386
Book
ReviewThe
Textures of Personal and Social LifeUntold stories. Alan Bennett, 2005. London:
Faber & Faber and Profile Books; ISBN 0571228305, xiii + 628 pp., £20,
cloth
SAGE Publications, Inc.2007DOI: 10.1177/09675507070140040703
CarolineKnowles
Goldsmiths College
Untold
Stories is a treasure trove of wit, social commentary and astute observation
of the literary and theatrical world and an intimate portrait of
387
Alan
Bennett's life in which we are offered occasional glimpses of his relationship
with his partner Rupert Thomas. There is material here for a dozen more plays
or works of fiction and Bennett confesses that he has chosen to tell his untold
stories in the form of this `album' as a `quicker if less face-saving way
of doing it'. The book is divided into sections all of which work independently
as well as rather nicely in concert. It begins with Bennett and his father's
rendezvous with the mental health authorities in Settle, Yorkshire in 1966
and his mother's descent into temporary madness and the questions this prompted
about whether there was any other mental illness in the family. This provides
a platform for the family stories of Bennett's childhood in Yorkshire up to
the time he did his national service and went to Oxford. They are told in
the ways he excels at: through relationships, with his father, his mother
and various aunts, beautifully observed, carved through their seemingly insignificant
detail into a delicate and robust portrait of postwar Britain. Inside Bennett's
family and its social encounters, you catch sight of raw material for the
Talking Heads series – much of this section and the book is told in
recounted dialogue form, the trademark of a playwright. Along with the last
section, this is my favourite section of the book. It uses autobiograph- ical
forms to expose broader social processes and periods of recent history as
well as providing an insider account of what it was like to be in a par- ticular
section of the northern British upper working class (his father was a butcher)
in the middle of the twentieth century. Bennett exposes the small snobberies
in his parents and aunts that mark significant social dif- ferentiations; their reserve, keeping to themselves and not being quite part of the life
going on around them, the kinds of outings they go on: these small but important
marks of respectability accumulate to fracture the working class. As Bennett
says of his Aunty Kathleen, her mind unzipped by Alzheimer's: `Corseted in
her immutable gentilities she still contrives to make something special out
of her situation and her role in it' (p. 87). This is also a story of social
mobility told modestly, not as a celebration with all the tensions and difficulties
left in: injunctions from his father about making a fuss and a show, political
concerns about social justice which reveal how `the woman in the van' ended
up in Bennett's garden in Camden, things that shape Bennett as a person and
show how class is etched in the fabric of a person's subjectivity, and the
accommodations that have to be negotiated in upward social mobility. I like
this section especially for its insider account of class (shaped by gender
and sexuality) as lived detail: Bennett deftly exposes the texture of social
life in ways the academic study of social life in sociology so routinely fails
to do. The short section following, called `Written on the Body', extends
the first section and includes family and other personal black and white pho-
tographs. It is a subtle portrait of emergent and muted masculinity and
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sexuality
as Bennett as a young adult walks around his home town late into the night,
walks he presents as potential voyages of discovery that don't quite work
out for him. This is interspersed with bits of dialogue from plays, which
again reveal some of the autobiographical fabric from which they are wrought.
This is followed by another short section, Seeing Stars, set around Bennett's
trips to the pictures which open onto the world of fifties cinema. Following
this is a section of just under 200 pages of diary entries for 1996–2004,
some of which he has already published in the London Review of Books. These
are, inevitably, more episodic and while I missed the linking narratives of
earlier sections, the diaries are fab- ulous. They of course reveal his later
life as a playwright through ordinary things such as eating sandwiches on
the road to Garsdale Head and cycling through Regent's Park, as well trips
to New York, Venice and churches and other places of historical interest (he
studied medieval his- tory at Oxford); and the way his life is lived between
London and Yorkshire, his professional engagements, social networks and friendships
with other writers, actors (such as Maggie Smith, Alan Bates and John Gielgud)
and TV personalities such as his friend Russell Harty, from his Oxford days.
Complete with self-deprecating humour: the Waterstones Literary Diary, which
records the birthdays of contemporary figures of let- ters, is blank for 9
May, Bennett's birthday, except for a note that this was the date in 1949
when the first British self-service laundry was opened. The variety in his
writing is worth reading because it documents an inter- esting life interconnected
with other interesting lives, and because they contain astute social and political
mini-commentaries (Bennett's politics, in line with his concerns about social
justice incline to the left) and because they are beautifully written. Theatres
and Plays follows the diaries and gives the back-story to The Lady in the
Van and The History Boys, both played at the National Theatre, and here we
see some of the processes through which autobiog- raphy is transformed into
drama – `But are these (M&S corduroy and suede shoes) the proper
garments of my inner voice?' (p. 379). `Always beneath the play you write
is the play you meant to write' (p. 405), a sen- timent that resonates with
writers across a range of genres. Following this is a section on Radio and
TV, which has a lovely commentary on Thora Hird, and a section on Art, Architecture
and Authors (Bennett is a trustee of the National Gallery), which has a commentary
on the County Arcade in Leeds, combining narratives on architecture with reminiscence.
The final section, Ups and Downs, returns to the continuous narrative style
of the first section and opens with the homophobic assault on Bennett while
he was staying in Italy and the most sustained reference to his sexuality.
However, his sexuality is not the story as Bennett refuses to simplify for
public consumption a fashionable `identity' as `badge'.
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It ends
with a touching but unsentimental portrait of his encounter with cancer told
in typical un-heroic Bennett style through observation of life's and death's
minutiae. `But I don't want my life, or what there remains of it, to be all
about cancer, any more than I ever wanted it to be about being gay' (p. 602).
Throughout this enormous book there is a delicately woven sense of the Bennett
family's social marginality (not that they were marginalized) as a carefully
considered choice: of how they didn't quite manage to be like other families,
and this forms the vantage point from which the writer plies his trade. Untold
Stories is a personal, political, cultural and social archive of Britain in
the last half century told with humour and elegance and ground through an
autobiographical lens. I highly recommend it.