Like, I imagine, a host of others, my favoured Christmas
present this year was Alan Bennett’s third volume of diaries, memoirs,
criticism and literary extracts entitled Keeping
On Keeping On. Bennett’s mordant wit has entertained us for years and his
best-selling literary and dramatic output has been highly impressive. He is,
although he hates the epithet, clearly “a national treasure”. Nevertheless he is also infuriating, a
woolly-minded Leftie hypnotised by every “progressive” cause and no doubt an
ardent admirer of Jeremy Corbyn and his unhinged acolytes. Mindful of Alan’s proud Yorkshire origins,
Bennett’s partner Rupert Thomas neatly summed him up:
Rupert: You’re rather
like Heathcliff
Alan, (gratified): Really?
Rupert: Yeah.
Difficult, Northern and a c*nt.
 |
| A typically lugubrious Alan Bennett |
Born in 1934, so now 82, Alan Bennett was brought up in the bleak Armley district of Leeds
in West Yorkshire. He was the elder of 2 sons of Walter Bennett, a Co-op
butcher, and his “Mam” Lillian Peel. He later was to paint a loving picture of
his painfully shy parents (a friendly clergyman married them at 8am so that
Walter could return to the shop by 8.30 am and avoid any “plother”). Alan’s working class background deeply defined
him; the dependence on the public library, the constant family visiting, the
Sunday get-togethers to sing while an aunt played the piano, Walter’s
accompanying violin, played by ear, the wartime hardships alleviated by pilfered
coal nuts, the rattling Leeds trams.
Alan was however an exceptionally bright pupil from the
unglamorous, but free, state schools of Leeds. He won a place at Cambridge but
first did his National Service learning Russian at the Joint Services School for
Linguists, principally based at Cambridge. On demob, he switched horses and
secured a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, winning a first class honours
degree in history before doing post-graduate work on medieval studies. He
enjoyed university acting, but would have settled into the life of a
second-rank Oxbridge don, had he not been invited to join the Oxford
Revue/Cambridge Footlights production of Beyond
the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. This satirical show,
debunking the public attitudes of the day, was an immense success in London and
New York with Bennett supplementing the more extrovert efforts of Peter Cook,
Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller.
The show opened up many wider horizons for Alan; he gave up
academia and decided to become a professional writer.
 |
| AB, atop a piano, in Beyond the Fringe |
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| Bennett in the 1970s |
In many ways, Bennett had the world at his feet but he had inherited a diffident streak from his parents and felt he did not easily fit into even his chosen milieu; he was also of a religious cast of mind. All this was compounded by the fact he was a covert gay, not “coming out” until the 1990s. This sense of otherness and of frustrated detachment was only very slowly overcome; he developed a parsonical air, high-minded, aesthetically aware, uncarnal, seeking to look and admire but not to touch. He knew and regretted he was missing out on many aspects of life.
He wrote a variety of plays for radio and TV. He enjoyed a
considerable West End theatre success in 1968 with Forty Years On, a rather heavily allegorical drama/review about a
school called Albion House led by its headmaster John Gielgud, easily
identified as 1960s England. Amusing in its time, it would be found too preachy
for contemporary tastes.
Bennett had found his voice, gently mocking and challenging
conventional attitudes. He took this further in his 1983 TV play An Englishman Abroad, depicting the
Cambridge spy Guy Burgess in a sympathetic way. This tolerance of traitors was
developed in A Question of Attribution (1988)
centred around dialogues between MI5, the Queen and Anthony Blunt, the unmasked
spy who was the Keeper of her Pictures. Interesting as both pieces may be, it
seems that patriotism, treachery and institutional loyalty sadly do not feature
in the Bennett vocabulary.
So fruitful has Bennett’s muse been that it is impossible to
cover everything. He has written penetrating criticism of Auden, Kafka and
Larkin, screenplays on Orton and many others, readings for children including Winnie the Pooh, fine plays in The Madness of King George (1991), The History Boys (2004) and The Habit of
Art (2009), a play within a play imagining conversations between Auden and
Britten. Several have been filmed or otherwise adapted. His TV monologue series
Talking Heads (1988 and 1998)
featuring Patricia Routledge, Thora Hird and Julie Walters is considered by
many to be the apex of his achievement.
It all represents a very solid body of work, even if there is no obvious
master-piece to rival those of Rattigan or Osborne.
I guess his autobiographical works and diaries will live
longest, collected in Writing Home
(1994), Untold Stories (2005) and Keeping On Keeping On (2016). They paint
a picture of a very civilised man. He has a very wide acquaintance in the
theatre but is by no means a green-room luvvie. He loves to gossip
reminiscently and regrets the passing of old friends. He lived in Camden Town
for years but his London base is now in leafy Primrose Hill. While in Camden
Town he was the reluctant but generous host to the eccentric Miss Shepherd who
parked her dilapidated van in his drive and lived there for 15 years – the
subject of his The Lady in the Van
starring Maggie Smith.
Alan also inherited his parents’ house in the Yorkshire
village of Clapham and he adores walks there amid the becks of the Dales. He
does everything with his civil partner, aesthete Rupert Thomas, with whom he
has been in a relationship since 1992, legally since 2006. Together they
enthusiastically visit churches, buy antiques and bric-a-brac, visit galleries
(Alan has been a Trustee of the National Gallery and gets privileged access) go
on trips abroad to New York, Rome and a villa in Provence.
 |
| Rupert Thomas with Alan Bennett |
He gives a candid and moving picture of his late parents,
Walter and Lill, and their families. Lillian’s father committed suicide by
jumping into a canal in the early 1920s, a shameful episode in those days,
never discussed. Lillian herself became mentally ill, suffering depression and
was intermittently institutionalised. Walter died of the strain of constant
caring and visiting. Alan was a dutiful son, regularly visiting as she
descended from depression to dementia, and she lived out her life pathetically
in a care home in Weston. Bennett describes this situation with delicacy, wit
and tenderness; his campaigning for improved mental healthcare has been hard
earned.
Alan is what I call contrarian: he refused a proffered
knighthood and even an honorary doctorate from his own university of Oxford on
the tenuous grounds that it had accepted the endowment of a Chair in
Communications from his bête noire
Rupert Murdoch. He dislikes the work of Leonardo and Cézanne, and until recently flew
around London talking to himself on his bike. He overdoes the eebygummery of his Yorkshire origins and
his political views are best classed as “Rococo”.
Yet his Northern tones are ultimately irresistible: he is
our best-recognised and most cherished literary intellectual. May he continue
to amuse and educate us for many more years!
SMD
8.01.17
Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2017
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