Imagine, if you will, that the cast of Monte Python got together and wrote dirty little stories. Only they wrote them in a somewhat serious mode – of course, being Monte Python they would need to be full of tongue in cheek, satirical and cynical humor that shined a mirror back at the inanities of real life and real people and society in general.
Alan Bennett is one of Britain's most beloved playwrights, screenwriters, actors and authors. Oxford educated , he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time. His output includes The Madness of George III and its film incarnation The Madness of King George, the series of monologues Talking Heads, the play The History Boys, and popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. keeping that in mind, you can imagine that this collection of two stories is not the usual titillating fare.
Smut
In our first story, Mrs. Donaldson is a recent widow of upper middle class standing whose husband, upon his death, has left her not quite as comfortable as she had thought. Now, because of her standing, class wise, in society she can’t simply take a job as a clerk in a department store, or the like. And, because of that same place in society, she of course has no skills for a job market anyhow. So, she hits on the ideal way to maintain that societal façade by ‘volunteering’ at the local doctors teaching hospital. Her duties as a volunteer are to act out the symptoms of patients for the student doctors. Ahh, I see I have your attention. Who doesn’t love a good dirty story about playing doctor? Takes us back to the earliest days of puberty, it does. Well, get your mind out of the gutter, because our Mrs. Donaldson does not need to get undressed or submit to the young interns in a gynecological way.
However, our Mrs. Donaldson does find that she has acting abilities, and quite a good memory for performing the tiniest nuance of symptoms and behaviors for everything from the flu to fallen arches. And she does get to know the naughty thoughts of her fellow volunteers as well as the young doctors and even the instructor and the added income is very helpful in supplementing her retirement. But not quite adequate. So, she also decides to let out a room in her large home. But she can’t simply rent a room as that also would be unseemly for a person of her standing. So, she decides to ‘help’ students from the college by providing them with a convenient and affordable place to stay. Things get interesting when a young couple get in a-rears on the rent and come up with a novel way to catch up. Listen to Bennett read a selection here.
The second story is “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes” in which Mrs. Forbes, also a comfortable middle class and middle aged mother dotes on her only child; her son Graham. Graham is stunningly good looking and he knows it. He is also fastidious in his appearance. Think a cross between Dorian Grey and the man in the Kinks song, “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion”. Graham is also decidedly gay, but, truth be told, Graham is really only in love with himself. But he does feel he must shield his mother from the truth about his choice in sexuality so he marries a very plain, but extremely wealthy woman. Mrs. Forbes thoroughly bullied husband is accepting of the arrangement, but Mrs. Forbes (holding tightly to the belief that her son is the most handsome and desirable man on the face of the earth) believes that Graham could have done better. So the farcical act begins. Mr. Forbes takes solace in an online relationship with a dark and sensuous beauty in Samoa (but who actually lives in Clitheroe), and he eventually comes to spend quality time with his daughter in-law. Mean while, Graham, having decided to perform his husbandly duties, only to satisfy his own curiosity of course, being the self-centered snob that he is and has been raised to be, finds a bit of enjoyment in the task, even though he can’t stand her outside of the marital bed. Eventually he takes up with a paid, gay lover who turns out to be a blackmailing village policeman. Graham is left to depend on his wife, who decidedly proves to be the brains in this farce, to extricate himself, while not disappointing his mother.
Bennett's humor in this small collection (160 pages)consistently triumphs in the logic of the parenthetical aside, the comedy of false face worn by most of the characters to show society or in the misperceptions of that society and the people that reside there. Mrs. Donaldson is not as ‘green’ as she thought herself to be, and no one around Mrs. Forbes is who they pretend to be.
Appropriately enough, given Bennett's day job, both stories are really about performing, about putting on a show for other people. Most of the characters think they're fooling the world, and most of them are wrong. The book's theme isn’t really "smut" it is "unseemliness," the pressures and expectations of decorum and social expectations. But it is also about the creative, even eccentric ways in which people use sex. The only couple in either tale who carry on a conventional, loving and sexual relationship based on mutual affection and pleasure is also an adulterous somewhat incestuous and secret relationship between Mr. Forbes and his daughter-in-law, Betty. The lesson to be taken from these marvelous stories are that appearances are, of course, deceiving: Mrs. Donaldson is not as green as she, or her friends would suppose, and Mrs. Forbes needs less shielding than her family thinks.
And finally, Bennett's satire is not really directed at the characters who counterfeit for society's sake (he actually treats the characters – especially the characters that society has a tendency to judge as deviant to some degree - with tenderness and acceptance). Instead, the satire is directed at the need to perform at all; at a society made up of people who, while probably fooling themselves, still expect others to live up to a collective sense of decorum.
Farcical? Yes. And it is easy to write these stories off as comedy; as wry wit, but the real question is just how farcical is society itself? And perhaps the Smut of the title is societies own expectations and norms.
Article first published as Book Review : Smut by Alan Bennett on Blogcritics.
Copyright © 2012 Robert Carraher All Rights Reserved
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