Enough Said, Alan Bennett’s fourth collection of diaries, is in the tradition of late-life works with such encouraging titles as his friend Alec Guinness’ journal, A Positively Final Appearance. Bennett, the now nonagenarian dramatist, novelist and screenwriter, has definitively arrived at the status of public institution, England’s uncle, a niche the late Tony Harrison called “Cosy Corner”.
Among other things, the diaries are notable as the internal record of a thinking, feeling person behind the icon of the secular saint, who bristles at the thought of standing among “rank upon rank of ceremonial old men”. There is a strange, unresolved disconnect between this Bennett, who demurs at Yorkshire Day as the commodification of English identity, and the Bennett who earnestly speculates about whether an athlete might get a CBE or admiringly delineates the traits of royals he has encountered.
The diaries span from 2016 to 2024, years of immense personal difficulties, as Bennett documents cataracts, forgetfulness, frailty and the deaths of innumerable close friends. Beyond his personal life, against the societal upheaval of this period, Bennett provides a welcome unsentimental deflation of political grandiosity and Little Englandism from the perspective of someone who has lived through the Blitz.
Recollections of the British state of the 1950s as “nurturer” contrast tragically with the present, as the diaries piercingly anatomise NHS cuts and reduced upward mobility. Bennett’s politics can periodically veer into the bizarrely incoherent, however, and one is treated to a particularly quixotic defence of John Bercow following his suspension from the Labour Party for bullying.
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There is a great deal of information on the gestation of Bennett’s work from this period, new Talking Heads monologues, the play, Allelujah!, and the film, The Choral. Throughout the diaries Bennett wrestles with personal doubt as to whether he can complete what he seems to consider final works, writing against the clock and the sitting jury of his own lengthy career.
His gratitude for the collaborators who have shaped his work is evident, particularly Nicholas Hytner, who has directed his work for stage and screen. Bennett’s assessment of his plays, each “a Christmas tree on which I hang ornaments, jokes, pithy remarks and bits of philosophy,” could easily serve as a summation of this collection, whose eclecticism ultimately charms.
