The Old Wives' Tale Read online

  But as so often happens, time and history and the demands of fiction refuse to follow the writer’s somewhat more limited plans. As the novel moves forward, the characters of Constance and especially of Sophia grow more multifaceted, complex; they become more compelling to the reader and, we feel, to Bennett; in fact, the least interesting thing about them is the unfriendly mischief that age is working on their faces and their bodies. Even as Sophia’s marriage founders, and as she rejects the advances of her husband’s friend Chirac, we see another sort of romance blooming before our eyes—the sort of literary love affair that occasionally transpires between a writer and a character in a novel, between Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, Flaubert and Emma Bovary, and here, between Arnold Bennett and Sophia Baines.

  Tracking Sophia’s development from a more or less innocent bride to a competent, self-activated, and independent woman, Bennett keeps enlarging his canvas, broadening his range, as if to accommodate the growing spiritual dimensions of its central figure. The novel’s extraordinary set pieces—the execution in Auxerre, the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune, Chirac’s ill-fated attempt to escape Paris in a balloon—are fascinating not only in themselves but because Sophia is experiencing them and learning, perpetually learning. Before we quite know it, the novel has changed from a portrait of the pettinesses and discontents of small-town existence into an astonishing bildungs-roman charting the education of a modern woman.

  Everything is a revelation to Sophia, who intercedes between us and the more disorienting aspects of a foreign culture, the “casualness” and “extraordinary lightness” with which Gerald and his French acquaintances arrange their affairs, the coarse bloody-mindedness of the capital punishment buffs who have made a pilgrimage (along with Sophia and Gerald and Chirac) to see the prisoner guillotined at Auxerre, and who are staying at a hotel on the square where the event is to occur:

  Some of the people there made a practice of attending every execution. . . . There was a woman who could recall the dying words of all the victims of justice for twenty years past. The table roared with hysteric laughter at one of the woman’s anecdotes. . . . How a criminal had said to the priest who was good-naturedly trying to screen the sight of the guillotine from him with his body: “Stand away now, parson. Haven’t I paid to see it?”

  Even this becomes part of Sophia’s education, so that as she observes the execution from her hotel window (from which she has just seen the faithless Gerald emerging from a house with a woman) she watches the priest inserting himself between the guillotine and its about-to-be victim.

  Meanwhile, what we are watching is a woman receiving a fairly stiff and radical dose of reality, a series of progressively more intense shocks that awaken her to what is required if she intends to survive. Unlike her larcenous nephew Cyril, who filches money from the till in his family’s shop, Sophia—deciding to steal from Gerald—is (as the rest of the novel confirms) achieving a moral triumph that will save her own life:

  She had no silly, delicate notions about stealing. She obscurely felt that, in the care of a man like Gerald, she might find herself in the most monstrous, the most impossible dilemmas. Those notes, safe and secret in her skirt, gave her confidence, reassured her against the perils of the future, and endowed her with independence. The act was characteristic of her enterprise and her fundamental prudence. It approached the heroic.

  Sophia suffers and learns, survives and prevails, and as Bennett grows more and more taken with her, his novel comes to know her better and better. Following the delicately nuanced turns of her relationship with Chirac, we begin to agree that The Old Wives’ Tale is, as its fans have claimed, a powerful and convincing novel written by a man, from the point of view of a woman. Its creator is no longer the solitary restaurant patron whose meal is being disrupted by a grotesque old woman, but rather, a writer fully capable of imagining how a woman like Sophia might see the world, and might want to be seen. So much is unexpected and unpredictable, even the effects of age, so that twice in the novel (once near the middle, once near the end) Bennett gives us the same description of Sophia, with only slight variations, a portrait that could hardly be less like that of the old woman in the preface:

  Sophia was such a woman as, by a mere glance as she utters an opinion, will make a man say to himself, half in desire and half in alarm lest she reads him too: “By Jove! she must have been through a thing or two. She knows what people are!”

  He was pleased by the quick responsiveness of her temperament, and the masterful vigour which occasionally flashed out in her replies. He noticed the hardly perceptible distortion of her handsome, worn face, and he said to himself. “She’s been through a thing or two.”

  As the novel draws toward its conclusion, and the sisters are reunited, Bennett seems to have learned, and to be able to tell us, an enormous amount about the ways in which women behave with one another, the delicate compromises and dispositions of weakness and strength, power and compliance.

  Reading the The Old Wives’ Tale provides the extraordinary experience of watching a novel grow and deepen along with its heroines. Planned as a taxonomic study of female physical disintegration, Bennett’s book becomes an account of a woman’s psychological and spiritual triumph. Having wanted to report to his readers on what society was like and how it changed in the decades before the novel was written, Arnold Bennett managed to tell us something of what would happen in the world, how human behavior would change, decades and decades after his remarkable book appeared.

