FREQUENT VISITOR.(Alan Bennett)

Alan Bennett, the English diarist, playwright, and sometime monologuist, came to town a few weeks ago for the New York premiere of his play "The History Boys." He was oddly calm for a man about to open on Broadway. "When I first came here, with Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, with 'Beyond the Fringe,' in 1962, we didn't really like it," he said one recent morning, over a pretzel croissant at City Bakery, on Eighteenth Street. "The food was awful. We wouldn't have got anything like this." He gestured at the roomful of cappuccino and brioches. "We were sorry that we were going to have to stay here for a year and a half, which you had to do for tax reasons in those days. Shows how arrogant we were. We all signed leases on apartments and resigned ourselves to staying here for all that time. What if we had gotten terrible reviews? We took it for granted at that age that 'they' would either get it or be contemptible for not getting it."

He shook his head, recalling a state of self-confidence that, he insists, has never fully returned. Already famous in his twenties as a comedian--his long mock-sermon on the Bible verse "My brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a smooth man" is still a classic--Bennett, at seventy-one, looks like the scholarship boy that he was fifty years ago, the kind of conscience-stricken lad whose plights and conquests remain at the center of his imagination. Blond bangs, spectacles, soft Lancashire vowels that bellow his cheeks out in startled-looking Os--the whole aura of mole-ish niceness concealing a sharp and, in its way, judgmental temperament.

"Beyond the Fringe" was, forty-odd years ago, a sort of comedy Beatles before the Beatles, and each of its members went on to seek a greater, if more painful, celebrity. "Dudley, after he became famous and went into analysis, became convinced that he had been slighted by the rest of us," Bennett said. "I think he thought that it would be better, on chat shows, to be seen as someone who had had more of an intellectual struggle than he really had. My memory, though, is that he was the most popular of all of us, and a happy man."

Although Bennett's imagination is intensely local--he has a new nonfiction collection, "Untold Stories," which is lit up by an account of the lives of his two aunts, shopgirls in Leeds a half century ago--he has made himself purposefully cosmopolitan, and has become what used to be called a "frequent visitor to these shores."

"When we first came to New York, my accountant had these parties, and people like Alexis Smith would come to them!" he said. "Eve Arden! I never knew what to say. I told Judy Holliday that she was wonderful in 'Born Yesterday,' and she looked at me, and I realized what a stupid thing that was to say to her."

In part because he didn't want to be ...