Drabble Arnold Bennett

A Biography
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ISBN: 978-0-571-28746-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

'Arnold Bennett was born in a street called Hope Street. A street less hopeful it would be hard to imagine.' Thus begins Margaret Drabble's biography of a man whose most famous achievement was to re-create, in such novels as The Old Wives' Taleand Clayhanger, the life, atmosphere and character of the 'Five Towns' region in which he was born and grew up. Arnold Bennett is a very personal book. 'What interests me', writes the author, 'is Bennett's background, his childhood and origins, for they are very similar to my own. My mother's family came from the Potteries, and the Bennett novels seem to me to portray a way of life that still existed when I was a child, and indeed persists in certain areas. So like all books this has been partly an act of self-exploration.' Of Bennett as a writer Drabble says 'The best books I think are very fine indeed, on the highest level, deeply moving, original and dealing with material that I had never before encountered in fiction, but only in life: I feel they have been underrated, and my response to them is so constant, even after years of work on them and constant re-readings, that I want to communicate enthusiasm.' Of Bennett as a man she paints an affectionate portrait, not glossing over the irritability, dyspepsia and rigidity which at times made him so difficult a companion but reminding us too of his honesty, kindliness and sensitivity. 'Many a time,' she writes at the end of the book, 're-reading a novel, reading a letter or a piece of his Journal, I have wanted to shake his hand, or to thank him, to say well done. I have written this instead.'

Margaret Drabble, born 1939, is a novelist, critic and biographer. Her novels include The Millstone (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Jerusalem the Golden (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Needle's Eye (winner of the Yorkshire Post Book Award . Her biographies of Angus Wilson and Arnold Bennett are reissued in Faber Finds. Her most recent book is a memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Drabble, Margaret

Leseproben

1

The Five Towns

Arnold Bennett was born in a street called Hope Street. A street less hopeful it would be hard to imagine. The house where he was born, on 27 May 1867, has since been destroyed, but from the surrounding district one can imagine that it is no great loss. A café now stands on the corner site, and on the wall of the café there is a bronze commemorative plaque. As Bennett himself was no great defender of his home towns, there is no need to protect them on his behalf. It can be said, plainly, that there are few regions more depressing to the eye than the Potteries today, and they must look considerably better now than they did a hundred years ago, before the concept of clean air had been dreamed of. The landscape lacks the scale which makes some of the industrial North (from a passing train) picturesque and dramatic, but it bears the same scars. There are the same neglected industrial sites, the same rows of terraced workmen’s cottages, the long high brick walls, the desolate patches of muddy grass. In 1971 the City of Stoke-on-Trent (a conurbation formed in 1925 of the six Five Towns) boasted more derelict land within its boundaries than any other county borough in England. Almost a twelfth of the city’s area is officially derelict. The coal mines and the clay marl pits defy the schemes for improvement. Trees are planted, pits are filled with slag heaps, disused railways tracks are adorned with shrubs and used for cycling, but it is slow work. There are grants now for reclamation, prize-winning schemes are made, plans are being put into action. Trees will be planted on the largest spoil heap, the one that elegantly shades Burslem Cemetery. The public were asked if they wanted the slag heap flattened. No, they said. They liked their slag heap. They didn’t mind its being landscaped, but they didn’t want it taken away.1 Bennett would have liked that.

Of course the squalor is not unrelieved. The flights of architectural fancy are few, but they exist. The golden angel weather vane on the Town Hall and the dirty but ornate façade of the Swan Bank Methodist Chapel (demolished since I began writing this) are among the rare attempts at decorative beauty, and feature as such in Bennett’s books. It is not surprising that Bennett became interested in the idea of architect as hero. Beauty, in such a region, does not meet the eye: it has to be looked for; and when we find Orgreaves explaining to the young Clayhanger the virtues of the Sytch Pottery, we sense the author’s relief at finding that even in such unpromising places there are, to the trained eye, points that can be admired. Edwin, having been told that the window of the Pottery is ‘the most beautiful window in Bursley, and perhaps in the Five Towns’ finds that he has to think again, for ‘it had never occurred to him to search for anything fine in Bursley. The fact was, he had never opened his eyes at Bursley. Dozens of times he must have passed the Sytch Pottery, and yet not noticed, not suspected, that it differed from any other pot-works: he, who had dreamed of being an architect!’2 One cannot really blame the young Clayhanger or the young Bennett for their lack of perception; although Edwin immediately decided to place the Sytch Pottery on a plane with the edifices of the capitals of Europe, a feast for discerning eyes, not many of the inhabitants can have so regarded it. And it is significant that the beautiful window, as pointed out by Mr Orgreaves, was in fact in the process of being boarded up.

