The Old Wives' Tale Read online

  From Life and Letters, 1931

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only in the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr. Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards. And yet—if life should refuse to live there? That is a risk which the creator of The Old Wives’ Tale, George Cannon, Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and more they seem to us, deserting even the well-built villa in the Five Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. . . .

  We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be that owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit seems to make from time to time Mr. Bennett has come down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.

  From “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader, 1948

  H. G. WELLS

  [While the current English spirit in novel-writing] is toward discursiveness and variety, the new French movement is rather toward exhaustiveness. One who is, I think, quite the greatest of our contemporary English novelists, Mr. Bennett, has experimented in both forms of amplitude. His superb Old Wives’ Tale, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest ‘long novel’ that has been written in English in the English fashion, in this generation; and now in Clayhanger and its promised collaterals he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentation of the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which is the essential characteristic of the continental movement toward the novel of amplitude. While the Old Wives’ Tale is discursive, Clayhanger is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movement in perfection.

  From “The Contemporary Novel,” in The Atlantic Monthly, 1912

  HENRY JAMES

  The Old Wives’ Tale is the history of two sisters, daughters of a prosperous draper in a Staffordshire town, who, separating early in life, through the flight of one of them to Paris with an ill-chosen husband and the confirmed and prolonged local pitch of the career of the other, are reunited late in life by the return of the fugitive after much Parisian experience and by her pacified acceptance of the conditions of her birthplace. The divided current flows together again, and the chronicle closes with the simple drying up determined by the death of the sisters. That is all; the canvas is covered, ever so closely and vividly covered, by the exhibition of innumerable small facts and aspects, at which we assist with the most comfortable sense of their substantial truth. The sisters, and more particularly the less adventurous, are at home in their author’s mind, they sit and move at their ease in the square chamber of his attention, to a degree beyond which the production of that ideal harmony between creature and creator could scarcely go, and all by an art of demonstration so familiar and so “quiet” that the truth and the poetry, to use Goethe’s distinction, melt utterly together and we see no difference between the subject of the show and the showman’s feeling, let alone the showman’s manner, about it. This felt identity of the elements—because we at least consciously feel—becomes in the novel we refer to, and not less in Clayhanger, which our words equally describe, a source for us of abject confidence, confidence truly so abject in the solidity of every appearance that it may be said to represent our whole relation to the work and completely to exhaust our reaction upon it. Clayhanger, of the two fictions even the more densely loaded with all the evidence in what we should call the case presented did we but learn meanwhile for that case, or for a case of what, to take it, inscribes the annals, the private more particularly, of a provincial printer in a considerable way of business, beginning with his early boyhood and going on to the complications of his maturity—these not exhausted with our present possession of the record, inasmuch as by the author’s announcement there is more of the catalogue to come. This most monumental of Mr. Arnold Bennett’s recitals, taking it with its supplement of Hilda Lessways, already before us, is so describable through its being a monument exactly not to an idea, a pursued and captured meaning, or in short to anything whatever, but just simply of the quarried and gathered material it happens to contain, the stones and bricks and rubble and cement and promiscuous constituents of every sort that have been heaped in it and thanks to which it quite massively piles itself up. Our perusal and our enjoyment are our watching of the growth of the pile and of the capacity, industry, energy with which the operation is directed. A huge and in its way a varied aggregation, without traceable lines, divinable direction, effect of composition, the mere number of its pieces, the great dump of its material, together with the fact that here and there in the miscellany, as with the value of bits of marble or porphyry, fine elements shine out, it keeps us standing and waiting to the end—and largely just because it keeps us wondering. We surely wonder more what it may all propose to mean than any equal appearance of preparation to relieve us of that strain, any so founded and grounded a postponement of the disclosure of a sense in store, has for a long time called upon us to do in a like connection. A great thing it is assuredly that while we wait and wonder we are amused—were it not for that, truly, our situation would be thankless enough; we may ask ourselves, as has already been noted, why on such ambiguous terms we should consent to be, and why the practice doesn’t at a given moment break down; and our answer brings us back to that many-fingered grasp of the orange that the author squeezes. This particular orange is of the largest and most rotund, and his trust in the consequent flow is of its nature communicative. Such is the case always, and most naturally, with that air in a person who has something, who at the very least has much to tell us: we like so to be affected by it, we meet it half way an
d lend ourselves, sinking in up to the chin. Up to the chin only indeed, beyond doubt; we even then feel our head emerge, for judgment and articulate question, and it is from that position that we remind ourselves how the real reward of our patience is still to come—the reward attending not at all the immediate sense of immersion, but reserved for the after-sense, which is a very different matter, whether in the form of a glow or of a chill.

  From “The New Novel,” in Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes, 1914

