Sierra Prasada

What better marker of time’s turning than yesterday’s passage of the Olympic torch through the Potteries that Arnold Bennett immortalized in our next book, The Old Wives’ Tale?

Bennet’s family had been potters for hundreds of years, according to biographer Margaret Drabble and she had this to say about the Potteries in the early 1970s:

It can be said, plainly, that there are few regions more depressing to the eye than the Potteries today, and they must look considerably better now than they did a hundred years ago, before the concept of clean air had been dreamed of.

The industry that gave the Potteries its name, Charlotte Higgins writes in the Guardian, is “essentially a museum culture now.” Indeed, this year’s Olympic torch set off on Thursday from the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

There was no torch relay at the 1908 Olympic Games, also in London; as reported by the Daily Mail, the relay only became tradition at and after the Nazis’ 1936 Games. (Though the 1908 games did witness the establishment of the “entirely random” marathon distance.)

Regardless, this video imagines what the torch relay would have been like, had there been one, and had it run through Swansea in Wales.

Image: Daily Mail

The writer J.B. Priestley, literary heir to Arnold Bennett by way of geography and diversity of output, described The Old Wives’ Tale as having two “suffering heroines, Constance and Sophia Baines, and three conquering heroes, Time, Mutability and Death.”

One might alternatively say that Bennett’s classic historical novel has one protagonist, Life, and many handmaidens, the most prominent among them, the Baines sisters. If Constance (older, circumspect) and Sophia (ardent, proud) suffer deeply, it is because they are so vividly and fervently alive:

The girls could only press their noses against the window by kneeling on the counter, and this they were doing. Constance’s nose was snub, but agreeably so. Sophia had a fine Roman nose; she was a beautiful creature, beautiful and handsome at the same time. They were both of them rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, rogueish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise. Their ages were sixteen and fifteen; it is an epoch when, if one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months.

That particular illusion of youthful omniscience, though not the startlingly clear memory of it, had long since left Bennett when he sat down to write The Old Wives’ Tale in his 40th year, only shortly after he’d married. By that time, he already had a handful of published novels to his name, as well as reams of articles and stories, and a life rich with the irony he dispenses so liberally, yet with such compassion, in the tale itself.

The near-600 page novel opens in the 1860s and concludes in 1907, the year Bennett spent writing it. (Yes, you read that right, just one year, and in that same period he also wrote short stories, plays, a guide to literary taste, a profusion of articles and a short comic novel, Buried Alive.)

Bennett deeply admired Guy de Maupassant’s story of one woman’s life, Une Vie (1883), and he wanted to surpass it with his own. The Old Wives’ Tale may be one of the more neglected novels on the Modern Library‘s best of the 20th century list, but it’s there nonetheless.

The novel’s title, however, does little to recommend itself to contemporary readers. While accurate to the extent that the tale told is that of two wives growing old, it is no “foolish story” told by “garrulous old women” as the expression goes (despite a recent feminist intervention).

Bennett’s glimpse of such a woman in a Paris restaurant in the fall of 1903, however, did open his mind to the possibility of the novel, and to that inspiration the title holds true.

That evening, he saw an old woman made ridiculous by time and asked himself, as he recalls in the novel’s preface, what kind of young girl she might once have been when the “unique charm of youth” still hovered about “her form and movements and in her mind.”

Time as we know it only moves in one direction; age, and not youth, is the verb. But what, then, of that mutability of mind known as imagination that moves Bennett to run the clock backwards, to ask ‘what if’? Is it some other mutability altogether or the flipside of Priestley’s coin?

The Old Wives’ Tale, London: Chapman and Hall, 1908

27 May 1867:       Enoch Arnold Bennett born in Henley in the Potteries district of England

1876:                      His father Enoch finds a late calling in law, moves the family of six to a larger house

1883:                       At his father’s insistence, Arnold leaves school at age 16 to work for him

1888:                  … fails his law exam and shortly decamps for London to clerk for a law firm

1889:                  … enjoys talking French and books with fellow clerk and francophile John Eland

1893:                  … publishes his first good story, A Letter Home

1894:                  … becomes an asst. editor at periodical Woman (Motto: “Forward, but not too fast”)

1898:                  … publishes his first novel, about a failed novelist, A Man from the North

1886:                  … publishes the first in a series of “sensational novels” that will allow him to…

1900:                  … leaves his editorship to write fiction (and freelance journalism) full time

