Alan Bennett’s Journey Home

Alan Bennett’s books come in three sizes: large and fat, tall and slim, or squat and thin. His three volumes in the first category - Writing Home (1994), Untold Stories (2005) and Keeping On Keeping On (2016; hereafter KOKO) – between them number over 1,900 pages. His plays, as published individually, are tall and slim; of those on my shelf, only The History Boys (2004) exceeds 100 pages. We usually associate slim volumes with poetry, none slimmer than Philip Larkin’s. Bennett, it’s no secret, is a great fan of Larkin. In the Introduction to KOKO, he tells the reader that when trying to think of a title for his new book, he picked up The Whitsun Weddings (1964; 43 pages), but was at once discouraged:

‘at eighty-one I’m still trying to avoid the valedictory note which was a problem Larkin never had, the valedictory almost his exclusive territory.’ 

 

Understandably for someone who will be ninety in two years’ time, there is something valedictory about Bennett’s latest book, House Arrest (2022), which definitely comes into my third category, squat and thin: it has only forty-nine pages and slips easily into one’s pocket. (I have been carrying it around and re-reading it for the past two weeks; if it was the one book I could take to my desert island, there’s a fair chance I might learn it all by heart.) House Arrest is subtitled ‘Pandemic Diaries’ and a monochrome painting by Jon McNaughton of Alan Bennett’s desk and study window prefaces the diary entries. It shows a room in deep shadow, the window blind lowered, the desk lamp off and the desk chair displaced by a low table. Desk and table are covered by neat stacks of papers and books, as if someone has had to come and tidy up the sheets of work(s) in progress that will now never be completed. A half-typed page sits inconclusively in the typewriter. 

 

Facing this frontispiece is an epigraph from ‘Staring out of the Window’ (2001), an essay in which Bennet suggests that the work for which writers really deserve recognition should be the endless time spent staring out of the window, searching for something to say or struggling for a better way to say it. Bennett sums up the argument of that essay, whose title perhaps nods towards Larkin’s High Windows (1974; 42 pages), thus:

 

The real mark of recognition for a writer or any artist, perhaps, comes when the public wants him or her to die, so that they can close the book on that particular talent, stop having to make the effort to follow the writer any further, put a cork in the bottle.

 

Now, in House Arrest, he condenses that idea dramatically:

 

4 September (2020): What your work does is ‘tell people you’ve been alive.’ Lucian Freud.

 

Bennett is still very much alive, though suffering these days from arthritis and no longer able to ride his bike. Happily, he finds the pandemic and the prospect of ‘static semi-isolation scarcely a hardship or even a disruption to my routine’. Indeed, he faces the indefinite sentence of house arrest with complete equanimity. Reflecting on the new threat of Covid, he recalls that when he was a child fear of catching TB was the major anxiety: his mother’s determination that he should always keep his neck warm is the reason why, to this day, he is never without a tie. Clothes feature frequently in his diary entries: his mother’s ‘swagger coat’; his father’s two suits (both navy blue, one for best and the other worn every day in the butcher’s shop); army civvies, ‘ill-fitting, itchy and unbecoming’. He is shocked to see the Queen now wearing protective gauntlets instead of her traditional white gloves and dreads the thought  she might next appear in full PPE. 

 

Hands and hand washing, appropriately, feature too. Recalling how his mother was ‘Always one to diddle her hands under the tap,’ he comments that she would ‘have found the precautions against the coronavirus only common sense.’ On Good Friday he notes that ‘this year Pontius Pilate is not the only one washing his hands’. He admits he’s never much liked his own hands; now, ‘much washed’, they appal him: ‘shiny, veinous and as transparent as an anatomical illustration.’ 

 

I did not know how much junk shops mattered to him – ‘Lures they were in the sixties, junk shops’ – and he has fond memories of Mrs. Hill’s kitchen shop in Kirby Stephen, which (as he has previously explained in KOKO) sold ‘what these days is dignified by the name of kitchenalia’. Bennett has had a lifelong affection for marginalia, real and metaphorical, and you can sense his contempt for this undignified neologistic noun. Later, he is dismayed to find that a second-hand bookshop in Settle (‘a lovely shop full of unexpected treasures and absurdly cheap’) has closed for good, not just for Covid. The sense of loss, of times and places irrecoverable, of people much missed, runs insistently through this little book.

 

No less insistent is the idea of home. Bennett describes himself, accurately, as a ‘denizen’  (an outsider who becomes a resident) of London for most of his writing life, and records with no small pleasure the discovery that a fellow diarist, the Rev Francis Kilvert, once visited 23 Gloucester Crescent, previously Bennett’s own house. But it’s Yorkshire, of course, that is really home, and House Arrest ends with lockdown lifted and Bennett heading north at last. His route from Leeds across Wharfedale and up almost across the Pennines is one I know well: Spen Lane, Otley Road, Ben Rhydding, Ilkley, Bolton Abbey, Skipton and on. And now, after reading his Pandemic Diaries, I shall always imagine Alan Bennett not as actor, man of letters or national treasure but, improbably, as a ‘soldier on Coronation leave in 1953’ clambering up Ingleborough, one of the Yorkshire Three Peaks. Looking down, he can see the village  below to which his parents retired in the 1960s and which, ever since, has been his true home too.

