Grant M. Overton

i

Mr. Bennett’s audacity has always been evident. One might say that he began by daring to tell the truth about an author, continued by daring to tell the truth about the Five Towns, and has now reached the incredible stage where he dares to tell the truth about marriage. This is affronting Fate indeed. It was all very well for Arnold Bennett to write a play called Cupid and Commonsense. Perhaps, in view of the fact that it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, it was all right for him to create The Old Wives’ Tale; but it cannot be all right for him to compose such novels as Mr. Prohack and his still newer story, Lilian.

Think of the writers who have stumbled and fallen over the theme of marriage. There is W. L. George ... but I cannot bring myself to name other names and discuss their tragic fates. There are those who have sought to make the picture of marriage a picture of horror; but that was because they did not dare to tell the truth. That marriage is all, no one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise. No one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise that, as between husband and wife, there are no such things as moral standards, there can be no such thing as an ethical code, there can be no interposition of lofty abstractions which Men call principles and appeal to as they would appeal to a just God, Himself. No one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise that the relation between a man and his wife necessarily transcends every abstraction, brushes aside every ideal of “right” and “wrong.” Mr. Bennett, in the course of the amazing discoveries of an amazing lifetime, has made the greatest discovery possible to mortals of this planet. He has discovered that marriage occurs when a man and a woman take the law into their own hands, and not only the human law, but the divine.

It would be impossible for the hero of a Bennett novel of recent years to be a character like Mark Sabre in If Winter Comes. Arnold Bennett’s married hero would realise that the health, comfort, wishes, doubts, dissimulations; the jealousies, the happiness or the fancied happiness, and the exterior appearances of the woman who was his wife abolish, for practical purposes, everything else. It is due to Mr. Bennett more than to anyone else that we now understand that while “husband” may be a correct legal designation, “lover” is the only possible Æsthetic appellation of the man who is married. If he is not a lover he is not a husband except for statutory purposes—that is all.

It is hard to describe Lilian. I will let you taste it:

“Lilian, in dark blue office frock with an embroidered red line round the neck and detachable black wristlets that preserved the ends of the sleeves from dust and friction, sat idle at her flat desk in what was called ‘the small room’ at Felix Grig’s establishment in Clifford Street, off Bond Street. There were three desks, three typewriting machines and three green-shaded lamps. Only Lilian’s lamp was lighted, and she sat alone, with darkness above her chestnut hair and about her, and a circle of radiance below. She was twenty-three. Through the drawn blind of the window could just be discerned the backs of the letters of words painted on the glass: ‘Felix Grig. Typewriting Office. Open day and night.’ Seen from the street the legend stood out black and clear against the faintly glowing blind. It was eleven p.m.

“That a beautiful girl, created for pleasure and affection and expensive flattery, should be sitting by herself at eleven p.m., in a gloomy office in Clifford Street, in the centre of the luxurious, pleasure-mad, love-mad West End of London seemed shocking and contrary to nature, and Lilian certainly so regarded it. She pictured the shut shops, and shops and yet again shops, filled with elegance and costliness—robes, hats, stockings, shoes, gloves, incredibly fine lingerie, furs, jewels, perfumes—designed and confected for the setting-off of just such young attractiveness as hers. She pictured herself rifling those deserted and silent shops by some magic means and emerging safe, undetected, in batiste so rare that her skin blushed through it, in a frock that was priceless and yet nothing at all, and in warm marvellous sables that no blast of wind or misfortune could ever penetrate—and diamonds in her hair. She pictured thousands of smart women, with imperious command over rich, attendant males, who at that very moment were moving quickly in automobiles from theatres towards the dancing-clubs that clustered round Felix Grig’s typewriting office. At that very moment she herself ought to have been dancing. Not in a smart club; no! Only in the basement of a house where an acquaintance of hers lodged; and only with clerks and things like that; and only a gramophone. But still a dance, a respite from the immense ennui and solitude called existence!”

After Lilian’s mother died she had been “Papa’s cherished darling. Then Mr. Share caught pneumonia, through devotion to duty and died in a few days; and at last Lilian felt on her lovely cheek the winds of the world; at last she was free. Of high paternal finance she had never in her life heard one word. In the week following the funeral she learnt that she would be mistress of the furniture and a little over one hundred pounds net. Mr. Share had illustrated the ancient maxim that it is easier to make money than to keep it. He had held shipping shares too long and had sold a fully-paid endowment insurance policy in the vain endeavour to replace by adventurous investment that which the sea had swallowed up. And Lilian was helpless. She could do absolutely nothing that was worth money. She could not begin to earn a livelihood. As for relatives, there was only her father’s brother, a Board School teacher with a large vulgar family and an income far too small to permit of generosities. Lilian was first incredulous, then horror-struck.

“Leaving the youth of the world to pick up art as best it could without him, and fleeing to join his wife in paradise, the loving, adoring father had in effect abandoned a beautiful idolised daughter to the alternatives of starvation or prostitution. He had shackled her wrists behind her back and hobbled her feet and bequeathed her to wolves. That was what he had done, and what many and many such fathers had done, and still do, to their idolised daughters.

