Cocktail Sticks is Alan Bennett’s dramatization of his prose memoir about his relationship with his parents. I listened to the BBC Radio 4 version. Bennett plays himself with the younger Bennett played by Alex Jennings.
Bennett is a deceptively straightforward writer. For example, he tells us that if he were a better writer, he would list all the items he found while clearing out his mother’s kitchen cupboard after her death. Then he goes on to list them anyway. Similarly, he suggests that a stable, secure family background is a problem for the would-be writer, because it deprives him of material. Then he goes on to prove himself wrong.
There are a couple of neat references to Philip Larkin here, I Remember, I Remember as well as the more obvious This Be the Verse. It’s worth remembering that Bennett is that crucial few years younger than Larkin and became more of an active participant in “the sixties” than Larkin ever was.
The play moves between Bennett’s narration and dramatized episodes from the past. Sometimes the past and present mingle, as when his father speaks in the present although he has died some years before.
There is a sort of standard narrative about the clever scholarship boy or girl who comes to be ashamed of their humble parentage. Bennett presents all this in a rather gentler way than some other writers have done. He tells us how he is ashamed now of his shame about his parents then.
The play is warm, witty and hilarious. Bennett clearly had a warm and loving relationship with his parents. It becomes poignant in the later part as his mother succumbs first to depression and then to dementia. Bennett has such a good ear for words that he can even make dark comedy out of his mother’s loss of language at the end. In fact, Bennett has the kind of feel for the absurdities of English that you normally expect to find in people who have learnt English as a second language. There is a neat play on the word “cocktail” and the way it is used to describe the mixture of drugs in Bennett’s chemotherapy treatment.
Bennett has written extensively about his early years and the question of what his parents knew or thought about their son’s sexuality haunts these works. There are hints here that they knew perfectly well what he was like, his father’s worry about how their “sensitive” son would cope with National Service and his mother’s knowing references to the writer Beverley Nichols. This is what Bennett captures so well, the rhythms of speech where things are hinted at and alluded to but never said directly. He has recorded not only the speech patterns but the social customs of that late 1940s/early 1950s era.
I think that rather like John Betjeman, Bennett has become the prisoner of a false reputation. Neither of them is quite the cuddly figure that they appear to be from the personae they adopted to present TV documentaries. There probably won’t be too many more works to come from Alan Bennett so we should make the most of him while we can.
The Good Reader 