Alan Bennett and David Hockney: parallel lives
I
Alan Bennett shares John Betjeman’s nostalgia for Victorian England and Philip Larkin’s sad outsider’s satire. He self-reflectively observes that in his poetry “Larkin achieved his characteristic voice, that wry, lugubrious, thoroughly unheroic tone which can turn so unexpectedly tender and lyrical.” But his real artistic parallel life is with David Hockney. These creative thinkers enjoyed worldly success and personal fulfillment, their talents enhanced by a distinctive Yorkshire common sense and modesty.
Like Hockney (born 1937), his near contemporary, Bennett (born 1934) never lost his attachment to Yorkshire and to his family’s working-class values and culture. Though he has lived in London for most of his life, Bennett identifies with his birthplace and loyally asserts that “in Leeds after a day or so my accent broadens and I’m more like myself”. His father was a violin-playing butcher whose “cold room was full of great beasts’ heads oozing blood with a horrible smell.” His maternal grandfather committed suicide, his mother had a nervous breakdown and remained in a psychiatric hospital for eight years. Bennett dramatised mental illness in the film The Madness of King George (1994). As John Dryden observed, “Great wits to madness sure are near allied.”
When applying to a Cambridge college, Bennett recalled, “I picked out Sidney Sussex as a suitably modest establishment I might get into.” He chose Exeter College in Oxford for the same reason, “I thought it was quite a modest place,” and earned a First in history. His constant self-deprecation is always undermined by style and wit. His character is marked by surprising contradictions: he’s a northerner misplaced in the south, a shy actor and dour comedian. His biographer Alexander Games notes that he is “reticent and forthright, gentle and sharp, generous and unforgiving”.
Bennett’s puns are clever and revealing. He plays on “Doctor-mentor” and “Doc-tormentor,” and calls T. E. Lawrence’s body servant “an unmade Bedouin.” One of his characters beginning to swim wears an “L” like the Learners-placard of a new driver. He irreverently says Jesus was “snotty” with his mother, and regrets that his own mother had spent her whole life trying not to be “common”.
Bennett thought he was a lifelong homosexual and told Stephen Schiff (in a New Yorker profile on September 6, 1993): “I’d always been in love with guys, you see, but always unhappily. They were always straight, and it was totally unfulfilled.” But he gratefully had sex whenever he could. He surprisingly found himself in bed with his entertaining and impulsive housekeeper, the “dark, fiery, gipsyish” Anne Davies, and had a long liaison with her. The daughter of Hungarian refugees, she was ten years younger, divorced with three sons. She ran the teashop next door to Bennett’s weekend cottage in Yorkshire.
After the tremendous success of the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1960), which he co-wrote and performed with Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Bennett confessed, “I was lost for about two years. I wasn’t confident of my ability to do anything by myself.” He notes the problems when acting in plays and films: “most people are sitting around, waiting for short sharp bursts of frenetic activity, like war, too, in a way.”
“An Average Rock Bun” (the size of his tumor) is an amusing essay on the ghastly subject of his life-threatening surgery and chemotherapy for bowel cancer in June 1997. He quotes Philip Larkin’s advice in extremis: “Courage is no good / It means not scaring others.” But jokes abound: after a colonoscopy “I felt that more people had seen the inside of my bum than had seen some productions at the National Theatre”; for patients at Christmas it’s “the holly and the IV”; he nervously watches as the chemo gives an ironic “last drop of life-giving poison”; in hospital “the only time I have come near to nausea is when removing the dish-cover of my supper-tray”; the scandalous newspaper coverage of cancer “is almost carcinogenic in itself.”
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After he found his real métier in Beyond the Fringe, Bennett gave up studying and teaching and became a playwright. When writing, he explained, “I tend to act things out and stride about the room saying the dialogue out loud.” His serious and satiric, amusing and topical plays portray King George III and Franz Kafka, a spy in Russia, a murdered playwright, a cunning art expert, and homosexual teachers and pupils in his old school. His best plays have been made into films; his most recent screenplay, for The Choral, was released only last month.
In 1958, after Coral Browne and other English actors had performed Hamlet in Moscow, she told Bennett about how she’d met the ex-spy Guy Burgess. He was drunk and miserable in Russia, lived in the past and longed for the England that he’d betrayed. Bennett turned this into his play An Englishman Abroad (1983). He contrasts the attractive actress and the depressed exile, acted by Alan Bates in the film, who is both funny and sad. No longer useful to the Communist Party, Burgess cried out as Browne drove away, “Write to me, it’s bloody lonely here, you know.” The bleak urban Moscow landscape was actually filmed in Dundee.
