feeding frenzy in the British press. She was revealed as the daughter of Hungarian refugees, some ten years younger than Bennett, divorced with three children, whom he had first met when he employed her to clean his London house, and later set up in business running a café next to his country cottage in the village of Clapham, in the Yorkshire Dales, which he had inherited from his parents. According to Alexander Games, Bennett went to ground after the interview appeared, leaving the somewhat puzzled and troubled Anne to field the journalists’ questions.
Untold Stories
does not explain why he chose to make their relationship public at this point in time; indeed it contains no direct reference to Anne at all. It does, however, describe other phases of his sexual life with more openness than ever before, and with characteristically droll, self-deprecating humour.
In 1950, when he was sixteen, he came to the conclusion that, ‘all things considered’, he was homosexual, but his desires then and for some time afterwards were essentially emotional rather than physical and steeped in romantic despair. He was invariably attracted to ‘straight’ young men who could never reciprocate his feelings, and this seemed to him his inevitable doom. He was unwilling to admit his orientation, least of all to his parents, though they seem to have harboured suspicions. When, as an undergraduate, he tapered his trousers to a fashionably tight narrow fit:
‘You can’t go out like that,’ Mam said. ‘People will think you’re one of them.’
Whereupon Dad, who was even more shocked than she was, said (and the question must have had a long gestation), ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’
‘Oh Dad,’ I think I replied, as if the question was absurd. ‘Don’t be daft.’
But I never wore the trousers.
The exchange, like many others, later found its way, slightly changed, into the script of a TV play – entitled,
Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
At the time of
Beyond the Fringe,
he had ‘occasional flings, all of them straight, two of them with the same slightly depressing outcomes: shortly after going to bed with me, my partners announce their engagement (to someone else) and are briskly married’. In the next decade he becomes more relaxed about looking for sexual pleasure with men. The ones he falls for are still straight, but ‘sex in the seventies is not so particular about gender and boundaries and so I find myself less often rebuffed and even having quite a nice time . . . I also find myself being led back from the paths of deviancy to what becomes, in the eighties anyway, a pretty conventional life’. This is the only, very oblique, allusion to his relationship with Anne Davies in the book. In other places
Untold Stories
describes a happy relationship in recent years with a new partner, Rupert Thomas, the young editor of a design magazine, first mentioned in the diaries as ‘R.’ in January 1996. So perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, the
New Yorker
interview was a way of bringing the relationship with Anne Davies to an end, even though he paid warm tribute to her there (and according to Games they ‘remained extremely close’). Bennett admits that ‘homosexuality is a differentness I’ve never been prepared wholly to accept in myself’. That may have complicated his life, but it ensured that he avoided the sometimes limiting categorisation of ‘gay writer’. In later dramatic work,
The History Boys
and a play about W.H. Auden,
The Habit of Art
, he ‘pushed the envelope’ as regards the explicit and often bawdy treatment of homosexual behaviour, almost as if he had decided to test the tolerance of his broadly based audience. Those plays, and the two comic-erotic tales published in 2011 under the title
Smut: Two unseemly stories
, one straight and one gay in subject matter, seem to be part of a late urge to renounce the diffidence and reticence that characterised Bennett’s attitude to
Untold Stories
does not explain why he chose to make their relationship public at this point in time; indeed it contains no direct reference to Anne at all. It does, however, describe other phases of his sexual life with more openness than ever before, and with characteristically droll, self-deprecating humour.
In 1950, when he was sixteen, he came to the conclusion that, ‘all things considered’, he was homosexual, but his desires then and for some time afterwards were essentially emotional rather than physical and steeped in romantic despair. He was invariably attracted to ‘straight’ young men who could never reciprocate his feelings, and this seemed to him his inevitable doom. He was unwilling to admit his orientation, least of all to his parents, though they seem to have harboured suspicions. When, as an undergraduate, he tapered his trousers to a fashionably tight narrow fit:
‘You can’t go out like that,’ Mam said. ‘People will think you’re one of them.’
Whereupon Dad, who was even more shocked than she was, said (and the question must have had a long gestation), ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’
‘Oh Dad,’ I think I replied, as if the question was absurd. ‘Don’t be daft.’
But I never wore the trousers.
The exchange, like many others, later found its way, slightly changed, into the script of a TV play – entitled,
Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
At the time of
Beyond the Fringe,
he had ‘occasional flings, all of them straight, two of them with the same slightly depressing outcomes: shortly after going to bed with me, my partners announce their engagement (to someone else) and are briskly married’. In the next decade he becomes more relaxed about looking for sexual pleasure with men. The ones he falls for are still straight, but ‘sex in the seventies is not so particular about gender and boundaries and so I find myself less often rebuffed and even having quite a nice time . . . I also find myself being led back from the paths of deviancy to what becomes, in the eighties anyway, a pretty conventional life’. This is the only, very oblique, allusion to his relationship with Anne Davies in the book. In other places
Untold Stories
describes a happy relationship in recent years with a new partner, Rupert Thomas, the young editor of a design magazine, first mentioned in the diaries as ‘R.’ in January 1996. So perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, the
New Yorker
interview was a way of bringing the relationship with Anne Davies to an end, even though he paid warm tribute to her there (and according to Games they ‘remained extremely close’). Bennett admits that ‘homosexuality is a differentness I’ve never been prepared wholly to accept in myself’. That may have complicated his life, but it ensured that he avoided the sometimes limiting categorisation of ‘gay writer’. In later dramatic work,
The History Boys
and a play about W.H. Auden,
The Habit of Art
, he ‘pushed the envelope’ as regards the explicit and often bawdy treatment of homosexual behaviour, almost as if he had decided to test the tolerance of his broadly based audience. Those plays, and the two comic-erotic tales published in 2011 under the title
Smut: Two unseemly stories
, one straight and one gay in subject matter, seem to be part of a late urge to renounce the diffidence and reticence that characterised Bennett’s attitude to
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