Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Or perhaps not quite. In the early sixties I was in America for two years, during which time my parents took to reading the books I had left at home. This made me slightly apprehensive, though all it meant was that my father became an early and unlikely fan of Nancy Mitford and it was my mother who first took to reading Denton Welch’s journals. What she picked up on were his visits to junk and bric-à-brac shops, since this was an inclination she shared. When he was younger my father had been a bit of a carpenter and made toys, so when she gave it to him to read what caught his fancy was the cleaning and restoration of the doll’s house. What I had been apprehensive about, the sexual undertones, seemed wholly to pass them by, leaving it, ironically, to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint as the first book of mine to which my father took real exception.

  Scarcely reaching middle age, it’s hard to think that had he lived Denton Welch would now be in his eighties. To me he will always be that frail, curly-haired high-foreheaded young man who sits at the chequerboard table with the lustres and the candles in the frontispiece to the journals that I bought in 1952.

  His subject matter had a richness and a colour that links him with very unlike writers, such as Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell and Christopher Fry, all of whom were standing out against the drabness of their times. The nearest he had come to active service was in the battle against beige, so it was fitting that in June 1945 he should have had a picture in the Victory number of Vogue, ‘a rendering of a room in his cottage in Kent, where colour plays an important part’. He writes, ‘Do not think that brilliant colour is difficult to live with. It is always stimulating and refreshing; and change to a neutral-toned, colourless room would be exhausting, lowering and depressing.’

  There was never much danger of that in his life or in his art; he went out still full of colour, and more than fifty years later it is unfaded.

  England Gone: Philip Larkin

  Larkin was such a fastidious critic of his own work that anyone making a selection from his poems finds the job virtually done already. It’s true that since the publication of the Collected Poems in 1988 there turns out to be much more verse to choose from but, reviewing the poems I’ve selected (using and being very grateful for that volume), I find that I’ve chosen only a handful of poems that were not originally included in Larkin’s best-known volumes of verse, The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974).

  It may be, of course, that since these are the collections I know best familiarity has influenced my choice, but I think not. It was only with The Less Deceived that Larkin achieved his characteristic voice, that wry, lugubrious, thoroughly unheroic tone which can turn so unexpectedly tender and lyrical and which made him, apart from Betjeman perhaps, the best loved of contemporary English poets. There are echoes of this tone in the earlier poems, prefiguring phrases that one would like to single out and preserve, but Larkin as we have come to know him really dates from The Less Deceived.

  At least one theme of Larkin’s poetry, though, emerged before the style evolved with which he could express it and this is why the selection begins with ‘Traumerei’ (1946), which spells out Larkin’s fear of death, the selection virtually ending with ‘Aubade’, which (thirty years later) does much the same. Between those fearful brackets I have arranged the poems in order of publication, beginning with poems taken from XX Poems (1951) then The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, finally folding in, as the cooks say, a few of the poems written after 1974 and which were first printed in the Collected Poems.

  If Larkin does not require much selection nor does he need much introduction, his verse so lucid and explicit that his virtues as a poet require only the briefest tour. This, I’m sure, would be Larkin’s own wish. Back in 1980 The South Bank Show did a TV programme on Larkin which, surprisingly, had his blessing, though he would not himself appear. I was interviewed and persuaded to say why I liked his poetry. This was a mistake. ‘There’s an awful lot of Alan Bennett,’ he wrote to Anthony Thwaite, the letter as published kindly omitting what I’m sure were further strictures.

  Fifteen years dead Larkin is still a looming presence so I will try and be terse. He writes with clarity and a determined ordinariness that does not exclude (and often underpins) the lyrical. He is always accessible, his language compact, though occasionally arcane. Fond of compound adjectives – air-sharpened, rain-ceased, bone-riddled – he shares this with Hardy, with whom he invites comparison though his sentiments are less gawky, what they have most in common a deep, unshiftable despair.

  My perspective on Larkin is not the usual one in that I know his poetry chiefly from having had to read it in recitals and to record it on cassette. I understand little of metre or scansion or the structure of verse, but to read Larkin aloud is to become aware of his skill as a craftsman. The writing supports the reader but with some give: the verse feels sprung as a dance floor is sprung, with rhymes and half-rhymes turning up unexpected and unforeseen just when one needs them, stepping-stones across the poem. The rhymes are generally unobtrusive, widely separated and it sometimes takes three or four readings before one uncovers them.

  Larkin spent most of his working life at the University of Hull, where he was the librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library. Hull suited him and England suited him and he never wanted to leave either, though he wouldn’t have minded going to China, he said, if he could come back the same day.

