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Available
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Publication
Faber and Faber (2005), 672 pages
Description
Here, at last, is the astonishing sequel to Alan Bennett's classic Writing Home, in a beautiful hardback edition. Untold Stories contains significant previously unpublished work, including a poignant memoir of his family and of growing up in Leeds, together with his much celebrated diary for the years 1996-2004, and numerous other exceptional essays, reviews and comic pieces. Bennett, as always, is both amusing and poignant, whether he's discussing his modest childhood or his work with figures such as Maggie Smith, Thora Hird and John Gielgud. Since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s Alan Bennett has delighted audiences worldwide with his gentle humour and wry observations about life. His many works include Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, Talking Heads, A Question of Attribution and The Madness of King George. The History Boys opened to great acclaim at the National in 2004, and is winner of the Evening Standard Award, the South Bank Award and the Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play. Untold Stories is published jointly with Profile Books.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member hattifattener
More than any writer publishing today, Alan Bennett’s work is recognised as a facet of the man himself. Spying my copy of 'Untold Stories' a colleague comments ‘Oh, you’re reading Alan Bennett’. This is representative of many things – his penchant for understated titles, the strength of
'Untold Stories' is a blend of autobiography, family memoir and writerly scrapbook, and it is in this book that Bennett explicitly references some of the murmurs and unknowns that have never really been consciously excluded from previous work, but have also never been aired publicly. In his comment about why he has never accepted an honour he admits, “I wish I could dispose of the question” and “I then generally edge [it] round to a discussion of honours in general.” Here he doesn’t. He faces the questions of his sexuality, family history and stance on the gay movement, all with a clarity, humour and humility that is facilitated by his belief that “none of it was likely to be published in my lifetime, so where was the problem?”
This frankness adds touching beauty to his accounts of the illnesses and deaths in his family, his teenage angst and his encounter with cancer. As this is Alan Bennett, of course, it’s all treated with a beguiling awkwardness and a Northen normality that is partly, one thinks, as much of a character as the A. Bennetts one and two in 'The Lady in the Van'.
The fragmented nature of the book means it seems almost to be intended to be read out of sync, but reading it front to back, one is irritated by the repetition of four or five Big Ideas that Bennett uses in memoir, diary, lecture and play. Although these are often funny and insightful on first reading, they really jar by the end of the book and could easily have been avoided by some more careful editing or selection. Similarly, to a regular reader of the 'London Review of Books', the large section of Bennett’s diary extracts may not be altogether fresh either, but are highly recommended if it’s the first time you’ve seen them.
I don’t think there’s any harm in skipping whole sections of this book if you’re so inclined. Not interested in the lectures, fine. Read the diaries already, fine. But the sections that are really, strongly recommended are the opening and closing memoirs ‘Untold Stories’ and ‘Ups and Downs’. For anyone fairly new to Bennett, or for any dyed in the wool Alan fans, read it front to back, and savour every minute of it.
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his voice and written persona, but most probably, his heavy use of personal experience.'Untold Stories' is a blend of autobiography, family memoir and writerly scrapbook, and it is in this book that Bennett explicitly references some of the murmurs and unknowns that have never really been consciously excluded from previous work, but have also never been aired publicly. In his comment about why he has never accepted an honour he admits, “I wish I could dispose of the question” and “I then generally edge [it] round to a discussion of honours in general.” Here he doesn’t. He faces the questions of his sexuality, family history and stance on the gay movement, all with a clarity, humour and humility that is facilitated by his belief that “none of it was likely to be published in my lifetime, so where was the problem?”
This frankness adds touching beauty to his accounts of the illnesses and deaths in his family, his teenage angst and his encounter with cancer. As this is Alan Bennett, of course, it’s all treated with a beguiling awkwardness and a Northen normality that is partly, one thinks, as much of a character as the A. Bennetts one and two in 'The Lady in the Van'.
