The difference between the apartment dweller and the house dweller is profound and full of detail surely. The essence to it is proximity. How do you respond to proximity? An apartment dweller for several years now (previously it was houses) I think I can 'see' both types. You who buy houses often aspire to privacy don't you; from the first terraced-house you might aspire to the mansion with grounds abundant, and settle for something in between as time runs out. You move, purchase by purchase, away from the centre of town; you seek the leafy suburb, and perhaps later the house in the country. On the other hand you apartment dwellers, surely, move purchase by purchase nearer to the town square don't you? You want to overlook, no you want to be a part of, the main square in Florence or Barcelona or supercilious Wolverhampton. Your sort of man is made anxious by privacy, made anxious if forced to live on the outskirts: the other sort of man, the house dweller, aspires to privacy.
Apartment people do know proximity. Oh the detail of it. Alan Bennett is right about the meetings on stairwells and the sounds through doors.
My condominium (Thailand) is fitted with secondary 'courtesy' doors, thin louvred doors that allow the main one to be left open. They maintain modesty and their purpose is to allow a breeze to flow through from external private window to internal public corridor (because of the climate); they also admit these domestic sounds that Mr Bennett writes of. The sound perhaps of dishes being laid on the draining board of some close-by kitchen. And these thin louvred doors admit cooking smells - I can walk a corridor and enjoy the anticipation of three or four different evening meals just as the occupants within.
Apartment people also have a sense of stack. A moment's thought or a knock or a scrape reminds you that you have a neighbour the other side of that left wall, and one on the right too, and just above the ceiling another one, and you tread upon the head of yet another beneath. You don't hear them much or often, but you know they're there.
There is a curious thing that apartment people do isn't there. You appropriate. In addition to the usual division between 'public' spaces and 'private' spaces, apartment people have a third division - 'communal' spaces. Your building's lobby, its long corridors, the spaces on its landings, are all in some way yours; well they certainly don't belong to outsiders. Some of you, perhaps myself also, the greedy ones, nurse fantasies of appropriating these spaces, making them yours at obscure times of the day perhaps. In the afternoons when most residents are at work, some of you might move a chair onto one of the enormous landings and read a book by a window. When coursing through the corridors, all of you spread your arms out, it's the law. Some of you, myself too, in the late evenings nurse an idea of sitting at small tables on these enormous landings, sporting your satin neck-scarf perhaps and listening to your wind-up gramophone player turned down a bit before you retire to bed. Does it have anything to do with square meterage? How many house dwellers know what square meterage they have? All apartment dwellers know. It's not even that you have less than house people, it's simply that you know the number, and somehow numbers try to constrain don't they?
Kafka was an apartment man. Mr Bennett has a gift for knowing just what Kafka would be drawn to writing about. He would say that Franz K. would write about none of the above. He would be drawn to the imperturbability of the lifts.
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