‘I’m afraid I really haven’t got much left to say,” is Alan Bennett’s opening gambit. “I have such a limited repertoire.” This, from a writer who recently published a chunky new volume of prose, and is about to be the subject of a new documentary, is frankly a tease. He will shortly converse in something approximate to high spirits (a relative term in Bennett’s universe) for about an hour and a half in the sombre elegance of his sitting room.
Outside his Victorian front door, a film crew is shooting Paddington 2 against the discreet pastels of his street in leafy Primrose Hill, north London, not far from Gloucester Crescent, where he lived for nearly 40 years, famously co-existing with Miss Shepherd, “the lady in the van”. This interview is the curtain-raiser to a BBC Bennett double bill on Christmas Eve: Adam Low’s Alan Bennett’s Diaries documentary – a portrait of the artist as “an old git” – followed by the TV premiere of The Lady in the Van, Nicholas Hytner’s 2015 film, starring Maggie Smith, about the woman who became a bizarre and eccentric part of Bennett’s life in his former home.
He and his partner, Rupert Thomas, moved to his current address in 2006. It was, says Bennett, a reluctant farewell to the “drunks, drug-dealers, snogging by the wall, and the stop-and-search” of Camden Town. Here the biggest excitement is “the occasional squirrel”, a species with which he is cordially at war. Otherwise, Bennett says that, having embraced the tranquillity of Primrose Hill, he has “just got on with it”.
Bennett is now 82. In these past 10 years he has been “getting on”, in all senses: films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van; four more plays at the National Theatre, including The Habit of Art; and the treadmill of senescence punctuating the quotidian reality of what he calls “keeping on keeping on”. That happens to be the title of his latest collection of diaries (2005 -2015), following Writing Home (1994) and Untold Stories (2005). In Low’s film he jokes that “banging on, banging on” might be a better title. As always, that’s part of an ironical self-presentation by a man who admits: “I always wanted to perform, I knew I could do it.”
In the 20-odd years since he first began sharing his progress with his readers, Bennett has become the zen master of the public/private literary career, fusing life and art in a nationally treasured presentation of himself that’s both immensely popular and also, on closer examination, surprisingly complex. Bennett wrestles with what he’s created. On the one hand, he rejects becoming “tweeness’s accepted measure”. On the other, he seems to recognise his fate, lamenting: “did I stab Judi Dench with a pitch-fork, I should still be a teddy bear”.
You can almost hear the nation’s grammarians yodelling with joy at that faultless archaism. But what would they make of the writer himself? That might depend on timing. In Hytner’s film, Alex Jennings plays both the “teddy bear” Bennett – and a tougher alter ego. Indeed, in any encounter with the writer himself, there will always be at least two “Alans” present: the Somebody and the Nobody. Both are to be found seamlessly interacting in his diary, and both are on show in the BBC documentary which follows Bennett as he completes the editing of the latest diaries, and goes about his business as a nationally renowned talking head. We find the Somebody feted as a “literary lion” by the great and the good at the New York Public Library, and also appearing on Radio 3’s Private Passions. Meanwhile, the Nobody gets comically misidentified by the gawping public (“which Alan are you?”) or, in Bennett’s memories of his Oxford graduate days, patronised on high table. Bennett the academic manqué (“I was no great loss to history”) is a component of this persona, a role he will slip into as happily as he inhabits the limelight. Bennett the Nobody can still be shy/self-effacing, telling funny stories to distract attention. Behind a beguiling mask of melancholy, he nurtures a fierce and well camouflaged commitment to his art.
Today, Bennett’s mood (and the mood of Keeping On Keeping On), projects contentment, valediction, and “banging on”, an engaging sort of Why-oh-why. “I try not to sound like an old git,” he says, laughing. Mixed in with the grumbling, and the obituaries, memorial services and funerals, there’s the evident happiness he derives from his life with Rupert Thomas, editor of the World of Interiors, and 30 years his junior, with whom he made a civil partnership in 2006.
