Autobiography: Alan Bennett was born in Leeds in 1934. His father was a bookish butcher; his mother kept house.
They were working-class people, shy, courteous and decent. Their son was shy, too, though he had a tendency to show-off of which they heartily disapproved. Alan was also very clever: he passed the 11-plus and went to grammar school. Here he flourished academically and developed into a mildly right-wing, zealous high Anglican, albeit one who harboured a secret. He was gay.
From school he went to Oxford on a scholarship, was briefly a medieval historian and then, with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, starred in the revue Beyond the Fringe (this was in 1962). Thereafter he embarked (which he never expected to) on a golden life - or at least so it seemed to envious others - as an actor, playwright, critic, essayist and diarist. His best-loved works - and loved is exactly right; he's always been popular because his work is so accessible - include The Madness of King George, his Talking Heads monologues (which deepened and extended the form), and The Lady in the Van, the play he wrote about Miss Shepherd, the vagrant who lived in the front garden of his house in Camden Town, London, for a quarter of a century.
Bennett's work has always been emphatically provincial. With the monologues, it is obvious that his roots lie in Yorkshire. In his other works, even when the debt to place is disguised, the source remains home. However, though he has what is thought of as pure gold in celebrity literary circles - genuine working-class authenticity - he's an intensely private man and has always refused to write autobiographical copy.
Or at least he was until, in 1997, a tumour was found in his bowel the size of a rock bun, as the doctor nicely put it. (One would almost think he was auditioning for a part in an Alan Bennett play.) A life-saving operation and chemotherapy followed. Convalescing, he found himself disinclined to go back to drama (play-writing perhaps being what brought on the cancer trouble "in the first place"). Instead he started scribbling about his family's secrets: his grandfather's suicide, his mother's depressions, his aunt Kathleen's disappearance from an old people's home and his own discovery of her frozen body in a wood beside the M60.
His pre-cancer self, though not against publication of these materials, would have favoured the posthumous route. Post-cancer, however, he decided they must be "prehumous". Untold Stories is simultaneously an account of this change from reticence to disclosure, as well as the product of that process.
The heroine of the piece is his mother; Lilian was a hard-working, dirt-hating woman with unfulfilled aspirations. She wanted to be like the glamorous women she read about in magazines and to have coffee mornings and cocktail parties and serve sausages on sticks. Though she collected antiques (actually bric-a-brac) - most untypical of a Leeds housewife of the period - and even succeeded once in dressing her husband in casual wear instead of his habitual suit, she never transcended her origins. As she was born, so she died: a woman on society's margins with little education, great spirit and a Sisyphean capacity for endurance.
Alan Bennett's father, Walter, was the same but different. Like his wife he liked to blend into the background and he loathed those - such as his wife's two unmarried sisters, "the ladies of misrule" as Bennett beautifully terms them - who drew attention to themselves in public with their clothes and exuberant conversation. Yet this same man (whom the son resembles in so many ways) was an accomplished, self-taught violinist and would often, when the family was visiting the cinema, join the orchestra in the pit and play along with the film, which doesn't seem exactly self-effacing.
The relationship of Bennett's parents was one of unswerving loyalty. When Lilian became clinically depressed, an event that coincided with her husband's retirement (and may have been precipitated by their move out of Leeds and into a bungalow in the countryside), she was put into a succession of hospitals and given ECT. Walter devoted himself to her care whenever she was well enough to come home - not easy given her delusions and paranoia - and when she was incarcerated he never missed a visit and was always on time, even when the journey was 60 or 70 miles.
After 10 years of this exhausting regime, Walter died of a heart attack. (Alan Bennett believes it was the stress of caring that killed him.) Lilian lived on for another 25 years, not dying until the mid-1990s. This quarter-century was spent in homes, mostly in Weston-super-Mare, and it was a taxing time for Alan Bennett. Lilian's dementia, as is the case for everyone, he found both heart-rending and infuriating. He did what was right and visited his mother regularly, but the icy-hearted writer, as distinct from the dutiful son, kept notes throughout. Bennett's candour on the split nature of his personality (which he dramatises in The Lady in the Van, which has two Alan Bennett characters - one the pitiless writer, the other the concerned citizen) is one of the many joys of this volume.
The sharply expressed opinions are also a joy; many of them are heretical, and spring from Bennett's newly-minted, post-cancer persona. For instance: he dislikes Liverpool, describing it as "sullen, tight-fisted and at night raw and violent" and he finds, on account of his age, "that shoe shops nowadays seem to be staffed by sluts".
Some readers might object that such views are nothing more than the hand-me-down opinions of an old fogey, with the poet Larkin (who Bennett admires) the template. This is unfair. Alan Bennett won't be put into any category. Take his attitude to his gayness: he loathes David Maxwell Fyfe, for example, the British home secretary who persecuted homosexuals in the 1950s, which for a gay man seems pretty unexceptional. Yet he also abhors all-male gay parties (as much for the presumption involved on the part of those who issue the invitations as for the absence of women, whose company he has always adored), and he is allergic to gay victimhood. In respect of his sexuality, as in all other areas of his life, he is unclubbable.
And nowhere is this more on display than in his responses to the various awards that have been offered over the years. He declined a CBE in 1988 (easy to turn down, as he confesses, because Thatcher was still in charge) and a knighthood in 1996. His reason, he explains, has its origins in his experience of National Service (which again, typically, he rather enjoyed and wouldn't mind seeing brought back). What it taught him was that authority was never to be trusted and that whatever he might aspire to be (an officer, a toff, a member of the establishment), he would always be an Other Rank. That was what he was and he had better get used to it. His parents, who were of the same opinion - although, in their case they were born with it rather than having to learn it, as their son did when he failed to qualify for officer training - would have been proud of him.
Bennett is entitled to feel proud of his flinty resolution, but he isn't. His refusal to capitalise on his virtues shows the sort of modesty one associates with Beckett (with regard to his war-time career) and Pinter (with regard to his pacifism). In the early 21st century, when there is so much bad faith around, he is exactly the sort of writer (readable, tender-hearted, merciless), and Untold Stories is exactly the sort of work (funny, savage, true), that we need. What a model for these mucky times.
Carlo Gébler's most recent books are The Siege of Derry and The Bull Raid, a new version of The Táin, or the Cattle Raid of Cooley. He is writer-in-residence of HMP Maghaberry, Co Antrim.
Untold Stories By Alan Bennett Faber & Faber/Profile Books, 658pp. £20