by Martin Wallace
identity, n.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ʌɪˈdɛntᵻti/ , U.S. /aɪˈdɛn(t)ədi/
a. The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness.
– Oxford English Dictionary
Identity is the story we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. Life experiences, often disparate, sometimes even contradictory, can hereby become trammelled within the rigours of narrative discipline. Ironically, it is through such elisions and emphases, such concealments and exposures, that our apparently coherent and consistent selves are instituted. The stability of our first-person pronominal referent, I, suggests an absolute and essential sameness, a subjective uniformity over time. Of course, in reality, such a resolute sameness is incompatible with anything other than entirely static environmental, physiological and psychological conditions.
Memoir is the literary enactment of such identity formation, forcing into narrative clarity even the foggiest of understandings and recollections. As Mary Evans has put it, the generic form of auto/biography provides ‘a chance to stabilise the uncertainties of existence’. Such writing, and the stable subjectivity to which it lends material reality, is antithetical to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose formulation of duration figures time as cognitive development necessarily propelled by continuous qualitative alteration. For Bergson, ‘there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change at every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow’. Consciousness, then, is the freedom to change one’s mind.
In his autobiographical stage play, Cocktail Sticks (2012), Alan Bennett observes that ‘you don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there’. Atypically for the genre, Bennett has used memoir not to project a coherent and consistent identity, but as an active process of self-exploration akin to Bergsonian duration. A case in point is one of his best-known works, The Lady in the Van. In fact, it is not one work but several; or perhaps one work in progress, having undergone several thematic and formal transformations since its first appearance in the London Review of Books in October 1989, shortly after the death of its protagonist, Miss Mary Shepherd.
The tale of Miss Shepherd, her various vans, and their fifteen-year residence in Bennett’s front garden, the original LRB article is formed of past-tense reflections interspersed with present-tense diary entries. The resulting frequent shifts in tense bring into question the implied spontaneity and observational authenticity of the diary entries, hereby exposed as retrospective reconstructions. Indeed, Bennett has explained that all his published diaries undergo such revisions: ‘immediacy in my case doesn’t make for vivid reporting, which is why I’ve not had any scruples about improving and editing.’ This aspect of Bennett’s writing recalls how, for Bergson, subjective development is propelled by a synthesis of past and present experiences, creating an ever-deepening well of cognition. In its composition, then, Bennett’s text is analogous to Bergson’s definition of duration, which ‘forms both the past and the present into an organic whole’.
Again writing about Miss Shepherd a decade on from her death, Bennett considers how the sound of a van door sliding shut can transport him back to when she was living in his garden. He contrasts this with how, for Marcel in Remembrance of Things Past, it is the sound of the gate in his aunt’s idyllic garden which prompts a stumble into memory: ‘The discrepancy is depressing but then most writers discover quite early on that they’re not going to be Proust.’ Such bathos is a signature stylistic feature of Bennett’s work, but it also suggests that to bring the theory forged by Bergson in the fires of high European modernism into dialogue with The Lady in the Van might not be as incongruous as it first seems.
Closing the original 1989 LRB article, Bennett gestures toward the artificiality of the memoir form, noting how the manner in which Miss Shepherd’s past secrets are belatedly revealed is a narrative trope familiar from fiction: ‘it was as if she had been a character in Dickens whose history has to be revealed and her secrets told in the general setting-to-rights before the happy ever after.’ Here, Bennett undermines the generic distinction between memoir and fiction, indicating that auto/biography is itself a form of imaginativewriting. It is a generic distinction further undermined by how The Lady in the Van subsequently came to be republished as part of Bennett’s 1994 collection of autobiographical prose Writing Home, again in 1999 in book form (declaring itself ‘his most famous piece of non-fiction’), and again as part of 2006’s Four Stories, categorised as fiction on its back cover.