In the book, and the film, Bennett narrates this milestone in his life with a minimum of self-scrutiny, while approving the absence of fuss: “no more splother or ceremony than renewing one’s parking permit”. It’s just possible that the documentary will supply more information about his marriage than any record he has kept for himself. Long ago, in his pre-Rupert days, when asked if he was gay, Bennett replied that this was like asking a man who has just crawled across the Sahara desert “to choose between Perrier or Malvern water”. His first instinct is to divert his audience. Now, discussing the diaries’ appeal, he remarks that readers like them because “they come in bite-sized chunks”.
They are a dish he first served up to his public in the London Review of Books, and later in book form. He marvels at fellow diarist Joe Orton’s fearless candour while recognising that such “unabashed” self-exposure is not really his game. Self-abasing, he says: “so little happens to me”. In another tease, he confides that “printed in their entirety, they [the diaries] wouldn’t do me any good at all”. So the published version becomes a confection for his fans, with Bennett himself doubly disguised: first in the process of writing for publication, and, second, in the editorial process of selection.
The pleasure of Bennett’s journal comes from his chuntering elegy for a lost world, the land of his Leeds childhood, and the England of healthcare; Kathleen Ferrier; parish churches; his friendship with “Debo” Devonshire; Hymns Ancient and Modern (hymns make him cry); public libraries; and state education (“I owe everything to the state,” he says). Who could not warm to someone who loathes Virgin trains, Classic FM and Tony Blair? Or to a writer who has “real regrets” about never having kept a donkey? Simultaneously, he wants to entertain: “Spend part of the afternoon in the gazebo with a water-pistol,” he writes on 16 May 2010, “hoping to surprise the squirrel rifling the bird-feeder.”
There’s also the potent magic of his crystal prose. This comes in two kinds of observation: a) brilliantly allusive grace notes, for instance, footballer Frank Lampard’s open mouth like “the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment”, and b) ironic self-effacement. “I am in the pigeon-hole marked ‘no threat’”, he writes. Whatever he might do to Judi Dench, he would still be that teddy bear.
A teddy bear with sharp teeth. Bennett is plainly devoted to his partner, but on 31 August 2009 demonstrates his writer’s splinter of ice firmly intact, reporting that, after watching Wuthering Heights:
“Rupert turns to me and says: ‘You’re rather like Heathcliff.’
Me: (gratified) Really?
R: Yeah. Difficult, northern and a cunt.”
As we talk about the chance of his diary giving offence – a suggestion he rebuts – Bennett suddenly seems “unabashed”, happy to be funny, honest – and casually devastating. Perhaps, like many older people, he no longer cares.
Ageing is definitely on his mind. Does he think about dying ? “Yes,” he says, with a short laugh. “All the time. And the fact that there’s 30 years between me and Rupert means it’s not something I can talk about because it’s not fair on him.” A beat. “But it’s always there, yes.”
Nearly 20 years ago, Bennett had an operation for colon cancer during which his surgeon removed a “rock bun-sized” tumour. “I was very, very lucky”, he says now. “I never had any pain, but it was touch and go, though they didn’t tell me that till after.”
It’s a shock to remember, talking to him now, just how long Bennett has been a “much-loved” part of English cultural life. He was born in 1934 which makes him a contemporary with his friend Michael Frayn, Joe Orton, and the late Simon Gray, another dramatist-diarist whom he admires. (“I like his diaries better than his plays,” he says).
Does he fret about posterity and his posthumous reputation? “Not really. I don’t think I’m that kind of writer, and anyway I won’t be around, will I?” He pauses to reflect on the question. “I think some things will last. The story about the Queen [A novella, The Uncommon Reader, 2007], for instance. That might last, I suppose, but that’s really to do with the Queen.”
I wonder if HMQ has ever expressed any opinion about her role in his work, for example A Question of Attribution, his play about Anthony Blunt’s chance encounter with Her Majesty in the picture gallery of Buckingham Palace. Bennett finds this idea laughable. “Oh no, no – she’s got better things to do.” He goes on, “The nice thing is that The History Boys is taught at A-level, so it does have an afterlife. Sometimes when people come up to me, some kids are quite surprised that I’m still alive.”
