Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  But I tell Christopher S. S. the story of the play and he is unsurprised by the descent of the porn film crew. He was at a stately home the other day and walked into a room to find a film crew and a naked girl spread-eagled on the rug, a shot they were filming for a calendar.

  30 October. A forties sky, broad and blue and streaked with thin cloud and waiting for a dog-fight.

  10 November. Read to an audience in York at the request of Graham Mort, the poet who used to live in our village. The audience is made up of chiefly teachers, teachers of English particularly. The meeting is full and very responsive though I don’t read as well as I usually do, nor do they always laugh as much – this perhaps to be put down to their all being of one mind. All doctors would be the same as all teachers, or all anybody: audiences shouldn’t be homogenous before one even starts; it’s the performance, even of a reading, that should weld them into a unit.

  The best moment of the day comes when I get out of the cab and cross Regent’s Park Road, when crossing with me is a sleek rufous fox. It pauses on the pavement to watch me crossing before loping unhurriedly into the shrubbery round the old people’s flats. There it pauses again and looks at me looking at it before going off across the forecourt.

  11 November. T. S. Eliot I only saw once, some time in 1964. It was on the old Central Station in Leeds, long since demolished, which was the terminus for the London trains. I was with Timothy Binyon, with whom I had been at college and who in 1964 was a lecturer in Russian at Leeds University and was also teaching me to drive. In the early 1960s there had been a long overdue attempt to reactivate the slot machines which all through the war years and after had stood empty and disconsolate on railway platforms, a sad reminder of what life had been like before the war. Now briefly there was chocolate in the machines again and cigarettes too; it had taken twenty years but austerity was seemingly at an end. One beneficiary of this development was a rudimentary printing machine to be found on most mainline stations. Painted pillarbox red it was a square console on legs with a dial on the top and a pointer. Using this pointer, for sixpence or a shilling one could spell out one’s name and address which would then be printed onto a strip of aluminium which could be attached to one’s suitcase, kitbag or whatever. Astonished to find such a machine actually working after decades of disuse, Binyon and I were printing out our names watched by a friendly middle-aged woman who was equally fascinated.

  It was at this point the train came in and after most of the passengers had cleared there came a small procession headed by the friendly lady, whom I now recognised as Mrs Fletcher, a customer at my father’s butcher’s shop, followed by her daughter Valerie pushing a wheelchair with, under a pile of rugs, her husband T. S. Eliot; all accompanied by a flotilla of porters. It was only when this cavalcade had passed that the person we were waiting for made her appearance – namely the current editor of the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who at that time worked for Faber and Faber and whose titular boss Eliot had been.

  T. S. Eliot died early the following year. Timothy Binyon, having produced a definitive biography of Pushkin, died in 2004 and now Valerie Eliot has died. I only met her a couple of times, though was persuaded to attend her funeral if only because, through her family coming to our shop, I had known her longest – if in some respects least.

  She used to claim that she remembered me as a boy doing my homework in a corner of the shop – an unlikely recollection, and a slightly distasteful one, reminiscent of Millais’s (fairly odious) picture of Christ in the carpenter’s shop. Had I ever chosen to do my homework in the shop it would have got short shrift from my father who would have seen it as ‘showing off ’.

  What Valerie Eliot did do, though, was to send me the notes her husband had made on the inside of his programme after their visit to Beyond the Fringe:

  An amazingly vigorous quartet of young men: their show well produced and fast moving, a mixture of brilliance, juvenility and bad taste. Brilliance illustrated by a speech by Macmillan (Cook), a sermon (Bennett) and an interview with an African politician (Miller, who otherwise reminded us of Auden). Juvenility by anti-nuclear-bomb scene, anti-capital-punishment scene and the absence of any satire at the expense of the Labour Party. Bad taste by armpits and Lady Astor speech (?). Still, it is pleasant to see this type of entertainment so successful.

