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Arnold Bennett

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Enoch Arnold Bennett

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(born May 27, 1867, Hanley, Staffordshire, Eng. — died March 27, 1931, London) English novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist. His major works, inspired by Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, form an important link between the English novel and the mainstream of European realism. He is best known for his highly detailed novels of the "Five Towns" — the Potteries in his native Staffordshire — which are the setting of Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), and the three novels that make up The Clayhanger Family (1925). He was also a well-known critic.

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Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Arnold Bennett

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The English novelist and dramatist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was the author of "The Old Wives' Tale", a masterpiece of realism.

Arnold Bennett was born on May 27, 1867, in Hanley, one of the pottery-making "Six Towns" of central England. The youth, called Enoch, spoke with a stammer and was determined to make his living in literature. After attending local schools and working in his father's law office, he moved to London in 1888 to become a writer. In 1893 he was employed by the magazine Woman, and in 1898 he published his first novel, A Man from the North. During these years he began to call himself Arnold Bennett. In 1902 Bennett published two novel, Anna of the Five Towns and The Grand Babylon Hotel - the first realistic, the second sensational. They represent the pattern of his work: fiction of serious artistic purpose produced at the same time as material of no artistic value.

Bennett lived in France from 1902 to 1913. Shortly after his fortieth birthday he married Marguerite Soulié. The couple seemed happy but within a few years proved incompatible. During these years Bennett wrote magazine articles, self-help books, plays, short stories, and novels - a tremendous output. Most of it, however, was written only to make money. But Tales of the Five Towns and the trilogy Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Leonora (1903), and Sacred and Profane Love (1904) are worth mention, for in them Bennett began his realistic studies of life in the industrial "Five Towns," changed from the actual "Six Towns" for reasons of euphony.

The Old Wives' Tale

The sight of an old woman in a restaurant in Paris in 1903 gave Bennett the idea for a novel that would, as he wrote, "go one better" than Guy de Maupassant's realistic novel Une Vie. While writing other books he nourished the idea, and in 1907 he began to write it. The novel came quickly, a thousand words or more each day. After various interruptions, including the writing of Buried Alive (1908) and the production of his play Cupid and Commonsense (1908), The Old Wives' Tale was completed and published in 1908. It is the story of the sisters Constance and Sophia Baines from their girlhood in Bursley, one of the "Five Towns," to their deaths 50 years later. Constance stayed at home; Sophia, like Bennett, escaped to Paris. The story realistically depicts the minute changes by which the girls become old women.

The Old Wives' Tale brought Bennett fame and money. He secured his position as an eminent author with the "Clayhanger" novels (Clayhanger, 1910; Hilda Lessways, 1911; These Twain, 1916), which are meticulous studies of love, marriage, and society in the "Five Towns." Meanwhile, he capitalized on his position with light novels, a travel book about the United States, and several plays, of which Milestones (1912), written with E. Knoblock, is best known.

During World War I Bennett served his country as a journalist and civil servant. He separated from his wife in 1921, and in 1922 he met Dorothy Cheston, an actress, by whom he had a daughter in 1926. In the 1920s Bennett's critical reputation declined, and his carefully objective realism became old-fashioned. During this period his literary productions were not equal to his best, though Riceyman Steps (1923) evinced a brief return of his talent. His popular reputation, however, was never higher, and his novels and journalistic work made him one of the highest-paid writers of his day. Displays of his portrait on posters advertising his works made his pleasantly distinctive face with its heavy-lidded gaze and prominent teeth familiar to thousands. After a trip to France during which he caught typhoid fever, Bennett died on March 31, 1931.

Further Reading

Newman Flower, ed., The Journals of Arnold Bennett (3 vols., 1932-1933), provides an indispensable account of his activities but reveals the inner man only unintentionally. Perhaps the best life of Arnold is Reginald Pound, Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1953). Two critical attacks on Bennett are Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) and passages in E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927). E.M.W. Tillyard defends The Old Wives' Tale in The Epic Strain in the English Novel (1958). American academic criticism is best represented by James Hall, Arnold Bennett: Primitivism and Taste (1959), and James G. Hepburn, The Art of Arnold Bennett (1963). The best brief introduction to the historical background is in Boris Ford, ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 7: The Modern Age (1958; rev. ed. 1962).

Additional Sources

Bennett, Arnold, Over there; war scenes on the Western Front, Plainview, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press 1975.

Bennett, Arnold, Sketches for autobiography, London; Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1979.

Bennett, Arnold, The truth about an author, Plainview, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press 1975, 1911.

Bennett, Dorothy Cheston, Arnold Bennett: a portrait done at home, together with 170 letters from A., Plainview, N.Y., 1975, 1935.

Darton, F. J. Harvey (Frederick Joseph Harvey), Arnold Bennett, New York, Haskell House, 1974.