1901:                  … finishes writing his earliest “Potteries” novel, Anna of the Five Towns

1903:                  … goes abroad to live and write in Paris

1903-1931:       … writes many novels, plays and nonfiction books

1904:                 … writes his mother seven separate postcards on one memorable day (31 August)

1908:                 … publishes The Old Wives’ Tale

1911:                  … feted on a grand U.S. tour

1922:                  … separates from his French wife and falls in love with an English actress

1926:                  … begins celebrated Evening Standard books column, which he’ll write until his death

1927:                  … daughter Virginia born, later president of the Arnold Bennett Society

1931:                  … passes away at home after suffering from Typhoid fever

Image: Photograph by Pirie Macdonald, Versatile Photograph

One confession from Oliver Herford’s 1917 collection. Click on the image for more.

The best writers of the past are often conceived of as having anticipated the future, but most have preferred to put some distance between themselves and the inherent challenges of confronting either ‘tomorrow’ or ‘today.’ Writing is an act of reflection, and reflection requires the passage of time. Novels not explicitly conceived as futuristic or historical are most comfortably set in the writers’ immediate past, not to mention the past tense.

The novels in our developing canon routinely look backwards: The events of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1900) take place in the mid-1890s. Likewise, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) stalks the moor in 1889, and Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907) takes action in 1886.

Reaching into the past, however, is not the same as writing about it. Only Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale stands out as a bona fide, self-aware historical novel, one that doesn’t merely touch down like a butterfly at a short remove from the author’s present but consciously bridges the gap between 1862 and 1907 (the time of writing).

Bennett’s novel commits to a genuine engagement with the past and directly confronts the author’s present day, without losing sight of the immutability of human nature. (It is surely no accident that one sister’s name is Constance.)

Contemporary readers – today’s and tomorrow’s – can be sure that when Bennett mocks the 1860s’ residents of his “Five Towns” for their lack of foresight, he’s also mocking their 1907 counterparts:

Instead of being humble and ashamed they actually showed pride in their pitiful achievements. They ought to have looked forward meekly to the prodigious feats of posterity; but, having too little faith and too much conceit, they were content to look behind and make comparisons with the past. They did not foresee the miraculous generation which is us. A poor, blind, complacent people!

And aren’t we always the ‘miraculous generation’?

The most accomplished historical novelists, such as Bennett and Barry Unsworth, who passed away last week, reject this self-congratulatory myopia and they reveal to us the intimate ties that bind us with the past, the vital link between foresight and hindsight.

At first glance, Bennett’s Tale and Unsworth’s Pascali’s Island (1980) and The Rage of the Vulture (1982), appear to have little in common, but the plots of Unsworth’s novels play out in the year of the Tale’s publication. At the very least, the more recent novels widen the scope of our vision as to the world stage on which The Old Wives’ Tale made its debut.

Unsworth’s vision of 1908 is certainly less proximate than Bennett’s, but Unsworth has greater freedom than his predecessor to candidly discuss the foibles of human nature. All writing about the past is shaped by the constraints of the present, a specific geographical, cultural present.

In The Author’s Craft, a nonfiction book published in 1914, Bennett acknowledges that:

[N]o first-class English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental writers enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is admittedly wrong on this important point – hypocritcal, illogical and absurd. But what would you? You cannot defy it; you literally cannot. If you tried, you would not even get as far as print, to say nothing of library counters.

Hindsight, of course, encompasses more than just new freedom of expression. The title character and narrator of Pascali’s Island, a dedicated informant, longs to leave his island at the edge of the Ottoman Empire and go to Constantinople where he intends to gather together into a book the detailed reports he’s spent decades writing for Caliph Abdul Hamid II. He finds it almost impossible to conceive that after all this time – and the unceasing, regular arrival of his pay check – his reports have been neither read nor collected. It is the historian’s nightmare, and our own, to have fallen short of posterity, to mean nothing.

The informant can be viewed as a stand-in for the novelist, any novelist, who may or may not be rewarded for his message, no matter how wise or well-thought out.

Pascali is also the medium through which readers observe the period’s clash of earthshaking ideas and the tentative contact between our hindsight (what we think must have happened) and the characters’ foresight (what they think will and must happen), whether accurate or faulty:

“That is the big difference between our two countries,” Mister Bowles said. “Our policy, British policy, is shaped by ideals. We protested at the Armenian massacres, for instance. We lost trade as a result, of course. Germany said nothing… As a result, Germany got the Baghdad Railways concession,” he said.

