That’s a Funny Way to React to Pain or Tragedy

THE LAYING ON OF HANDS

Stories

By Alan Bennett

Picador USA

200 pages, $15

Chronic illness, foot ailments, strokes, AIDS, deathbed vigils, the body betraying the soul, loved ones betraying each other: Such is not the stuff of which comedy traditionally is wrought. But in the hands of Alan Bennett, the British playwright and screenwriter (“The Madness of King George”), the tragic and painful are close bedfellows with the funny and the sexual, making for a collection of stories, “The Laying On of Hands,” in which we laugh at the situations presented and then feel a twinge of guilt for having indulged humor at such moments.

The three tales--longish short stories that can be read in their entirety over an afternoon--demonstrate Bennett’s sharp ability to use dialogue, coupled with an uncanny sense for flawed human reactions to tragedy. Bennett’s characters do not do the noble and high-minded thing when under emotional strain. Rather, like most of us, they think they’ll be heroic when misfortune strikes but find themselves acting in undignified ways at the crucial moment.

The title story is a biting satire of a memorial service told from the point of view of two ministers: Canon Treacher, who’s attending to critique the service, and Father Jolliffe, the presiding minister, about whom Treacher is going to make his report. The deceased is Clive Dunlop, a masseur who died in Peru under hazy circumstances at the age of 34.

The church is filled with celebrities, politicians, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company and pop singers--every cross-section of power and prestige is represented. Most of the mourners know each other and they all knew Clive, but none had known that the others knew Clive as well.

Clive’s magical healing hands had eased the suffering of many in the congregation. “Though Clive was scrupulous never to omit the ceremony of massage, for some it was just the preliminary to a more protracted and intimate encounter .... Father Jolliffe wondered who were here just as grateful patients ... and who had come along to commemorate the easing of a different sort of burden.” The entire congregation, the minister included, wonders if perhaps Clive died of AIDS and may have left them with that ominous calling card.

The tenor of the story shifts from grief to relief and back again as the eulogies run amok and the doomsayers are put in their place with the supposed “real” story of Clive’s demise. Throughout this and the other tales, Bennett plays with the emotional ambiguity at the heart of the story (are the mourners more beleaguered by Clive’s passing or by what it means to their own lifespan?) using mordant humor to neutralize the weightiness of the subject matter.

Unfortunately, the story ends on a note suggestive of the sexual-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Although written well before the revelations in today’s headlines, the story’s correlation overshadows the rest of the tale.

“Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet,” limns the life of an old-maid department-store clerk who cares for her stroke-addled brother and strikes up what might be a romance with her chiropodist (or, as the Americans say, her podiatrist), a narrative in which the author leans heavily on the intrigue of a foot fetish.

The final and perhaps strongest offering, “Father! Father! Burning Bright,” is based on Bennett’s BBC film “Intensive Care.” The tale focuses on Midgley, a middle-aged teacher who keeps vigil as his father dies. Undercutting the sadness are years of unfinished battles between the two and Midgley’s desire to be there at the moment of death, in essence, as the victor. The humor throughout is caustic. Midgley asks his Aunty Kitty, for example, what his father had been like. “He was a saint,” she replies. “You take after your mother more.”

This kind of one-line zinger seems Bennett’s strongest weapon as he disarms doleful situations. In taking pains to make sure we keep laughing, though, Bennett fails to get beyond this sitcom presentation to the real complexities beneath. The sexual circumstances that end each of the stories are likewise troublesome in that they shift our focus from the perplexing dilemmas to simplistic resolutions.

When, in “Father! Father! Burning Bright,” Midgley takes off for a romp with a robust nurse, we can’t help but wish the British penchant for funny sexual predicaments could have been subverted somehow.

The strength of Bennett’s stories is that they open our awareness to troubling dilemmas. Before we can fully explore the intricacies, though, he makes a joke and moves on. This technique may work well in a visual medium, but on the page, where readers expect to dig in past the surface details, it seems a bit flimsy, and the jokes about these heavy subjects often fall flat.