  He was a poet of England, or of England at a certain time, because to list Larkin’s poetic locations is to realise now, less than two decades after his death, how diminished is the England he wrote about. It’s not just ‘The shadows, the meadows, the lanes/ The guildhalls, the carved choirs’ that have gone. They haven’t particularly, just changed their character under a deluge of visitors. What scarcely lasted his time was a much dingier world – churches, cemeteries, station hotels, digs, local trains, bikes, the seaside, parks, libraries. Larkin’s world is no longer ours. The unvisited church is now so unvisited it has mutated into a carpet warehouse or a furniture cave; the cemetery has been landscaped and incorporated into a heritage trail and the precinct (Larkin’s poetry largely pre-precinct) has swallowed the coach-party annexes and the banquet halls up yards. The fumes and certainly the furnace glare of Sheffield are no more, his awful pie would be quality controlled and if Whitsun remains it’s only on the Church calendar and provokes no rush to the altar; the ‘Spring Bank Holiday Weddings’ would not be quite the same.

  Only the moon, strong, unhindered, dashing through the clouds or thinned to an air-sharpened blade … only the moon persists in a world that, even in Hull, has changed, if not beyond recognition certainly beyond any poetic impulse Larkin had in his sad unwriting years to recognise it. This change is acknowledged, just, in his last notable poem, ‘Aubade’ (1977). Unpack the phrase ‘all the uncaring/Intricate, rented world’ and you have much of what has happened to England since his death – or his two deaths, the death of poetry and the death of the man. Typical, he might grumble, that someone in such dread of death should be made to go through it twice.

  Larkin’s gloom has to be faced and sometimes, I’ve come to think, faced down. It gets under the skin as Hardy’s never does. Though this may be because he’s our contemporary, it’s also that where melancholy is concerned Larkin is such a missionary. It’s not enough that he sees the world as he does; we must see it too and feel as depressed about it.

  ‘You’re trying to preserve something,’ he writes. ‘Not for yourself but for the people who haven’t seen it or heard it or experienced it.’ Or:

  People say I’m very negative and I suppose I am, but the impulse for producing a poem is never negative: the most negative poem in the world is a very positive thing to have done. The fact that a poem makes a reader want to lie down and die rather than get up and sock somebody is irrelevant.

  Of course, a poem sometimes does both and the person one wants to get up and sock is Larkin himself.

  Thus it is that whereas w
hen I first read him it was his sadness that appealed, these days the poems I like best are those from which his depression and disenchantment are most absent – ‘Church Going’, for instance, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Maiden Name’ and ‘The Explosion’ – none of them poems that can be said (perish the thought) to be cheerful: they would also include ‘MCMXIV’, which is not cheerful at all. But they are all poems in which the reader is not required to endorse or go along with what in some of the poems, ‘Aubade’, for instance, I now think of as a bullying (and, to my mind, specifically male) despair.

  My perspective on this is of someone who has had to stand on the stage and read the poems, when it becomes a predicament. Declaiming lines like ‘Life is first boredom then fear’ or ‘Courage is no good/It means not scaring others’, and sensing an audience nodding I feel I want to dissociate myself from the poem and even slip in a disclaimer (‘Just because I’m reading this doesn’t mean that I believe it’). There is, after all, more to courage than that.

  It would not be the same if Larkin himself were doing the reading, not that he ever (or very seldom) did, saying he didn’t care for poetry recitals because he didn’t fancy going round the country pretending to be himself. Yet anybody who does recite his poems has to some extent to pretend to be Larkin because if they’re not then they haven’t earned the right to preach the misery being Larkin seemed to involve.

  Maybe all I’m saying is that his poems shouldn’t be read aloud, at any rate in public. No great loss, he would have thought. Better read alone, under a lamp, hearing the noise of the wind.

  Though I said at the start that, beginning with ‘Traumerei’ and ending with ‘Aubade’, this selection is bracketed by Larkin’s fear of death, I have allowed one poem to escape those parentheses simply in order to finish on a relatively cheerful note. This is ‘The Trees’ and I’ve often thought that it makes a pair, a pendant as they say in art history, with Hardy’s ‘Proud Songsters’ – the trees, as it were, and the birds in the trees, both poems coming as close to optimism as either poet allows himself.

  I have read ‘The Trees’ often in recitals but once, when I was reading with Judi Dench, she was assigned the poem, the last line of which is:

  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

  I had read the poem umpteen times without sensing the obvious point that each ‘afresh’ should be differently inflected, which was how Judi read it. It was as if a bud was opening. I have never managed to read it like that myself but I’m sure that’s how it should be done. It’s unlikely, but it might even have pleased the poet.

  Staring out of the Window

  Writing about writing is a second best. For a writer the process is only of interest when he or she finds that they cannot do it (as today, 13 November 2001). If I could write … a play, a short story, anything … I would, writing about writing (or not writing) is just vamping till ready.

  A writer only feels he or she is a writer at the point of performance, the moment of writing. Do anything else, even related activities like research or background reading, and the claim seems fraudulent. A writer is only a writer when writing. The rest is marking time. And your published books and plays don’t count; they only prove that you were a writer yesterday but not today, not now.

  Some might think this is an over-literal view. An actor is still an actor when he is off the stage; a singer still a singer when he or she is not in full flow. But it is not the same. Put down the pen or abandon the keys and a writer is always on the brink of fraud.

