ARTS
‘Typical me to have a spat with our best-loved Englishman’
The writer offended Alan Bennett when she put him in her memoir Love, Nina. She says that she still doesn’t understand how it happened
Friday May 27 2016, 12.01am BST, The Times
The world of specialists in the art of understated English comedy is small enough. So it’s bad when two members fall out. Nina Stibbe is a new entrant to the group, with her Love, Nina letter collection, currently being televised by the BBC, putting people in mind of a Sue Townsend, a Victoria Wood or even a PG Wodehouse.
Yet she has slightly offended Alan Bennett. Which is unfortunate because Bennett’s appearance in those diaries is the very reason Stibbe reached the international acclaim she so deserves.
“Typical me,” Stibbe tells me, “to have a literary spat with the world’s best-loved Englishman.”
It’s a very delicate and English business this Nina Stibbe-Alan Bennett thing, and for that reason I am blundering right in there. I’m too excited at the prospect that my conversation with Stibbe could stand as a kind of explanation of the whole misunderstanding. Too self-aggrandising to see that nothing I do could reunite these two in an awkward double-cardigan hug. Still, it’s worth a try.
“He never does that. He never rains on people’s parades. He’s a really supportive guy,” Stibbe says. “He’s a gentleman. I know that’s an old-fashioned word, but he is really caring and decent. And yet the only time in his whole life he’s been a bit . . .” she pauses, “has been to me. God, how did that happen?”
Well, this is how it happened. It requires us to delve into the story of Stibbe’s early life, which, if not narrated by Stibbe, would appear shocking and traumatic, involving drug addiction, miscarriage and rampant casual sex. And that was just her mother.
However, it is no hardship for the reader to hear of this time in her novels, the second of which, Paradise Lodge, is out now. This pain is the stuff of her jokes. And it is also why, when Stibbe was a 20-year-old first meeting Bennett, she depicted him quite as she did.
By the time she was 50, Stibbe’s was a lifetime of unfulfilled potential. It’s easy to forget that, now that The New York Times considers her “working in her country’s rich tradition of Wodehouse and Waugh”. As a child she endured the ostracism that befell her single mother, who was treated with abominable cruelty by neighbours in their rural Leicestershire village, a period Stibbe barely fictionalised for her first novel, Man at the Helm.
Then Stibbe, who longed to be a writer, started working in an old people’s home at the age of 14 instead of going to school; her bed-pan years are the unlikely subject of Paradise Lodge.
In adulthood she tried and failed for decades to get these novels published. As her own two children grew older she was finally resigning herself to never being an author. “I was beginning to give up on it.”
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He was cross I had him as a handyman when everyone else was having sex
Enter Alan Bennett. You could trace back Stibbe’s sudden and fantastic success to many improbable things, all centring on the letters she sent to her sister while Stibbe was working as a nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, in the 1980s. The cache of letters was shown by Wilmers to an editor at Penguin — but really it was Bennett’s walk-on part as a helpful neighbour to Wilmers, a single mother, that tickled the nation’s fancy. Stibbe recorded Bennett forever popping over to Wilmers’s house with bathos and rice pudding. We couldn’t get enough of him fixing the washing machine. The book was an overnight success and four years later here we are: a second TV series, this time of Man at the Helm, is in production.
“I wasn’t breaking through on my own,” she says. “I needed Alan Bennett’s DIY skills.”
In fact the coverage of Love, Nina’s launch so focused on Bennett that Stibbe recalls her daughter seeing an article about the book in a newspaper, illustrated with a large photo of Bennett, and asking, “Did you write Love, Nina, or did he?”
Yet while the TV show runs fairly close to the letters (“it’s not very sweary and I do like the swears”) and Wilmers is apparently caught “spot on” by Helena Bonham Carter (“I think I’m allowed to say she’s thrilled about the Helena Bonham Carter thing”), there is no Bennett in the Love, Nina TV adaptation.
“He made a decision early on not to get too close to it,” Stibbe says. “Straight away he was quite disappointed with it. He felt he came over as a miserable Jimmy. He was cross I had him as a handyman and mending the fridge, and being sensible and supportive. I had him crossing the road with rice pudding when everyone else was wearing silk shirts and having sex. That’s what I think. His character wasn’t badass.”
