The Habit of Art: A Play

The Habit of Art

Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of
Beyond the Fringe
in the 1960s. His television series
Talking Heads
has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for stage, including
Forty Years On
,
The Lady in the Van
,
A Question of Attribution
,
The Madness of George III
(together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay
The Madness of King George
) and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows.
At the National Theatre, London,
The History Boys
won numerous awards, including
Evening Standard
and Critics’ Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier for Best New Play and the South Bank Award. On Broadway,
The History Boys
won five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics’ Circle Awards, a New York Drama Critics’ Award, a New York Drama League Award and six Tonys. His collection of prose,
Untold Stories
, won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography in 2006.
The Uncommon Reader
, a novel, was published in 2007.

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Characters

Part One

Part Two

By the time Auden came to live in the Brewhouse, a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church, in 1972, I had long since left Oxford, and in any case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall sometime in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from High Table where the dons dined, and hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like the voice of the devil. Someone better informed put me right. It was Auden, at that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.

I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have understood it if I had, but when Auden gave his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry the following year, I dutifully went along, knowing, though not quite why, that he was some sort of celebrity. At that time I still harboured thoughts of becoming a Writer (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 an ideal 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. What Auden was saying (and he said it pretty regularly) was, ‘All do as I do,’ which is what unhelpful writers often say when asked about their profession, though few with such seeming conviction and authority as the newly inaugurated Professor of Poetry.

He used to hold court in the Cadena, but it wasn’t a café I cared for. There were undergraduates I knew at whom Auden made passes, though I was still young and innocent enough to find a pass as remarkable as the person making it.

When he died in 1973 his death seemed to me less a loss to poetry – the poetry was largely over – than a loss to knowledge. Auden was a library in himself and now all this store – the reading, the categories, the associations – had gone down with that great listing clay-coloured hulk. And though much of what he knew he had written down and published, either as lectures or in reviews, there was always more: the flurry of memoirs and reminiscences of the poet and his talk that began almost immediately on his death, not only a testament to his life but an attempt to salvage some of the wisdom he had discarded in conversation – and some of the unwisdom, too.

In
The Hunting of the Snark
, Lewis Carroll, a Christ Church don, wrote: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ With Auden, also at Christ Church, it was the opposite. What Auden said three times you would begin to doubt, and when he’d said it a dozen times nobody cared anyway. Auden somewhere makes the distinction between being boring and being a bore. He was never boring – he was too extraordinary for that – but by the time he came back to live in Oxford he had become a bore. His discourse was persistently pedagogic; he was never not teaching and/or showing off how much he knew, always able to make a long arm and reach for references unavailable to his less well-read hearers. As he got towards the end of his life his conversation and his pedagogy got more and more repetitive, which must have been a particular disappointment to his colleagues at Christ Church, where, when he had been briefly resident in the past, he had been an enlivening member of the common room. Now he was just infuriating.

What they had been hoping for was, understandably, some form of enlightenment and entertainment. This was made plain early on in the
The Habit of Art
, in a speech by the Dean which had to be cut, as favourite bits of my scripts often are:

But to everyone’s disappointment – the college, the students, Auden himself – it didn’t turn out like that. But say it had been Larkin at the same stage of his life – he wasn’t much fun either at the finish.

In 1972, when Auden arrived in Oxford, Britten was well advanced in the writing of
Death in Venice
, his last opera. Neither poet nor composer was in good health, with Auden six years older than Britten. I never met or even saw Britten, but find I wrote about him in my diary in June 2006:

There’s a story told in Tony Palmer’s superb film about Britten,
A Time There Was
, of how when Kathleen Ferrier was working with the composer on
The Rape of Lucretia
there was quite a serious quarrel (though not with her). Britten tells the story against himself of how Ferrier took him on one side and said: ‘Oh Ben. Do try and be nice.’ And he says, slightly surprised: ‘And it worked.’ Both Britten and Auden’s works were in better taste than their lives. ‘Real artists are not nice people,’ Auden wrote. ‘All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue.’

The Habit of Art
was not easy to write, though its form is quite simple, because so much information had to be passed over to the audience about Auden and his life and about Britten and his and about their earlier association. Thinking of
Beyond the Fringe
, now nearly half a century ago, makes me realise how I have projected onto 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. Recalling their early collaborations (in another passage from the play since cut), Britten remembers his slightly desperate attempts to keep up with Auden and make a contribution besides the musical one:

While this seems to me a true assessment of Britten’s early relationship with Auden, it also chimes with my experiences in 1960. So, though in some ways I find Britten unsympathetic, he, much more than Auden, is the character I identify with.

