Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Apropos the cathedral (and French churches in general): I never understand why they are so dull. There are generally no monuments, no ancient clutter, just sickly nineteenth-century statuary, virulent stained glass and bits of modish ecumenicalism. Why there is no evidence of society in the shape of tombstones, plaques and inscriptions no one seems satisfactorily to explain. I suppose it’s the Revolution, but how was it so comprehensive as to leave not even a paving stone to bear witness to the society it displaced?

  31 August. Drive by back roads to Leeds, avoiding the Bank Holiday traffic and stopping en route to look at a church at Broughton near Skipton. The vicar comes over to open the door, a bit dishevelled as he’s just back from a car-boot sale to raise funds to restore the bells so that they can ring in the millennium. At first sight it’s quite a plain church, though with some good fourteenth- and fifteenth-century woodwork round the family pew of the Tempests, the local gentry who were (and are) Catholic. This helps to explain a tomb cover propped against the wall which is a communal gravestone for those who died in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern rebellion against the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1537. Mutilated around the same time are two effigies of the Virgin and Child, the head of the Virgin knocked off one, the head of the Child knocked off the other and both found buried outside the north wall sometime in the nineteenth century.

  The guidebook implies that burying the statues was a further stage in the iconoclasm which knocked the heads off, but it might equally well have been done out of reverence and to preserve what was left, this neatly exemplifying one of the current controversies in sixteenth-century historiography: the degree of persistence of Catholic belief after the break with Rome.

  A leaflet explains how the red sandstone from the tower came from the foundations of the Roman fort in nearby Elslack, some of the stones still blackened from when the Scots attacked the church after Bannockburn in 1314. Near the gate of the churchyard is the tomb of Enoch Hall, who was one of the escorts accompanying Napoleon to St Helena and who stayed there ten years before coming home to Broughton to be thirty years the local schoolmaster.

  We sit outside listening to the wind streaming through a huge copper beech and talk about this ordinary enough church which has been bound up with great events in the nation’s history: a conventional thought, though one which would have excited me when I was fifteen and first took to visiting churches and which excites me still, fifty years later, when, thanks to Rupert, I’ve taken to visiting them again.

  Then over the deserted moors and down into Keighley, an empty Leeds and the train to King’s Cross.

  10 September. Watch some of a programme about Dennis Potter, but the assumptions it makes about the relationship between art and life are so naïve and wide-eyed and scarcely above the tabloid level that I don’t persist. It takes Potter at his own self-valuation (always high) when there was a good deal of indifferent stuff which was skated over. One of his best plays, Where Adam Stood, an adaptation of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, is not mentioned, as it seldom is. The programme also interviews some of Potter’s heroines, and once the actors start talking about what they see as the significance of the words they’re required to speak there’s no telling what nonsense comes out, some of it very solemn.

  13 September. Wake early on Sunday morning and short of something to read find a copy of the Torrington Diaries: Tours through England 1781–94 of Hon. John Byng, and this passage:

  Oh that a critical tourist had minutely described, before the Civil War, the state of the castles, and of the religious remains and of the mode of living of the nobility and gentry, e’er the former were dismantled, the monuments of religion demolish’d; and that the entrance of folly, by high roads, and a general society, had introduced one universal set of manners, of luxury and expence.

  There are echoes of Aubrey here but also, in the comments on roads and ‘a general society’, of almost anybody writing about the state of England any time in the last forty years; one just needs to substitute ‘TV’ for ‘a general society’ and it’s a contemporary cliché.

  30 September. Finish reading The Guest from the Future by György Dalos, an account of Isaiah Berlin’s visit to Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in November 1945 and its disastrous repercussions on Akhmatova’s career, or, at any rate, on her relations with the authorities. Neither the poet nor the philosopher comes out of it particularly well, though right at the start I have a problem with Akhmatova, who is universally acknowledged as a great poet but whose poetry, of which snatches are printed here, seems in translation commonplace and banal. This is thanks, no doubt, to the shortcomings of the translation, as I remember feeling much the same about Pushkin when I was in the army on the Russian course, my rudimentary Russian never sufficient for me to appreciate him in the original. So one has to take the greatness of the poetry on trust, which is what Akhmatova does herself, her conviction of her own greatness another stumbling block. Indeed both she and Berlin take for granted their role at the centre of history, which again is unappealing. What they both lack, Akhmatova in particular, is a touch of Kafka.