 

© Adrian Barlow

 

Illustrations: (i) Alan Bennett’s new book, House Arrest, published 2022, alongside a work by the ceramic artist Janine Roper; (ii) the epigraph and frontispiece of House Arrest. 

Phototographs © the author.

I have written before about Alan Bennett: 

‘So teach us to number our days': diaries and diarists

Alan Bennett  and Tennyson in Poets' Corner

‘So Teach us to Number our Days’: diaries & diarists

At the year’s end it’s always a pleasure to read the latest excerpts from Alan Bennett’s dairy, published annually in the London Review of Books. There are things one always looks out for – name dropping, for instance. 2017 is a vintage year: Bennett begins with ‘Tony Snowden and Princess Margaret’ and ends with ‘the (much missed) Debo, Duchess of Devonshire’.  In between come Gielgud and Guinness, Derek Jarman and Patrick Garland, Cecil Beaton and Coral Browne – a veritable dramatis personae.

Bennett is surely the Eeyore of modern letters. He notes with equal resignation and pleasure that The Oldie has called him ‘trademark lugubrious’, but at the same time he can be endearingly funny. Reading in bed one night he contrives to fall asleep ‘with a very uncomfortable bunch of keys in my pyjama pocket’, the consequences of this left to the reader’s wincing imagination.

I enjoy spotting Bennett’s other trademark: his habit of ending sentences with an added, abbreviated, comment – abbreviated because the author has left out the verb one would expect to find there. Here are two examples from 2017:

(9^th June, about Theresa May): Notable that she keeps referring to ‘our country’ whereas an ordinary person as distinct from a politician would say ‘this country’ – ‘our’ paradoxically not an inclusive term.’

(29^th August, in Paris): ‘We go into a creperie opposite the St Germain covered market hoping for some tea, in the window a solitary piece of cake.’

What is missing from these examples is the active voice. I used to assume that this was just a form of diarist’s shorthand, thoughts and observations tagged on rather than incorporated into the sentence. But it crops up in different contexts too – in The History Boys (2004) for instance – where Hector is arguing with his VIth Form students about how to write an Oxbridge entrance essay on the Holocaust. ‘Why can’t you simply condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?’ he asks. Lockwood cockily replies:

‘No point, sir. Everybody will do that. That’s the stock answer, sir …  the camps an event unlike any other, the evil unprecedented, etc., etc.’

Here Lockwood uses the Bennett ellipsis quite appropriately, as if reeling off headings for an essay. But Hector replies:

‘No. Can’t you see that even to say etcetera is monstrous? Etcetera is what the Nazis would have said, the dead reduced to a mere verbal abbreviation.’

‘Mere verbal abbreviation’ defines Bennett’s literary mannerism precisely, if inadvertently. But it’s when this ellipsis finds its way into the speech of other characters – albeit one such as Hector, in many ways a mouthpiece for Bennett himself – that I start to ask whether what began as diarist’s shorthand isn’t showing signs of repetitive strain. Might Hector’s denunciation not have been stronger if he’d actively condemned the Nazis for reducing the dead to an etcetera?

I have spent a lot of time with diaries recently. While writing my book on Charles Eamer Kempe* I have had access to the diary of Wyndham Hughes, a fine but forgotten artist, who was Kempe’s leading draughtsman during the 1870s. Hughes was a lifelong diarist, each volume prefaced with ‘The record of our days and years’ or ‘So teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom’ (Psalm 90). For me, his diary has been invaluable, describing his friendship with Kempe, listing many of his key commissions (previously unidentified) and sometimes containing precious ephemera slipped between the pages – this 1876 letter, for instance:

My dear Hughes

Thanks for the drawing which I hope, (& think it aught) will pass the Royal Critic. I think I should take with me in the morning the former drawing (charcoal) to remind H.R.H. of the architect[ural] background &c – as well as to show the changes in the figure. The Child is very successful now. Could you bring me the old drawing by 9.15. I have to be at the Palace by 10.

 Yours, C.E.K

This never-before-seen letter refers to the most significant commission Hughes ever undertook for Kempe: a memorial window for Queen Victoria’s grandson.^‡ The window established a friendship between Kempe and the Royal Family, his reputation thereby greatly enhanced. To find such a letter, in such a diary, is one of a biographer’s rewards.

