Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  A diary is undoubtedly a comfort. I feel better for having written it down, however hard the experience. I never enjoy, though, having to record set pieces and prefer to pick at incidents rather than try for a comprehensive account. As I’ve noted before, my diary is often best when written in the intervals of other writing; it’s a turning away, a place for asides. What I do always dislike is not having written anything for a while and then finding I have to catch up.

  Where no place is specified the entry was written in Camden Town in London, where I have lived for the last forty years. Craven is the village in Yorkshire to which my parents retired and where we still have a house.

  1996

  3 January. To Dynasties, the exhibition of Tudor portraits at the Tate. There are some superb pictures but, with the sitters shortly to die or be executed, many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the embroidery or work out the folds and flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is Holbein’s portrait of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VI; he’s not the weed that he’s normally pictured but a big solid bully of a baby, the image of his father. On the Underground R. says he’s never known a poster so persistently defaced, the child’s brutal look seeming to irritate people. One poster that he saw had UGLY written across the forehead and another SPAM.

  27 January. To Leeds by the 9.10 train with snow flurries much of the way. We call at the British Epilepsy Association, where I have to sign some books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad neighbourhood, not far from the Hyde Park street which is said to hold the record for the most burglaries in England. The British Epilepsy Association is offices only but has a steel door, having been broken into three times, one of them a ram-raid; so, coming away, I’m perhaps more conscious of vandalism and urban decay than I otherwise might be. The result is, when we see a starved-looking boy of ten and his sister, twelve or so, tugging at a bollard round some roadworks before sending it flying, I wind down the window and say primly: ‘That’s a pretty silly thing to do.’ This releases a torrent of abuse from the two Bisto kids, the girl cold and dirty and in a thin anorak, the boy with snot dribbling down from his pinched little nose. As we’re driving off she gives me her parting shot: ‘Get a life!’ It’s a ready-made cartoon for the New Yorker.

  At Addingham we turn off to Bolton Abbey, deserted this cold bright afternoon with the paths down to the river covered in untrodden snow and the Wharfe winding black between the drifts. Building at the priory must have been going on until the very eve of the Dissolution, with the uncompleted west tower begun by Abbot Moon in 1520. The confidence such plans imply still surprises me as I’ve never quite got rid of the notion that the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Reformation altogether, was part of some general winding-down of the medieval Church. In fact, the future must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight.

  10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmonds animated film about a pig who acts as a theatrical dresser; this seems right up my street. Except I am called today to say that, unaware of my interest, the casting director has approached someone else and ‘his agent is standing firm’. Clearly Stephen F. is back in the market.

  11 February. Turn on the radio this evening to find Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto just beginning, the unexpectedness of it taking me back to 1951, when I heard it for the first time. How lofty I thought my life was going to be then, just like this music; I saw myself modestly ascending shallow staircases to unspecified triumphs, with love disdained, or at any rate transcended, always a part of it.

  It’s a live performance on Classic FM, a concert by the Liverpool Phil. with someone coughing badly throughout and a rather wayward account by the soloist, who sometimes slows it down so much that it almost stops, the swooning second subject in the last movement well over the top. These days audiences know a work so well that soloists must find public performance more nerve-racking than it has ever been. To play one of the great concertos in the concert hall must be like an actor having to do ‘To be or not to be’ before an audience which knows the text as well as he does.

  But I loathe Classic FM more and more for its cosiness, its safety and its wholehearted endorsement of the post-Thatcher world, with medical insurance and Saga holidays rammed down your throat between every item. Nor does the music get much respect; I’m frequently outraged when they play without acknowledgement or apology a sliced-up version of Beethoven’s Ninth, filleted of all but the most tuneful bits. It’s like a Reader’s Digest condensation of the classics, defined on Monty Python once as ‘Great Books got down to Pure’.

  The only gramophone I had access to as a child was my grandma’s – a red Rexene-covered wind-up job with metal needles, almost no amplification and few records to go with it. These included such oddities as ‘Ain’t it Grand to be Bloomin’ Well Dead’ (a possible signature tune for Kafka if not for Philip Larkin) and one of the chart-toppers of the time, ‘Oh I lift up my finger and I say “Tweet tweet, Hush hush, Now now, Come come”’.

  This somewhat sparse musical diet was supplemented from Hustwitt’s Music shop up Tong Road, where there was an oddities box in which I found a 78 of Chopin’s Polonaise in A, heard first in the film A Song to Remember with Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand, and the never-to-be-forgotten scene when during an energetic sforzando the consumptive Chopin’s blood spatters on the keys.

  I also bought a record of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, doubly unfinished in this case as I got only one record out of a set of three so it wasn’t until years later I found out how it officially didn’t finish. I played it so often then, though, that I’ve never cared for it since.

