Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Behind the fringe

Keeping On Keeping On, his latest collection of anecdotes, character sketches and crisp one-liners, keeps on giving pleasure for 700 pages

‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,’ Philip Larkin famously announced in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.’ But the key line is a far more private confession, caught in parentheses like a gloomy thought bubble: ‘(which was rather late for me)’. Few of Larkin’s contemporaries would have been more sympathetic than Alan Bennett. In 1963 he was appearing on Broadway in Beyond the Fringe, the hit satirical revue that also featured Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller; and while this led to him rubbing shoulders with the stars (the first- night audience included Rita Hayworth and Stravinsky, and after another show President Kennedy popped backstage to say hello), he doesn’t seem to have gone much further with anyone else. He was simply too shy: happy to pretend to be someone else on stage (T. S. Eliot especially enjoyed his spoof sermon ‘Take a Pew’), but rather less good at being himself. Instead he hid behind a thick pair of glasses and a neat haircut. While the others clearly enjoyed performing, Bennett’s contributions might just as well have been entitled ‘Behind the Fringe’.

These days he lives in Primrose Hill with his long-term partner Rupert Thomas, the editor of World of Interiors magazine, but otherwise little seems to have changed. He still views himself as ‘a connoisseur of embarrassment’, and in 2015 he finds himself complimenting a chauffeur

on his courteous driving but not (the subtext) on his eyelashes, though it’s something at 81 I’m probably allowed to do. No danger. Not that I ever have been.

Even the front cover of this book (which is a collection of his diaries and other pieces written over the past 20 years) plays up to his public image as a mild-mannered innocent.

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