GENERAL

F RANCIS K ING

A LITERARY BANQUET

U NTOLD S TORIES

★By Alan Bennett (Faber & Faber 658pp £20)

I NHIS PREFACE , Alan Bennett asks us to view this bumper book as one of those once popular but now rare annuals that at the close of each year would lure readers through a gallimaufry of stories, reminiscences, pictures and puzzles. Some of the items in those annuals would already be familiar to their readers. So will items in this collection, particularly to those who have already encountered extensive extracts from Bennett’s diaries in the London Review of Books. Fortunately, even already familiar pieces can still delight; but one suffers an intermittent exasperation when something already served up in this new literary banquet then reappears, an unwelcome reflux, many pages later. So it is with Thurston Hall, a long forgotten movie actor, of whom we are three times provided with precisely the same observations. Similarly, in the case of Judy Holliday one finds oneself wishing that a more attentive editor had ensured that a star of whom one could in the old days never see enough had here been confined to a single appearance. The title piece comes first, as it deserves to do, since it is both the longest and the best. Here, brilliant in its succinctness and eloquence, we have a history of Bennett’s immediate family. Clinical depression, which also afflicted Mam, drove his maternal grandfather to a suicide that remained a secret from his grandson until he uncovered it late in his life. Mam’s two sisters did not marry for years; then, when they had at last secured husbands, their prettiness and perkiness began to fade and both died tragically. Eventually Mam, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had to be incarcerated in an institution, in which she remained for fifteen years. To it, with touching devotion, Dad would motor fifty miles each day, in order to hold a hand from which he rarely received a response. The whole landscape of this wintry journey through the past would be unbearably sad were it not for the glints of sunlight provided by the author’s wry, stoical wit and his unquestionable love for parents who nonetheless often filled him with pent-up rage and despair. When I used to visit my cousin, the publisher Colin Haycraft, and his wife, the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, in their house in Camden Town, I used to hear a lot about ‘that ghastly woman’ (Haycraft’s frequent phrase) living in a dilapidated and malodorous van on Bennett’s

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006