Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Least likely to be surprised by this account are unabashed homosexuals, or homosexuals who are less abashed than I am, and not so much in two minds, and whose dress and demeanour leave no doubt as to their preferences. To be attacked, beaten up or otherwise abused, and to find the police response one of indifference, is the not infrequent experience of homosexuals, and blacks too. But, reluctant to be enrolled in the ranks of gay martyrdom, reluctant, if the truth be told, to be enrolled in any ranks whatsoever, I kept quiet about this adventure. It has been another untold story, though it is better that it should be told. The police protect the respectable, of which I have always been one. So, to find ourselves in this grubby seaside town briefly and mistakenly cast out from respectability a while, and put outside the protection of the law, was, I hope, a salutary experience, though not one I would recommend.

  * Lest I should be thought to be manufacturing these coincidences, I have since been in hospital twice more on my birthday, in May 1998 with appendicitis and in May 2000 with something similar.

  * An incident I later incorporated in the short story ‘The Laying on of Hands’.

  * I note some of the times I have written about risks not taken: ‘Another day, another ball had ended,’ John Gielgud used to intone every night at the end of the first act of Forty Years On, as he remembered the years before the First World War, ‘and life had not yielded up its secret. “This time,” I always thought as I tied my tie, “perhaps this time.” But there would be other nights and time yet, I thought.’ That was about risk and a later play, the farce Habeas Corpus, was more specific:

  On those last afternoons in the bed by the door

  On the Clement Attlee Ward,

  When you mourn the loss of energy

  Even Lucozade cannot replace,

  And Sister Tudor thinks you may go any time,

  Do you think that you think

  Of the things that you did

  Or the things that you didn’t do?

  The promise broken, the meeting you missed,

  The word not spoken, the cheek not kissed.

  Lust was it, or love? Was it false or true?

  Who cares now?

  Dying you’ll grieve for what you didn’t do.

  (And, as they say, passim.) The notion of risks taken and not crops up in less likely plays. It’s there in The Lady in the Van, for instance, when my own character remembers Miss Shepherd as the bold one: ‘All those years stood on my doorstep, she was all the time on the run. Self-sacrifice, incarceration, escape and violent death – a life, this is what I keep thinking, a life besides which mine is just dull.’ And, most unlikely of all I suppose, I am the bedridden ninety-year-old Violet, who in Waiting for the Telegram looks back to her doomed sweetheart who, on the eve of his departure for the front in the First War, wants to make love to her. In a moment she will regret all her life, she turns him down.

  * See Untold Stories, pp. 11–13.

  Arise, Sir …

  It’s seldom that a week passes nowadays without an invitation to speak either at a literary festival or to some local literary society. Publishers are keen that their authors undertake these engagements, particularly the festivals, as the talk is often followed by a signing session when authors meet their readers and significant amounts of stock can be shifted.

  I do fewer of these engagements than most authors partly because I am of an age now when I like to sleep in my own bed and also because I’ve found that, the large literary festivals apart, many of the smaller societies exist less to promote the written word than to beef up the social life of the organisers. Far too often one ends up in a provincial town at half past eleven at night having a Chinese meal up a back street somewhere with people you don’t know.

  When I do perform – and it is a performance, as Larkin, who refused as he put it to go round pretending to be himself, pointed out – I generally read from some of the stuff I’ve written, with my diaries the most popular (plenty of jokes), and then I take questions from the audience before finishing up with five minutes more reading, almost always ending with a speech from my 1980 play Enjoy in which a character describes the contents of a mantelpiece in a working-class household, a passage I have read so often it has become almost like an old-fashioned parlour recitation. It’s fair to point out that, though I’m reluctant to undertake these engagements, generally speaking I enjoy them but feel it doesn’t do to do them too often. The more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want to hear me talk anyway.

  I am not especially articulate so the question-and-answer segment might seem likely to expose my shortcomings, except that I have found that over a period of time the same questions tend to recur. Someone will always ask, for instance, if in the monologues I (used to) write I have in mind a particular actor or actress. Do I keep to a daily routine when writing and would I describe it? Why do I seem to prefer writing for women than men? Do I make notes on conversations that I overhear and in what circumstances?

  It perhaps says something about the kind of audiences I attract but I’m seldom questioned about anything that requires much self-revelation. I was once asked how much money I made (it was by a boy at Bradford Grammar School) but my personal circumstances are generally left unprobed: I have never been asked if I live alone, for instance, or if not whom do I live with and why. The tentative confidences of my published diaries don’t touch off requests for further information and, embarrassingly confessional though some of my writing occasionally seems to me to be, my audience perhaps sense that even this degree of opening up does not come naturally to me and don’t enquire further. Maybe they’re just not interested; or don’t want to be thought to be the sort of reader who might be.

  One slightly ticklish question I do get asked, though, and that is whether I have ever been offered any sort of official decoration. Why have I never figured in the Honours List?

  Flattering though the assumption is that my failure to figure is some kind of omission, to date I have never answered this question directly, saying that, had I had such an offer and seen fit to turn it down, to acknowledge this would hardly be fitting; to have accepted an honour without fuss would seem less self-regarding than to turn it down then boast about it.

