Lives in Writing (11 page)

A dark thread runs through the family history on Bennett’s mother’s side. After she was admitted to the mental hospital for the first time, his father revealed that her father, Alan’s grandfather, committed suicide by drowning. Bennett admits that he was rather excited by this revelation. ‘It made my family more interesting . . . I had just begun to write but had already given up on my own background because the material seemed so thin.’ In fact much of his best work was to be distilled from the memory of what seemed at the time dull ordinary experience, and like most writers he suffers occasional qualms of conscience about exploiting his nearest and dearest in this way. Bennett’s uneasiness about his last encounter with his father (described above) was compounded by the circumstance that he had just written a television play, then in pre-production, about a man who has a heart attack on the beach at Morecambe, the same beach where Bennett’s own parents took their last walk together, making him feel that in some uncanny way he had caused his father’s death. Six years later he returned to the same emotional nexus, another TV play about a man who visits his father in intensive care to be with him when he dies, but is in bed with a nurse at the crucial moment.

Bennett has based several of his female characters on his mother and recalls a remark of hers, ‘By, you’ve had some script out of me!’ which obviously struck home. But typically he explored its implications creatively in a different context – the play he wrote about Miss Shepherd,
The Lady in the Van.
This was based on one of the more bizarre episodes in Alan Bennett’s life, when he allowed a crazed, filthy, smelly, aggressive, bigoted vagrant of genteel origins to live in an insanitary camper parked in the front garden of his London house for fifteen years. Why did he put up with her, and for so long? Altruistic compassion alone cannot explain it. Perhaps, as some lines in the play suggest, he was compensating for guilt at neglecting his mother in illness and old age (for though he visited her regularly, it was often with impatience and ill-grace) by being kind to the ungrateful Miss Shepherd, who did not take him away from his metropolitan life. Almost certainly he felt from an early stage of their acquaintance that she would make interesting copy. He made several attempts to write a play about their relationship, but significantly it was only when he split his own character into two dramatis personae – Bennett the decent private individual, exasperated by the demands of his ungrateful tenant, but unable to extricate himself from her toils, and Bennett the anarchic, ego-driven writer fascinated by her extraordinary character and outrageously transgressive behaviour – that the play took off, and became a kind of parable of the way writers turn life into art.

Bennett is gratefully aware that, ‘For a writer nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people because, however dreadful, it may be of use’. This is well illustrated by the account of his treatment for cancer, ‘An Average Rock Bun’ (the title refers to the size of his tumour), and by an alarming story of being the victim of an unprovoked homophobic attack in a small Italian town. In both pieces he manages to find humour in even the grimmest circumstances, and avoids any hint of self-pity or self-dramatisation. The same scrupulous honesty characterises his treatment of more trivial plights and dilemmas. He declines an honorary degree at Oxford in protest against the university’s recent acceptance of an endowment from Rupert Murdoch, but then wonders if he hasn’t ‘slightly made a fool of myself’, thus denying himself any satisfaction from the gesture. He analyses in exquisite and amusing detail the reasons why he declined a knighthood, but adds ‘lest it be thought that this refusal has much to do with modesty, when the list of those who had turned down honours was leaked in the newspapers I cared enough to note (I hope wryly) how obscurely placed I was on the list and that sometimes I wasn’t even mentioned at all’. But even Bennett’s candour has its limits. ‘I hope wryly’ – if he doesn’t know, who does?

