(Faber/Profile, £20)
Alan Bennett is always telling us how hopeless he is. He goes to Oxford and gets a first in history. "I was a safe, plodding second," he writes. "I knew it and my college knew it too." He goes on to be a huge success with Beyond the Fringe. "In April 1961 we did a run-through of the show for the benefit of Donald Albery, the leading London manager of the time. He was far from certain that the show would be a success but of one thing he was convinced: 'The fair-haired one,' as he put it, 'will have to go.'"
This Eeyorish modesty is one reason for Bennett's popularity. His accessibility is another. His new collection, Untold Stories, begins with an image of himself as a boy at Christmas. "One of the presents I could generally count on," he writes, "was an annual." "So if I have a model book," he goes on, "it is not Jane Austen or Dickens or Evelyn Waugh; it is one of those long-forgotten annuals which lured you on from story to story through pictures and puzzles, a real box of delights." Right at the beginning, he reassures us, this isn't going to be too literary.
Similarly, Bennett has no time for pretension. Peter Brook, "the sage of the modern theatre," is accused of "taking himself too seriously," and when Isaiah Berlin dies, Bennett writes in his diary, "I've never understood… why he should have been held in such high intellectual esteem. His writing is windy and verbose."
Self-deprecating, funny, unpretentious: Bennett has all the English virtues. There was always more, however. From early on, he had a foot in two very different kinds of England. He had a perfect ear for the reticence and inhibitions of working-class life, especially in the north he grew up in. However, he had left Leeds for the south early on: 1950s Oxford, the west end, the BBC and the National Theatre. He both belonged and didn't belong to this new world. He wrote both as an outsider and insider.
This was not apparent in his early television dramas. Bennett belonged to the generation of northern writers, born in the 1930s, educated at grammar school, who took television drama by storm in the 1960s and 1970s: Keith Waterhouse, Jack Rosenthal, David Storey, Trevor Griffiths and Alan Plater. But it is Bennett who has made the biggest leap into other forms and subjects.
His career took off at the moment in the mid-1980s when he moved from these working-class television dramas (A Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, Intensive Care) to a series of plays about outsiders, or rather people who do and don't belong. An Englishman Abroad, his television play about Guy Burgess in exile in Moscow, was first shown in 1983. It was followed by plays about writers (Kafka, Proust), spies and homosexuals.
Besides these more self-consciously literary plays, Bennett also produced two other works which perfectly captured a very different kind of voice. The first was Talking Heads, a series of six television monologues for the BBC, set in a world far away from Burgess and Kafka. A Chip in the Sugar set the tone. Bennett himself played Graham, a mild middle-aged man living with his elderly mother. The play is set in his bedroom but he describes a world which increasingly came to be identified with Bennett, a world of disabled toilets, day centres, piles and bifocals, two-tone cardigans, vicars in anoraks and running shoes. The second was a documentary, Dinner at Noon, narrated by Bennett, observing the way people behaved in the genteel, respectable north. Instead of the seaside boarding houses of his early television plays, Bennett had moved upmarket, to the Crown Hotel, Harrogate. The perfect pitch, however, was the same.
By the early 1990s, Bennett had become a national institution. He adapted The Wind in the Willows for the National and the following year came The Madness of George III. One journalist described him as "the nation's teddy bear." Bennett, wrote Melvyn Bragg in the Sunday Times, "increasingly personifies the best of British." BBC2 showed A Night in with Alan Bennett. Then came his breakthrough book, Writing Home. Published in 1995, it sold over 200,000 copies in hardback and then around 300,000 in paperback. Two years later, he was offered, and rejected, a knighthood.
Interestingly, Bennett became popular for very different kinds of work. Plays about the timid and the inhibited and plays about the extrovert and exuberant; plays about ordinary northern people and about strange outsiders, spies and mad kings and Jewish writers. The more complicated his work became, the more everyone liked its plain, ordinary style. The darker the plays, the more he was hailed for his comic touch.
In the late 1990s, Bennett's work took another turn. He began to write a series of long pieces about his family. These have now been republished and make up the first 125 pages of Untold Stories. Bennett has always drawn upon his family in his writing. However, through these stories his family evolve beyond the timid, slightly comic northern working-class people of the earlier work. New, more troubling, stories emerge. Uncle Clarence, his mother's only brother, killed at Ypres; his grandfather's suicide; his mother's history of mental illness ("'What have you done to me, Walt?' she said. 'Nay, Lil,' he said and kissed her hand… Mam and Dad was what my brother and I called them and what they called each other, their names kept for best. Or worst."); his father's awful childhood, losing his mother at five, then brought up by a "vicious" stepmother and sent out to work as a butcher at 11; and the sad decline of his two aunts, Myra and Kathleen.
