Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  I first met Bruce McFarlane at Oxford late in Michaelmas term 1957. I had read history at Exeter College and in Final Schools the previous term, rather to my own surprise (and very much to the surprise of my college), had just scraped into the first class. So instead of being thrust out into the world as I had expected I was offered the chance of putting Life off a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely, ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a subject I paid a disastrous visit to Beryl Smalley at St Hilda’s, thinking I might do something on the Franciscans. There had been a torrential thunderstorm and forgetting to wipe my feet I trailed wet footsteps all across her white carpet, thus putting paid to any hope of research into the friars, barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane.

  My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak.

  I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen. I remember nothing of that first meeting except that Bruce was sitting in his armchair, possibly with a cat on his knee, and that I marched awkwardly into the room, stood on the hearthrug and said, ‘I’m Bennett,’ at which he laughed. And the laughter and the angle of his head and the smile that was so often in his eyes is how I recall him now. Freesias bring him back too, as there were always some in a glass scenting the whole room, with its collection of keys hung on the plain plaster wall, the bleached oak, the thirties paintings and bits of brocade. But as one came in the last smell was always the fish that was put out in the vestibule for the cats.

  We settled on ‘The Royal Retinue of Richard II 1388–99’ as my research subject and thereafter I used to go down and see him pretty regularly, not in my recollection talking much about work; these visits, very often around tea time, gradually became less tutorial and more social. I’d generally take with me a cake from Fuller’s or some establishment in the Covered Market, cakes that can have done him no good but which he ate with relish, meringues particularly.

  I had never come up against as strong a personality as this before and I found without any conscious effort that my handwriting now began to resemble his. He always wrote Esq. with the superscription re and I found myself doing that too. It’s rare enough nowadays to write Esq. at all but I still write it Esqre and note that others of his former pupils do the same.

  Bruce was very set in his ways, though perhaps no more than I am now. At Stonor once I was helping him change some sheets and had put the bottom sheet on with the crease folding down, not up … the fact that I find my mistake hard to describe indicates how finicky I found it. Bruce reproved me, explaining that the creases should go the other way. I thought this pedantic and probably said so but I have observed his method ever since.

  Stonor, his pied-à-terre in the country, was hardly the cottage I had imagined but a sizeable house with an extensive garden tended largely by Helena Wright, the pioneer of birth control with whom he shared the house, who was often knelt there working, planting out the beds, with her radio (a source of irritation to Bruce) always beside her. Brudenell House at Quainton, to which he subsequently moved, was more imposing but I never stayed there. Food was fairly simple with lots of soups and salads, the soup in the evening drunk with a set of sixteenth-century silver Apostle spoons. In those more expansive days one took elaborate table silver for granted, undergraduates at my own college regularly drinking beer in hall from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century silver tankards. But the spoons I knew were in a different class and indeed they had to be deposited in the bank between visits. Bruce enjoyed food and was quite funny and snobbish about it. Dining once with him at the Randolph (a more intimidating experience then than it is now) I chose scampi, which I’d never eaten. Bruce sniffed, ‘Commercial traveller’s food.’

  McFarlane has figured in accounts of the period chiefly as the colleague and opponent of A. J. P. Taylor with whom he shared the history teaching at Magdalen. Taylor achieved the kind of fame Bruce wanted none of but, unlike Taylor, Bruce managed without effort to acquire a body of pupils who were both friends and disciples and who carried on his work and cherished his memory. Anyone who was supervised by McFarlane must have been aware that they had a long way to travel before they reached the frontier of his own knowledge and there was very little any of his students could tell him that he didn’t already know, though this didn’t stop one trying. Having come under his spell I wanted very much to please him even though it gradually became apparent to me that I was pretty hopeless at research and not much better as a teacher. Still he steered a number of his surplus pupils my way which financially was a great help, finally getting me appointed a junior lecturer in history at Magdalen.

  He did too much teaching himself and grumbled about it but never treated it as a chore; what takes me by surprise in his letters is how much his happiness and well-being was bound up with the progress and responsiveness of his pupils – and not just the cleverest ones either. A good tutorial even with an average pupil put him in a good mood and was thought worth mentioning in a letter. This dedication to teaching could make him intolerant of what he saw as laziness and he was harsh with pupils who, it seemed to him, were performing below their capacity. His zeal was tempered by his relish for oddity and his interest in the personalities of those whom he taught but it could make him seem unfeeling.

  It wasn’t that he measured intellectual worth by success in examinations, though he did believe that one had to play the system and that if a good degree bought you time or opened doors and gave you the opportunity to do what you wanted, you were a fool not to take examinations seriously. This comes out in one of his letters to Michael Wheeler-Booth, a letter I find encouraging because it deals to some extent with the stratagems necessary to get through Finals. I had used stratagems myself and felt a bit shabby for doing so, though mine were probably cruder (artful quotations, a selection of facts learned by rote) than anything Bruce was advocating. Still they did the trick, but his friend and colleague Karl Leyser having been one of my examiners, Bruce would have known that it was a close-run thing, so I always felt intellectually I was on very thin ice.

