{"id":25351,"date":"2012-01-10T08:00:51","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T13:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=25351"},"modified":"2012-01-10T11:01:04","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T16:01:04","slug":"alan-bennett-on-%e2%80%98smut%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/10\/alan-bennett-on-%e2%80%98smut%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Alan Bennett on \u2018Smut\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

If Alan Bennett needs any introduction at all, I would need more than a paragraph in which to write it. I would start by explaining how, in the early 1960s, he formed the comic revue<\/em> Beyond the Fringe, along with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller. I would go on to describe his subsequent half-century of writing for television and the stage, which has included such hugely successful plays as<\/em> Forty Years On<\/a>, The Madness of George III<\/a>, and<\/em> The History Boys<\/a>. Perhaps I would round things off by suggesting that he has provided the most authoritative introduction to his own writing life through his wry, tender, autobiographical writings, collected in<\/em> Writing Home<\/a> and<\/em> Untold Stories<\/a>. His latest book, <\/em>Smut<\/a>, includes two long\u00a0stories, the first of which, \u201cThe Greening of Mrs. Donaldson,\u201d concerns a formerly staid widower whose life is changed by some adventurous student lodgers. Meanwhile, <\/em>\u201c<\/em>The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes<\/em>\u201d<\/em> describes an intergenerational family romp that is set in motion by the marriage of attractive, vain, and\u00a0gay Graham Forbes to the outwardly plain Betty, who nonetheless\u00a0harbors secrets of her own. To find out whether\u00a0this book represents the sort of \u201choliday from respectability\u201d that his protagonists take, I talked to him over the phone last Friday morning.<\/em><\/p>\n

Were these two stories conceived as a pair?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. Most of the short stories I\u2019ve written have started off because they wouldn\u2019t turn into plays, and certainly the first one in this book, \u201cThe Greening of Mrs. Donaldson,\u201d has quite a theatrical beginning. The other one probably dates back further. I wrote a play called Habeas Corpus<\/a> <\/em>and it\u2019s a bit in that style. It\u2019s a farce and not a realistic story. I think the notion, particularly in the first story, of somebody breaking out, like Mrs. Donaldson, who is breaking out after a fairly humdrum life, keeps recurring. <\/p>\n

There are one or two moments where the narrator addresses the reader in both stories. Did you feel there were liberties you could take in the short-story form that you couldn\u2019t take on the stage?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I always like to break out and address the audience. In The History Boys, <\/em>for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.<\/p>\n

Your title, Smut, <\/em>is a very English word, and something I associate more with the North of England, where you are from.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a genteel way of saying filth, really, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Was it a word you\u2019d heard said a lot?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. One reason I wrote these two stories was to outflank my fans, or those of my readers who expect me to write a certain kind of thing. Sometimes, like Mrs. Donaldson, you just want to break out. You don\u2019t want to shock them, quite, but you do want to surprise them. It\u2019s about not wanting to be thought of as cozy.<\/p>\n

You have written about sex before though. You mentioned Habeas Corpus, <\/em>but it\u2019s there in The History Boys <\/em>too, and Kafka\u2019s Dick <\/em>is, as the title suggests, about the body. Do you think people neglect that side of your writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I always feel overappreciated but underestimated. I can\u2019t complain that I\u2019ve had a public all through my writing life, but people don\u2019t quite know what I\u2019ve written. People don\u2019t read you too closely. Perhaps, after I\u2019ve died, they\u2019ll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there\u2019s more in it. That may be wrong, but that\u2019s what I comfort myself with.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve had such an unusual writing life. There are the diaries, the reminiscences, the stories, as well as your writing for the stage and television.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think in England they like you to do the same thing, but with a slight variation\u2014but the same thing again and again. They don\u2019t like you to be too diverse. Also, there\u2019s something that\u2019s said in The Habit of Art<\/em><\/a> that, at this stage in life, your public just wants you to finish. They want you to put the cork in the bottle. They just want to have you on their shelves, complete. They don\u2019t want you to keep on having another go. They don\u2019t want to keep adjusting. That\u2019s said about Auden and Britten, but I think it\u2019s true of any writer who\u2019s getting on. It\u2019s chastening, but it\u2019s a fact of life.<\/p>\n