Drabble, Margaret, Arnold Bennett; a biography, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1974; New York: Knopf, 1974; Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1974, 1986.

Follett, Helen Thomas, Arnold Bennett, Folcroft, Pa. Folcroft Library Editions, 1974; Philadelphia: R. West, 1978.

Swinnerton, Frank, Arnold Bennett: a last word, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

Oxford Dictionary of British History:

Arnold Bennett

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Bennett, Arnold (1867-1931). Like George Eliot, Bennett was a fine novelist of provincial middle-class society—in his case that of the Potteries, a landscape of canals and kilns and trams and chimneys and dust. The Old Wives' Tale (1908) tells of two sisters, daughters of a draper in Bursley (Burslem). Clayhanger (1910) recalls the introduction of steam-printing into the Potteries. Bennett, born in Hanley, was a solicitor but went to London in 1888 where he made a living editing and writing short stories.

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Arnold Bennett

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Bennett, Arnold (Enoch Arnold Bennett), 1867-1931, English novelist and dramatist. One of the great 20th-century English novelists, Bennett is famous for his realistic novels about the "Five Towns," an imaginary manufacturing district in northern England. Bennett's early career included editing the fashionable magazine Woman and writing literary reviews and articles. About 1900 he began to devote himself industriously to his own work, producing a series of excellent regional novels. Influenced by the naturalism of Zola, he depicted in great detail the grim, sometimes sordid, lives of shopkeepers and potters. His attitude toward his characters was one of affectionate sympathy, and he always managed to make their mundane lives interesting. Bennett's best work is contained in his novels of the "Five Towns," which include Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), the trilogy Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1916). Bennett also achieved considerable success as a playwright, most notably with Milestones (1912), written with Edward Knoblock, and The Great Adventure (1913).

Bibliography

See his journal (3 vol., 1932-33); biography by M. Drabble (1974).

Quotes By:

Arnold Bennett

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Quotes:

"It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top."

"If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living."

"It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality."

"Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life."

"Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality."

"To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists."

See more famous quotes by Arnold Bennett

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Arnold Bennett

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Arnold Bennett
Born 1867
Hanley, Staffordshire, England
Died 1931
Chiltern Court, London
Cause of death Typhoid
Occupation Novelist

Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English novelist.

Contents

Early life

Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley is one of a conurbation of six towns which joined together at the beginning of the twentieth century as Stoke-on-Trent. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the family were able to move to a larger house between Hanley and Burslem.[1] Bennett was educated locally in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Arnold was employed by his father—his duties included rent collecting. He was unhappy working for his father for little financial reward, and the theme of parental miserliness is important in his novels. In his spare time he was able to do a little journalism, but his breakthrough as a writer was to come after he had moved from the Potteries. At the age of twenty-one, he left his father's practice and went to London as a solicitor's clerk.

Career

Journalism and nonfiction

Bennett won a literary competition in Tit-Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full time. In 1894, he became assistant editor of the periodical Woman. He noticed that the material offered by a syndicate to the magazine was not very good, so he wrote a serial which was bought by the syndicate for 75 pounds. He then wrote another. This became The Grand Babylon Hotel. Just over four years later, his first novel, A Man from the North, was published to critical acclaim and he became editor of the magazine.

From 1900 he devoted himself full time to writing, giving up the editorship. He continued to write journalism despite the success of his career as a novelist. In 1926, at the suggestion of Lord Beaverbrook, he began writing an influential weekly article on books for the Evening Standard newspaper.

As well as the novels, much of Bennett's non-fiction work has stood the test of time. One of his most popular non-fiction works, which is still read to this day, is the self-help book "How to Live on 24 Hours a Day". His diaries have yet to be published in full, but extracts from them are often quoted in the British press.[2]

Move to France

In 1903, he moved to Paris, where other great artists from around the world had converged on Montmartre and Montparnasse. Bennett spent the next eight years writing novels and plays. Bennett believed that ordinary people had the potential to be the subject of interesting books. In this respect, an influence which Bennett himself acknowledged was the French writer Maupassant whose "Une Vie" inspired "The Old Wives' Tale." Maupassant is also one of the writers on whom Richard Larch, the protagonist of Bennett's first (and obviously semi-autobiographical) novel, A Man from the North, tries in vain to model his own writing.

In 1908 The Old Wives' Tale was published and was an immediate success throughout the English-speaking world. After a visit to America in 1911, where he had been publicized and acclaimed as no other visiting writer since Dickens, he returned to England where Old Wives' Tale was reappraised and hailed as a masterpiece.

Public service

Bennett in 1914

During the First World War he became Director of Propaganda for France at the Ministry of Information. (At that time the word propaganda did not have the negative implications it acquired later in the twentieth century). His appointment was made directly on the recommendation of Lord Beaverbrook, who also recommended him as Deputy Minister of that Department at the end of the war.[3] He refused a knighthood in 1918.