It wasn’t until he had left the Potteries that Bennett even thought of them as material for fiction. Having left them for London, he never went back to live there, though he visited friends and family. He could appreciate their virtues only from a distance. Indeed he claimed that he had not thought of using them as fiction until he read another man’s work of fiction, George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife; he wrote to Moore on 24 December 1920, ‘I wish also to tell you that it was the first chapters of A Mummer’s Wife which opened my eyes to the romantic nature of the district I had blindly inhabited for over twenty years. You are indeed the father of all my Five Town books.’3 Among the passages which must have aroused his admiration in A Mummer’s Wife are those which describe the landscapes – passages like these:

‘Below her in the dazzling morning light lay a valley miles upon miles in length. It was one of those terrible cauldrons in which man melts and moulds this huge age of iron. And of what did this valley consist? Of black plains that the sunlight could not change in colour; of patches of grass, hard and metallic in hue; of tanks of water glittering like blades of steel… sharp as the teeth of a double saw were the interminable gables, and not a ray of light glinted against the black windows…. There behind Bucknell were more desolate plains full of pits, brick and smoke; and then for miles rose up against the sky, with a roll oceanic in grandeur, the interminable hills’…. ‘No spray of green relieved the implacable perspectives, no aesthetic intention broke the frigidity of the remorseless angles. Wide widths of walls, bald rotundities of pottery ovens, reigned supreme; before them nature had disappeared, and the shrill scream of the steam tram as it rolled solemnly up the incline seemed man’s cry of triumph over vanquished nature4 [chapter 4].’

It’s easy to see what Bennett saw in this: he saw scale, and dignity, and importance given to what he had thought mean and dirty and insignificant. Once a writer like Moore uses the phrase ‘aesthetic intention’, even if only to deny its existence, the reader enters the realm of art. And Bennett needed the distance of art to make the reality tolerable and malleable. One of the experiences he describes frequently is the experience of being aroused to aesthetic appreciation by things read or said, a very real and common experience, which many writers are too vain to admit. Bennett admits it openly. He was an insatiably self-educating man, and one of his great charms was his eagerness to learn, to be informed, to extend his appreciation; but that’s not the whole clue to his admission of his dependence on Moore. (One must allow for the fact that his letter to Moore may have been in part a polite gesture towards a writer whom he genuinely admired, but I think there was at least some truth in it.) He needed Moore, because the material he grew up in, the Five Towns material, was intractable. As a fact, it was so. It was harsh, difficult, unattractive. Bennett needed a guide when he travelled abroad – and his Florentine Journal is touchingly full of his delightful efforts to see and understand all, through his Baedeker; but even more he needed a guide to his home town. Not because there was so much to see, as in Italy, but because there was so little. He doesn’t in any way slavishly follow Moore’s outlines; on the contrary he reacts against them, he is mock-heroic rather than heroic, he writes with wry human insight rather than with the visitor’s eye of Moore, who saw nothing but the grandiose in the landscape. But Bennett needed the reassurance that the grandiose was there, behind it all, as a backcloth.

Bennett created the Five Towns. Once he had seen how to do it, he went ahead and made them. The reality of his creation is at times confusing; many people think not of the Potteries as they were, but of the Potteries as he described them. Even the names get mixed up. There were in fact six towns, not five, but even serious newspaper articles have to explain this, because for many readers Bennett’s phrase, the Five Towns, has stuck so firmly that it has more meaning than the places themselves. This is partly the fault of his own method of providing pseudonyms: he stuck so close to the original that he forgot which was which. Tunstall became Turnhill, Burslem became Bursley, Hanley became Hanbridge, Stoke became Knype, Longton became Longshaw, and Fenton he missed out altogether. On a similar scheme he converts Waterloo Road into Trafalgar Road, Swan Bank into Duck Bank – this last a highly characteristic and suitable piece of bathos. But he was not wholly bathetic or comic in his choice of names: there operated in him something of the spirit of defiance, the spirit which led to the real-life naming of the suburbs of Florence and Etruria, and it must surely have been some frolic of aspiration, some kick at the face of dreary destiny, that led him to christen his heroines by such names as Leonora and Annunciata? Harold Owen, another local man, writing in 1901 in The Staffordshire Potter, makes it clear that he at least considers that the naming of Etruria was ironic; he writes that the Potteries are ‘unutterably unlovely’, that even Birmingham has its Edgbaston but the Potteries is all Soho, and ‘as for the classic suburbs of “Florence” and “Etruria”, vassals to Longton and Hanley – or even the more modern if equally modest claim of Dresden – they are merely sly and deliberate examples of the irony of nomenclature.’5 And in a way Owen may be right – which of us, familiar with the industrial North or the wastes of London, does not know some Violet Bank where surely violets never blossomed, some Primrose Road deep in soot, some Endymion Way where no goddess would ever risk her bare feet? And how can one not speculate at the motives of the council which deliberated over such a name?

The Potteries have their Paradise Street and their Paragon...