Alan Bennett writer

any writer would tell you that though the sales and the plaudits come not with doing it but having done it the useful metal to have would be one bestowed as it were on the field of battle hung around your neck in recognition of yet another fruit this morning spent at the typewriter or after a week or even months spent staring out of the window [Music] we're in Camden Town which is where you've lived for about 35 years and it's from this vantage point that you see a lot of the world you're right about your summer place in Yorkshire which was heard about it is there a division in your writing that certain things are reserved for the North post placed there and written there and certain things happen more in the South the thing I like about the North in which you don't get in London in Camden Town is the pleasure in language that they still have I went into the supermarket in settled a local town to get some parmesan parmesan I think a relatively recent arrival in settle but anyway I went to the cheese counter instead of you know Parmesan oh yes we got some parmesan and and then reeled off a list of the parmesan say gorgeous and finally the Reggio army the rolls-royce of Burmese Elms now you'd never get anybody in captain town said to be saying that my father you never said I'll find out he'd say I'll ascertain and and it and it's a slightly pissed taking way of talking but it's a it's got a lot of flavor still which language down here doesn't tell going down south always represented an escape from my parents until they actually tried it themselves and it ended disastrously but writers or actors have made the jump always had a place in their mythology it was always a sense in which success for my mother and father was represented by one way to get to Kings Cross there's so much to say about Alan Bend that you don't know where to start except at the same time you think there's so much known about Alan Bennett that you don't think you need to start at all because he's talked so much about himself it seems in his monologues in his plays he's being with us I mean in my life since the Beyond the Fringe and then reviews and then 40 years on and on and on we go one sometimes very good but often wonderful work history boys is rightly thought of as one of the best plays by a contemporary yes I remember his Talking Heads I was in filming in America years ago and woke up couldn't get sleep and about half-past three woke up and flicked across that desert of God knows how many channels and hit on a bed among the lentils and it was like a stark kind of a dark sky was wonderful and that was Alan Bennett there and in the lady in the van he plays himself and his other self he's perhaps the most Bennett of plays he's he's himself observing and commenting on his own self who's an act itself he's invented himself this character who was a sports jacket on the same under a cotton the same hacker and so on and so forth and I'm sure he enjoys those games but there's a sense in which I think it's all a disguise he's very inward from my experience of him he seems it's one of those people who hides himself by appearing in public a lot as it were his public we caught up with Alan Bennett on the set of his film adaptation of The History Boys which is based in part on aspects of his own experience in school between 22 and 25 but when they're all together they behave as if they're 14 euros as a good company because if the relationship works right a play is play that you were allowed not to be your age so I'm 71 but they make me feel I have no need to stand on my dignity or after to be a well thought or figure in the theatre I can be silly and there is a great deal of silliness and and I enjoy that I never think there's enough silliness in life anyway I think that's what's wrong with politicians are too little silliness in Downing Street it's the paradox about them that he is backing into the limelight a lot of his life I mean clearly he's drawn to the theater and and and to public appearance while at the same time I think it's something which comes deeply from his background from his family strong belief that people should keep quiet and not make too much fuss about anything and not me get big-headed in any way and all of those things it's very clear about describing himself as a non joiner as a man who doesn't really join in with anything that he doesn't want to be part of the establishment he doesn't really has never been a member of a party or anything like that I suppose he might feel that he'd joined the theatre in a way because that theatre has been a home for him but more than a home I suppose it's been an environment in which he has felt absolutely productive [Music] a drunk clinging onto the railings in Inverness Street gathers himself up to speak excuse me Squire but how far as yesterday gone I'm sorry how far was yesterday gone I say helpfully that it's 6 o'clock 6 o'clock 6 o'clock what sort of answer is that of course I could have said what sort of question was it in the first place I work looking out onto the street it's not a busy street but at the same time there's always something going on you could see things in the street which very interesting and which image sometimes I write down in my diary and then go back to what you're writing and there's a momentum to it send a complimentary copy of Waterston's literary diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures here is Dennis Potter on the 17th of May Michael Frayn on the 8th of September Edna brown on the 15th of December and so naturally I turn to my own birthday May 9th is blank except for the note the first British self-service launderette is opened on Queens Way London 1949 [Music] can I talk briefly about the lady in the man how did you come to want to turn that relationship into a play I'd written a job for the London review books as a as an account of how this this woman brought her van into my garden and as I thought for three months and then stayed for 15 years because she was there in the garden and I work here saying the battle would be there she was there in the corner of my eye all the time I was sitting in my table working so she was a kind of Diary and I would see the things she did if she did anything Drollet noting down so when eventually I came to write it up it was relatively easy to do cuz I had all the material she inhabited a different world from ordinary humanity the world in which the Virgin Mary could be encountered outside the post office in Parkway and mr. Khrushchev higher up the street a world in which her advice was welcomed by world leaders and the College of Cardinals took note of her opinion seeing herself as the center of this world she had great faith in the power of the individual voice even though it could only be heard through pamphlets photocopied at prom to print all read on the pavement outside Williams and Linz Bank she died in 1989 and I wrote the play in 1999 so it took 10 years and the reason why it took so long was because I couldn't see while I could tell her story I couldn't tell my own story in that time and then I saw that the person who was writing the story it was different from the person who was occasionally having to go out and interact as I said it's with with Miss Shepherd and that the observing Alan Bennett I think was a slightly different person from the person I was having it all to do and once I've seen it you could write yourself as two people they then became much more fun to write for a start she wasn't there in any sense of funny character I don't think I ever saw a smile in the whole of her life but funny things happened I mean she was not too well once and I went out and said do you want a cup of coffee and she said no I don't want you to go to all that trouble I'll just have half a cup then the other Alan Bennett