Alan Bennett has once or twice had a go at being a little more unbuttoned as he writes, but it hasn't always worked. "Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York," he once confided to the readers of the London Review of Books, "I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease even, so that if I start off undressed I have nowhere to go."
For a man who once observed that he required a police cordon before he could unknot his tie, this process of self-exposure must always have been an awkward one; in recent years, however, close readers could be forgiven for thinking that Bennett has been casting aside – in his writing at least – overcoat and scarf and jacket and sweater with something approaching abandon.
This tendency began after Bennett developed bowel cancer in 1997, and was told he had a 50/50 chance of recovery. His chemotherapy regime and the apparent imminence of death had the side effect of him wanting to publish the things that up until then he'd been filing as private: "I had no objection to it being read," he'd always thought, "I just didn't want to be in the room at the same time." Such restraint now seemed pointless. Thus came Untold Stories, his indelible family memoir – including a frank account of his mother's depressive illness that shadowed much of his life; and unexpected candidness about his halting homosexuality and his cancer.
This confessional spirit was given added momentum with the publication of a biography, by Alexander Games, in 2001. Bennett did not cooperate with the book and neither did most of his friends (Games described the process to me at the time as like "conducting keyhole surgery"). But though it turned out to be more celebratory than revelatory in tone, Bennett appears to have been shaken by its implications.
Few writers have managed to exercise the kind of control that Bennett has exerted over his public image. He discovered early on that one way to protect yourself from a gossip-loving culture is to hide in plain view, to become a character. Bennett, always a wonderful performer, created, in his own image, the eternal provincial scholarship boy, face pressed against the window of metropolitan life, and passed it off as himself. He never enjoyed being questioned about this character, always "feeling less afterwards", and stopped giving interviews in 1993, after the New Yorker had printed his unguarded thoughts about his curious love affair with his former cleaning lady, Anne Davies, whom he had installed in the Dales village where he had a home. For a while the tabloids were parked outside his house in Camden Town, shouting questions about his love life through his letterbox. Under reluctant house arrest, Bennett confided to his diary: "All you need to do if you want the nation's press camped out on your doorstep is to say you once had a wank in 1947."
His strategy, in response to these intrusions, has been to get his revelations in early and in his own inimitable voice – perhaps the most trusted cadence in British public life – presumably in the hope that there might not be much for the more salacious biographers to bother with after he has gone.
For a man so careful about his own comportment, Bennett is pretty unbelted with the private lives of others. As well as unpacking the intimacies of his pathologically reserved parents and wider family in his work, he exploited for all it was worth his bizarre relationship with Miss Shepherd, the Lady in the Van, who parked herself in his front garden for more than a decade. Bennett has always been keenly aware of the dubious ethics of the writer, whose first loyalty is to the story; he has used a line from Borges to describe his own feelings in mining his family's life for "material": "All the books he ever published filled him with a complex feeling of repentance." In the stage version of The Lady in the Van he divided his own character into two competing forces – the private individual and the competitive author – in order to dramatise this split. The writer held sway. When the twin Alan Bennetts fear that Miss Shepherd has died in her van, Bennett the man hangs back: "Give over. This could be really sad." Bennett the writer meanwhile elbows him out of the way: "I know. I can't wait!"
Bennett has often parodied the claims to seriousness of literary biography – famously in Kafka's Dick in which Sydney, an insurance salesman, advertises his preference for judging the man, not the work: "I'd rather read about writers than read what they write," Sydney suggests; he'd rather know that "Mr Right for EM Forster was an Egyptian tramdriver" than get stuck into A Room With a View, for example. "This is England," he argues, by way of explanation. "In England facts like that pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect." Part of Bennett himself winces at a culture that wants to know more about the philandering than the work – but, like the high-minded broadsheet editor reporting the latest tabloid outrage, he still generally gives his audience the philandering along the way.
