The Old Wives' Tale Read online

  THE

  OLD WIVES’

  TALE

  ARNOLD BENNETT

  THE

  OLD WIVES’

  TALE

  Introduction by Francine Prose

  T H E M O D E R N L I B R A R Y

  N E W Y O R K

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY FRANCINE PROSE

  COMMENTARY

  PREFACE

  BOOK ONE: MRS BAINES

  1. The Square

  2. The Tooth

  3. A Battle

  4. Elephant

  5. The Traveller

  6. Escapade

  7. A Defeat

  BOOK TWO: CONSTANCE

  1. Revolution

  2. Christmas and the Future

  3. Cyril

  4. Crime

  5. Another Crime

  6. The Widow

  7. Bricks and Mortar

  8. The Proudest Mother

  BOOK THREE: SOPHIA

  1. The Elopement

  2. Supper

  3. An Ambition Satisfied

  4. A Crisis for Gerald

  5. Fever

  6. The Siege

  7. Success

  BOOK FOUR: WHAT LIFE IS

  1. Frensham’s

  2. The Meeting

  3. Towards Hotel Life

  4. End of Sophia

  5. End of Constance

  Copyright

  About The Modern Library

  The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.

  ARNOLD BENNETT

  Arnold Bennett, a versatile and prolific writer who was one of the luminaries of the London literary scene during the early twentieth century, was born on May 27, 1867. He grew up in the environs of Hanley, Staffordshire, one of the Midlands pottery towns that later served as a backdrop for his celebrated Five Towns novels. The son of a solicitor, Bennett received a secondary education but was forced to leave school at the age of sixteen to clerk in his father’s firm. Having twice failed his legal examinations, Bennett escaped to London in 1889 to work in law offices, only to realize that he possessed three qualities that would well serve him as a writer. He listed them: “First an omnivorous and tenacious memory—the kind of memory that remembers how much London spends per day in cab fares just as easily as the order of Shakespeare’s plays or the stock anecdotes of Shelley and Byron. Second, a naturally sound taste in literature. And third, the invaluable, despicable, disingenuous journalistic faculty of seeming to know much more than one does know.”

  Gradually drawn into literary and artistic circles, Bennett abandoned the law in 1894 and secured an editorial position with the weekly magazine Woman. The following year his story “A Letter Home” appeared in the fashionable Yellow Book, and he soon brought out an autobiographical first novel, A Man from the North (1898). In 1902 Bennett completed two highly popular works: The Grand Babylon Hotel, one of his many sensational “fantasias” on modern themes, and Anna of the Five Towns, a brilliantly detailed chronicle of life in the Potteries of his boyhood that was inspired by Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. But the appearance of The Truth About an Author (1903), a lighthearted memoir, briefly tarnished his image because it emphasized the commercial aspects of authorship, depicting Bennett as a writer engaged solely in the “manufacture of a dazzling reputation.”

  In 1903 Bennett resettled in Paris, where he lived for much of the next decade. He continued his examination of provincial mores in countless short stories subsequently collected in Tales of the Five Towns (1905), The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (1907), and The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories (1912). Bennett scored a triumphant success in 1908 with the publication of The Old Wives’ Tale, a masterful portrayal of English provincial life that rivals the meticulously crafted novels of Flaubert and other French realists. “It at least doubles your size in my estimation,” remarked H. G. Wells. “I am certain it will secure you the respect of all the distinguished critics.” And Somerset Maugham later observed: “I was astounded to discover that The Old Wives’ Tale was a great book. I was thrilled. I was enchanted. I was deeply impressed.”

  Bennett quickly enhanced his renown with the Clayhanger trilogy, a saga of the Five Towns which comprises Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1916). The three novels were reissued in one volume as The Clayhanger Family in 1925. He also turned out Buried Alive (1908), a satire poking fun at the excesses of modern life; How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day (1908), the most popular of his several “pocket philosophies”; and The Card (1911), the lighthearted tale of a rogue whose every bad deed turns to gold. In addition he enjoyed considerable theatrical success in London with the plays Milestones ( 1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).

  Bennett’s prominence declined temporarily following World War I owing to the appearance of such novels as The Lion’s Share (1916), The Pretty Lady (1918), The Roll Call (1918), Mr. Prohack (1922), and Lilian (1922). Yet he experienced a resurgence of popularity with Riceyman Steps (1923), a dark, Dostoyevskian tale praised by Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy, among others, and Lord Raingo (1926), an ambitious political novel based on the wartime dealings of his influential friend Lord Beaverbrook. As Bennett himself reflected: “I have written between seventy and eighty books. But I have also written only four: The Old Wives’ Tale, The Card, Clayhanger, and Riceyman Steps.” In 1926 he began contributing a weekly book review, “Books and Persons,” to the London Evening Standard. His final novel, Imperial Palace, came out in 1930.