The fragmented nature of the book means it seems almost to be intended to be read out of sync, but reading it front to back, one is irritated by the repetition of four or five Big Ideas that Bennett uses in memoir, diary, lecture and play. Although these are often funny and insightful on first reading, they really jar by the end of the book and could easily have been avoided by some more careful editing or selection. Similarly, to a regular reader of the 'London Review of Books', the large section of Bennett’s diary extracts may not be altogether fresh either, but are highly recommended if it’s the first time you’ve seen them.
I don’t think there’s any harm in skipping whole sections of this book if you’re so inclined. Not interested in the lectures, fine. Read the diaries already, fine. But the sections that are really, strongly recommended are the opening and closing memoirs ‘Untold Stories’ and ‘Ups and Downs’. For anyone fairly new to Bennett, or for any dyed in the wool Alan fans, read it front to back, and savour every minute of it.
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LibraryThing member sheilaref
A series of essays by the acclaimed writer playwright. Fascinating story of his youth in West Yorkshire.
LibraryThing member sas
Masterful mixture of memoir, diary, and essays, which adds up to one of the funniest, most touching and profound books I have ever read. Is Bennett the greatest living Englishman? Or, some might say more importantly, is he the greatest living Yorkshireman?
LibraryThing member hmc276
Provides an intimate history of Alan Bennett's family. Perhaps the most moving sections are those describing his mother's descent into depression and madness. It is the sheer ordinariness of this dementia that makes it unnerving: all families have these kinds of tragedies. The detailed enumeration
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of the lives of aspirational battlers, as they would be called in Australia, is told with grace and surprising distance. He has been a dutiful son. Show Less
LibraryThing member trench_wench
I have a real soft spot for Alan Bennet, must be the wry Yorkshire humour. This book didn't disappoint, it was a fantastic collection of autobiographical work, diaries and random musings. I particularly enjoyed his account of his childhood in the Leeds area and coming to terms with his mother's
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mental illness. He tells the tale in his typical dry style, which adds lightness to what would otherwise be a pretty grim tale. Show Less
LibraryThing member keylawk
A great playright presents autobiographical materials, somewhat in the spirit of an annual or scrapbook [ix]. The suicide of his grandfather, the mental illness of his mother, the harrowing (Harrow School) education, the background around his writing, presented pre-posthumously.
LibraryThing member msprint
His humaneness and decency come through this - even when he occasionally makes snide comments or has regrets over things he has done. His day to day reporting is funny and best of all he writes beautifully.
LibraryThing member thorold
Alan Bennett does seem to have a knack for giving nondescript, interchangeable titles to his various collections of miscellaneous writings: it actually wouldn't be such a bad thing if he followed up his own suggestion and just called this The 2005 Alan Bennett Annual.
As always, there's a lot of
The diaries, which are probably the closest thing we get to raw material here, are the liveliest: the longer pieces, where he writes about the old age and mental illness of his relatives and his own treatment for cancer, are necessarily a bit depressing, but not without the occasional touch of dry Yorkshire wit. The least interesting parts of the book are the texts of lectures he gave at the National Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery: slide shows don't really work without the slides.
Compared to the earlier collections, he's a lot more open here about his personal life, which turns out to be disappointingly unsensational (if this account is to be believed). It was rather more entertaining for the reader when no-one officially knew whether he was straight or gay, but it must be easier for Bennett not to have to keep obfuscating his pronouns any more.
(Aside: whilst writing this, I noticed the various covers of different editions of this book lined up in the margin. It's worth a look - they are all based on the same photograph, but Bennett's scarf is a slightly different colour in each one, and he moves about the frame like a bouncing ball, right, left and centre. Strange.)