Prick Up Your Ears (1987) portrays the life of the playwright Joe Orton, who was bludgeoned to death by his homosexual lover. One bold scene quickly takes place in a public lavatory, with puns on up and down, erection and detumescence. The startling stage direction reads, “Orton goes up to the man and puts his hand down to his cock. . . . Someone is sucking Orton’s cock. He comes. Zips up his fly.”
The title of Kafka’s Dick (1987) mocks the absurd pseudo-Freudian notion that all Kafka’s psychological problems come from his supposedly small penis. Bennett dramatizes Kafka’s relations with his close friend Max Brod and with his oppressive father Hermann. The play, a mad riff on Kafka, is a mixture of comedy, fantasy and farce, with many amusing allusions and clever jokes. Explaining why he never married, Kafka says, “I was on such bad terms with my own body there was no room for a third party.” Hermann tells his wife, “You played about as big a part in our son’s genius as Ivy Compton-Burnett did in the 1966 World Cup.” Kafka’s Prague was filmed in Bradford, “where every other script I’ve written seems to have been shot.”
In Bennett’s second Kafka play, The Insurance Man, the hero is called Franz, a young man who contracts a mysterious skin disease from his job in a dyeworks. As a result he is sacked and comes to Kafka’s Workers Accident Insurance Institute to claim compensation. He fails to get any money but Kafka, anxious to help him, offers him a job in his brother-in-law’s asbestos factory. In that poisonous place the young Franz (not Kafka) is splashed by a chemical dye and suffers a severe rash. Disfigured and humiliated, he paradoxically says, “I didn’t want anybody to see my skin.” He begs for medical help and financial compensation in that factory of torture, but no one will sympathise with or assist him. The play subjects Franz to the kind of inhuman bureaucratic nightmare and cruel punishment (including the comic elements) that Kafka portrayed in The Trial.
Bennett is also a brilliant actor of older, learned, upper-class men. In one of his best roles, he played the spy and art historian Anthony Blunt in the stage version of his masterpiece A Question of Attribution (1991). The play focuses on Titian and His Friends (1560), a triple portrait by the great Venetian artist in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The man on the left is based on Titian’s 1560 self-portrait in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. He wears a gold chain, fur-lined gown and black nightcap. The scarlet-robed figure in the centre is Andrea de Franceschi, the powerful Grand Chancellor of Venice. The identity of the third man is unknown, but he appears in another portrait by Titian (in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) holding a letter inscribed Di Titiano Vecellio singolare amico (“by Titian, a special friend”). An X-ray of the Windsor picture in 1957 revealed two other figures: a younger man beneath the face in the centre and an older bearded man at the right side of the group.
Bennett suggests a brilliant parallel between the exposure of the figures in the painting and of the notorious Soviet spies revealed in 1951. The first three men suggest Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Cleaning reveals that the fourth man is Blunt. He was known to be a homosexual and a spy, but had kept his position as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures in return for confessing and telling the authorities everything he knew. The fifth revealed man and last of the “Cambridge Five” remains unknown. Blunt’s persistent interrogator asks him about Queen Elizabeth, who had unexpectedly appeared in her art gallery as Blunt inspects the puzzling painting. His question “What is she really like?” refers to Blunt as well as to the Queen. The Queen’s clever double entendre on portrait painting—“I don’t think one wants to be captured, does one? Not entirely, anyway”—also applies to the elusive Blunt. When Blunt tells her about the dubious origins of the picture, she “vaguely wonders, now that it is a fake, ‘what are you planning to do with it? Put it out for the binmen ?’ ” After the Queen is informed that she doesn’t own any paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Blunt does, she wittily replies, “You mean you have one and we don’t? Something wrong there.”
Bennett handled the homosexual theme most explicitly and tenderly in The History Boys (2006). The older teacher Hector is disgraced for fondling a boy who’s riding pillion on his motorcycle. The student Posner confesses his guilty unrequited homosexual love for the handsome young straight Dakin. The narcissistic Dakin, to exert his power and “out” the new teacher Irwin, boldly tries to seduce him. As the boys prepare to take the Oxbridge entrance exams, Bennett looks back on his own acceptance into Oxford and rite of passage to a wider cultural world.
II
Both Bennett (born 1934 in Leeds) and Hockney (born 1937 in Bradford) have continued to work into old age. They grew up in Yorkshire cities only 8 miles apart and still retain their distinctive Yorkshire accents. They both own country houses in Yorkshire: Bennett in Clapham in the Yorkshire Dales, 240 miles from London; Hockney in Bridlington on the North Sea coast (110 miles from Clapham). Both men came from working class backgrounds: Bennett’s father was a butcher; Hockney’s father repaired prams and bicycles.
