English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Sometimes this generosity hardened into an ossified bar code: he was pernickety that everyone should stand his round and behave like a good fellow. It was an offence against the laws of hospitality to say to a lunch guest, ‘Shall we go straight in?’ There was no keener member of the 1400 Club at the Garrick, composed of those barflies who thought it poor form to sit down before 2 p.m. Like Richard Burton, he believed that ‘the man who drinks on his own’ was scarcely human.

  But until his very last years his company still left a glow. And when he arrived in Swansea as a young lecturer with Hilly and their small children, they hit the place like a tornado, laying waste both the campus and the crachach in the Uplands district. Kingsley set about a programme of screwings that would have been enough to construct an ocean liner. Hilly followed in his wake, but hers was only a cottage industry in comparison with Kingsley’s mass seduction. At Saturday-night parties he would ask every woman present to come outside and visit his greenhouse – an implausible pretext considering his well-advertised dislike of gardens and gardening – and one by one they would return dishevelled but with a wild, furtive triumph in their eyes.

  Drink and sex were his passions. The extraordinary thing is that he could not believe that one might have an impact on the other. When his powers began to fail, he consulted a series of sex therapists (as well as regular shrinks to treat his night fears) and even consented, like the hero of Jake’s Thing, to wear a ‘nocturnal mensurator’, a device for measuring penile tumescence. It never seems to have occurred to him that he might be suffering from an entirely normal case of brewer’s droop.

  Both in his letters to Larkin and to Robert Conquest, there is, it cannot be denied, a callous tone about his references to women. To Larkin, for example: ‘The only reason I like girls is that I want to f*** them.’ When trying to reconcile Hilly: ‘The successive application of tears and pork sword had brought hubby right back into the picture’ – while at the same time denouncing Hilly (who was bringing up three children and doing everything for Kingsley without him lifting a finger in any direction) for ‘her laziness, her continuous peevishness with the children, her utter lack of interest in anything whatsoever’. Soon he was able to report triumphantly, ‘I have more or less got my wife back. As a consequence (though I can quite see how you can’t quite see how this can be so), I have got my girlfriend back too.’

  Nor did Elizabeth Jane Howard fare much better. When she eventually walked out on him, he explained to Larkin: ‘She did it partly to punish me for stopping wanting to fuck her and partly because she realised I didn’t like her much. Well, I liked her as much as you could like anyone totally wrapped up in themselves and unable to tolerate the slightest competition or anything a raving lunatic could see as opposition and having to have their own way in everything all the time.’

  Well, it takes one.

  Curious perhaps that he chose her in the first place. Many people found her affected and, though very beautiful, not all that easy to get on with. She did not herself deny that she was awkward and self-centred. To pursue her career as a writer, she had more or less abandoned her only child, her daughter by her first husband, the naturalist Peter Scott, but when married to Kingsley she worked night and day to look after the large, untidy household, drove him everywhere, dealt with all the repairs and accounts and acted as the most dutiful of stepmothers, all of which left little or no time for her own writing.

  For someone who took such an intense interest in people’s quirks, Kingsley often seemed indifferent to what people were actually like. He tolerated company at the Garrick Club that other members fled from. He would make regular excursions to Swansea to drink in the Bristol Channel Yacht Club with the solicitor Stuart Thomas, described by some as ‘one of the most unpleasant men I have ever met’ and eventually expelled from the Yacht Club on grounds of ‘general horribleness’.

  But then, as Zachary Leader points out, the desire to irritate and annoy animated Amis himself all his life, and hobnobbing with other curmudgeons was part of it. He liked to give offence in his books too, by putting in recognizable portraits of people he knew, like Peter Quennell’s wife Marilyn or the old devils he drank with in Swansea. In embarking on a new project, for example his Ian Fleming pastiche Colonel Sun, he liked to think how much it would annoy intellectual lefties. Baiting was a pastime, ranking only slightly behind drink and sex. Nor did he restrict his venom to people who could stand up to him. He could be cruel to some shy stranger who made an ill-phrased remark or had an unfortunate laugh.

