Keeping On Keeping On

Alan Bennett

Faber & Faber, £9.99

Review by Nick Major

LIKE most people, one of the pleasures of my recent New Years is to remember auld acquaintances. I don’t mean my flesh and blood friends; I mean the writings of Alan Bennett, whose yearly diary is published in the London Review of Books every January. Of course, I’ve never met Bennett, but his diaries are written in such an accommodating and casual manner you feel he is writing for your sole benefit.

This feeling, odd as it is, has something to do with his writing process, if it can be called a ‘process’ at all. His entries are written haphazardly on scraps of paper, then bundled together at some point and written up by a secretary. Keeping On Keeping On collects these scribbles from the ten years between 2005 and 2015, and ends with a few short essays, including an excellent defence of libraries. The main bulk of the diary contains the usual, and very welcome, Bennett paraphernalia – notes on churchyards and village markets, anti-Tory rants, general bibliophilia, family reminiscences and a few wince-inducing puns.

As the title suggests, Bennett is getting on, which provides its own amusements, even in the most serious circumstances. When he finds out he has a stomach aneurysm, he is happy to leave the thing where it is, but his doctors insist on its removal. “Before ‘the procedure’ (which ends up lasting seven hours) there is a slightly comic scene in which the nurse goes round the various wards gathering up the patients due to be operated on this afternoon. We are told to take a pillow with us so, clad in our hospital gowns and each clutching our pillow, we walk in single file behind the nurse across the bridge above the atrium that leads to the surgical wing. We look like medieval penitents on the way to public humiliation and an auto-da-fé.”

Diaries provide a measure of a writer’s days. But they are also a personal pinhole into history. As Bennett survives through three general elections that return successive Tory governments, he becomes increasingly irate. In May 2015, after another disappointment, a woman tells him not to worry. Politicians, after all, are all the same. “At which point (we are in Shepherd’s grocers) I hear myself as very rarely shouting at the top of my voice: ‘No, they are not all the same. This lot are self-seeking liars, the cabinet included, and we’re landed with them for another five years.’”

As entertaining as all this is, diaries must, rising as they do out of the chaos of life, contain multitudes of unrelated events or thoughts. There is only one entry on tennis, for example, and Bennett captures Andy Murray’s playing style in one pithy phrase: “a triumph of grit over grace.” But one of the most enjoyable things about Bennett is that, after 50-odd years spent making people laugh, he still practises a skilled self-effacement, even in his diary: “18 October [2005]. Robert Hanks, the radio critic of the Independent, remarks that personally he can have too much Alan Bennett. I wonder how he thinks I feel.”