  I knew that Bruce was fond of me but did not let on that I knew, flattered that he should be glad of my company but embarrassed when he gave any hint of it. I’ve always regretted this, reproaching myself for not acknowledging his affection and managing things better.

  I ended up quarrelling, as I’m reassured, reading his letters, to find that several of his friends and pupils did, though I’m glad I made it up with him before he died. I called to see him one afternoon at Quainton and we sat in the garden talking. Suddenly he said, à propos of nothing, ‘I think I’m going to retire.’ I thought he meant into the house and so stood up abruptly and this made him laugh. So I’m happy to think that our friendship both began and ended with his laughing.

  First published in the London Review of Books in 1997.

  John Schlesinger 1926–2003

  St John’s Wood Synagogue, 30 September 2003

  It’s not often that one can reprise or indeed recycle a speech made at a memorial service but I’m in that happy or unhappy position this evening. A few weeks ago I had to speak at Thora Hird’s memorial service and began by talking about a scene from A Kind of Loving, John’s film of Stan Barstow’s novel, made in 1962. Thora played the sour-faced Mrs Rothwell, straitlaced, houseproud and wary mother of the beautiful Ingrid. At Thora’s service I told the story from her p.o.v. This evening, I suppose, I’m doing the reverse angle.

  Woken late one night Mrs Rothwell comes downstairs to find Alan Bates’s Vic drunk and snogging the beautiful Ingrid in the parlour. Bates is about to apologise
when he is abruptly and copiously sick behind the sofa.

  John took a great deal of pleasure in this scene, calling initially for much more sick (probably Crosse and Blackwell’s Scotch Broth) and even stirring it himself. It was quite a long scene, Bates throwing up at least twice but the Waterhouse and Hall script only gave Thora one line, ‘You filthy, disgusting pig.’ It was a line admirably suited to her talents but not enough to cover what went on so John told Thora to improvise.

  This was not a technique Thora had ever had any occasion to acquire, her job to say the words not make them up. However she did her best and having a text, ‘You filthy disgusting pig,’ she proceeded to play variations on it.

  ‘You … pig. You’re filthy … you. Disgusting.’ Then, looking over the back of the sofa, ‘You … you’re … a pig!’

  Thora thought that would be all that would be required of her but John with what in every sense was gay abandon, kept the camera rolling with Thora forced to weave more and more variations on the four words the script had allotted her. Alan remembers that she said the magic phrase no less than eleven times, with all her frustration at not being able to think of anything better feeding into the anger she was supposed to feel as the character. And it’s a wonderful scene.

  But it demonstrates the first thing you could expect when working with John, namely that there would always be a good deal of fun and sheer mischief.

  I first became aware of John with that film, A Kind of Loving, which, together with Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life and Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning were all defining films of the early sixties … and part of a new anatomy of England that was being put together in the films and plays of that time.

  A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar, both scripted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, were funnier than the others, less grim and with a fondness for the North. John begins Billy Liar with a long sequence in which the camera pans across an estate of council houses at nine o’clock in the morning, every house tuned to Housewives’ Choice on the radio, the snatches of music you hear so right … Litolff ’s Scherzo, the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ from Nabucco … that they were practically a joke in themselves and you know at once you’re in the hands of a sceptical and amused observer of the English scene and that it’s going to be fun.

  When eventually I came to work with John on An Englishman Abroad I was frightened that it wasn’t going to be fun at all, simply because I’d never worked with anyone who had such a short fuse, or whose moods could change so dramatically. Coral Browne, though, reassured me. ‘Don’t worry, dear. John can always drag the crown of thorns out from under the bed whenever it suits him.’

  Like Lindsay Anderson (though not), part of the dynamic of film-making with John was to have someone to blame. He needed a villain. Film-making put him instinctively on the defensive though it was so instinctive it was almost a joke. It was like Old Mother Riley getting her corsets out of the oven and going into pugilistic mode.

  Sometimes it was the costume department, sometimes it was even the writer … John, for instance, didn’t get on at all with Penelope Gilliatt on Sunday, Bloody Sunday … and routinely, of course, it was the front office and the money.

  But the films I did with him were for the BBC and were produced by Innes Lloyd, the most emollient of producers and a saintly man with whom even John at his most choleric could find no fault. And with Innes on hand it was hard to blame the BBC so John … like Lindsay again … would go into terrible rages about the shortcomings of England. The advantage of blaming England rather than the wardrobe being that England isn’t found two hours later weeping in the loo.

  But his ambiguous attitude to England I always found deeply sympathetic and I wish he’d had the opportunities to work it out more in films or on television. Too often, landed with an unsympathetic project he was himself the Englishman abroad and one would get calls from some location hotel on the other side of the world to hear John say sadly, ‘No jokes, dear. No jokes at all.’

