Flaubert thought Stoke-on-Trent was called Stoke-on-Trend, a happy delusion
which would have amused Arnold Bennett. Bennett admired Balzac, Flaubert,
Guy de Maupassant and Emile Zola, and wrote to André Gide in 1920 that he
suspected the French tended to despise English fiction as “rather barbaric,
lacking in finesse and civilized breadth”. (In correspondence with Gide, he
displayed a tendency to defend his own artistic credentials and aspirations
to modernity. With other correspondents, he sometimes adopted a worldlier
stance, though he never lapsed into the philistinism which some of his comic
characters so triumphantly display.) French realism and its successor
naturalism were, when Bennett was young, the avant-garde, and some of their
freedoms were deeply shocking to what he called the BP (the British Public).
The BP lagged far behind the French. It is startling to discover that
Bennett was asked to remove the line “I am going to have a baby” from the
serialization of one of his later novels in 1922. It is true that Flaubert
and Zola had run into serious trouble with censorship, but not quite of this
simplistic nature.
It was Bennett’s misfortune that during his lifetime realism came to be seen
not as radical but as reactionary. Its groundbreaking efforts were dismissed
en bloc by some younger critics, as a self-conscious modernism began to push
towards the centre stage. Bennett was a very trend-conscious man, both for
good and ill, and much disliked the notion of being classed as one of the
old guard. He preferred the young. Politically and intellectually, he always
regarded himself as a liberal progressive, but he also wrote much of fashion
and style. A knowing familiarity with the best tailors (renamed Shillitoe in
the Five Towns and Quayther and Cuthering of Vigo Street in London), the
best bootmakers (based near St James’s, and famous “from Peru to Hong
Kong”), and the best hotels (Wilkins, the Imperial Palace) was one of the
trademarks of his lighter fiction, and his fantasias of London life display
a man-about-town joie-de-vivre that is still infectious. (The absurd Grand
Babylon Hotel, which is claimed as the first “hotel novel”, was serialized
on Radio 4 in 2009, and his name still haunts the Savoy, attached to the
Arnold Bennett omelette, with its filling of smoked haddock.) He loved
parade, stylish women’s clothes, the lavish spectacle of theatre and music
hall, the great department stores, the plumbing of modern hotels, the
conveniences of electricity and central heating – all such a contrast with
the nineteenth-century Five Towns from which he had escaped.
But this repressive old world itself was already being invaded by the new
medium of the cinema. Bennett, even as he was giving his support to the less
commercial experimental dramatic productions of the Stage Society, had his
eye on the mass market of the cinema, and, had he lived longer, might have
made his mark there. He welcomed, on almost every front, the new. His
support in the watershed year of 1910 for Roger Fry’s notorious first
Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries has been well
recorded, principally as a pendant to Bloomsbury history. In an article in
the New Age in December 1910 Bennett praised Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin,
condemning London’s scorn of them as insular, and predicting that in twenty
years London would be “signing an apology for its guffaw” and “writing
itself down an ass”. In the same article, also prophetically, he hinted that
the exhibition had made him question his own aesthetic:
I have permitted myself to suspect that supposing some writer were to come
along and do in words what these men have done in paint, I might conceivably
be disgusted with nearly the whole of modern fiction, and I might have to
begin again . . . . Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me, and
some of our contemporaries – us who fancy ourselves a bit – to admit that we
had been concerning ourselves unduly with inessentials, that we had been
worrying ourselves to achieve infantile realisms? Well, that day would be a
great and disturbing day – for us. And we should see what we should see.
This, of course, is what Virginia Woolf, over a decade later, would indeed
force him to do.
Less well known, perhaps, is Bennett’s interest in Modigliani, at least one of
whose works he purchased in 1919 through the Polish dealer Leopold
Zborowski. He wrote a catalogue note for the 1919 exhibition of Modern
French Art at the Mansard Gallery, organized by Osbert Sitwell, again
attacking British insularity, and praising “the young pioneers”, Modigliani,
Utrillo, Kisling, Dufy and Soutine, whose introduction to British dowagers
was “steadied” by the presence of “such veterans” as Picasso, Derain,
Matisse and Vlaminck. He seemed to think Modigliani was Spanish, but
nevertheless offered £60 for any of his “three women”, £20 for Soutine’s red
fiddle, and £40 for any of the Vlaminck landscapes. He was a friend of
William Nicholson, and took a kindly interest in young Ben Nicholson. He was
much impressed by the work of the “ethnologist and psychoanalyst” W. H. R.