Suicide and mental illness are not the only subjects in these stories. They allow Bennett to talk about silence and absence: photographs that should be on the family dresser but are not, the church wedding that never was, the contact of hands and eyes and lips that doesn't happen, words unspoken. Untold stories, unlived lives.
These stories are part of Bennett's larger project, which goes back to the first television plays for the BBC and LWT and culminated in his two series of Talking Heads monologues: How to make reticence speak? How to convey the inner world of the inhibited? It is possible to trace a journey in Bennett's writing from drama (Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf) to monologues (Talking Heads and Telling Tales), to Bennett himself, writing about his family in the first person.
Throughout these family pieces it is Bennett who speaks—"confidently," "without doubt or hesitation." His parents, by contrast, are silent, "nervous and tongue-tied," "mute with misery." Throughout his writings about the north, it is hard to find families in which everyone talks together. Either the parents are silent, inarticulate and uneducated and Bennett speaks, as in these Untold Stories. Or the son is hopelessly timid and inarticulate, overwhelmed by his unstoppably garrulous female relatives.
This is so realistically depicted that it is easy to forget that it may not be true. At one point he writes: "Left out of this account are all their jokes and fun, the pleasure they got out of life and their sheer silliness." Why left out? This is part of what Bennett does with his mythic "north" and "south." The north, for Bennett, is a place of repression and inhibition, of a failure to come alive ("Mam, I'm nothing, Mam"). Down south is different. "I was reluctant to be away from London even for a night," he writes in Untold Stories, "because I was having a nice time… I was 'living' as one of the characters in another play describes it."
Part of his subject is the movement between lonely individuals and institutions—schools, hospitals, old people's homes, intensive care units. On the other hand are those exuberant figures who fascinate Bennett. Extroverts like George III ("what, what") and Miss Shepherd, the lady in the van, or cheekie chappies like Burgess and Toad and southern comedians like Max Miller. Which is Bennett? Obviously, on the side of the shy and reticent, a late developer physically and as a writer. But, of course, it is not so simple. He is shy and reticent, but the kind of shy person who publishes his diaries (almost 200 pages in Untold Stories, 180 pages in Writing Home), who performs on stage and appears on television. It is a complicated kind of timidity.
The timidity and these personal stories give Untold Stories part of its melancholy. However, there is something else, a more general sense of loss. There is the lost past of mid-20th century northern working-class life. Musical evenings at home are described as "the last throes of a tradition." He recalls the lost world of northern variety hall comedians and panto dames. Thora Hird was formed by a "now vanished world."
Everywhere, in the background, the past is being literally demolished. He finds himself filming outside the gates of the cemetery where his grandparents are buried. He looks for their graves but "the cemetery has long since been filled up and subsequently landscaped." Other churches have become "carpet warehouses, second-hand furniture marts and, nowadays health clubs." His old grammar school "is about to be demolished." Writing about Larkin, in a piece called "England Gone," Bennett points out that "to list Larkin's poetic locations is to realise now, less than two decades after his death, how diminished is the England he wrote about."
So, too, is much of Bennett's childhood world. Part of the book is a rearguard action on behalf of the institutions and values that formed him: the grammar school, the BBC, free art galleries and museums, public libraries, the NHS and old universities. All, he implies, are gone, changed or under threat. Visiting Leeds city art gallery, he speaks of "the paintings I saw here, the books I read next door, the music I heard over the road, or the education I had up at Lawnswood."
This is in many ways a conservative lament for old England—torn apart by city developers, ravaged by Thatcherism, replaced by the common and yobbish. "It would do as a definition of what's gone wrong with England in the last 20 years that it's got more common."
He watches the cult of Diana in disbelief. The England he belongs to is very different. His diary entries are full of references to Elgar and AE Housman. At times, he sounds like Burgess or Blunt—an Englishman cut off from his past.
This sense of being both an outsider and an insider has always run through Bennett's work. It was there in his first satires, in his interest in spies and homosexuals. He contrasted this with the worlds he felt he knew and belonged to: the working-class northern communities of his early television plays, the old England of The Wind in the Willows and the curiously imprecise grammar school world of The History Boys. In Untold Stories he has brought these worlds together, in a different voice, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac but more often melancholy—expressing that familiar modern ambivalence about roots, places of both repression and belonging.
This book has already been widely praised. It will be a bestseller, like Writing Home ten years ago. But like Bennett's persona, the book is deceptive; it seems so personal and open, it is easy to miss what is oblique and complicated. Either way, these tales of madness and old age, of social change and loss, will confirm Bennett as one of the great modern British writers.