When Bennett left school he was a practising Anglican, nurturing vague ideas of becoming a minister, and politically conservative. Now he seems to have no religious belief and supports the left on most political issues, but he enjoys visiting old churches, cathedrals and ruined abbeys, about which he is knowledgeable, and admits that the destruction of stained glass and statuary at the Reformation still moves him to more indignation than recent atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone. His socialism too is personal and nostalgic rather than ideological. The only time he voted Conservative was when a Labour government threatened to extend the motorway network – a bad move, since the Tories have been much more enthusiastic supporters of motorised transport, at the expense of railways and the English countryside. Because he benefited from free university education himself Bennett opposes the introduction of tuition fees, refusing to take into account that quite different socio-economic conditions now obtain. (In his day – and mine – only 5 per cent of the age group got a university education, so the state could afford to educate those lucky few for free, whether they needed the subsidy or not; now it’s about 40 per cent.) His opposition to the war in Iraq is unqualified, and strongly felt, but not really argued. When the news of Saddam Hussein’s arrest breaks, he notes in his diary, 15 December 2003: ‘Whatever is said it does not affect the issue. We should not have gone to war. It has been a shameful year.’

Some readers, especially American ones, may find the diary entry for 11 September 2001 somewhat perfunctory. It reads in its entirety:

Working rather disconsolately when Tom M. rings to tell me to switch on the television as the Twin Towers have been attacked. Not long after I switch on one of the towers collapses, an unbearable sight, like a huge plumed beast plunging earthwards. I go to put the kettle on and in that moment the other tower collapses.

It seems surprising that there is no reflection here, or in the days that follow, on the significance of the event, no speculation about what fanatical conviction and chilling indifference to death drove the perpetrators of this unimaginable deed, no sense that possibly the human world had changed for ever in consequence. It is of course possible that Bennett wrote about all these things but decided his thoughts would seem redundant when reproduced much later. That is the danger of publishing a diary: leave it unedited and you risk being boring; edit it and you may leave a misleading impression. The characteristic bathos of missing the collapse of the second tower while going to make a cup of tea seems out of place here, and the ‘plumed beast’ simile neglects the human suffering involved. But it’s a rare and uncharacteristic lapse of judgement. The fact is that Alan Bennett is more at ease with the homely, the private, even the trivial than he is with big historical ideas and epic events. Again and again in this book he demonstrates that almost anything that happens to a person can be interesting, moving and entertaining if you write about it well enough.

THE BOOK
¹
BEGINS:

I was standing by the window in the Plaza Hotel, looking out. Below – ten stories below – I could make out round-faced women in ponchos standing on the sidewalk of the city named for peace and renting out cellphones to passersby. At their sides, sisters (or could it be daughters?) were sitting on mountainous piles of books, mostly advising pedestrians on how to win a million dollars. Along the flower-bordered strip of green that cuts through Bolivia’s largest metropolis, a soldier was leading his little girl by the hand, pointing out Mickey and Minnie in Santa’s sleigh.

The scene is described by synecdoche – parts which stand for the whole – as it has to be in this kind of writing. The art is in the selection of details and the way they surprise and inform us. The default associations of ‘Plaza Hotel’ for a reader in America, where the book was first published, would be New York, but the round-faced women in ponchos immediately establish an exotic context. It is, however, a complex exoticism, in which the local and the traditional co-exist with the international and the modern, generating for the observant visitor ironic incongruities of which the native inhabitants, with different priorities, are unaware. Even if one didn’t already know from the book’s jacket-copy that the man within Pico Iyer’s head is Graham Greene, one might guess that he had learned from that writer how to evoke a foreign place (in this case, La Paz, Bolivia). Compare, for instance, the opening paragraph of
The Heart of the Matter
:

Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond Street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in dark blue gym-smocks engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wire-spring hair.

Greene’s style is not, however, an influence Iyer mentions in this book; his acknowledged debts to the novelist are more existential.

