Margaret Drabble's 1974 Biography of Arnold Bennett

Arnold Bennett 1867-1931

I must admit I had never read any of Arnold Bennett's books before this year - or Margaret Drabble's for that matter. Then, I bought Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale and thoroughly enjoyed reading it (see my 8th May Blog). I have just finished Drabble's biography of Bennett and find I entirely concurred with her final paragraph on page 356:

He was a great writer from a stony land, and he was also one of the kindest and most unselfish of men. Many a time, rereading a novel, reading a letter or a piece of his journal, I have wanted to shake his hand, or to thank him, to say well done...

Weidenfeld and Nicolson first edition - 1974

Drabble's is a positive biography; thank goodness it wasn't written by the sneering Lytton Strachey type. When Drabble mentions that Clive Bell and Strachey despised Bennett, then it made me warm to him even more. Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, I think I have mentioned previously, was the only 'A' Level set book I didn't get on with. I just wished she'd get them to the bloody lighthouse. Stream of consciousness? Boring stagnant water! Woolf mocked Bennett's stammer and his Potteries accent, his concentration on dull materialism, especially in Hilda Lessways. As for Strachey, he mocked Bennett's establishment - the rooms were peculiarly disgusting - but he also dismissed T. S. Eliot's reading as sad and seedy. Strangely, that is exactly what I think of Lytton Strachey. To be fair to Woolf, she did write in her Diary, Arnold Bennett died last night, which leaves me sadder than I should have supposed. A lovable genuine man: impeded, somehow a little awkward in life; well meaning; ponderous; kindly; coarse; knowing he was coarse; glutted with success...Drabble is good on explaining Hugh Walpole (who had been much helped by Bennett) and Rebecca West when they criticised Bennett's seeming championship of materialism. There speaks another critic of materialism who had never known poverty, and who could not discern Bennett's passionate yearning for fraternity and joy and opportunity for all.

In no particular order, some thoughts occasioned by the book. As an (ex?) Wesleyan Methodist myself, I knew the hold the movement had in the cities of the UK (the Midlands, the North, Wales) but also the more rural, but mining, areas such as North Somerset and Cornwall. Drabble's book, its first chapter on The Five Towns in particular, brings home both the positives and negatives of its pervasive influence in the lives of the lower-middle class (the working class tended to drift to the Primitive Methodists). Of Bennett, she writes, he completely lacked the censorious side of Methodism, its judging, its sniffing and sneering, its righteous scorn for others... if potting was the industry of the district, Methodism was its religion, and the two together formed the Bennett inheritance. At its beginning, Wesleyanism was a genuine working-class movement, which offered spiritual hope and material improvement to its followers... It preached thrift, discipline and frugality. But over the years, the 'improved' Methodist became just as repressive and worldly as the churchmen he had despised. Worse, education of the workforce did not necessarily work to employers' advantage and many actively inveighed against the teaching of writing in the Sunday Schools. There was a strange mixture of emotionalism, enthusiasm, even fervour, and extreme dourness and repression...[Methodism] was masochistic, submissive, debasing...wallowing in their abasement. I remember, at the January Covenant Service in the 1960s, being asked to recite such phrases as being a miserable worm and put me to suffering. As a teenager, no way was I going to agree to such diktats! Drabble's chapter absolutely nails the background under which Bennett grew up.

At each stage of his life, I found I was admiring him. The stifling, narrow-mindedness of Burslem and the Potteries; the loneliness and drudgery of London; the sheer hard work and application as he churned out thousands of words in his journalism; his brave move to France and Paris; his early novels - Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Tales of the Five Towns (1905) etc.; his unsatisfactory and increasingly arid marriage; his real breakthrough with The Old Wives' Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910); his entry into London's literary, social and political society, in it but never quite of it. Wealthy enough to run yachts and country houses, but with entirely self-made money. He was at his best writing about the Potteries, although Riceyman Steps (1923) was regarded as one of his finest creations. Yes, he could be coarse - but he was not fake, like so many others; he could be boastful - but he had much to boast about; he craved genuine friendship (he was a great, and often generous, friend to others) as much as love. He was so enthusiastic about travel, about architecture, about modernity. He deserved to have such an empathetic book such as Drabble has served up.

I've decided, that next year, (rather like I have done with Camus, Gide, Housman and several other authors I knew little about), I am going to purchase some of his novels. I will hunt down Penguins - in first edition printings, of course. I see the following are likely candidates: 

Penguin

1936    No. 33         Anna of the Five Towns

1946    No. 519       The Grim Smile of the Five Towns 

1954    No. 996       Riceyman Steps

1954    No. 997       Clayhanger

1954    No. 998       The Old Wives' Tale

1954    No. 999       The Journals of Arnold Bennett

1975                        Hilda Lessways

Update (23 December): I have bought all the above, bar Hilda Lessways and am now also looking for The Grand Babylon Hotel.