  John was very much a family man. He revered his parents and after An Englishman Abroad asked me to write a film based partly on the book of tributes to his parents that was put together at the time of their golden wedding.

  So we had talks about it and tried to rough out a plot. And I began to turn up again at Victoria Road with treatments and pages but un-usually for John, who was always bold and didn’t worry about treading on toes … with this project he was tentative. He was anxious not to upset anyone in the family, which sometimes my treatments might unwittingly have done … and above all he wanted to do his parents justice and properly to celebrate them.

  Gradually it became clear that we were getting nowhere and so it was never written. But in a sense this was right, too, and evidence of his affection and respect, the fact that he couldn’t make a film about his family as much a tribute to them as if he had.

  It’s impossible to talk about John even in these circumstances without referring to sex. Being gay determined his life and much of his work. It informs, of course, one of his best films, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, the moment when only a few frames from the end Peter Finch turns and talks to the camera one of the great moments in cinema and still as fresh and startling when you see it today.

  He was so aware of his sexuality that he contrived to find a corresponding awareness in the unlikeliest of places. At his investiture with the CBE the Queen had a momentary difficulty getting the ribbon round his neck.

  ‘Now, Mr Schlesinger,’ she said, ‘let us see. We must try and get this straight.’ Which John chose to take as both a coded acknowledgement and a seal of royal approval.

  I owe John an immense amount. An Englishman Abroad was one of the happiest films I’ve ever worked on and one that thanks to John far exceeded my expectations. We shot it largely in Dundee and our hotel was next door to a housing estate and after supper every night Alan Bates, John and I used to take a stroll round these rather genteel streets when we would speculate about the lives lived there.

  Someone looking through the curtains would have seen three middle-aged men, entirely sober but helpless with laughter, night after night for no apparent cause.

  It was such a happy time and that’s how I will always remember him, full of joy and fun.

  The National Theatre at Fifty: What the National Means to Me

  The first time I set foot on the stage at the National was in November 1987 at the Cottesloe. It was an inauspicious debut. Patrick Garland had put together an evening of Philip Larkin’s poetry and prose entitled Down Cemetery Road, done as a two-hander with Alan Bates as Larkin. This was then revived at short notice for some extra performances but Alan wasn’t available and I agreed to substitute. The change of cast hadn’t been advertised and many of the audience, having come along expecting to see Alan Bates, must have thought he’d gone downhill a bit since they last saw him wrestling naked on a rug with Oliver Reed. I was also in the middle of some extensive dentistry, which involved the removal of several bridges and, though the dentist had assured me that the effects of the anaesthetic would have worn off long before the evening’s performance, I often took the stage feeling as if large sections of my mouth were coned off. The anaesthetic did indeed wear off during the course of the performance so that when I hit a suddenly tender spot there was an agonised yelp uncatered for in Larkin’s muted verse. Even at the best of times the poet didn’t care for the public performance of his works so it was perhaps fortunate he had died two years previously.

  What the audience felt I tried not to think though I remember coming off at the interval and en route for my dressing room meeting Judi Dench and her attendants bound for the Olivier stage. ‘Not many laughs tonight,’ I said. ‘None at all with us,’ she replied but since she was appearing in Antony and Cleopatra this was hardly surprising. They had one unscheduled laugh, though, as it was while she was giving her Cleopatra that Judi was made a dame. On the evening in question Michael Bryant, playing Enobarbus, turned upstage and muttered
en passant, ‘Well I suppose a fuck’s quite out of the question now,’ an extra-textual remark, such was Michael’s never other than immaculate diction, that was heard by the first ten rows.

  About the NT building itself I’ve always had reservations. It’s better inside than out with the foyers, in particular, interesting and lively and even living up to those fanciful illustrations with which architects populate their constructions with idly gossiping creatures who seem to have all the time in the world. They always have oval heads and are wholly intent on using the space the architect has so thoughtfully provided. Oval heads apart, the foyer of the National is a bit like that and works, just as Denys Lasdun envisaged it should.

  Nor are the three theatres too bad, with the Olivier, to my mind, the best. From an actor’s point of view (or that of someone with a weak bladder) the huge central block of seats of the Lyttelton is daunting. The Olivier is more broken up, though it, too, has its drawbacks and it’s said that Michael Gambon got so accustomed to playing the vast space that even in private conversation he would still slowly move through the necessary arc.

  A few years after the building had opened the late Ronald Eyre, having directed one or two productions here, said that it would be better for all concerned if the National Theatre could straight away close again and be converted into an ice rink and/or dance hall … the Olivier, I suppose most suited for the ice rink, the Lyttelton for the palais de danse. Then, after twenty years or so, when the corners had been rubbed off the building and it had acquired its own shabby and disreputable history, all the cultural stuffing long since knocked out of it and every breath of Art dispersed, it would be time for it to be reclaimed for theatre. As it was it was too much of a temple for him and altogether too worthy; somewhere ordinary was what he wanted and with no pretensions. I remembered this and years later included it as part of the stage manager’s final speech in The Habit of Art (2009).