Alan Bennett on libraries, Primrose Hill Lecture 2011

I hope you can all hear if you can't hear just shout out but anyway I've always been happy in libraries though without ever being entirely at ease there a scene that seems to crop up regularly in the place that I've written has a character often a young man standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled he and occasionally she is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground still to be covered how shall I ever catch up wails the young Joe Olin in the film script of prick up your ears and in the stage play the old country another young man reacts more dramatically by hurling the books to the floor Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself this resentment which was I suppose somewhere mine had to do with feeling shut out a library I used to feel was like a cocktail party with everyone everybody standing with their back to me I could not find a way in the first library I did find my way into was the Army Public Library in leaves and I nearly called this talk cuttings for the library because that was what a readers ticket cost in 1940 not tops a time or even Thomas a year but just chums that was all you ever had to pay it was rather a distinguished building Art Nouveau built in 1901 one the architect Percy Robinson an amazingly four leads which is even always has been Demolition crazy it survives and he still used as a library though whether it will survive the present troubles I don't like to think the library was at the bottom of Hall Lane in armed the entrance of a flight of marble steps on the open arches and through Brass Rail spring the swing doors and our family my dad my mom and my brother who was three years older than I am and me would be there going to the library together and I suppose I ought to say before this how I'd learned to read I my brother and I both used to read comics and I was still on dandy and be no picture based comics and he had graduated to text-based comics like Hotspur and wizard and when I'd read my comics I'd lie on the carpet beside him looking at what he was reading and asking him questions about it and doubtless being a real pest and then and it's maybe telescoped in my mind but in my mind suddenly one day it began to make sense and I realized I I could read I was slow at it but I I could make out what he was what he was reading now this was fine but there were no children's books in the house there were the books that there were were things like do-it-yourself manuals really and everybody's home doctor was one of them but that were very there were no books for children my mother and father were both readers but they tended to too like books about escape really they both an escaped from Leeds particularly they my father had a notion of leaving his job and starting a small holding and that they read books about people who did that the only book I can remember them actually having was a book called I haven't unpacked by William Howe and this was a book about somebody from Yorkshire who who had bought a horse and left his job and just traveled the country with the horse and wrote a book about him and I think I've still got it somewhere at home but anyway there we are about to go into the Army Public Library and my mum and dad go straight ahead into the adult section which is light and airy and inviting and my brother and I turn right and go into the junior library which was not inviting at all a low dark room made darker by the books whatever their contents had been bound in heavy boards of black brown or maroon embossed with the stamp of Leeds public libraries this grim packaging was discouraging to a small boy who'd just begun to read though more discouraging was the huge and ill-tempered walrus moustache British Legion commissionaire who was permanently installed there the spitting image of General Hindenburg who was pictured on the stamps in my brother's album he'd lost one or other of his limbs in the trenches but since he seldom moved from his chair and just shouted it was difficult to tell which he was also mixed up in my head with Kitchener over there Kitchener needs you poster and and the figure in the corner of the Monopoly board go to jail go directly to jail such veterans of the first war were very much in evidence well into the 1950s as a child one encountered them in park sitting on benches and in shelters playing dominoes generally grumpy and with the war having robbed them of their youth and often their health the luckier and less disabled ones man-lift so were posted at the doors of public buildings a uniformed and remember mantled Conciergerie that was more often than not unhelpful making the most of whatever petty authority they were left invested with and so it was here the veterans only concerned two men to maintain absolute silence and not at all the mentor one would have chosen to introduce one to the delights of literature of the books themselves I remember little Henty was well represented Captain Marryat books which whenever I did manage to get into them only brought home to me that I was not an entirely satisfactory version of the Guinness boy I suppose somewhere there must have been a need blyton but she too would have been backed in the same few Nerio but immensely serviceable boards and so she passed me by two as it was the books I best remember reading there reading there were Hugh laughs Tings dr. Doolittle books which were always well represented and the delight of them was that there were always more of them I think at that time I thought I knew that they were fiction I knew that a doctor who talked to animals was not a likelihood but at the same time I reported me thought that portal beyond the marsh which is where dr. Doolittle lived I did believe that was a proper place and that this took place in historical time but the cat though the characters were wonderfully vivid polynesia the talking parrot Prince bumpo and a very mysterious creature the catsmeat man I I never come across a cat's meat man I didn't know whether the meat was of cats or for cats we didn't have a cat so