Story of Alan's life

From Alan Bennett's 2011 diary in the LRB (gated, I think; comes with peculiarly robotic-sounding podcast -- or perhaps that is how all podcasts sound, I rarely listen to any):

15 April. Seeing a banana skin on the pavement reminds me how when I first read the Dandy and the Beano the presence of a banana skin meant that inevitably it was going to be slipped on. No matter that at that time, in the early 1940s, few children had seen let alone eaten a banana, the skin was still shorthand for calamity. Other comic clichés were a fish, almost certain to be stolen by a cat and always represented as a perfect skeleton devoid of flesh but still with the head on; a string of sausages, destined to be grabbed by a dog, the sausages trailing from the dog’s mouth like a scarf in the wind; a bull (beware of) in a field, a billy goat similarly, with a ladder another portent of disaster.

21 May. A plumpish young man gets off the train at Leeds just behind me.
‘Aren’t you famous?’
‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’
‘It’s Alan something.’
‘Yes.’
‘From Scarborough?’
‘No.’
‘So which Alan are you?’
‘I’m another Alan.’
‘Are you just a lookalike?’
‘Well, you could say so.’
He pats my arm consolingly.
‘Be happy with that.’

14 October. Were I Adam Werritty and going into lobbying and PR I would have changed my name at the outset. Verity has the literal ring of truth about it, Adam Verity a dauntless fighter for justice, whereas all Werritty suggests is some anxious yapping dog which, whatever his faults, Werritty hardly seems to have been.

"All middle, like a tortoise"

Ivan Bunin recollects a conversation with Chekhov [from the forthcoming Memories of Chekhov, excerpted in the NYRB]:

“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.


I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”

“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”

And then, without any discernible connection, he added, “It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end. We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible.” 

According to Peter Young's book Tortoise, this truncating habit of Chekhov's is where Galsworthy's line about C's stories comes from: that his stories are "all middle, like a tortoise." I'm not sure I follow the connection between Chekhov's two remarks either -- except that the more you write the more you can afford to throw away -- but this struck me as an unexpected parallel between the "Protestant work ethic" and that of someone like Flaubert. Truth-to-life is a less dandyish criterion than truth-to-language but the idea is the same at some level. (I don't read Russian but I have heard that Chekhov's prose is "workmanlike.") I guess the gloom is poignant in its way: if one is a perfectionist about one's work and is condemned, as Chekhov was, to a youth of hackwork:

Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by—among other jobs—private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers. ...[ca. 1880] he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life.

Cf. also Pope: "the last and greatest art, the art to blot." (I twice typed in "blot" as "blog" ...) And: "To write well, lastingly well, immortally well, must not one leave father and mother and cleave unto the Muse? It is such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be a good neighbor, an useful friend, nay to plant a tree, much less to save his soul."

NB: 1. the Tortoise book seems appealing but unreasonably pricey. 2. Had you heard of Ivan Bunin? Apparently he won the Nobel Prize.