On parenthood: “To become a parent is to accept terrible risks. I’m Charlie’s father. What then?... He owes nothing whatever to me or to you. If we were starving and he had plenty, he would probably consider it his duty to look after us; but that’s the limit of what he owes us. Whereas nothing can put an end to our responsibility towards him.... We thought it would be nice to have children and so Charlie arrived. He didn’t choose his time and he didn’t choose his character, nor his education, nor his chance. If he had his choice you may depend he’d have chosen differently. Do you want me, on the top of all that, to tell him that he must obediently accept something else from us—our code of conduct? It would be mere cheek, and with all my shortcomings I’m incapable of impudence, especially to the young.”
On ownership: “Have you ever stood outside a money-changer’s and looked at the fine collection of genuine banknotes in the window? Supposing I told you that you could look at them, and enjoy the sight of them, and nobody could do more? No, my boy, to enjoy a thing properly you’ve got to own it. And anybody who says the contrary is probably a member of the League of all the Arts.”
On economics: “That’s where the honest poor have the advantage of us.... We’re the dishonest poor.... We’re one vast pretence.... A pretence resembles a bladder. It may burst. We probably shall burst. Still, we have one great advantage over the honest poor, who sometimes have no income at all; and also over the rich, who never can tell how big their incomes are going to be. We know exactly where we are. We know to the nearest sixpence.”
On history: “Never yet when empire, any empire, has been weighed in the balance against a young and attractive woman has the young woman failed to win! This is a dreadful fact, but men are thus constituted.”
On bolshevism: “Abandon the word ‘bolshevik.’ It’s a very overworked word and wants a long repose.”
iv
The best brief sketch of Arnold Bennett’s life that I know of is given in the chapter on Arnold Bennett in John W. Cunliffe’s English Literature During the Last Half Century. Professor Cunliffe, with the aid, of course, of Bennett’s own story, The Truth About an Author, writes as follows:
“He was born near Hanley, the ‘Hanbridge’ of the Five Towns which his novels were to launch into literary fame, and received a somewhat limited education at the neighbouring ‘Middle School’ of Newcastle, his highest scholastic achievement being the passing of the London University Matriculation Examination. Some youthful adventures in journalism were perhaps significant of latent power and literary inclination, but a small provincial newspaper offers no great encouragement to youthful ambition, and Enoch Arnold Bennett (as he was then called) made his way at 21 as a solicitor’s clerk to London, where he was soon earning a modest livelihood by ‘a natural gift for the preparation of bills for taxation.’ He had never ‘wanted to write’ (except for money) and had read almost nothing of Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and George Eliot, though he had devoured Ouida, boys’ books and serials. His first real interest in a book was ‘not as an instrument for obtaining information or emotion, but as a book, printed at such a place in such a year by so-and-so, bound by so-and-so, and carrying colophons, registers, water-marks, and fautes d’impression.’ It was when he showed a rare copy of Manon Lescaut to an artist and the latter remarked that it was one of the ugliest books he had ever seen, that Bennett, now in his early twenties, first became aware of the appreciation of beauty. He won twenty guineas in a competition, conducted by a popular weekly, for a humorous condensation of a sensational serial, being assured that this was ‘art,’ and the same paper paid him a few shillings for a short article on ‘How a bill of costs is drawn up.’ Meanwhile he was ‘gorging’ on English and French literature, his chief idols being the brothers de Goncourt, de Maupassant, and Turgenev, and he got a story into the Yellow Book. He saw that he could write, and he determined to adopt the vocation of letters. After a humiliating period of free lancing in Fleet Street, he became assistant editor and later editor of Woman. When he was 31, his first novel, A Man From the North, was published, both in England and America, and with the excess of the profits over the cost of typewriting he bought a new hat. At the end of the following year he wrote in his diary:
“‘This year I have written 335,340 words, grand total: 224 articles and stories, and four instalments of a serial called The Gates of Wrath have actually been published, and also my book of plays, Polite Farces. My work included six or eight short stories not yet published, also the greater part of a 55,000 word serial Love and Life for Tillotsons, and the whole draft, 80,000 words of my Staffordshire novel Anna Tellwright.’
“This last was not published in book form till 1902 under the title of Anna of the Five Towns; but in the ten years that had elapsed since he came to London, Bennett had risen from a clerk at six dollars a week to be a successful ‘editor, novelist, dramatist, critic, connoisseur of all arts’ with a comfortable suburban residence. Still he was not satisfied; he was weary of journalism and the tyranny of his Board of Directors. He threw up his editorial post, with its certain income, and retired first to the country and then to a cottage at Fontainebleau to devote himself to literature.