by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Still, none of this kept Woolf from steadily sniping at Bennett’s “shopkeeping view of literature.” Bennett was a provincial from the Five Towns; Bennett was commercially successful; Bennett was an elder to be pulled down, as elders must always be pulled down even if they are also admired a little.
Through more than a decade of their guerrilla encounters, Bennett tried to parry Woolf’s attacks, but as a polemicist he was sadly outclassed. (Hynes writes in a personal letter that Bennett was a poor polemicist “because he was simply too nice.”) In 1920 Bennett made a fatal tactical blunder: he wrote in the Evening Standard, a London paper, that Woolf is “the queen of the high brows; and I am a low brow.” Now this may have tickled his readers, but among the literary people who would be making and unmaking reputations, it was the equivalent of shooting himself in the foot. For one mark of the modern era has been a ready celebration of the high against the low brow—though Bennett wasn’t really a low brow, he had been baited by Woolf into a truculent misrepresentation of himself. Years earlier he had already written in his journal that “we have absorbed from France that passion for artistic shapely presentation of truth, and that feeling for words as words, which animated Flaubert, the de Goncourts, and de Maupassant.” Hardly the sentiments of a low brow. And in one or two of his novels Bennett would himself write in accord with the word “from France.”
Feelings of class, always abrasive in England, also figured in this dispute, and again Bennett was outmaneuvered. Woolf attacked from both sides, first as a patrician looking down a prominent nose at the grubby lower middle class of the provinces and then as a free spirit elegantly bohemian and contemptuous of shopkeeper mentality. Bennett couldn’t even salvage for himself the doubtful advantage of claiming he was a sturdy proletarian—his father had been a solicitor in the Five Towns. And in the 1920s to be called a “shopkeeper’s novelist” meant being thrust into philistine darkness.
Bennett and Woolf, writes Hynes, were “not antithetical in their views of their common art.” After all, Bennett had shown respect for new writing, had praised Dostoevsky and Chekhov when the Russians were translated into English, had declared admiration for the “conscious art.” What had actually happened, I think, was that Bennett had allowed feelings of class inferiority—they persisted despite his success, his yacht, his mistress—to shift to the arena of cultural judgment, and Woolf had been quick to take advantage of this confusion. Yet Hynes may be overstating the case a little when he sees nothing “antithetical in their views of their common art.” There really was a serious clash regarding “their common art,” and at one point in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” Woolf made clear what the issue was. Older writers like Bennett and Wells were using one set of “conventions”—that’s the key word—while younger writers found these to be “ruin . . . death.” The “Edwardian tools,” she said, “have laid an enormous stress on the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” Or to put it in other words: the Edwardian novelists believed that human nature could be revealed by rendering conduct and circumstance—“from the outside,” as some critics would say.2*
In one of her objective moments, Woolf admitted that “the tools of one generation are useless for the next.” What was consequently involved in her clash with Bennett was not the superiority of one set of fictional conventions over another—for it is very doubtful that such superiority can ever be demonstrated—but, rather, that two generations had reached a fundamental division over the kinds of novels to be written. Outside/inside, objective/subjective, social/psychological: let these stand as rough tokens of the division. Where Woolf gained a polemical advantage was in claiming, or at least arguing as if, there was something inherently better about the novel of sensibility as against the novel of circumstance. She didn’t yet have to consider that in a while the new becomes old, giving way soon enough to the still newer new.
What I have just said is not, however, the most important point. True, Woolf was using her self-chosen role as advocate of the new in order to undermine Bennett, but she was also doing something else. She was writing in behalf of a great new cultural impulse, that of literary modernism. By 1924, if it had not yet entirely triumphed, this impulse was certainly well on the way to triumph, and in retrospect Woolf’s essay seems less the outcry of a beleaguered minority than evidence that this minority was consolidating its cultural power. An attendant irony is that while Woolf spoke for the new and had a certain right to do so, she was unfriendly to, indeed rather obtuse about, the great modernists: she found Joyce “indecent” and Eliot “obscure.”
So Woolf won the battle, if not perhaps the argument. I remember several decades ago being informed by authoritative literary persons that Woolf, once and for all, had demolished Bennett. Growing older, I have come to recognize that “once and for all” often means no more than a few decades. By the end of our century, literary modernism has settled comfortably into the academy; there is no longer a need to defend it against detractors, and one might even look back upon it with a critical eye. The deeper issue, then, wasn’t really, as both Woolf and Bennett said, which writer could create more persuasive characters; it was a clash over competing versions of the novel as a form. Such clashes are never fully settled; they keep recurring in new ways.
