'There's nowt so queer as folk' says Alan Bennett

10 April 2012

Smut: Two Unseemly Stories

It never stops, you know. Alan Bennett, now 76, still likes thinking about what people get up to and having a peek at it.

This neat little book, in a bright yellow wrapper, contains two new stories, one 100 pages long, the other 70, both fondly imagining agreeable filth.

In The Greening of Mrs Donaldson (first published in the London Review of Books), a glamorous but shy 55-year-old widow has found work acting as a patient with mystery problems for practice diagnosis by medical students. Hospitals, along with schools, have always been one of Bennett's favourite locales - and this scenario allows him lots of mucky repartee. You could identify Bennett as the author from this single sentence alone, with its carefully placed multiple brackets: "Having had a dullish day (thyroid deficiency, hiatus hernia and (non-extruded) piles), she was sitting in the kitchen having a quiet drink when the doorbell went "

Mrs Donaldson's 20-year-old student lodgers come up with a scheme to cover the rent they owe by inviting her to watch them have sex. Bennett's all for this unusual idea, quite gravely endorsing it indeed, by telling us that it gives Mrs Donaldson "that slow deep pumping of the heart she had not felt since she was a girl. 'Life,' she thought."

The spectacle, a bit more animated than anything she knew with her late husband, sets her up a treat. Her next couple of lodgers helpfully repeat the show for her - and while the girl is away, the boy, an artist, hinted to resemble Pete Doherty, looks all ready to oblige Mrs Donaldson herself

In The Shielding of Mrs Forbes, secretly gay, good-looking and narcissistic banker Graham, 23, marries rich, plain, quick and clever Betty, to the distress of his monstrously snobbish mother.

To his surprise, Graham finds that he truly enjoys having sex with Betty, not having to bother with condoms for the first time in his life - or, as Bennett elaborately puts it, "the marital bed was untrammelled by tedious prophylaxis so that what Graham had been expecting to find an onerous and even distasteful duty unexpectedly partook of a freedom and absence of restraint that he found exhilarating".

He finds heterosexual sex "pleasingly felonious", no less, thrillingly "burglarious" even.

Unfortunately, a rent boy starts blackmailing Graham, threatening to expose his sexuality to his wife and mother, and when Graham bravely goes to the police station to report this, he finds his blackmailer is the gay liaison officer and flees. Haply, both his mother and wife are well aware of his foible. When the rent boy goes to see Graham's mother, she ruthlessly inveigles him into servicing her

All Bennett's work seems to me a dreamy evocation of an imaginary world in which he'd like to dwell, full of jokes and queerness. These days, he seems to be getting steadily smuttier, ever more disinhibited. But more strength to his elbow, I say.

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