  17 February. Catch part of BBC2’s celebration of French cinema and note how much more nostalgic and redolent of the past are these French clips than those from British films of a similar period: Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first French film I ever saw and which we were taken from school to see at the Tower in Upper Briggate in Leeds. Then when I was on the Russian course during National Service at Cambridge we used to see French films at the Arts cinema – Une Partie de Campagne, Le Blé en Herbe, films which were so much part of one’s life then as to be almost commentaries on it. Perhaps their vividness now has to do with the fact that they combined reading (via the subtitles) with seeing, thus reinforcing the memory.

  In an interview before reading Doctor Dolittle on Radio 4 last year I mentioned how mysterious a character I find the Cats’ Meat Man, never having come across such a character as a child. Was the meat from cats, I wondered then, or for cats? I’d heard of dog meat but never cat meat. Since when I’ve had several letters telling me about real-life characters who used to sell such meat, generally on long skewers which were sometimes just put through the letter box, one telling me how, as a child, finding this forerunner of the kebab on the doormat she had scoffed the lot. I don’t think there were such itinerant characters in Leeds, possibly because it wasn’t affluent enough or because this was during the war when cats had to pull in their belts along with everyone else.

  2 March, Venice. Fur much in evidence in Venice, where they plainly have no truck with animal rights, old ladies in their minks queuing along with everyone else to get on the vaporetto. One reason Venice feels like a rea
l democracy is the absence of private transport. It’s true there are taxis, but it’s much harder to get down into a speedboat than to walk onto a water bus and as a result taxis are avoided by many of those rich enough to use them. Rich and poor in Venice rub shoulders with each other much more than we do and the city feels better for it.

  A nice carrier bag from the Correr, red with yellow handles and on the front the signature of Leonardo da Vinci. There is a sticker inside saying ‘Used by permission of Corbis Corporation and Bill Gates’, to whom I suppose Leonardo, or his signature at least, now belongs.

  Note the number of retired couples among the visitors, retirement more obvious in the British and the Americans than with the French, say (and where the Italians are concerned, utterly invisible).

  In the basilica all the seats are now roped off so that one can’t sit down and take it in (let alone pray) but just has to troop round, go with the flow, I suppose. Less magical now than once it seemed, the gold tawdry, the woodwork dusty, only the floors retaining their unfailing appeal. Nor is one any longer allowed along the marble-balustraded upstairs corridors that took you above the nave and much nearer to the mosaics. It’s still possible, though, at this time of year, to find the piazza virtually empty at eleven in the evening, the floodlighting of the basilica not at all harshly done, so that St Mark’s emerges from the gloom and seems to glow. And yet one gets a sense of the building sitting there like a spider, luring people in.

  3 March, Venice. The Correr is an ideal museum, with just the right number of paintings, many of them superb, particularly the man in the red hat which I’d always thought by Carpaccio, but isn’t now, and also the Portrait of a Young Man by Baldassare Estense. I don’t care for Cosimo Tura, whom I usually find a sinister painter, the flesh and aspect of the living not much different from that of the dead; still I like his funny little Pietà with the Virgin looking at the wounds in Christ’s hands as if he’s making a bit of a fuss about nothing, while above them, in what I suppose is an apple tree and cocooned in a huge spider’s web, is a tiny-headed devil. I’m puzzled by one painting of the Marriage at Cana where, hanging from the beams above the feast, are many rings with what seem to be labels fluttering from them. I ask the attendant, who comes over, looks at it glumly, shrugs and says: ‘Non so.’ It’s Madge H. who suggests, probably rightly, that the labels are flypapers.

  10 March. I read the Sunday papers first thing, otherwise they hang about all day like an unmade bed. I find less and less in them to read and feel like somebody stood against a wall while a parade goes by. An article in The Garden, the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society: ‘Making Sense of the Celandine’.

  11 March. Depressed by an item glimpsed on TV last night revealing that Railtrack, to save itself money (and the problems of ‘leaves on the line’), has sent in squads to cut down the woodland that grows along railway lines, a copse in Blackheath for instance sawn off level with the ground. Some of the squads for obvious reasons have begun their operations at four in the morning with any appeal to planning regulations of no avail as Railtrack claim public safety as a justification. If it happened to a wood that I was fond of I’d be inclined to find out the address of the local Railtrack manager, take along a chainsaw and do the same to his precious plot.

  30 March. To Petersfield on a cold, blue day, the traffic thick over Hammersmith Bridge, where crowds are watching the crews practising for the Boat Race. Go via Midhurst to look at the Camoys tombs in St George’s Church, Trotton. Lord Camoys was a veteran of Agincourt, where he commanded the left wing; he married Hotspur’s widow and both of them are buried in a massive and inconveniently placed tomb at the east end of the centre aisle, smack in front of the altar. There’s another much plainer tomb c.1478 on the north wall, carved with a symmetrically ruched frieze of draperies round the rim which seems very sophisticated for a village church, and more Italian than English.

  Fragments of wall-paintings include one of Clothing the Naked, in which a man is taking off or putting on a shirt in a crude version of the man in Piero’s Baptism in the National Gallery. Nosing about I see leaned up against the back wall near the vestry a dusty reproduction of Botticelli’s Mother and Child from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It’s shielding a hole in the plaster and has an old label stuck on it: ‘From Professor Joad. BBC.’

