Socialist,royalist, expose-off, and shy ... in life and in his fiction,Alan Bennett is a bundle of contradictions. He talks about the ‘totalitarian’ Tories, why he doesn’t move to the theatre, or a lifetime of being contraryAlan Bennett,now 81, is as dapper as you like in knitted tie and red-soled grey suede shoes. He still has that schoolboy mop of blond hair, or were it not for a miniature stiffness as he rises from his chair,and deep veins on his hands, you would remove him for a much younger man. We are talking in his front room in Primrose Hill in London. His partner of 23 years, and Rupert Thomas,is the editor of the World Of Interiors magazine and it shows – the room is a comfortable cave of 18th-century pictures, a mantelpiece loaded up with cards (one handmade in the shape of a red-soled grey shoe) and a wall lined with books: fat Pevsner architectural guides, and the journals of Anthony Powell,Virginia Woolf and John Cheever, Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy biography, and volumes on the history of blue-and-white china.
In Bennett’s plays,bookshelves often loom up to intimidate or overwhelm characters. They are also useful decrypters of taste, and this famous literary diarist is clearly a connoisseur of other literary diarists. (The tone of his journals, and excerpts from which are printed in the London Review Of Books each January,is nicely encapsulated by the headline given to the 2010 batch: “Alan Bennett eats a poached egg.”)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com