  14 November, Paris. At five to call on Peter Adam who wrote something for World of Interiors a couple of years ago, subsequently sending us a beautiful drawing by Keith Vaughan.

  Adam could stand as representative of European culture, British and continental over the last forty years – having known everyone, particularly the generation of writers and directors at the BBC in the 1970s – Tristram Powell, Julian Jebb, Jonathan Miller, Melvyn Bragg and the writers too beginning with Hester Chapman and including Selina Hastings, the Gowries – no one he does not know, though not in a name-dropping sort of way but as memories of a world in which he moved. And still does, having last week been at the funeral of Hans Werner Henze, where a massive wreath from Angela Merkel fell to the ground during the service provoking general mirth and, as the coffin was borne out, one of the bearers’ mobile phones went off and he dropped out to answer it leaving the coffin dangerously lopsided.

  In his eighties now probably, dressed in a rich black velvet smoking jacket and embroidered slippers – a noble presence and a congenial one. We stay for an hour or so, walking back along the Rue de Sèvres and up Cherche-Midi, past the apartments on Coëtlogon where Keith and Lynn lived in the late 1980s and to which I still have a key.

  15 November, Paris. Write it and it happens. People begins with two old people sitting in a grand though dilapidated room when a young man comes in (he is virtually naked, but that is incidental). He puts his finger to his lips, indicating that filming is going on. Dorothy, the younger of the two women, says ‘Are we dangerous?’ meaning will they be in shot, and the young man shushes her again.

  This afternoon I’m packed, ready for Eurostar and waiting in one of the hotel drawing rooms while R. does some last-minute shopping. A porter comes in and puts a log on the fire, at which point a young woman looks in, puts her finger to her lips, motioning him to forget the fire as they are filming in the next room.

  I cannot see what it is they are filming, but it is a lavish crew of some twenty or so with half a dozen other technicians hanging about outside. Someone is being interviewed, I can tell that, which in England would warrant a crew of three or four at the most. Whoever it is has a low purling voice which, increasingly deaf as I am, I can’t quite hear. This goes on for an hour or so at which point R. returns and with him our taxi. Standing up to go I have my first view of who is being interviewed. It is Salman Rushdie.

  23 November. The dress rehearsal of The Habit of Art and Frankie parading in her haute couture reminds me of the relatively rare occasions in Leeds when we ventured into the café of Marshall and Snelgrove. In addition to the social atmosphere being rather grander than what we were used to, there was an additional hazard in the shape of mannequins who paraded between the tables modelling numbers that were presumably on offer in the Ladies’ Gowns Department. Mam was very anxious not to catch the eye of these haughty women lest (on the analogy of the auction room) one was thought to be a prospective purchaser.

  3 December. The basic London Library fee is now £445.00. My borrowings are so few this works out at £20 per book – and this is an underestimate. I suppose I have to think of it as a contribution to charity.

  2013

  3 January, Yorkshire. The year kicks off with a small trespass when we drive over from Ramsgill via Ripon and Thirsk to Rievaulx. However the abbey is closed, seemingly until the middle of February, which infuriates us both, and though at seventy-eight and with an artificial hip it’s not something I feel I should be doing, we scale the five-bar gate and break in. The place is of course empty and though it’s quite muddy underfoot, an illicit delight. It’s warm and windless, the stones of the abbey sodden an
d brown from the amount of moisture they’ve absorbed. Spectacular here are the toilet arrangements, the reredorter set above a narrow chasm with a stream still running along the bottom. Unique, though (or at least I haven’t seen another), is the tannery complete with its various vats, a small factory in the heart of the abbey and which must have stunk as tanneries always did. I remember the tannery down Stanningley Road opposite Armley Park School in Leeds which my brother and I (en route for the Western cinema) always ran past holding our noses. The site at Rievaulx is just over the wall from the abbot’s lodgings, which smelly though medieval abbeys were, must have been hard to take. Coming away we scale the gate again, happy to have outwitted authority, but since all that stands between Open and Closed is a five-bar gate it’s maybe English Heritage’s way of turning a blind eye.

