The report in last Friday’s Guardian that Alan Bennett is to donate his entire archive - including “his manuscripts, diaries, letters and, on his death, all remaining papers and his working library, including hundreds of inscribed first editions of his own and other books” — to Oxford’s Bodleian Library for free isn’t just an extraordinarily generous and practical gesture, but also surely an instructive and chastening example for authors and estates looking to cash in on interest in their work. 7 As Bennett told The Guardian, “I really feel that Oxford is where I was educated and where I belong, and that if Bodley would like them, then they should have them. It sounds rather grand to say I can afford to, but libraries in England anyway are not well-endowed; they don’t have much money. Me and my partner, we’re relatively well off, and so I felt I didn’t really want to take money for them.”
He went on to say that it as if it was a debt was being repaid: “”I was educated free right from the start. I was educated free in Leeds where I went to a state school, and then I got a scholarship to Exeter College Oxford, and so at no point did my parents or me have to pay anything for my education. One didn’t have much money, but one never really gave money a thought because you had just about enough to be going on with. Now that’s a situation that students today can only dream of, really. In that sense giving the manuscripts to Bodley - it sounds rather pious - is a kind of small recompense for what I was given. And not merely given by Oxford, I also feel I was given it by the state, and the state isn’t something that people would normally thank or think well of and hence the phrase ‘the nanny state’.”
At last week’s meeting of the Critics’ Circle and Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, variously impassioned pleas were made for to him for state funding to be used to acquire Titian’s Diana and Actaeon - a painting that has been on continuous view in the National Gallery of Scotland since 1945 but whose owner, the Duke of Sutherland, wants to now sell it off after a “prudent review” of the family assets, according to a report here — as well as fund a new film centre for London when the BFI have to vacate their current home on the South Bank, and to contribute towards restoring the fabric of the West End theatre buildings.
Burnham replied at the time, “We can’t always agree to every single request that comes our way - it is impossible because there simply isn’t the money to do that. But at all times you enter the discussion as a willing partner, and try to come up with a solution that is proportionate and in the long-term serves the public good.”
But if the arts are full of people who constantly look to the state for solutions to such problems, it is heartening indeed when an artist of the stature of Bennett doesn’t create a problem but merely removes the barriers entirely. And one wonders why artists aren’t looking to their own posterity more in letting the state benefit from the prosperity that they’ve earned through their work: given £95.7m recently raised by Damien Hirst for what The Times called “two years’ worth of pickled animals, spot paintings, dead butterfly collages and stubbed-out cigarettes”, for instance, he could easily buy the Titian for the nation and have £45m over. Or, to revive an old bugbear of mine, Andrew Lloyd Webber could stop asking for state funding for the upkeep of his theatres, when his own group recorded an operating profit of some £21.9m last year - thanks in part to “strong production income from copyright and rights exploitation as well as strong trading results from the theatres”, according to a story in The Stage here.
Alan Bennett’s gift to the Bodley is magnificent proof of a different way of doing things. And as well as providing a wonderful legacy to the library, it will put the seal on his own reputation as one of our best and most selfless writers: a win all around. And we can all play our part, however modest: as someone who has, over the years inevitably amasses a huge volume of theatre programmes, I finally surrendered and stopped collecting them a couple of years ago when I moved flat, and instead boxed them up and donated them all to the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection - and will continue doing so from now on. Once upon a time I used to say I needed to cling onto them for reference; but in the age of google, I can find out most of what I need to online. And if in doubt, Mander and Mitchenson are always there should I need them!
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