Volume 7, Number 7 · November 3, 1966
To Bennett's Rescue
By Christopher Ricks
Writer by Trade: A Portrait of Arnold Bennett
by Dudley Barker
Atheneum, 260 pp., $6.50
Arnold Bennett is in limbo. In a time when many writers are famous mainly for being famous, he is ignored for being ignored. What ineffectuality could be worse than that of a novelist who is so merely known about? Bennett hasn't even the piquancy which attaches to the totally unknown, the literary equivalent of that tiny restaurant as yet unspoiled. We are all (rightly) willing to be gallant on behalf of a novelist like Christina Stead whose new fame suddenly surfaces from nowhere. But in the case of Bennett (1867-1931), we know what we know: that he had a drooping eyelid, wrote very long and altogether unexperimental novels about the Potteries, was something of an Edwardian vulgarian (a 'card?'), and made a great deal of money. His obsession with fact, his knowing worldliness—wasn't he merely the C. P. Snow of his day, and where are the Snows of yesteryear? With the notable exception of John Wain (a first-rate essay), none of the critics who count, who really influence the taste of new generations, has argued for Bennett—one had almost said has interceded for him.
Review, 1526 words
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