her compact and with her lipstick carefully draws the French flag on both cheeks and colours them in. This is done so unselfconsciously and without a smile R. feels that for this alone they deserve to win.

  20 March. Tonight Lansley’s bill passes into law and the NHS is effectively abolished. For a doctor or any sort of health professional it must be like the fall of France – a relief that it’s done with and a pause before resistance begins to be organised. Though I doubt that it will.

  12 April. See a way to begin the man and his mother story, though it has echoes of Mrs Forbes. Still it cheers me up and I have quite a productive morning. In the late afternoon I shop for vegetables to put in tonight’s stew, including turnips which they often have at Yeoman’s but nowhere else. Today Nigel the greengrocer has to get some from the cellar or, as it would have been called in Dad’s shop, the back place. And I think what a good title The Back Place would be for an anthology of the – maybe quite unworthy – stuff that wouldn’t make it into a more respectable collection. The back place at the shop was where Dad (and sometimes Gordon and me) made the sausages, shaped the rissoles and where (at 92A anyway) it was hung with beasts’ heads. I suppose it was in the time of rationing what people meant by ‘under the counter’ – though Dad never kept anything much there except supplies of greaseproof paper. The back place was also the setting, at least in the imagination of the Widow Eliot, where I could have been seen studying Russian or stuff for my degree.

  The words put into the mouth of Humphrey Carpenter in The Habit of Art are to do with how writers feel threatened by biography, their lives as they see it what they have put in the shop window, the rest – what’s in the back place – their business. The stuff in the back place (emphasis on back rather than place) was not meant to be seen. It’s the back places of writers’ lives that they want left unexplored.

  16 April. Wrens bounce.

  25 April. At five a car comes to take me down to Silk Sound studios on Berwick Street to record a voiceover (of my own voice) for an episode of Family Guy, the story being that Brian, the dog, has written a play, premiering at Quahog, which ‘all the playwrights’ (i.e. Yasmina Reza, David Mamet and me) duly go and see – and rubbish. They had first of all asked if they could use me as a cartoon character to which I graciously agreed (not saying that I felt it was the highlight of my career). It was then they asked if I would voice myself. Yasmina and David had apparently not been tempted but I went for this too and it was only as I was signing the clearance afterwards that I realised Family Guy is a Fox (i.e. a Murdoch) programme and so not something I would normally do. Today was the day Murdoch Sr was on the stand at the Leveson Inquiry and en route to the studio I ask the driver who has been his most famous passenger. Without hesitation he says Muhammad Ali but then reels off a list of other celebrities he has driven, including the Murdochs. I take this just to be the driver keeping in the swim but a few minutes later the car phone rings with the message, ‘Car for Mr Murdoch at eight thirty.’ Which Murdoch it is I don’t ask, though feel myself faintly brushed by the wings of history. The driver, incidentally, is the first person I’ve spoken to who is actually looking forward to the Olympics.

  30 April. Outdated though some of them are, we still rely on the Shell Guides, particularly when searching out churches. Some, generally the ones with which John Piper was involved, are more idiosyncratic than others but they’ve always been easier to handle and broader in scope than the Pevsner guides and they don’t make one feel a fool for not knowing what a soffit is (or gadrooning). Until recently, though, Yorkshire hasn’t been well served by the guides. Then in 2001 came North Yorkshi
re by Peter Burton, a favourite photographer of Betjeman’s, and today I’m sent West Yorkshire, one of the Heritage Shell Guides by William Glossop, a notable addition to the series and full of good things and marvellous photographs, some still by the now late Peter Burton.

  The good thing about Glossop is that unlike me he doesn’t wring his hands too much over what has been lost, particularly the wholesale destruction of Victorian buildings that has gone on all over the country, though even he finds the destruction of Bradford hard to forgive. He’s also milder about church robberies than I’m inclined to be and the thieves who wrenched the original Norman bronze door ring from Adel Church he calls thoughtless. I’d feel like nailing them to the church door.

  Bleak though it often is, I find the area round Halifax romantic and almost fabled. This is because my mother’s family the Peels came from Elland and at family gatherings in Leeds the talk was always of places I’d heard of but never been to … Greetland, Salter Hebble, Ripponden, Sowerby Bridge. My aunt Eveline had been a pianist for the silent films, with Ivor Novello a staple of her repertoire. I bet she didn’t know (this is one of Glossop’s plums) that Novello wrote ‘Perchance to Dream’ in Barkisland’s Howroyd Hall, the original stage set a copy of the sitting room. A lovely book.

  2 May. Jeremy Hunt has the look of an estate agent waiting to show someone a property.

  10 May. I sit in Rome airport while R. stands by the baggage carousel. We’re only here for four days, and did either of us have bags on wheels we would not have to wait as most passengers these days seem to lug them on board. As he waits a flight arrives from Beijing and behind him a middle-aged Chinese woman leans forward and (with her fingers) blows her nose copiously onto the floor.

  11 May. One object of the trip is for R. to see the room in the Vatican Museum devoted to Roman animal sculpture, a possible article for the magazine. He has got a special permit which enables us to bypass the queue – at 11 a.m. (and in baking heat) stretching down the hill outside. Inside our contact is waiting but there is no getting round the throngs of tourists pouring into the building, most of them I imagine set on seeing the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It is like a mainline station in the rush hour but with this difference, these people are all of one mind – tour guides in the van, gathering their flocks up as they scatter at the turnstiles, coach parties supporting their aged and their lame and, of course, their fat – some of them so gross one wonders they have the energy spare from just getting about never mind the sightseeing. Unsmiling, too, most people, grim even – or at least determined, pressing on and upwards along galleries lined with sculptures and busts, hung with thousands of ancient artefacts too many to be even casually appreciated, let alone properly – though instead they halt in an awed circle around a Michelangelo hulk – hunk, too, probably once upon a time – thighs and crotch that has lost its cock but kept its scrotum.