She filched from him his good name
The post — which in our part of Clapham arrives in the early afternoon, as if its delivery involved a lame horse cross- ing a rope bridge swaying above a fathom- less canyon on whose other side a tiger stands swishing its tail — has brought news from a former pupil, now reading English at one of what used to be called 'the Two Universities'. He has revived the moribund college literary society and wonders if I can suggest a motto for it. The letter, I note sardonically, is resonant with the absence of any invitation to address the undergrad- uate cenacle, but he has another favour to ask. In their magazine (may it stretch to rather more issues than the Germ and the Eton Candle) they want to 'reappraise the 20th-century scene', a phrase whose sloppy grandiosity has me shaking my head in suit- ably 'A youth, youth!' fashion. Would I be kind enough to name a writer whom mod- ern critical orthodoxy has prevented from achieving classic status? Having devoted several columns in this paper to doing exactly that, as a sort of `burker' or 'resurrection man' of literary cadavers, I can think of nothing easier. The motto as a result clicks neatly into place as Cassio's 'Reputation, reputation, reputa- tion!' from Othello. Hard on its heels comes the most obvious example of an author whose grave was dug for him, at the close of a successful career, with the lethal implements of self-righteous good taste and polite contempt. He had lived not always wisely but certainly too well, with his yachts and Rolls-Royces, gourmet dinners and French paintings, and there was a cer- tain vulgarly ironic appropriateness to be found in the fact that he died from drink- ing tainted tap-water in a smart Parisian hotel. `Ce n'est pas sage, monsieur,' com- mented the waiter as he watched the port- ly, moustachioed Englishman reaching for the carafe. Some might say, however, that in the case of Arnold Bennett the damage had been done already. Micro-organisms in the end were less lethal to him than the pen of Virginia Woolf. In what proved to be one of the most effective demolitions in the annals of criti- cism, she had wielded her cyanide stylus in a lecture given at Cambridge in 1924 enti- tled 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'. Her demolition technique was superficially ladylike, a word nobody uses nowadays and which, applied to the High Priestess of Modernism, seems positively sacrilegious. The sound here is that of the velvet glove being peeled, with a great deal of alacrity posing as good-mannered reluctance, from the steeliest of fingers, between which the wretched author of Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide and Literary Taste: How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (not to speak of Hilda Lessways and Anna of the Five Towns) is then ground into match- wood — or, to use the choice West Country expression, 'to flibbets' — for the crime of insisting that character alone is the source of good novel-writing, 'We are trembling,' declares Woolf, 'on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature', one which, by implication, does not include a writer who can spend so much time describing a dressing table, a washing line or the view from a bedroom window in the Potteries.
Unless self-referentially, she was mistak- en in her prophecy. Readers might tremble until the cows came home before the 1920s produced anything like the excitement and originality of English literary culture in the decade leading to the first world war. Her attack, nevertheless, effectively dished poor Bennett, as he seems to have realised. His reputation never recovered, and the obitu- arists further put the boot in by suggesting that his genius had been compromised by technical facility and by overmuch devotion to material comforts. He swiftly became the writer who had had an omelette named after him and had remarked that Lord Beaverbrook wore second-rate pyjamas.
The reading public, as Bennett per- ceived, was all too ready to label him low- brow or at best middle-market, while Virginia's work became the ne plus ultra of fiction considered as a contemporary art form. Were the pair of them in fact, what- ever her eagerness to distance herself as a pioneer modernist from stuffy old Bennett the Edwardian with his spats and watch- chain, so very different in aim, sensibility or even method? Bennett's idea of things as gifted with a positively human eloquence, a chair with a fat woman sitting on it, a suit- case being loaded onto a train, the creases in a poor boy's trousers, nods as much in the direction of Mrs Ramsay's famous boeuf-en-daube, or the mark on the wall in Woolf's eponymous essay, as towards the Zola and Balzac he devoured as a young. man. The quirky prose style parodied with such cruel effectiveness by Max Beerbohm, offered more than a hint or two of the sibyl of stream-of-consciousness:
And she existed yet. On a spot of earth's sur- face entitled Brighton, which he could locate upon a map, she existed: a widow in difficul- ty, keeping a boarding house. She ate, slept, struggled; she brushed her hair. He could see her brushing her hair. And she was 34 — was it?
Why shouldn't there be room for both writ- ers? Woolf's status is now inviolate, bol- stered • ironically by the embarrassing display of Bloomsbury's manifold inade- quacies currently on show at the Tate. Ben- nett meanwhile is seen as, at best, an over-productive avatar of J. B. Priestley and John Braine, the originator of provin- cial stereotypes paraded before us in Coro- nation Street. Yet half a dozen of his best books seem to me not merely to challenge Woolf's achievement in terms of workman- ship and effects but to embrace a strain of humanity which lies so far beyond her com- prehension as to reduce the issue between them to that most banal of questions: what do we want the novel to do for us?
Nothing in The Waves or Mrs Dalloway, much as I admire them, moves me half so deeply as those story endings of which Ben- nett was a complete master. In the old dog Fossette's return to her dinner at the close of The Old Wives' Tale, in Elsie's heroic exit from Clerkenwell with Joe and the grip bag in Riceyman Steps or in the flawlessly judged rhythm of Clayhanger's final sen- tence, 'He braced himself to the exquisite burden of life', the sense of wresting some- thing of value from failure, compromise and humiliation gives each book, for all its messier narrative intervals and rhetorical tricksiness, a quality close to epic in the elemental notion of a triumph over mortal- ity. Soon after Woolf's suicide in 1941 my grandmother heard two women on a train discussing the tragedy. 'She couldn't have been a very nice lady', pronounced one of them, 'to have gone and done a thing like that.' Perhaps being a nice man was Ben- nett's greatest misfortune. Popular wisdom decrees that old pussycats don't make great writers. I can't see the resuscitated college literary society licking its chops at the thought of Clarice of the Autumn Concerts or The Death of Simon Fuge, superb as each may be. The Staffordshire stammerer goes on awaiting his readers.
Jonathan Keates
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