Book Review

Pleasurable melancholy

Untold Stories

ALAN BENNETT’s mother – his Mam – became depressed in 1966 when her quiet, violin-playing husband retired from his unlikely trade as a butcher and they moved into a country village. It was lovely and clean after Leeds, but she felt the “centrepiece” of attention and developed paranoid delusions, “standing stock still on the landing by the hour together” for fear of the spies she knew monitored the living room.

When at last she was admitted to a hospital, Bennett accompanied his Dad on his first visit, only to find “Bedlam, a scene of unimagined wretchedness. What hit you first was the noise … Some of the grey-gowned wild-eyed creatures were weeping, others shouting, while one demented wretch shrieked at short and regular intervals like some tropical bird.”

So the first, and most fascinating item, in this 600-page collection starts with a distressing bang, then develops into a careful, sensitive exploration of an ordinary mid-twentieth-century family that felt it was not “like other folk”. Part of the 120-page memoir had appeared in the London Review of Books, as had extracts from Bennett’s Diaries (1996-2004). Introductions to his plays The Lady in the Van and The History Boys, also here, originally appeared with the published scripts. And if other items, such as a short essay on Denton Welch, are of less interest, it is only because the prime items are so compelling.

Funny and sad, a sympathetic author, or at least narrator, Bennett always writes well – it comes as a shock to read of one of his plays being rejected a few years ago – and fans will be pleased to have autobiography, criticism and musings gathered between hard covers.

It is the title memoir, “Untold Stories”, though, that is the key both to Bennett’s own elusive character and that of his plays. The dialogue and people he encountered in his boyhood find their way again and again, transformed, into his work, even his most recent. The History Boys, now being filmed, is set in a school unlike any now sending pupils to Oxbridge, but very like Leeds Modern School in 1952. Bennett’s Dad’s realisation that he alone, and not the doctors, knows what Mam is like when she is herself, is translated into a remark by Queen Charlotte in The Madness of George III. Something his Aunty Myra said on presenting some souvenir embroidery from India – “It’s so intricate they go blind doing it, apparently. Just sat there in the street” – is typical of the dialogue of Bennett’s celebrated series of television monologues, Talking Heads.

But, as Untold Stories shows, characters that seem merely strange and comical on first acquaintance become more poignant and human as their tales are told more fully. There is an element of pleasurable melancholy in Bennett, something in the genre of Betjeman’s “Death in Leamington”. Bennett also values – perhaps relishes – sudden incursions of violence.

Bennett’s Aunty Kathleen was also a victim of mental illness. She was ridiculously infuriating in her interminable reports of life at the shoe shop where she worked (“I wouldn’t care,” remarked Dad laconically, “but you’re no further on when she’s done”), becoming a figure of Jacobean tragedy, all the more so with her homely diction unchanged, when demented and wandering around the long-stay wing of a hospital. “A man is wetting himself; a woman is howling. ‘I’ll just have a meander down,’ says Aunty, stepping round the widening pool of piss. ‘They’ve always stood me in good stead, these shoes.’ ”

Bennett’s world is indeed tragic, redeemed at best by the humanity of its suffering populace. Dad’s life started uncertainly, with the early loss of his mother and her replacement by a wicked stepmother, who took him out of school at 11 to be apprenticed to a butcher. His only defence was to nickname her “the Gimmer” – a lambless sheep. He was clever, sensitive, a brilliant untaught violinist, but would spend the rest of his working life with his suit (worn at work, at home, even on the beach) smelling of meat and with turn-ups greasy from the floor.

Dad was shy, solitary, reticent and happiest repainting a motorcycle sidecar. He hated anything showy, keeping young Alan’s graduation ceremony quiet from the garrulous aunts lest they make too much of a “pother”. His wife was petrified of independent activity outside the home, yet was the first of three sisters to marry, even if it was at 7.30 in the morning, so that Dad could get to work at the shop in time. “Better to be shy, however awkward it made you feel, than to be too full of yourself.” Condemning both vulgarity and pretension as “common”, Mam still hankered after a social life that she read about in magazines – the impossible sophistication of a cocktail party (though neither drank, not liking the taste). Years later her son found a tube of cocktail sticks in a kitchen cupboard, unused.

Her bouts of depressive madness, during the last eight years of her husband’s life, form the backbone of the memoir. Bennett, hardly a conventional family man himself, could not agree with the fashionable psychiatric theories of the 1960s, that madness was a way of dealing with repressive family pressure and affection bartered for good behaviour. “This didn’t seem to have much to do with my father’s affection for my mother,” he writes, with Dad taking up the daily task of driving 50 miles to the hospital to spend an hour’s visiting time sitting next to his silenced wife, just holding her hand.

Alan Bennett does not let himself off lightly. He notes his angry outbursts at his mother’s paranoia, his unwise attempt as a “writer” to grasp the experience of seeing his father’s dead body, his reluctance to come home on visits from London where he had discovered a sex life. As for the “untold story”, I shall not give away the details, but Bennett finds himself in middle age falsifying an account of a painful family death (for the sake of the survivors), just as, at the beginning of his tale, a suicide in the family had been covered up two generations before.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...