Osbert Sitwell,[4] in a letter to James Agate,[5] notes that Bennett was not, despite current views, "the typical businessman, with his mean and narrow outlook." Sitwell cited a letter from Bennett to a friend of Agate, who remains anonymous, in Ego 5:

I find I am richer this year than last; so I enclose a cheque for 500 pounds for you to distribute among young writers and artists and musicians who may need the money. You will know, better than I do, who they are. But I must make one condition, that you do not reveal that the money has come from me, or tell anyone about it.

Final years

He separated from his French wife in 1922 and fell in love with the actress Dorothy Cheston, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life. He won the 1923 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Riceyman Steps.

He died of typhoid at his home in Baker Street, London, on 27 March 1931, after returning from a visit[6] to France. His ashes are buried in Burslem cemetery. Their daughter, Virginia Eldin, lived in France and was president of the Arnold Bennett Society.

References to the potteries in his works

In 1902, Anna of the Five Towns, the first of a succession of stories which detailed life in the Potteries, appeared. His most famous works are the Clayhanger trilogy and The Old Wives' Tale. These books draw on his experience of life in the Potteries, as did most of his best work. In his novels the Potteries are referred to as "the Five Towns"; Bennett felt that the name was more euphonious than "the Six Towns" so Fenton was omitted. The real towns and their Bennett counterparts are:

The Six Towns of Stoke-on-Trent Bennett's Five Towns
Tunstall Turnhill
Burslem Bursley
Hanley Hanbridge
Stoke Knype
Fenton The 'forgotten town'
Longton Longshaw

All but one of these are mild disguises; "Knype" may possibly be taken from the nearby village of Knypersley near Biddulph, and Knypersley Hall. Neighbouring Oldcastle, where Edwin Clayhanger went to school, is Newcastle under Lyme. Axe, towards which Tertius Ingpen lived, is Leek.

Several of his books set in the Potteries have been made into films (for example The Card starring Alec Guinness) and television mini-series (such as "Anna of the Five Towns" and "Clayhanger").

Criticism

Critically, Bennett has not always had an easy ride. His output was prodigious and, by his own admission, based on maximizing his income rather than from creative necessity.

As Bennett put it:

Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself? Not me. If anyone imagines my sole aim is art for art’s sake, they are cruelly deceived.

Contemporary critics—Virginia Woolf in particular—perceived weaknesses in his work. To her and other Bloomsbury authors, Bennett represented the "old guard" in literary terms. His style was traditional rather than modern, which made him an obvious target for those challenging literary conventions.[7][8] Max Beerbohm criticized him as a social climber who had forgotten his origins. He drew a mature and well fed Bennett expounding, "All to plan, you see" to a younger tougher version of himself, who replies: "Yes—but MY plan."

For much of the 20th Century, Bennett's work was tainted by this perception; it was not until the 1990s that a more positive view of his work became widely accepted. The noted English critic John Carey was a major influence on his rehabilitation. He praises him in his 1992 book, The Intellectuals and the Masses. ISBN 978-0571169269. , declaring Bennett to be his "hero" because his writings "represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals' case against the masses" (p. 152).

Quotations

  • My mother is far too clever to understand anything she doesn't like.
  • Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

List of works

Fiction

  • A Man from the North – 1898
  • The Grand Babylon Hotel – 1902
  • Anna of the Five Towns – 1902
  • The Gates of Wrath – 1903
  • Leonora – 1903
  • A Great Man – 1904
  • Teresa of Watling Street – 1904
  • Sacred and Profane Love – 1905 (Revised and republished as The Book of Carlotta in 1911)
  • Tales of the Five Towns – 1905 (short story collection)
  • Whom God Hath Joined – 1906
  • Hugo – 1906
  • The Grim Smile of the Five Towns – (short stories 1907)
  • The Ghost--a Modern Fantasy – 1907
  • Buried Alive – 1908
  • The Old Wives' Tale – 1908
  • The Card – 1910
  • Clayhanger – 1910
  • Helen with a High Hand – 1910 (Serial title: The Miser's Niece)
  • Hilda Lessways – 1911
  • Milestones – play written with Edward Knoblock
  • The Matador of the Five Towns – (short stories 1912)
  • The Regent – 1913 (US Title: The Old Adam)
  • Paris Nights and other impressions of places and people – 1913 (Illustrated, E. A. Rickards; George H. Doran Company, NY)
  • The Price of Love – 1914
  • These Twain – 1916
  • The Pretty Lady – 1918
  • The Roll-Call – 1918
  • Mr Prohack – 1922
  • Riceyman Steps – 1923
  • Elsie and the Child – 1924
  • The Clayhanger Family – 1925, the complete trilogy consisting of Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, and These Twain
  • Lord Raingo – 1926
  • The Woman who Stole Everything and Other Stories – 1927
  • The Strange Vanguard – 1928
  • Imperial Palace – 1930
  • Venus Rising from the Sea – 1931

Non-fiction

Film

Opera

  • Don Juan de Mañera

For further guidance consult Studies in the Sources of Arnold Bennett's Novels by Louis Tillier (Didier, Paris 1949), and Arnold Bennett and Stoke-on-Trent by E. J. D. Warrilow (Etruscan Publications, 1966). Also, Arnold Bennett: A Biography by Margaret Drabble (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1974).

