newcritics

Coming back from Dublin a few weeks ago, I had several books with me, but found myself immersed, virtually the whole trip, in Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories — a smorgasbord of memoir, diaries, lectures and other writings that the playwright published in 2005, and that I have been meaning to read for a while. What I most enjoyed is his diary, covering 1996-2004, excerpts of which are published annually in the London Review of Books.

Keeping a diary with the idea that it will see print before a year is out is more like a time-release blog, I think, and must affect the diarist’s candor. So be it. I love Bennett’s wit and the range of his interests, as well as his apparent politics.

May 31, 1997

Ran into Edmund White, who tells me what a revelation Beyond the Fringe (the review Bennett was in with Peter Cook , Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore) was when he saw it in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: “Were you one of the original four?”

I wonder whether there were any shy, retiring Apostles: “Were you one of the original twelve?”

January 13, 2002

The canonisation of Dame Iris (Murdoch) proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on Omnibus extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation made Max Clifford (Britain’s best-known p.r. agent) seem timid and retiring.

One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once it is shot, it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s by, among other things, asking Dame Iris to recall which of her many books won the Booker Prize. This was The Sea, The Sea, the winner in 1978, a triumph the ailing author could not recall, but since the Booker Prize in 1978 was not the over-publicised proto-Oscars it tries to be today, this is hardly surprising. Still, that an artist’s state of mind should be assessed by his or her recollection of awards adds a new terror to success. The test used to be recalling the name of the prime minister or counting backwards from 10 to 1. Now it’s whether you can remember winning the Evening Standard award or something similar at BAFTA. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats.”

I realized reading Bennett’s diaries that journals — sometimes published posthumously (as in the case of Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Tynan) and sometimes not too long after they were written (as in the case, besides Bennett, of Alec Guinness and former Tory Minister Alan Clark, to name some of my favorites) — give me, word for word, as much pleasure as any other form of writing. An interesting facet of Bennett’s diaries is that all three of the other British writers make various appearances in his own journals.

I happened to pick up a used copy of Tynan’s diaries at a book fair some months ago — I had read whatever was excerpted in the New Yorker a few years back — and derived a bit of wicked pleasure from his wicked comments and hedonistic quests. I won’t reproduce the May 5, 1974 account of how he tried what he read about in Alan Watts’ autobiography — that alcohol is best taken rectally instead of orally — for fear that I will run afoul of every spam filter and shut my blog down. Suffice it to say, don’t try that at home: “within ten minutes,” Tynan writes, “the agony is indescribable,,” and continues for the next 48 hours.

Alan Clark doesn’t come off too well by Bennett. One entry notes that Clark was in the media (this is October 1998) commenting on the arrest of Pinochet for his “alleged” crimes. Bennett goes on: “He is careful to refer to them as ‘alleged,’ probably because he didn’t actually hear the screams of the tortured himself….[Clark has] that built-in characteristic of eighties Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake.” Ouch. And this, upon Clark’s death the next year:

“Alan Clark dies. I never met him, though I saw him once in the street, noting that he shared a walk with Denis Healey, both of them swinging their arms laterally as they walked in the manner of Soviet soldiery. Except I fancy Clark swung his arms more slowly than Healey, this putting him ina slightly King of the Apes mode.”

But don’t pass up Clark’s diaries just because of his gait and proto-Fascist tendencies. In addition to his hypochondria and extracurricular activities (”I returned by the back route, and saw that the dear little chestnut-wood Chalet where that Belgian cutie (how shameful to have forgotten her name) had digs in the winter of ‘56 — ‘pourquoi que to me prends…’, all that….”), they are perhaps the most candid accounts I’ve read from inside a government, and his bureaucratic slights and advances are lots of fun to read. During the first Gulf War:

“I have been in a vile mood all day, and beastly to Jane [his wife].

This fucking Saddam ting has given the AF side of the Dept a renewed raison d’etre. A war to fight! Whee-ee. As a result everything has gone on hold, the Consolidated Fund ‘tap’ is unlocked — buy anything, order anything. All great fun, but I sense that those who are opposed to me and what I am trying to do are in the ascendant.”

Sounds familiar.

Alec Guinness, no hedonist, makes a number of appearances, including this one, written after his death in 2000:

“I saw Alec Guinness two days before he died. Though the papers say he had been ill for some time he had not been seriously incommoded until the last few weeks and had no notion he was dying. Almost the last thing he said to me as I was going was to ask where I was getting the train.

‘Petersfield.’

‘Liss is better. It takes ten minutes off the journey.’

This bending you to his will, gently though he did it, was entirely characteristic and the way he had always been, particularly on the hundreds of occasions he took me out to supper.

‘What are you having?’ he would ask.

‘I thought I’d try the bream.’

‘Oh, the bream? Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I rather fancied some fish.’

‘Sure you don’t want the lamb? It’s very good here.’

I hesitate.

‘No, I think I’d prefer the bream.’

‘Would you? Oh.’

He seemed disappointed so I would relent.

‘Oh, all right. I’ll have the lamb.’

‘You don’t have to. Have the bream by all means.’”

Again, no reason to let Guinness’s fussy controlling qualities deprive you of his diaries, also published during his lifetime, in the Spectator. Lots of reminiscences and observations about the quiet rural life. And here and there, in 1997, Alan Bennett makes an appearance: at one of their hundreds of meals, this time in a noisy “posh new restaurant,” where Bennett had come from a lecture at the National Gallery “but I couldn’t make out by whom or about what. All rather frustrating; but I expect the yuppies did their deals successfully.” And then in a postcard from Baden-Baden, where Bennett wishes Guinness and his wife a “gooden-gooden” time.

As indeed all these published reflections afford.