Bennett’s own theatrical debut in Beyond the Fringe occurred in 1960, when Harold Macmillan was prime minister, and he occupies an odd position in British theatre. After Beyond the Fringe, it was some years before he returned with Forty Years On, and then more than two decades (and a few flops) before he struck gold with The Madness of George III. Some critics locate his masterpiece in his TV writing, notably Talking Heads. Is he a diarist or a playwright ?
“I’m a writer,” he replies, admitting that he has always seen himself as a performer, preferring the company of actors to writers. As a writer-performer, he prefers monologues, and began his stage career with a famous comic sermon. For years after Beyond the Fringe, he thought he would be a teacher or a clergyman, or possibly a librarian. He always knew he wanted to perform, but is less certain about writing. Ask him to define himself as a “playwright” and he will demur. “I’m a writer,” he replies. “I get embarrassed when they say ‘playwright, novelist and actor’. I’m not a novelist, and I’m not much of an actor.” Ask him about work in progress and he’ll tell you that his plays usually gestate in a four-year cycle. At the moment, he says: “I’ve started one, but haven’t got any further.”
In this vein, Bennett could win a Nobel prize for self-deprecation. Still both shy and an outsider, he’s a man with a terror of parties, who says he can easily feel his 16-year-old self returning. Even at 82, he doesn’t feel “any different”.
The phone rings at the other end of the room. Bennett, walking deliberately, goes to pick up. It’s his brother Gordon, three years his senior. Bennett politely explains that he has a visitor and can’t talk. As he resumes his seat by the fireplace, he says: “When we were young, we used to quarrel. We get on much better now. He’s really good. He wants nothing to do with show business, but he does come to see my plays.”
Gordon Bennett seems to share his younger brother’s reticence. Apropos the north-south gap between Leeds and Camden Town, Bennett volunteers: “I didn’t know how he would take to my being gay when Rupert turned up.”
“Surely, he knew you were gay ?”
“I don’t know whether he knew or not, but he never made any comment. We never discussed it.”
Bennett’s reticence, an indispensable part of being Somebody/Nobody, holds the key to his appeal. He is a very special kind of English writer who is beloved of a people who love literature, and its entertainments, but don’t want it thrust down their throats. They want honesty, but not the show-off, flashy kind that feels like self-promotion. His readers want to explore for themselves the life of an Englishman who could be a neighbour, savouring its austere satisfactions in private. Bennett will never break this unspoken contract, even though he will test it a bit, when he can. He is, after all, an English libertarian as well as a writer.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the dominant tone of Bennett’s recent work is valedictory. He has always harked back to an England where questions about class and sex were unspoken. At the same time, he identifies strongly with the common man, who is as good as anyone else. He believes in tolerance, fairness and fair play, while hating snobbery, pretension and privilege. He knows that preaching won’t get him anywhere, so he has perfected the art of being funny and affectionate about English life through which he has morphed into being a national somebody, a role he acknowledges, while sending it up.
As the nation watches Bennett on TV, how will he and his partner celebrate Christmas? “We’ll stay in London, and go to Rupert’s parents on Christmas Day. That will be the nearest thing to a family lunch.” He sounds quite happy to play the spouse, but the prospect of the meal seems faintly alarming. “I don’t much like turkey,” he admits, then brightens. “But I do like Christmas pudding, and we’ll go to Yorkshire after.” In a connection he cherishes, Bennett keeps his parents’ old home, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. With Rupert, he visits regularly on the train. “I’m the only non-resident in the village, but I’ve been going there for 50 years.”
How, then, did Yorkshire respond to his civil partnership? “The village…?” Bennett laughs. “Well, there are far more interesting things going on there than that…” He does not finish the sentence. “Rupert is more at home there now than I am really.”
Alan Bennett’s Diaries is on BBC2 on 24 December at 8pm, followed by The Lady in the Van
