Currently almost half-way through and, to be honest, it's a toss-up as to whether or not I'll get much further. Friends who I write letters to always say that my letters are like Alan Bennett and, having only seen the "Talking Heads" monologues and other Alan Bennett pieces on TV and having read the "Talking Heads" scripts, I've always taken this as a compliment. Having now read the appalling "Smut" and now some of this compilation, I'm not so sure! What a bl**dy joyless b*stard!Apologies for the language, but it is necessary to convey the frustrating tedium of this book. It has been quite painful reading, as I recognise myself all too clearly in Bennett's young self, agonising over his sexuality and looking ahead to a life devoid of loving, intimate human contact, walking the streets in a sublimation of desire, (although my walks were taken in the very early morning and with the express purpose of calming myself, in preparation for the inevitable round of bullying at school and the added intention of focussing my mind on the motorway, which ran through the little village I came from and which represented escape and freedom. At the time it only ran as far as Blackburn - hardly the yellow brick road!)But Bennett absolutely martyrs himself on the altar of his sexuality and sexual inadequacy. I would hope that I temper my more downbeat stories with rather more humour than Bennett shows here. I'm presently struggling through the diaries. With all the people that Bennett knew, you would have thought they would be full of amusing anecdotes but, really, if I have to read about ANOTHER visit to some flipping church and its marvellous burial crypt, I dare say I'll fling the darn book across the room! He also wears his learning like a trophy, taking pleasure in some little literary whimsy or simile that you need to be an Oxford don to comprehend. Now I know how my sister used to feel when I used "big words" that, to me, with my grammar school education, were commonplace but to her were just "showing off"!And I'm also tired of Bennett's incessant homophobia! The other night, I watched the film of "The History Boys" and at the end, when they are telling what becomes of them in the future, the main Gay schoolboy character, who has become a teacher, says, (words to the effect that,) "Although I don't TOUCH the boys, it's a struggle, which perhaps makes me a better teacher!" Oh, please! this is Bennett's philosophy all over; if you're Gay, you are bound to be at best a potential "kiddie fiddler" and self-denial is the price you have to pay for accomplishment in another area of your life and if I wanted to read such nonsense, I'd be reading the Daily Mail, not a book!
I have read (most of) this book so that you don't have to, and offer this review in the same spirit of public service. Dull, demoralising and depressing. This was hardly what I expected to be saying about one of the founding members of “Beyond the Fringe” - the others being Peter Cook, Dudly Moore and Jonathan Miller (http://www.youtube.com/results?search...). Nor of the author of plays and films such as “The Madness of King George III” and “The History Boys”.But that's the result of this mass emptying of his bottom draw with seemingly zero editorial influence. A collection of articles, obituaries, diary entries, through together to form a weighty and repetitive tome. Mourning the dissolution of the monasteries as though it were yesterday once has a certain quaint charm. Doing so in every second chapter gets repetitive, as do all the other tics and throw aways. We know Bennett was a late starter, he repeats this time and time again. He knew a lot of dead actors. Didn't seem to like them all that much. Which is the sum of most of his insights. To be fair, he doesn't like himself very much either but this self loathing gets tiring well before page 626.The highlight of the book is the description of a Christmas card he once received. A picture of Christ on the front it has the following inscription - “Jesus loves everyone, except for you, you cunt”.My soul is duller from having dutifully waded through this book, and if the card had not already been sent I would be licking a stamp now and dashing to the post box.
What do You think about Untold Stories (2015)?
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1418941.htmlI don't know Alan Bennett's work all that well, but it doesn't really matter; these are memoirs of a shy English writer born in Leeds in the mid-1930s and looking back on his life from the years around the turn of the century. Bennett has become something of a national institution, though he would hate to be described as such, and writes here about why he turned down a knighthood in 1996 ('it didn't suit me').The two most effective pieces in the book are the very long opening piece about his mother's mental illness and the rest of his extended family, particularly her sisters (one of whom died after wandering out of a mental hospital; Bennett himself found her body), and the rather shorter closing piece about his own, so far successful, battle with bowel cancer, a legacy of his father's side of the family. In between are long, amusing extracts from his diaries between 1996 and 2004, and various other pieces mostly about the arts in Britain and his own work which didn't appeal to me as much but are, as usual with Bennett, engaging and often bitterly funny. Recommended.
—Nicholas Whyte
I feel a great affection for Alan Bennett, at least the one he offers up in these periodic collections of ephemera. He seems the kind of mildly eccentric, vaguely comic figure you might find lurking around the periphery in a novel by Trollope. (Though I wouldn't find him there myself - I can't bear Trollope, his obsession with the minutiae of life in small cathedral towns drives me mad.) He spends much of his time puttering around London on his faithful bicycle; making daily observations in his diary, the tone of which suggest someone who is slightly disengaged, and not at all unhappily, from the mess and struggle ("living," he says elsewhere, not without some pride, "is something I have managed largely to avoid"); and indulging what are apparently his two favorite pastimes when not writing - visiting historic religious sites, the older and more decrepit the better, and consuming sandwiches al fresco in hedgerows, fields and deserted churchyards with his partner Rupert. He's like something out of Wind in the Willows. It's hard to imagine just how he got through the years with Beyond the Fringe and the three other outsized and exceedingly messy personalities involved in that, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and house genius Jonathan Miller; they didn't remain especially close after, I don't think, although Miller apparently lives nearby and occasionally stops when he's passing to chat over the front gate, a wonderful image in itself. ("He asks me what I'm reading. It's actually re-rereading, and telling him he would hate every page I show him James Lees-Milne's Through Wood and Dale. I ask him what he is reading and he shows me The Origins of the Final Solution. I say to him we would each of us derive more benefit if I were reading his book and he mine...") But when you watch the film of FRINGE, you realize how much of the writing was Bennett's and how cleverly he found a performing niche for himself amid the baroque flourishes of the others, somewhere between a dotty old professor and a psychotic schoolboy. There are very few genuine English eccentrics remaining, not in this true, slightly 19th century sense, and I suspect England is the poorer for it.
—Margaret
Bennett has a measured, well-toned cynical voice which is distinctly his. A few segments of this book stand out against the rich literary and thespian anecdotes of his life. His parents' life and their slow glide to bodily and mentally decline, his own upbringings in Leeds and Oxford, and his several brushes with death. Outside of his fame in the theater, Bennett has confined his physical movement fairly close, and his own personal life closer. One can not fault him for living a life with higher color and more brash strokes, but one can appreciate the fine art of finding wit and humor in all things quotidian including illness and death. He has showed us a well-lived interior life in this book.
—Qi