The other diary I’ve been reading recently is my grandfather’s. Edward Barlow, a Baptist minister, was not a diarist by habit; however, in 1917 he went to France as a YMCA padre and kept a diary of the two most remarkable years of his life. Working in a transit camp near Rouen, he met and recorded conversations with ordinary soldiers on their way to the Front. Here is one such encounter, from 100 years ago today: 1st January 1918:

A draft of men from the Camp for Base missed their train by 30 mins. & consequently had a long wait in our Hut. One spoke to me in great trouble about his home in a colliery village (Northumberland). He showed me a letter from his wife’s mother which he received last Friday saying that his wife was going out with another man & cared no more for him than she did for her. The children had for a time been with her mother but now they were taken off by a black woman. His wife had gone to the dogs & was a disgrace to them. She hadn’t got any money but wasted it on dressing herself like a fairy & going with the man in the evenings to picture houses and the theatre.

The man was greatly upset & said he would try to get home without anyone knowing it & catch his wife with the man. It would pay the man to keep out of his way & he would get his wife, who was in munitions, out of the town. She was 29.

My grandfather never revealed that he had kept this diary; my father found it among his papers after his death, and I have it now.

Adrian Barlow

* Kempe: the life, art and legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe will be published by Lutterworth Press in Summer 2018. Further details to follow in due course.

^‡Prince Friedrich (Frittie) von Hessen-Darmstadt (1870-1873) was the second son of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, wife of the Grand Duke of Darmstadt and Hesse. A haemophiliac, Frittie was the first of Victoria’s grandchildren to die. He was buried in the Neues Mausoleum at Rosenhöhe, on the outskirts of Darmstadt, and it was for the window in the mausoleum that Kempe was commissioned to produce the stained glass designed by Wyndham Hughes. The commission was brokered by Alice’s brother, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and he is the ‘Royal Critic’ referred to by Kempe in his letter to Hughes.

Illustrations] (i) Alan Bennett (National Theatre); (ii) Window (1877), designed by Wyndham Hope Hughes for the Royal Mausoleum in Darmstadt. The image of the child is a likeness of Prince Friedrich. (iii) Edward Barlow’s Diary for 1918, while serving with the YMCA at No. 11 Convalescent Depot, Buchy (Nr. Rouen).   Photos (ii) and (iii) © author

Alan Bennett and Tennyson in Poets' Corner

Poets’ Corner seems to be popular this month. The Times Literary Supplement has just published a provocative item suggesting we have simply forgotten many of the writers commemorated there. ‘How many visitors to Poets’ Corner today,’ asks NB, the back-page columnist of the TLS, ‘recognise the name of Thomas Shadwell, whose monument was raised circa 1700?’ Well, as it happens, I do. Shadwell has a cameo appearance in Dyden’s Dunciad, and I memorised the following couplet for my finals, hoping it might come in useful—as at last it has done:

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

            But Sh——— never deviates into sense.

Meanwhile The London Review of Books has been publishing extracts from Alan Bennett’s diary of the past twelve months. Last September, we now learn, Bennett was recalling a conversation he had had in 1995 with the then Dean of Westminster Abbey, Michael Mayne. The Dean had asked Bennett (who at the time was making a documentary about the Abbey for the BBC) whether he thought Philip Larkin and J.B. Priestley deserved to be commemorated in Poets’ Corner. Bennett admits that while he considered Larkin ‘an obvious yes on the strength of Church Going, let alone the rest’, he’d been lukewarm about Priestley. Today Priestley still isn’t there, and no doubt has now missed his chance—about which Bennett confesses he is filled ‘with regret and self-reproach’.

Deciding Abbey business in an informal way that has irreversible consequences echoes a letter sent by an earlier Dean, George Granville Bradley, to Charles Eamer Kempe, the celebrated stained glass designer, in March 1894:

My dear Kempe

   You see I treat you as an old Rugbeian & dock you of the ‘Mr’!

   I am sure that I may privately ask your opinion on a matter in which I rather distrust my own judgment - & Somers Clark, whom I sometimes surreptitiously consult is away.

   We are laying down a gravestone over Tennyson.

   It is to be very simple  - black Irish marble.

   I thought a plain cross

                                   +  †

Then the name

      Alfred

Lord Tennyson

born August &c

died October &c

& just a wreath of laurels below.

  

   Lady T rather likes to have the laurel wreath on the +. but wd not that suggest to the ordinary mind the couronne d’epines [crown of thorns] rather than the laureate ship?

   I told her that I should take some good counsellor’s opinion.

   It will be of course in a much trodden part of Poets’ Corner i.e. the S transept close to Chaucer’s monument.

   I should much value a hint from you & I am sure that you will forgive me.

   Mr Pearson has been very ill – is better; but still poorly. I may see him on Wednesday & it wd be a comfort to have my own views strengthened by a better guide than myself.