there was and also my father was a butcher so if we wanted me we could have that but but the cat the cat's meat man remained a mystery to me until until the 1990s when I had to read it for the BBC well I had to read some of the Doctor Dolittle books for the BBC and I mentioned the fact that I wasn't sure what a cat's meat man was and I was deluge with letters from I suppose older listeners who remembered a cat cats meat man including one woman who said that he was a somebody who went round the street shouting out his wares which were sold which were long strips of meat tied to a stick and that as a child she'd once been in he'd been told not to round to the door so he rang the bell and put through the letterbox the stick with the with the strips of me and she was so famished she hate the lot but I didn't add he was totally mysterious to me was it was the cat's manic manic a few years later in 1944 believing as people in Leeds tended to do that things were better down south my dad threw off his job with the coop and we migrated to Guildford it was a short-lived experiment and I don't remember even ever finding the public library there but this was because a few doors down from the butchers where my father worked there was a little private library costing six pence a week which in the children's section at all richmond compton as william books i devoured them reading practically one a day happy in the knowledge that there would always be more years later when I first read a book by evil in war I had the same feeling here was a trove of books that was going to last I wish I could say I felt the same about Dickens or trollop or Proust even but they seemed more of a labor whereas these were a prospect of endless delight and I used to take the books everywhere my father worked for a butcher called mr. banks who also ran horse meat business which was I suppose meet again for cats and dogs but it was always had to be painted bright green so that he couldn't be sold for human consumption but he had a big lorry and I used to hang about hoping he would take me along in the lorry when he went out to pick a pick up a carcass which he sometimes did and we go out around Guildford and and then in the middle of a field would be the inflated body of a horse or a cow which would be winched into the lorry and then I'd go back with with them and they'd to the slaughterhouse which was in walnut tree clothes in Guildford where they dismembered the body and I'd sit in the corner of the slaughterhouse with my William book not thinking at all it's a terrible peculiar that here was this very grisly scene going on and it made no impression on me at all I was far more interested in my book but I suppose when you're a child you just assume that everything is normal but anyway we didn't stay long in Guildford we went back to Leeds at the end of 1945 and ended up living in Headingley the public library there on North Lane a visit to which could be combined with seeing the film at the lounge cinema opposite I went to Leeds Modern School a state school up at Lord's wooden Hill there in a different building but now called lon told school I spoke there a few months ago and found it still a good school though it's failed its Ofsted inspection whatever that means but he's still managing I'm glad to say to resist the siren charms of academy status and Mr Gove in the evenings when I got into the sixth form I used to work at the lead city reference library in the head room at that time the municipal buildings housed not only the lending library and the reference library but also the education offices and the police department which I suppose was handy for the courts which still functioned across the road in the Town Hall the whole complex Town Hall Library Art Gallery was an expression of the confidence of the city and its belief in the value of reading and education and where you might end up if they were neglected it's a high Victorian building done throughout in polish-german toffs brick extravagantly child the staircase is a polished marble topped with brass rails and carved at the head of each stair a slobbering dog looking as if it's trying to stop itself sliding backwards down the banister if you've ever got half an hour to sparingly it's going and see the building it is the most wonderful building the reference library itself proclaimed the substance of the city with its solid elbow chairs and long the Hagen II tables grooved along the edge SteriPEN and in the center of each table a massive pewter inkwell arched and gallery didn't line from floor to ceiling with books the reference library was grand yet unintimidating half the tables were filled with sixth formers like myself just doing their homework or studying for a scholarship there would be university students home for the vacation though the lead students tended to work up the road in their own Brotherton library there were two the usual quota of eccentrics that haunt any reading room that is warm and handy and are somewhere to sit down old men would dose for hours over a magazine taken from the rack though if they were caught nodding off an assistant would trip over from the counter and his no sleeping one regular always up with a pile of art books at his elbow was the painter Jacob krama some of whose paintings with their vortices slammed hung in the art gallery next door drama has a connection with with Primrose Hill in that he was the brother-in-law of a more distinguished painter and wrought assist William Roberts who said marks present dirty and half tight there wasn't much to distinguish him from the other tramps wiling away their time before trailing along Victoria Street to spend the night in the refuge in the basement of st. George's Church where occasionally I would do night duty myself sleeping on a camp bed in a room full of these sad defeated utterly unthreatening creatures with its mixture of readers and its excellent facilities and the knowledge that there would always be someone working there whom I knew one who would come out for coffee I found some of the pleasure going to the reference