  J. B. PRIESTLEY

  It would be difficult to overpraise the skill with which [The Old Wives’ Tale and Clayhanger] have been devised and executed. . . . [Despite] their drab setting, their deliberate insistence upon prosaic matters, and their uneasy skepticism, which makes their author appear an ironical spectator of this life—despite all these things, they are really the work of a thorough romantic. Bennett is an English romantic working in an alien method, a method that suggests anything rather than the romantic outlook and temper. . . . He hustles away all the usual romantic trappings, the tinsel and the limelight and the sobbing violins, brings before us the most commonplace people in the dingiest and dreariest setting it is possible to imagine, and then proceeds to evolve romance. There is always present in his mind, and if it is not in the reader’s too then the whole significance of these fictions has been missed, the piquant contrast between what we might call the “outward” and the “inward” views of his creatures’ lives. . . . [Unless] the reader keeps this contrast in mind, the romantic significance of these stories is lost. Modern life is peculiarly suitable for this method of treatment because, with all its bewildering and intricate organization, it presents to us a mass of fellow-creatures who are not, so to speak, realized as fellow-creatures at all except at odd moments; we see them as economic units and what not, and their real humanity is lost. . . . Because we see them in terms of tags and labels, we are apt to forget that their lives to them are as exciting and wonderful as are our lives to us. In earlier times, the common brotherhood of men was ever present in men’s minds—a universal religion never allowed them to forget the fact; but in our great modern cities we need to be ever reminded, and it says a good deal for Arnold Bennett that . . . he has revealed and stressed this common humanity. So far, so good. And yet something is wrong. . . . It is not enough that he should run a kind of romantic obstacle race; he should give us a personal vision of this world. The same fault we remarked in his lighter work is present in a slightly different form here too; he is too general, too easily satisfied with a broad average; he does not dig deep enough. We feel a want in him of values, a certain insensitiveness to the finer shades of feeling, the more subtle traits of character, the more poetical and mystical states of mind. He lacks the philosophic imagination that is necessary to all works of art on a great scale. He takes his old woman in the provinces, his dead miser in Clerkenwell, and, running back over their lives, contrives to tell us more of the truth about them than all the newspaper reports or the works of the social historian; but, we feel, he does not tell us the whole truth about them, not because he does not wish to but simply because he cannot. . . . [He] is a great journalist, who has an unflagging zest for and curiosity about the surfaces of this life; but while he has the virtues, the very solid virtues, of the great journalist, he has also the serious limitations. Whole sides of life and states of mind, and these not the least important, some of them perhaps the most important, seem to mean nothing to him; he can humanize the world of the newspapers, but cannot even enter the world of the poets and the saints and the philosophers. It is only right that he should have become one of the most successful men of letters of his time, if only because he is very much a creature of his time who has exploited, with extraordinary skill, the modern world as perhaps no other novelist, with the possible exception of Mr. Wells, has exploited it. An ordinary man of talent could not have done it; a great man of genius would have done something more.

  From “Modern English Novelists: Arnold Bennett,” in English Journal, 1925

  To W.W.K.

  PREFACE

  In the autumn of 1903 I used to dine frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table which I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running she would reproach me sharply: “What! you are unfaithful to me?” Once, when I complained about some French beans, she informed me roundly that French beans were a subject which I did not understand. I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned the restaurant. A few nights before the final parting an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. 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. That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me, but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never spoken.

  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. And the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout ageing woman is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos.

  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. It is an absolute rule that the principal character of a novel must not be unsympathetic, and the whole modern tendency of realistic fiction is against oddness in a prominent figure. I knew that I must choose the sort of woman who would pass unnoticed in a crowd.

  I put the idea aside for a long time, but it was never very distant from me. For several reasons it made a special appeal to me. I had always been a convinced admirer of Mrs W. K. Clifford’s most precious novel, Aunt Anne, but I wanted to see in the story of an old woman many things that Mrs W. K. Clifford had omitted from Aunt Anne. Moreover, I had always revolted against the absurd youthfulness, the unfading youthfulness of the average heroine. And as a protest against this fashion, I was already, in 1903, planning a novel (Leonora) of which the heroine was aged forty, and had daughters old enough to be in love. The reviewers, by the way, were staggered by my hardihood in offering a woman of forty as a subject of serious interest to the public. But I meant to go much farther than forty! Finally, as a supreme reason, I had the example and the challenge of Guy de Maupassant’s Une Vie. In the nineties we used to regard Une Vie with mute awe, as being the summit of achievement in fiction. And I remember being very cross with Mr Bernard Shaw because, having read Une Vie at the suggestion (I think) of Mr William Archer, he failed to see in it anything very remarkable. Here I must confess that, in 1908, I read Une Vie again, and in spite of a natural anxiety to differ from Mr Bernard Shaw, I was gravely disappointed with it. It is a fine novel, but decidedly inferior to Pierre et Jean or even Fort Comme la Mort. To return to
the year 1903. Une Vie relates the entire life-history of a woman. I settled in the privacy of my own head that my book about the development of a young girl into a stout old lady must be the English Une Vie. I have been accused of every fault except a lack of self-confidence, and in a few weeks I settled a further point, namely, that my book must ‘go one better’ than Une Vie, and that to this end it must be the life-history of two women instead of only one. Hence, The Old Wives’ Tale has two heroines. Constance was the original; Sophia was created out of bravado, just to indicate that I declined to consider Guy de Maupassant as the last forerunner of the deluge. I was intimidated by the audacity of my project, but I had sworn to carry it out. For several years I looked it squarely in the face at intervals, and then walked away to write novels of smaller scope, of which I produced five or six. But I could not dally for ever, and in the autumn of 1907 I actually began to write it, in a village near Fontainebleau, where I rented half a house from a retired railway servant. I calculated that it would be 200,000 words long (which it exactly proved to be), and I had a vague notion that no novel of such dimensions (except Richardson’s) had ever been written before. So I counted the words in several famous Victorian novels, and discovered to my relief that the famous Victorian novels average 400,000 words apiece. I wrote the first part of the novel in six weeks. It was fairly easy to me, because, in the seventies, in the first decade of my life, I had lived in the actual draper’s shop of the Baineses, and knew it as only a child could know it. Then I went to London on a visit. I tried to continue the book in a London hotel, but London was too distracting, and I put the thing away, and during January and February of 1908, I wrote Buried Alive, which was published immediately, and was received with majestic indifference by the English public, an indifference which has persisted to this day.