   I shall not leave here till after post comes in on Wednesday morning – unless something unforeseen happens. I’ve no vehicle or wd. drive down.

   Forgive me.

   Very truly yours

   G G Bradley

Dean Bradley (1821-1903) was an interesting character. Like Kempe, he had been educated at Rugby, and had returned to teach there while Kempe was a pupil. He later became Headmaster of Marlborough, then Master of University College, Oxford, and was finally appointed Dean of Westminster in 1881. Up to that point he had been best known for his revised version of a school textbook on Latin Prose Composition, always referred to as ‘Bradley’s Arnold’. Hence, when his appointment was announced in the press, Punch published a caricature, showing Bradley as a butterfly rising above what looks like a church with a mortar board atop its steeple, but actually has the name Marlborough just legible on its roof. Bradley had a reputation as a progressive and reforming Headmaster, but on the ground lies a bundle of birch twigs wrapped around with a piece of cloth on which appears the word CHRYSALIS. The caption, punning both on his notoriety among schoolboys – his name a metonym for enforced translation of passages from English into Latin – and on his elevation to the deanery at Westminster, echoes Peter Quince’s astonishment at seeing Bottom the weaver transformed into an ass: ‘BLESS THEE! THOU ART TRANSLATED!’

Bradley and Tennyson had been a two-man mutual admiration society: when the poet sent his son Hallam to Marlborough, he declared that he had sent him ‘not to Marlborough but to Bradley’. Bradley for his part returned the compliment by naming his daughter Emily Tennyson Bradley. So it isn’t surprising that he took such a personal interest in designing an appropriate memorial to go over the resting place of Queen Victoria’s favourite poet.

His letter to Kempe is revealing. When he cheerfully admits that he sometimes consults the architect and Egyptologist Somers Clarke surreptitiously, he opens up a world of Cathedral intrigue recognizable to anyone who has read Trollope’s Barchester novels. The logical person to have advised the Dean was the Abbey’s Surveyor of the Fabric.  In 1894 this was John Loughborough Pearson, but he – as the letter explains – had been seriously ill. But even with Pearson indisposed and Somers Clarke away, Bradley might have consulted his friend, the architect George Frederick Bodley. After all, it was Bradley who had brought in Bodley at University College to build a new Master’s Lodging (1879); and when Pearson died three years later, it was Bodley whom Bradley appointed to succeed him. But perhaps it was from previous dealings with Bodley and Pearson that Bradley had discovered it was useful to have a second, discreet, architectural ear to bend when occasion required – as here, in the matter of Tennyson’s tomb. Perhaps, too, he was being cautious in case Bodley suggested a wholly different (and much more elaborate) design; he had already designed a fine memorial brass tombstone in the Abbey for the architect George Edmund Street, who had died in 1881. Whatever the reason, the opening and closing sentences of his letter suggest this was the first time Bradley had consulted Kempe confidentially on a question of religious symbolism.

Attached to the letter, in the Kempe Trust archives, is a small pencil sketch on a torn-off piece of Whatman’s fine wove Original Turkey Mill paper. The sketch is in Kempe’s own hand, and shows two ideas for an appropriate Poets’ Corner tombstone. While both develop the Dean’s original idea of a cross and a laurel wreath, neither incorporates the stricken widow’s wish for a wreath to be placed over the cross. How Kempe replied and whether he even sent any sketches to Westminster is not known; but in any case Tennyson’s memorial stone, as seen today, displays no cross, and no wreath, just name and dates. The final decision seems to have been a compromise of a peculiarly Anglican kind. Neither Dean nor widow got their way – and all were satisfied.

Adrian Barlow

[Notes:

·      For the discussion of Poets’ Corner, see J.C., NB, TLS 22.1.16, p.32

·      Alan Bennett recalls his conversation with the Dean in his diary for 2015, now published in the London Review of Books, vol.38, no. 1 (7 January 2016) p.6

·      Tennyson’s tombstone can be seen in an extract from Bennett’s documentary about Westminster Abbey here, on YouTube.

·      Tennyson’s comment about sending his son to Bradley not to Marlborough is quoted in Niall Hamilton, A History of the Chapel of St. Michael and All Angels, Marlborough College, Wiltshire, (1986), p.17

[illustrations: (i) The Punch cartoon (Vol. 81, 1 October 1881, p.154), drawn by Linley Sambourne; (ii) inside pages of Bradley’s letter to Kempe (31.3.1894); (iii) Kempe’s pencil sketches for Tennyson’s tombstone (1894). Illustrations (ii) and (iii) © Kempe Trust.

I first published a shorter version of this post, entitled ‘Kempe and the Case of Tennyson’s Tomb’, on the Kempe Trust website.

I have written about Westminster Abbey twice before:

World and time: pity about the Abbey

On Boadicea, William Cowper and Westminster Abbey