  It was sometimes as though his reservoirs of sensitivity were concentrated on his writing. All his delicacy of touch went into the run of the sentence. Surprisingly, although Zac Leader is a professor of English literature rather than a biographer by trade (he also did an exemplary edition of the Amis letters), the one gap in this otherwise beautifully balanced, affectionate, unsparing and unfailingly accurate portrait is any discussion of Amis’s style in its heyday. Rightly, Leader points out that late Amis can be almost as orotund and impenetrable as the late Henry James – a comparison which would have annoyed Amis greatly. Anthony Powell thought that in The Folks That Live on the Hill, for example, the determination not to be pretentious develops into a sort of pretentiousness.

  But all memorable styles tend to become parodies of themselves in the end. And Amis’s style is certainly memorable. To me it is one of the most original and infectious styles in twentieth-century English writing, comparable in its impact to that of Joyce or Hemingway, though not recognized as such, or not by academics, because of Amis’s dislike of their carry-on. The way he writes arises out of what Stephen Potter would call his ordinarychapmanship, but it is only the starting point to declare, as Amis does in what is taken to be the Manifesto of the Movement poets, ‘Nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities.’ What Amis does is not only to represent ordinary blokes and (less successfully) blokesses but to catch the way their minds run on, correcting their first thoughts, doubling back, trying to render what exactly it is that they are thinking. More complicating still is that Amis is at the same time setting down how the author is trying to describe and then describe better, more exactly, more vividly what the characters are doing or saying or looking like. So that at its best you feel a thrilling sense of actually being there as the text is being created. Amis was famous for liking unshowy immediacy in books. All his life he preferred the sort of book which began ‘a shot rang out’. He hated writers like Bellow and Nabokov for their distinguished style which ‘usually turns out in practice to mean a high idiosyncratic noise level in the writing, with plenty of rumble and wow from imagery, syntax and diction’. Yet he was at pains to point out that immediate didn’t mean simple. Paradise Lost was the greatest poem in our language, but it was difficult as well as being immediate. Amis was himself engaged in something which was much more difficult than it looked. When it works, a comic joy spreads over every page, even when he is writing about death and decay as he is in Ending Up or The Old Devils.

  To the end Kingsley remained the spoilt only child who believes that the universe ought to be organized for his benefit and is furious whenever he discovers it isn’t. ‘You atheist?’ the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked him. ‘Well, yes,’ Amis replied, ‘but it’s more that I hate Him’ – resented the competition, I suppose. And it is this combination of indignation and eloquence that puts him up there with Swift and all those other monsters we hate to love.

  ALAN BENNETT: AGAINST SPLOTHER

  ‘I’ve got great faith in the corner of the eye.’ Alan Bennett is talking about the picture by the eighteenth-century Welsh artist Thomas Jones of some towels drying on a balcony in Naples. It is an utterly ordinary, unremarkable scene, a piece of background, but in its freshness, its irresistible thereness, it jumps off the wall. Jones only painted a handful of these little sketches, devoting the rest of his life to muddy historical paintings and pleasant but stand
ard-issue landscapes. Alan Bennett by contrast has devoted his life to freezing the corner-of-the-eye moment, so that it seems not only touching and funny but somehow grand, far grander in fact than the bombastic rodomontades of high literature which by comparison come out looking like so much ‘splother’, to use the lovely word much employed by Walter and Lilian Bennett, Alan’s mam and dad, to dismiss anything smacking of ostentation, pretension and fuss.

  So it is that Bennett wants this huge collection of his writings over the past ten years to be thought of as occupying no loftier niche than those old children’s annuals issued each Christmas by Dandy or Beano and packed with strip cartoons, stories and games. In such an easy-going format, his title sequence – essentially a memoir of his parents and his aunties Kathleen and Myra – stands out in all its laconic brilliance. Untold Stories is every bit as touching and funny as you would expect, but you are also left in no doubt about the, well, nobility is the only word for it, of the lives led by Mam and Dad, lives so restricted and inconspicuous by the world’s standards. I have read nothing in recent fiction to rival the precision and power of the accounts of Mam’s descent first into depression and then later into a dementia of sorts and, towards the end of the memoir, of finding Kathleen’s body in the undergrowth beside the M6 after she had run away from Lancaster Moor Hospital.

