Keeping On Keeping On

Alan Bennett

Profile Books, £25

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

IN the perception of the great British public Alan Bennett is a member of a select club of bona fide National Treasures. As he himself appreciates he has gained an unwanted reputation as “a teddy bear” who is “essentially harmless”. His diaries, of which Keeping On Keeping On is the third volume, underline what poppycock this is. Though couched in temperate, urbane and humourful prose, and redolent of an England – tea shops, antique emporia and country churches – that seems out of kilter with its insistent, hubristic 21st century “nastification”, Bennett’s diaries bristle with irritation, anger and frustration.

Like all the best diarists, he does not want for bugbears. Among the most constant are Tony Blair and the Tories, the police and public schools. However, he is equally blessed with things that cheer him, including public libraries, the novels of Philip Roth, and the National Gallery in London to which, being a National Treasure, he has privileged access.

This collection starts in 2005, when Bennett was 70, and ends 10 years later. He is not, he insists, “a conscientious diarist”, though the evidence would suggest otherwise. His diary, he adds, “is generally a tale of frustration and dissatisfaction which, though it may help me, is no fun to read”. In this regard, he could not be more wrong. There is not a dull or uninteresting page here. This is the kind of book for which bedsides were made.

Bennett’s genius both as a playwright and a diarist is that he writes in a manner that takes the effort out of reading. He is an observer and a commentator and unafraid to put into print anything that might cause him embarrassment and shame. He wears his prejudices with pride and his passions with aplomb. Shuttling between London and his native Yorkshire, invariably in the company of his partner, Rupert Thomas, editor of World of Interiors, he is a camera with his shutter ever open. To him, moreover, the past is ever present and he often has cause fondly to remember his “Mam and Dad”.

Like Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Parkinson, he is a professional Yorkshireman for whom straight talking is in the genes. Apropos of nothing in particular, he remarks of Roy Keane that he “has the face of a mercenary. Meet him before the walls of 15th century Florence and one’s heart would sink.” Jeremy Hunt, meanwhile, “has the look of an estate agent waiting to show someone a property”. Nor is he any more enamoured of David Cameron, who on a visit to Leeds, where Bennett was born, banged on about “the smart state”.

“This seems to me a state,” he writes, getting to the nub of modern conservatism, “that gets away with doing as little as possible for its citizens and shuffling as many responsibilities as it can onto whomever thinks they can make a profit out of them.”

Age, it is clear, has not diminished his sting. It is, however, playing havoc with his hearing and a number of the entries involve “mishearings”. When Alan Titmarsh, another NT, tells him that he and his wife have gone to Grantham, “I say I didn’t know they were planning to move. They weren’t. What he’d actually said was they’d got a grandson.” His sight doesn’t seem to be much more reliable. Buying a bottle of organic wine he notes that the label says it is “Suitable for Vegetarians and Vagrants” which, on closer inspection, he realises reads “Vegans”. When shortly after the 2015 election, which returned a Tory government, a woman shopper tells him not to worry and that “they’re all the same", he cannot stop himself shouting at the top of his 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.”

The best diarists rejoice in such everyday encounters and life’s little absurdities. They are also inveterate eavesdroppers, collecting commonplaces like a kid gathering the first fall of conkers, stuffing them away for future use. “On your bike this morning?” someone remarks. Bennett nods cheerfully. “God help us all,” comes the reply. Waiting to be served in the greengrocer’s he overhears a woman say, “I’ll be ninety tomorrow. It’s disgusting.” An aged aunt rings from Edinburgh on her birthday which she celebrates each year by learning a Shakespeare sonnet which she recites by heart.

This, in capsule, is a Britain that has been submerged in boorishness and cacophony. Bennett mourns its passing even as he records it. “Nowadays,” he reflects, pepper spray in hand, “the road to Damascus would be called ‘a steep learning curve’.” He has earned the right to his cantankerousness. Were he a member of the Labour Party, he says, he would vote for Jeremy Corbyn, “if only out of the hope that the better part of salvation lies not in electoral calculation but in the aspirations of the people”. Bennett finds the prospect of an independent Scotland “lowering”, believing that England can “ill afford” to lose us. While treasuring him, we should be careful not to underestimate him. Teddy bear he may be but he has a tiger’s teeth.