  11 January. The doorbell goes around noon. I’m expecting Antony Crolla, the photographer, so don’t look through the window and open the door to find what I take to be a builder with a loose piece of flex in his hand and what could be a meter. He says he’s working at a house nearby but needs to check our drain which may have a hairline crack. He makes to come in, but I say that if there is any work needs doing we have a builder of our own and in any case my partner deals with all that. He then claims to have spoken to my ‘boyfriend’ who says it’s OK. I shut the door on him and telephone R., the so-called builder meanwhile banging on the door. R. of course has never spoken to anyone, so I go back to the door where, as soon as I open it, the caller gets his foot in the door (literally). Our friend Bridget, who’s downstairs, now comes up and at the sight of a third party he takes fright, retreating to a white van waiting opposite with its engine running which drives off so quickly I fail to get the number. Thinking about it afterwards, where he went wrong was in not being ingratiating enough or trying to explain what the ‘drain problem’ was and graduating straight to the frenzied banging on the door; ‘your boyfriend’ didn’t help either. Like all crooks he was affronted when his honesty was questioned, if only because it implied a criticism of his performance.

  19 January. Snow yesterday which makes Yorkshire out of the question with a particular cause for regret Friday night’s fish and chips at La Grillade. Still snowy today though no more has fallen but rather than moon about the house all day we make an effort to go out and take a cab down to the Courtauld which I’ve not visited, or since it was remodelled at least. Though it’s crammed with masterpieces it’s not a gallery I find I like – as being too bare and uncosy with none of the genial clutter of the Fitzwilliam with its leather banquettes and occasional furniture. And with so many famous pictures there’s not much chance of discovering anything for oneself. As it is I almost shy away from the best-known stuff – Cézanne’s Card Players, various Van Goghs – as at a party one would avoid going up to a celebrity guest. We spend more time looking at Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, unable to make sense of the mirrors and the perspective while noticing the odd little pair of acrobat’s legs dangling in the top left-hand corner.

  Still in a gallery my most trustworthy instinct is whether I want to take a painting away. The Card Players no. A tiny Seurat of a (blurred) man, yes.

  4 February. I don’t imagine that my old Oxford supervisor, the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane, would be much exercised by the discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-Duke of York’s receiver’s accounts, say, or records of Yorkist estate management.

  The TV programme on Channel 4 was a lengthy and slightly spurious cliffhanger, culminating in the always conjectural reconstruction of what the famous corpse looked like. No different from the fanciful portrait, it turns out, but with enough humanity to satisfy the convictions of the Richard III Society, who were stumping up for the whole exercise. Bracketed in my mind with the ‘Bacon is Shakespeare’ lot, the Richard III fans seem not without a bob or two and with some of their barmier members on parade in the programme. I also blame the Richard III Society for tarting up Lead Church. [See 25 September 2012.] So had the last of the Yorkist kings been left under the car park I would not have grieved.

  14 February. Valentine’s Day – Tuesday’s expedition to The Lacquer Chest having proved fruitless – I have nothing to give R. He manages a lovely card of a tile that I can pin on my wall and three good ties which we can share. It’s also twenty-one years since we first got together, an association durable enough to silence even the most voluble backbench Tory. It happens, too to be the night Keith McNally has asked us to the previews of Balthazar where we go, me with some trepidation, R with more of an ill grace, redeemed though by our taking Dinah W. who (unaccountably to me) has no date. And predictably we all have a lovely time. It looks terrific, a huge loftyceilinged room, lively, busy with the staff – more women than men – friendly and funny and attentive. K. takes us through into the bakery next door, a shop that is on the street, and as enticing and delectable as the one in New York. He keeps stopping and introducing us to people working there, giving us their stories – one oldish guy at the fish counter whom he had flown in from NY but who had been stopped at immigration and sent back before being provided with a lawyer’s letter at JFK and flying straight back again. You can see – as one always has, right back to the Odeon in 1980 why he is a good (and funny) boss to work for and very much on the floor.