  FRANCINE PROSE is the author of nine novels, including Hunters and Gatherers, Bigfoot Dreams, and Primitive People, two story collections, and most recently a collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and numerous other publications. A fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, she writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal. The winner of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, two NEA grants, and a PEN translation prize, she has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Arizona, the University of Utah, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. A film based on her novel Household Saints was released in 1993.

  COMMENTARY

  by

  REBECCA WEST

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  H. G. WELLS

  HENRY JAMES

  J. B. PRIESTLEY

  REBECCA WEST

  Arnold Bennett was indubitably great. I do not mean that he was a great writer, for about that, owing to the peculiar circumstances of his literary career, it is not easy to be sure. But as a character in a novel written by a great writer at his best was great, so was Arnold Bennett. He could not be compared properly with Fielding, or Dickens, or Balzac, but he could be compared with Squire Western, or Mr. Micawber, or Lucien de Rubempré. He was positive as they were, positive as the creations of mere nature rarely are.

  Arnold Bennett wanted to do everything and to be everything. That determined his personal life and his literary career; and in that latter sphere it led to the curious result that he succeeded in being nearly everybody in turn. Incredible as it may seem, he successively occupied the positions in English literature which are roughly comparable to those in America occupied by—at their zenith—S. S. Van Dine, Sinclair Lewis, James Huneker, Theodore Dreiser and William Lyon Phelps. These analogues are not exact. The parallel between Arnold Bennett and Sinclair Lewis lies in nothing profound, but simply in the fact that both turned back from the metropolis and set themselves to a patient evaluation of provincial life, and gained great applause thereby. But the range of names does suggest the astonishing diversity of eminences between which he journeyed in his life-time. It is not less astonishing that in the spaces between his enjoyment of these eminences he was not eminent at all. He was as unequal as Wordsworth—a writer w
hom he resembled more closely than the hasty might suspect.

  He had the first necessity for a novelist in his insatiable appetite for life. He loved every phenomenon which the world presented to him and grudged no expense of time and energy in studying it. Also he had the right emotional dynamo: what he saw he loved. The phenomena which the world was presenting to him at the moment when he began writing were those which composed life in the Five Towns: the amalgam of always patient and occasionally heroic and occasionally contemptibly supine endurance of routine and tedium, of staunchness and obstinacy, of preference for the uncolored stuff that lasts over the colored stuff which wears into holes, which is characteristic of English provincial life. He looked on this and saw that it was good. He saw, too, and here he was in advance of his age, that its physical setting was good: that the plumes of flame with which the factories brush the night sky, that snowdrops pushing their naive whiteness through the oily blackness of a sooty garden in front of a little house in a row, that the lights and shadows in a mean little room are as gloriously beautiful to the artist’s eye as the Parthenon against a blue sky.

  This was nearly a revelation at this time. There are many reasons why Shaw and Wells and Galsworthy and Bennett should be honored; but chief among them is the difference between the state of English literature when they started to write and its state today. The English novel of the ’90s was deplorably frivolous. The outstanding personality in English fiction since the passing of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot was Robert Louis Stevenson; and it was his personal tragedy that he was under the thrall of an imaginary commitment to the graceful and discreet and limited.

  The age was hungry for more solid food. Thomas Hardy, discouraged by the outcry over Jude, had shut up shop as a novelist. George Moore was working away, but he was so great that there was always bound to be a slight uneasiness between him and his generation. His way was not theirs; he was teaching them a new way. They were bound to feel a certain shyness, suspicion, resentment, envy. Henry James was doing superb work, but all the same he was (being essentially timid) subscribing to the heresy of the age and was not honestly with those who wanted sounder doctrine. The so-called esthetic movement of the ’90s had promised much, but it had vanished, partly on account of trouble with the police, but largely because it knew too little about esthetics. Its literature was noisy but empty of content like a drum. It was no wonder that the one writer who insisted on being earnest, George Gissing, received a homage from the young which is well nigh incredible in view of the drab incompetence of his writing. The situation was deplorable.

  Then there came Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett. And Bennett’s was in a sense the most easing advent. The other three came to give good writing which, however, they entangled in the nexus of modern and anti-capitalist thought. But Bennett stood for a purer liberation. He stood for the emancipation of the phenomenon, for the establishment of democracy among the perceptions. A novel need not depict nice people, it need not inculcate an established system of morality, it need not be loyal to any standard of delicacy. Simply it must celebrate life. He piled up book after book of sober, unevasive studies of provincial existence, till the world took notice and saw that a barrier had been built up between it and the floods of romanticism that had threatened to wash it away. True that at first he had to attract their attention by writing thrillers of a new kind, as glossily efficient and abounding in gadgets as a modern bathroom. It is not sufficiently remembered that he invented the modern type of detective story that is half an adventure story. The business had been begun by Conan Doyle, who showed one Sherlock Holmes and Watson peering down on the tobacco ash;but not till The Grand Babylon Hotel did one have a detective story that showed the crime being committed, that gave the rapture of the flight as well as the chase. As always, Arnold Bennett had to have everything.

