Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)
I have just finished this 'blockbuster' - even the postman staggered under the weight of The Folio Society's edition (2004) of Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale. It stands at 546 pages and I took several days to read it. This is not meant as a criticism, but it is certainly not a book you can just dash off.
Their dominating mother - Mrs Baines: though intensely proud and fond of her daughters, had justifiably preserved a certain condescension towards them. She honestly doubted whether either of them would develop into the equal of their mother. who believed a dose of castor oil would cure obstinacy and yearnings for a freer life (in Sophia)
The father, bed-ridden Mr John Baines: had belonged to the past, to the age when men really did think of their souls...when the sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell really had no bottom, and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the secret of England's greatness. The Baines grew up in an age when the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, for example, instead of a sparse handful of persons disturbingly conscious of being in a minority, as now, a magnificent and proud majority had collected, deeply aware of its rightness and its correctness.
At 15 years old Sophia was as tall as her mother, and as imperious, as crested, and proud; and in spite of the pigtail, the girlish semicircular comb, and the loose foal-like limbs, she could support as well as her mother the majesty of the gimp-embroidered dress. She is attracted to the travelling salesman Gerald Scales (a serpentine surname); they meet illicitly; they agree about the navvies on the railway construction: dangerous beasts of prey in their yellow corduroys and their open shirts revealing hairy chests. No doubt they both thought how inconvenient it was that railways could not be brought into existence without the aid of such revolting and swinish animals. Sophia flees, aged 19, with Gerald to London, then Paris. It was a mistake that cost her dear. Very quickly, the scales fall from her eyes: she had recognised her marriage for what it was...she saw again that he was irreclaimably a fool and a prodigy of irreponsibleness...she was ready to pay the price of pride and of a moment's imbecility with a lifetime of self-repression...they hated each other, but in different ways. She loathed him, and he resented her. He races through a large inheritance, fails to get her to ask for money from home, and absconds. When Sophia sees Gerald for the last time, he is over 70 and dead: a withered face, with the shiny skin all drawn into wrinkles! The stretched skin under the jaw was like the skin of a plucked fowl. The cheekbones stood up, and below them were deep hollows, almost like eggcups...
Back in Burslem, Samuel Povey: the fount and radiating centre of order and discipline in the shop; a quiet, diffident, secretive, tedious, and obstinate youngish man, absolutely faithful, absolutely efficient in his sphere; without brilliance, without distinction; perhaps rather little-minded, certainly narrow-minded, but what a force in the shop!...outwardly insignificant, possessing a mind as little as his body, easily abashed, he was none the less a very susceptible young man, soon offended, proud, vain, and obscurely passionate. He marries Constance, much to Mrs Baines's disapproval, and makes a real go of the business. Bennett skilfully ages him as the book progresses: a spectacled man of fifty, short and stoutish, with grey hair and a small beard half-grey and half-black. When he dies, of toxaemia, the narrator summed him up: Samuel Povey never could impose himself on the burgesses. He lacked individuality. He was little. I have often laughed at Samuel Povey. But I liked and respected him. He was a very honest man...
Constance and Samuel have a son, Cyril Povey: Cyril was the pivot of the house; every desire ended somewhere in Cyril. The shop existed now solely for him. The usually one-sided relationship between Constance and her son is tragic. Bennett clearly recognised and pointed out the dangers of an only child being indulged by well-off and doting parents, which led to idleness and uncaring adulthood. The fraught relationship brings out some fine writing from Bennett.
The shop assistant Miss Insull, who becomes Mrs Critchlow, is also finely drawn: for twenty-five years she served in the shop...in the eternal fusty dusk of the shop she had gradually lost such sexual characteristics and charms as she had once possessed. She was as thin and flat as Charles Critchlow himself. It was as though her bosom had suffered from a prolonged drought at a susceptible period of development, and had never recovered...
In Sophia's Paris, at the time of the Prussian bombardment and subsequent Commune, there are vividly drawn characters, such as Madame Foucault, the pathetic, ageing courtesan - over forty, fat, creased and worn out; Chirac, painfully in love with Sophia, who finally flees from the besieged city in a balloon and is never heard of again; M. Niepce, the 'siege-widower' and local grocer, who lodged at Sophia's pension, gave her discounts and wanted more in return.
Cyril Povey's friend, Matthew Peel-Swynnerton, comes across Sophia over twenty years later, when he stays at her Hotel: Undoubtedly she was a handsome woman. Her hair was greying at the temples, and the skin was withered and crossed with lines She was one of those women of whom to their last on earth the stranger will say: 'When she was young she must have been worth looking at! - with a little transient regret that beautiful women cannot remain for ever young. Her voice was firm and even, sweet in tone, and yet morally harsh from incessant traffic with all varieties of human nature. Her eyes were the impartial eyes of one who is always judging...her eyes announced that she had lived and learnt...
The last of the four sections - What Life Is - contains some of the novel's most powerful and tragic writing. The two sisters meet again, and Sophia returns to her old home. 'What Life Is' has an awful, downbeat tone to it. The sisters tolerate each other's differences: Sophia saw in Constance the quality of an honest and naive goodwill, of powerful simplicity...she knew that she had a stronger individuality than Constance's. When they go to stay at the Rutland Hotel in Buxton, other guests saw them arrive: The shorter and stouter of the two ladies did not impose herself with much force on the collective vision of the Rutland; she was dressed in black, not fashionably, though with a certain unpretending richness; her gestures were timid and nervous; evidently she relied upon her tall companion to shield her in the first trying contacts of hotel life. The tall lady was a different stamp. Handsome, stately, deliberate, and handsomely dressed in colours, she had the assured hard gaze of a person who is thoroughly habituated to the inspection of strangers.
The end, when it comes for them both is not morbid, but definitely moving. Sophia goes first, after visiting her dead husband in Manchester, of a fatal stroke. When Constance gazes on Sophia's dead body, it is tragic: What a career! A brief passion, and then nearly thirty years in a boarding-house! And Sophia had never had a child; had never known either the joy or the pain of maternity. She had never even had a true home till, in all her sterile splendour, she came to Bursley...Hers had not been a life at all. Constance, the child of her parents, can't help but think: Sophia had sinned. It was therefore inevitable that she should suffer. Constance does not last much longer, dying of rheumatic fever in her one and only home.
The First Edition - 1908
I had never read a single book of Bennett's before this - he is almost forgotten these days and rarely read; yet he was a 'literary dreadnought' from the 1900s to the 1930s. The Old Wives' Tale shows tremendous insight into the vicissitudes of trade, of small town businesses and its social intercourse, and of the struggles of women to engage successfully in the commercial world. In Bennett's novel, the women are really the ones in charge, first Mrs Baines and then the two daughters in their respective spheres. As one critic has said, Bennett may be an unfashionable writer but this novel is a work of real genius. The narrative touches on alcoholism, murder, mental illness, prostitution, death, disease, and marital strife...and yet, through it all, Bennett never loses sight of the individuals that he is describing. It never seems less than real.
A final point. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Old Wives' Tale No. 87 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
No comments:
Post a Comment