  Had I known about this meeting twenty years ago I might have thought of making it a companion piece (or a pendant, as they say in art history) for An Englishman Abroad, an account of another Moscow visit, though the Berlin–Akhmatova encounter furnishes fewer jokes other than the comic (but portentous) appearance in the courtyard of Akhmatova’s apartment house of the drunken Randolph Churchill.

  Run into David Storey in M&S. Never in high spirits, he always cheers me up. Today he is trailing round the store a couple whom he has spotted shoplifting. He often does this apparently, I suppose because he is a novelist, and says the shoplifters’ technique is always the same. Those intending to pinch go into the store, find the security guard and ask the whereabouts of, say, soup or sandwiches. The guard shows them and then, since they have established themselves as bona fide customers, takes no further notice of them. David S. says he has never reported anyone, though, like me, he’s tempted to do so when they shoplift so blatantly as to insult the intelligence of anybody who might be watching.

  6 October. I have been reading, courtesy of Keith Thomas, Bare Ruined Choirs, Dom David Knowles’s account of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Four hundred and fifty years after the event I find myself actively depressed by the destruction and vandalism it involved, so when R. says to me this morning, ‘You seem a bit low,’ it’s not because my mind has been on Kosovo but on how the King’s Commissioners even grubbed up the floor tiles at Fountains in 1538 in order to sell them off in the chapterhouse as architectural salvage. And like Randolph Churchill reading the Bible and saying, ‘God, isn’t God a shit!’ so have I never quite taken in the full horror of Henry VIII (whom, typically, the English just think of as a joke).

  Knowles, of course, is a Catholic historian but he’s hardly propagandist, not bothering to bring out some ironies I would have found it hard to resist. Latimer, for instance, one of the Oxford martyrs burned by Mary, was himself present and preached at the much more savage burning of a friar, John Forest, in 1538. I had always thought both Ridley and Latimer saintly figures but Latimer seems to have been pretty coarse-grained and a clown and was lucky to have friends who made sure he had a quicker end than he gave Friar Forest. Conversely there is Thomas More, venerated as a saint but himself a burner and harrier of heretics, though that is not dwelled on by Knowles or, more lately, by P. Ackroyd. So it’s not inappropriate this morning that I sign an appeal by the National Secular Society on behalf of Peter Tatchell, charged under some ecclesiastical nonsense Act of 1860 with indecent behaviour (i.e. demonstrating) in Canterbury Cathedral.

  It occurs to me that there is something rollicking about many Protestant divines in the sixteenth century and which comes from indulging in constant controversy. It’s the same coarsening detectable nowadays when bishops are too much on television.

  19 October. Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke resurrected this lunchtime to comment on the
arrest of Pinochet. Both routinely acknowledge Pinochet’s crimes, although Clark A. is careful to refer to them as ‘alleged’, probably because he didn’t actually hear the screams of the tortured himself. Both have that built-in shrug characteristic of eighties Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake. They both talk contemptuously of gesture politics as if Lady Thatcher having tea with the General isn’t gesture politics too, the gesture in question being two fingers to humanity.

  25 October. At Broadcasting House I run into Richard Wortley, now a distinguished drama producer and who was at Oxford with me, where we both had digs in Summertown with a Mrs Munsey. Mrs Munsey had a middle-aged daughter, Dulcie, who was excessively shy and who bolted noisily into the back room if she ever heard one coming. There was also a large old cat which used to crap in the bath. In the way of things when one is young, none of this seemed at all strange to me.