  He wrote better and better. Whom God Hath Joined is possibly still the best novel ever written about divorce; there is a scene beside a canal, a prehensile woman being detached, which is a masterpiece. Leonora is a beautiful study of maturity. In their day both were not only good but daring. One did not write about divorce, for it was too full of sensuous possibilities; and for the opposite reason one did not write about a woman of forty. Financial ease came to him and he went to live in France, and in that country, where traditions grow thick-trunked and deep-rooted like old oaks, he found the reinforcement of the spirit that many find there. Then he traveled on to the point where he wrote The Old Wives’ Tale.

  That was his highest point. It is high enough to establish in itself his claim to greatness. It is certain that his work will puzzle posterity, for the reason that in the years after the production of his masterpiece he applied no standard to his artistry save the single test of quantity. He was utterly without power of self-criticism, and he would issue his worst in the confident illusion that it was simply different in kind from his best. It is quite possible that by the end of his life his grossly and obviously bad books outnumbered his good; and scholarly posterity by the time it has waded through half a dozen Lillians and Pretty Ladies will have had a pretty tough time. But when they come on The Old Wives’ Tale they will know why we count him a king among writers.

  I have said that there was a certain resemblance between Wordsworth and Arnold Bennett; and here it is most manifest. For it is a lifting from the earth of the web of false values which gentility and romanticism have thrown over it, and a recognition of the true colors of the things that grow upon it. Knights pricking o’er the plain are tragic and glorious; but so too are linendrapers in Bursley. Maidens tied to trees by wicked kings touch the heart; but so too do two Five Town wenches named Constance and Sophia. There is now no longer any need to stress this point, any more than there is to stress Wordsworth’s case for the abolition of the specialized poetic vocabulary. But the desire to prove this point when that was necessary wrought up both these men to a pitch of excitement that enabled them to extend their power to as near the human limits as their generation could. Arnold Bennett used his power of empathy to enter into each of his characters in turn, to imagine how each of them would have reacted to all of their experiences. He analyzed each moment that was thus presented him till he squeezed the last drop of significance from it, he synthesized the results of his analysis with his dogged determination to get the right relationship between his thought and the reader’s attention, so that once read it is retained. It has the peculiar strength of something that is cut back to the primitive roots of being. The degree to which these people are civilized means merely that they have stepped out of the chiaroscuro of the jungle into a clear light where it can be seen more plainly what birth and love and death meant to them. And at the same time, as “Jacob Tonson” in the London weekly, The New Age, he indorsed with his criticism all the other writers of his time who claimed the same right to range with daring and seriousness through the whole of life. He inspired a whole generation of writers just as Huneker did in America.

  He came near to reaching that standard again in Riceyman Steps; but not, I think, in the Clayhanger trilogy. His novels declined in quality for a variety of reasons, most of which were paradoxically rooted in his virtues. For one thing, the ambition to know everything defeated itself. I only came to know him during the last sixteen years of his life, and he then struck me as being at once one of the most observant and unobservant persons I have ever known. He would remember the order of the shops in an unimportant street in a foreign city for years; but he was curiously blind about human beings. He would know a man and a woman for years and see them constantly without realizing that they were engaged in a tragical love affair; he could meet a man shaken by a recent bereavement and notice nothing unusual about him till he was told. I am told that this was amazingly unlike him in his youth and indeed all the earlier books bear proof of an extremely penetrating vision regarding his fellow creatures. The plain fact was, I suppose, that there is a limit to the powers of human attention and memory, and that he had
touched it.

  From Arnold Bennett Himself, 1931

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  I was astounded to discover that [Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale] was a great book. I was thrilled. I was enchanted. I was deeply impressed, I had never suspected that Arnold was capable of writing anything of the sort. It would be impertinent of me to say anything in praise of it. I have read many appreciations of it, and I think everything has been said but one thing, and that is that it is eminently readable. I should not mention a merit that is so obvious except that many great books do not possess it. It is the greatest gift of the story-teller, and one that Arnold Bennett had even in his slightest and most trivial pieces. I thought at first that he owed it to his journalistic training, but . . . now I am under the impression that it is due to the intense interest the author has in what he is writing at the moment.

  [Bennett] was neither mystic nor poet. He was interested in material things and in the passions common to all men. He described life, as every writer does, in the terms of his own temperament. He was more concerned with the man in the street than with the exceptional person.

  The Old Wives’ Tale is certainly the best book he wrote. He never lost the desire to write another as good, and because it was written by an effort of will he thought he could repeat it. He tried in Clayhanger, and for a time it looked as though he might succeed. I think he failed only because his material fizzled out. After The Old Wives’ Tale he had not enough left to complete the vast structure he had designed.