Word: bennette
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George could also be a failed Alan Bennett. "My films are about embarrassment," he says. "George III, for one, is nervous and shy, like many royals. His bluntness and heartiness proceed from social unease. But his role is to present himself as King. When madness sets in, he drops this facade; he isn't embarrassed anymore. Embarrassment is a continuing theme in my work. I can't say I'm George III, but I certainly understand...
Writing Home gives the reader a sporting chance at understanding Bennett; it is as close to an autobiography as this gentleman is likely to vouchsafe. And in its evocations of Bennett's early years, it offers a virtual oratorio of embarrassment. His father, the butcher, played double bass in a jazz band and produced herb beer at home but succeeded at neither. His prim "Mam" made a religion of getting along; eventually she retreated into what Bennett calls "her flat, unmemoried days," like a meeker George III. Young Alan sought glamour in Leeds' double-decker trams, musty mystery...
...national service abducted him into manhood; an army stint at Cambridge encouraged him to seek, and win, a scholarship to Oxford, where he taught after graduation. But from Fringe on, anonymity would be lost to Bennett, and sensation would press in on this lifelong bachelor in odd ways. All sorts of stray beasts would show up on his doorstep...
...Lady in the Van," the centerpiece of Writing Home, is Bennett's memoir of a deranged woman who parked her car in his garden and stayed there for 15 years, until her death in 1989. If he did not always feel generous ("One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation"), he always acted generously. To allow this radical intrusion in a quiet life seems the emblem of English accommodation. But, Bennett insists, "allow isn't quite the word. I was just faced with her-it was like Eleanor Roosevelt moving in! I just...
...write about her," he says. "That's perfectly straightforward. But I have to find a story that I can tell about myself. And revealing things about yourself is so difficult." It's an easy trick for the typical contemporary author; every sentence is an advertisement for himself. But Bennett is discreet-which these days amounts to literary heroism...