He returns to these themes in his new play The Habit of Art, which I saw in its first preview at the National on Thursday. The play opens with an actor playing the late literary biographer Humphrey Carpenter, setting out the philosophy of his calling: "I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men…" he says. What follows is a subtle and often hilarious traversing of the lines between the public and private lives of two great artists – WH Auden and Benjamin Britten – territory that has long fascinated Bennett, not least because it goes to the heart of the contradictory ways he thinks of himself as a writer.
You don't have to read far into Bennett's work to see that it snags in particular places, and threads of obsession emerge. He has worked at these threads over the years like a schoolboy worrying at a sleeve. There's the Kafka thread and the spying thread, the family thread and the royalty thread, all part of the fine knitted weave from which he unravels "Alan Bennett". In among these yarns, he has returned often to Auden, the principal subject of The Habit of Art. In the habits of Bennett's own art, Auden figures as one of two early examples of "Literature with a capital L" against whom Bennett as a young man – bookish but never, in his own estimation, well read – stumbled in search of his vocation. (The other is TS Eliot, whose wife Valerie was the daughter of a woman who bought her sausages from Bennett's father, a butcher in Leeds. "There was a time when I thought my only connection with the literary world was that I had once delivered meat to TS Eliot's mother-in-law.")
Auden was the first poet Bennett saw in the flesh, though – in the dining room of Exeter College Oxford in 1955, "quacking" at the dons, when Bennett was still young enough not quite to believe that authors were of the same world as secondary schoolboys from Leeds. He subsequently went to watch the great man lecture – Auden had just become Oxford professor of poetry – and heard exactly how far he was from the life he imagined for himself. "At that time I still harboured thoughts of becoming a Writer," Bennett recalled recently, as he has noted a couple of times in a near identical passage over the years, "(and I thought of it in capital letters), so when Auden outlined what he took to be the prerequisites of a literary life, or at any rate a life devoted to poetry, I was properly dismayed. Besides favourite books, essential seemed to be a literary landscape (Leeds?), a knowledge of metre and scansion and (this was the clincher) a passion for the Icelandic sagas. If writing meant passing this kind of kit inspection, I'd better forget it."
Bennett didn't forget it, of course. But having observed Auden at close quarters, he determined to make his career not in Literature but as a writer with an insistently small 'w'; the volumes of his own work that now line his shelves, the plays and their awards, the 50 years of brilliant craft and wit, have done nothing, in his public persona at least, to persuade him otherwise. It is his modesty – even if some of it is calculated – that has most endeared Bennett to his loyal readership: he's the outsider never invited to top table, the amateur among self-styled pros. As Bennett well knows, the English prize most of all a man who never forgets where he came from, who doesn't get above himself, who is not quite sure of the sound of his own voice. (His father had a good word for affectation – "splother" – and Bennett has always been watchful for signs of it.)
Auden, in the form of Richard Griffiths in Bennett's play, could be accused of none of these discreet virtues, and he challenges their conceit. We find him adrift in his own mythology, in rooms of his Oxford college in 1972, the year before he died, no longer required to write but still indulged as a writer. It's a complicated scenario: Griffiths is playing an actor who is playing Auden in a play within Bennett's play that focuses on the seedier detail of the poet's biography – rent boys and squalor and peeing in the sink. The distancing ironies allow Bennett to unpick the impulses behind his portrait: "We keep focusing on the frailties – he has no nobility, no grandeur…" Griffiths complains of his Auden at one point. "All he does is talk about dicks."
Bennett, in his life and in his work, has often been drawn to such unlicensed figures as Auden, to people who run out of control: Miss Shepherd, the mad King George, Mr Toad, as well as friends such as Russell Harty and Peter Cook. Their ability to be rather than to act has often served as a counterpoint to the social awkwardness that Bennett has made his comic trademark, the inheritance of those emblematic childhood afternoons in teashops and department stores marked by the "dread of imminent exposure", the knowledge that he and his family didn't quite belong.