As always, there's a lot of
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good stuff here: excerpts from the diaries, introductions to books and plays, lectures, obituaries, autobiographical essays, etc. It's put together in a fairly random and intersecting way, so it doesn't make much sense to read it through from cover to cover - if you do, you keep coming across good bits that he has recycled from elsewhere. I watched the film of The History Boys when I was about halfway through, and spotted quite a few bits that appear in this book in other contexts. But that's all part of the fun, and it helps to create the illusion that we are watching his creative process at work. It is an illusion, of course: reading these pieces we are reminded how much of a performer Bennett is. Tellingly, Bennett quotes Philip Larkin as objecting to giving public readings because he didn't like pretending to be himself. Bennett has no such inhibitions: he obviously loves pretending to be Alan Bennett. (And he doesn't mind getting other people to pretend to be Alan Bennett either: witness the two Alan Bennetts in the stage version of The lady in the van.) It is striking, though, that the AB we meet on the printed page is rather more assertive and intellectual than the AB we know and love from the telly.The diaries, which are probably the closest thing we get to raw material here, are the liveliest: the longer pieces, where he writes about the old age and mental illness of his relatives and his own treatment for cancer, are necessarily a bit depressing, but not without the occasional touch of dry Yorkshire wit. The least interesting parts of the book are the texts of lectures he gave at the National Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery: slide shows don't really work without the slides.
Compared to the earlier collections, he's a lot more open here about his personal life, which turns out to be disappointingly unsensational (if this account is to be believed). It was rather more entertaining for the reader when no-one officially knew whether he was straight or gay, but it must be easier for Bennett not to have to keep obfuscating his pronouns any more.
(Aside: whilst writing this, I noticed the various covers of different editions of this book lined up in the margin. It's worth a look - they are all based on the same photograph, but Bennett's scarf is a slightly different colour in each one, and he moves about the frame like a bouncing ball, right, left and centre. Strange.)
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LibraryThing member janglen
This is a beautifully written collection of prose pieces, some long, some short. Alan Bennett tells his own personal stories in a very self-effacing way but with great humour and insight. He comes across as a very honest and humane person. A must for all fans of The History Boys.
LibraryThing member Fliss88
Started, but just didn't get into it at all.
LibraryThing member GeorgeBowling
This is a lovely book that kept me entertained on my commuter journeys for going on a month. It is a sprawling unweildly collection of Bennett's musings on life, Leeds, family, philosophy, art, history, homosexuality and mortality - some pieces date from the time that he was seriously ill with
I know there are some who find Bennett irritating - and for sure he is repetitious. But I know of no-one who combines his intelligence and articulacy with so much clearly genuine modesty.
He writes so well in his fictions of the lost souls of life because he too has always been a little bit lost and uncomfortable despite his fame and success.
He seems never to have quite slotted in to either the lower middle class of his upbringing, the intellectual class of Oxford, or the self-regarding coterie of theatre and show-biz.. But he manages to write sympathetially about people from all walks of life. Like us all, he has his prejudices, but is about as open-minded as we have any right to expect.
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cancer (now in remission).I know there are some who find Bennett irritating - and for sure he is repetitious. But I know of no-one who combines his intelligence and articulacy with so much clearly genuine modesty.
He writes so well in his fictions of the lost souls of life because he too has always been a little bit lost and uncomfortable despite his fame and success.
He seems never to have quite slotted in to either the lower middle class of his upbringing, the intellectual class of Oxford, or the self-regarding coterie of theatre and show-biz.. But he manages to write sympathetially about people from all walks of life. Like us all, he has his prejudices, but is about as open-minded as we have any right to expect.
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LibraryThing member edwinbcn
Although not presented as such, Alan Bennett's Untold stories (2005) is very much, and should be seen as a companion volume to Writing home, which appeared in 1994.
Like Writing home, it is a book full of scraps and tid-bits that nobody in their serious mind should attempt to read, let alone buy.
Writing home consisted of 630+ pages, and Untold stories goes over that, forming a formidable tome of 658 pages, which, obviously, took me an incredibly long time to finish, and, again, I feel I wasted a lot of time reading it.
If may be that Alan Bennett is, or is considered an important author, but that does not seem to justify the publication of these two massive volumes of prose.
