The playwright Alan Bennett is one of Britain's best-loved writers. But, writes David Herman, Bennettland is not the cosy or comforting place that we suppose

I spent most of the summer of 1989 visiting Jonathan Miller to discuss a television history of madness we were putting together for the BBC. Another regular visitor that summer was Miller's friend and neighbour, Alan Bennett. Miller would talk, ideas would spark and flow, and he would hold forth on everything from Victorian asylums to George III's porphyria. After a few minutes, Bennett would get up: "I think I belong in the stupid corner," he would say and leave.

The series was made, though it didn't live up to the fascinating conversations of that summer. They weren't wasted, though, because from "the stupid corner" came Bennett's The Madness of George III.

It is easy to forget that the man who, in 1990, was hailed as "the nation's teddy bear" by the Observer and as personifying "Best of British" for Melvyn Bragg had spent most of his 40-year career on the sidelines, writing about unfashionable people in an unfashionable medium. Bennett's career took off only in the mid-1980s with An Englishman Abroad (1983), his television play about Guy Burgess, and his first film, A Private Function (1984).

In the same year came an audio cassette of Bennett reading Winnie the Pooh. His readings of A A Milne, The Wind in the Willows, Edward Lear and Alice in Wonderland are the best versions there are and a crucial part of his transformation from recorder of the snobberies and embarrassments of the northern working class to chronicler of 20th-century Englishness. By 1988 the television series Talking Heads had established Bennett's central place in the national culture. Its success was followed by The Madness of George III (1991) and Writing Home (1994), which sold more than 200,000 in hardback (and a further 280,000 in paperback).

In the 40 years since Beyond the Fringe, Bennett's career has boasted a fantastic productivity and an extraordinary range: film scripts, television plays (more than 30), stage plays, television documentaries . . . not to mention careers as actor, diarist and book reviewer.

Even so, the popularity of Bennett's work lags behind the popularity of his greatest achievement - himself. BBC2's evening of programmes with Bennett, A Night in with Alan Bennett, provides, in its very title, a clue to his place in the nation's heart. We feel "at home" with Bennett and he feels at home with Middle England. Whether writing in his diary or for the stage, Bennett has perfect pitch when it comes to Englishness. It is a talent shared by Russell Harty, Michael Palin and David Attenborough. It is a talent not shared by, say, Jonathan Miller (too clever), David Starkey (too nasty) or David Hare (too posh). It is, above all, something to do with a vision of England.

Bennett was fascinated by exiles and outsiders, those people who don't belong. This is seen clearly in An Englishman Abroad, about an upper-class Englishman who yearns for England from an exile's flat in Moscow. It is just as true of the mad King George and of Miss Shepherd, the protagonist of his new play, The Lady in the Van, which has just opened in the West End. The character is based on the real indigent who parked her van outside Bennett's home, presenting him with his worst nightmare: a filthy, uninhibited woman who won't go away. And yet, and this is at the core of the story, he is strangely drawn to her and won't (can't?) get rid of her. Of all the cultural figures who are so at home with England and Englishness, none has such an outsider's perspective. This "double vision" gives Bennett his distinctive voice.

And yet when we think of Bennett we usually think of the chronicler of everyday life, someone so at home with our world that he can register every nuance of clothing and speech. Take this passage about what is (or is thought to be) common: "tattoos, red paint, yellow gloves and two-tone cardigans, all entries in a catalogue of disapproval that ranged through fake leopard-skin coats, dyed (blonde) hair to slacks, cocktail cabinets . . . and umpteen other embel-lishments, domestic and personal."

This is vintage Bennett. It's from his most recent piece in the London Review of Books (30 September) and it's also to be found, almost word for word, in his introduction to Talking Heads, published in 1988. The point is not that he repeats himself. Who doesn't? The point is how consistent are the preoccupations, how Bennett returns to the same details (cocktails, a glass of sherry, trendy vicars) again and again. They are the timeless features of Bennettland.

We all know that peculiar world of northern working-class and lower middle-class concerns. It is a world of small snobberies and shames, where the lavatory, hospital and old people's home loom large. But beside that Bennettland (northern, naturalistic, acutely observed), there is another. This is in the south of England, and it's more privileged, middle and upper-middle class, a world of public schools and Oxbridge, smart bootmakers and posh spies, where the play of language is about cleverness and ideas rather than the battle not to be common. This is the world of Forty Years on, An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, and usually exists on stage.

It's easy to see this as a geographical divide. Two Bennettlands reflecting two Englands divided by class. The first is northern working class and the second is southern posh. In the first, betrayal (an important word in Bennett's work) is when your body or your words betray you as common. In the second, it is when spies betray their country.

But how realistic is Bennett's depiction of the north? Because of his meticulous ear for detail, we forget that Bennett's Lancashire and Yorkshire are not the north. They are his version of the north, a different world from Jack Rosenthal's Dustbinmen or Howard Jacobson's Manchester, the York of A S Byatt or the Cumbria of Melvyn Bragg and Hunter Davies. Bennett's is just one north. His division between north and south is not about a society divided by class, but about where he puts his own anxieties about sexuality, inhibition and embarrassment.

In other words, Bennett's "north" is (usually) where we find sexually and socially inhibited people, usually working class, usually middle-aged and usually women. His "south" is (usually) where we find characters who are less inhibited, socially upper class and usually male.

At the centre of Bennett's vision of England is not class or history (though there is plenty of both) but a set of anxieties about dirt and disease, sexuality and masculinity, bodies and embarrassment. Perhaps that's why "common" is such a key preoccupation. As he writes in his introduction to Talking Heads: "A common woman was likely to swear or drink . . . to get all dolled up and go out leaving the house upside down and make no bones about having affairs. Enjoy herself, possibly, and that was the trouble; a common woman sidestepped her share of the proper suffering of her sex."

A look at Bennett's work makes it clear that he is drawn to two completely different kinds of people. The first kind is funny, lively, larger-than-life and uninhibited. This includes friends such as Peter Cook and Russell Harty. "Peter was immune to embarrassment; that was one of his great strengths," Bennett said in his memorial address.

"And if one had to point to the quality that distinguished Russell [Harty]," he said admiringly, "it would be cheek."

He admires Miss Shepherd, despite everything, for her "bold life" and notes "how it contrasts with my own timid way of going on". And among his characters you could add, in their different ways, Toad in The Wind in the Willows, Joe Orton, George III and Guy Burgess: uninhibited, monstrous egotists all. The other group are the meek of the earth: the timid, inhibited and repressed. A E Housman, Kafka and Larkin's women, the dons and vicars of Bennett's early revue sketches, the characters of Talking Heads, Mole in The Wind in the Willows and his three greatest creations: his parents and himself. Just as Bennett sees England and the English from within and from outside, he can see both sides of this great divide from the inside. He describes with great intensity the suffering of the meek and admires the shameless vitality of the uninhibited.

His great divide, then, is not between north and south, it is between the Toads and the Moles. Put like this it sounds comic, at worst bitter-sweet. This is Bennett's charm, what we love about him. He brings us up close to life's terrible indignities and leaves us laughing. Recently, though, the mood has darkened. The writing has become more personal (Uncle Clarence, about his uncle killed in world war one, and Untold Stories, about his mother's mental illness). Increasingly, they are stories of madness. The madness of a king, of a lady in a van, of a butcher's wife in Yorkshire. The doctor's tablets and the community care centre are never far away in Talking Heads. And if not tales of madness, then of isolation. The exile and the spy, Bennett's parents in their village in the Dales, the solitaries of Talking Heads.

Bennettland is not only a funny world of snobbery and camp. It is also a place of the old, the mad and the lonely. No wonder he pricked up his ears when Jonathan Miller started talking about madness. It is also a bleak and frightening place. No wonder we prefer to pretend it's all two-tone cardigans and soft furnishings. But that misses the point and fails to recognise why Bennett is one of the greatest British writers.

"The Lady in the Van" is currently playing at the Queen's Theatre, London

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website