Rivers, and recommended him warmly to his American publishers. (His alter
ego, “the Card”, would have dismissed psychoanalysis as “bosh”.) Yet all
this openness to the new and engagement with the future have not stood
Bennett’s reputation in good stead. He has fallen far from literary fashion,
and, as Woolf’s fame has grown, his has waned. He has been associated with
the wrong movements, the wrong critics, the wrong admirers. (I class myself
as one of the latter: and my admiration for his “realism” has been argued
against him as well as against me.) Woolf has been buoyed up by the rise of
feminism and the popularity of gender studies, and by the vogue for
Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury, Garsington, Charleston and St Ives have prospered,
but not many literary pilgrims, or indeed tourists of any description, go to
Stoke-on-Trent. The loss is theirs. The twentieth-century tragedy of the
Potteries is part of another story altogether, but this falling from fashion
is nevertheless connected with Bennett’s geographical origins.
Bennett’s greatest works are embedded in a strange and mournful landscape,
stubbornly, almost heroically resistant to post-industrial regeneration, and
his grand efforts to reveal the romance and poetry of its history have
fallen by the wayside. Nobody goes there now, nobody is interested now. Or
so, at first sight, it might appear.
Much has been written about the famous inter-generational dispute between
Woolf and Bennett which sprang from Woolf’s essay on “Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown” (1924), the argument of which is well known: Woolf accuses Bennett
(and his contemporaries Wells and Galsworthy) of materialism, an
over-reliance on bricks and mortar, facts and figures, and a lack of insight
into the fluid inner movements and momentary impressions that constitute the
self. Realism – the detailed, at times frenzied heaping of fact on fact, à
la Zola – was out: Modernism, with its fragmentation, glimpses and
discontinuities, was in. As we know, Woolf’s position and Modernism won the
day. In order to rescue Bennett from critical neglect, he might have to be
rediscovered as a modernist. But this might be easier than reviving the
economy of Stoke-on-Trent.
Bennett’s modernist credentials as a purchaser of modernist art are
impeccable. In his novels he reveals a sharp contempt for the
sentimentalities of the Victorian and Edwardian engravings (Frederic
Leighton, Marcus Stone) that had decorated the walls of the houses he had
known as a child. It was not merely a provocative stance. This largely
self-educated man had trained his eye when living in his thirties in Paris at
the beginning of the twentieth century, where he mixed with artists, visited
studios, looked at paintings, talked about painting. (He later trained
himself to become a competent watercolourist, although he always classed
himself strictly as an amateur.) Clive Bell, representing the worst side of
Bloomsbury, made mock of him in his Paris years, describing him in his
memoirs (1956) as “an insignificant little man and ridiculous to boot” whom
he condescended to take along with him to Bohemian triperies as “a great
treat”, alleging that Bennett at this period “was learning French, and he
took longer about it than anyone has ever taken before and since”. Bennett
survived this patronage, and did not allow himself to be pushed back into
the “bowler hat and reach-me-down” stereotype that Bell draws. It is true
that in The Regent he makes fun of a show at the highbrow Azure Society with
decor involving a purple cuttlefish and an enormous crimson oblong patch
with a hole in it, which sounds like a parody of a Gordon Craig set, but the
spectator here is the entrepreneur Edward Henry Machin, “the Card”, who is a
parody of Bennett as a businessman and provincial made good. Bennett’s
ability to mock himself in exaggerated fictional portraits provides him with
a useful double aesthetic, deployed at times with complex and dazzling
refractions.
Modernist in his visual tastes, realist in his literary affiliations and in
his dominant aesthetic, Bennett stood on the cusp of two cultures. In this
context, we may compare the posthumous reputations of two men he greatly
admired, Cézanne (1839–1906) and Zola (1840–1902). The careers of these old
schoolfriends were closely interlinked in creative but ultimately doomed
friendship and rivalry: Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre provides an electrifying
account of the raging antagonisms and alliances of the artistic world, and a
deadly insight into the destructive power of inter-generational jealousy and
journalistic labelling. Cézanne, portrayed in the novel as a tragically
unfulfilled genius, is now one of the most highly-prized painters of all
time, whereas Zola's reputation has sunk: the one belongs to the present and
the future, the other to the past. Like Bennett, Zola has fallen into
neglect, his innovative genius undervalued and misrepresented. There are a
few good recent translations, but his name is hardly current in mainstream
critical discourse. This posthumous divide reflects the divergence of the
once-confluent streams of modernism and realism. Zola’s doctrine of
naturalism has suffered, understandably, from the oddity of some of his
artistic and genealogical theories, and from his weakness for slogans,
although his work remains as powerful and as moving as ever. But it belongs
to the wrong school, it has all the wrong labels. He needs repackaging; and
so does his disciple, Arnold Bennett.
