Alan Bennett Talks About Smut, OWS, and Writing

Jan 4, 2012 - Book Beast - Lucy Scholes

The famed playwright talks about his new short stories about, well, smut, Occupy Wall Street, the writing life, and a new wave of child abuse

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As if in direct juxtaposition to the content of the book we’re discussing, Alan Bennett’s Smut, I meet the author and playwright in the comfortably literary surroundings of the London Review of Books Cake Shop in London’s Bloomsbury. He’s both instantly recognizable and yet oddly unassuming. I ask him if he’d like some tea, but they don’t seem to have the simple English Breakfast that he requests. I want to ask, don’t you know this is Alan Bennett? Surely you can find him a teabag. But I don’t, of course, and he politely makes do with a glass of water instead.

In one sense we’re enacting the same distinctly middle-class notion of respectability and worrying (or not, as the case turns out in the first of these two stories) about what other people think. As the title suggests, both stories deal with the subject of sex—sometimes titillating, sometimes predictable—but never quite what we'd expect given the fact we're viewing events through the eyes of two middle-aged women. Mrs. Donaldson, the heroine of his first story, is a widow not “quite ready to school herself for the dignified solitude” those around her consider “appropriate” to her newfound status. She’s one of the many characters in Bennett’s work who, he explains, “feels they’ve been suppressed or kept down and then suddenly break out.”

“I think that’s a realization that comes with middle age,” he continues. “When you’re young, you think that everyone is concentrating on you. But when you get older, you realize that they’re only really bothering with themselves.”
Full story at The Daily Beast