  Also at a table (wholly occupying it) is the biggest man I’ve ever seen – not fat, just huge, six foot eight and mountainous, a rugger player for the Harlequins apparently. ‘I know,’ says our funny Italian waitress wistfully. ‘All the ladies, they think the same thing.’

  16 February. Go down to the London Library, empty as always on a Saturday afternoon, to collect E. M. Forster’s Journals and Diaries (in three volumes), having resisted buying them at £285. I am thankful I did as on the evidence of Vol. 2, which I read for the rest of the day, he is no diarist and doesn’t really attempt to be one. Vol. 2 is temptingly described as The ‘Locked’ Diary 1909–67 but only the most zealous policeman could detect wrong-doing here – though I suppose catching the eye of young men counted as wrong-doing until – well 1967 which was when homosexuality came off the ration. Like Larkin he doesn’t seem to have done too badly, various gentlemen ‘obliging’ him as the ladies did Larkin. Like Larkin, too, his wellbeing is often bound up with that of his mother. The novels don’t much figure, or work of any description though I’m handicapped by only having read Howards End, never having managed The Longest Journey or A Passage to India. Saw him only once, I think when I was in the army and coming round a corner at King’s I nearly knocked him down – in his latter days quite easy to do.

  17 February. I am a founding member of the Council for the Defence of British Universities and today comes a letter asking for a brief account of my time at Oxford, quotes from which they could use in support of their cause.

  I never think my experience of university was typical but I send this:

  What Oxford gave me was time. Like many of my generation I didn’t go up until I was twenty and had done National Service. I was young for my age so, though I worked hard, my first two years were pretty much wasted. It was only in what I imagined was to be my final year that I tippled to the (still to me) rather shameful fact that there was a technique to passing examinations which had less to do with knowledge than presentation and indeed journalism. This carried me through my finals and enabled me to stay on and do research and indeed to teach … even if I was not much better at teaching than I was at learning.

  In that time, though, I was supervised by someone whose passion for his subject, his care for his pupils and his moral rigour I have never forgotten and whose example has stayed with me all my life.

  I am not sure this is much use to the CDBU but I hope it helps.

  27 February. ‘On your bike this morning?’

>   I nod cheerfully.

  ‘God help us all.’

  5 March. So cold this week that I do what I haven’t done since I was in the army in Bodmin in 1954, get up and put on my clothes on top of my pyjamas.

  14 March. Walking up to the bridge at Primrose Hill where once the station was, an oldish woman stops me, looks furtively around and says, in an undertone, ‘I don’t like Leonardo either’ – this, I presume to a reference in my LRB diaries a couple of years ago. What makes it comic is her concern not to be overheard, her few words suggesting she is maybe German.

  28 March, Suffolk. Turns out a good day partly because we didn’t have any plans. First comes a ritual visit to Yoxford where we go round the junk shop and I buy a book of letters between Beth Chat-to and Christopher Lloyd. Then coffee in the eccentric post office where an ancient customer recognises me and shakes me so firmly by the hand it’s like being caught in a mangle. ‘Say something whimsical,’ he commands.

  29 March. Richard Griffiths dies. We’ve been away for a couple of days so are spared the unctuous telephone calls that always come from the tabloids on such occasions, ‘We’re sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings’ or ‘We hope we’re not intruding on your grief.’ Outside his family the person who would have known him best as an actor at the National and who would have been most acquainted with the logistic difficulties caused by his bulk was Ralph his dresser. No one will think to ask him, and I’ve never known him gossip about the actors he’s dressed (myself included), but he would have an angle on Richard and how he coped with his life that is unshared by any of the obituary writers.