What Book to Read?

Depending on your age, an understanding of ‘smut’ can range from soot emitted by steam trains to internet porn. In Alan Bennett’s hands, it has the feel of music halls and risqué postcards. This feeling is reinforced by the subtitle of Smut (2011) – Two Unseemly Stories. ‘Unseemly’ carries a sense of affront to lace curtain respectability, and this is the world that Bennett likes gently to poke fun at. The two stories in the book are separate, but have smut in common.

The first story is ‘The Greening of Mrs Donaldson’. A ’muddle’ over her husband’s pension has left the widowed Mrs Donaldson less well off than expected, so she decides to take in student lodgers. Through one of them, she begins to work as a ‘Simulated Patient’ at the local medical school. She enjoys it. ‘It’s a way of not being yourself,’ she says. But when the students can’t pay their rent they make a most unusual suggestion ‘in lieu’. She is a demonstrator at the hospital; they will do a demonstration for her. Mrs Donaldson does not immediately understand. But when she does, she quite enjoys the experience. ‘Hectic though the evening had been for Mrs Donaldson in retrospect it constituted some sort of refuge, a haven set utterly apart, a place of her own.’ She is changing in ways quite unforeseen in the days of her dull and conventional marriage.

The second story is ‘The Shielding of Mrs Forbes’. Mrs Forbes, ‘though almost alarmingly robust, claimed to be seldom altogether well, though it wasn’t anything one could put one’s finger on. True the trouble was often to do with that department Mr Forbes might have been expected to put his finger on but rarely did …’ She is very disappointed when her good looking son Graham decides to marry Betty, who is quite plain – though also quite well off. ‘One does not have to be in the forefront of the struggle for women’s rights to find Betty’s decision to marry Graham deplorable. She wasn’t wholly infatuated, though she liked the way he looked; but, so too did he and that unfatuated her a bit.’ What Mrs Forbes has to be shielded from is the fact that Graham is gay. This is something his wife and father can cope with, but which becomes more problematic when they find out that Graham is being blackmailed by a lover who is threatening to tell all. But there are other things that need to be kept from Mrs Forbes; in fact none of them, Mrs Forbes included, is quite what they seem.

Bennett has a number of ways of making the stories entertaining (in addition to the smut). One is simply the oddity of the circumstances he has contrived. The very first lines of the first story are a good example. ‘‘I gather you’re my wife,’ said the man in the waiting room. ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Might one know your name?’’ Mrs Donaldson is his wife for the purpose of the patient simulation they are about to undertake, but it all seems a bit crazy until you realise this. Nearly all the simulated patient situations are funny, not only because of the teacher’s sarcasm at the expense of his inept students, but also because of the interplay between reality and simulation. A lot of the relationships between characters are really quite sad, but made funny by Bennett’s turn of phrase. Graham’s father is very quiet. ‘Indeed his wife was often taken for a widow. She had so much the air of a woman who was coping magnificently that a husband still extant took people by surprise.’ There is also an amusing use of parenthesis. Mr Forbes consoles himself online with ‘a dusky beauty in Samoa (but who actually lives in Clitheroe)’. It is a comedy of false appearances or misperceptions; no one is quite who other people think they are, or who they have presented themselves as being.

What the stories have in common, besides humour, is Bennett’s humanity. He may be laughing at his characters, but he treats even the most objectionable of them – like Graham and his mother – with genuine compassion. Even though he is writing about their unseemly foibles, he never mocks their ordinary aspirations. Despite the distance between the elder Mr and Mrs Forbes, ‘People would have a said this was a happy marriage, which it sort of was.’ It’s this humanity which saves the stories from being too slight. I think that celebration of the oddness of individuals within ordinary everyday reality is characteristic of Bennett – it comes out in all of the ‘Talking Heads’ monologues, in ‘The Lady in the Van’ and in ‘The History Boys’. You can read about these here. (I was a bit unfatuated with The Uncommon Reader; the Queen doesn’t play so well in Australia). Short stories and plays seem to be his natural form of literary expression; they are no less pleasing for being brief.

Speaking of unfatuated, some critics didn’t like Smut much; here is one who thought it not up to Bennett’s best.