  11 April, Wandsworth. What strikes you about a prison is not that it’s unlike any other place you’ve ever been in, but that it’s quite like all sorts of places you use quite regularly. It’s not unlike a hospital, for instance, or a state school, a big post office or even one of the new universities. Here are the same harassed but well-meaning staff, short-handed, crippled by lack of funds, struggling to make the institution work despite all the curbs and cuts imposed by a penurious and ill-disposed government.

  After umpteen TV series the look of the place is quite familiar too, though not as lofty as the prison in Porridge, and cosier altogether than the prisons in movies. But then this is the wing where most of the sex offenders are, or the prisoners who are likely to be attacked. Many of them are quite old, or seem so anyway; maybe they’re just in their fifties. I look at them, bald, stooped, one of them only half there, and wonder what it is they’ve done, wishing that they carried a notice of their crime on their chests so that one could place them in some sort of spectrum, fit the face to the offence and so somehow make sense of it.

  There’s no particular smell but this wing is said to be the cleanest, with no slopping out, the remand wing the worst because there the inmates are certain they are going to get off so treat the place like a pigsty. Decent bearded art-school teachers is what one or two of them look like but whether these are prisoners or civilian staff I can’t tell. Two gay men take me round the well-stocked library, dressers they could be on a film set or assistants in a provincial outfitters, opera buffs probably. There are two-tone walls, a century of paint over the bricks and lots of studded doors – cottage doors almost. Some dinky warders, in short-sleeved shirts, dark ties and epaulettes, not quite giving you the wink but certainly a cheeky stare.

  Read and then answer questions though without feeling I do much good or do anything more than pass the time. I note, though, my presumptions, made out of sheer politeness rather than liberal prejudice, that most of my audience have been wrongly imprisoned and that I’m anxious not to be thought personally responsible for this.

  26 April. To Holland for the Vermeer exhibition. Travel to Delft separately from the rest of the group, who make up a coach party. R. hopes that this expedition, which includes prominent bankers, lawyers and industrialists, all benefactors of the National Gallery, will nevertheless be overtaken by the ethos of rather different English coach parties abroad, chanting ‘’ere we go!’ ere we go! Ver-meer! Ver-meer!’ at the startled burghers of The Hague, while elderly connoisseurs moon out of the coach windows. One understands this did not happen.

  With much of his life a mystery and the content of his paintings so simple and accessible, one reason for the popularity of Vermeer is that he eludes the art historians. With Vermeer expert knowledge doesn’t take you far. There may be symbolic significance in a discarded broom, say, or an unemptied laundry basket, but that is not the point of the painting. The paintings are about women and about loving women, as he must surely have done; most of the men in differing degrees ninnies. Miracles of light, the paintings are also miracles of space as, for instance, The Milkmaid, where the space behind the stream of milk coming from the jug is almost palpable. I have a sense of vertigo, though, in the presence of great paintings, as when standing on a cliff and feeling oneself pulled to the edge. ‘If I were to put my fist through this painting,’ I think, ‘things would be irrevocably changed and my whole life be seen as leading up to this act.’

  The rooms adjoining the Vermeer exhibition contain part of the Mauritshuis’s permanent collection, and passing from the presence of these few simple, utterly unassuming pictures into a room containing at least half a dozen R
embrandts, including The Anatomy Lesson, it’s startling to find how clamorous these other masterpieces now seem to be. Though there is often something going on in the Vermeer paintings (a woman reading a love letter, or writing one, or just admiring herself in the glass), the inner peace of the pictures and the unassertiveness of the sitters, nearly all of them women, are so simple and direct that even two of Rembrandt’s most famous self-portraits, one at either end of his life, seem almost coarse by comparison. I’m sure it’s the tranquillity of the Vermeers rather than its small size, that makes it an untiring exhibition to see. And how small some of the pictures turn out to be, some of them scarcely larger than the postcards on sale in the museum shop.

  27 April, Delft. A tangle of bicycles dredged up from the canal. Grey with mould and mud and with bright patches of rust, they are dumped on the quay where, surrounded by chic galleries and art establishments, one isn’t certain that bicycles is all they are. Is this art?

  The Dutch in the seventeenth century were famed for their neat houses and the orderliness of their lives, qualities celebrated not so much in Vermeer as in the paintings of his contemporaries, particularly de Hooch, which form a companion exhibition at Delft to the Vermeer show at The Hague. Though they’re as bad at drink as we are (the carriage from Rotterdam to Brussels dominated by a group singing and shouting), and though they’re as prone to graffiti, the Dutch are still noticeably neat in other aspects of their lives, as in the acres of carefully cultivated allotments which lie along the railway. The plots are quite modest, but all seem to come with a hut that is less of a garden shed than a summerhouse and outside which, this warm Friday afternoon, oldish couples in skimpy bathing costumes are taking the sun and one old man naked except for a G-string. I imagine the owners of these plots and pavilions live in the high flats nearby, though such a tempting display of civility and order would not long survive proximity to similar flats in England.