“Herein was the root of Lilian’s awful burning resentment against the whole world, and of a fierce and terrible determination by fair means or foul to make the world pay. Her soul was a horrid furnace, and if by chance Lionel Share leaned out from the gold bar of heaven and noticed it, the sight must have turned his thoughts towards hell for a pleasant change. She was saved from disaster, from martyrdom, from ignominy, from the unnameable, by the merest fluke. The nurse who tended Lionel Share’s last hours was named Grig. This nurse had cousins in the typewriting business. She had also a kind heart a practical mind, and a persuasive manner with cousins.”

Lilian in the office late at night has been engaged in conversation by her employer, Mr. Grig, and Mr. Grig has finally come to the point.

“‘You know you’ve no business in a place like this, a girl like you. You’re much too highly strung for one thing. You aren’t like Miss Jackson, for instance. You’re simply wasting yourself here. Of course you’re terribly independent, but you do try to please. I don’t mean try to please merely in your work. You try to please. It’s an instinct with you. Now in typing you’d never beat Miss Jackson. Miss Jackson’s only alive, really, when she’s typing. She types with her whole soul. You type well—I hear—but that’s only because you’re clever all round. You’d do anything well. You’d milk cows just as well as you’d type. But your business is marriage, and a good marriage! You’re beautiful, and, as I say, you have an instinct to please. That’s the important thing. You’d make a success of marriage because of that and because you’re adaptable and quick at picking up. Most women when they’re married forget that their job is to adapt themselves and to please. That’s their job. They expect to be kowtowed to and spoilt and humoured and to be free to spend money without having to earn it, and to do nothing in return except just exist—and perhaps manage a household, pretty badly. They seem to forget that there are two sides to a bargain. It’s dashed hard work, pleasing is, sometimes. I know that. But it isn’t so hard as earning money, believe me! Now you wouldn’t be like the majority of women. You’d keep your share of the bargain, and handsomely. If you don’t marry, and marry fifty miles above you, you’ll be very silly. For you to stop here is an outrage against commonsense. It’s merely monstrous. If I wasn’t an old man I wouldn’t tell you this, naturally. Now you needn’t blush. I expect I’m not far off thirty years older than you—and you’re young enough to be wise in time.’”

It will be seen that Lilian has all the philosophy and humour which make Mr. Prohack a joy forever, and in addition the new novel has the strong interest we feel in a young, beautiful, attractive, helpless girl, who has her way to make in the world. And yet, I love Mr. Prohack. I think I have by heart some of the wisdom he utters; for instance—

On women: “Even the finest and most agreeable women, such as those with whom I have been careful to surround myself in my domestic existence, are monsters of cruelty.”

On women’s clubs: “You scarcely ever speak to a soul in your club. The food’s bad in your club. They drink liqueurs before dinner at your club. I’ve seen ’em. Your club’s full every night of the most formidable spinsters each eating at a table alone. Give up your club by all means. Set fire to it and burn it down. But don’t count the act as a renunciation. You hate your club.”

On his wife: “You may annoy me. You may exasperate me. You are frequently unspeakable. But you have never made me unhappy. And why? Because I am one of the few exponents of romantic passion left in this city. My passion for you transcends my reason. I am a fool, but I am a magnificent fool. And the greatest miracle of modern times is that after twenty-four years of marriage you should be able to give me pleasure by perching your stout body on the arm of my chair as you are doing.”

On his daughter: “In 1917 I saw that girl in dirty overalls driving a thundering great van down Whitehall. Yesterday I met her in her foolish high heels and her shocking openwork stockings and her negligible dress and her exposed throat and her fur stole, and she was so delicious and so absurd and so futile and so sure of her power that—that—well ... that chit has the right to ruin me—not because of anything she’s done, but because she is.”

On kissing: “That fellow has kissed my daughter and he has kissed her for the first time. It is monstrous that any girl, and especially my daughter, should be kissed for the first time.... It amounts to an outrage.”

On parenthood: “To become a parent is to accept terrible risks. I’m Charlie’s father. What then?... He owes nothing whatever to me or to you. If we were starving and he had plenty, he would probably consider it his duty to look after us; but that’s the limit of what he owes us. Whereas nothing can put an end to our responsibility towards him.... We thought it would be nice to have children and so Charlie arrived. He didn’t choose his time and he didn’t choose his character, nor his education, nor his chance. If he had his choice you may depend he’d have chosen differently. Do you want me, on the top of all that, to tell him that he must obediently accept something else from us—our code of conduct? It would be mere cheek, and with all my shortcomings I’m incapable of impudence, especially to the young.”

On ownership: “Have you ever stood outside a money-changer’s and looked at the fine collection of genuine banknotes in the window? Supposing I told you that you could look at them, and enjoy the sight of them, and nobody could do more? No, my boy, to enjoy a thing properly you’ve got to own it. And anybody who says the contrary is probably a member of the League of all the Arts.”

On economics: “That’s where the honest poor have the advantage of us.... We’re the dishonest poor.... We’re one vast pretence.... A pretence resembles a bladder. It may burst. We probably shall burst. Still, we have one great advantage over the honest poor, who sometimes have no income at all; and also over the rich, who never can tell how big their incomes are going to be. We know exactly where we are. We know to the nearest sixpence.”