  Arnold Bennett died in London of typhoid fever on March 27, 1931. At the time of his death Sinclair Lewis deemed Bennett “one of the really great novelists,” and H. L. Mencken reflected: “At his best Bennett was clearly entitled to rank among the half dozen most important English novelists of his time. His two principal works, The Old Wives’ Tale and Clayhanger, are little short of masterpieces.” Critic Carl Van Doren concurred: “Arnold Bennett brought into English fiction a range of realism which it had never had before, particularly as concerned with English provincial life. ‘The Five Towns’ of Arnold Bennett must long remain among the famous territories of the British imagination.” The Journal of Arnold Bennett, a fascinating account of his life and times, was issued posthumously in three volumes beginning in 1932.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Francine Prose

  The Old Wives’ Tale begins in a manner so arresting and bizarre that we may find ourselves wondering why our friends haven’t been calling up and insisting that we read it. What makes the first sections so riveting are the tantalizing glimpses of antic, subversive id peeking from behind the sturdy superego of the Victorian literary man whose stated ambition was to create a British equivalent of the French realistic novel, of Balzac or Zola. Then the fog of obsession clears, and slowly the novel changes, offering us the pleasure of watching it evolve into something larger and greater even than its creator intended.

  If Arnold Bennett’s preface dizzies the modern sensibility, it’s not so much because of the vertiginous gap between the social behavior he d
escribes and what we intuit would be permissible today, but because of the more unsettling chasm between the lines of the text—the near-schizophrenic divide between the writer’s language and what he claims to be doing.

  In 1903, four years before Bennett wrote the novel, he was, he tells us, living in Paris and used to dine at a restaurant where, one evening, the Muse made her appearance, disguised as a repulsive old hag:

  She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels, which she kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her. . . .

  I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: “The woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heart-rending novel out of the history of a woman such as she.” Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque—far from it!—but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. . . .

  It was at this instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became The Old Wives’ Tale. Of course I felt that the woman who caused the ignoble mirth in the restaurant would not serve me as a type of heroine. For she was much too old and obviously unsympathetic. . . . I knew that I must choose the sort of woman who would pass unnoticed in a crowd.

  How rare and fortunate the reader who can finish this passage without flinging down the novel and racing off to her mirror or her bathroom scale! And how difficult to think of another example, in literature, that combines such clinical cruelty with such earnest protestations of sympathy and compassion! What are we to expect from the novel that Bennett is proposing, one that must—we assume—be written from the perspective of the heroine who may not, after all, agree with the writer that the natural effects of age and time are necessarily, in her case, a tragedy, an occasion of extreme pathos?

  And what are we to conclude when the novel itself starts out with a statement that will, early on, reveal itself to be either a lie or pure irony or the author’s miscalculation? “Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious.” Soon enough, it will become painfully clear that the Baines sisters could hardly be more conscious of their situation, but for now the narrative has license to leave them to their ignorant bliss and head into a leisurely, Balzacian (think of the opening of Eugénie Grandet) description of their region, of the topology of the surrounding countryside, and of the Five Towns, the indispensable manufacturers of pottery for all of England, that form the setting for a number of Bennett’s novels. (“You cannot drink tea out of a teacup without the aid of the Five Towns.”) Those grim settlements purchased their livelihood by sacrificing natural beauty for “an architecture of ovens and chimneys,” an atmosphere “black as its mud”; “for this it burns and smokes all night, so that Longshaw has been compared to hell.”

  In the heart of this inferno (which our heroines are said not to notice) is the town square, on which the Baines girls’ invalid father has a moderately prosperous dry goods shop. Shortly after the novel opens, the teenage girls—“both of them rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood”—are distracted from their idle entertainments by the groans of a certain Mr. Samuel Povey, their father’s loyal assistant, a timid young man afraid of dentists and suffering from a toothache. Obligingly, the sisters produce some laudanum from the medicine chest, and when the patient passes out under its influence, Sophia, the younger and more daring sister, grabs a pair of pliers and pulls Mr. Povey’s tooth. He awakes in time for tea—cockles and mussels—and when he suddenly cries out that he’s lost his tooth in a mussel, it turns out that Sophia has pulled the wrong tooth. Later that night, when the girls retire to bed, Constance learns that Sophia has saved the extracted tooth. A struggle over the ownership of the molar ensues.

  It was a battle suddenly engaged in the bedroom. The atmosphere had altered completely with the swiftness of magic. The beauty of Sophia, the angelic tenderness of Constance, and the youthful, naïve, innocent charm of both of them, were transformed into something sinister and cruel. . . . They could hear the gas singing over the dressing-table, and their hearts beating the blood wildly in their veins. They ceased to be young without growing old; the eternal had leapt up in them from its sleep.

