Some weeks ago, in the course of a sneering review for the Independent on Sunday of Sophie Dahl’s new TV cookery show, Tim Walker (of whom I’d never previously heard) complained that ’[Dahl's] first recipe, the Arnold Bennett omelette, was originally concocted by an otherwise unremarkable mid-20th century novelist.’ Excuse me?
Two points of detail may quickly be dispatched. Said omelette was named after, not concocted by, Bennett by chefs at the Savoy Hotel in London; and a life that spanned the period 1867-1931 does not qualify Bennett to be a ‘mid-20th century novelist’. More annoying than these careless factual errors, though, is the dismissal of Bennett as ‘unremarkable’ – a judgment clearly not shared by such august figures as Margaret Drabble, an enthusiastic biographer of Bennett, and the literary critic John Carey, who lauds Bennett for refusing to observe any distinction between the cultural tastes of the ‘masses’ and those of soi-disant intellectuals/smart alecs (see where I’m going with this)? So, Tim, even if you couldn’t be bothered to read any of Bennett’s novels (which usually feature unfashionable people living in unfashionable places but are far from ‘unremarkable’) a bit of basic fact-checking would have helped you to appreciate that Bennett was and is best known not for eggy cuisine but for edgy realism. He honed the skills necessary to deliver the latter by working as a popular journalist (including time spent as editor of the weekly journal Woman in the 1890s and, in his later years, as regular book reviewer for the London Evening Standard). He was an essayist and playwright as well as producing some 30 novels, beginning with A Man from the North (1898).
But perhaps I am being too hard on Tim, for Bennett is one of those ‘provincial’ British authors who have never quite made it into the first rank of the Eng. Lit. canon. During his life, and for some decades afterwards, he was rather despised by some of his younger peers for his supposed ‘materialism’, an accusation that seems to have originated in an extended literary spat with Bennett that was initiated by Virginia Woolf in the early 1920s. Woolf, I think, objected to the pragmatic diegesis deployed in the novels rather than the commercial nous of Bennett himself but, as Margaret Drabble illustrates, his most trenchant critics included some of the more snobbish (and most politically compromised) figures of the inter-war literary scene – DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis – who satirised the author’s own wealth and ‘vulgarity’. The disdain of this disreputable bunch appears to have cast a long shadow, for the literati have never quite ‘got’ Bennett. A film adaptation of The Card (starring Alec Guiness) was made in the early 1950s and during the same decade the Arnold Bennett Society was re-formed and continues to thrive. But it has been left largely to cultural brokers in his birthplace, the Potteries, with which he had a very ambivalent personal and literary relationship, to celebrate Bennett’s extraordinary depictions of life (especially life for women) in industrial towns in the north of England. In particular, from the late 1960s, Joyce Holliday (Cheeseman as was) and Peter Cheeseman revived interest in Bennett by dramatising and staging some of the novels at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent as part of their mission to represent and perform the local. Because of the wider cultural influence of Holliday and Cheeseman, this eventually resulted in further adaptation of some of the novels for radio and television, but it also left a legacy for local curators, for curriculum design in neighbouring universities and, more recently, for town planning (intriguingly, a new ‘portable’ statue of Bennett is being produced as a regeneration initiative for Burslem, one of the Potteries’ six – not five – towns).
Bennett would no doubt have been amused by the thought that he might contribute to the economic value of his birthplace by stimulating cultural tourism, but he was a cosmopolitan figure during his lifetime and he managed to cultivate a presence in London and in continental Europe that ensured that, while he might not be regarded by the intelligentsia as quite the thing, he had sufficient influence among members of the wider British establishment to ensure that his work was unlikely ever to become obscure. (He was, for example, a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, for whom he had worked as a propagandist at the Ministry of Information during World War I.) The same cannot be said of another author, Gwyn Thomas (1913-1981), who spent most of his life in south Wales.
I came across one of Thomas’s novels, A Frost on My Frolic (published 1953), quite by chance after I followed up a reference to cinema-going in south Wales in the 1930s that I thought might illuminate a research project that I’m writing up. Instead of simply looking up the relevant comments, I became hooked and read the whole novel. It is set in the south Wales town of ‘Myndd Coch’ during World War Two: because of the war, the town is in remission from the depression that had devastated it for the previous twenty years. Like Bennett, Thomas puts the social and, most interestingly, the psychological, consequences of local economics at the heart of his story. Like Bennett, too, he illuminates the role that methodist religions (there were several variants) had played in dividing communities and unsettling individuals – although, unlike Bennett, he counterposes the superstition and neuroses associated with religion with the rationalism of socialism. He also seems, at least on the basis of A Frost on My Frolic, to lack Bennett’s empathy with women’s experience of such conditions: the depictions of the very few female characters in the novel are either maudlin or verging on misogynistic – but, despite this, the novel fascinated me enough to find out more about Thomas and to read more of his work.
I’ve managed to get hold of a couple more of the novels: The Dark Philosophers (first published 1946) and The Alone to the Alone (first published 1947). Both of these have been reprinted in the rather fine Library of Wales paperback series, which has been funded by the Welsh Assembly Government as an unashamed exercise in cultural nation-building. I find any variant of nationalism – even when it is self-consciously progressive – disturbing, and I regret that this fine writer can only be revived as a tool of literary canon construction rather than as a celebration of fine writing about a closely observed locale; on the other hand, I’m now engrossed in The Alone to the Alone and I suppose that I might not have been able to read it without the good offices of the Library of Wales.
So if not as part of a national literary canon, how should we revive ‘unremarkable’ authors? And does anyone have any suggestions for forgotten ‘provincial’ novels that should be brought out for an airing?