library there but had I been less studious I could have found in a problem over the next 10 years while I still thought I might turn into a medieval historian I became something of a connoisseur of libraries but the reference librarian leads always seemed to me one of the most congenial it was there on leave from the Army and during my national service that I discovered that they held a run of horizon the literary magazine started bicycle connolly in 1940 and that i vengefully did get a scholarship to Oxford I put down to the smattering of culture I gleaned from its pages in my day it was a predominantly male institution with the main tables dividing themselves almost on religious or ethnic lines there was a Catholic table patronized by boys from st. Michael's College the leading Catholic school with blazes in bright Mary blue it was a Jewish table where the boys came from round II or the Grammar School the Jewish boys even when they were not at the same school often knowing each other the synagogue or other extracurricular activities and if like me you were at the modern school and they were about half a dozen of us who went there regularly one had no particular religious or racial affinities and indeed will not thought perhaps quite as clever the school certainly not as good as round a or the Grammar School the few girls who braved this male Citadel disrupted this form of division leavened it I'm sure for the better and they worked harder than the boys who were seldom to be found and there was and was seldom to be found on the landing outside where when adjourned for a smoke it had glamour - for me and getting in first at 9:00 one morning I felt as I open my books as I did as a small boy at armed Lee baths when I was first in there the one to whom it fell to break the immaculate stillness of the water shatter the straight lines child on the bottom of the bath and set the day on its way of the boys who worked there a surprising number must have turned out to be lawyers the one had no notion of that at the time and I could count at least eight of my contemporaries who sat at those tables in the 50s who were now judges or now retired judges a school and certainly a state or a provincial state school would consider that something to boast about but libraries of facilities a library is no honest board and takes no credit for what its readers go on to do but remembering myself at 19 only from the Army and calling up the copies of horizon to get me through the general paper I feel as much a debt to that library as I do to my school it was a good library and though like everywhere else busier now than it was in my day remains unlike so much of Leeds largely unaltered the library closed at 9:00 at night and coming down in the lift beveled mirrors mahogany paneling little bench the attendant another British Legion figure would stop and draw the gates at the or below which was the police department and in would get a copy of policemen and even the occasional miscreant on route for the cells one of the policemen might be my cousin Arnold who belonged to what my mother always felt was the more common wing of the Bennet family loud burly and wonderfully genial Arnold was a police photographer and he would regale me with the details of the latest murder he'd been called upon to snap bhai Allen I've seen some stuff the stuff he'd seen included the death of the stripper Mary Millington who would committed suicide I can't understand why she committed suicide she had a beautiful body to someone as prone to embarrassment as I was these encounters particularly in the presence of my school friends ought to have been shaming that they never were it was I suppose because cousin Arnold was looked on as a creature from the real world the world of prostitutes found dead on waste ground of corpses in copses and cars burned out down Lovers Lane this was life where I knew even then that I was not likely to be headed or ever to have much to do with there's no shortage of libraries in Oxford some of them of course of great ground here and beauty the Radcliffe Camera seems to me one of the handsomest buildings in England and the square in which it stands a superb combination of styles crossing it on a moonlit winter's night lifted the heart though that was often the trouble with Oxford the architecture out soared one's feelings the sublime not always easy to match there are in that one square three libraries the bada lien on the north side on the east the Codrington part of Hawkes Maas All Souls and James Gibbs camera in the middle there's actually another library a modest little library neo-gothic built in 1856 by the architect George Gilbert Scott which is over to garden wall in the northwest corner but you can't quite see it Exeter was my college and that was where I worked though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and architectural a splendid surroundings of the Codrington and a few undergraduates did so they tended though to settle s store on what they were reading or writing than on where they were reading or writing it and I with my narrow sympathies but who was just as foolish despised them Freud staying on at Oxford after I take my degree I did research in medieval history the subject of my research Richard the second's retinue in the last ten years of his reign this took me twice a week to the public record office then still in Chancery Lane and in particular to the round room gallery lined with books a humbler version of the much grander round room in the British Museum presiding over the British Museum round room in his early days with Angus Wilson where's that the PR oh it was Noel Blake Easton Etonian friend of Siddall Connelly hair as white as Wilson's and possibly the most distinguished looking man I'd ever seen though I made copious notes on the manuscripts I studied which was chiefly records of the many evil Exchequer I would have found it hard to say what it was I was looking for imagining I think that having amassed sufficient material it would all suddenly fall into place and become clear failing that I hope to come upon some