  I wish I could dispose of the question by saying that I am a republican and then there would not be much more to be said. But while not a fervent monarchist (or a fervent anything much), I have no particular objection to the monarchy, whatever its drawbacks, or even the honours system that comes with it. It seems a better way of going on than any presidential arrangement politicians could be trusted to devise and so, for reasons that are historical, sentimental and also practical, I would leave the monarchy alone.

  So I then generally edge the question round to a discussion of honours in general and the shortcomings of the system, making some of the points I make here, though as I’ve got older I tend to feel less cagey about the whole subject and so can be more frank.

  Out and out republicans apart, it’s pretty safe to assume that those who refuse an honour are diffident about it and that this diffidence extends to keeping their refusal quiet. This, though, is voluntary. There is no requirement to this effect in the official notification. One is asked to let the prime minister’s office know if the offer is not acceptable, and if it is acceptable not to mention the award until the list is published, with some implication that jumping the gun in this regard might result in the offer being withdrawn.

  Voluntary though this discretion is, it accords with conventional notions of good behaviour and is therefore quite powerful. To refuse an honour and brag about it would seem bad form, but what makes the system self-sustaining is that those who complain about it can be presumed never to have been made an offer and so can be accused of sour grapes; just as those who have been preferred and have refused and come out and say so can be accused of showing off. It’s not a very adult way of going on and the morality is that of the school playground, but it suits the Establishment as it
precludes the possibility of change.

  What should be plainly stated, though, is that the happiest temperament to have is one that accepts whatever distinction is offered, and accepts it graciously and without fuss or a lot of soul-searching. This is the nearest one gets to genuine modesty. Isaiah Berlin, on whom honours were heaped by the bucketful, never demurred. True, he said these marks of distinction were undeserved and made light of them, but he took them. But who is to say he was more or less modest than someone who refused because they don’t care to be brought into the official fold? Or, as Updike puts it, ‘Who will measure the selfservingness of self-effacement?’

  Towards the end of 2003 a newspaper got hold of a list of those who had refused honours and published their names both in the paper and on the Internet so, while it did not altogether clear the air, the slightly absurd secrecy that has always surrounded the process was to some extent dissipated and it became possible to talk about honours less obliquely than in the past. Jon Snow, having turned down a distinction, did a TV programme about the subject and there was talk of reform. Whether that will happen remains to be seen but there is no doubt that nowadays the system is more porous and much more discussed.

  If the bestowal of honours was not selective, came like the bus pass, say, on the attainment of a certain age, there would be nothing to talk about. And even allowing that some were singled out and others not, were there one honour and one honour alone undivided into ranks and categories (MBE, OBE, CBE and whatever) then the subject would lose much of its fascination. The more selection there is, the more grading and differentiation, the more occasion there is for snobbery.

  I’ve nothing much against snobbery. It’s a fairly harmless failing, though one to which the English are more prone than most peoples, and undoubtedly the honours system panders to it and is permeated by it.

  Some critics blame the Queen for this, or at any rate the monarchy, but the English have never needed much encouragement to get themselves into clubs and cliques and, twiddling on their own particular eminences, however slight, pretend to be special and different, so that monarchy or no monarchy we would find ways of doing so.

  Whether the French are the same with the Légion d’Honneur I am not sure, though I doubt it, and that’s as far as my knowledge of other honours runs. I have the impression, though, that Europe (or what Mr Rumsfeld calls Old Europe) is generally more sensible than we are so I’m sure in this, as in many other departments, we could learn a thing or two from our hoped-for partners.

  It’s hard to object to the honours system, though, when it gives so much twice-yearly pleasure and is the occasion for such rich hypocrisy among the beneficiaries.* Perhaps I am unfortunate in my friends or in the corrupt metropolitan circles in which I move, but it’s seldom I come across someone who has accepted a knighthood and done so with genuine pride and pleasure, still less anyone agreeing that it was well deserved. Nobody ever says that this is just what they have always wanted, though it’s true that Kingsley Amis justified or at least excused his knighthood by saying that he took it because he knew so many people that it would annoy, which seems as good a reason for accepting it as any.

  No, most of the knights I know are a bit shamefaced about it, disclaiming the title even when they have accepted it. They proffer a variety of excuses, their need to do so suggesting they are uncomfortable with their elevation or uneasy about the system altogether. They are anxious to show that they don’t take it seriously and now they are knights or dames or whatever, could we please forget all about it.

  This is probably not a general view. In the arts and on the left (which is often the same thing) genuine pride is, I would have thought, quite rare and honours seldom accepted without this note of apology or self-justification. In other sectors of society pride perhaps abounds. I imagine, for instance that those newspaper editors and TV commentators Mrs Thatcher thought it prudent to honour rejoiced in their advancement, though these honours were hardly a gift; there needs no money to change hands for honours sometimes to be a transaction. Still, whatever the circumstances, the majority of those singled out must be honestly pleased and accept with alacrity – which is nice, if not of much interest. More entertaining, though, are those who are in two minds and, when they do accept, feel the need to offer excuses.