In his notes to The Habit of Art Bennett suggests that he identifies himself in the play not with Auden but with Benjamin Britten, the poet's estranged friend and one-time collaborator. In their fictitious meeting in the play Britten is repressed and tongue-tied, next to Auden, who is anything but. Writing those scenes, Bennett says he drew on his own formative experiences in the theatre, which marked his subsequent character.
"Thinking of Beyond the Fringe, now nearly half a century ago," he observes, "makes me realise how I have projected on to Britten particularly some of the feelings I had when I was a young man, not much older than he was and thrust into collaboration (which was also competition) with colleagues every bit as daunting as Auden."
In the company of Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller in particular, Bennett always felt himself wholly inadequate (who wouldn't?). All the awkwardnesses and doubt of his adolescence were magnified in their company, that sense of "I haven't got anything to say anyway, and if I did I wouldn't be able to say it as well as they do". His competitive desire to engage on equal terms with these intensely glamorous figures, and his inability to do so, was a heightened version of his parents' ever-unfulfilled need "to mix" – the poignancy of the unused cocktail sticks discovered in his mother's kitchen cupboard after her death.
In his recent harder-edged memoirs, Bennett has given the impression that his "cosy" public persona, that brilliant defence mechanism against the world, has become something of a trap for him, a barrier against self-expression, and that in deceiving the world, slightly, he has also been deceiving himself. His mother – who was so self-conscious that she arranged her wedding for eight o'clock on a weekday morning so as not to draw attention to herself – transferred her shyness to her son: "'Our Alan's like us,' Mam would say, 'Shy.'" Bennett went along with this, in part because it was a description that allowed him and his parents to overlook the fact of his homosexuality. It was easier to be thought of as shy than gay – "shy is useful to someone shy of saying (or thinking) something else".
Bennett never went in for the angry rejection of the narrowness of his parents that fuelled the work of Dennis Potter, say, or Philip Larkin. He felt himself to be too kind for that. You could see, however, his entire career as an act of rebellion against the identity he was stuck with, even as he publicly perpetuated it. Reserve and restraint, those English virtues, were never much use in facing up to the real difficulties of character, just a method of pretending they didn't exist.
Bennett's first play, Forty Years On, written in 1968 in his parents' front room after he returned from the glitz of Broadway and Beyond the Fringe, contained the following exchange, son to father: "Have you ever thought what's happened to all the shy people? What became of them all of a sudden? … Whatever happened to reserve, Dad, and self-consciousness? Was it your government that got rid of guilt? Tell me this, Dad. How is it easier, how is it easier to reach out and touch someone for the first time? Why is it easier for me, now, than it was for you, then, whenever that was? Because that's an irreducible fact… "
That ease was something that Bennett found it simpler to dramatise than to experience, however. In his 2005 essay "Written on the Body", he details the loneliness that ingrained awkwardness occasioned, shyness masking an unwillingness to face up to who he was, and a preference for self-deception. Bennett is sometimes depicted as nostalgic for the rationed emotional range of the postwar years, the comical net-curtain chatter of the voices in his Talking Heads, but however much warmth and comedy he could find in those voices, the structure of those monologues was always an argument against the bottling up of things, against repression. In Writing Home he said: "I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over."
Bennett once added to Auden's most famous line – "we must love one another or die" – the two words "of embarrassment"; it's a good joke, a wry comment on the strangled social unease he so delights in exploring, but applied to himself it could have been fatal. Writing and performing allowed him a way out, even if it has taken him a long while to acknowledge that fact. One of the discussions in The Habit of Art, between the open-hearted Auden and the tortured Britten, centres on when it became possible for gay men to say in public that they had "partners". Auden had to go to America to get away with it. Britten, despite his long-term relationship with Peter Pears, never managed it. Was it possible in 1955, or 1969, or 1972? While this debate goes on, it is hard not to think that Bennett in writing it was also turning over this question in his own mind, and wondering why it took him until his 60s to say openly that he had a partner "Why," Auden subsequently wonders of Britten in 1972, about the hidden desire in his music, "are you still sending your messages in code? These days you can come clean… "
If that question had been put to Bennett's younger self, he might have had no ready answer to it. (When Ian McKellen asked him, on stage at an Aids benefit in the 80s, if he was gay, Bennett replied that the question was like asking a man who was wandering in the desert if he preferred "Malvern or Perrier water".) Since his cancer, however, he seems to have wanted to put right some of that earlier evasion, acknowledging without ironies – in Untold Stories – the facts of his life: "Always a late starter, I must count myself blessed that, at a time in my 50s, when I expected to remain permanently unattached, I found, or was found by a partner who, though much younger than I am, now shares my life [Rupert Thomas, an editor at World of Interiors]. I can't quite boast that it is an ordinary life, or my parents' ambition, a life like other people's. But it does for us."
The liberating force of this belated coming out finds expression in The Habit of Art. Bennett jokingly refers to it as his Late Style, the capital letters as usual signalling his amusement at the pomposity of the idea: "Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up."
Kick his heels up, Bennett does, having all sorts of fun with his outrageous Auden (who memorably confuses his biographer at one point with a rent boy: "I'm going to suck you off," the poet insists. "But I'm from the BBC!" says a startled Humphrey Carpenter, brandishing a microphone.)
Richard Eyre once suggested to me that the kind of anecdote for which Bennett is famous tends to "seek him out… when you are with Alan you feel that his particular perception of the world is so powerful that the world itself becomes Bennettesque around him." It has taken nearly a lifetime for that perception of the world to take proper public account of all the impulses that created it. "For a long time, years even," Bennett recently wrote, "it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate you do not put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there." The habit of art is, above all, a process of self-discovery.
David kynaston
Historian and author
He depicts with an unerring eye the cruelties as well as niceties of social class. Bennett, educated at a grammar school, is a classic story of postwar upward social mobility but has recorded a scarring episode from his Cambridge entrance exam in 1951. "They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy," was his first encounter with public schoolboys in the mass. Better taught, better prepared, they did not question their entitlement to the glittering prizes. "I thought that was unfair when I was 17," Bennett added on the radio last year. "And that view has never changed." As we prepare for another Old Etonian prime minister, his anger at the fundamentally unfair socio-educational divide remains as pertinent as ever.
Lucy Prebble
Playwright
Mental illness, racism, paedophilia, sexual exploitation. Bennett's subjects are savage, dark and beautiful. I don't understand why he gets perceived as a warm and cuddly writer. Perhaps it is a patronising cliché about "the North", or because his skill with humour is so profound. Yet it is the darkness of his work that stays with me. Bennett does what any good writer does – smiles as he plunges in the knife. Then, as a great writer, he leaves the blade stuck in.
Sarah Millican Comedian
I'm a massive fan. He writes the way that people talk. Theatre always felt to me like posh people having cups of tea but when you see his plays you think ,"Oh, I know her. She lives down the street from me mam." People say his characters are bleak but I always thought of them as very normal.
Michael Frayn
Playwright and novelist
Bennett's ear for the way people reveal themselves through the words they utter is mercilessly exact, and yet, having exposed them so precisely for what they are, he accepts them with understanding and generosity at exactly that valuation. He has also, with the same cunning mixture of frankness and artifice, wonderfully brought to life a character called Alan Bennett, which allows him to tell us a good deal of the truth about that most elusive of any writer's subjects, his own self.
Lucy Porter
Actress and comedian
His comedy is widely described as that of the meek, overlooked and downtrodden, and that's what I love about him. He shows that affection, observation and a brilliant turn of phrase are comedy tools as effective as the bludgeoning putdown.
The Habit of Art is on at the National Theatre, with on-the-day seats and returns only until 24 January. Further performances from January to April 2010 will be open for general booking from 2 December; 020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk
