Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (54 page)

What gives Wells’s best (i.e. early) fiction its distinctive tang is the black vein of gloom running through it. The Invisible Man, like the sighted man in the Country of the Blind, finds himself an alien – doomed, despite his advantage, to be an outsider
and a social inferior. The world does not like people better than itself. The work which is regarded as Wells’s most optimistic,
The Shape of Things to Come
(1933) is dedicated, subversively, to a social thinker even more pessimistic than himself, Ortega y Gasset. At its most controlled, Wellsian pessimism takes the form of satire, as in
Tono-Bungay
’s scathing comedy on quack medicine and the incorrigible foolishness of the buying public. There’s not one born every day but millions. Comedy, however, cannot keep the awfulness at bay. The Time Traveller, as far in the future as his machine will carry him, stands on a bleak seashore, regarding a fading sun, with only a giant crab for company. Is this what it was all for – science, art, progress, novels? Wells lived to see the atom bomb he had foreseen half a century before dropped on the country of the Samurai which, half a century earlier, he had seen as his ideal. He witnessed his well-meaning eugenic theories tested to destruction by the Nazis. His final thoughts, expressed in his testament,
Mind at the End of its Tether
(1945), are as hopeless as Kurtz’s: ‘Homo Sapiens in his present form is played out …There is no way through the impasse. It will be the Dark Ages over again, a planetary instead of a European Dark Ages.’ ‘The horror! the horror!’

Writing to a friend, Rebecca West commemorated him cruelly and kindly: ‘Dear H. G., he was a devil, he ruined my life, he starved me, he was an unexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for thirty five years, we should never have met, I was the one person he cared to see to the end, I feel desolate because he is gone.’ The finest portrait of Wells in extremis is found not in straight biography but in David Lodge’s 2011 docunovel,
A Man of Parts
. The prelude pictures ‘H.G.’ in his Regent’s Park flat. London, blacked out, is under bombardment from the Germans. He is very ill. He does not want to die but must. The end of civilisation and his own end merge. There is one final surge of the energy which has fuelled his remarkable career. To a new Preface to the Penguin reissue of
The War in the Air
, he adds ‘the epitaph he wished to have inscribed on his tombstone: “I told you so. You
damned
fools.”’

They write of unimportant things.
Virginia Woolf on Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy

Arnold Bennett was born in the Staffordshire Potteries, or ‘Black Country’ – a region his fiction would make as famous as Hardy’s Wessex. He was one of six children of a struggling Hanley solicitor. The family was Methodist, high-minded, and unusually close-knit. When away from his mother, in later life, Arnold wrote to her every day; on occasion seven times a day. Arnold excelled at school (particularly in French, prophetically) but with all those Bennett offspring higher education could never be afforded, even for a clever lad, and at sixteen he was put to work in his father’s office. By night he studied and penned pieces for local newspapers. A loan from his mother enabled him to go to London in 1889. The transplant from the industrial Midlands to
fin de siècle
London was electrifying and he promptly gave up any interest in law. His first literary contact was with John Lane – in whose
Yellow Book
(alongside Wilde and Beardsley) he published his early efforts. Lane it was, on the advice of John Buchan (another rising star), who published Bennett’s first novel,
A Man from the North
(1898). Bennett was meanwhile coining it with reviews for the London prints: Gissing’s ‘New Grub Street’ held no terrors for Arnold.

By the turn of the century he was sufficiently prosperous to move his now indigent family into a farmhouse in Bedfordshire. At this period he wrote his first Black Country novel,
Anna of the Five Towns
(1902) – a work whose mood and plot is influenced by his father’s concurrent death. The five towns are the linked centres of pottery production in Staffordshire. It was followed by a very different novel, drawing on the author’s currently cosmopolitan lifestyle,
Grand Babylon Hotel
(1902). Grand Hotels and the Five Towns would be motifs throughout Bennett’s forty-volume strong fictional
oeuvre
. Bennett had made himself a valuable literary property and his commercial affairs were entrusted to the agent J. B. Pinker – to whom he was introduced by his friend H. G. Wells.

After the death of his father in 1903, Bennett went to live in Paris for what would be ten years. On his trips to London, he would stay in the Savoy, where the waiters were circulated with his photograph and a dish (a fishy omelette) was named after him by the head chef (who was reciprocally honoured as ‘Rocco’ in
Imperial Palace
). H. G. Wells, who knew all about philandering (and, as J. B. Priestley claimed, had the ‘better taste in women’), liked to put it about that Bennett was ‘undersexed’. This would seem to be borne out by his not marrying his French mistress, Marie Marguerite Soulié, a woman eight years his junior, until he was forty. But portions of Bennett’s journal, suppressed until the 1980s, suggest sexual sophistication – and
perhaps more than that. Four years before his marriage, he recorded, from conversation with a Parisian
poule
: ‘Concerning sexual perversions. Chichi gave me several of her own experiences. As of the man who always wished to make love on the floor,
more canino
. The man who had his
fesses
beaten until they bled … I explained to her the philosophy of the passion for pain in the enjoyment of love and how it grew on a man like drink.’

It was during the Paris years that Bennett produced much of his best fiction:
Whom God Hath Joined
(1906),
The Old Wives’ Tale
(1908), the first volume in the
Clayhanger
trilogy (1910), and the comic novel,
The Card
(1911). By now the streams of literary, journalistic and stage earnings had made Bennett the richest author in England, and he enjoyed his riches as only the once-poor can. He bought himself a yacht and travelled the world. On the outbreak of war in 1914, he joined the Ministry of Information, where his intimate knowledge of France proved useful. His private misgivings about the conflict are reflected in
The Pretty Lady
(1918).

With one of his literary roots in the 1890s and his French connections, Bennett was a friend to modernism. He was, none the less, set up as a target by Ezra Pound, in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ as the crass, sales-grubbing ‘Mr Nixon’ and – more argumentatively – by Virginia Woolf, who defined her finely touched impression in contradistinction to Bennett’s clumping realism. Sides have been taken by partisans ever since. Woolf is currently well ahead. Somerset Maugham – who liked Bennett and hobnobbed with him in Paris – thought him ‘like a managing clerk in a city office’. Vulgar, that is, with poor French. It did not help that Bennett retained his provincial accent, perhaps to cover up a bad stammer from which, like Maugham, he suffered.

After the war, Bennett gave up his country house, his mother having died in 1914, and separated from Marguerite in 1921. He formed a ‘marital understanding’ with an actress Dorothy Cheston, who was twenty-five years younger (she later changed her surname, by deed-poll, to ‘Bennett’). The union was ‘open’ and fraught. In 1926, when their only child, Victoria, was being born, Bennett wrote to Dorothy on the subject of her two, simultaneously running, lovers. ‘No doubt normal husbands’, he drily observed, ‘would regard it as quite proper for you to have two men at once and to leave our baby in my charge … But I am abnormal.’

During the 1920s, Bennett produced some of his best fiction:
Riceyman Steps
(1923),
Lord Raingo
(1926), and
Imperial Palace
(1930). And, in the
Evening Standard,
he exercised an authority as a reviewer which has rarely been equalled. The official account of his death is that on holiday in France, with Dorothy, he contracted typhoid from tap-water and died of infection three months later. His last, enigmatic, words are recorded as being ‘the bill, the bill’: appropriate for one so associated with
good living. He left some £40,000, which meant that he had no reason to be frightened of hotel bills. Dorothy lived to the ripe age of eighty-six which meant that the dark suspicions that Bennett’s family and friends had about her were suppressed. It was suspected, for example, that she misconducted herself with Bennett’s nephew, Richard, while her husband lay dying and that she ripped a valuable ring from his dying hand. Most luridly, H. G. Wells was led to exclaim, hysterically: ‘She’s a bitch and she
killed
Arnold.’ Arnold’s sisters concurred, disbelieving, apparently, the official version of his death.

If the gods have no sense of humour they must weep a great deal.

Pearl Richards was born in Boston, America. Her family was enriched by patent medicines, notably Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Pearl grew up deeply attached to her father, John Morgan Richards (1841–1918): a cultivated magnate, he purchased the
Academy
literary magazine (a precursor of the
TLS
) in 1896. The Richards family moved to London in 1868 and it was in that city the young girl spent her formative years. She was brought up in the style approved for upper-class English girls, attending boarding schools in Berkshire and at Paris. Her literary sensibility was remarkably precocious, her first story being published when she was nine.

Richards was presented at court in 1886 and, aged nineteen, she married an English banker, Reginald Walpole Craigie (1860–1930), whom she had met in America. There was one child, a son, born in 1890, whom she had tried unsuccessfully to abort with a particularly violent bout of horse-riding. In the same year the couple parted. She did not give marriage much of a try but her partisans point out that he was drunken, unfaithful, and infected her with venereal disease. Whatever else, Craigie gave his wife the principal theme of her subsequent fiction – utterly wretched marriage and the rottenness of the male sex. The couple were eventually divorced messily, on the grounds of his adultery, in 1895. Three years earlier Craigie had converted to Catholicism. She took a lifelong vow of celibacy, as a conventual gesture. At the same period she resolved both to educate herself and to pursue a career in literature. She had earlier enrolled to study at University College London,
the ‘Godless Place in Gower Street’, for whose English Department she retained a lifelong affection. In the divorce proceedings she had been accused of misconduct with a UCL professor.

In 1891 she published her first novel,
Some Emotions and a Moral
. The story of an ill-assorted and mutually unfaithful marriage, the work is written with a light, worldly wise touch – and was very successful. Since it first appeared in Fisher Unwin’s ‘Pseudonym Library’, the author was obliged to devise a pen-name, John Oliver Hobbes. ‘John’ she took from her father, ‘Oliver’ from Cromwell, and ‘Hobbes’ from the author of
Leviathan
. No woman qualified. She followed up with other modish studies of sex and bohemian manners, dedicated to her view that ‘if the gods have no sense of humour they must weep a great deal’. Representative of this highpoint of her career is
The Herb-Moon
(1896), the story of the courtship between a young clerk, Robsart, and an older woman, Rose, whom he initially supposes to be a widow. In fact, she is married to a husband locked up in a lunatic asylum. After many years (and his winning a VC in the Indian Mutiny) they eventually marry. The odd title is a proverbial reference to long engagements. On the strength of such chronicles of sexual cross-purpose, her striking looks, her wealth, and her father’s literary clout, Hobbes became a fashionable London woman of letters. Her most enduring work is the pair of novels with a pronounced Catholic-Disraelian theme,
The School for Saints
(1897) and
Robert Orange
(1900).

George Moore, with whom she was sexually (if chastely) and emotionally involved, represents Hobbes vindictively in his fiction. In later life she was – like Mrs Humphry Ward – a member of the Anti-Suffrage League and president of the Society of Women Journalists, 1895–6. She never enjoyed good health, and died young. A John Oliver Hobbes scholarship was established in her memory at University College London (even winners vaguely presume it is in honour of the author of
Leviathan
). Carter’s Little Liver Pills were designated a quack remedy (at least as regards the liver’s well-being) by the FDA in 1951 and have since disappeared from the drugstore shelves.