  Mrs Munsey was a good soul, every morning providing a huge cooked breakfast brought up on a tray by Dulcie and laid reverently outside the bedroom door. All I want in a morning is a cup of tea and a bit of toast, but perhaps sensing that this huge breakfast was a source of pride to Mrs Munsey I never had the heart to point this out, leaving me with the daily problem of disposing of a fried egg, two rashers of bacon, baked beans and a slice of fried bread. I eventually evolved a routine whereby I parcelled the lot up in yesterday’s Times (stolen from the JCR), which I deposited in the used-ticket receptacle at the bus stop in Banbury Road. So skilled did I become at this daily deposition that I could punt the parcel in as I cycled by without even slowing down, and I can see myself doing this the hot Whitsuntide morning at the start of Final Schools in 1957 (when such a breakfast was particularly unwelcome), never thinking that I would remember this silly moment all my life.

  1 November. Lord Tebbit writes to the Times saying that homosexuals should be banned from sensitive cabinet posts lest they be in a position to do each other favours. This is taken to be just an eccentricity on the part of the noble lord, though exactly the same argument used to be advanced, and with about as much substance, against Jews. Tebbit, of course, has always gone out of his way to be unsympathetic, the single moment he achieved pathos when he was being dug out of the wreckage of the bombed Brighton hotel in his pyjamas and was weakly trying to shield his balls from the waiting cameras.

  By chance I am reading French and Germans, Germans and French, Richard Cobb’s book on France under occupation in the First and Second World Wars, and, on the same day as Tebbit’s letter, come across this: ‘Perhaps homosexuals will always welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes or misfortunes as an opportunity to move in and secure the best jobs.’ Cobb doesn’t offer much evidence for this unexpected statement other than the fondness of the French Right for youth organisations with bare knees. Generally a superb historian (and very readable), Cobb is sometimes a little too pleased with himself for not making moral judgements – torturing for the Milice, for instance, and selling nylons on the black market just different points on the same scale. It’s the reluctance to condemn which makes his assertion of gay opportunism seem so startling. It’s not a subject on which there can be a sensible or a productive argument, but it would be just as true to say that in a crisis homosexuals would welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes in order to put themselves in positions of great personal danger, and that the late Bunny Rogers, who used the opportunity of a fierce German bombardment to touch up his eyeliner, is just as typical as any knee-fancying collaborator.

  6 November. Some Essex police officers convicted of ill-treating (and in one case killing) police dogs. They are said to be likely to lose their jobs, which makes a nice change. Had it been blacks they had been ill-treating (or indeed killing) they would be returned to duty as a matter of course.

  17 November. I’m looking forward to a quiet morning’s work when out of the blue [sic] a letter comes from Oxford offering an honorary degree. This distinction is what Larkin called ‘the big one’ and when he got his letter he uncharacteristically bounded up the stairs to tell Monica Jones the good news. I sit looking at mine and wondering about it for most of the morning, wishing I could just say ‘Delighted’ and have done with it. But ever since the establishment of the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Language and Communication I’ve felt disaffected with the University. I’m aware of the arguments about bad money being put to good uses but I still think that Murdoch’s is not a name with which Oxford should have associated itself. So, eventually, I write back saying no and explaining why.

  Of course I am aware that writing (and publishing) this may be sneered at as showing off, and that if one does turn something down it’s proper to keep quiet about it. But this refusal isn’t for my own private moral satisfaction: Murdoch is a bully and should be stood up to publicly and so, however puny the gesture, it needs to be in the open.

  One disappointment about the proposal is that it comes on ordinary paper. My first contact with Oxford took place nearly fifty years ago when, as a schoolboy, I sent off for the prospectuses of the scholarships and exhibitions given by the various groups of colleges. These were printed on quarto sheets of thick rough-edged paper, rag paper perhaps it was, the texture so fleecy and absorbent it was practically blotting paper. Peppered with phrases I had never come across like ‘viva voce’, ‘pro hac vice’ and ‘Founder’s kin’, these sheets I took as evidence of the grandeur and antiquity of the institution I was hoping to enter; one could imagine them peeled off the stone and hung up to dry. I wonder this morning when such prospectuses fell into disuse and the University’s correspondence ceased to be conducted in such an antique mode. Certainly today’s letter, apart from its contents, is just like any other.