  When Untold Stories was serialized in the Daily Telegraph, a reader wrote in complaining that the description of how old ladies in such hospitals and care homes were neglected and so gently starved to death was exaggerated and unfair. As it happened, only a week later I read in The Times the report of a coroner’s scorching criticism when precisely this had happened to a 91-year-old woman in a Manchester hospital. As I am writing this, another such case of slow starvation in a care home is reported in today’s paper.

  At the same time Bennett insists always upon his mother’s jauntiness as soon as she has recovered her spirits. He never ceases to rejoice in the bravura of her denunciations: ‘Tangerine! I wouldn’t have tangerine curtains if you paid me.’ Or of the blood-red figure of the Buddha that Aunty Myra brings back from the Far East: ‘I don’t care if it is a god, I am not having it on the sideboard with a belly-button that size.’

  In fact, he shares Mam’s distaste and unerring eye for the common. ‘It would do as a definition of what’s gone wrong in England in the last 20 years that it’s got more common’, and he remarks resignedly that ‘it’s a sign of my age that the shoe shops seem nowadays to be staffed by sluts, indifferent and unhelpful and with none of that matronly dignity’. He deplores the Dianafication of public emotion and, when he hears that the Queen is finally to broadcast to the nation after Diana’s death, remarks sourly in his diary, ‘I’m only surprised that Her Majesty hasn’t had to submit to a phone-in.’ When John Major sends the Stone of Scone up North in the vain hope of pacifying the Scots, Bennett comments that ‘the Coronation Chair is left looking like an empty commode’. So, although he thinks of himself as a lifelong leftie, wants to see public schools abolished and worries about the future of the National Health Service, he emerges as an unregenerate small-c conservative, the grumpiest of grumpy old men. We catch him gorging himself on the journals of Anthony Powell and James Lees-Milne, his own diaries coming increasingly to resemble theirs, not least in his adoption of the elaborate Powellian participial clause moored alongside the main sentence. If encountered in someone else’s book, the abysmal standard of proofreading in Untold Stories would certainly have provoked a tart comment (two publishers do not seem to be better than one). My favourite typo is Bennett’s reference to an appointment with ‘a complimentary health clinic in Harley Street’. Fat chance in that avenue of conspicuous extortion.

  This appointment precedes the chemotherapy he undergoes for bowel cancer in 1997, an experience recounted in the closing piece, ‘An Average Rock Bun’ – according to the doctor, the size of the tumour in question. At the time, Bennett tells us, he refrained from talking about his illness, otherwise he might have died from embarrassment, but now that he is in the pink again (although the initial odds against survival were poor), he gives us a cheerfully uninhibited account of the whole business.

  This is typical of his lifelong struggle with embarrassment. He backs in and out of the limelight, always just in time, he hopes, to escape looking pleased with himself, like some never-ending game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. When the list of those who have turned down knighthoods is leaked to the newspapers, he finds himself noting how he is sometimes placed rather low down on the list of refuseniks and sometimes not mentioned at all. In the same way, he wouldn’t want anyone to think that putting Mam’s condition down to Alzheimer’s was jumping on a bandwagon. He has a similar reaction when asked to appear on television after Gielgud’s death: ‘Reluctant to jump on the bandwagon, particularly when the bandwagon is a hearse.’

  ‘Our Alan’s like us, shy,’ Mam would say, meaning it as a virtue. ‘Sly’ is Bennett’s own verdict on himself. A bit of both, really. He is unashamed of his fastidiousness, content to have ‘come out’ (I cannot remember whether the inverted commas are mine or his or whether he uses the phrase at all) and delighted to have settled down with a partner who is half his age, but he still finds the uninhibited talk of all-male gatherings both tedious and embarrassing. Unashamed too of his long stretches of moony chastity when younger. Like Wilfred Thesiger in the desert, ‘I could go for months, years indeed, on virtually no dates at all. No quarter could have been emptier than my twenties.’ Yet of that decade and more of unrequited affection, he says in retrospect, ‘It isn’t an education which I would have elected to undergo, but nor do I wish it away, then or now.’

