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novels. His greatest achievement was to make English provincial life a subject
for good fiction , but in none of his novels does he endow it with the depth or
tension that Lawrence manages.
And yet, the life is interesting, even fascinating. One watches that
increasingly rare species, a good writer who is also an honest and industrious
man, as he goes about his daily business. Like the young Faulkner, Bennett
stood between classes . But his father, a vigorous attractive man who had, by
sheer hard work and determination, made himself a soliciter at the age of
thirty-four, seems to have been a distinctly healthy influence upon him.
(Blomer depicts Faulkner's father as isolated from his sons.) As with Gissing,
we are again brought up against that awful English class brutality. Reading
these two biographies, one wishes for nothing more than an act of psycho–
logical leveling, something that would go beyond even English class-con–
sciousness . Ms. Drabble quotes from Clive Bell's reminiscenses about Bennett
in Paris, an example of a particular kind of English snobbery which manages
to be both libertarian and vicious, a product of class translated from econ–
omics to style . Bennett was always one step away from his childhood potteries.
Is it any wonder that he found turn-of-the-century Paris liberating, even if, as
Somerset Maugham cattily noted, he was provincial enough not to recognize
that ' 'his Empire furniture .. . was certainly not genuine"? The fact that he
was satirized by both Pound and Wyndham Lewis speaks well for Bennett as a
man of what used to be called " character."
But having noted the genuinely attractive qualities Bennett possessed
and how successfully Ms . Drabble presents his life-he
is
an attractive fig–
ure-one has to examine the work he left behind . And here, I am afraid, Ms.
Drabble's estimate is considerably higher than my own. For her, he remains
"one of the most readable and versatile ofmajor novelists." Leaving aside the
question of what makes a writer ..major," one notes little evolution in
Bennett's work. There is something static about his books, just as there is
something static about the Edwardian world he inhabited. That he was one of
its more attractive inhabitants does not, in itself, make him the important
subject Ms. Drabble believes she has got hold of.
Even more than other writers, the biographer of literary figures is sub–
ject to shifts in taste . That there has not been a significant shift where Bennett
and even Gissing are concerned should not blind us to this fact . Consider Leon
Edel'sJames,
a work which has taken most of the biographer's literary life–
time .
It
has suffered some strange vicissitudes of late, and one wonders how
many of them are Edel's fault . When the first volume appeared in 1953,
James was at the height of critical fashion, his reputation apparently secure in
the hands of the New Critics as well as the mood of national conservatism.
Both of these combined to makeJames the preeminent American novelist. By