inside instantly writes that down you see but the elevator who gets a cup of coffee is curse again in his 2005 book untold stories Alan Bennett describes the decline in his mother in her later years and in heartbreaking detail I'm all it was after my father died she suffered slightly from depression before my father died but after he died she then really seldom was out of a depression for them for 20 years really and then it was only as she began to lose her memory that the depression lifted but by that time I was too late she was just not there anymore the onset of depression would find her sitting on on accustomed chairs the cork stool in the bathroom the hard chair in the hall which was just there for ornament and where no one ever sat it's only occupant the occasional umbrella she would perch in the passage dumb with misery and apprehension motioning me not to go into the empty living room because there was someone there you won't tell anybody she whispered tell anybody what tell them what I've done you haven't done anything but you won't tell them ma'am I said exasperated but she put her hand to my mouth pointed to the living room door then wrote talking in wavering letters on a pad mutually shaking her head you're right in great detail they're very movingly about your mother was it very hard to write about your mother's depressions under visits to hospital now have looked and what was happening and so on it was difficult but in the book it it's part of a longer story when my mother suddenly became depressed the first time was in 1966 and he really was very very soft and he just suddenly over a period of a few weeks she suddenly became apprehensive and lost all the sense of humor and was frightened and not only mystifying condition because I'd never seen it and my father even more so after six weeks of what dad called this flaming carrion he was as much for his sake as for hers that the doctor arranged that she should be admitted to the mental hospital in Lancaster what hit you first was the noise the hospitals I'd been in previously were calm and unhurried voices were hushed sickness during visiting hours at least went hand-in-hand with decorum not here crammed with wild and distracted women lying or lurching about in all the wanton disarray of a hogarth print it was a place of terrible tumult my father stopped at the bed of a sad shrunken woman with wild hair who cringed back against the pillows here's your mom he said and of course it was only that by one of the casual cruelty is routine in flicks she had on admission being bast and her hair washed and left on combed and uncurled so that it now stood out round her head in a mad halo this straightaway drafting her into the ranks of the demented dad sat down by the bed and took her hand what have you done to me Walt she said nay little he said and kissed her hand nay love untold stories' us as the title suggests is Alan as it were coming Klayton about what he feels most deeply about about the whole extraordinary experience for him of his mother's illness decline into dementia one of the you know classic and definitive accounts of dementia and also about his own illness and that's very important because it's not only about obviously how he faced it which essentially was very sterically but because it's also about the National Health Service and which i think is probably absolutely at the core of his his feeling about the state and about about you know what we should hope for from our government from our country and then there's lots of little bits pieces diary entries and and so on which do add up to a quite substantial self portrait really again of course he's always says I'm not very interesting and there's nothing fascinating and I don't want for us to be made and there's a there's a whole wonderful sequence and his anywhere he writes about his family background where he writes about this aunt Myra who was the sort of black sheep of the family because unlike everybody else in the family she didn't want to keep her head down she wanted to be interesting she wanted to be fallacious she wanted to be unusual and as Alan says to have a story to tell and that was regarded as extremely poor form in Bennett circles well of course here we are here's Alan with a story to tell these are anything that you ever feel that you don't want to write about in your Dara's anyhow of your life because they seemed this time to be more candid more about your personal life I have been before I I now live with my partner and as I have done now for 14 years and I've written about that and about about being attacked in Italy which was taken by journalists and news fest would be an account of a homophobic attack he wasn't particularly homophobics out we were just attacked but the police assumed that we'd been cruising or whatever now put in the nurse helped me up from the table and suddenly seeing a side by side a solution to the crime presents itself to the policeman a solution the police being the same the world over which hardly makes it a crime at all this one he says indicating me is much older than the other one the opinion of the law is given medical endorsement when dr. death nod thoughtfully they consult our passport and I am revealed as old enough to be Rupert's father perhaps theta the two thought I was his father but not anymore now there is no longer any mystery about this crime in either of their minds strolling down to the seafront at 11:00 at night this oddly matched couple have been up to no good what this sorry looking middle-aged Englishman is not saying is that on that CD promenade some advance had been made a gesture even and the honour of the Italian male impudent the wound I have received is virtually self-inflicted an entirely proper response to an insult to Italian manhood for which a blow on the skull with the length of steel scaffolding is perfectly appropriate we had been cruising it was our own fault a few years ago I had cancer the prospect of death because the prognosis wasn't good is a great diuretics out it's all comes and and I wanted to write it down because I you know nobody else could could tell the story but I thought it would all be posthumous I didn't think I would live to see a book published but then I've survived well and I've got the book so you know whether I sit on the book which are I'm afraid I don't have the moral strength to do so I published it we have this man Alan Bennett who plays Alan Bennett an awful lot who looks like Alan Bennett all the time but I'm absolutely convinced and I know that when he's sitting at his study there's another Island Venice that he doesn't want us to see partly because he wants to find out about himself on his own do you have any concerns when a book like this comes up well there hasn't been a public basically about what people will say I used to be bothered about that I'm not bothered now no I mean that's the lesson of my parents life they were they were bothered also their lives by what people would say and I rate was future yeah and they would have had so much a better time if they'd cared less really about what people thought they were they aspired for the whole of their life to be like everybody else to be ordinary people and they weren't ordinary people and they would have been much better recognising that but I live you know in New York sure in a little village and I and then we go there and and I think well I don't know this had this thirty years difference between Rupert my partner and me I think well what do they think which I don't care what they think really and and that at least I think my parents have told me not to not to care

Channel: George Pollen

Views: 16,230

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Keywords: Alan Bennett

Id: Ur3a6GFub7Q

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 16 2018