Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  ‘Yes, what is that?’ asks the other. ‘I don’t know what the rodeo position is.’

  I take this to be a conversation about sex and it’s only later that it occurs to me that if there’s a company called Rodeo the discussion may well have been about a financial position rather than a sexual one.

  16 April. Another day filming for the TV version of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, the location a crumbling neo-Gothic pile at Sonning with a vast view over the Thames Valley. Built by a Victorian millionaire MP, it was only briefly inhabited before it became what it was obviously suited for – namely, an asylum. It’s surrounded by various generations of outbuildings and Nissen huts but has a number of magnificent Gothic rooms, one of which is doing duty today as the House of Commons dining room.

  I play Sillery, now eighty, though I can’t say I adjust the acting to the age, a white wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the time our table is ‘background action’ to a foreground scene of some talk at another table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party.

  There is one problem with this and that is that the MPs are played by London extras, a notoriously difficult, uncooperative section of the profession and about as helpful as, I’m told, the chorus at Covent Garden. There are reasons for this unhelpfulness: though they’re not badly paid, the extras are seldom given much encouragement by directors and often treated as not much more than movable scenery. Certainly on this occasion they resent having to talk at all and I am left animatedly chatting to these four unresponsive young men, one expressionless, light-eyed actor making me feel a particular fool. John Standing and Jeremy Clyde look across sympathetically, knowing exactly what the situation is. Eventually I try and force some response by asking them who is the worst director they’ve ever worked with or the most unpleasant actor. This at least elicits something, including the interesting fact that very often leading actors (Tom Cruise is mentioned and, down the scale a bit, Jimmy Nail) require that the extras do not look at them while they are performing as they find it off-putting.

  One of the extras asks me what I am reading. I show him my book, some Alice Munro short stories, whereupon he says, ‘I’m reading this,’ and takes out a paperback of My Secret Life, the saga of the sexual adventures of a middle-class gentleman in Victorian London. It’s a book with more sex per page than almost any other, and not a book I had thought that one reads, at least in any sequential way, as it’s just one fuck after another, with no plot or progression, not even that short journey from the simple to the complex, the straight to the kinky, that characterises most pornography. The matter of fact way he brings out the book slightly surprises me but we talk about it and I explain, rather in the manner of the character I’m playing, the doubts that have been expressed about its authenticity and the light it throws on the street life and topography of Victorian London. But now they are ready to start the scene and I look again into the dead eyes of my impassive neighbour, who did three days last week on The Bill, and tell him that I will mention his name to the Italian Ambassador, with whom I will be dining tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.

  22 April. Filming again at Breakspears, the manor house near Harefield where last autumn we shot an earlier scene of Dance to the Music of Time. A Queen Anne house with later additions, it is now forlorn and neglected and has the CV of many too-large country houses, ending up as either a conference centre or an old people’s home. This has been a home but has since been used for umpteen films, relics of which are scattered through its cold, damp and listed rooms. Judy Egerton at the National Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Colonel Tarleton used to hang in the house. Colonel Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would figure in a dream exhibition, ‘Nice Legs’ (or rather ‘Nice Legs on Men’).

  1 May. Cast my vote early, the ballot paper longer than I ever remember and the party affiliations in very modest type. Though there are predictions of a Labour victory, even from the Tories, I am still nervous that factors like this will affect the result. Nor am I alone in my uncertainty. Go down to the National Gallery for a meeting of the Trustees, where Keith Thomas tells me that his polling booth in Oxford is next door to a pub in Merton Street and that, it being May morning, he had to fight his way in through crowds of drunken revellers, an ordeal he feels might deter tamer spirits. As a historian he speculates whether such considerations are too subtle to be picked up by the psephologists, among whom David Butler figures, as he has done in every election that I can ever recall.

  2 May, Chicago. Sitting on my bag at O’Hare waiting for the other to come round on the carousel, I become aware of a small white terrier sniffing round me. Thinking it might slyly cock its leg, I shoo it away, only to find it’s attached to a customs officer who politely asks me if I am carrying any prohibited merchandise. Having already declared on the form that I’m not, I suddenly remember two oranges I bought to eat on the plane and shamefacedly extract them. The customs officer examines them and says with no hint of reproach that he will have to confiscate the fruit but in return gives me a postcard with a picture of the dog and the compliments of the Beagle Brigade.

  At the hotel, hoping to find some post-election coverage, I switch on CNN and indeed catch Tony Blair arriving at Downing Street (though not John Major leaving it, which I would quite like to have seen). However, it’s the briefest flash and is put in perspective by the next item, a much more extensive piece about how Eddie Murphy invited a transvestite prostitute into his car with a view to putting him/her on the right road.

  3 May. To the Chicago Art Institute, a relatively modest museum but with superb paintings. It’s Saturday and very busy so I confine myself to rooms with benches and find myself sitting in front of a Cranach Crucifixion, notable because the Bad Thief is depicted as fat, a great beer gut sagging down from the Cross. Everyone – the Holy Family apart – is grotesque, while Christ himself is so idealised he belongs in a different painting, crucified against a blue and white sky that looks like a map of the world. His thighs are concealed by dancing draperies, and since I’m currently reading the new edition of Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, I scan the floating linens for the erection Steinberg often manages to detect, though not, I think, here. In the crowd at the foot of the Cross is a child who looks up as its father points at the figure of Christ. There is a father and son of similar age looking at the picture, but here it is the child who is pointing while the father explains what is happening. It is such a neat coincidence I note it diffidently – one might easily be thought to have invented it.

