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Kathmandu Sunday January 27, 2002 Magh 14, 2058.
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Laughter, painfully
intelligent
By Swarnim Waglé
Alan Bennett is Britain’s most admired
playwright. Having written and adapted plays for the National Theater, Broadway, and the
BBC for over forty years, he has finally diversified his skills to write a little novel.
Literally a ‘little’ novel of around 20,000 words, Bennett’s "The
Clothes They Stood Up In" has been described as a novella, although I am not sure if
such a word exists in proper dictionaries of the English language. Regardless of what we
call what Bennett has written, what a story it is, and what a debut. The book is supposed
to be funny, but not in the usual loud, ha-ha way. He expects us to quietly relish the
sharp wit adorned undistorted by a beautiful prose. But beneath the humor, Bennett poses
an astounding set of philosophical enquiries on contemporary Western lifestyle. Taking the
themes of material possession, institutional trappings of functioning democracies, and
expectations from marriages crafted to conform, perhaps never before has such a big
attempt been made in such a small work to nudge readers into questioning life’s
routines in a humorous guise. "The Clothes They Stood Up In" is thus a seriously
funny book that is simultaneously sad, quirky, sardonic, clever, crisp, and superbly
intelligent.
The basic plot begins with the protagonists, Mr.
and Mrs. Ransome, returning from an opera to find their posh London apartment broken into.
Except the empty space, nothing is left behind, not even a used roll of toilet paper. The
first paragraph is conveniently one of the finest in the book that unambiguously sets the
tone for succeeding developments: "The Ransomes had been burgled. "Robbed,"
Mrs. Ransome said. "Burgled", Mr. Ransome corrected. Premises were burgled;
persons were robbed. Mr. Ransome was a solicitor by profession and thought words mattered.
Though "burgled" was the wrong word too. Burglars select; they pick; they remove
one item and ignore others. There is a limit to what burglars can take: they seldom take
easy chairs, for example, and even more seldom settees. These burglars did. They took
everything."
Bennett exploits this unusual situation to probe
people’s attachment to material possessions. By chronicling Mrs. Ransome’s
travails to re-start from scratch as her indifferent husband goes about life only visibly
displeased at the loss of his Mozart CD, Bennett is asking us, do things matter? Does
stuff count? How important a concept is ownership - of emotions, of things? Is it the
actual loss of convenience that materialism lends that is bothersome, or is it the need to
re-invent life from ground zero that is irritating; or is it perhaps that like we borrow
identities through lineage, stuff and things define who we are, and once that tie is
severed, we are left in a state of utter worthlessness? Bennett appreciates the perfected
wonders of 20th century capitalism – the power of an ingenious instrument called
insurance, for example, but by mocking mankind, and the depths we have reduced ourselves
to service the markets, he is proving a larger point. Mercifully, he stops short of
overreaching for the nonsensical spiritual solace that, like insurance, is traded in the
bazaar of private sorrows.
The Ransomes soon discover that all their
possessions have been immaculately preserved at a dreary suburban location. Bennett is
asking here, how is one to deal with chaos of this kind, the emotional roller coaster of
instant loss and recovery? How cruel and costly can unpredictability be? How does one
manage confusion? Can confusion be managed at all? By funnily portraying snippets from the
modern police force, the ridiculously overrated counseling industry, and the mind-numbing
quality of American television, Bennett is transparent about his complete distaste for
unintelligent indulgence; but he is wise enough not to abuse his humorous license to make
indirect moral prescriptions on how individual lives should be led in open societies.
After the mystery of the burglary is solved, nothing of course is the same again. Mrs.
Ransome is a new woman and Mr. Ransome’s perverted bent of mind is sharpened. Under
this subplot, final in the book, Bennett wants to pin down a trade-off between the
risk-averse discomforts of conformity with the pleasures of enacting suppressed desires.
Submerged in his dry humor, one can dig deep to infer a subset of interesting questions:
Why is the notion of conforming always thought of as passé, and the pursuit of free will
always interpreted as rebellious? What price do we pay for this false dichotomy? Why
can’t we be inventive enough to balance cherished values with enterprising will? Why
can’t we, so to speak, conform rebelliously?
I first read Bennett six years ago. His
delightful essay, ‘The Lady in the Van’, made a lasting impression, and it was
thus with joyous expectation that I picked up his debut novel. I am pleased to have not
been let down. Unlike good music, humor unfortunately does not command universal
appreciation quite as uniformly. Even acknowledging Bernard Shaw’s quip about Britain
and America being the same civilization divided by the same language, it is surprising
that the book did not do very well in the US, the largest English speaking market. It is
well known that rich British creations are routinely neutered for the American audience.
While the title of Bennett’s own play, ‘The Madness of George III’, for
example, was renamed ‘The Madness of King George’, later an Oscar-nominated
screenplay, to prevent confusion on the part of the average American on the number of
Georges who have governed England so far, no such attempt at revision seems to have been
made on this novella. Barring this caveat about the place-people-culture specificity of
refined and restrained humor, I have nothing negative to say about Alan Bennett’s
"The Clothes They Stood Up In". It is quite simply a most brilliant work of
fiction that adds substantively to an enviable canon of meaningful, witty writing in a
country where the greatest offence is to tell someone politely: "you don’t have
a sense of humor."
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