BARD OF EMBARRASSMENT

A reluctant star for 35 years, Alan Bennett is England's most endearing man of letters - and now he's an Oscar nominee

BY RICHARD CORLISS

During the location shooting of The Madness of King George, one fellow looked out of place. Or thought he did. "We're in this country house," Alan Bennett recalls, "with all the vans and caravans and the whole invading army of mercenaries. And I felt that everyone had something purposeful to do there - except me." No matter that director Nicholas Hytner and the crew were, like expert midwives, carefully bringing Bennett's 1991 play to the screen; the creator was still adrift. "I'd started it all by telling the story," he says, "but I felt as if I didn't have a function anymore."

The son of a Yorkshire butcher, Bennett may be wishing against wish for a good honest job that bloodies the hands. Instead, this Oxford grad with a fretful, donnish air is stuck with his reputation as Britain's most endearing man of letters. A reluctant star since the early '60s, when he beguiled London and Broadway with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in the Beyond the Fringe comedy revue, Bennett has proved to be the surprise marathoner of that dazzling quartet. In his plays (A Question of Attribution, The Wind in the Willows), film scripts (A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears), TV dramas (An Englishman Abroad, Talking Heads) and frequent pieces in the London Review of Books, one can hear the thin voice of the last country parson. That's Bennett at 60 - comic laureate of the cramped, considerate English temperament.

Last week, like Robert Redford and John Travolta, Bennett was nominated for an Oscar. King George received nods for Nigel Hawthorne (Best Actor), Helen Mirren (Best Supporting Actress) and Bennett for Screenplay Adaptation. His reaction is mildly pleased: "I'm happy, because it means more people will see the film."

Recognition at this advanced stage of an exemplary career can hardly cow this very private public man. In Writing Home, his delightful prose collection recently published in Britain and due out in the U.S. later this year, Bennett describes himself as "one who can scarcely remove his tie without having a police cordon thrown around the building." His sly art is an anti-striptease: he reveals only edges and crinkles of himself in the pith of an essay or dramatic monologue. "Bennett has become a major figure in the English landscape despite versatility and his steadfast wish to remain hidden," writes critic David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of Film. "He may be Britain's best and most stubborn surviving miniaturist."

The Madness of King George spreads its story on a broad canvas: the court of a troubled King who is seized by what seems to be dementia. As George III (Hawthorne) loses control, the foppish Prince of Wales (Rupert Everett) plots to seize the throne, while Prime Minister William Pitt (Julian Wadham) fights to retain his power. But at its heart King George is an intimate family drama. It can be seen as satirical parable - "The film is really as much about the royal family today as it is about the 18th century," says Bennett - or as domestic tragedy, a kind of Mr. and Mrs. King Lear. Father is slipping away; what are Mother (Mirren) and the children to do?

George could also be a failed Alan Bennett. "My films are about embarrassment," he says. "George III, for one, is nervous and shy, like many royals. His bluntness and heartiness proceed from social unease. But his role is to present himself as King. When madness sets in, he drops this facade; he isn't embarrassed anymore. Embarrassment is a continuing theme in my work. I can't say I'm George III, but I certainly understand him!"

Writing Home gives the reader a sporting chance at understanding Bennett; it is as close to an autobiography as this gentleman is likely to vouchsafe. And in its evocations of Bennett's early years, it offers a virtual oratorio of embarrassment. His father, the butcher, played double bass in a jazz band and produced herb beer at home but succeeded at neither. His prim "Mam" made a religion of getting along; eventually she retreated into what Bennett calls "her flat, unmemoried days," like a meeker George III. Young Alan sought glamour in Leeds' double-decker trams, musty mystery in the artifacts of Grandma's parlor. Later he would realize he had a great subject in this gray world. It begged for a wit that evokes nostalgia and distress, and Bennett became its not-quite-lyric poet: the bard of the drab.

At 18, national service abducted him into manhood; an army stint at Cambridge encouraged him to seek, and win, a scholarship to Oxford, where he taught after graduation. But from Fringe on, anonymity would be lost to Bennett, and sensation would press in on this lifelong bachelor in odd ways. All sorts of stray beasts would show up on his doorstep.

"The Lady in the Van," the centerpiece of Writing Home, is Bennett's memoir of a deranged woman who parked her car in his garden and stayed there for 15 years, until her death in 1989. If he did not always feel generous ("One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation"), he always acted generously. To allow this radical intrusion in a quiet life seems the emblem of English accommodation. But, Bennett insists, "allow isn't quite the word. I was just faced with her - it was like Eleanor Roosevelt moving in! I just got used to it. I know this sounds odiously modest, but I don't think it needed much goodness. It's more laziness. Just as you can do harm by being lazy, you can do some good as well."

He is turning this essay into a play. But the adapter is having predictable problems. "I can write about her," he says. "That's perfectly straightforward. But I have to find a story that I can tell about myself. And revealing things about yourself is so difficult." It's an easy trick for the typical contemporary author; every sentence is an advertisement for himself. But Bennett is discreet - which these days amounts to literary heroism.

That same reticence may keep this most English of writers in London on Oscar night. "I'm not a big traveler," he says. "You know, when the poet Philip Larkin was asked if he'd like to go to Australia, he said, 'I wouldn't mind, if I could come back the same afternoon!"' For George III or the Lady in the Van or Alan Bennett, there's no place like home. It's where one has a modest function.