  I wish I could say that this refusal leaves me with a warm feeling of having done the right thing, but not a bit of it. I end up, as so often when I have tried to get it right, feeling I’ve slightly made a fool of myself, so that I wonder whether after more momentous refusals martyrs ever went to their deaths not in the strong confidence of virtue but just feeling that they had somehow muffed it.

  7 December, Venice. The size of the place apart, there’s not much difference between landing at Venice and at JFK. There’s the same grey lagoon with industry on the horizon, the same sparsely inhabited islands of cold brown grass with channels in between and, once you’re out, the same thrill to be had in both places from the first glimpse of the towers of the city.

  It’s always said that one should arrive in Venice by boat, which, if you come by air, you generally do. But I think rail is best. The first time I came was by train and at night and, not knowing what to expect, was amazed to find that the canals weren’t sequestered in a quarter of their own but were part of the city itself and that, with the water lapping the steps, Venice began right outside the station. And that still astonishes.

  8 December, Venice. I used to feel badly that I didn’t care for the inside of St Mark’s (tatty, no vistas and too much gold) but once written off or regarded as a collection of superior bric-à-brac it’s full of separate pleasures, particularly the floor, though what takes my eye this morning is an intricate little stretch of Gothic arcading in brown and white marble on the right of the steps behind the lectern. I would like to parcel it up and take it home, just as, like so much else in the church, it was presumably parcelled up and brought home here by the Venetians, who plundered it in the first place.

  We climb the steps to the outside loggia, empty this cold bright morning. The horses overlooking the Piazza are now replicas, the Greek or Roman originals these days stabled in a room behind. Here they can be seen face on and in close-up as they can seldom have been seen before in their long history. It is as if they are in conversation with each other and, at first glance, it seems from their expressions that two are clearly female, two male. But move round them and the genders shift, so that each animal can be seen to partake of both. The patina is a sumptuous blend of green and gold, the remnants
of the harness still hiding the joints in the casting. But they are not much visited now, or not on this particular morning anyway, though they must be the most extraordinary and certainly the most appealing sculptures in Venice.

  9 December, Venice. The Scuola San Giorgio behind the Riva degli Schiavoni is never easy to locate so when we’ve managed to track it down it’s a keener disappointment to find it (and its collection of Carpaccios) closed. A handwritten note on the door promises that it will be open on Wednesday at ten, but today is Wednesday and it’s after eleven and there’s no sign of life, just a handful of disconsolate Carpaccio-lovers hanging about on the Calle Furlani.

  I first came across these Carpaccios by accident late one Saturday afternoon in 1970, a couple of hours before my train left. The caretaker was about to lock up and he waited while I put in my 200-lire coin to turn on the light in what seemed on that hurried visit like a dark parish room which just happened to house these extraordinary pictures.

  Being a particularly human painter with quite a limited output, Carpaccio is an artist, unlike Titian, say, or Veronese, who has fans. His grave, long-nosed elegantly turned-out young persons people a Venice that is still walkable-through today, though the picture here I would most have liked to see again isn’t of Venice at all but of the monks thrown into a panic by the arrival of St Jerome’s lion.

  10 December, Venice. Walking back to the Accademia from the Rialto, we come through the Campo Santa Margherita, a long, irregular-shaped space surrounded mostly by two-storey houses. J. G. Links’s Venice for Pleasure directs us to what is reputedly the oldest house in Venice, which, except for a marble well-head built into a garden wall, isn’t very interesting. But coming out again into the Campo I realise that this was where we lodged when I first came to Venice in the summer of 1957. I was with Russell Harty and two other undergraduates from my college and we had digs in one of these little low houses. In those days I only needed to shave once or twice a week, the process always painful and never achieved without a cut or two. Shaving one morning, I had an accident and was mystified as to what to do. None of us spoke Italian but Russell, always the man of the world, went out into the Campo and bought a large bunch of flowers which he presented to the beaming but baffled landlady while I tried to explain (the phrase not occurring in any of the phrase books) that I had dropped my styptic pencil down the plughole.