During National Service Bennett learned Russian; Hockney was a conscientious objector and worked as a medical orderly in hospitals. Bennett was educated at Exeter College, Oxford; Hockney at the Royal College of Art in London. Bennett taught medieval history at Oxford, specialising in King Richard II (1367-1400); Hockney taught art at four American universities.
Both men create self-portraits in words and paint, and carefully cultivate their appealing public personae. They have round, owlish, horn-rimmed spectacles, thick hair and similar haircuts. Bennett was blond in his youth, Hockney dyed his hair blond. Despite these similarities, their personal style is quite different. The six-foot tall Bennett poses for photos with his feet close together and shoulders hunched. He dresses conservatively and wears scuffed suede shoes, baggy trousers, sleeveless cardigan, long scarf and clapped-out raincoat. He likes ties in plain bright colors that are long enough to chew when he is nervous. Hockney’s dandy costumes are always colourful and flamboyant.
Bennett seems buttoned-up and ill-at-ease, and his plays often portray people who are trapped and caged. Hockney broke out of his cage and is liberated and expansive. Bennett is diffident and private, introspective and restrained; Hockney is extrovert and exuberant. Both have engaging personalities, wit and joie de vivre.
They admire homosexual poets—Bennett identified with A. E. Housman, Hockney with Walt Whitman—and used them in their work. Both are boyish-looking and openly queer. Bennett came out of the closet slowly; Hockney, bold and open from the start, had many short- and long-term partners. Rupert Thomas has been Bennett’s partner since 1992. Born 1966 and 32 years younger than Bennett, Thomas has a degree from the Courtauld Institute in London, was a lecturer at the Winchester College of Art and the editor of The World of Interiors. Bennett had always lived alone, but in 1997 Thomas moved permanently into his house in Camden Town, north London.
While acting in the Broadway production of Forty Years On Bennett lived for a year in New York. He visited Moscow on a cultural-friendship tour in May 1988 but, still rooted in Yorkshire, frequently wrote about the contrast between the north and south of England. Hockney travelled widely in Morocco and China, and lived for many years in Los Angeles.
In 1997 Bennett had a near fatal operation for cancer but, against all odds, managed to survive. Since 1975 Hockney has been deaf, which has sharpened his sense of space and perspective. But physical illness has not impeded their creative lives. Hard-working and productive, both realistic and poetic, they are impressive polymaths with many talents. Bennett is a stylish comedian, an accomplished writer for the stage, film and television, a short story writer and, as diarist, the most prominent contributor to the London Review of Books. In 1987 Bennett went to Cairo to appear in the excellent television serial of Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War. He was superb as the egoistic, clueless and intolerably prissy Professor Lord Pinkrose, who is assassinated before he can deliver his long-awaited and long-delayed lecture on Lord Byron. Bennett defensively remarked about appearing on stage, “there’s a mask when you’re acting; you’re actually not revealing yourself.” Hockney is an innovative painter, stage designer, printmaker, photographer, prolific author and explorer of the role of the camera obscura in art.
Bennett declined an Oxford honorary degree, a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) and in 1996 a knighthood. He caustically remarked, “If you can get a boiled egg down at ninety, they give you the Order of Merit.” Hockney accepted the Companion of Honour and Order of Merit. Bennett is the most successful playwright of his time. Like Somerset Maugham, who in 1908 had four plays running in the West End, in 1992 Bennett had “three plays on in London at the same time.” His latest work, an original screenplay The Choral (2025), concerns a singing society that recruits teenage boys and girls for a performance of Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.
The fabulously rich Hockney is the most famous living artist in the world, and one of his paintings has recently sold for more than $91 million. He’s had retrospective exhibitions in major museums: the Tate Britain, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2025 he exhibited 400 works in the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. He established the impressive Saltaire Gallery in an old textile mill near Bradford that exhibits many of his works. Bennett’s The Choral was partly filmed in Hockney’s Saltaire. In a short movie about his visit to the Leeds Art Gallery, Bennett seemed to be disillusioned by seeing the pictures he’d once admired as a schoolboy. In 1993 he was named a trustee of the National Gallery in London, and enjoys privileged evening visits to the empty museum.