startling and unexpected fact a very silly notion had it been reached the third I was researching rather than Richard the second I might have been hoping to come across something as relatively unambiguous as a note in the Monarchs own hands saying it was me that killed ye princes in ye hehehe historical research nowadays is a dull business and I had any sense I would have been collating the tax returns of the nights I was studying or the amount they borrowed or were owed that or sifting through material other historians had ignored or discarded as in many disciplines both scientific and historical it showed them at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin the memoranda rolls on which I spent much of my time were long thin swatches of parchment about five foot long and about eighteen inches wide and written on both sides thus to turn the page required the cooperation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table so it would sometimes look like the cast of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party struggling to put wallpaper up when all I was doing was to try to turn over one side effect of reading these unwieldy documents was that one was straightaway propelled into quite an intimate relationship with readers along side and one of those I got to know in this way was the historian Sissel Woodham Smith the author of the great hunger an account of the Irish Famine and the reason why the events leading up to the charge of the Light Brigade Sissel was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like scroll looking more like Elizabeth the first in later life than Edith Sitwell ever did who used to boast that about it yeah but Cecil had the advantage didn't go in for the sheet metal earrings that he this it will affected and she did look exactly like the tomb of municipal the first Inn in Westminster Abbey Irish she had a fur bank Ian which and a lovely turn of phrase you know the Atlantic at all she once asked me and I put the line in habeas corpus and got a big laugh on it from a ground Irish family I think she was an O'Neill she was quite snobbish and talking of someone she said then he married a Mitford but that's a stage everybody goes even the most ordinary remark will be given her own particular twist and she could be quite camped conversation at once turned as conversations will to forklift trucks feeling that industrial machinery might be remote from sittel sphere of interest I said do you know what a forklift truck is she said I do to my cost books and bookcases crop up in the self that I've written and this means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film this isn't as straightforward as it might seem a designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt to library sets the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest secondhand bookshop and think that those will do another shortcut is to send out for a cargo of remainded books so that you end up with the shelf so garish and lacking in character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture a bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by a foot that someone's working library shelves have a particular tone with some shelves more heterogeneous than others for instance or in the case of an art historian filled with off prints and monographs or with an old-fashioned literary figure shelves lined with the faded covers and jackets of distinctive Faber or Cape Editions none of this seems to occur to a designer even designers who were very scrupulous and I won't mention any names do have a blind spot about bookshelves and on two occasions at least I've had to take my own books down to Shaftesbury Avenue to give the right tone to the shelves I had to do this for a play the old country at the Queens the books there which were Orden demag nice of central importance to the plot I wanted the faded buffs and blues and yellows bleached into a unit unity of tone by long sunlit Cambridge afternoons the kind of books you might find lining day dear Islands rooms for instance in Kings Antony blunts bookshelves were crucial in single spies the look of an art historians bookshelf significantly different from those of a literary critic say more folio volumes folders off prints and this too passed the designer by one knows that design Sun rather Copic but it's it's it's one of the lifetime in the theaters remains with me one knows that designers seldom read but they don't have much knowledge of Inca civilization either or the Puritan settlement of New England and yet they seem to cope perfectly well reproducing them an agglomeration of books as illustrating the character of their owner seems to defeat them and I noticed there's a play on this time maligning whoever it is designed it but I noticed that there's a play at botany is on the play by Simon gray has been revived and there's a bookshelf there notice in the photograph and that didn't look quite right it looked a bit to the part of many of the books had jackets on and add-ons library tended intended to lost its jackets in my experience but anyway when I first bought books for myself in the late forties they were still thought to be quite precious and in poor Holmes books might often be backed in brown paper paper itself was in short supply and such new books as there were often bore the imprint produced in accordance with the authorised economy standard the paper was merely slightly freckled and looked not unlike the texture of the ice cream of the period it was though a notable period in book design and perhaps because they were among the first books I ever bought one was CV Wedgwood William the silent the books of that time have all seemed to me all that was necessary or desirable simple unfussy wholesome and well-designed and books of the forties and early fifties are still to me immensely appealing they were not though to be left about at home books do furnish a Rome wrote Antony pol but my mother never thought so and she'd always put them out of the way in the sideboard when you weren't looking books untidy books upset more her view and with