On history: “Never yet when empire, any empire, has been weighed in the balance against a young and attractive woman has the young woman failed to win! This is a dreadful fact, but men are thus constituted.”

On bolshevism: “Abandon the word ‘bolshevik.’ It’s a very overworked word and wants a long repose.”

The best brief sketch of Arnold Bennett’s life that I know of is given in the chapter on Arnold Bennett in John W. Cunliffe’s English Literature During the Last Half Century. Professor Cunliffe, with the aid, of course, of Bennett’s own story, The Truth About an Author, writes as follows:

“He was born near Hanley, the ‘Hanbridge’ of the Five Towns which his novels were to launch into literary fame, and received a somewhat limited education at the neighbouring ‘Middle School’ of Newcastle, his highest scholastic achievement being the passing of the London University Matriculation Examination. Some youthful adventures in journalism were perhaps significant of latent power and literary inclination, but a small provincial newspaper offers no great encouragement to youthful ambition, and Enoch Arnold Bennett (as he was then called) made his way at 21 as a solicitor’s clerk to London, where he was soon earning a modest livelihood by ‘a natural gift for the preparation of bills for taxation.’ He had never ‘wanted to write’ (except for money) and had read almost nothing of Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the BrontËs, and George Eliot, though he had devoured Ouida, boys’ books and serials. His first real interest in a book was ‘not as an instrument for obtaining information or emotion, but as a book, printed at such a place in such a year by so-and-so, bound by so-and-so, and carrying colophons, registers, water-marks, and fautes d’impression.’ It was when he showed a rare copy of Manon Lescaut to an artist and the latter remarked that it was one of the ugliest books he had ever seen, that Bennett, now in his early twenties, first became aware of the appreciation of beauty. He won twenty guineas in a competition, conducted by a popular weekly, for a humorous condensation of a sensational serial, being assured that this was ‘art,’ and the same paper paid him a few shillings for a short article on ‘How a bill of costs is drawn up.’ Meanwhile he was ‘gorging’ on English and French literature, his chief idols being the brothers de Goncourt, de Maupassant, and Turgenev, and he got a story into the Yellow Book. He saw that he could write, and he determined to adopt the vocation of letters. After a humiliating period of free lancing in Fleet Street, he became assistant editor and later editor of Woman. When he was 31, his first novel, A Man From the North, was published, both in England and America, and with the excess of the profits over the cost of typewriting he bought a new hat. At the end of the following year he wrote in his diary:

“‘This year I have written 335,340 words, grand total: 224 articles and stories, and four instalments of a serial called The Gates of Wrath have actually been published, and also my book of plays, Polite Farces. My work included six or eight short stories not yet published, also the greater part of a 55,000 word serial Love and Life for Tillotsons, and the whole draft, 80,000 words of my Staffordshire novel Anna Tellwright.’

“This last was not published in book form till 1902 under the title of Anna of the Five Towns; but in the ten years that had elapsed since he came to London, Bennett had risen from a clerk at six dollars a week to be a successful ‘editor, novelist, dramatist, critic, connoisseur of all arts’ with a comfortable suburban residence. Still he was not satisfied; he was weary of journalism and the tyranny of his Board of Directors. He threw up his editorial post, with its certain income, and retired first to the country and then to a cottage at Fontainebleau to devote himself to literature.

“In the autumn of 1903, when Bennett used to dine frequently in a Paris restaurant, it happened that a fat old woman came in who aroused almost universal merriment by her eccentric behaviour. The novelist reflected: ‘This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heart-rending novel out of a woman such as she.’ The idea then occurred to him of writing the book which afterwards became The Old Wives’ Tale, and in order to go one better than Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Une Vie’ he determined to make it the life-history of two women instead of one. Constance, the more ordinary sister, was the original heroine; Sophia, the more independent and attractive one, was created ‘out of bravado.’ The project occupied Bennett’s mind for some years, during which he produced five or six novels of smaller scope, but in the autumn of 1907 he began to write The Old Wives’ Tale and finished it in July, 1908. It was published the same autumn and though its immediate reception was not encouraging, before the winter was over it was recognised both in England and America as a work of genius. The novelist’s reputation was upheld, if not increased, by the publication of Clayhanger in 1910, and in June, 1911, the most conservative of American critical authorities, the New York Evening Post, could pronounce judgment in these terms:

“‘Mr. Bennett’s Bursley is not merely one single stupid English provincial town. His Baineses and Clayhangers are not simply average middle class provincials foredoomed to humdrum and the drab shadows of experience. His Bursley is every provincial town, his Baineses are all townspeople whatsoever under the sun. He professes nothing of the kind; but with quiet smiling patience, with a multitude of impalpable touches, clothes his scene and its humble figures in an atmosphere of pity and understanding. These little people, he seems to say, are as important to themselves as you are to yourself, or as I am to myself. Their strength and weakness are ours; their lives, like ours, are rounded with a sleep. And because they stand in their fashion for all human character and experience, there is even a sort of beauty in them if you will but look for it.’”

Books

by Arnold Bennett