Basically, you look inside your work. (I should think this is good as a measure of both the self you find, and the work.)
From Tim Adams’ interesting article about the always-interesting Alan Bennett:
“For a long time, years even,” Bennett recently wrote, “it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate you do not put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.”
It seems that his new Auden/Britten play, The Habit of Art, is largely about how you find yourself in it. But in a practical sense that will be hard to do; tickets are virtually unobtainable now.
2 Comments
November 8, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Dear Katy
National treasure indeed! I enjoyed his book ‘The Common Reader’ and his film ‘The History Boys’ which was ‘gay’ in every sense of the word. I also liked his comment about ‘backing into the limelight’.
He is the kind of writer who can score bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye without breaking sweat.
Best wishes from Simon
November 10, 2009 at 11:00 am
I met Alan Bennett once in the 1980’s in Chichester. He was in the delicatessen buying a huge blue tin of Beluga caviar and a bottle of Dom Perignon, in a rain coat.