sexuality earlier in life.
Bennett writes very honestly about himself, or he creates the effect of doing so. He is never vain or pretentious, always wryly observant of the weaknesses and contradictions of his own character, ready to confess to ignoble or selfish feelings with a candour that sometimes makes the reader wince. But it is inevitably a selective self-portrait, a rhetorical construction, that emerges from these anecdotes, memories and journal entries. He presents himself as a shy loner at high school, crippled with self-consciousness about his unusually late puberty (his voice did not break until well after the age of sixteen, and the other physical manifestations were equally late in arriving), and there is no reason to doubt the agonies of embarrassment and anxiety this caused him. But he omits to mention that (according to his unofficial biographer) he was much in demand as an actor in school plays, and particularly praised for his performance as Kate in
The Taming of the Shrew
, where his unbroken voice and smooth cheeks would have been an asset. Learning this resolved a paradox which had long puzzled me: how was it that someone who presents himself so convincingly as shy, repressed and awkward could be such a successful actor (and without the benefit of professional training) not only in satirical revue, but later in West End productions of his own plays and in television drama and feature films by other hands? Obviously he used acting, in which a licensed fictional frame is put around behaviour, as a way of overcoming and turning to good account what he perceived as crippling abnormalities and inhibitions in adolescence. Later it was his success as writer and performer in student revue during his postgraduate years at Oxford that catapulted him out of an unpromising start as a medieval historian and into the fame of
Beyond the Fringe
, but he has said very little about that phase of his life – or indeed about the moments of triumph and euphoria that must have been quite frequent in the course of his distinguished professional career. He presents himself for the most part as diffident and depressive, someone who has never entirely freed himself from the psychological shackles of a dim, provincial, lower-middle-class upbringing, and never therefore quite believed in his own success. Hence his delight in relating stories that confirm this pessimistic self-assessment, like the receipt of a complimentary copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary for 1997, in which the birthdays of various contemporary writers are recorded, but the date of his own, 9 May, is blank except for the note, ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949’. Bathos is Bennett’s favourite trope.
He was born and brought up in Leeds, but deduces from his date of birth that he was conceived during an August holiday in some cheerless seaside boarding house, imagining his parents’ lovemaking constrained by their consciousness of the thin bedroom walls and the adjacency of other guests, ‘so much of my timorous and undashing life prefigured in that original circumspect conjunction’. His mother was painfully shy – so much so that she couldn’t face her own wedding, and was married privately by a kindly and co-operative clergyman, early enough in the morning for the groom to go punctually to work immediately afterwards. (Reading Bennett’s memoirs the Yorkshire proverb ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’ often comes to mind.) Mr Bennett Sr was a butcher by trade, and eventually had his own shop, but never much enjoyed the occupation. From time to time he entertained various schemes for making money by more enjoyable means, like brewing herbal beer, or becoming a double-bass player in a dance band (he was musical, and played the violin), but they never came to anything. In Alan’s memory the little family was resigned to its dullness and marginality when he was growing up, a feeling that ‘other
Bennett writes very honestly about himself, or he creates the effect of doing so. He is never vain or pretentious, always wryly observant of the weaknesses and contradictions of his own character, ready to confess to ignoble or selfish feelings with a candour that sometimes makes the reader wince. But it is inevitably a selective self-portrait, a rhetorical construction, that emerges from these anecdotes, memories and journal entries. He presents himself as a shy loner at high school, crippled with self-consciousness about his unusually late puberty (his voice did not break until well after the age of sixteen, and the other physical manifestations were equally late in arriving), and there is no reason to doubt the agonies of embarrassment and anxiety this caused him. But he omits to mention that (according to his unofficial biographer) he was much in demand as an actor in school plays, and particularly praised for his performance as Kate in
The Taming of the Shrew
, where his unbroken voice and smooth cheeks would have been an asset. Learning this resolved a paradox which had long puzzled me: how was it that someone who presents himself so convincingly as shy, repressed and awkward could be such a successful actor (and without the benefit of professional training) not only in satirical revue, but later in West End productions of his own plays and in television drama and feature films by other hands? Obviously he used acting, in which a licensed fictional frame is put around behaviour, as a way of overcoming and turning to good account what he perceived as crippling abnormalities and inhibitions in adolescence. Later it was his success as writer and performer in student revue during his postgraduate years at Oxford that catapulted him out of an unpromising start as a medieval historian and into the fame of
Beyond the Fringe
, but he has said very little about that phase of his life – or indeed about the moments of triumph and euphoria that must have been quite frequent in the course of his distinguished professional career. He presents himself for the most part as diffident and depressive, someone who has never entirely freed himself from the psychological shackles of a dim, provincial, lower-middle-class upbringing, and never therefore quite believed in his own success. Hence his delight in relating stories that confirm this pessimistic self-assessment, like the receipt of a complimentary copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary for 1997, in which the birthdays of various contemporary writers are recorded, but the date of his own, 9 May, is blank except for the note, ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949’. Bathos is Bennett’s favourite trope.
He was born and brought up in Leeds, but deduces from his date of birth that he was conceived during an August holiday in some cheerless seaside boarding house, imagining his parents’ lovemaking constrained by their consciousness of the thin bedroom walls and the adjacency of other guests, ‘so much of my timorous and undashing life prefigured in that original circumspect conjunction’. His mother was painfully shy – so much so that she couldn’t face her own wedding, and was married privately by a kindly and co-operative clergyman, early enough in the morning for the groom to go punctually to work immediately afterwards. (Reading Bennett’s memoirs the Yorkshire proverb ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’ often comes to mind.) Mr Bennett Sr was a butcher by trade, and eventually had his own shop, but never much enjoyed the occupation. From time to time he entertained various schemes for making money by more enjoyable means, like brewing herbal beer, or becoming a double-bass player in a dance band (he was musical, and played the violin), but they never came to anything. In Alan’s memory the little family was resigned to its dullness and marginality when he was growing up, a feeling that ‘other
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