Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  But I was an odd unfinished boy and came to many things backwards. At seventeen I knew all about the final act of Der Rosenkavalier where the Marschallin (sung in this instance by Sylvia Fisher) renounces her love for the young Octavian and graciously gives way to Sophie. I knew already that my lot in life would be cast with the General’s wife, renunciation the rule: it was already my story. But the first act which opens in the morning with Octavian and the Marschallin in her bedroom was lost on me. It never occurred to me what Octavian might have been doing there or that he had stopped the night: I just thought he’d popped round for breakfast.

  22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is now) from which it later transferred to London. I must have seen it in my first vacation from Oxford in January 1955 and in memory had put it somewhere north of Oxford Street, Portman Square possibly. In fact it was in Forbes House in Belgrave Square: not knowing London, I took Knightsbridge to be Oxford Street.

  Of the exhibition I recall only the two huge blackamoors at the foot of the staircase in the entrance and the music that was playing throughout (the notion of music in an exhibition then thought quite daring), though I remember, too, coveting some of the portraits and drawings of the Diaghilev troupe and finding the wild colour exciting. The exhibition had been sponsored by the Observer, at that time peopled with fabled beings like Kenneth Tynan, Edward Crankshaw and C. A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers at Schmidts in Charlotte Street or Romano Santi’s in Soho.

  No glamour today, I think as I stand at the lights at Wardour Street waiting to cycle up past the Queen’s, though maybe some young man down from Oxford for the weekend finds it as exciting now as I did then, but probably not. Too much going on in the world for that.

  31 January. Further to Richard Buckle (family from Warcop in Westmor-land): he served in the war in the Scots Guards, a brave if bumbling officer who took part in the gruelling campaign that preceded the capture of Monte Cassino. The rigours of the fighting were mitigated by a ready supply of willing Italian boys and on one occasion Buckle bounced into the mess announcing: ‘I’ve just slept with a cardinal’s nephew!’ Nor was he alone, a brother officer referring to his Military Cross as ‘my new brooch’.

  For all that, morale seems to have been impeccable so that I wonder what the senior army officer who has recently resigned because of the tolerance now legally extended to gays in the armed forces would make of this passage (referring to Buckle’s scavenging activities on behalf of the mess) taken from the official Scots Guards regimental history: ‘Eggs were not the sole commodity Lieutenant Buckle collected; a brother officer alleged that he “walked over to the German lines in daylight, rummaged at will, and usually returned with old curious books, abstruse and pornographic. One day he came back with a bridal dress which he wore for dinner in the evening.”’

  10 February. In one of the many pieces on Austria’s Mr Haider it’s said that he’s ‘wickedly funny’. As wickedly funny, presumably, as the SS guards whose honour and camaraderie he so much admires and who, when a prisoner escaped from a concentration camp and was recaptured, paraded him round the camp with a placard say: ‘Hurrah! I’m back.’

  12 February, Yorkshire. It’s a sad fact but it has to be acknowledged that whatever the sublimity and splendour of our great abbeys (we are visiting Rievaulx), to the droves of often apathetic visitors the monastic life only comes alive when contemplating its toilet arrangements. Not monks stumbling down the night stairs at three in the morning to sing the first office of the day; not the round of prayer and praise unceasing sent heavenwards from altar and cell: what fires the popular imagination is stuff from the reredorter plopping twenty feet into the drains. The soaring buttresses of the Chapel of the Nine Altars at Fountains count for nothing beside what remains of a fifteen-stall latrine.

  The past is also a place of punishment and were there relics of that they would also entertain, but disappointingly these are cells of the wrong sort. I once heard a child at Chatsworth ask where the torture chambers were.

  Another thought occurs apropos the monastic life: what is it about music that encourages the non-performance of its duties? Musicians are notoriously unreliable and think nothing of sending someone else along to take their place. And so it has always been, apparently. Quite early in their history the monks wearied of getting up in the middle of the night and were putting in deputies to sing the offices.

  13 February. The few archaeologists I have come across in life were shy, retiring and mildly eccentric. The archaeologists on television are loud, unprepossessing and extrovert – their loudness and overenthusiasm to be accounted for, I suppose, by the need to inject some immediacy into a process which, if properly undertaken, is slow, painstaking and, more often than not, dull. Sir Mortimer Wheeler probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at Coventry. His enthusiasm is anything but infectious and almost reconciles one to the bulldozer.

  And there’s always a spurious time limit, thus making it another version of Ground Force, where a transformation has to be wrought in the space of three days. The timetable of the Resurrection would just have suited the programme-makers; the angel appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden was probably Alan Titchmarsh.

  17 February. Though she complains about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the relish of a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. In her body stocking and headband she looks like a downtrodden Beatrice Lillie.

