Seven hundred or so pages containing 10 years of a diary, two scripts, also essays, eulogies, lectures… You could call this book a bumper bonanza bargain, except it’s the work of Alan Bennett, so such over-the-top adjectives feel inappropriate. Bennett’s reputation is for wryness, modesty, pointed but unshowy observation. Thwartedness, also: ambitions unfulfilled, passions fumbled. Nothing grandiose or overheated. It would take a braver critic than I to sully his image. Ostentation is not Bennett’s style.
His diaries are true to this, though from time to time he insists that he would like to shake things up. “I am in the pigeonhole marked ‘no threat’ and were I to stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear,” he writes at the end of 2005. He worries that his work – that he – is considered cosy. Discussing the scene in The History Boys where sixth-former Dakin seduces Irwin, his teacher, Bennett remarks that “where sex is concerned directors think I’m not that sort of writer… and so don’t entirely trust what I’ve written”. What to do? Actually, he’s written about sex quite a bit –the short book, Smut, written during the timescale of these diaries, consists of “two unseemly stories” – but his sex is always realistic and within character, whether repressed, comic, or vicious. There is no sex at all in these diaries and not much lust, carnal or otherwise. About the cast of The History Boys he comments that they “play football against the playground wall with an openness and abandon I have never managed in all my life”.
This inhibition is a recurring theme; sometimes he regrets it, sometimes it’s embraced. But we would be wrong to deem Bennett a teddy bear. There is righteous anger here. He writes excoriatingly about Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt, Rupert Murdoch. He is appalled by the Met’s shooting of “Mr de Menezes”. He calls Margaret Thatcher “a mirthless bully”, who “should have been buried, as once upon a time monarchs used to be, in the dead of night”. In 2015, a couple of days after the general election, he is upset by a woman who says casually to him that all politicians are the same. “I hear myself as very rarely shouting at the top of my voice, ‘No, they are not all the same. This lot are self-seeking liars, the cabinet included, and we’re landed with them for another five years.’” He mentions that if he were a member of the Labour party, he would vote for Jeremy Corbyn, “if only out of hope that the better part of salvation lies not in electoral calculation but the aspirations of the people”.
Tolerant of flaws in people who deserve tolerance, he sees the humanity in traitors, the brutality of the elite. He does not really like the police (a dislike that proves wholly reasonable when he is robbed in the street. He reports it and the police immediately inform the Daily Mail). He loathes public schools. He loves libraries. None of this is surprising, really, but is it cosy? I think not. If we find Alan Bennett comforting, the comfort comes partly from his morals, which are robust and uncosy, though of another age.
Unlike some writers, Bennett doesn’t give much away about what the loftier might call his “process”. Occasionally, there is a mention of too many notes taken, too much actual writing. He gives away boxes and boxes of his unpublished prose to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He does note the odd structural breakthrough and points out flaws in his earlier work, but pointedly he also says this: “Writers feel threatened by biography, their lives as they see it are what they have put in the shop window, the rest – what’s in the back place – their business.” Not all of Bennett’s life is on display or for sale, even in his diaries. He withholds, he edits. He knows what he is doing.
(Actually, I assume that this is not merely due to self-preservation. A polite man, Bennett must also be motivated by good manners. He doesn’t want to bore his readers with a long list of aches and pains, of tedious medical work, of the arguments he must surely occasionally have with Rupert, his partner. At one point he has a seven-hour operation, but restricts himself to commenting on the nurses’ uniforms. He mentions his deafness, but mostly for the consequent misunderstanding and jokes.)
He is funny, sometimes screamingly so. Some of the diary entries are short, just gags really, shafts of light to leaven the everyday. “In Dorset, passing a signpost: ‘That’s where Hardy’s buried.’ ‘Really?’ Pause. ‘Laurel’s in Ulverston.’” “I wouldn’t want to be as bald as that. You’d never know when to stop washing your face.” “We are in the car when a pretty girl crosses too slowly. If I’d been bold (or insane) I’d have wound the window down and said ‘Listen. We’re nancies. Big tits mean nothing to us.’”
Although it’s his diaries that make up most of this book, Bennett’s other works aren’t afterthoughts. They represent just a small part of what he has been up to, aside from his diligent diarising, his regular articles for the London Review of Books, his books and his plays (during this decade alone: The Uncommon Reader, Smut, The Habit of Art, People, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks). Bennett is prolific, but never sloppy. His sentences are always beautiful. So we have a short entry covering the making of the film of The History Boys, the introduction to The Habit of Art (which I loved) and other plays. The two screenplays included are Denmark Hill, a radio play written in 1972 and performed on Radio 4 in 2014, and an old film script, The Hand of God. The latter is quite bonkers really, an art whodunnit, an examination of class that also says (as in The Habit of Art) that it’s the art that matters, that the characters are just barrow boys moving it around. There is, you note, a bit of bedroom shenanigans.
This book is a pleasure, though, yes, a temperate one. Is it strange to read such even-tempered diaries? If there’s no sex, do we desire more action? Bennett’s life is not commonplace – too many famous friends and invitations to speak at venerable institutions – but it isn’t dramatic. He and Rupert go to Yorkshire a lot. They walk around churches and National Trust properties. They have their sandwiches in scenic spots. He goes into detail – a bit too much detail for me, though other readers may well love it – about medieval glass, church pews, alabaster monuments.
Deaths occur: he is mostly unsentimental. His ex-lover, Anne Davies, dies (he refers to her as “my friend”), but he says little, other than to commend her son’s impromptu speech. At such times, his reticence can seem chilly, though he is kind about Anne at other moments and earlier makes the quiet point about her that “the highest form of courage there is, it seems to me, to take away the burden of concern from friends and family… so that they can go away feeling better about you”. You have a strong sense, sometimes, that he is doing the same.
In short, then, don’t read this enormous tome for thrills. This is a life being lived, some of it privately, and we all know what life can be like. Same-same, routine, ordinary. But there is a joy in gentleness, in emotions kept in check, in kindness and domesticity, in nature, in history, in hilarious detail. Bennett knows his age (81 in 2015) and he knows what this means. He is keeping on keeping on – with his writing, his particular way of going about things, his non-stabbing of Judi Dench – because that is what he does. Long may it continue.
Keeping on Keeping on is published by Profile (£25). Click here to buy it for £20.50