Matters become still more complicated if we glance at the novels Bennett and Woolf wrote. At least one of Woolf’s novels is greatly to be admired, and that is To the Lighthouse, where in her own fragile and iridescent way she does command “the reality gift.” But Woolf’s reputation needs no defense these days; it has been inflated for reasons having little to do with her work as a novelist. What does need to be said is that Bennett still merits attention as a fine, largely traditional novelist in a few of his books (he wrote too many): Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives’ Tale, Clayhanger, and Riceyman Steps. His prose is often slapdash and flavorless, quite without Woolf’s felicity of phrasing; his psychology is intuitively bluff rather than precisely nuanced; and in technique he often stumbles. Yet he had the true novelist’s gift, what Woolf called “a gigantic absorbing power” or what the Russian critic M. Bakhtin meant when he wrote that “for the prose artist the world is full of the words of other people.” Listening to those words, Bennett recorded through them the lives of ordinary people with what he once marvelously called a “crushed tenderness.”
In his novels there is a strongly realized sense of place—those cramped dingy towns of provincial England, bristling with high aspirations, streaked with meanness of spirit. Place, not as a Hardyesque rising to spiritual transcendence, but confined, local, the narrow corner of a province. In Clayhanger, a modest classic in the subgenre of the Bildungsroman, Bennett faithfully charts the yearnings for emotional articulation of a printer’s son in the Five Towns (“a new conception of himself”). He depicts the homely, almost speechless love of middle-aged, middle-class men and women with a stolid respect, if not the flair of a Woolf or the depth of a Lawrence. Bennett is a master of the middle range of life and literature, neither soarings of sublimity nor plunges into the soul. He is indeed the prosing poet of the shopkeepers (who may also deserve a poet of their own).
Riceyman Steps, published in 1923, late in Bennett’s career, is something else again, a tour de force Flaubertian in its stringent organization but with moments of Balzacian power. In a style somewhat unnervingly detached, this short novel depicts the lives of shopkeepers trapped in miserliness, showing not only the predictable psychic costs but also how self-denial can become a twisted expression of the life-force. Here is the kind of passage that leads one to invoke Balzac; it describes a moment when the shopkeeper protagonist is at the height of his obsession:
He took a third drawer out of the safe, lifting it with both hands because of its weight, and put it on the table. It was full of gold sovereigns. Violet [his wife] had never seen this gold before nor suspected its existence. She was astounded, frightened, ravished. He mu
st have kept it throughout the war, defying the government’s appeal to patriots not to hoard. He was a superman, the most mysterious of supermen. And he was a fortress, impregnable.
Finally, however, even an admirer of Bennett must admit that there is something in his work—some strand of feeling or aspiration—that is thwarted, unfulfilled. In all his novels except Riceyman Steps the life of the narrative has a way of gradually draining out, as if creation were also a mode of exhaustion. A costive heaviness sets in. Why should this be? Perhaps because there is some truth in the idea that the kind of Victorian novel inherited by Bennett and the other Edwardians had reached a point of exhaustion, what might be called the routinization of realism. And Bennett, a latecomer in the development of the English novel, lacked those mad outpourings of energy which mark the greatest of the Victorians. At moments a touch of modern sadness seeps into his soul, some grim deprivation bred in provincial life.
Something like this may have been what D. H. Lawrence had in mind when he wrote: “I hate Bennett’s resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.” Bennett himself seems occasionally to have had similar responses to his own work, though in a fine essay about George Gissing he provided a justification for its grayness of tone. Gissing, he said, “is . . . just, sober, calm, and proud against the gods; he has seen, he knows, he is unmoved; he defeats fate by accepting it.” Whether this quite disposes of Lawrence’s criticism is a question, though I would venture the opinion that Lawrence’s attack cut more deeply and painfully than Woolf’s, even though it is Woolf’s that has been remembered.
The years pass, and by now the dispute between Bennett and Woolf has settled into history. It may be time for a spot of justice for Arnold Bennett, not a great but at times a very good novelist. But I doubt that it will come, since it is a delusion to suppose that the passage of time is an aid to justice, and, in any case, there hovers over Bennett’s work and reputation the shadow of the formidable Mrs. Brown, called into being by the silkily ferocious Mrs. Woolf.
Notes
1* Herself sensitive to the need for a room of her own, Woolf seemed indifferent to what a house might mean for people who had risen somewhat in the world. For a writer like Bennett, however, imagining a house was part of the way to locate “a person living there.”
2* A memorable expression of this view is provided by a character in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Madame Merle says, “. . . every human being has his shell. . . . By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman. . . . What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again.”
Dickens: Three Notes
{1994}
Absolute Goodness and the Limits of Fiction
It is a truism frequently acknowledged that few things are more difficult for the novelist than to portray an absolutely good person—indeed, the greater the goodness, the greater the difficulty. I see no reason to challenge this judgment, but propose here to glance at a few instances that may yield attractive complications.
Let’s start with the approximation that unalloyed goodness may take the form of a ready submission of selfhood to the needs, even the desires of others. Such behavior can excite our admiration almost as much as it may violate our sense of probability. The truly good person, whether we seek him in ourselves or in others, seems mostly a figment of hope. And this persuasion as to how things really are, this moral realism—it need not be engraved as a dogma of original sin—serves as a powerful controlling presence in our responses to works of fiction, including those written in nonrealistic modes.
