BOOK OF THE WEEK
ARNOLD BENNETT: LOST ICON
by Patrick Donovan (Unicorn £25, 280 pages)
Being a writer must be pretty scary, knowing that the minute you’re dead you’ll be forgotten. Now who’s reading Anthony Burgess or Iris Murdoch? Still, they were big in their day and everyone took them seriously.
Arnold Bennett, who died in 1931, published 124 books but is only remembered for being an omelet that’s still on the Savoy’s menu: mix the eggs with chunks of smoked haddock.
Although Bennett’s The Card was filmed with Alec Guinness and made into a musical for Jim Dale and Peter Duncan, Hilda Lessways was a television series starring Judi Dench and an adaptation by Mr. Prohack largely starred Dirk Bogarde, as did Patrick Donovan regrettably says “Bennett’s reputation has long since faded”. (My wife thought I was talking about Alan Bennett. “What’s Omelette Alan Bennett?” she asked.)
Arnold Bennett (pictured), who died in 1931, published 124 books but is only remembered for being an omelette, which is still on the Savoy’s menu. Patrick Donovan’s new book reveals that in 1912 Arnold Bennett was making what is now the equivalent of £1.8million a year from journalism and writing alone
It is incredible that in 1912 Arnold Bennett was earning what is now the equivalent of £1.8million a year from journalism and writing alone. Picassos and Toulouse Lautrec originals hung on its walls, even a Caravaggio.
Bennett regularly indulged in pedicures and Turkish baths. He grew up far from luxury, in Stoke-on-Trent, among “the gigantic plumes of smoke that rolled down the stalks of a thousand factory chimneys”. His family ran a shop selling cheap everyday tableware, from soup tureens to chamber pots, then ran a textile shop and a pawn shop.
The Staffordshire economy was precarious, plagued by strikes and lockouts – and the Bennetts lived in a cramped “madrel of domesticity, shouting and smells” while the patriarch Enoch studied law in his spare time.
He qualified at 33 and “made a name for himself as one of the hardest-working commercial lawyers in the region.” Born in 1867, Arnold inherited the work ethic but was “an odd card.” He was disabled by a stutter, “a lifelong struggle that tore him to pieces,” as George VI put it.
Arnold is remembered because it’s an omelet that’s still on the Savoy’s menu: mix the eggs with chunks of smoked haddock
It seems Bennett was unfavorable overall. His teeth bulged, he was stocky and had a big belly. At school and later he was “gloomy… not easy to understand”.
His first job in 1889, arranged by his father, was as a paralegal in London. He lived in an “unheated bedsitting room” in Hornsey and took part in literary competitions at the weekends – which he often won. Donovan points out that as literacy increased in the Victorian era, there suddenly was a huge market for reading.
In 1896 there were 2,355 daily newspapers and 2,097 weeklies. (Now look at us – nobody manages to focus on anything bigger than a tweet.)
Bennett “perfected drafts” commendably through revisions, experimenting with paragraph structure, alliteration, dialogue, and pacing.
In 1894 he was appointed editor of Woman, a magazine devoted to new soaps and “the latest corset”. Bennett took the job seriously. “I learned a lot about clothes, housekeeping and the secretive nature of women.”
He also wrote theater and music reviews and became notorious for never turning down an assignment, no matter how busy he seemed to be. Well, at least that’s what I have in common with him.
In 1903 Bennett moved to France, where a London newspaper paid him an annual advance of £20,000 for a weekly column on the locals. He also began producing fiction – the classics waiting to be rediscovered in Donovan’s estimation are The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923).
The usual themes were poverty in the potteries, “cheerful, confident geeks” rising to mayor, the allure of material rewards, and good food. (Bennett once sampled stewed Caucasian bear.) All of this, said one critic at the time, was “suffused with the universal significance of small shifts, ambitions, jealousies, and disappointments.” It sold well in America.
Arnold photographed with Dorothy Cheston in the city in 1929. Dorothy was his longtime lover, a budding actress whom he entertained in a flat in Chiltern Court above Baker Street tube station
The literary lion was not a great husband. Donovan wonders if “sexual dysfunction” turned Bennett off. In 1907, Bennett married a French woman named Marguerite. Their honeymoon consisted of bike expeditions in the rain and mud — 65 miles a day. According to her account, this was “the beginning of a serious nervous breakdown”.
Nothing should disturb the master in his work. Bennett locked himself in at 6:30 a.m. every morning. He never wanted children. His routines were sacrosanct.
When the couple bought an Essex property in 1913, Marguerite wasn’t even allowed to change the arrangement of the furniture – Bennett would send her ugly little notes whenever a door was left open. He also kept her short of cash. In the meantime he splashed out on steam yachts and drove a Rolls.
He also had a longtime mistress, Dorothy, a budding actress, whom he entertained in a flat in Chiltern Court above Baker Street tube station. Dorothy didn’t like the place. She said the underground rumble and vibration “went straight through my rectum.” Despite this, Marguerite refused to divorce, even when Dorothy gave birth to a daughter in 1926.
Bennett had spent the war years producing propaganda material for the government, in which he said the front was “the happiest, most confident and spirited” place he had ever seen. He also wrote that the Germans repatriated their dead by binding them “like bundles of asparagus, piled on their feet, tied with wire.”
For this he was offered knighthood, which to my surprise he declined, especially since he had to endure terrible condescension. Maugham said Bennett was “pretty ordinary” and that the literary establishment, Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf, constantly mocked him for being commercial and mediocre.
Terrible snobbery lay at the root of their feud because he was of working class origin (by contrast, Woolf’s father was a knight of the empire) and did not know his place – they met at a dinner party in Chelsea in 1919 and did not speak. In 1926 there was another encounter at a dinner party at the home of HG Wells. Woolf gave Bennett the cold shoulder again.
He (15 years her senior) goaded her on being a woman who was therefore prone (in his view) to too much rambling and a lack of focus – except for Emily Bronte: “No woman has ever written a novel, the great novels would be equal of men.’
Bennett had spent the war years producing propaganda material for the government, in which he said the front was “the happiest, most confident and spirited” place he had ever seen
His view, she replied, was a “state of semi-civilized barbarism.”
Bennett then accused her of too much “cleverness”, her superliterary fiction consisted of many “dazzling fragments”, and at a lecture given by Woolf in Cambridge she said that he was no better than a shoemaker, that his novels were of craftsmanship and not constructed by art.
She also said he was like a “home cook” who has outdone himself and thinks he can sit down with his employers, join in their conversation or get a newspaper. This caused a huge laugh from Woolf’s audience.
The mockery was picked up by the literary establishment, who derided Bennett for being “commercial.” He revealed his “common” pottery origins by mentioning money in salons! How vulgar! According to Bloomsbury, the only virtue of his novels is that they can be consulted “for the time of a train or the price of a bicycle lamp”.
Bennett had to admit that Woolf is “the queen of snooty eyes”; and I’m a low brow. But I don’t think he liked being seen as just that.
Still, it’s interesting that he named his daughter Virginia. When he died, Virginia Woolf said she felt “sader than I thought”.
I think she would have liked his income, readership and fame, and he would have liked her critical reputation.
Donovan ends his excellent biography with the words: “Bennett never renounced a snobbish contempt for his family’s humble origins”.
He died of typhus at the age of 63. It sounds like suicide. Dorothy was stubborn. Marguerite was a nuisance. Bennett was a chronic insomniac himself, and his brief rest was ruined when “flatulence was a damn omen.” That was too many omelettes.
On a recent trip to France, Bennett intentionally drank tap water, knowing full well that it was contaminated. “He went to his bed, where he would remain while his infection became more acute.”