In gastronomy

Bennett is one of a select number of celebrities to have a dish named after them. While staying at the Savoy Hotel in London, the chefs perfected an omelette incorporating smoked haddock, Parmesan cheese and cream, which pleased the author so much he insisted on it being prepared wherever he travelled. The 'Omelette Arnold Bennett' has remained a Savoy standard dish ever since.[9]

The George Hotel in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, has a restaurant named after Bennett. It is adorned with Arnold Bennett photographs and memorabilia.

Other geographical links

  • 1907/8 Paris: Old Wives Tale written here.
  • 1908 French Riviera: convalescence after typhoid fever. Married and moved to Fountainbleau.
  • 1914: Camarques, Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex coast: here he had the yacht Velsa and trips from this 'home in the country' to Frinton-on-Sea gave rise to one of the characters in The Price of Love.
  • 1917 Bennett's bachelor pad is at Thames Yacht Club: a couple of rooms 'furnished to his own taste'
  • 1920 A month trip to Portugal with Frank Swinnerton, as Bennett was at a particularly low ebb.
  • May–June 1926, Bennett stayed in the village of Amberley, West Sussex where he wrote the last two thirds of The Vanguard in 44 days, noting 'I have never worked more easily than in the last six weeks.[10][11]
  • 1928 house rented in Le Touquet for the summer[12]
London
  • Strand Palace Hotel London: on London trips, he frequented as it offered a bedside light during his periods of insomnia.
  • His wife Marguerite's London flat was over a bank on the corner of New Oxford Street and Rathbone Place.
  • "large flat" George Street, Hanover Square, which subsequently Marguerite came to live in
  • 1921-ish: 75, Cadogan Square; Dorothy moved in here. From here, they moved in 1930 (according to plaque on the building) to Chiltern Court, an "impressive block of flats" at Baker Street Railway Station (where H. G. Wells also lived).
  • 1931 Bennett dies at Chiltern Court on March 26.[13]

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.thepotteries.org/listed/33a.html
  2. ^ http://thediaryjunction.blogspot.com/2009/09/half-crown-public.html
  3. ^ Smith, Adrian (1996). The New statesman: portrait of a political weekly, 1913-1931. Taylor & Francis. p. 122. ISBN 9780714641690. http://books.google.com/books?id=oNx5nxhzaRwC&pg=PA122&dq=france+ministry+of+information+%22arnold+bennett%22. 
  4. ^ Sitwell, Osbert, Noble Essences: Or Courteous Revelations, Being a Book Of Characters and the Fifth and Last Volume, New York, MacMillan and Co., 1950.
  5. ^ Ego 5. Again More of the Autobiography of James Agate., London, George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd (page 166), 1942.
  6. ^ "Straw for Silence". The Spectator (F.C. Westley) 203. 1959. ISSN 0038-6952. OCLC 1766325. http://www.google.com/search?q=Arnold+Bennett+water&tbm=bks&tbo=1#sclient=psy&hl=en&tbs=bks:1%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1950%2Ccd_max%3A1960&q=%22Arnold+Bennett%22++In+a+Paris+hotel+he+drank+ordinary+water+from+a+carafe.+The+waiter+protested&aq=&aqi=&aql=f&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=e11c4d147a465ff9. Retrieved 16 March 2011. 
  7. ^ Seminar - "Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown"
  8. ^ Essay on the debate between Woolf and Bennett including comments on poor modern reputation of Bennett
  9. ^ Smith, Delia (2001-2009). "Omelette Arnold Bennett". Delia Smith / NC Internet Ltd. http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/omelette-arnold-bennett,1088,RC.html. Retrieved 2009-06-06. 
  10. ^ The Journals, Arnold Bennett ed. F. Swinnerton; Penguin Books pp. 510-514
  11. ^ Hepburn, J. Arnold Bennett and Amberley. Smoke Tree Press (2002) ISBN 0-9539914-0-7
  12. ^ Frank Swinnerton Arnold Bennett: a Last Word. Hamish Hamilton, 1978 ISBN 0-241-89877-3
  13. ^ Frank Swinnerton Arnold Bennett: a Last Word. Hamish Hamilton, 1978 ISBN 0-241-89877-3

External links

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Oxford Dictionary of British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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