The re-description of Bennett is being attempted, with some success, through
the imaginative initiative of a small publishing house, Churnet Valley
Books, which is based in Leek, the Staffordshire town known as Axe in the
topography of the Five Towns. This company has been producing, over the past
few years, some exceptionally good reprints of Bennett novels, with
excellent introductions by the Staffordshire-based critic John Shapcott,
whose insights unite local knowledge and fresh research with an easy
familiarity with contemporary critical theory. This is an unusual
combination. Until recently, there has been little crossover between
faithful Bennett fans (and there are still some) who want to locate the
draper’s shop from The Old Wives’ Tale (it is in a sorry condition in St
John’s Square, Burslem) and those who wish to read a discussion of its
spatial poetics illuminated by insights gleaned from Gaston Bachelard (Fiona
Tomkinson, “Escaping from Madame Foucault’s Chamber: Arnold Bennett’s
politics and poetics of space”, in Arnold Bennett: New perspectives, 2007).
Reading Bennett through Shapcott’s eyes is like looking at him through a new
and clearer lens, like looking at a painting cleansed of dirt and varnish.
He wipes away the accumulated prejudice of decades, and asks us to read the
novels afresh. They become different books with different stories. Moreover,
he has encouraged other scholars to engage in his journey of discovery, and
pointed us towards the interesting recent work of North American critics
such as Kurt Koenigsberger (The Novel and the Menagerie: Totality,
Englishness and empire, 2007) and Robert Squillace (Modernism, Modernity,
and Arnold Bennett, 1997). He has brought us and the exegesis of Bennett up
to date.
One of the characters in The Old Wives’ Tale, a novel greatly admired by both
Gide and Walter Benjamin, is, proleptically, named Foucault, now a name to
conjure with – she is Madame, not Monsieur, but she reverberates. Benjamin
read this novel in 1933 in German, under the title of Konstanze und Sophie
oder die alten Damen, and wrote to a sculptor friend on July 24, 1933:
I continue to read Bennett, in whom I increasingly come to recognise a man
whose stance is very much akin currently to my own and who serves to
validate it: that is to say, a man for whom a far-reaching lack of illusion
and a fundamental mistrust of where the world is going lead neither to moral
fanaticism nor to embitterment but to an extremely cunning, clever and
subtle art of living. This leads him to wrest from his own misfortune the
chances, and from his own wickedness the few respectable ways to conduct
himself, that amount to a human life.
The unlikely conjunction of the names Bennett, Benjamin, Foucault and
Bachelard indicates how different an afterlife Bennett might have led, had
he not been cast in a posture of perpetual adversarial opposition to Woolf.
It is this other life that Shapcott explores, prompted by his belief that
Bennett himself in his later years was on the brink of discovering a new
modernistic aesthetic, a new style for a new age.
Shapcott’s prefaces to two little-known novels, The Price of Love (1914), set
in the Five Towns, and The Pretty Lady (1917), set in wartime London, make a
strong argument for the unknown Bennett. In the first, he uses his intimate
local knowledge to evoke the impact of the cinema on the culture of the Five
Towns, and to discuss Bennett’s personal interest in the medium, while
evoking a traditional community on the brink of traumatic collapse,
threatened by war and market forces as well as the “crystal dream” of the
London Cinematographic Company. Shapcott sees the novel, written in
peacetime but published on October 1, 1914, as “an elegy to Bursley”, and as
a marriage of symbolism and realism. The finely drawn character of the
charwoman Mrs Tams and the growing threats of industrial pollution are
revealingly discussed in the language of purity and danger. (Shapcott
invites readers to visit the Moorland Pottery at Chelsea Works on Burslem’s
Moorland Road if they wish to see the site of the petty crime on which the
plot is based: the building, with its bottle kiln and cobbled yard, still
looks much as it did in 1888 when it was built, although the grimy windows
and dust-covered sample vases may have been somewhat spruced up.) Shapcott’s
analysis of the rituals of cleanliness is acute; he tellingly describes the
surface of Mrs Tams’s steps as “a domestic signifier of salvation akin to
that in the commercial sphere of the Protestant work ethic”. Contrasted with
Mrs Tams’s time-honoured struggle against dirt, Bennett presents us with the
“flaunting modernity” of the Imperial Cinema de Luxe in Hanley, built,
symbolically, next door to the new Primitive Methodist Chapel, and
dazzlingly illumined by displays of electrical extravagance.
