Arnold Bennett's Letters to his Nephcw Richard Bennet
The Public -Life
(Heinemann 40s. 6d.) = t 1.
This record of amazing energy, of dinners and cruises and casinos and Blue Trairis,fif a bfe`craitirad with public appear- antes and yet a life which found time in the small hours before the first engagement for' a literary production 41
enormous quantity,. , curiously, reminifcent of Jam fantasy of The Private Life. 1011 be remembe
was fascinated by his vision of Robert Browning, the din out, with his " loud, sound, normal, hearty presence, bristling with prompt responses and expected opinions and usual views," and his other personality !' who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wrote admirably deep and brave and intricate things." And for comparison there was another figure in the London of his time : " that most accomplished of artists and most dazzling of men 0 the world whose effect on the mind repeatedly inyited to appraiie him was to beget in it an image of representation and figuratiiii so exclusive of any possible inner self that, so far from there beiqg here a question of an alter ego, a double personality, there seem4d scarce a question of a real and single.one, scarce foothold or margixi for any private and domestic ego at all."
One must not press the comparison with Browning or Wilde too far, for Bennett was obviously a man of as much greater - honesty and human kindliness than the ...one as he was a much smaller writer than the other. His engaging vanity about his clothes (the shoes which cost five guineas a pair) and the hotels he stayed in, his sometimes rather absurd self-assurance (" I may say that I disgree with Einstein'ii theory of curved space"), were only aspects of his honesty: He may have led as public .a life as Wilde's, but he was not concerned, except in his superficial vanities, with the appear.; ance he made ; he spoke what he thought whether it might damage him in the eyes of the unsympathetic or not.
And unlike Browning's his public life had become his work : the huge hotels, the yachts, the wagon-lits, the company of millionaires and Cabinet Minister's theie were his,material. No writer has been more shaped by success genuinely shaded,; for the literary conscience which was nurtured on Flaubert never allowed him in his serious work to write for the sake of popularity. Popularity simply overtook him. For the public life was not his first material—at the time of The Old Wives' Tale—and he made one mysterious, because so unexpectedly successful, return, away from Lord . Raingc;,- to' the people for whom his sympathy had been deeper, sihO inbied his creative brain, perhaps because they belonged to 'his
• years, in a jar more poetic manner, in Riseyman Stops: In these letters, kindly, sympathetic, occasionally haish when he felt his nephew's conduct needed improving sbeially, we read between the accounts of dinner partieS and theatre pbrties of a few early morning visits to Clerkeb. : to " get the scene of Riceyman Steps took much less time than his exploration of the Savoy for Imperial Hotel, perhalis because it connected, as that excellent piece of documentari reporting did not, directly with hiS imaginative experience.
Usually the documentary eye served him only too well. Vivid descriptive informative writing came to him easily' Again and again the character of places springs admirably alive in Bennett's letters but Very seldom the character of peOPle; The documentary 'eye 'aas always vivid : at rehearsals—" The theatre is very large, 'very fine, and Verf cold.' A sort of Arctic hell " ; drivirig home after the restrained riot of the Olympia Circus—" we came home with the brougham full of hydrogen balloons, which necasionaliSr sw;epl out on their strings through the window into the infinite ether " ; noting the quality of the lemonade at a dabee hall ; recording that Lord Rothennere's house fad seVenteen bathrooms. He: had an urifilling inteiest for the scene,- and the scene in these letters is crammed Niith' prOPerties, but one has a curious sense that this kindly, holiest, lovable man was • its only living inhabitant, as if Popularity had robbed him of the only kind of peOple' he:really, deeply, knew. In 1980 he recorded with his usual inb-oee not and candid pleasure that the publication of his Jonrnal in the DagfrAtitA wits anulcing " a great stir " : -but one cannot help wondering where that stir was to be noticed, among the 'plane crashes and the unemployed suicides; a year's births and diaat i tae t Lerhays, LordG. Rninga s:
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