This is a collection of diaries, recollections and book reviews - including several old favourites, such as "The Lady in the Ban" and various "LRB" diaries - which work as a whole... more...to create a portrait of the writer.
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Writing Home is a collection of Alan Bennett's prose writings, diaries, thoughts on plays and films he has worked on, his family background and much, much more. It was first published in 1994 and is a very good book to dip into now and again when you are stuck for something to read. On the back cover it states that the book brings together twenty-five years worth of reminiscences, reviews, broadcasting and diaries.
There are broadly five sections to the book. The first is titled 'Past and Present' and includes five seperate pieces of writing. These include three gentle and nostalgic autobiographical chapters about Bennett's family and relatives and growing up in Leeds. Also included are tributes to Innes Lloyd and Bennett's great friend of many years, the broadcaster Russell Harty, who died in 1988. There is also a very enjoyable transcript of 'Dinner At Noon', a fly on the wall television documentary that Bennett made in 1988 about class and life in a hotel in Harrowgate.
Another hugely enjoyable part in this book comes next in the form of 'The Lady In The Van'. Bennett uses his diary entries to tell the story of Miss Shephard, an eccentric old homeless woman who pitched up in his garden in a shabby old van and ended up staying there from the late sixties to the late eighties!
This is followed by probably the main reason for buying this book and the best part. For about the next hundred pages we get to read Bennett's amusing and sporadic diary entries and musings covering the period 1980-1990.
I think it's fair to say the book then takes a more literary turn with sections titled 'Prefaces To Plays', 'Filming and Rehearsing', 'Books and Writers' and 'Stocking Fillers'. These sections are perhaps more difficult to get into, especially if the reader is not familiar with some of the figures under discussion or not steeped in the theatre. You'll find detailed thoughts about some of the plays and television films Bennett has been involved with and musings on everyone from John Gielgud to Kafka. As you may have gathered this is a whopper of a book with a vast amount of varied material to dip into.
The style of the writing is naturally very dry, often funny, sometimes moving, a bit left-wing, never too showy, nostalgic, very Northern, very English and strangely comforting. Dipping into this book is like watching an old black and white film with a cup of tea and a biscuit as it rains outside. It's just pleasant to dip into it and be in the company of Bennett for a while.
There is far too much material to mention in a review but for me just the inclusion of 'The Lady In The Van' and the 1980-1990 Diaries alone would make this an essential purchase.
The book is not a 'tell all' piece like Bennett's more recent collection (he apparently thought he was going to die before that book was published so was naturally more candid) but it is a fascinating little window into Bennett's thoughts about events that occurred during this period both in his own life and beyond. The diary section covers the eighties and so we get Bennett's very dim view of the Falklands War ("It's the Last Night Of The Proms erected into a policy"), Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and members of the tabloid press who worked themselves into a frenzy over the possibility of Russell Harty having AIDS and got up to all sorts of nonsense including bluffing their way into the hospital. The memorable speech Bennett gave at Russell Harty's memorial service is included in the book. Bennett comments that in the dedicated and tireless staff of a hospital we see the best that we are capable of and in the gutter press the worst.
The diaries are of course often very funny and warm with little snapshots of an afternoon blackberrying in Yorkshire hedges or just a memory of a funny thing Bennett overheard someone say in Sainsburys. The Lady In The Van (later turned into a play) is equally distinctive and absorbing. This also includes one of my favourite lines in the book when Bennett asks Miss Shephard if she would like a cup of tea brought out to her. She replies that she doesn't want to be any trouble or put him out so she'll just have half a cup! The independent and - it has to be said - slightly barmy Miss Shephard is vividly remembered and really comes to life. Some of her exchanges with the exasperated writer are very funny. At the end of this section is a postscript where Bennett shares with the reader what information he managed to find out about her past when she died.
For me personally the other treat of the book is 'Dinner At Noon' which I enjoyed a lot with its gentle observations about gradual change, trends and class;
"Once, visitors came to take the waters but now it's a 'Leisure Break' or a conference. Nowadays I like hotels, at any rate in small doses; they're a setting where you see people trying to behave which is always more interesting than them just behaving. When people are on their best behaviour they aren't always at their best. For years, hotels and restaurants were for me theatres of humilation and the business of eating in public every bit as fraught with risk and shame as taking one's clothes off."
So, overall the book is highly recommended. I struggled a bit with some of the latter half of Writing Home but still find much interesting material in this section including a few more Bennett diary observations from a set or city.
But overall the book easily has more than enough priceless material to make it an essential purchase.
Writing Home also has a nice collection of black and white photographs in it that run through Bennett's childhood to Beyond The Fringe, his other notable works and pictures of him at home or on location somewhere.
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