However, Untold stories seems a little bit better than the preceding volume. For instance, the first section, which bears the same title as the whole volume, namely Untold stories is a chronicle of the author's mothers illness. For years, as is usually the case in such patients, Bennett's mother suffered from Manic Depression. This is described very compassionately in this memoir, showing the tragedy of such prolonged depression for the mother, the father, and the author, who was a university student, at the time. This memoir also describes very accurately the dynamic between the parents, having a working class, lower educational background, and their son, who is trained at university, but above all the narrative shows how inadequate that university knowledge is in expressing affection and dealing with this situation. The memoir shows, actually, the father to be more apt and understanding and communicating feeling. As a result, the father and the son also grow closer.
Given the fact that in the Western world, Depression takes place on epidemic scale, it is remarkable that this type of memoir seems to be so rare. At 127 page, forming the first part of the book, Untold stories deserves to be read,and should be anthologized in other form.
Written on the body is an interesting personal memoir, but very short.
For the rest of the book, I would advise a hap-snap approach. The diaries (1996 - 2004) are largely very uninteresting, unless one is perhaps particularly interested in Alan Bennett, taking up almost 200 pages. About 100 pages are devoted to essays about plays written by Bennett, more about The lady in the van, that was already so extensively dealt with in Writing home. There are various essays on radio and TV, among others on contemporaries of Bennett such as Thora Hird and Lindsay Anderson, just in case these people would disappear into oblivion, as will probably happen anyway. The remaining essays on art, architecture and authors seemed promising, but are, by and large, rather uninteresting
I would advise anyone to take it from a library and read only those parts which have your particular interest, rather than attempt to swallow the whole book (and choke on it).
Like Writing home, it is a book full of scraps and tid-bits that nobody in their serious mind should attempt to read, let alone buy.
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Supposedly, most of these 'occasional pieces' were once published or unpublished. Much of it is either very boring or of inimitably little interest. The Diaries, for examples, tell us nothing whatsoever, as with most other pieces.Writing home consisted of 630+ pages, and Untold stories goes over that, forming a formidable tome of 658 pages, which, obviously, took me an incredibly long time to finish, and, again, I feel I wasted a lot of time reading it.
If may be that Alan Bennett is, or is considered an important author, but that does not seem to justify the publication of these two massive volumes of prose.
However, Untold stories seems a little bit better than the preceding volume. For instance, the first section, which bears the same title as the whole volume, namely Untold stories is a chronicle of the author's mothers illness. For years, as is usually the case in such patients, Bennett's mother suffered from Manic Depression. This is described very compassionately in this memoir, showing the tragedy of such prolonged depression for the mother, the father, and the author, who was a university student, at the time. This memoir also describes very accurately the dynamic between the parents, having a working class, lower educational background, and their son, who is trained at university, but above all the narrative shows how inadequate that university knowledge is in expressing affection and dealing with this situation. The memoir shows, actually, the father to be more apt and understanding and communicating feeling. As a result, the father and the son also grow closer.
Given the fact that in the Western world, Depression takes place on epidemic scale, it is remarkable that this type of memoir seems to be so rare. At 127 page, forming the first part of the book, Untold stories deserves to be read,and should be anthologized in other form.
Written on the body is an interesting personal memoir, but very short.
For the rest of the book, I would advise a hap-snap approach. The diaries (1996 - 2004) are largely very uninteresting, unless one is perhaps particularly interested in Alan Bennett, taking up almost 200 pages. About 100 pages are devoted to essays about plays written by Bennett, more about The lady in the van, that was already so extensively dealt with in Writing home. There are various essays on radio and TV, among others on contemporaries of Bennett such as Thora Hird and Lindsay Anderson, just in case these people would disappear into oblivion, as will probably happen anyway. The remaining essays on art, architecture and authors seemed promising, but are, by and large, rather uninteresting
I would advise anyone to take it from a library and read only those parts which have your particular interest, rather than attempt to swallow the whole book (and choke on it).
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Subjects
Awards
Lambda Literary Award (Nominee — 2006)
Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (Shortlist — 2006)
Ackerley Prize (Winner — 2006)
Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (Longlist — 2006)
Original publication date
2005
Physical description
672 p.