Books: The Author as Character

WRITER BY TRADE: A PORTRAIT OF ARNOLD BENNETT by Dudley Barker. 260 pages. Atheneum. $6.50.

At the time of his death at 63 in 1931, Arnold Bennett was the ruler of Britain’s literary roost. He was not only the author of 70-odd volumes of novels, plays and other assorted pieces, but the one literary critic in London whose Olympian deliberations (in the London Evening Standard) were regarded as absolute gospel.

Whether Bennett himself was a good or bad writer was a judgment that his sometimes awed, often contemptuous contemporaries were never able to make. Partly it was because his physical presence was so overwhelming. He was a strutting cockatoo of a man, resplendently tailored, grey hair swept up into a crest, wit as sharp as a honed spur, manner as crude as a clod. Fascinated by the combination of the baroque and the bumptious of the man, Rebecca West once wondered if it would not be better to judge Bennett as a character rather than an author. “He could not be compared properly with Fielding, or Dickens, or Balzac,” she said, “but he could be compared with Squire Western, or Mr. Micawber, or Lucien de Rubempre.” The posthumous publication of parts of his own remarkable million-word Journal, moreover, only added to the popular caricature of him as a fop, a snob, and a frightened little poseur hiding behind bombast and a vulgar cocksureness.

Slum Child. But the author of Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives’ Tale, the Clayhanger trilogy and Ricey-man Steps was also a superb storyteller and a literary innovator, a Dickens shorn of romanticism. By imposing on the sentimental Edwardian fabric the realistic techniques he had absorbed from such French masters as Goncourt, Flaubert, Maupassant and Turgenev (whom he insisted on calling French because it was in that language that he read him), Bennett became the first popular novelist of his time to tell of the actual lives of recognizable people in words that ordinary readers could understand. This was not a happy accident. Beneath the fop, as British Biographer Dudley Barker shows, was a dedicated and gifted literary craftsman. He wanted to write good books, and make money —in that order—and he forever respected and tried to improve his art. As a young writer, he set himself the task of producing 1,000 words a day, and for most of his 40 productive years he somehow managed to maintain that rate.

Bennett was a child of the Midland slums, the son of a domineering and ambitious pawnbroker father who eventually became a fairly prosperous solicitor. Handicapped by a stammer that in childhood made him jerk epileptically and bite the air, he grew up painfully shy and covered his shyness with the show-off’s mantle. He was as frugal as a ragpicker, carefully kept a record of each shilling tip, constantly worried about money.

Master Nagger. Although he married at 39, and lived with his wife for 15 years, Bennett was neither a happy husband nor a good one. Compulsively punctual, always suffering torments from a variety of ailments from neuralgia to colic, he begrudged every moment spent away from his work. He was a master nagger; once, when his wife moved the piano in the living room by a few inches, he wrote her a four-page letter of reprimand.

Eventually, Bennett and his wife separated. During the last eight years of his life he lived with a young actress named Dorothy Cheston, who bore him a daughter. Although he seemed to find a special glory in the notoriety of having a mistress, his life with her was otherwise as proper and well-regulated as any conventional marriage. Dorothy was with Bennett as he lay dying in his London flat. Clasping her hand, he muttered, “Everything’s going wrong.”