My Weekly Book

Writing Home - Alan Bennett

December is drawing to a close and this is now a race to see how far in advance of 60 books I can get before the year ends. Perhaps then I was unwise to choose this 600-page doorstop to take away as holiday reading. However the last book of Alan Bennett’s writings that crossed my path, Untold Stories back in November, was so enjoyable that its 600-plus pages just flew past and I was left desperate for more. Therefore I was confident of having backed another winner.

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And I had, but perhaps less so than I was expecting. There is no doubt that this is a consumingly readable and thoroughly enjoyable book. It just doesn’t connect in the way that the subsequent volume does. It was perversity on my part and the serendipitous accidents you have in bookshops that lead me to read the later instalment first. And I’m glad it happened this way round or I’m not so sure I would have been running out of the door to get my hands on another volume. It would definitely still have been on my list, but considerably further down and I would have missed out mightily if events had indeed unfolded in this order.

The difference between the two is small but striking. In Writing Home we are seeing the author’s formal public face. Almost everything he includes in this first anthology has been previously published, or made public - as a book review, a lecture or an address. His diaries have been carefully edited for publication in the London Review of Books. The accounts of filming or producing his work, laced with theatrical anecdotes and astringent observation, as often at his own expense as at that of other people, make for fascinating reading which leaves you laughing out loud on public transport and irritating friends and family with your compulsion to quote every other perfectly-honed line at them. But still it maintains a relentlessly public face.

As the introduction to Untold Stories explains, the author was faced in 1997 with a very serious run-in with cancer. This seems to me, having read this earlier book, to have given his writing an unflinching clarity and honesty which, while not exactly lacking from this first volume, is not to the fore in the same way. It is much more reserved, buttoned-up even, and commensurately less gripping as a result. Whereas a preoccupation with the personal can turn into prurience and inquisitiveness, it’s also the thing that forms the deepest connections and provokes the strongest responses with readers and nowhere is that more evident than in a comparison between these two books. For the full story, seek out this introduction for yourself. But it concludes thus: “I might have preferred to tell it differently - in the form of plays, say or fiction - but this album is a quicker if less face-saving way of doing it. ‘Pass it on,’ says Hector in The History Boys. ”Just pass it on.’”

In a final attempt to make my point I shall quote two things. The first is a passage from Writing Home that occurs in a review of Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin entitled Alas! Decieved: “[Larkin’s father] was the City Treasurer of Coventry. He was also the veteran of several Nuremberg rallies, a pen-pal of [President of the Reichsbank Hjalmar] Schacht’s, and had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece that gave the Nazi salute… to describe a childhood with this grotesque figure at the centre of it as ‘a forgotten boredom’ seems ungrateful of Larkin, if not untypical, even though the phrase comes from a poem… so Larkin is telling the truth rather than the facts… Still to anyone (I mean me) whose childhood was more sparsely accoutred with characters, Larkin’s insistence on its dullness is galling, if only on the ‘I should be so lucky’ principle.” The second is a from a review of Untold Stories from the Glasgow Herald that rather took my fancy at the time which stated that “[Alan Bennett] can find more drama in a cup of Darjeeling than others could in a household of nymphomaniacs.”

So what ties these two quotes together? In Writing Home the author refers obliquely to his childhood and family on occasion. In Untold Stories they form the backbone of the book. He may, by his own assessment, have been working with the cup of Darjeeling rather than the nymphomaniacs but the material he comes up with makes compulsive reading nonetheless. For this reason the later volume is on my list of stand-out reads of the year, while I don’t think this is. But it’s still an excellent book - just in extremely exalted company when viewed next to its successor.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 11:33 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.