Prime, Pure and Just

By Martha Duffy

ARNOLD BENNETT by MARGARET DRABBLE 396 pages. Knopf. $10.

"Quotidian" was one of Arnold Bennett's favorite words. Dailiness was his mania. The best of his realistic novels about hard life in North Staffordshire are triumphant patchworks of detail about people who worked in the fields or the potteries, their habits, routes and involuntary timetables. In his own life, even when he was a millionaire Edwardian novelist with a yacht and country houses, he wrote as many as 5,000 words virtually every day. The total result is practically incalculable. Margaret Drabble lists 84 "major" works--mostly novels and plays--but beyond that there are diaries, frivolities, criticism and endless journalism.

To put it kindly, Bennett is not fashionable any more. The Old Wives' Tale, perhaps his best novel, is one of the few that are read at all. It is possible that he would accept this near obliteration. He was always insistent that he wrote for the day and did not understand colleagues who were employed by "posterity." Although he knew his full worth in terms of a publisher's contract, he was a modest, self-effacing man who never forgot his roots or upgraded his accent. He was born in 1867 in Burslem, one of the "Five Towns" in the industrial north of England from which he drew almost all his best material. His family had just struggled out of the potteries to a tenuous hold in the middle class. Arnold was an insatiably self-educating fellow. When he left home for London at 21, he had mastered shorthand, made a start on French and begun reading any "masterpiece" whose existence he had discovered. He clerked in London for several years, gradually making his way into the bourgeois musicale-and-reading set in Chelsea. His new friends had to coax him to try writing.

Once started, he swiftly became editor of a magazine called Women, turning out stories and articles on such subjects as "Do Rich Women Quarrel More Frequently than Poor?" as well as a column signed "Barbara." But one journal could not contain him; Bennett had realized that he could write anything. Within a few years it was a critical commonplace to grade his output: Prime Bennett (literature), Pure Bennett (for fiction lovers), and Just Bennett (for those who read anything).

Pure Bennett and Just Bennett were often eager, free fantasies based on the luxuries he was increasingly able to buy. He loved yachts and grand hotels. Two of his greatest bestsellers, Grand Babylon Hotel and Imperial Palace, are phantasmagorias crowded with counts and chandeliers. To the connoisseur of popular fiction they are still texts; Arthur Hailey, for one, admits to studying them for his own whopper, Hotel.

Prime Bennett titles--The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, These Twain--are among the best realistic English novels. Bennett's angle of view into working people's lives never needed correction. His characters are so authentic that they withstand criticism.

Shopkeeper's View. Few first-rank writers have attracted the scorn that Bennett did. Henry James said that Bennett had squeezed his beloved towns like a vast orange. D.H. Lawrence, with more justification, called him "an old imitator." Virginia Woolf complained that she could not bear the detail that he lavished on his characters, and thought he had "a shopkeeper's view" of literature.

The sad thing, as this literary biography points out, is that Bennett was generous with other writers. He praised Proust, Joyce and Lawrence, and chided London audiences for walking out on The Cherry Orchard. He virtually introduced Dostoyevsky to Britain because he had read his novels in French. As for Mrs. Woolf, he made a few rejoinders but concluded: "She is the queen of the highbrows; and I am a lowbrow."

It is this unpretentious, large-minded quality that English Novelist Drabble clearly loves about Bennett. She says early on that she was "profoundly affected by his attitudes," particularly in her second novel, Jerusalem the Golden, about a small-town girl discovering sophistication. She is good at describing Bennett's shyness and his troubles with women. He married once, but was happy domestically only toward the end of his life with an actress who took his name and bore him a child when he was 60. But the evidence is that Bennett was worldlier and had more fun out of life than it would appear in these pages.

Drabble's Bennett is the Five Towns man, and she is curiously reluctant to let him escape that landscape. Biographically speaking, that is a loss for the reader, but in literary terms she has chosen the best part.

Martha Duffy

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