On Alan Bennett

(Alright, then - In Adoring Praise of Him)

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’

So wrote Alan Bennett — writer, actor, master of self-deprecation — in the London Review of Books.

(I have a year’s free subscription to the LRB to give away. If you would like it, please share this or a previous Diary entry with a friend or family member — then drop me a comment sharing an extremely obscure, non-identifying fact about them. No proof needed. I’ll trust you. I think you’ll have to be resident in the UK, and willing to share a delivery address with me.)

I have always loved Alan Bennett — starting with an adoration for certain sketches in the satirical stage show Beyond the Fringe.

Here’s his ‘Take a Pew’ — delivered to 1960s West End and Broadway audiences as if they were a bunch of catatonic schoolboys —

Very many years ago, when I was about as old as some of you are now, I went mountain climbing in Scotland with a friend of mine. And there was this mountain, you see, and we decided to climb it. All day we climbed—up and up and up —higher and higher and higher—until the valley lay very small below us, and the mists of the evening began to come down, and the sun to set. And when we reached the summit, we sat down to watch this magnificent sight of the sun going down behind the mountains. And as we watched, my friend, very suddenly, and violently, vomited.

Some of us think life’s a bit like that, don’t we? But it isn’t. Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We all of us are looking for the key. And I wonder how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key. I know I have. Others think they've found the key, don’t they? They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life. They reveal the sardines—the riches of life—therein, and they get them out, and they enjoy them. But, you know, there’s always a little bit in the corner you can’t get out. I wonder is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine!

However, because of something like Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, I went into denial about Alan Bennett for several years. His was too strong a voice; if I fell completely in with its rhythms and quirks, I’d end up writing second rate versions of his Talking Heads TV monologues, first broadcast in 1988.

‘A Cream Cracker Under the Settee’, starring Thora Hird, is one of my favourites. The title says it all (settee not sofa).

I think we can see a theme developing here (excrement, blocked sink, sardine tin key, cream cracker) — the drabber moments of life having the beam of Bennett’s attention shone upon them, because he can’t deny the exist, and feature largely for him. Those humiliating, though unwitnessed times where you have to bend down and remove some reluctant dropped thing out of its dirty, slimy place.

Here, I’m afraid, I have to self-quote. Around the time I was avoiding being like Bennett, I wrote lots of quatrains. This was one —

     America gets money, praise,

     a summer of unclouded days.

     We in our turn are duly sent

     greyness, grime, diminishment.

This is a very post-war view of things. But it is at least trying to point to a separation of expectation that I felt very much.

That fact of its not-being-American meant a lot to me in Bennett’s work. His early success on and off Broadway, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Cook, had brought him into contact with the expansiveness and possibilities of life Stateside.

Bennett was often confused, mainly due to their glasses and northernness, with David Hockney. But whereas Hockney loved the US, especially California, and relocated there as soon as he could, and made of it his subject, Bennett retreated back to England and squinted at it very very hard.

Wonderful plays and other writings followed, not without struggle or him being taken for granted. Bennett just doing what Bennett does. And a times, he did seem to exhibit a great talent for backing into the spotlight. The modesty could come across as a bit of a shtick, but it wasn’t.

There’s an anecdote he tells in a documentary. It’s about him and his parents. He’s sitting in the faux-glamorous restaurant or reception of a grand northern hotel. When he came back from a visit to New York, he wanted to bring something nice for his mother and father. He decided on large, white, fluffy bath towels, of the kind he’d encountered in Manhattan hotels.

He presented these vast towels to his parents, and — though very embarrassed — they thanked him.

Years later, he found them in a cupboard. Untouched. When he asked his mother (I think), why they had never used them, she said something like, ‘Oh, they’re not for the likes of us.’

(I haven’t seen this in years. Details may be wrong.)

Again, this attitude might seem very post-war — the idea of feeling ashamed to use a grand towel, even if no-one else is there to see it (just like the humiliation of unblocking a sink).

But there’s something here that’s important for any English, and I’ll risk British, writer. (Possibly others, too — vast subject.)

It’s a dangerous thing to read mainly American fiction, and get used to the equivalent of those towels.

Not that your characters have those towels and revel in them, but that there’s even the possibility of them getting and using them.

You can read the fiction of Raymond Carver, and find plenty of equivalents to Alan Bennett’s drabber moments of life, but they still take place ringed by a bright a horizon of greater expectations.

Lazily, I could call it The American Dream. More exactly, I’d call it a more complete diminishment, in the face of a far vaster expanse.

This is the American sense of space I mentioned in the different contexts of Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.

How do the drabber moments fit with this? Isn’t their own local drabness one of the things any writer needs to discover?

Bennett’s influence on my writing finally came though with the stories of Adventures in Capitalism — ‘Mr Kipling’ and ‘Please Use a Basket’.

In my more extreme moments of curriculum design, now I’m running a Creative Writing MA, I consider only having short stories by contemporary British writers.

Chief among them, Alan Bennett.

But the wonderful thing about short stories is that, with two weeks’ intensive reading, you can start to cover it as a global form — stories from all over the map.

So much more to say.

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