  The star of the gallery is Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, which has a perpetual crowd, while ignored is a beautiful (and rather classical) self-portrait by Van Gogh, whom I don’t always care for, and also the Degas Hat Shop, which was shown last year at the National Gallery.

  6 May, New York. To the Frick, last visited in 1963. It hasn’t changed much and can’t change much, I imagine, by the terms of its endowment. What has changed is the number of visitors: in 1963 I was the only person there; today it’s crowded out, a large proportion of the visitors for some reason French, including two droll-looking dikey, long-nosed ladies who might have run a bar or spirited away fallen flyers during the war. Few seats, or seats that can be sat on, so I end up in the picture gallery, where there are a couple of benches – and a couple of Rembrandts, too, and a brace of Turners, a Velázquez and a Vermeer, the arrangement, roughly, portrait–landscape–portrait–landscape all ro
und this dark, glass-ceilinged room. None of the paintings is shown to advantage, most looking dull and hung so close to each other as to make them difficult to take in on their own. Thus there’s a painting of Philip IV by Velázquez hung next to Vermeer’s Lady with Her Maid and a self-portrait of Rembrandt in old age; none is lit, they don’t complement one another, and together look like a trio of mud-coloured pictures.

  It would be more sensible to arrange the collection chronologically: the way it is now, one is made more conscious of the fact that Frick had no particular taste and no eye for pictures, except the expensive ones, and that Duveen and Berenson and whoever else bought for him had no notion of putting together a group of paintings which, besides being masterpieces, were also a pleasure to live with. These were merely to be gloated over, so that Rembrandt and Van Dyck here seem vulgar and even Vermeer only just survives.

  8 May, New York. The warders at the Metropolitan Museum are given no chairs and so are always on the move and, less mindful of the reverence due to art that pervades the National Gallery, hold lively conversations with the warder next door. ‘I mean,’ says one Hispanic warder, ‘this is a woman who changes her hair colour three times a week. Where are you with a dame like that? You don’t know.’

  The names Americans visit on their children never cease to amaze me. One of Diana Ross’s daughters labours under the name of Chudney.

  12 May, New York. Sit looking out of the bedroom window into the back garden of a house on the next block where an idyll develops. An elderly couple are unhurriedly setting the table for brunch, beginning with a huge jar of buttercups, perhaps bought in yesterday’s farmers’ market in Union Square. Then as she brings out a bottle of white wine, the table setting is invaded and upset by a large Abyssinian cat, which has to be lifted off. Now comes lunch itself, omelette and salad, which he has prepared. The couple clink wine glasses before drinking, and, each with a book, eat their brunch. They seem straight out of a short story in the (old) New Yorker. Now a squirrel appears, running some urgent, necessary errand and slightly lame in its left paw. The wildlife in this garden – sparrows, squirrels, a blackbird – all belongs to the third division, drab, tame, unexotic, the wildlife of my childhood. The vegetation is middle of the road too – ivy, sycamore, flowering currant and, of course, privet.

  13 May, New York. Dining at Balthazar, Keith’s new restaurant, we are across the aisle from Calvin Klein. I have half a mind to step across and say: ‘I don’t suppose you’d be interested, Mr Klein, and I don’t want to intrude on your privacy, but we’re both wearing your underpants.’ Calvin Klein is sitting with Susan Sontag. Actually he isn’t but if he were it would sum up what celebrity means in New York.

  22 May. Watch the second programme in the BBC2 series It’s Not Unusual, in which gays and lesbians, many in their seventies and eighties, recall their experiences in the Second World War and the lives they led. It’s both droll and inspiring; the unselfconscious way these eighty-year-olds recall experiences in the WAAF or as seamen on the Western Approaches makes one want to raise a cheer, not for gay liberation particularly, but for toleration and common sense, and also for courage.

  In tonight’s programme there’s an unlikely homosexual, a Doncaster miner, Fred Dyson; photographs show him as a merry-faced boy built like the proverbial brick shit-house, now recalled by the grey-haired monumental figure he has since become. Arrested for propositioning a policeman in a lavatory when he was in his early twenties, he was brought before a lady magistrate in Doncaster – this would be in the fifties – who asked him how long he had had ‘these feelings’.

  ‘All my life, Your Worship.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of trying for a cure?’

  ‘A cure? Listen, love. If there was a cure for this there’d be a queue miles long.’

  He was fined £50, and because he’d spoken up the case was extensively reported in the local papers. He went to work next day (shots of miners soaping each other in the pit-head baths) and talked to a union official about whether he could go on working there, or show his face in the social club. The union official offered to go to the social club with him and they were standing at the bar when one of his fellow miners came up and shook his hand and after that it was all right.

