posted on 15 May 2024

Keeping On Keeping On: Revisiting Alan Bennett’s diaries and memoirs on his 90th birthday

I suppose that if I read or watched more drama I might, along with millions of others, regard Alan Bennett’s plays for stage and screen to be his greatest work. 

But over the years I have come to regard this place being taken by the three large collections of diaries, memoirs and non-fiction pieces he has published. For three decades now an annual selection from Bennett’s diaries has appeared in the London Review of Books, and then roughly every ten years Faber combines these with other memoirs, reminiscences and non-fiction pieces and publishes them. So far there has been Writing Home (1994), Untold Stories (2005) and Keeping On Keeping On (2016). If that makes these volumes sound a bit of a ragbag then I am doing them a disservice, for you only have to dip in almost anywhere to realise the abundant care with which they have been assembled. On the 9th May 2024 Bennett turned ninety and revisiting these wonderful collections seems an appropriate way to mark this important birthday.

I think these collections provide everything we come to Bennett for – the breadth and sometimes unpredictability of his interests, the humanity, the wonderful, pithy prose, supple, expressive, conversational and free of unnecessary ornamentation; the wealth of incident and the fascinating glimpses into the domestic life of Bennett and his partner, Rupert Thomas – the literary aristocracy of Camden Town and Primrose Hill, the glamorous show-biz friends (one always feels that no matter how affectionately they are regarded Bennett always sees them with the sharp skeptical eye of the outsider), and the acquaintances, neighbours and shop-keepers of the Yorkshire village where he still owns his parents’ retirement cottage. 

We get to read about the normal, routine stuff that makes up Bennett’s daily life but which he manages to make so fascinating – giving readings, reluctantly on set during filming, or in the gloom of the backseats at rehearsals; relaxing on visits to country churches and garden centres, or combing flea markets, architectural salvage yards and antique shops in search of bargains. (In this connection there is a lovely, passing tribute to a local Yorkshire antique dealer, John Midgley, whose items were always accompanied by handwritten, copperplate labels detailing provenance – the precise Yorkshire pottery in which an otherwise unremarkable Victorian plate or teacup or rummer glass was manufactured, for example. What I think of, Bennett says, ‘is how much expertise has died with him.’) And of course he is also an omnivorous reader and I have probably found more recommendations for unlikely reading pleasures in the pages of his diaries than almost anywhere else.

I always think that the crucial thing we want from Bennett is that reserved, retiring, lugubrious, sanely melancholy voice, for he is one of those writers whose voice, with age and familiarity and, yes, with affection too – for absurdly many of us feel that we have grown to know him – has become unmistakeable and cherished. It has become a little franker and less guarded with the passage of time, more open, for instance, about aging and sexuality and politics, but it is the voice we have always known and to read it on the page — its inflections, rhythms, the under-statement, the cunningly judged pause – is to hear it.

If you don’t normally read diaries then there may be little I can say that will make these three volumes sound appealing to you. However, if you do but haven’t yet tried Alan Bennett’s, then do yourself a favour and discover the pleasures of these three collections. As well as being funny, unfailingly intelligent and comforting, they also reveal Alan Bennett as a social historian for our times, a more immediately accessible Pepys; and more importantly they also reveal him as one of the vanishingly small number of people whom we feel it is safe to both envy slightly and admire enormously, secure in the knowledge that he won’t let us down.

Happy 90th birthday, Alan Bennett. Please keep on keeping on.

Alun Severn

May 2024

 

Alan Bennett elsewhere on Letterpress:

Smut by Alan Bennett