In The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett imagines a meeting late in the lives of two artistic titans of the twentieth century: former friends, composer Benjamin Britten and poet W. H. Auden. The two met in their twenties and worked together for the next half-dozen years, during Auden’s most fertile period and just before Britten made his mark on twentieth-century music. Six years, an unsuccessful seduction (Auden of Britten, early on), several documentaries, an opera, and several songs later, Britten broke off their collaborations and friendship.
Bennett pictures these men in 1972 near the end of their lives—both secure in their reputations, both concerned that their powers are fading. Auden is a kind of poet in residence at Oxford, where he has a reputation as a terrible slob and a brilliant but repetitive conversationalist. Britten is working on an opera he correctly suspects will be his last, an adaptation of Death in Venice. The opera’s central character is a writer who fights but is ultimately destroyed by his desires for a 14-year-old boy. Britten’s own chaste (if not wholly innocent) friendships with some of his choir boys is on his mind, and he seeks out the company of his old friend as he wrestles with this story—and his own history—of desire and restraint.
The Habit of Art has one more twist. The play we’re watching is, in fact, Caliban’s Day—a play in rehearsal at London’s National Theatre (where Bennett has premiered his own work for the last twenty years). The director is unexpectedly out of town for the day and tells the actors to attempt a run-through of the play. The rehearsal is further complicated by the unexpected arrival of the playwright, who discovers some liberties that the company has taken with the text of the play in his absence. And the lead actor—facing some of the same questions of an aging artist as Auden, whom he plays—is struggling to remember his lines.
Playing out on a scale that is grand and a little goofy, The Habit of Art is both generous and meticulously precise about the shortcomings, failings, and humanity of artists. Bennett’s layered work explores the excitement of art-making and the tenacity of its makers, while taking an honest look at the mix of doubt, joy, loneliness, camaraderie, and unshakable discipline that a life in art requires.