Writing Home.

Alan Bennett Random House, $25, 417 pp.

The dust jacket of Writing Home tells us that this was a number-one best-seller in England. As it happens, its author's profile also sits on the cover of the 1996 David Levine Calendar. Still, American readers might ask with understandable hesitation, "Alan Who?" To bracket him by the extremes of his career: most recently a moviegoer would know him as the screenwriter of The Madness of King George and, at the other end of the scalelif memory harks back to 1962 and the Beyond the Fringe revue on Broadway, Alan Bennett clowned with the Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller. To offer a third point of reference, any inveterate PBS-TV viewer will have enjoyed Bennett's brilliant Talking Heads series, broadcast some years ago. In one, "Love Among the Lentils," Maggie Smith gave an extraordinary performance in a rare bit of what television (and Bennett) does best.

The book, as the author confesses, is difficult to classify. There are the diaries, prefaces, texts. of television plays, book reviews, and pieces done for various British periodicals. "To write home" has to mean to take up pen to tell the family what has happened, and this miscellany functions as Bennett's way of telling those of us who admire his work about his life as playwright, television writer, comedian, and actor. And there might lie the greatest obstacle in the path of the book's move to the top of the best-seller list here: Writing Home offers a first-name (and sometimes only a one- or two-initial) account of British theater and television. To savor the perspective you need to have a sense of the personalities and the productions in which they were featured; however, the Who's Who necessary for an American reader has yet to be written. We happily enough meet a sufficient number of luminaries (John Gielgud for one) to get our bearings in the diaries and in the notes or prefaces to Bennett's plays, but the anecdotes and the one-liners make any concern for the biographies of the people named fade away. Nevertheless, it is simply a pleasure to read Bennett.

The introduction sets the tone; the effect, genial, unprepossessing, is something like that of a gracious host's, who you imagine is self-conscious only insofar as he is asking, "Am I doing enough to entertain these people whom I hardly know?" His style follows an aesthetic of gaps, which is the same rule governing a great comedian's timing: the sense to know when not to say something. Much he sketches in and much more he leaves out, so that the story of his life at Oxford, as a teacher and a research student, is reduced to small strips of detail, with the empty spaces in between filled with a close-up of a friend or a project. The history of his life becomes something that happened to him, not something about which he asserts, "I did such and such." It is possible to see the same aesthetic operating in The Madness of King George. The plot and the details are dear and beautifully filled-out, but the film itself leaves a gap: it offers little more by way of meaning than, "It happened to him." To the question, "What is the point?" Bennett might answer, both to his career and to his film, "It is in the gaps."

All of this should not suggest a lack of substance in the work or the man. Bennett's relationships with three old, mad women offer a sense of his moral sensibility. "Mam," senile and in a nursing, home in the west of England, Rose, a neighbor in a New York apartment house who screams at the ceiling, and Miss Shepherd, the woman in the van outside his London row house. The extent to which these women affect Bennett as more than curiosities or annoyances reveals his generosity of spirit; they also show, his humility. Miss Shepherd is the focus of a thirty-page account (and again the gaps in the explanations are revealing) which spans their fifteen-year relationship; Bennett offered her heroically understated charity and she the inspired zaniness of the mad. But he does not let us or himself forget the quixotic dedication of her life, its misery and frustrations, the incontinence pads, the filth of her van, her demands tapped daily at his window, nor her essential dignity.

At one point in his diaries, Bennett remarks on: "The same conflict in church particularly when a service is being said) that I feelin art galleries, a need to stay and go at the same time ... It's a sense that there is something t@ be had here and I ought to have the patience to wait on it, while the other (generally stronger) urge is get out and think about it later he is clearly not a believer, but his upbringing was Anglican and his sense of liturgy appropriate for a dramatist. He comments astutely on the change in liturgical practices (the funerals of theatrical people accounting often for the focus), and in "Comfortable Words" addressed to the Prayer Book Society, one dedicated to the Anglican equivalent of Latin liturgy, he takes on directly the issue of aesthetic as opposed to devotional purpose. As he warns the Society about overstressing the beauty of the old ways he recalls that Miss Shepherd (Yes, she was R.C.) was buried in the worst of modernized Catholic rites; but noting this Bennett admits, "my liturgical fastidiousness was sheer snobbery." It was the affirmation of fellowship, the "Peace be with you" offered and received by an old man at the funeral which inspires Bennett to remind the society as to the origins of its beloved Book of Common Prayer: "[Bishop] Cramner did not die for English prose." The allusion and, one imagines, the timing involved in this ending are wholly representative of the writer's style.

In a piece on Kafka (subject of one of Bennett's plays) and in essays on Philip Larkin and Auden, Bennett works brilliantly as a critic. Despite his disclaimer that he has neither the "breadth of reading and reference" to do such work and that he ends up "either covering up or showing off" the piece on Kafka alone would make the book worth buying. And to continue to offer reasons to read Writing Home: the very grab-bag effect of the contents which might be divisive is in fact one of its attractions. The voice, as varied as the topics, is still steady, funny--one liners everywhere--and the whole driven by fearsome honesty. Bennett is laconic and refuses to spare the truth. The sardonic force of much of the comment arises out of a refusal to fake.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams Schoot in New London, Connecticut.