From its appearance in Writing Home onwards, the main body of the text is largely identical to the original published version, save for minor cosmetic editorial interventions and one slight but suggestive textual variant. In the LRB, Bennett describes how, while he and a neighbour push Miss Shepherd and her van from its previous resting spot in which it has been served with an obstruction order, ‘she can’t decide whether her next pitch should be outside number 61 or my house opposite. Eventually she decides there is “a nice space” outside 62 and plumps for that.’ When the same passage appears in Writing Home, and ever after, ‘… or my house opposite’ has become ‘… or further on’, the revision seemingly an effort to steer narrative focus onto Miss Shepherd and her situation, and away from the author’s subjective response to it.
In Writing Home and subsequently, The Lady in the Van is accompanied by an additional text: ‘Postscript (1994)’. Listed separately on the book’s contents page, its date of composition incorporated into its title, the postscript is awarded sufficient distance from the main text to throw it into relief. Bennett explains that his original telling of Miss Shepherd’s final days was left purposefully vague, the real sequence of events having ‘seemed so neat that I felt, when I first wrote it up, that to emphasize it would cast doubt on the truth of my account, or make it seem sentimental or melodramatic’. Here we find a highly unusual biographical strategy: a purposeful obfuscation of that which otherwise would have yielded comfortably to generic conventions. Concerned that such a neat narrative might seem too contrived, Bennett deliberately destabilises what could have seemed certainties in Miss Shepherd’s existence.
These apparent certainties, described by Bennett in the postscript as ‘the formality of her last days’, do indeed conform to narrative conventions: shortly before her death, Miss Shepherd attended mass for the first time in many months; having lived for so long in uninterrupted squalor, she died soon after agreeing to be bathed at a day centre, dressed in clean clothes, and for the van to be furnished with fresh sheets. Toward the end of the main text, diary entries describe in present tense how these events unfolded: Bennett’s final encounter with Miss Shepherd after her uncharacteristic visit to the day centre (27 April 1989); the discovery of her death (28 April); and her funeral (9 May). Closing the main narrative, Bennett reflects in the past tense on his discoveries about Miss Shepherd during the interval between her death and her funeral. The postscript begins with an observation that, while left unemphasised in the main text, the narrative neatness of her final days is ‘deducible from the dates of the entries’.
Yet, the diary entries for 28 April and 9 May appear for the first time in the 1994 version of the text, bridging what had been a narrative gap in the original LRB article and now making it far easier to deduce the sequence of events. Unlike the postscript, these two diary entries are new additions discreetly blended into the main body of the text and therefore appear original. Oddly, then, Bennett begins the postscript by reflecting on an aspect of the original text which he has in fact altered prior to its republication in Writing Home. Besides calling attention to narrative structure within autobiographical writing, these curious interventions into and responses to the original text undermine its status as a stable object, its uniformity over time.
In its peculiar inter/intratextuality, Bennett’s writing resembles that which, critiquing the ontology of identity, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (in)defines as queer: an ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning’. For Sedgwick, this semiotic tangle is revealed when the constituent characteristics belonging to any individual ‘aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’. The development of queer theory by scholars including Sedgwick is contemporaneous with Bennett’s writing about Miss Shepherd, and echoes philosophically Bergson’s argument for the impossibility of full subjective stability. Just as a person might refuse to comply with conventional identity categories, The Lady in the Van formally evades signification as a complete construction.
Another generic mutation of Bennett’s text occurred when it appeared in 2000 as a stage play. In his introduction to the published text, Bennett indicates his having deliberately disturbed the structure of Miss Shepherd’s life when representing it dramatically: while her story seemed to him to present itself as a three-act play, he opted instead to condense it into the more popular two-act format. He reiterates how his original prose account of Miss Shepherd’s death was deliberately ambiguous so to avoid its seeming ‘handy and convenient, just when a writer would (if a little obviously) have chosen for her to die’. These highly deliberate creative interventions into biographical source material in the service of verisimilitude are analogues of how apparently coherent identities are always produced through careful narrative processes.
