The best medicine

IN 1997, playwright Alan Bennett had a hospital test. A tube with a camera attached began its track up his bowel. “I notice how the two nurses, who are also watching the screen, instantly become more solicitous, one kneeling down and stroking my arm, whispering reassurance before I have entirely realized that reassurance is required,” he writes in “An Average Rock Bun,” one of the stand-out autobiographical essays in “Untold Stories,” his new book of occasional prose. The culprit was a polyp that had turned malignant. Its size was that of “the average rock bun” of the essay’s title. Big enough, in other words. Bennett, then in his 60s, was told he’d most likely die, but a surgeon’s skill and chemotherapy saved his life or, rather, saved it “so far.”

Bennett has Graham Greene’s sliver of ice in the heart. He never stops being a writer, is always notating, watching, in fearful and gut-squirming circumstances. Impending death, he observes, doesn’t improve his character any: “[B]enevolence did not come to me in a rush ... a good review for a fellow playwright could still make me grieve.” Nor does it improve the character of others. “When Alec Guinness came to see me,” he writes, “he was surprised and even disappointed that I had not lost my hair, understandably perhaps, in someone who had been bald since he was a young man. He was not wholly convinced that my hair remained my own until he had contrived to tug it to make sure. This was not entirely a joke.” For the habitually depressive, humor might be a way of whistling past the graveyard (“Sometimes I felt that more people had seen the inside of my bum than had seen some productions at the National Theatre”), but in Bennett’s case it’s never a way of not looking. Bleak circumstances only excite his unsparing gaze.

Bennett grew up in the provincial north of England and went to Oxford on a scholarship. There, he excelled, becoming a junior history don, before success intervened with the satirical revue “Beyond the Fringe,” which he wrote and performed with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller. This stellar quartet appeared in Edinburgh, then in London’s West End and on Broadway. Elizabeth Taylor perched on Bennett’s knee. He’s probably best known in the United States for “The Madness of King George” (his script for Nicholas Hytner’s film version was nominated for an Oscar), though his great work has been done for TV. There’s the dark and hilarious “Talking Heads,” the one-offs he wrote for Stephen Frears, and “A Question of Attribution” and “An Englishman Abroad,” deliciously sly riffs on the lives of traitor spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, both directed by John Schlesinger. Bennett couldn’t care less about espionage, but the manners of betrayal interest him very much, as do characters who will themselves into exile, be it from their countries or their sanity.

His genius is for the day-to-day. Rather than taking him away from his roots, success entangled him more deeply -- not merely with Yorkshire, or the industrial city of Leeds, but with the particular Leeds suburb of Armley, with its Victorian hellhole of a prison, a place that would have really gotten Johnny Cash going. This is where Bennett grew up, as he relates in “Untold Stories’ ” almost book-length title essay, “over a butcher’s shop in a house with no hallway, the living room giving straight onto the street where Mam’s painfully collected gentilities were periodically overwhelmed by the stench of fat being rendered in the cellar.” He describes his mother’s depressions, “all of which ended up being what Dad called ‘hospital dos,’ ” and her slow descent into madness and memory loss. This agonizing process takes decades and provokes a sequence of revelations, the unearthing of long-hidden secrets. Madness and suicide, it turns out, run in the family, and we glimpse the material that fueled Bennett’s great dramatic works.

Bennett strikes a tone of autumnal sorrow, often interspersed with a wild hilarity that moves us because we know it proceeds from exasperation, the suppressed, though violent, turbulence of his own feeling. He never left his parents behind, never wanted to, never dreamed of doing so. With withering self-exactingness, he records the death of his father and his final visits to his mother, terminally blank with Alzheimer’s. He tries to play it like “Brief Encounter” while the nursing home staff bounces about, telling his drooling Mam what a clever girl she is for having finished her mince and Arctic roll. “And Mam purses her lips over her toothless gums for a rewarding kiss. Twenty years ago she would have been as embarrassed by this affectation of affection as I am. But that person is dead, or forgotten anyway, living only in the memory of this morose middle-aged man who turns up every fortnight, if she’s lucky, and sits there expecting his affection to be deduced from the way he occasionally takes her hand, stroking the almost transparent skin before putting it sensitively to his lips.” This beautiful, intensely evocative piece concludes at graveside: “I try and get a picture of my parents, Dad in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, Mam in her blue coat and shiny straw hat. I even try and say a word or two in prayer, though what and to what I’d find hard to say.”

Although family and the past dominate “Untold Stories,” there are other themes, other essays, including large chunks of a diary that Bennett always knows he’s going to publish. (Extracts have appeared in the London Review of Books.) He is straightforward about being gay, an orientation he recognized early on.. At one point, he describes a World War II-era visit to the movies to see “The Sea Hawk.” Outside the cinema, he meets “a genial middle-aged man in glasses.” Bennett goes on: “The film had already started, Errol Flynn flirting with Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth while the usherette showed us down the aisle and before we had sat down the man was pinching me and remarking on my nice chubby legs.” Bennett flees to the lavatory, is predictably followed, and what ensues is pure Joe Orton, censored by fear and fate’s hand.

Things don’t get much better at Oxford. “I was generally in love,” Bennett writes, “always unhappily, always with my own sex, and seldom with any physical outcome. I was still a medieval historian, not a profession, I imagine, with a high sexual strike rate.” Sexual ease and confidence arrive late, but the route to that destination seems hugely relevant. He and his partner were attacked in Italy in the early 1990s, an episode recounted here in “A Common Assault.” Being gay touches upon Bennett’s fastidious loathing of violence, his shyness, his acutely self-conscious eye, his empathy for the outsider, his need to burst out of his privacy while in fact protecting it by making people laugh.

There is, too, the matter of his ongoing engagement, argument nearly, with the “looming presence” of Philip Larkin, Mr. Misery himself, the gloomy bard of Hull (not far from Leeds and almost as desolate as Armley). On the one hand, Bennett’s identification is compelling. “[Larkin] writes with a clarity and a determined ordinariness that does not exclude (and often underpins) the lyrical. He is always accessible, his language compact,” he notes, and he could be describing some of his own best qualities. But other aspects of Larkin make him shudder. “Declaiming lines like ‘Life is first boredom then fear’ or ‘Courage is no good / It means not scaring others’ and sensing an audience happily concurring, I feel a tart; it’s just giving them a cheap thrill. The despair is too easy,” Bennett records in his diary, describing what it’s like to “stand on the stage and read the poems.” Bennett’s the wiser man, I think. He’s tolerant and compassionate. He’s been out in the world and has observed death’s approach at close hand. He’s had more fun too. Photographs show him laughing a lot, and his work proves that he also likes us to laugh. He’s turned the subjects of failure and not belonging into brilliant cascades of sustaining observation.

Bennett is one of those writers who creates a distinct and instantly recognizable world. When my own mother was dying with Alzheimer’s in a Yorkshire nursing home, I had the eerie feeling that I’d strayed into one of his plays or paragraphs. He’s a beloved figure in Britain, often popping up in bit parts in other people’s plays and films, or on TV, or reading “The Wind in the Willows” on the radio or featured in year’s best lists. His public image is almost cuddly, fostered by the deadpan Leeds accent that he has chosen never to discard and the sober jackets and twee sweaters he always wears. The barb and shattering sadness in his writing constantly betray this persona, though modesty is part of his artistic charm. Empathy is always present too, and sometimes even affirmation. “Meanwhile,” he writes of his recovery from cancer. “I am one of many who are here when they did not expect to be here. Take heart.” We do. *