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In the introduction to this new instalment of Alan Bennett’s diaries, which run from 2016 to 2024, the author worries about what to write: “I have said everything before. At 90 it’s impossible to avoid repetition.” And, indeed, I was halfway through the entries for 2020 before they started to seem familiar. It turns out that I had already reviewed Bennett’s pandemic diaries when they were released as a slim standalone volume in 2022.
Here they are again, then, this time embedded in a much longer stretch of journal-keeping, characterised by Bennett’s customary looping between past and present. The repetition turns out not to matter because the prose is sufficiently layered to take on new meanings as the context shifts. Bennett’s pandemic years read differently now that Covid is in the rearview mirror. The first time round, I got the impression that, devoted to the NHS though he is, the banging of pans on a Thursday evening struck him as a bit daft. Reading the section again, I’m convinced he detested the whole performative palaver.
There are other things I missed. Like just how much Bennett’s experience of two years’ national service stayed with him down the decades. He nearly always notes the anniversary: “8 August. 8/8/52. The day I was called up. A Thursday.” Especially intense are the memories of physical shame, such as the worry of undressing in front of others, something that Bennett manages to avoid entirely during conscription. This is despite yearning for the casually naked bodies all around him. On the one occasion when he manages a fumble with a fellow serviceman, he feels so awkward that he never refers to it again. “I am still embarrassed about incidents in my life of which all participants are long since dead. Embarrassment is eternal.”
Not so embarrassed, you can’t help noticing, that he feels obliged to conceal his cattier side. On 17 October 2024, Bennett greets the publication of Michael Palin’s fourth volume of diaries with a rivalrous side-eye. He can only get through it, he explains, “after much skipping” thanks to the overabundance of detail, which makes the volume “something of an animated desk diary”. Bennett never forgets that his journals are written – edited, certainly – to entertain.
There is real ambivalence, too, towards Jonathan Miller, who lives at Gloucester Crescent, the north London haut-bohemian enclave of which Bennett was once a resident. In 2016, Miller is not yet diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s that will kill him, and on 7 February 2016 he embarks on a monologue about how his famous production of The Mikado has been performed 300 times around the world, which makes it “a great success”. This leaves Bennett biting his tongue to avoid blurting out that his The History Boys has had 2,000 outings. “I say nothing, but without feeling any better for not doing so.”
There are, nonetheless, plenty of reasons to be cheerful. While Bennett is unflinching about his physical decline over the nine-year stretch of these diaries, his creative life flourishes. The 2018 stage play Allelujah!, a paean to the NHS, does good business and gets turned into a film starring Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Jennifer Saunders. And The Choral, his filmic tribute to Elgar and small-town Yorkshire during the first world war, is a delightful late-life hit. Both are directed by Nicholas Hytner, one of the two men who he says have changed his life (the other is his partner Rupert Thomas, distinguished magazine editor and eagle-eyed pan-handler who can spot aesthetic treasure in the most unpromising of junk shops).
The diaries’ tone never slips into sentimentality, though. Invited to the unveiling of Miller’s memorial stone in Highgate Cemetery in 2022, Bennett worries how he will manage the rutted terrain. His fear is that, once he finally reaches Miller’s monument, his physical frailty will oblige him to perch on it, a gesture that could so easily be misinterpreted as schadenfreude. He is, after all, the last man standing.