And this was only one of the “picture- palaces in dozens” that had already
sprung up in these provincial towns. Shapcott’s discoveries about the rapid
commercial growth of the industry make fascinating reading. He is convinced,
surely correctly, that Bennett’s own interest in the infant film business
deserves further consideration. Woolf, the modernist, rarely mentions that
most modern of media, although her narrative techniques are now frequently
described as “filmic”, and her 1926 essay “The Cinema”, while describing the
popular audience as “savages of the twentieth century watching the
pictures”, gives a prescient glimpse of the possibilities of symbolism,
dream and fantasy: she wrote that “some residue of visual emotion which is
of no use either to the painter or the poet may still await the cinema . .
.”. Bennett himself engaged more actively. He wrote screenplays, became
involved in the processes of film-making, and saw one of his original
scenarios, Piccadilly, reach the screen in 1929. (His script of 1928, Punch
and Judy, was rejected by Alfred Hitchcock because Bennett didn’t want it
made as a talkie.) If The Price of Love was a farewell to Burslem, The
Pretty Lady, written between May 1917 and January 1918, was a “feverish”
engagement with the violence and sexuality of modernity. Bennett claimed
that it showed “symptoms of the new manner”, and it is charged with messages
of primitivism, disintegration and sudden death. It was attacked by
contemporary moralists as pornographic, has been critically dismissed as
lightweight, and examined by biographers for its alleged portrait (as Lady
Queenie) of the artistic exhibitionist Lady Diana Manners (later Cooper).
When I first read it I thought it showed Bennett’s debt to the resplendent
courtesans of Balzac and Zola, some of whom longed, like the refugee French
cocotte Christine, to be safely set up “amongst their own furniture”, and I
am still intrigued by the question of how much Bennett knew first-hand
(rather than as spectator and voyeur) of the elegant rose-tinted world of
commercial sex that he describes. But Shapcott’s preface reveals a different
and more intriguing novel.
He makes a strong case for The Pretty Lady as a modernist text, forging a new
aesthetic from the violence of a war which by 1917 had reached the streets
of London. Bennett portrays a frenzied social scene of syncopated music,
Negro singers and nightclubs, which contrasts with Christine’s safe
old-fashioned nest in Cork Street. As Shapcott points out, severed body
parts of both civilian and front-line victims litter the novel. Queenie
capers around her boudoir as Salome, with a plate of bread and butter
representing John the Baptist’s head, and then ascends to her Mayfair roof
where she is killed by shrapnel while watching the theatrical display of
searchlights during an air raid. Her boudoir is a shocking display of
modernist decor (Roger Fry is mentioned), adorned with suggestive nude
statues of crouching women, with African textiles in primary colours
patterned with “rhomboids, lozenges, diamonds, triangles and
parallelograms”: the semi-detached refined bachelor protagonist Hoape
perceives it as a “gigantic and glittering kaleidoscope deranged and
arrested”. Shapcott skilfully explores the wide range of the novel’s
cultural references, which embrace Christine’s tastes in reading matter
(East Lynne and the Fantomas series of popular French crime novels, dealing
with severed hands) and the decadent art of Félicien Rops (whose work was
admired both by Bennett and his wartime colleague Beaverbrook). One may find
this journey exciting without necessarily following Shapcott to all his
conclusions.
Bennett has found an energetic champion in Shapcott, in the conferences he
organizes, and in the Arnold Bennett Newsletter which he edits. Bennett was
as eager to reveal the concealed intellectual culture of the Potteries as he
was keen to espouse and expose metropolitan modernity. The rivalry between
them, which is the subject of his finest short story, “The Death of Simon
Fuge”, lives on. Bennett, writing to George Moore in 1920, thanked him for
revealing to him (in his novel The Mummer’s Wife) “the romantic nature of
the district that I had blindly inhabited for over twenty years”. And so we
in turn may look to a new generation of locally inspired critics and
publishers to see Bennett’s own work in a new light.
Margaret Drabble is a novelist, editor and critic. Her most recent
book, The Pattern in the Carpet: A personal history with jigsaws, was
published earlier this year.
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