the potential for infection and not intellectual infection either lurking among the municipal I own page this might be the germs of TB or scarlet fever so one must never be seen to peer at a library book too closely or lick your finger before turning the page particularly if you were reading such a book in bed there were other parallels in reading but it was only when I hit middle age that I became aware of them me I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf was a television play written in 1978 and though it doesn't contain my usual scene of someone baffled at a book's bookcase the sense of being out faced by books is a good description of what the play is about Hopkins I wrote of the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero Hopkins was never without a book it wasn't that he was particularly fond of reading he just liked to have somewhere to look a book makes you safe shows you're not out to pick anybody up try it on with a book you're harmless though Hopkins was harmless without a book books as badges books as shields one doesn't think of libraries as perilous places where you can come to harm still they do carry their own risks of the library that I've talked about the one that was most important was the first one the Army Public Library where I went when I was six and I think that's worth remembering today when when the libraries are under threat the library the local library I'm most familiar with is obviously Sharples Hall Street and when I go by there it's often particularly after school or in the holidays thronged with with small children and there they counter the arguments that have been put forward that nobody needs libraries now because these are probably children a lot of them are children from the from the flats who don't have computers and who can only keep up with their classmates by by seeing the computers in in the library and it's it'd be I think I've been said to be condescending to say this I don't think it's condescending I see those children as myself when I was six years old and they're in the same position now as then all of 60 years 70 years ago the other thing that's not been emphasized enough is that a library is a place it's not just a resource that many of those children will go there because it's the only place they they where they can have a bit of peace and quiet and and have the place to themselves and have a book to themselves and and that crucial I think it's it's not a political matter all the parties of disgrace themselves in my view on this the labour party particularly which has such a long tradition of self education and support for the libraries it's disgraceful that that doesn't come out more the Tories it has been on privatization has been on the agenda for a long time I wrote something in a diary for the London Review of Books about this switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from guess where the Adam Smith Institute proposing the privatization of public libraries his name is Eamonn Butler and it's to be hoped he's no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are from that stable he's pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who's an authority on children's books Paxman looks on on dissenting as this odious figure dismisses any different defense of the tradition of free public libraries as the usual bleating of the middle classes I go to bed depressed only to wake and find Madsen Peary also from the Adam Smith Institute for the criminally insane banging the same drum in the independent not long ago John Bird and John fortune need a sketch about the privatization of air these days it scarcely seems unthinkable now that was written in 1996 in the last hectic days of privatisation which landed just with the railway system what we have now and so it was obviously on the agenda then and so I tend to think that with the Tories anyway the financial crisis is just an opportunity to do what they've always wanted to do but there's no such excuse for the labour party and I am NOT a campaigner and I'm not a tub-thumping I'm not very good at it but it is something I feel a little passionate about and anybody everybody I think if it can support the campaign save our library not just like the libraries at which are probably in less fortunate areas where we live well that's all I've got to say but I'm very happy now to answer question to both about libraries are about anything really about about anything I've written whatever and maybe be a bit funnier I know that wasn't very for me well it's I'm used to being in churches simply because one of the things I used to do when I was when I was a boy was go around go look at churches old churches particularly which least doesn't have many really but I used to do that until I was in my twenties and then I lost the habit and then when I met my partner Rupert Thomas he a more keen than I am and so we do spend a lot of time going around churches although he's much more I'm more of a I'm a residual member of the Church of England so but but he's much more atheistical than I am and and so he doesn't like churches where there's much evidence of religion so that rather limits us anywhere there's another question and you were talking about the contemporaries of yours who have gone on to presume from the judges but other things as well that's who you went to do you think it's now some lack of aspiration or when you went there do you think those children that you were talking to it also going to become perhaps judges or aspirations well I'm as I said I went back to my old school about a few four months ago and they seemed to me to be aspirational there and and they the the teachers were I mean you felt guilty in a way that the teachers were so so keen and so eager because you know they're I have such a bad time and and my school being given a bad time because it won't take up academic status and Renee bring schools which get all the attention and and most of the funds which are and heat so they they still seem to me to be to be aspirational I don't I suppose I never thought of us as being particularly