Reviewed by Summer Block
5.26.07

Untold Stories collect the memoirs, diary entries, sketches, and miscellany of Alan Bennett, a long-time presence in British theater best known in the United States as the writer of The Madness of George III and The History Boys. The thick volume includes lectures delivered to the British National Gallery, memorials of late artists like Thora Hird and Lindsay Anderson, an essay on Philip Larkin, a chronicle of his battle with near-fatal cancer, and most affecting, a memoir of his life growing up in wartime Leeds. The common thread that binds this very diffuse collection is Bennett’s signature tone, a mixture of liberal sentiment, old-fashioned nostalgia, and self-effacing good humor—he’s the Garrison Keillor across the pond.

“Every family has a secret and the secret is that it’s not like other families,” Bennett confides in the book’s first and strongest section, “Untold Stories.” Bennett’s mother and father, Walter and Lilian Bennett, are hampered by shyness and a strong aversion to any sort of ostentation or public display, so much so that they wed in secret early on a weekday morning to avoid facing a throng of well-wishers. Though his mother conceals some touchingly modest social aspirations, neither she nor her husband can stand much “splother,” their family word for vulgarity and attention-seeking. From his earliest childhood, Bennett is caught between fellow-feeling with his parents—he is shy, diffident, not a “joiner”—and the demon desire to show off, to capture attention as a promising student and later as an actor and playwright.

Sadly, over time Lilian’s mild eccentricities give way to more serious mental illness, as a series of depressive episodes spirals into dementia. Bennett charts his mother’s long slide into senility and his own struggles to care for her, as he vacillates between affection and annoyance, bound by filial duty but ever eager to get back to his own youthful life in London. Most movingly, he chronicles his parents’ unflagging affection for one another, including his father’s daily trips to visit Lilian in the sanitarium where she occasionally resides “until the decay of the body catches up with the decay of the mind and they can cross the finish line together.”

Born in 1934, Bennett remembers an England of bathing holidays, radio plays, and his father’s trilby hats. Eventually Bennett will leave Leeds for Oxford and later for the stage, where he will get his start with Beyond the Fringe. That a painfully shy boy would wind up as one of England’s major public personalities points to the continuing fissure in Bennett’s personality between his parents’ shyness and his own latent love of the limelight.

In his personal writing, Bennett seems to be a genuinely likable character, if somewhat gruff and stodgy. His old-fashioned gentility, and way of being both candid and tactful, so that even discussions of masturbation, puberty, colonics, and other unpleasant parts of human life are made somehow modest and tasteful.

Alan Bennett is hardly an ordinary man, but he writes with a determined ordinariness. He is never histrionic and rarely self-pitying, though occasionally a bit gloomy, as he ponders “happiness, which I think of not as a mood that comes and goes, but as a goal a place one arrives at.”

He follows the grand gesture of declining an honorary degree from Oxford with the musing, “I wonder whether after more momentous refusals martyrs ever went to their deaths not in the strong confidence of virtue but just feeling that they had somehow muffed it.”

Despite his “every Englishman appeal,” however, Bennett is often at his most charming when being a bit cheekier. In his diaries (excerpted from 1996-2004) we’re treated to such observations as:

“Calvin Klein is sitting with Susan Sontag. Actually he isn’t but if he were it would sum up what celebrity means in New York.”

“I hadn’t known about [Ted] Hughes’s homophobia – though I’m not sure antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself.”

“I may not be the one to talk but with [Peter] Nichols the vestibule between Life and Art is quite short and nobody lingers in it long.”

His comments on art, literature, and architecture are equally priceless, whether remarking that a member of Titian’s “Vendramin Family” is “like one of the weaker brothers in The Godfather who you know will end up getting bumped off” or remarking of Cosimo Tura “I like his funny little Pietà with the Virgin looking at the wounds in Christ’s hands as if he’s making a bit of a fuss about nothing.” It’s only a pity that the publisher has skimped on the accompanying illustrations, leaving us with only tiny black and white images that scarcely do justice to the “glow” Bennett finds in his favorite works.

Though he has rubbed elbows with his fair share of celebrities (Maggie Smith makes many fond appearances) and lived to receive—and decline—a number of honors, still Bennett has led a comparatively unremarkable life of work and travel. What is remarkable are his insights into art and history, his clever asides and gracious tributes to fellow artists and family members. In an age of florid memoirs that read like laundry lists of every kind of trauma and deprivation, Bennett's restrained observations are refreshingly smart and sane.