This makes me think of The Uncommon Reader<\/a> <\/em>where the Queen discovers reading and it goes against what her public expects. <\/em>Is that about wanting to resist one\u2019s reputation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s about wanting not to be put in a box, to be put in someone\u2019s pocket. I only\u2014I\u2019ve never liked the phrase\u2014came out, as it were, about being gay quite late. But I think the reason I didn\u2019t do it earlier was because I didn\u2019t want to be put in that box either.<\/p>\n

The reverse of this is also true because writers who do write about sex fearlessly end up being defined by it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You\u2019re damned if you do and damned if you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Are there any writers you admire for their writing about sex?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I always think Philip Roth is very good, but, of course, he gets criticized for always fetching it in. But his style is so good and so delicate that he can write about very intimate sexual stuff and the style insulates you against it. It takes any revulsion out of it, because he writes about it so beautifully. I think that probably Americans do that better than we do. It may be because they\u2019ve been filtered through Henry James, because they\u2019re certainly more forensic, or more delicate about it, than English writers are.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that you mention Henry James because The Master was not known for his own friskiness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh no!<\/p>\n

In the second story, \u201cThe Shielding of Mrs. Forbes,\u201d you say that Graham, a character who is not so secretly gay, finds marital sex a \u201cfelonious pleasure.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s true, psychologically true, though it\u2019s more theoretical in my experience. Graham feels that he wants to embrace risk, but doesn\u2019t actually want to.<\/p>\n

The woman he marries, Betty, is described as being distinctly plain. There\u2019s a tradition of plain characters in fiction surprising other characters, as well as the reader. I think of Mary Garth in Middlemarch <\/em>and Jane Eyre, of course.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t associate plainness with virtue, and that becomes obvious with Betty, who, although she\u2019s very straightforward and honest, is not particularly morally attractive. When you realize Betty\u2019s having an affair with Graham\u2019s father, well, that would be difficult to do on the stage. On the stage, you\u2019d have to do more setting it up, and so it would be a bit more complicated. But I relished the freedom of being able to just put her into bed with Graham\u2019s father, the ease with which you can do this sort of thing with prose.<\/p>\n

I did find myself noting in the margins of the book, \u201cit\u2019s always the quiet ones.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, put that on the cover!<\/p>\n

Do you think these could be considered love stories in any way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. \u201cThe Shielding of Mrs. Forbes\u201d could certainly be a love story, and a story of a reasonably successful marriage. Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn\u2019t be able to write about. Generally, an element of pathos comes into it when I\u2019m writing about love.<\/p>\n

When Graham\u2019s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Forbes, dance at the wedding, and everyone is surprised at how good a dancer Mr. Forbes is, well, it would have been very difficult for you to dramatize that he is in fact whispering obscenities to his wife. Language seems to be a concern in these stories, and how things are or are not said. Did you enjoy writing scenes like that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I thought it was quite a risky scene. I thought it might make people cringe. But somehow cocooning it in him being slightly drunk, and in him being a very good dancer, I thought I\u2019d get away with it. I always find it quite risky to be too vernacular, I suppose. It\u2019s an area where I tread rather gingerly.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve recently written about the plight of libraries here in Britain<\/a>, which have been threatened with closure as a government austerity measure. What is at stake? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Here, in Primrose Hill, around the corner, is the Chalk Farm Library, which I go by virtually every day. After school in the afternoon, it\u2019s always full of children, and they\u2019re mostly not middle-class, they\u2019re from the high-rise flats, and a lot of them are Somali children. The library for them is as much a lifeline as it was for me fifty or sixty years ago. A library is not simply the books and the computers and the resources, but it\u2019s actually a place where there aren\u2019t four or five conversations going on. It\u2019s a place where children can read and be on their own, and that\u2019s invaluable. But they want to turn our library into some sort of retail outlet. In fifteen or twenty years\u2019 time, they\u2019ll be complaining about rioting youths, and it\u2019ll be a result of the decisions they\u2019re making now. Anyway, I\u2019m a bore on the subject.<\/p>\n

Not at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I bother less about boring people than about being an old git. But then I suppose that the essence of being an old git is that you don\u2019t bother about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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