  I have always been a late starter, and was as slow off the mark with writing as I was in other departments. Even when I was writing on a regular basis it was a long time before I dared to think of myself as a proper writer as distinct, I suppose, from someone who just wrote sketches. I was not to know then that writing sketches was not a bad way to begin since that was how Chekhov had started, as indeed had Harold Pinter.

  Since it was a revue, sketches were obviously the stuff of the first stage production I had to do with, Beyond the Fringe done first here in Edinburgh over forty years ago. I went on writing sketches, chiefly for television, and when in 1968 I put together the stage play Forty Years On that too was still a bit of a hybrid, a play certainly but which included sketches, to the extent that some critics thought I ought to make up my mind.

  But I never have and the stamp of my origins has stayed with me, and I still write in three-minute bursts so that beneath the most elevated stretch of dialogue or description lie buried the breeze blocks of revue.

  By the time I’d written Forty Years On I was already thirty-four and had ceased to find reassuring Virginia Woolf ’s remark that one should never publish anything before one is at least thirty. I had understandably been consoled by this all through my twenties, though as so often with the pronouncements of writers on their trade (Auden is a prime example) this was simply the writer saying, ‘All do as I do.’ Virginia had kept quiet until she was thirty and so should we all.

  When I hit thirty with still not much done I then took comfort from Proust, who had been an even later starter than Virginia Woolf: whatever else can be said about Proust, he did not hit the ground running.

  In the end writing just seemed to sneak up on me. I was a writer after Forty Years On, not by virtue of having had a play produced but because by then I had started to do it (or to try and do it) every day. I still hesitated to lay claim to it as a profession, though, and it was only in the early seventies that I crossed out Teacher in my passport and substituted Actor/Author. The order is significant as I obviously thought at the time that the acting was a better bet than the writing; the actor would go on and the author might peter out, whereas it has tended to be the other way round.

  Nowadays, of course, passports no longer require that one states (or confesses) a profession and rites of passage like mine are not so easily charted.

  If I was slow off the mark it was also because it took me time to realise that I had a world to write about that was my own and not one that had been revealed to me through books or education. My Leeds contemporary the poet Tony Harrison had a similar experience. His class and social background were approximately the same as mine and like him I felt at first that ‘the life … I lived didn’t seem to be the stuff that literature could be made of … We didn’t have books in the house,’ he writes, ‘so that my love of language and books always seemed different from the life I actually lived at home. Once I’d found a way of writing about that life, it all came back to me in the richest detail.’*

  That wasn’t quite my experience as I’m more light-minded than Tony Harrison and had (and maybe have) less of a grip on my vocation. It took me much longer to see that I had a childhood that could be written about and I couldn’t truthfully say, as he does, that at sixteen or eighteen I loved language or had any notion that language or literature might be part of my future. But Tony went to a posher school than I did and a more snobbish one, and he suffered for his accent at school, was punished for his tongue as I never was, so it’s hardly surprising if he sorted out his priorities quicker than I did.

  For a long time, years even, it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate that you do not put yourself into what you write; you find yourself there.

  When I realised that I ceased to worry. Or to worry about that anyway.

  With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life that you do and is sometimes easier of access. My first play was set in an English public school, which was not an institution of which I’d ever been a pupil. I knew about it, though, and could write about it from the books I had read … memoirs, biography, school stories and indeed comics. State-educated, I had quite early on tried to write about the kind of school I had attended, a northern grammar school, but found it impossible and have never really managed to write about it since, perhaps because few others have managed it either.†

  There was certainly not much state-school
literature to draw on and definitely no tradition. Art comes out of art and to break new ground unassisted is not easy. Certainly I found it hard to do, whereas to write about the oddities and eccentrics to be found teaching in a run-down public school was to release the imagination, facilitate the jokes and draw on much that I had read. It was not a life I craved or an education I envied but I found public school far easier to depict (or caricature) than the lives of the sometimes desperate and deeply disillusioned men who had taught me in state school … and whom I would perhaps have been better employed trying to understand and re-create.

  Reading and going to the pictures as a child I had readily absorbed the inverse moral standards that prevailed in these alternative worlds. I needed no telling that the real villain in the gangster movie was not one of the small-time hoodlums and bully boys but the genial, white-haired and seemingly respectable mayor. In the story-book world, poor was better than rich and plain than pretty. Nothing was as it seemed.

  So thoroughly did I absorb these topsy-turvy values, I expected them to prevail in the real world also. How could the French nobles on the eve of Agincourt not see that their overweening confidence and superior strength must inevitably doom them to defeat? Had they never read a fairy story? Or David and Goliath?

  I was old enough to register the rout of the BEF in France in 1940 but the defeat and evacuation at Dunkirk to me made the victory at El Alamein and the D-Day invasion seem a foregone conclusion. Though it helped, of course, that that was also how the story was told.