Introducing the play, Bennett also explains how the dramatic form demanded further new contrivances. Accordingly, the character of Miss Ferris is a composite of various social workers who, over the years, did visit Miss Shepherd in Bennett’s garden. Similarly, Pauline and Rufus represent collectively several of his actual neighbours. Another character in the play, Underwood, personifies Bennett’s curiosity and its eventual satisfaction, having been ‘invented in order to hint at something unexplained in Miss Shepherd’s past (and ultimately to explain it)’. Further undermining the boundary between the real and the imagined, the characters in the play speak dialogue reproduced verbatim from the earlier prose account.
The play’s most striking creative intervention into the source material is its presentation of two characters named Alan Bennett. As specified in the stage directions, the two Alans are dressed identically, one Alan interacting with Miss Shepherd and the other characters, the other Alan providing commentary on these interactions. That the two Alans are often in conflict with one another is analogous to how in reality each of us has not one but many selves, often new adaptive responses to shifting environmental, physiological and psychological conditions.
Indeed, as Bennett indicates in the introduction, the two Alans in the play represent how his attitudes toward the real Miss Shepherd were not uniform over time. Explaining how this highly unusual theatrical device nevertheless corresponded to the reality, Bennett writes:
There was one bit of me (often irritated and resentful) that had to deal with this unwelcome guest camped literally on my doorstep, but there was another bit of me that was amused by how cross this eccentric lodger made me and that took pleasure in Miss Shepherd’s absurdities and her outrageous demands.
As Bergson argues is the case with subjectivity in general, Bennett’s responses to Miss Shepherd have undergone frequent change. That is why they aren’t made, or can’t be made, to signify monolithically within his written reconstruction.
In the postscript to the 1994 version of The Lady in the Van, Bennett suggests resemblances between the behaviour of Miss Shepherd and that of his mother, for example their shared tendency to hoard toilet rolls. In the play, one of the Alans admonishes the other for drawing such a parallel:
A. Bennett (to Alan Bennett 2): It’s always Mam you compare her with. They’re not the same. I don’t like them even sharing the same sentence.
Mrs Bennett features nowhere in the original LRB article. Yet the play stages several interactions between Alan and Mam, suggesting that his development of the material has generated for Bennett an association between his tolerance of Miss Shepherd’s long residence in his garden and his feelings relating to his mother’s deteriorating mental health.
Of course, The Lady in the Van has always been as much about Alan Bennett as about Miss Shepherd. His frequent returns to and reworking of the material comprise a self-exploratory project resulting in a text that is Bergsonian both in that it is continually evolving, and in its creative synthesis of the past and present. That Bennett’s relationship with his mother has emerged as a prominent theme in the stage play suggests that the increasing artificiality of the form and its distancing effect has enabled deeper introspection. As the text has become formally more fictional, it has become thematically more personal. Bennett has not put himself in the text, but has found himself there.
In October 2014 a film adaptation of The Lady in the Van was filmed in the actual location in Camden Town where the real events once occurred, using a script by Bennett based on his stage play. It will be fascinating to see which elements of the established narrative(s) will this time have been elided and emphasised, and indeed what if anything has been freshly included.
In its continual formal and textual variation, The Lady in the Van is a work in progress and as such refuses to signify as a complete construction. It is a creative project through which the author seems to have mined a deeper understanding of the biographical and autobiographical source material. Bennett’s use of the memoir form is at once thematic exemplar and formal analogue of how the subjectivity belonging to a given individual is similarly a work in progress, how what seem to be stable identities are produced through rigorous narrative discipline. Bergson, whose time philosophy anticipates the basic tenor of Sedgwick’s queer theory, could almost be describing Bennett’s project when explaining how ‘for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, and to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly’.
Martin Wallace is a doctoral research student at the University of Oxford.
Image by gingerbeardman, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.
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