In his chapter about his early experiences as a homosexual, Alan Bennett in Untold Stories provides a sardonic and persuasive metaphor that puts paranoia about homosexuality in its proper place.

Throughout a chapter called "Written on the Body," Bennett recounts his awkward shyness as a young man, his slow adolescence, and his struggles to both articulate and act upon his sexual feelings. More than anything, he simply wanted to find companionship and to enjoy sex, without necessarily being voracious or public about it. He did not choose his sexual orientation; it is just something that seems to have happened to him at school, almost unnoticed.

At a party hosted by Ian McKellen in 1989, to support the abolition of Clause 28, Bennett relates the following anecdote about one of his readings at the event:

I introduced the extract, saying that to enquire (as McKellen had done) if I was homosexual was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water.

Just as the man in the desert wants water, and its precise variety is irrelevant, so any individual wants (is even at times desperate for) love, sex and companionship. It is - or ought to be - irrelevant whether this need may be satisfied by attachments to those of the opposite sex, or of the same sex. This humanitarian observation is one that those religious conservatives who are petrified of homosexuality would do well to take note of. To be concerned about sexual preference is to miss the bigger picture of why sex and relationships matter in the first place, as necessary as water to the full and nurtured human life, and not something which anyone should be deprived of or chastised for.

Labels: Alan Bennett, homosexuality, Miscellaneous, religion

There are many interesting things one could say about Alan Bennett's thoroughly enjoyable play The Habit of Art. One that struck me most, however, was the way in which a faintly retrospective air hangs over the whole thing: looking at a stage set in a backstage rehearsal room, it is almost as if this play is a reflection on Bennett's career and the public perception of him as a dramatist.

This is, more than anything, a play about playing. It has a multi-layered quality, so that we see actors playing the part of actors, who are rehearsing for a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, who are in turn playing up to the personalities that the public expect them to possess: Auden the untidy, dishevelled but loquacious poet; Britten the inspiring conductor who is suffering from composer's block at the end of his career. This reflexive quality is exacerbated by the touring production which I saw. Firstly, performed in Newcastle's Theatre Royal, there is an ironic edge to the fact that the rehearsal is supposedly for a play for the National Theatre; this makes us think about the way in which theatres themselves impose expectations on actors, the audience of the National expecting to see only big name stars and intelligent productions, both aspects of which are somewhat lacking in the play within The Habit of Art. Secondly, Desmond Barrit plays Auden in the touring production, but he is highly conscious of Richard Griffith's inhabiting of that role in the original National Theatre one; thus Barrit plays as Griffiths playing as Fitz, the actor who plays Auden.

All these metadramatic elements frame one of the key themes of the play, the question of who owns a role: is it the playwright, is it the actor, or is it the character he or she is playing? Fitz objects to the depiction of Auden as being more concerned with the ideals of the body - bluntly, oral gay sex - than with those of the mind and the language. Contrary to Fitz's protestations, the writer of the play insists that the corporeal, sexualised Auden is validated by his letters, though it is hard to ignore the fact that the writer himself might have been mislead by his reliance on another artificial rehearsal of Auden's life, in the form of Humphrey Carpenter's biography of him (Carpenter too forms part of the play, though the actor playing him objects to his mere bit-part chorus role).

It is within these contexts, then, that we can start to see the play as a reflection on Bennett himself, and the way in which as an established (and establishment) playwright, Bennett too may seem to play a role, and that rather than writing about and influencing public life, Bennett is increasingly conditioned by that same public's perceptions of him. Although unlike in Bennet's earlier plays about the process of drama, such as The Lady in the Van, Bennet himself does not make an appearance, the characters of slovenly Auden and neat and tidy Britten are his analogues.

Quick-witted but camp, gay but faintly melancholic, the late Britten and Auden are surrounded by a faded mythology. Britten made his name as an avant-garde composer, but his place at the leading edge has been assumed by Tippet (and we are conscious that Britten today is a staple of that most populist of musical variety shows, the Last Night of the Proms). In the 1940s Auden emigrated New York in search of artistic freedom, and to escape the War, and has returned to Britain full of tales of the sexual freedom and poetic acclaim he had found in the United States, only to be seemingly half-disappointed that Britain in the meantime has become a sexually tolerant place, whilst his poetry is at best respected (by the BBC, no less) rather than greeted with ovations. Auden hates his own poetry being quoted back at him, which adds another layer to the dramatic role-playing: Barrit plays as Griffiths playing as Fitz, who plays a poet struggling to avoid inhabiting the role that he once defined, and that now defines him. Living in the cosy semi-retirement offered by Christ Church, Oxford, both Auden and Britten want to recuperate the controversy that attached itself to their earlier gay personas and artistic avant-gardism, and to avoid donning that dressing gown for the evening of their lives which has two damning words sewn into it: National Treasure.