  19 February. ‘Police killing was lawful’ says inquest. What police killing isn’t? I can’t recall any that has been censured and none certainly without the policeman concerned being hurriedly retired on medical grounds. There’s an instance of that in the paper this morning, one of the officers criticised in the Lawrence inquiry off to pastures new with his pension and his hurt feelings. It’s also reported this morning that two of the presumably incriminating rifles used in the Bloody Sunday shootings and supposedly in the safe keeping of the Ministry of Defence have been ‘destroyed’. The mystery on mornings like this is how one can still persist in thinking that this is a decent society whichever government we live under.

  20 February, Yorkshire. Via Mallerstang to Kirkby Stephen and Barnard Castle, the tops still veined with snow and in the late afternoon bathed in a rich tawny light, the valleys in shadow with the hills still catching the sun. We have tea at Muker, where we look in the church, which is dull and scraped, how dull one can see from an old photograph of the way it was before it was done up in the nineteenth century – galleried with a three-decker pulpit and looking (as Whitby still does) like some dreamlike marine interior, crooked, bargeboarded, a church out of Alice or Kafka. Now it is subdued to a rigid ecclesiastical geometry – even the sixteenth-century font recarved and thus deprived of its original design.

  22 February. Noel Annan dies and gets good notices. He was one of the models for Duff, the best or certainly the most enjoyable character in The Old Country (1977). I always felt kindly towards him after learning that he would not stay in the same room as Paul Johnson.

  15 March. There is generally a beggar sitting outside the back door o
f M&S (and likely to be one at the front as well). I will sometimes give them my change as I’m coming out, though I’m irritated at being asked for money as I’m padlocking my bike before going in. Today I see the young man who’s begging furtively reading a newspaper and I find myself not giving him anything for that reason. It’s as if, having grudgingly accepted that begging is an occupation, I expect it to be carried out with a proper degree of diligence, and if someone is going to beg hal-fheartedly I am not willing to contribute.

  I wish I were one of those people who say ‘I never give to beggars’, as it must make life so much simpler. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. When I do it’ll often be out of superstition or wanting a bit of luck; when I don’t it’s because the beggar has a mean face, looks a crook or, as today, because he’s not doing a good job.

  21 March. Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia – though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself. As usual, I’m repelled by how ‘poetic’ it all is – their fierce quarrels and affections and all the fish, blood and bone of the verse. If there had been jokes, I suppose, the spell might have been broken.

  2 April. Remember the device advertised in comics sixty years or so ago called, I think, a Seebackroscope. It was a small funnel in black Bakelite containing a tilted mirror about the size of a sixpence; this device you were meant to hold to your eye or screw into your eye socket in order to check that you weren’t being followed. It was intended, presumably, as part of the equipment of the schoolboy sleuth (invisible ink similarly) and my brother even sent off for one. When it came we were swiftly disillusioned, the mirror never reflecting anything useful or even in focus. It was a definite stage in that process of discovering that things were never as good as advertisements cracked them up to be.

  7 April. After filming An Englishman Abroad Coral Browne gave the extravagant fur coat she wore in the film to the National Theatre, partly for sentimental reasons but partly, too, because times were changing and it was getting almost unwearable. Hoping to be able to use it in their current production, the West Yorkshire Playhouse wrote to the NT to see if they could borrow it, only to find it has been disposed of. This was not due to shortage of space (the NT has a large warehouse for costumes) but because it was natural fur and therefore disapproved of. I’d like to have heard Coral herself confronting whichever apparatchik it was that made this decision.

  26 April, New York. A middle-aged woman on the bus; a man sitting behind her opens his paper rather noisily and the woman turns round.

  WOMAN: I don’t like your paper in my hair.

  MAN: I don’t like your hair in my paper.

  At this point the bus passes an anti-Castro demonstration on behalf of Elian Gonzalez and an argument breaks out in which the whole bus takes part, the (quite sensible) conclusion being that there wouldn’t have been any fuss at all if it had been his mother claiming the boy not his father.

  7 May. I’m coming to the end of Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel supposedly based on his friend and associate Allan Bloom. I’m never entirely comfortable with (and never unaware of) Bellow’s style, which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose – designer prose it is, good, tasteful and self-evidently rich. In this book he writes about the rich too, Ravelstein suddenly a multi-millionaire from the success of his book (Bloom’s original book called The Closing of the American Mind). I’m perhaps behind the times here but I would have thought it unlikely for such a book (even when widely translated) to make its author a multi-millionaire (and certainly not if he or she is with Faber and Faber).

  Bellow has a good time detailing the evidence for and display of this newly gotten wealth – a suite at the Crillon in Paris, neckties from Hermès, shirts from Turnbull and Asser and a mink thrown on the bed. Though Chick, the teller of the tale, is in a more modest way of things, I’m not sure these evidences are volunteered with an eye to their vulgarity, and there is an Ian Fleming-like knowingness about him – the best place to stay, the shop to buy shirts, etc. Bellow’s presentation of vulgarity itself vulgar. But maybe I’m missing something here and it’s all part of Bellow’s take on Bloom.