When I started writing the play I made much use of the biographies of both Auden and Britten written by Humphrey Carpenter, and both are models of their kind. Indeed I was consulting his books so much that eventually Carpenter found his way into the play. His widow, Mari Prichard, was more than helpful over this, though feeling – and I’m sure rightly – that I hadn’t done justice to him as a biographer or as a personality. I had had the same problem in
The Madness of George III
when trying to fit in another character who was larger than life, namely Charles James Fox. To have given him his proper due would have meant him taking over the play. And so it is with Humphrey Carpenter, my only excuse being that he would have been the first to understand this and to be unsentimental about it. When he turned up on the stage he tended to hang about and act as commentator, often speaking directly to the audience. This was useful as he could explain points of fact and saved the main characters from telling each other stuff both of them knew already but the audience didn’t. Even so, there was still a good deal of explaining left to be done. It’s a perennial problem for dramatists and one which Ibsen, for instance, never satisfactorily solved, or, so far as I can see, ever tried to.

Towards the end of the play Carpenter mildly reproves Auden and Britten for being so concerned about their reputations, when their audience, Auden’s readers, Britten’s hearers, are anxious simply to draw a line under them both. They don’t want more poetry; they don’t want more music; they want – as they say nowadays – closure. Guilty at occasionally entertaining such thoughts myself apropos Updike’s relentless output, for instance, I was reassured to find myself not alone in feeling like this. On the death of Crabbe, Lord Melbourne wrote: ‘I am always glad when one of those fellows dies for then I know I have the whole of him on my shelf.’ Which is, of course, the cue for biography.

This is the fifth play on which Nicholas Hytner and I have collaborated, not counting two films. Asked, as one inevitably is in Question and Answer sessions, what this collaboration consists in, I can describe it in general terms: discussion on various drafts of the script, for instance, decisions on casting and suchlike, but I can seldom be satisfyingly precise and nor can he. There are no rows or even arguments; neither of us, that I remember, ever sulks. It’s so amicable that directors or authors of a more abrasive or histrionic turn of mind might think that the creative process was being shortchanged. However, believers in creative conflict will be reassured to hear that this play has been different.

If Ibsen couldn’t explain things it’s not surprising that I found it hard, so, whereas Nicholas Hytner had liked the first draft, he was less keen on the second, the script returned neatly annotated with remarks like ‘Do we need to know this?’, ‘Too much information,’ and ‘Haven’t we had this already?’

At this point (though not as a result), in April 2008 I had to go into hospital. This knocked me back a bit and the last thing I wanted to be worrying about was the play. I therefore asked for it to be taken out of the National Theatre schedule (it had been slated for October 2008) until further notice. When I took it up again I found the problems to do with too much information had not gone away, but it occurred to me that the business of conveying the facts could be largely solved if a frame were put round the play by setting it in a rehearsal room. Queries about the text and any objections to it could then be put in the mouths of the actors who (along with the audience) could have their questions answered in the course of the rehearsal.

There was an unexpected bonus to this in that when, as happened on the next couple of drafts, Nicholas Hytner raised objections, these queries, too, could just be passed on to the actors. ‘Do we need this?’ NH would write in the margin. And on the next draft he would find ‘Do we need this?’ (his own query) given to the actor. At one point he suggested cutting a pretty tortuous section on Auden’s (to me) impenetrable poem
The Sea and the Mirror
. We had a discussion about it and I duly cut it but then introduced the author as a character complaining about the cut. I found all this quite enjoyable, but it happened so often I began to feel the director almost deserved an author’s credit.

Less of this, more of that: the director is in the first instance an editor, and so it is with Nicholas Hytner and myself. He likes action more than he does discussion so it’s often the more reflective passages that get cut, though they’re not always lost. Sometimes they end up in the introduction or, greatly condensed, I manage to smuggle them back into the text – even though this may have to wait until another play comes along: the fractured speech about biography, for instance, that begins the play was actually a casualty from
Kafka’s Dick
, written more than twenty years ago. Still, it’s a pragmatic process and I’m thankful never to have reached that eminence which would endow every sentence I write with significance and make it untouchable.