Bennett himself, soft-spoken Northerner, mildly camp but not self-congratulatorily homosexual, possessing the dubious and simple virtue of having been around for a long time, is often talked of in just such terms. As Michael Billington complained, they make him "sound like a theatrical Queen Mum radiating beneficence over a grateful populace." However, this satirical observer of the foibles of national life deserves more than to be treated as the doyenne of the W.I. In another light, the self-reflexivity that many of his plays exhibit, none more so than this one, might a few decades ago have been seen as sharply postmodernist; as a realist writer true to the ironies of common conversation, he is unsurpassed.


The Habit of Art, then, is something of a paradox. This play could be seen as dominated by the anxiety of his own influence, about the formulaic repetition of old parts, stale dramas, hackneyed writing. Yet it also, paradoxically, must rank among Bennett's finest, for whilst this is a play about the habits of art, it also kicks against the habits of a lifetime in an ironic, self-conscious way that is poignant, metadramatic rather than melodramatic.

Labels: Alan Bennett, English Literature, The Habit of Art

News this morning of more snow chaos brought to the South West of England, juxtaposed with an earthquake in Haiti. The two things - vans stuck in drifts, bodies buried under rubble - hardly seem equivalent; so it is editorially sensible that, in comparison to last week when the snow dominated the headlines and hours of bulletins and smothered terror attacks and the economic crisis into silence, the earthquake is top story, whilst the snow drifts to number three. Interceding between the two, it appears Google now plans to pull out of its operations in China, realising that it is futile to offer a search engine onto the world, when an autocratic regime is determined to prevent it from focusing sharply.

On the bus to Stockton for a library meeting, I read Michael Billington's account of the relationship between Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser in the Guardian Review. Seems Pinter was not so interminably temper-prone as people make out, and both Fraser and Billington recall occasions when he demonstrated his sensitive side - including strewing their new house with flowers.

Making first trip to the library in ages, I pick up the London Review of Books, to read two articles which were not available freely online. Jenny Diski condemns a rather pointless academic/populist book about the Psycho shower scene. More interestingly, in the process she reminisces about the days when movies played in a continuous loop, so that one could come in midway through and then leave once one has come round to a recognised scene (as she notes, the experience predates 1960s postmodernism by a few years). Psycho is groundbreaking, she says, because it is the first film which needed to be watched from its intended start to finish (which is important, given that the main character and star draw of the film, Janet Leigh, dies mid-way through, and would therefore leave viewers who come in after an hour somewhat disappointed). Apparently, cinemas showing Psycho had cardboard cutouts of Hitchcock erected in the foyer, with a voice bubble explaining that no one, but no one, was to be let in after the film started, "not even the President of the United States...not even the Queen of England, God bless her." The thought of the Queen rudely knocking over Hitchcock's cardboard bouncer in order to catch a glimpse of Janet Leigh's nipple is an amusing image.

Diski is right that the shower scene has a special status. Like a myth, it is a scene everyone knows about and can visualise unconsciously, without ever having to have watched the whole. At this point, I note Psycho ought to be pushed to the top of my "films to be watched" list.

I also read Alan Bennett's New Year diary. Among others, his well-observed anecdote about people observing the 11 o'clock Armistice remembrance, and not only falling quiet but remaining "fixed in whatever attitude (handing over money, examining a vase) the silence caught them" seems destined for a minor scene in a future play.

More academically, I pick up F.B. Pinion's book on T.S. Eliot, and begin to read the chapter on The Waste Land. It starts promisingly: "What is peculiar about The Waste Land is the collocation of images and scenes in a manner calculated to evoke feelings and accordant ideas, without overt statements of meaning," which is obvious, but put much better than I could have done myself. Then I come across I.A. Richards' rather more pithy way of saying the same thing, in that it is like music in this respect, "a music of ideas." Having opened by saying that its images cannot be pinned to particular meanings, Pinion goes on to do just that, listing meanings and references in a dull, detailed, dictatorial way. I give up.

Labels: Alan Bennett, Antonia Fraser, Daily Diary, Harold Pinter, Jenny Diski, Michael Billington, Psycho, The Waste Land