The effort to portray, even the ability to imagine, a state of absolute goodness takes the mind into realms—misty, speculative, transcendent—which the novel as a genre finds hard to accommodate. Grubbing along in the low vistas of actuality, or at least simulated versions of actuality, the novel is not usually hospitable to elves, fairies, ghosts, angels, devils, and gods. Many novels show God as a figure keenly desired, but only rarely does He make an appearance, whether as voice or sheet of flame; and as for devils, they have the decency, when they do make an occasional entry, to dress as gentlemen. Now it is true that such hypothetical beings are not unconditionally excluded from novels, since of all modern genres the novel is best able to put up with alien matter; but God and the angels, especially the unfallen ones, are clearly not as comfortable with Balzac as with Milton.
When we think about the problem of rendering goodness in fiction, we are likely to turn, first of all, to Don Quixote. It’s not at all clear, however, that “goodness” is the most accurate description of the Knight of the Mournful Countenance. He lives by a chivalric code of good works, he sees himself as a man of action, and when in the grip of his mania, which is throughout the richest parts of the book, he is completely serious about his intention to bring justice to earth: “I am the valorous Don Quixote de la Mancha, righter of wrongs and injustices,” he says. And “What are we to do? Favor and aid the weak and needy.” Precisely his exalted aims, bringing him to the threshold of grace, are what unhinge the poor fellow, as each act in quest of justice leads to an absurd pratfall.
We are not invited by Cervantes to disparage Don Quixote’s intentions, but we cannot avoid recognizing that, more often than not, he either does unwitting harm or turns out to be ineffectual. An insatiable hunger for purpose, for a goal beyond the mere exercise or gratification of ego, drives him into recurrent states of agitation—and this, while surely admirable, is rather different from a pure goodness. Once “the idealism of [Don Quixote’s] idée fixe takes hold of him,” remarks Erich Auerbach, “everything he does in that state is completely senseless and so incompatible with the existing world that it produces only comic confusion there.” It also produces intense pathos, though the confusion and the pathos must both be distinguished from the visible presence of goodness.
Don Quixote wishes to release an active principle in the workings of the world, which is one reason he must always be on the move. His behavior, sometimes heroism and sometimes a parody of heroism, seems to confirm or shadow the idea, similar perhaps to the quietist element in Christianity, that action, as it locks into the fallen world, carries within itself the seeds of destruction. Between actor and act there is a chasm not to be bridged—not, at least, in this world. Only when Don Quixote turns his back on the windmills, the giants, and other phantasms of his sublime delusion, only when he ceases to be Don Quixote can he revert—we are now at the end of Cervantes’s book—to his decent, flawed, commonplace self, Alonso el Bueno, Alonso the Good. This return to familiar sanity and alloyed goodness is purchased at the price of spiritual and, soon enough, physical death, so that the book may be read as implying—or is this a modernist misreading prompted by the ethic of striving?—that the return to sanity should be taken as a kind of fall. Throughout most of the book Don Quixote is too exalted or too deluded—he is always too busy—to live by the norms of absolute goodness, whatever those might be, indeed, to live by any norms but the chivalry of madness.
Dostoevsky, struggling with The Idiot, wrote a letter to his niece in 1868 speculating on the problem of positive goodness in fiction:
The chief idea of the novel [the one he is writing] is to portray the positively good man. There is nothing in the world more difficult to do, and especially now. All writers, and not only ours, but even all Europeans who have tried to portray the positively good man have always failed. . . . There is only one positively good man in the world—Christ (so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely good person is, of course, an infinite miracle in itself). . . . Of the good figures in Christian literature, the most perfect is Don Quixote. But he is good only because at the same time he is ridiculous [comic]. Dickens’ Pickwick (an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote, but nevertheless immense) is also ridiculous [comic] and succeeds only by virtue of that fact. Compassion appears towar
d the good that is mocked and does not know its own value. . . .1*
Why does Dostoevsky believe “positive goodness” to be credible, or more credible, when presented as “comic” or “ridiculous”? Because our compassion is stirred when we see a virtue “that does not know its own value,” a virtue neither proud nor self-conscious that is being mocked. (This, by the way, may echo Turgenev’s remark in his 1860 lecture “Don Quixote and Hamlet”: “we are ready to love someone whom we have laughed at.”) It is, then, the innocence or naivete of the good person, the refusal to take affront at the world’s mockery, that wins our love.
Let me suggest another reason for thinking that goodness is credible, or more credible, when presented through the lens of the comic. Goodness so regarded tends to shrink to something life-size or smaller than life; it does not disconcert us or fill us with a despairing awe as might a “positive goodness” of large scope.
Mulling over this matter in his notebooks for The Idiot, Dostoevsky writes about Prince Myshkin, the character he hoped to establish as an exemplar of “positive goodness”: “How to make the hero’s character sympathetic to readers? If Don Quixote and Pickwick, as virtuous types, are sympathetic to the reader . . . it is because they are comic.”