Herr Gesing was smiling. “Ideals?” he said. “It was not about the massacres the English were protesting. It was the loss of the eight percent from the Ottoman Loan Company.”

“Nonsense,” Mister Bowles said. He was looking flushed.

“Listen to me. You must these moral categories transcend. We are moving toward the coming age. Like a great music. Like a symphony. You must hear all the music together. If not, you have only discords.”

Children bayoneted,” Mister Bowles said heatedly.

“That is discord.”

From How to Live on 24 Hours a Day:

You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly
and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four.

I am an impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them.

The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one’s self in one’s self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me
repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already “put by” about three-quarters of an hour for use.

Image: Wikipedia Commons.

Having first met Joseph Conrad “toward the end of the last century” at the house of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett recalled the older man in the pages of the Evening Standard, a few years after Conrad’s death:

Even then, from the way he talked, one could perceive at once and all the time that creative writing for him was not a literary pursuit, but a sanguinary war, in which victories were won at enormous cost. His working days were terrible. The most suitable epitaph for the artist in him would be that which Francis Adams wrote for his own life as a whole:

Bury me with clenched hands
And with eyes wide open
For in storm and struggle I lived,
And in struggle and storm I died.

Bennett met Conrad for the last time (probably in the early ’20s), again at the house of a mutual friend:

I had not seen him for some years, and for a few minutes he failed to recognise me. Then he suddenly came across the room to me and gripped my shoulders with both hands. His dark eyes were burning into mine, his broad shoulders shaking. “My dearrr Bennett,” he said, in his earnest formidable voice. “You have been my faithful friend for 25 years, and I do not recognise you! Forgive me.” Believe me, I was profoundly touched, and could scarcely speak to him.

“Some Personal Memories of Conrad: ‘Cad’ as a New Word: His ‘Twilight,’ ” 3 November 1927
Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years, London: Archon Books, 1974

An omelette named after an author? It sounds like a scene from one of Bennett’s “sensationals.”

Actually, it’s a longstanding dish (distinguished by the addition of smoked haddock, Parmesan cheese and cream) on the menu of London’s Savoy Hotel. As the story goes, the Savoy’s chefs first whipped up this frothy, fishy concoction when Bennett stayed there while writing Imperial Palace (1930).

It was the second of two Bennett novels set at the Savoy, preceded by The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902).

The Savoy honored their guest by bestowing his name upon an omelette he reportedly liked so much that he asked it to be prepared everywhere else he stayed.

Image: Screen shot from The Guardian; Jonathan Lovekin for The Observer

From The Author’s Craft:

On observation as a “moral act” and a novelist’s duty:

Observation endows our day and our street with the romantic charm of history and stimulates charity – not the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity which puts itself to the trouble of understanding.

On the geography of characters:

Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an explanation, of the human beings who live in it.

On the art of momentum:

All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of the past and are moving towards a future. But how often does our imagination put itself to the trouble of realising this? We may observe with some care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human individuals, but a popular race of beings who pass their whole lives in motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! No human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it back into its past and forward into its future. And this is the final process of observation of the individual.

On the need for disruptive ideas:

The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision is passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. He will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree.

On the reader’s judgement:

In proportion as the interest of the story is maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the plot is a bad one. There is no other criterion of good construction.

On literature and life:

No novelist has yet, or ever will, come within a hundred miles of life itself. It is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life…The notion that “naturalists” have at last lighted on a final formula which ensures truth to life is ridiculous. “Naturalist” is merely an epithet expressing self-satisfaction.

Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division via Vangobot
The Author’s Craft, London: George H. Doran Company, 1914

In a lecture delivered in 2009, the late historical novelists Barry Unsworth spoke about the “unbroken continuity” of the past – unbroken, but not undisrupted.

Unsworth first explains how his father, born to a mining village and a mining life, took up the trade at 12 years old. Seven years later, he broke away and left for the U.S. When he returned, he went into the insurance business. His father’s choice, Unsworth relates, “rescued my brother and me from that long chain of continuity, which was what happened in mining villages.”

In the same way, Arnold Bennett’s father Enoch rebuffed another multi-generational family industry (pottery) and qualified as a lawyer. Enoch, it turned out, blazed a trail for himself alone. Arnold, his eldest son, broke the chain of continuity once more when he failed his law exam and moved to London. The accelerating pace of innovation made the 20th Century ripe for such frequent disruptions. (To paraphrase another recently deceased author, one might call the immediate past continuing into the present an age of “wild rumpus.”)