  Their mothers, for instance. Isaiah Berlin used to claim he had only taken a knighthood in order to give pleasure to his mother. And the mother doesn’t need to be still around, as presumably Berlin’s mother wasn’t for most of the many honours that subsequently came his way. It’s the thought of the mother that’s important. After a lifetime on the left Eric Hobsbawm excused his acceptance of the CH by saying that it would have given his mother much happiness. Fathers are less often adduced, probably because they’re beadier altogether and, dead or alive, are less likely to be taken in.

  But as with mothers so with wives. A husband will often pass off his own snobbery as the aspirations of his wife. This is the ‘little woman’ argument, the husband posing as being above such petty considerations as knighthoods or whatever but not wanting to deprive the silly little creature of her fun. Meeting at a reception at Buckingham Palace, the playwrights John Osborne, Harold Pinter and David Hare are all said to have blamed their attendance on the curiosity of their wives, the wives, with more sense, probably not feeling it necessary to blame anyone at all.

  Still, men being more decorated than women, wives have some reason to feel aggrieved and may think, quite rightly, that years of long-suffering loyalty entitle them to a share in the credit for their husbands’ elevation and that it is proper, therefore, that a knight’s wife should be ennobled, too, and be called a lady. That men, even when no less loyal, are not so long-suffering as partners perhaps explains why a wife appointed a dame throws no corresponding cloak of ennoblement over her husband. Nor, it hardly needs to be said, does a knight’s elevation affect a partner if that partner is not a wife or if that partner is not of the opposite sex. As a convention, honours are nothing if not conventional.

  Another strategy for acceptance is to take the honour as being bestowed on the institution, if such there be, or the firm to which one belongs, the assumption being that the staff or the employees thereby share in the honour. ‘Oh yeah?’ would seem a fair response to that, though it’s sometimes more plausible than others. I can imagine the average Maltese being boosted by the George Cross awarded to the whole island for its record of resistance during the Second World War. Whether a thrill of pride went through the ranks of the RUC when the Queen decorated the Constabulary as a whole, I’m less sure.

  I was once filming in a derelict factory in Bradford, the offices of which had not been touched since the firm closed down the previous year.

  There is a ledger open on a desk, records and files still on the shelves. In a locker is a cardigan and three polystyrene plates, remnants of a last takeaway, and taped to the door a yellowing cyclostyled letter dated 12 June 1977. It is from a Mr Goff, evidently an executive of the firm, living at The Langdales, Kings Grove, Bingley. Mr Goff has been awarded the OBE in the Jubilee Honours and in the letter he expresses the hope ‘that the People, who are the Main Prop in any endeavour, many with great skill and ability, will take Justification and Pride in it and will,’ he earnestly hopes, ‘feel that they will be sharing in the Honour conferred on me’.

  (Writing Home)

  The CH is at the other end of the scale from the OBE, and at the other end of the social scale, too, probably and a result of entirely personal achievement. Still, it can pay dividends in its actual bestowal, and Anthony Powell’s account of a morning at Buckingham Palace and his interview with the Queen at which he was invested with the CH almost justified the award itself.

  In the theatre the most direct route to honours is via Shakespeare, actors with the subsidised companies more likely to figure in the list (or to figure in it earlier) than their colleagues on Shaftesbury Avenue or on television. Hollywood isn’t always helpful, as to make a good deal
of money such as film stardom normally entails can put off elevation. There is a compensatory aspect to the Honours List; repertory Shakespeare is not well paid, the CBE therefore something of a top-up.

  It’s tacitly expected, certainly in theatrical circles, that most recipients of knighthoods or damehoods should not set too much store by the social cachet of such distinctions, the use of the title not to be insisted on. My own experience of the theatre began when there were relatively few knighted actors but it required only a brief acquaintance before they licensed the elision of the title and you were told to, ‘Drop the sir.’

  I never knew him but this was not true, apparently, of Terence Rattigan, who liked his handle used, perhaps because for all the usual reasons (absence abroad, earning too much money in Hollywood and dallying with his own sex) he’d been quite a long time acquiring it. Anyone making too much of such marks of distinction these days, though, runs the risk of being thought arrogant or foolish, the elevation is too small to insist upon without incurring ridicule. Besides knights, dames and commanders of the British Empire are now commonplace. Indeed there are so many it might save time (and some heartache) if the honour was just handed out along with the final diploma at drama school.

  Opera singers and musicians generally don’t have to wait so long and tend to be upgraded quite early in their careers, presumably because going to the opera or to concerts is one of the chief recreations of the great and the good who decide such things. If it takes longer in the theatre it’s partly because plays can involve thought, more so anyway than opera, and so are a less satisfactory evening out for the great and the good, who have been thinking all day (or like to think so).

  Sportsmen and women are less likely to figure in the upper reaches of the honours list because sport is popular and popularity is thought to be its own reward, though in more and more sports, football in particular, popularity equals advertising and that is not its own reward at all.