  31 May. A late birthday present from Mary-Kay Wilmers, a mug dated January 1889, commemorating the gift by Colonel North of the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey to the then borough of Leeds. There is a picture of Kirkstall and the inscription: ‘Built in 1147. Destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1539.’ This was what most people believed in Leeds when I was a boy, the notion that there could have been two iconoclasts both named Cromwell but a century apart too much of a coincidence for them to take. The idea that it was ‘built in 1147’ is equally silly.

  Run into Edmund White, who tells me what a revelation Beyond the Fringe was when he saw it in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: ‘Were you one of the original four?’

  I wonder whether there were any shy, retiring Apostles: ‘Were you one of the original twelve?’

  14 July. I wish there had been rollerblades in my time (though I would probably have thought them ‘not my kind of thing’). They seem the epitome of grace. Skateboarding, on the other hand, now looks clumsy and, however skilfully done, somehow desperate and without art.

  25 July. Dubbing the kind of characters I write about – denizens of retirement homes, ageing aunties, old people on their last legs – I choose suitably solid, old-fashioned names: Frank, Harold, Arthur, Nora, names of their period. Just. Because, of course, the personnel of these designated scrap heaps is altering. Ranged in vacant rows or stood immobile by a radiator, these shrunken creatures still answer to Hannah, Arthur, Peggy and Bill. But soon it will be Melanie and Karen, Dean and Sandra Louise. Somewhere I wrote some half-heard dialogue on the edge of a scene outside an old people’s home: as the middle-aged children of one deceased resident come away carrying his meagre possessions the matron is helping another old man out of the ambulance, saying: ‘Hello! Welcome! You’re our first Kevin!’

  12 August. The BBC are planning some elite channel, and have written to Anthony Jones, my literary agent, saying that since I was so distinguished and award-winning etc. they would be happy to pay £3,500 for my entire oeuvre. What happens if you’re not distinguished and award-winning, my agent wonders. Do you pay them?

  Read an article suggesting that Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel were largely done by another painter, Cavallini, now forgotten because, unlike Giotto, he was not singled out for mention by Vasari. I don’t believe this, if only because the name Cavallini lacks substance. He sounds like a juggler or a conjuror appearing on the halls: The Great Cavallini.

  14 August. From time to time, sitting in the garden chair outside my front door, I hear an audible thud and a fat, emerald-green caterpillar drops from one of the lime trees onto the car bonnet. Today one lands on the flags and is straight away assailed by a wasp which either bites or stings it so that the caterpillar wriggles in pain. I watch this process for a while, then stamp on the caterpillar to put it out of its misery. Later another caterpillar falls and is picked up by the resident blackbird, which pecks away at it. There is more flinching from the caterpillar but this I watch with no distaste at all, just glad that the blackbird has found a decent meal. The hen blackbird, which was rather stupid and which I thought the cats had got, is now about again.

  31 August. An American woman who witnessed the accident to Princess Diana is interviewed on television and says that she noticed that the air bag was ‘fully deployed’. An entirely correct usage, I’m sure, but who in England other than a technician would think to say it?

  2 September. Hysteria over the death of Princess Diana continues, people ‘from all walks of life’ queuing down the Mall, not merely to sign the book but to sit there writing for up to fifteen minutes at a time. Others, presumably, just write ‘Why?’, which suggests a certain cosmic awaren
ess besides having the merit of brevity.

  ‘What a treasured possession these books will be for her two sons,’ says the BBC commentator, which has echoes of Ernest Worthing and the Army Lists. It also summons up the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the thousands of tea chests in a dusty unvisited cellar. Apparently, similar volumes are to be opened all over the country and it will be possible to analyse regional differences in the degree of mourning.

  3 September. The order of service is published for the funeral, the music to be played, Albinoni, Pachelbel and Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’. It’s the apotheosis of Classic FM. The Dean: ‘And now from Elgar’s Enigma Variations “Nimrod”, which is on page two of your Order of Service and No. 17 in this week’s Classic Countdown.’ The poor Queen is to be forced to go mournabout. I suppose it is a revolution but with Rosa Luxemburg played by Sharon and Tracy.

  4 September. ‘God created a blonde angel and called her Diana.’ This is one of the cards on the flowers outside Kensington Palace that the BBC chooses to zoom in on. It purports to be from a child, though whether one is supposed to be touched by it or (as is my inclination) to throw up isn’t plain.

  HMQ to address the nation tomorrow. I’m only surprised Her Majesty hasn’t had to submit to a phone-in.

  5 September. HMQ gives an unconvincing broadcast: ‘unconvincing’ not because one doesn’t believe that her sentiments are genuine (as to that there’s no way of telling), but because she’s not a good actress, indeed not an actress at all. What she should have been directed to do is to throw in a few pauses and seem to be searching for her words; then the speech would have been hailed as moving and heartfelt. As it is she reels her message off, as she always does. That is the difference between Princess Diana and the Queen: one could act, the other can’t.

  I remember, regretfully now, one of HMQ’s lines in A Question of Attribution which, when we were looking for cuts, we took out: ‘I don’t like it when people clap me because there may come a time when they won’t. Besides I’m there. It’s like clapping Nelson’s Column.’