Unsworth and Bennett each felt moved to meditate on the enigma of their own trajectories. Unsworth’s father died when he was young, leaving his son ignorant as to why he acted as he did. Bennett puzzled over whether or not he purposely failed the law exam, thus liberating himself from a career he didn’t want.

Hardly an idle question, why people do what they do, and Unsworth and Bennett both looked to the world beyond for answers – Bennett to the future for some justification and Unsworth to the past for reasonable explanations.

If there is any true, fixed border between the past and the future, it is marked by that transition between the young man casting his gaze forward and the older man looking back.

The Rage of the Vulture, Unsworth’s second novel set in 1908 Istanbul, presents both figures as natural observers: a young boy and his father, Henry and Robert Markham, the one with unglimpsed catastrophe in his future and the other, his character distorted by disaster already come and gone.

The novel’s title refers to the opening few lines of a poem penned by Lord Byron in 1813:

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime,
Where the rage of the culture, the love of the turtle
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?

No character entirely escapes comparison with the eponymous vulture – the brutal, desiccated Caliph, the last of the Ottomans; the encroaching powers waiting for the “sick man of Europe” to collapse; the Turks who massacred the Armenians in the mid-1890s; the protagonist who preys on his son’s governess; the son who spies on his parents; the visiting reporter more interested in the city’s exotic, superficial perfume than the stench of its enduring past; and so on.

The vultures of history interest Unsworth to a far greater degree than they do Bennett, who devotes the bulk of his pages to chronicling ordinary lives and the telling interactions within a particular social group, that of the Five Towns (actually six) where he grew up. Both authors spent much of their adult lives abroad, but Unsworth traveled more widely and Bennett seems to have felt the mental pull of home more strongly.

For Unsworth, individuals’ actions reflect and are shaped by the great forces of history. For Bennett, history is a backdrop, against which the same human drama plays out again and again even as the parade of ordinary occurrences takes on a contemporary hue.

One night, shortly after one of Bennett’s protagonists Constance marries, she makes a far deeper criticism of her husband than she intended and he responds with hurt and anger that “surprised him unawares.” The ensuing scene belongs to the perennial present:

Both of them suddenly saw that they were standing on the edge of a chasm and drew back. They had imagined themselves to be wandering safely in a flowered meadow and here was this bottomless chasm!

Bennett takes care to remind us that his characters are “not angels,” but the sins they’re capable of committing are, with a couple of exceptions, venial sins. Unsworth’s characters in The Rage of the Vulture, in contrast, are complicit in genuine horrors, and he wants to explore what it is that makes them so.

Nations, like institutions, have no true physical form beyond borders, buildings – themselves mere envelopes. The machinations of states emerge, in one way or another,from the inciting actions of smaller groups of “influencers,” vanguards that conflict and collude with one another; they either lead the charge or are pushed forward by the insurgent masses, depending on one’s perspective.

These vanguards consist of people for whom history has some tangible weight, such as Robert Markham, made sensitive to the currents of change by his profession (as an agent of the British crown) and his personal life, specifically, the murder of his Armenian fiancée 12 years earlier:

Change was in the air, he had felt it himself. Some sense of final impotence in the vast unwieldy bulk of the Ottoman state, or perhaps simply the undisguisable whiff of decay, was bringing dissident elements of all kinds back into the city. . . Vultures of democracy, Markham thought – he had little faith in the liberal principles they brought with them, not, at least, applied to a medieval theocracy like Turkey. But they were coming back, so much was certain; coming with false identities after years of exile in remote corners of the Sultan’s possessions; coming by train, tourist boat, tramp steamer, fishing caique; coming in a variety of disguises, the turban of the priest, the leather apron of the stevedore, the Albanian fustanella, or the rags of the wandering dervishes. And the word ‘Constitution,’ banned for thirty years by the palace censors, was in circulation among them, slogan and political programme in one . . .

Bennett’s characters not only do not sense this change in the air – change they are decidedly part of – they mostly shut their eyes to it. Sometimes they actively rebel against it.

The two visions are ultimately complementary. In reality, we go back and forth between these two roles, actively participating in one kind of progress even as we dig in our heels at another. Outside of our individual capacity for evolution, the sensibilities of our own time are at once the lifeline to which we cling and the shackles that even Houdini couldn’t break.

The Rage of the Vulture, London: Granada (now Harper Collins), 1982