posted on 07 Aug 2024

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

I rather think that this is one of those books that readers either fall on hungrily with a cry of ‘This is exactly what I want to read!’ or conversely avoid picking up because even the title sounds as dull as ditchwater. 

Let me say right at the outset that while I haven’t read a great deal of Bennett I am an admirer and had long planned to read this particular novel; I was just waiting for the right time, the right mood, the right personal receptiveness, call it what you will. And I’m so glad I did wait: it is a huge 600-page novel, a major undertaking; but more than anything else I have read by Bennett I think it illustrates the vast scale of both his talent and ambition. It is an extraordinary book and if you are in the mood for a multi-generational masterpiece of provincial life covering around fifty years, undertaken in the company of a sure-footed writer at the height of his considerable powers then you are in for a massive treat.

I have tried elsewhere to explain what I understand of Bennett’s transplanting of the methods of the French social realists– especially Balzac, Zola and Maupassant – to the grimy but fast-evolving towns of the Potteries in the early years of the twentieth century. These small towns were Bennett’s home turf and he felt that their religious non-conformism, entrepreneurial know-how and rigorous social rectitude offered the ideal canvas for Zolaesque social realism. Like all great story-tellers Bennett’s novels are founded on character but what distinguishes him from some other Edwardian novelists, I think, is that his characters are fully rounded people and they exist in a complex social, economic and political world that is shaping modernity around them, thrusting some into sudden social dominance and consigning others to historical obscurity. 

In a sense, Bennett’s preparations for The Old Wives’ Tale began when he moved to Paris in 1903 on a quest for self-education and literary experience. He began the novel three or four years later and so as to root it as deeply and as realistically in its time as possible, it begins chronologically in the mid-1860s and ends in 1907, the year he began writing.

At the heart of the novel are the two sisters of the Baines family, Constance (the older) and Sophia, whose parents own a highly regarded millinery shop, admired for the honesty of its dealings, the quality of its merchandise, and the rectitude of its owners and staff. The novel opens when the sisters are in their teens, their mother in her late prime, their father diminished and bed-bound by a stroke a dozen years earlier that has left him a shell of his former self. Nonetheless, the fiction of his continuing influence and indispensability and high regard in the Five Towns is tirelessly maintained by his wife and the obnoxious, blunt-speaking bully, his old friend Mr Critchlow, another prominent Burslem shop-keeper (its chemist). Together these two self-satisfied old grumblers enjoy ‘a sort of grim, desiccated happiness’ once a week when Critchlow spends the long Thursday afternoon with his old friend, ‘cooped up together’ in Mr Baines’s bedroom where they are ‘secure from women and fools generally’. 

The fortunes of the two daughters could not be more different. Constance, against all expectation, marries the dull but eminently worthy and sensible chief assistant of her parents’ shop, Mr Povey, while Sophia elopes with a raffish commercial traveller, Gerald Scales, and they take flight to Paris. 

Unlike, say, Dickens, Bennett’s novel is capacious but it isn’t baggy: its canvas may be grand and crammed with incident but it never loses either focus or forward momentum, and I think in part this is down to Bennett’s fastidious adherence to his chosen chronological framework. This is doubly important, I think, because time and its effect on people is a further important underlying theme in the book. 

The other thing that must be said about the novel is that unexpectedly it is often very funny. This is because throughout Bennett employs a gentle and affectionate irony – always warm, always humane, never scathing or malign – to highlight the outdated attitudes of the Victorian period and the primitive and obsolete way of life that passed for Victorian modernism fifty years earlier. This, in conjunction with Bennett’s flawless omniscient narrator makes for an immediately distinctive reading experience but perhaps one that readers will either love or hate. 

I will admit that after three hundred pages, when we take up the story of Sophia and the setting shifts to Paris, I was somewhat disappointed: I wanted to stay immersed in Burslem, partly because of Bennett’s loving depiction of the town and partly because I feared that he couldn’t possibly manage a similarly convincing depiction of the French capital during the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris. But I was wrong. If anything, the French setting – perhaps by way of hommage to the European masters he acknowledges – seems to elevate his style and sensibility even further. The dialogue and descriptive writing become even more acute, more pungent, more subtle and I read on feeling increasingly that nothing was beyond him.

I think The Old Wives’ Tale can safely be described as a major reading project but it repays the time and effort royally and on every page. I think that anyone who reads it with enjoyment will consider it a remarkable experience, but I can imagine it being especially vivid read during the dark days of late-autumn and winter, when snow lies on the streets of Burslem and in the mornings the assistants at the brass and mahogany counters and in the great cutting room can see their breath suspended in the air. Wonderful. 

 

Alun Severn

August 2024

 

Elsewhere on Letterpress:

Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett

Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett