Charles Finch

Exactly thirteen months ago I was living in a small, cheerful apartment just by the Place des Vosges, in Paris, and reading Alan Bennett's miscellany Writing Home, a mix of diaries, essays, radio broadcasts, and other assorted odds and ends. Or bits and bobs, as he would say. Now I'm reading his second book of the same sort, the absolutely wonderful Untold Stories. As a writer Bennett may be closest in spirit to one of my other favorite memoirists, Bill Bryson. He has a wider angle than Bryson, though, and to be fair he's not as funny. Bennett is best known for his plays, I guess, which use glibness as a means of disavowing the depth they generally have.

But really I think he's best in the fragmentary style of these two books - which seem to point out that after all fragments might be the art form best suited to describing an entire life. Take the following passage, about his parents; his father has asked the vicar to marry them at 7:30 in the morning.

Lovell Clarke says that this is out of the question; the law does no permit him to marry anyone before eight in the morning. However, he has no objection to performing the ceremony beginning at eight o'clock, and surely if he is getting married the Co-op won't mind if he is half an hour late for work? Dad enquires: the Co-op does mind; he has to be at work by eight-fifteen.

There are occasions in life, often not in the least momentous, which nail one's colours to the mast. There was the morning, ten days before the end of my National Service, when a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps at Maresfield made me scrub out a urinal with my bare hands; another when a consultant at the Radcliffe Infirmary discussed my naked body without reference to me with a class of smirking medical students; and though it occurred years before I was born, this moment in St. Bartholomew's Vicarage when my father, baffled at every turn, tells Mr. Lovell Clarke that he cannot get a quarter of an hour off work in order to get married is another. Logic, education, upbringing leave such moments unshifted and unforgotten. They are the self at its core.

There's so much in this passage; it's a certain gift in some writers, for instance, to let the dead live on in their minds, gaining complexity. And I love and admire how Bennett tacitly aligns himself with his father, tacitly lets his father know that he isn't alone, all these years later, by recounting two of his own humiliations. And then there's the gift of language - that phrase "nail one's colours to the mast," or the two words "unshifted" and "unforgotten." (The "un-" construction reminiscent of Hardy, as Bennett himself points out in The History Boys.) Even in passages like this, which induce some strange, passing sorrow in me, it's good to have what the best books can give you: the sense of being with an old friend, whether you've met him before or not.