Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  which has the lines:

  … no sight or sound,

  No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

  Nothing to love or link with …

  2 November. The car gets a flat tyre, out of sheer boredom, I imagine, as it gets driven so seldom. I take it to Chalk Farm Tyres opposite the Roundhouse where a boy runs out, assesses the damage then jacks up the car while a bald Alfred Drayton-like man finds the split and decides it needs a new tyre. This is put on and it is all over and done with in ten minutes. I feel I want to ask them home so that they can take charge of my life.

  16 November. I am reading Paul Bailey’s Three Queer Lives, one of whom is Naomi Jacob. Eccentric though she was (and what Mam used to call ‘one of those men-women’), she did represent the attraction, the glamour and certainly the possibilities of escape, of the literary life. This was partly because she was Yorkshire-born (Ripon) and thus often in the local papers but she was also one of a breed of popular writers … others would be Godfrey Wynn, Beverley Nichols, Phyllis Bentley and even (though he would have scorned such company) J. B. Priestley … who impinged on our lives as more celebrated literary practitioners, Virginia Woolf, say, or Evelyn Waugh, never did.

  So absurd though Naomi Jacob was … and without ever having read a word that she wrote … I feel she made it easier for others starting off down the literary path and I wonder whether she was ever read by John Braine, who in his way was as absurd a figure as she was but equally talismanic.

  I imagine human beings have always seen faces in fires and foliage or in the play of sun and shadow. So, lying on my bed, I fancy I can see a girl’s face composed of the reflections of the bookshelf in the mirror. It’s not a naturalistic face and were it reproduced on paper or canvas would look almost abstract. So when with Cubism (is it?) painters start making faces out of awkward angular shapes it’s really only a setting down of what most people … an old lady looking into the fire, a child staring at a tree through the bedroom window … do as a matter of course and without thinking.

  So abstract art, to begin with, isn’t very abstract at all and as a figurative way of seeing is surely pretty general.

  30 November. More Larkin parallels, this time with an indifferent poem by Belloc: ‘The world’s a stage …’ – life as a play.

  The only part about it I enjoy

  Is what they call in English the Foyay.

  There will I stand apart awhile and toy

  With thought, and set my cigarette alight;

  And then – without returning to the play –

  On with my coat and out into the night.

  This mirrors Larkin’s own account of how when he was an undergraduate he went to see The Playboy of the Western World at the Oxford Playhouse. At the interval he asked himself whether he was enjoying it, decided he’d seldom had to listen to so much balls so had another drink and didn’t go back for the second half … a decision he found immensely liberating. Which is okay but hardly earns Belloc’s poem its place.

  9 December. Page 4 of today’s Observer is taken up with a large photograph of me and extensive coverage of the supposedly riveting news that I have writer’s block. Below is a list of other writers who have suffered from this dreadful affliction. On the opposite page is a picture of Osama Bin Laden (writer’s block not his problem). The piece stems from the Q and A session I did last week at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where on being asked what I was doing at the moment, I said I wasn’t doing anything very much, and that I was a bit stuck. But the phrase writer’s block was not used (I never do use it) and the tone of my reply was sceptical and ironic. This has passed the reporter by and she reports the exchange so that it appears I have gone to the Observer and wept on its caring shoulder.

  This is a technique perfected by the Mail but which (particularly in the week of David Astor’s death) ought not to disgrace the Observer. However, as R. says, who reads the papers?

  10 December. Well, lots of people seems to be the answer as I have had letters from Observer readers recommending various remedies for my sad situation and my supposed writer’s block: remedies psychological, remedies physical and indeed remedies herbal. Since I always acknowledge letters, though seldom pursue a correspondence, this has increased my workload considerably. One letter is actually from the Mail on Sunday wondering if I would consider being interviewed about ‘my problem’.

  15 December. Words only used at Christmas: Tidings. Abiding. Swaddling. Lo! Abhors.

  Carols are also full of titles for bad novels:

  This Happy Morning

  The Son of Earth

  The King of Angels

  A card from Victor Lewis-Smith with a sanctimonious picture of Jesus and printed underneath:

  Jesus loves everyone, except you, you cunt.

  This makes me laugh helplessly.

  Isabelle McN. is twelve and her end of term assignment is ‘The Most Outstanding Personality of the Twentieth Century’. She chooses Martin Luther King but having been writing for five minutes she switches to Joan Crawford.

  26 December. Nigel Hawthorne dies. A heart attack, though presumably related to the pancreatic cancer he’d had for the last eighteen months and which was discovered quite by chance in the course of another investigation entirely. Courteous, grand, a man of the world and superb at what he did, with his technique never so obvious as to become familiar as, say, Olivier’s did or Alec Guinness’s. No one could have played George III as well, even though his superb performance sometimes cast the play itself into the shade. He was a delight to watch, as I imagine a superb batsman is, touching the ball to the boundary with no effort at all; a dancer, little flicks and glances, the raising of an eyebrow, techniques honed, I imagine, in the umpteen small parts he played until middle age when Yes, Minister made him famous.

  He owed me something but I probably owed him more. George III would have been half the play it was without his performance, a performance that I was able to write around as I saw it evolving in rehearsal, thus benefiting both him and the play.

  27 December. Still ploughing through Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. It’s full of poets I’ve never heard of and rather than organising little trips to Larkin’s parents’ grave and any other spots the poet may have known or visited, the Larkin Society would do better putting together a companion to this particular Oxford book. It would tell you more about Larkin and about these out-of-the-way poets he discovered and would, I should think, commend itself to him far more than their brackish trips down memory lane.

  The poems he chose continue to chime in with poems of his own (which would also bear investigating), e.g. poems about horses or jockeys (nos. 240, 302), a country fair, the ‘Fair at Windgap’ (no. 293) as it might be his ‘Show Saturday’. And there are other prescient notes.

  The old couple in the brand new bungalow,

  Drugged with the milk of municipal kindness,

  Fumble their way to bed.

  This from ‘The Old Couple’ by F. Pratt Green, and a foreshadowing of the old age Larkin and Monica Jones were not to have.

  29 December. Snow in the night and when we stop for our sandwiches on the road to Garsdale Head, Dentdale is in immaculate relief with the Howgills ghostly beyond. They’re Christmas sandwiches (cold pheasant, apple sauce, Cumberland sauce and lettuce, followed by mince pies), then we go on down Mallerstang to Kirkby Stephen where we buy a curtain pole and two storage jars at Mrs Hill’s and then in another shop a couple of country elm chairs (‘Hepplewhite’ the label has it) which are only £65 and which we buy to use in the kitchen. Plain, bleached and nicely bowed, they could well be out of Kettle’s Yard, and really need a similarly spacious white-painted interior such as we don’t have.

  ‘No stopping J. K. Rowling,’ says this morning’s Independent.

  ‘No stopping Marcel Proust’ either, not that any paper said so at the time. But then he didn’t make any money.

  ‘No stopping J. K. Rowling coining it’ is what the Ind
ependent means.

  2002

  4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst:

  Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s’. When the bag company refused to replace them staffers at the Town Hall spent hours pasting little pieces of adhesive tape over every offending apostrophe. My contradictory husband, who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape.

  13 January. The canonisation of Dame Iris proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on Omnibus extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring.

  One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once shot it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s by, among other things, asking Dame Iris to recall which of her many books won the Booker Prize. This was The Sea, The Sea, the winner in 1978, a triumph the ailing author could not recall, but since the Booker Prize in 1978 was not the over-publicised proto-Oscars it tries to be today, this is hardly surprising. Still, that an artist’s state of mind should be assessed by his or her recollection of awards won adds a new terror to success. The test used to be recalling the name of the prime minister or counting backwards from 10 to 1. Now it’s whether you can remember winning the Evening Standard Award or something similar at BAFTA. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats.

  19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at Shere, a picturesque hamlet below Newlands Corner, where we’d sometimes go on walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura, though why he does this isn’t explained, or the workings of the device either, which must have mystified most people at the time. The notion of eavesdropping keeps coming up in Powell’s work until with Peeping Tom it virtually ended his career.

  Other oddities in AMOLAD are the naked goatherd playing the flute, an unlikely sight on the Norfolk sands, I would have thought, even in 1946, and a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that follow with a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the LRB.

  We are on a kind of stair. The world below

  Will never be regained; was never there

  Perhaps. And yet it seems

  We’ve climbed to where we are

  With diligence, as if told long ago

  How high the highest rung.

  23 January. To Sotheby’s, where I’m reminded of a lunch given for Alec Guinness in 1989 when I sat next to Lord Charteris, the Provost of Eton and previously the Queen’s Private Secretary. Talking of A Question of Attribution, then playing at the National, he remarked: ‘Of course, the question everybody asks is whether the Queen knew and whether Blunt knew the Queen knew. The truth of the matter is they both knew – but, of course, that’s not to be said.’

  At the time I remember thinking this was sensationally indiscreet (and it would certainly have made the newspapers). Now it’s tame stuff. But thinking about Charteris, who was a funny man, one realises that it’s much harder if you have a sense of humour not to be indiscreet; the temptation to hang discretion and make jokes or be witty is too great. Secrets are best kept by those with no sense of humour.