Bennett wrote a stage adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1994), and there’s a role for each of them in the play. Bennett resembles the timid, genial and thoughtful Mole, who wears National Health Service spectacles and “could also be an old-fashioned northern schoolboy.” Hockney would be the extravagant, theatrical Mr. Toad, who wears a loud tweed suit and huge round glasses, and exclaims, “I live wholly for pleasure; pleasure is the only thing one should live for.”
There’s no record of their ever meeting, but Bennett has sometimes been mistaken for Hockney and thanked for the pleasure of his paintings. In a restaurant he once sketched his face, signed the drawing with Hockney’s name and gave it to an ecstatic woman who thought she’d acquired a valuable treasure—though the forged sketch is almost as valuable as the real thing.
III
A friend described Hockney as “modest and self-confident, honest in speech, unconcerned with impressing yet considerate and well-mannered, impatient with all fraudulent or compromised behaviour, ardent, curious, warm hearted, uncorrupted (and probably uncorruptible) by success.”
Hockney has previously portrayed exotic locales in Norway, Iceland, Egypt and Japan, but has recently focused on east Yorkshire, never before the subject of landscape painters. His astonishing popularity is based on qualities notably missing from most contemporary art: vibrant imagination, fluent line, dazzling colours and astonishing beauty. The essential qualities of his long artistic career are wit and intelligence, vibrant imagination and fluent lines, high-spirited exuberance and provocative bravado, humanity and gentleness. He paints very still still lives, and emphasizes vision and perspective. He has a wide range of techniques and constantly experiments with new tools, including the use of printing machines, composite polaroids and iPads. He’s painted charming variations of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, Cézanne’s Card Players, Monet’s Water Lily Pond, Matisse’s light, sensual and charming The Dance, and the twisted features in Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar.
In Hockney’s Self-Portrait of 2012 the bulky 75-year-old artist, close-up and filling the frame, is seated at a white striped table, holds a pen in his raised left hand and faces the viewer. He wears a flat yellow cap crossed with black stripes, red-rimmed spectacles over bright blue eyes and red shirt beneath a heavy blue jacket. The elderly fop has a hearing aid, lined cheeks, downturned mouth and rather sad, anxious expression, as if the viewer had suddenly appeared and startled him.
In his Self-Portrait nine years later, his old yellow cap has morphed into a garish canary yellow suit heavily crossed, like a busy intersection, with black and pale brown stripes. His flat cap is now bluish-grey, his outsized spectacles yellow, his long thin blue tie decorated with little white squares. He’s seated with his raised left arm pointing out of the frame and his right arm, with drooping hand, resting on the arm of a black office chair. He has a large nose, double chin and bulging belly, and looks out at the viewer with a solemn expression. Still strong and joyous at 84, he remarked “I don’t even take a nap in the afternoon, because I get a lot of energy from work, a lot of energy. It’s gorgeous everywhere I look.”
Hockney has felt neither embarrassed nor guilty about his tastes, and his paintings portray homosexuality as completely normal and acceptable. His naked young men in showers and in bed place him with the homosexual artists from Leonardo and Michelangelo, through Caravaggio, to Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol. Sunbather (1966) is quintessential and hedonistic Los Angeles. A naked, tanned, dark-haired young man with a strong nose, thin mouth and bulging pale buttocks, lies face down on a towel, his feet extending just over the edge. The swimming pool has a white ledge above blue tiles, color fading from dark to light blue and swirling spaghetti-like ripples that reflect the curve of his bare bottom. Cooling off after a hot night, the horizontal man contrasts to the curlicues in the pool and lies half-awake in a tranquil setting. Placing himself in opposition to pitiless tragic artists such as Edvard Munch or George Grosz, Hockney adds, “I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.”
IV
When writing my life of Orwell I asked Bennett if that author had influenced him. On September 9, 1998 he replied on a postcard of the Yorkshire Dales: “I fear Orwell had no influence on me at all—being an Etonian probably ruled him out as I didn’t think we shared a great deal. I pass the church where his funeral was held almost daily so he’s often in my thoughts. Best wishes with the book, Alan Bennett.” The novelist Anthony Powell recalled that Orwell’s funeral service at Christ Church in Albany Street, near Regent’s Park,”was one of the most harrowing I have ever attended.”
I spoke to Bennett in London in the summer of 2006 when he received the J. R. Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography. He was not distracted by other people who’d gathered for the ceremony and concentrated on our conversation. In his acceptance speech he made amusing comments about members of the audience, admired the work of the talented and eccentric Ackerley, and questioned the point of awards. Bennett’s £4,000 check, enclosed in a paper airplane, was floated down to him from a balcony.
Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in 2024. Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway appeared in November 2025. The Biographer’s Quest will be out in April 2026.
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