aspirational I have to say when when I was young and and I and though as I say eight of my contemporaries became judges there was some very surprising ones among them particularly the ones some of the people who were leads went to the same colleges ID and and and as even lose touch with them but you know the people who the last sight you had of them was after examination schools and they were lying half naked and drunk on the lawn and the next time you see them they're in court and maybe even nightís so it's it's very very strange but I don't know my sympathies are always go to them to the to the well to the unand out places really so that I the other the I passionately believe that private education is wrong it is just not fair and I don't believe that this country but tap its proper resources until that is recognized and until there is some sort of amalgamation between private education and state education it could have been done just after the edge of the bottle Education Act in 1944 he could have been done as part of the the all that legislation that came about when Labour came in in 1945 he could have been done or a beginning made in 1997 and and it would seem to me not to be difficult to envisage for instance the that sixth-form education of in-state schools should be amalgamated with sixth-form education in public schools that doesn't seem to me to be too much depth before but there's been no went at all and the no movement under the last government and there will certainly be none under this one been all the talk of everybody pulling their weight no mention has been made of the of the public schools pulling their weight and I know I should be it but it remains one of the things well I'm I'm not particularly radical but about that I am I do I feel feeling outside of yes is the answer and it may seem absurd but I tend to think that in literary circles I'm regarded as somebody from the theater and in theatrical circles I'm slightly tinged by being to do with literature I've always found and still think that the theatrical world is nicer and kind than the literary world which I don't really see a great deal of and I'm happy to to be as it were an outsider in that sense but it's also in my work the the short story I when I started to write short stories they were always stories which what we plays and I couldn't make them into place and so they became story so they're still as it were have one foot in the theatrical world seldom go to literary parties and I've had occasion of literary pride and the nice thing about literary prizes is distinct from the optical ones is that they come with money attached you know they the whole add one the Hawthorne and prize and that I can't remember how much it was but there was someone the attached to it you never get any money for the Evening Standard Award or on the olivier you know just get another hideous statuette you mentioned you talking about your family moving and from Leeds to Guilford and back again a better life do you think there's any such thing as the north/south divide and if so what is it well I wouldn't want if there is I wouldn't want to do anything about it adds to the you know the variety of things I I don't know whether there is a they they more skeptical it seems to me when I go home to leave every fortnight or so and and I'm always relieved that they all talk like I do but but they're also quite skeptical last time I went I was getting off the train and a the man said aren't you Alan something and I said well if I am it Scarborough and I said no no that's a different Alan and he said well which other they you and I said well I'm and I'm another I said are you just to look alike and I said well yes I am really he said and he patted my army said well be happy with it I don't think I can't imagine that happening down south what I'd like to ask you Ellen is what would you take with you into a desert I oh I have a bridge I'm John desert island if once in 1966 and now the reason I've refused to do it again is because I can't answer questions like this really I don't know really the book I would go back to and again simply because I forget it's as soon as I'm ready the diaries of James leaves Milne which in the kind of book I would expect myself to like it snobbish and catty and gossipy but I do find it endlessly entertaining but that's not a very elevating answer I know I've got them but I don't know where they are and I feel persecuted by books really because there's so many of them and I get sent books even though you get sent books now in the hope that you'll free by the publishers in the hope that you'll give a quote for the jacket and and so I gave our mounting piles of books which I haven't chosen but which have been as it were wished on me and I I find it very difficult to to put them in the recycling back I feel sure that you know there's a better way of doing it but I I find I read the same books again and again I it's not you're delighted when you find a new author I'm now reading what is his initials is it CJ Sansom the man who writes about the Tudors I find his books very good though they're quite depressing but I tend to I tend to if a book is all the rage I tend to wait until the heats gone off it before I read it really I don't like to be in the forefront with books and that's I don't know that's not a very praiseworthy characteristic but I just know it's slightly the feeling of well go on prove it you know but I'm reading about a book which people read I think it's also when people recommend books to me that puts me against them I've been persecuted on my life by people saying I would like Jane Austen now I've read some Jane Austen but not all and it's because I just don't want to be the kind of person who but the book I am really which people have recommended is the book about Netsky you know the hair with amber eyes which I started off had to really work ethic I didn't like the beginning but now I'm much more into it we met those things drop cuts made if we let the language continue to be cut well I can only say I endorse this yes no absolutely but I I don't know that