  His unflinching watchfulness preserves him from easy slurping on remorse and regret. The illusion that he is some kind of cuddly national treasure cannot survive reading more than a couple of pages of this bumper compendium. He is about as cuddly as a Swiss army knife, old-fashioned in design and fits nicely in the pocket, but equipped with a ferocious variety of attachments for slicing through, gouging out and cutting down to size.

  One by one, the tin gods are tapped and found hollow: ‘Never comfortable with (and never unaware of) Saul Bellow’s style, which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose’; ‘I persevere with Sebald, but the contrivance of it, particularly his un-peopling of the landscape, never fails to irritate’; ‘re-reading Berenson I find him both intolerable and silly’. Ruminating on the famous shrinks who might have something to say about Mam’s condition – R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, Freud, Oliver Sacks – he tends to find them posturing, if not irrelevant, and unhealthily drawn to patients who make a good story – ‘mistake your wife for a hat and the doctor will never be away from your bedside’.

  Even the merchants of literary gloom with whom he is sometimes bracketed do not escape. He finds Barbara Pym lowering to read, and in re-examining Larkin’s verse, which he is often asked to give readings of (as though he were the nearest living substitute for the poet), he repeatedly discovers a cheap, hectoring note – ‘the despair is too easy’. For all his well-advertised lack of airs and graces, Larkin has his own brand of splother.

  I cannot think of another writer whose judgments are quite so steely, so genuinely unimpressed by reputation. But then in anything Bennett takes on there is a self-confidence which is nonetheless formidable because it is concealed under this carapace of modesty. It will be done his way or not at all. His plays, for example, offer only minimal homage to the gross contrivances of the stage; they explore an idea – a mad king, an old-fashioned schoolmaster – in a discursive, dwelling style which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere much. According to the conventional preconceptions, this ought to be box-office poison, but never is. Talking Heads deliberately affronts the telly producer’s taboo – that the viewer cannot tolerate prolonged exposure to a single face and voice. The irony is that, although this concentration is just how the playlets make their remarkable effect, one does miss something and that something is Bennett’s
own voice, those kindly, tired, gravelly tones, so thoughtful, so eternally self-critical, for it is that voice which redeems his characters from condescension and caricature.

  Untold Stories, for its part, says boo to the notion that a serious writer’s anthology should be a ruthless culling of his best work. This is a Christmas allsorts, jam-packed with delights. Only the reminiscences of theatrical productions are for me as tedious as I always find such things, no matter what the play or the players. I would not cross the road to hear William Shakespeare himself telling the story of Twelfth Night’s first night. The rest of it – the rambles round art galleries and out-of-the-way medieval churches, the acerbic commentaries on modern life, the vivid recollections of the Leeds of his youth – is pure pleasure, a marvellous meander you dread to see the final bend of. Even so, I might be tempted to lift out ‘Untold Stories’ from Untold Stories and preserve it separately for the nation, because it is something else, a work of art, and without a drop of splother in it.

  MURIEL SPARK: THE GO-AWAY BIRD

  There is no plaque yet on No. 13 Baldwin Crescent, otherwise known as ‘Dunedin’. There ought to be. For on the top floor of this shabby yellow-brick house, hidden away between the Camberwell New Road and gloomy Myatt’s Fields, Muriel Spark wrote most of the four or five novels for which we’ll remember her. She was as happy in leafy, run-down Baldwin Crescent as she ever had been or was to be in her long, tense, proud, unforgiving life. She did, it is true, make an excursion to her childhood Edinburgh home to reimmerse herself in the speech of Morningside while she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in four weeks. But all her other masterpieces – Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors and much of The Girls of Slender Means – were written within a glorious period of only five years in her two attic rooms in Camberwell. After she left, she never lived in Britain again.