Across seven decades, Alan Bennett has revealed a great deal of himself through plays and screenplays. In 1994, with the publication Writing Home, his first volume of diaries, culled from the London Review of Books column he started writing in 1983, he began revealing a good deal more. Enough Said is his fourth collection (leaving aside the 64-page House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries) and likely his final, as the title implies. It's an elegant package, the book's endpapers and tailbands matching the colours of the cushion on which he is shown reclining. Ninety-two-next month and physically frail, as the diaries and his appearance attest, he’s lost neither his acerbic tone nor his ability to empathise, the twin poles of much of his writing.
It’s been among the greatest thrills of my writing life to have interviewed Bennett five times. The occasions felt a genuine privilege, and I treasure the handwritten postcards that followed each encounter. Once we sat next to each other at the British Book Awards, my having persuaded him to come as he was to receive the Author of the Year bauble. As we unfolded the napkins over our evening finery, he revealed he’d been outfitted by friends Alec Guinness and George Fenton. Later, as the proceedings dragged on through endless speechifying, he whispered in his inimitable tones: “You’re lucky it’s not a Thursday, I wouldn’t have come. I’d have been at home watching Footballers’ Wives.”
And, of course, that’s the delight of reading Bennett – his voice, with its laconic Yorkshire tones and deadpan delivery, is always in your mind’s ear. His parents now long gone, and so many friends, there’s no need to rein in the disinhibitions of old age. Starring roles in Enough Said go to Nicholas Hynter, the director with whom he’s worked for 25 years, from The Madness of George III to The Choral, and his partner Rupert Thomas. The two met in 1991, introduced by a mutual friend, and Thomas moved in six years later when Bennett was diagnosed with bowel cancer. “Without him, and expert surgery, I would not have survived,” Bennett writes in the introduction to a volume which spans the years 2016-24.
Thomas, whose design eye and talent as an editor Bennett much admires – his only complaint, on 6 November 2021, that World of Interiors “is so heavy I have sprained my wrist reading it in bed” – is the playwright’s constant companion and devoted carer. Theirs is a loving and companionable relationship, the pair delighting in visiting churches and antique shops, often in Bennett’s beloved Yorkshire but sometimes on daytrips from their long-time home in Primrose Hill. Birthday and Christmas gifts are inevitably arty, a painting perhaps or an item of old porcelain; maybe a book. Thomas brings Bennett breakfast in bed and cooks, though sometimes they order pizza from Domino’s. Victoria sponge, one of the book’s many leitmotifs and a comestible on which Bennett never fails to deliver his verdict, is one interest they don’t share – Thomas is gluten-free. It is Rupert who attends to the medical appointments, resolves issues with recalcitrant hearing aids, arranges the wheelchair for trips north, walks behind him as he shakily ascends the stairs, and tries to assuage Alan’s anxiety when he fears that forgetting words, or the details of last night’s supper, are indications of dementia. “I have become totally dependent on the kindness of Rupert,” Bennett acknowledges.
Unsurprisingly given Bennett’s infirmities, including severe arthritis, there's less gadding about now: there are fewer visits to rehearsals and film sets, and he even has to give Jonathan Miller’s funeral a miss due to illness. The two Beyond the Fringe alums were not “unrivalrous” and largely ignored each other’s post-BTF achievements – Pete and Dud would generally give a call. He regards Miller as a know-all and is somewhat censorious of his lack of research when accepting stage projects which he directed “by proxy” as John Bird put it. And like Miller's fellow medic Oliver Sacks, he didn’t always tell the truth, though Bennett allows that the latter was “not quite in the Susan Sontag class.” Maggie Smith’s death is a real blow, and he can scarcely bring himself to speak about her for fear of breaking down. As to the Jesuit priest who conducted her funeral, he rather over-acted.
There’s lots of observation and chit-chat about old friends from school (a fellow sixth former whose piano skills he admired, though not as much as his deep tan, “the colour I’d always wanted to be”); from Oxford, where there’s a fair bit of unrequited love; and of course from the theatre world, as well as those that enliven his everyday life – the handsome bin collector and train guard are among those who catch his eye. Weather and urban wildlife feature and, in Yorkshire, the state of the rill, and the spider who is a permanent house guest. How long, he wonders, can spiders live?
And course there’s the social commentary (the musical nonentities with which the BBC Proms are these days stuffed; the parlous state of the NHS, to which he donates the royalties from the Covid-year screening of Talking Heads), and of course politics. He watches Theresa May’s weepy 2017 election appearance “without a pang of sympathy” and quotes Kipling (“I lied to please the mob”) when summing up Boris Johnon. John Bercow’s bravery in standing up to Johnson and Donald Trump is much admired. On 7 January 2019, he writes: “When Trump destroys the world those who are left will look at one another and wonder why nobody stopped him.”
Indeed, we do.
Enough Said is published in hardback by Faber and Profile, £25
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