you've come up against the the other occasion when I've spoken about libraries it was at keeping the council rise library oh and they they've bent over backwards to keep their library open and they've they've worked out solutions and and and offered all over to to maintain it with their own staff and so on so forth and they've come up against a blank wall and it's it's to do with the bureaucratic mind and also the sense that they are in charge as it were and but and they all they say as they say in bren which was where can we cancel rises under that they're planning a spanking new Central Library now this sounds very good and and I'm sure this has been said in many parts of the country now but that is not an answer a library should be local it should be handy it shouldn't require a child and I think particularly of the children II shouldn't require child to have to make an expedition to go to it it should be round the corner where they can grow themselves without being overseen and these obvious things are not they they're not said and oh they thought to be seen that quote you know the middle class is being well meaning something that's not been raised I've not seen it raised much if if the libraries are closed what happens to the buildings now in there there was a after the council rise meeting there was an item on Newsnight some oh he was a jerk really I I can't remember some Institute of political economy or whatever but he let fall the revealing phrase they were valuable retail outlets and you felt well this is something else which has not been revealed and and that again you know what were you shame to think they burr councils would do exactly the same thing that the it's it's you know a windfall and and they would they would they wouldn't be able to resist it really this is the thing I've been sneered out for saying but that closing down libraries is a form of child abuse because you hinder a child's development by denying it resources for it to to to expand and and it's the worst thing you can do but one feels I mean they all and with all due respect I've just this exercise it's just made me feel so inadequate because I know so little about it I just know in my heart that it's wrong and I can't you know that seems an inadequate thing to say but one has to stand up be counted really I'm going to read from the uncommon reader just just to finish off with which it's just about the Queen I mean I don't know the book it's the Queen by accident strays into a mobile library which he found finds parked at the back of Buckingham Palace and and out of politeness really she takes out a book and and because she's the sort of person who if she starts the book she finishes it she she finishes it although it's I become to net and quite hard to finish and then the next she goes again to take the book back and finds a better book Nancy Mitford pursuit of love and she gradually beacon beam begins to read and as she reads a whole attitude to life change it and this is this is a private secretary who to prove reading he said it was even done a year he doesn't like her reading at all I could understand said sir Kevin your Majesty needs to pass the time past the time said at passing the time there about other lives of the world wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand with two mentions of his name he didn't like he doesn't like being called Kevin with two mentions of his name and one of New Zealand sir Kevin retired hurt still he had made a point and he would have been gratified to know that it left the Queen troubled I'm wondering why it was at this particular time in her life she'd suddenly felt the pull of books where had this appetite come from few people after all had seen more of the world than she had there was scarcely a country she had not visited a notability she had not met herself part of the panoply of the world why now was she intrigued by books which whatever else they might be were just a reflection of the world or a version of it books she had seen the real thing I read I think she said to Norman because one has a duty to find out what people are like at right enough remark of which Norman took not much notice feeling himself under no such obligation and reading purely for pleasure not enlightenment though part of the pleasure was the indictment he could see that but duty did not come into it to someone with the background of the Queen though pleasure had always taken second place to duty if she could feel she had a duty to read then she could set about it with a clear conscience with the pleasure if pleasure there was incidental but why did he take possession of her now this she did not discuss with Norman as she felt it with who she was and the position she occupied the appeal of reading she thought laying its indifference there was something lofty about literature books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not all readers were equal herself included literature she thought is a Commonwealth Letters a republic actually she'd heard this phrase the Republic of Letters used before at graduation ceremonies honorary degrees and the like there without knowing quite what it meant at that time talk of a republic of any sort she taught mildly insulting and in her actual presence tactless to say the least it was only now she understood what it meant books did not defer all readers were equal and this took her back to the beginning of her life as a girl one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognized with the crowds there was something of that she felt to reading it was anonymous it was shared it was common and she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognized these doubts and self questionings though were just the beginning once she got into her stride it seems to seem strange to her that she wanted to read and books to which she taken so cautiously gradually came to be her element you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 33,394

Rating: 4.7307692 out of 5

Keywords: Alan Bennett (Author)

Id: 8xiDpJGid1E

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2015