  Eventually Constance steals the tooth and throws it out the window. I will not be giving too much of the plot away when I say that Constance will wind up married to the recovered Mr. Povey, who, as far as we know, never learns that he was the subject of his sister-in-law’s experiment in dentistry.

  What an intensely peculiar series of events, a scene that could hardly have been written just a few years later when the growing popularity of the ideas of Sigmund Freud would have lent the characters’ actions—this rendering of innocent, coltish young girls at war and play—a simultaneously hilarious and pathological subtext! Readers of later generations may sense the anxiety only partly concealed by Bennett’s paean to the power of young women: “The heart of a young girl mysteriously speaks and tells her of her power long ere she can use her power. If she can find nothing else to subdue, you may catch her in the early years subduing a gate-post or drawing homage from an empty chair.” And what a fitting beginning to a novel that seems at first like a Chekovian tragicomedy (or a William Trevor story) of blighted small-town hopes and dreams, but one in which many of the characters appear to be suffering from varyingly severe cases of inappropriate affect.

  So much, in these early chapters, is tinged with the surreal—particularly the ways in which one event leads to other seemingly logical or inevitable sequences of incidents that could hardly be more peculiar and that continue to resonate as slightly off notes thrumming just beneath the surface of the novel. Thus Sophia’s first meeting with Gerald Scales—the roguish, attractive traveling salesman who will change her life forever—takes place in her father’s shop, which has been left almost empty because everyone in town (including the Baines family) has gone off to inspect the corpse of the circus elephant recently shot for killing its attendant. (Public executions will figure largely in the novel—the death-by-guillotine that Sophia and Gerald witness in France is perhaps the book’s most brilliant and beautifully orchestrated scene—and the ghost of the dead elephant will reappear in the “undescribed soup” that Sophia is served by the proud restaurant owner who has procured the carcasses of zoo animals from the Jardin des Plantes to feed his hungry customers during the Siege of Paris.)

  Just a few minutes of harmless flirtation is all it takes for Sophia, entranced by the captivating Mr. Scales, to forget her invalid father, a lapse for which she is swiftly and harshly punished. During those moments, the paralyzed Mr. Baines half slips off his bed and dies, a loss that gives rise to a highly unusual mixture of low comedy and high drama: “His face, neck, and hands were dark and congested; his mouth was open, and the tongue protruded between the black, swollen, mucous lips. . . . After having been unceasingly watched for fourteen years, he had, with an invalid’s natural perverseness, taken advantage of Sophia’s brief dereliction to expire. Say what you will, amid Sophia’s horror, and her terrible grief and shame, she had visitings of the idea: he did it on purpose!”

  Guilt subdues the “forbidding, difficult, waspish, and even hedge-hog” Sophia, but not, as it happens, for long. The watchful Mrs. Baines (“for mothers, despite their reputation to the contrary, really are the blindest creatures”) fails to notice the signs of Sophia’s dee
pening involvement with Gerald Scales, and eventually Sophia elopes with the commercial traveller, first to London, then Paris. Constance, the more passive sister, remains at home in the Five Towns and marries (happily) Samuel Povey. Together, they run the dry goods shop, making occasional changes and modifications to keep up with fashion and the times—it being understood that time moves slowly in the Five Towns, and fashion arrives only belatedly—and raise their son, the emotionally distant and larcenous Cyril. (Like public execution, hot-air balloon travel, and the violent death of elephants, petty theft and deception are subthemes that recur throughout the book.)

  And so the Baines sisters’ destinies take off in opposite directions. The novel divides to follow them down their divergent paths, and in the process greatly expands its scope and breadth and depth. Throughout, we continue to feel Bennett’s attempts to adhere to the initial idea that swept into that restaurant with that disorderly woman—an effort we may find ourselves wishing he’d abandoned, since the repeated references to ugly old women frequently make the ruinous effects of age and time seem less like a tragedy than like a punishment for some unspecified misdemeanor—“the crime of being over forty, fat, creased, and worn out.” Indeed, it’s the felony, aggravated by alcoholism, for which one of the novel’s minor characters (the wife of Samuel Povey’s cousin) must pay the ultimate penalty: she is murdered by her husband. “She was vile. Her scanty yellow-grey hair was dirty, her hollowed neck all grime, her hands abominable, her black dress in decay. She was the dishonour of her sex, her situation, and her years. . . . [Samuel] remembered when, years after their marriage, she was still as pretty, artificial, coquettish, and adamantine in her caprices as a young harlot with a fool at her feet. Time and the slow wrath of God had changed her.”