Enervated by the high altitude, he draws the curtain on the hotel window and sleeps for a while, waking with an irresistible urge to write, though he has come to Bolivia to take a break from writing. He writes ‘unstoppably . . . the words came out of me as if someone (something) had a message urgently to convey’. What he writes is a sketch of a boy standing at the dormitory window of a British boarding school, watching as the ‘last parental car’ drives away at the commencement of a new term, calculating the number of institutional weeks and days ahead, ‘trying to magick the numbers down’, and listening to the other boys sniffling under their covers. The writer stares at his work, ‘as if it were something I’d found rather than composed. I’d been at a school akin to this thirty years before – the emotions weren’t entirely foreign to me – but why was the main character . . . called “Greene”, as if he had something to do with the long-dead English novelist?’ Interrupted, as he ponders this question, by a waiter wordlessly bringing a tank of oxygen to the door of his room (a deft touch of local colour Greene would have approved) the writer then wonders why that morning he had remembered his father ‘eyes alight and unfailingly magnetic’, laughing uproariously when watching
The Sound of Music
, and himself laughing at exactly the same point in the movie forty years later. ‘I looked down again and saw the name in my handwriting: “Greene.” The novelist had never even come to Bolivia, as far as I knew. Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?’ The next section begins: ‘I drew back the curtain and, as the light came in, recalled the same thing had happened three years before, pretty much to the day.’ He had taken his mother on a trip to Easter Island, where he wrote a story about a Catholic missionary priest that was almost parodically derivative from Graham Greene.

In these opening pages Pico Iyer establishes the basic themes of his book, and its narrative method: being in one place triggers the memory of another place and then another memory, a series of memories which he interprets through the ‘familiar compound ghost’ (T.S. Eliot’s phrase in ‘Little Gidding’ seems appropriate) of Graham Greene and his characters, as he seeks an authentic sense of his own identity. The next morning he makes an excursion to Lake Titicaca on the Bolivia/Peru border. ‘As the bus, groaning and faltering, began to sputter out of town, the other great presence of my life came back to me again.’ This is his father, recalled making a surprise visit to his son at an Oxford college, barely giving the latter’s current girlfriend time to slither out of a back window. ‘As he walked into the room . . . my father might have been walking into his own vanished youth, twenty-six years before; he had arrived from Bombay and been given a prize room in the ancient cloisters.’

On the bus he notices a woman in her late thirties stealing glances at him, and she introduces herself as the guide he had requested. As she questions him about his life he registers her envy of his freedom and mobility. ‘I’d found this theme echoed in every page of Graham Greene: the foreigner, precisely by going to another country, brings a whiff of a different world into the lives of the locals he meets.’ They get on well in the course of the day, to the point where she ventures to give him a neck massage during a boat trip on the lake. The possibility of further intimacy hovers in the air, but he has a wife in Japan, she has two children which his fee will help to feed, and the moment passes. Pico Iyer records several such encounters in the course of his itinerant life – one young woman who caught his eye on a street in Nicaragua asked him to marry her within five minutes – and they are all connected in his mind with the figure of Phuong, the Vietnamese mistress of the narrator in Greene’s ‘archetypal novel’,
The Quiet American.

The Man Within My Head
(a title which echoes that of Greene’s first novel,
The Man Within
) is not an easy book to categorise, or to read, because it is a memoir that deliberately renounces chronological structure, shifting abruptly from one time and place to another like a stream-of-consciousness novel. ‘I remember walking into a long-distance telephone parlor in the Mexican town of Mérida one hot August afternoon . . .’ ‘I was in Saigon one autumn, and had just checked into the hotel Majestic . . .’ ‘We were driving . . . down unpaved roads across the highlands of Ethiopia . . .’ These are typical opening sentences of the short sections into which the chapters are divided. The globe spins back and forth dizzyingly as one reads, the episodes are rarely tied to particular dates, and they come in a seemingly random order. Facts that would help us to follow a particular story are revealed much later – or not at all. This fragmentary, allusive, jumbled narrative method is of course motivated. One reason is stated: ‘like Greene, I suspect, I’d never had much time for memoir: it was too easy to make yourself the center – even the hero – of your story and use recollection as a way to forgive yourself for everything . . . to soothe the rush of often contradictory and inexplicable events in every life into a kind of pattern and even a happy, redemptive ending.’ Another, unstated reason is that the absence of chronological order foregrounds theme: Graham Greene as guru, guide and father-substitute in the writer’s quest for self-understanding.