  2 February. A letter from a reader comparing her experiences of evacuation with mine. She was sent to Grantham and says that Alderman Roberts, Mrs Thatcher’s father, was thought to be in the black market and that Maggie used to hang out of her bedroom window and spit on the other children.

  12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these fifteen-year-old boys had been fifteen-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even more famous than those of Jonathan King, the Beatles’ say, or the Rolling Stones’, would the police have been quite so zealous in trawling for the supposed victims from a quarter of a century ago? King does himself no favours but I prefer his defiance and want of remorse to the odiously caring voice of the man who presents the programme. As it is, a succession of sad middle-aged men are encouraged to blame their failure in life on these ancient wanks, a service for which the state will now reward them far more munificently than King ever did.

  16 February. Man on a mobile opposite takes a piss by the wall, talking throughout. I wonder whether he tells the person he is talking to that he’s currently having a piss and, if it’s a woman, if this is some sort of come-on.

  28 February. Spike Milligan dies and the nation’s laughter-makers queue up to testify to what it was that made his talents unique, how irreplaceable is his inspired lunacy, and how they personally have benefited from his instructive anarchy. All of which is, I suppose, true, though comedians are never reluctant to provide such posthumous attestations of one another’s genius. It happened when Peter Cook died and with the same maudlin affection. ‘Dear Cooky’. ‘Dear Spike’. The necessary element of suffering, the cost always sought for in the deaths of comics, and which in Peter’s case came with the drink, is here supplied by mental illness (‘No less than 12 nervous breakdowns’, ‘the price he had to pay’).

  There is no doubt that Milligan was very funny and inspired, particularly in the Q5 TV programmes he did in the 1970s, though his verbal dexterities I found less engaging and with unfortunate effects on some of his disciples, e.g. John Lennon’s In His Own Write. The disciples were always the problem, The Goon Show was very funny, the people who liked it (and knew it by heart) less so.

  16 March. In the afternoon to the new British Galleries at the V&A, particularly to look at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the Catholic Herald and how, via a seventeenth-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, the cope eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed apparently by Torrigiano, though this is not said on the label nor is a link made with the bust of Henry VII, also by Torrigiano, in a neighbouring showcase. Even the most limited imagination would find this cope evocative, though; worn presumably at Henry VII’s funeral and possibly, too, at the coronation of Henry VIII, it then went with the young King to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Smuggled out to Flanders in the seventeenth century, whence it eventually came back to Stonyhurst, it must have been seen if not worn by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught there.

  Apropos Henry VII, what happened between 1485 and 1500? How did bold Harry Tudor of Bosworth Field turn into the crabbed penny-pinching accountant that is his usual representation?

  24 March. A film beginning with a man being shepherded through a darkened hall; glimpses of paintings, a shaft of light on a plaster ceiling, the gleam of arm
our but so dark (lines of light around the shutters) that it’s hard to see anyone’s face. A distant murmur of sound. Odd muttered directions. ‘Steady, a step here,’ the man steered round sheeted furniture and up uncarpeted stairs. Then the group comes to a stop. Someone knocks on the shutter and it is thrown open, light floods in, there is the sudden roar of the crowd. Charles I steps out onto the scaffold.

  30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical afterthought. In fact he came as the acknowledged star of the Oxford cabaret circuit, and right through the run of Beyond the Fringe remained the darling of the audience. Cheerful, extrovert and on his own musical ground very sure of himself, he only started to play up the melancholy and portray himself as a tortured clown, a line journalists are always happy to encourage, after he’d teamed up with Peter and subsequently gone into analysis or psychotherapy.

  Obviously Dudley did get sadder as he got older and coping with Peter’s drunkenness can have been no joke. But portraying himself as shy, put-upon and intimidated by Jonathan, Peter and to a lesser extent myself was a construction that came later. On and off the stage during Beyond the Fringe he was sunny, social and effortlessly successful. A sad clown he wasn’t.

  5 April. I persevere with Sebald but the contrivance of it, particularly his un-peopling of the landscape, never fails to irritate. ‘It was already afternoon, six in the evening when I reached the outskirts of Lowestoft. Not a living soul was about in the long street.’ In Southwold ‘everybody who had been out for an evening stroll was gone. I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre.’ Maybe East Anglia is like this (or more like it than West Yorkshire, say) but Sebald seems to stage-manage both the landscape and the weather to suit his (seldom cheerful) mood. Kafka has been invoked in this connection, but Kafka dealt with the world as he found it and didn’t dress it up (or down) to suit him.