  In the past it’s Bellow’s women I’ve found trying, generally heavy-breasted, a touch exotic and very much in control. The woman most closely scrutinised in Ravelstein is rather different. This is Vela, Chick’s Serbian first wife – slim, fastidious and over-discriminating. To viewers of Cheers or Frasier she will not be unfamiliar, as she sounds very like Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith, and Niles’s ex-wife, Maris.

  14 May. A group of women, care-workers or probation officers, white and black, are coming out of the resettlement centre on the corner of Arlington Road. ‘Hello!’ says one to a new arrival whom she kisses. ‘Hello, you motherfucker.’ This is said in such lazy affectionate tones, with ‘Hello, you old cunt’ I suppose once the equivalent but these days not permitted.

  20 May. Nick Hytner is in the second week of rehearsals of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending at the Donmar. We chat in Maggie Smith’s dressing-room in the interval of The Lady in the Van, Maggie saying that Tennessee Williams had a distinctive laugh and when she was playing Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic she kept hearing him chuckling in the stalls at wholly inappropriate moments, Hedda’s predicament seeming to him a huge joke. Similarly footage of thousands made homeless by typhoons could reduce him to helpless laughter.

  21 May. Gielgud dies. Asked to appear on various programmes, including the Nine O’Clock News, but say no. Reluctant to jump on the bandwagon, particularly when the bandwagon is a hearse. Some notes:

  Despite the umpteen programmes of reminiscence Gielgud did on both radio and television there was always more and I never felt he had been sufficiently debriefed. Anyone of any distinction at all should, on reaching a certain age, be taken away for a weekend at the state’s expense, formally interviewed and stripped of all their recollections.

  It was hard to tell if he liked someone, only that he didn’t dislike them. I think I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’

  In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed John G. in Home felt able to ask his help, saying that if he felt Lindsay was doing too much or had any other tips he was to tell him. Gielgud was appalled: ‘Oh no, no. I can’t do that. I shall be far too busy thinking about myself!’

  The last time I saw him was when we were filming an episode of the TV adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time. We were supposedly talking to one another but the speeches were separately recorded and intercut. His speech was haltingly delivered (but then so had mine been) and we did several takes. At the end he was given a round of applause by cast and crew, which I felt had not much to do with the quality of the speech itself so much as his having stayed alive long enough to deliver it. I imagine this kind of thing happened on most of the jobs he did (and he did a good many) in his nineties, and it was probably one of the things he hated about being old as there was inevitably some condescension to the applause. But he would just smile, do his funny snuffle and say that people were awfully kind.

  23 May. Watch the Omnibus tribute to John G. in which Oedipus and Forty Years On, which came after it, both go unmentioned, though much is made of Prospero’s Books, largely because he took his clothes off in it (not, incidentally, for the first time, as he did so in Bob Guccione’s Caligula; this too goes unmentioned, though more out of kindness, I would have thought). To some extent the omissions simply reflect the material that is available – the programme is archive-led. The BBC did have film of Forty Years On but lost it or wiped it or certainly made no effort to preserve it, though I would have thought that even in 1968 it was plain that any film or tape of Gielgud needed to be
set aside. Thirty years and more later, I doubt the situation has improved much and it remains a scandal that a public corporation should still have no foolproof archive system.*

  Letters from Gielgud were always unmistakable because of the one-in-five slope of his handwriting, the text sliding off the page. I always felt it was slightly unfriendly that I’d never been invited down to Buckinghamshire but then I reread a letter he wrote me after I’d reviewed one of his books and in it I find an open invitation to lunch any time, with telephone number, directions, and how to get from the station. So now, of course, I feel mortified.

  31 May. Carnations are an unregarded flower nowadays, on sale at garages and supermarkets, packaged and mass-produced and utterly without scent. A young man, a boy still really, going into Cambridge on Saturday afternoons and fancying himself a bit of a dandy, I used to buy a carnation for my buttonhole and it would scent the day – musty, rich and, as I thought, sophisticated. I buy them still in Yorkshire because the garden is over-supplied with lady’s mantle, Alchemilla mollis, and in early summer particularly the red carnations and the sharp fresh green of the alchemilla light up the room.

  13 June. At supper Alec Guinness tells a curious story apropos a BBC documentary on Anthony Eden last night. In pre-war days Eden used to see a good deal of the theatre director Glen Byam Shaw and when he was contemplating resignation over Abyssinia in 1938 he sought Byam Shaw’s advice. Byam Shaw said that his advice wasn’t worth having as he knew nothing of politics, but Eden said that wasn’t what he wanted. He needed to know how ordinary people would react: who would know that? Whereupon Byam Shaw took him round to Lord North Street, where the impresario Binkie Beaumont lived, and they put the question to him. ‘Resign,’ said Binkie promptly. And so he did. Binkie Beaumont as voice of the people sounds odd and indeed alarming and A.G. isn’t always a reliable witness or when he’s been told a story will often get it wrong. But this one is so peculiar as to seem not unlikely.