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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The Conventional image of Arnold Bennett as a novelist-at-work has three or four sources: general notions about realistic novelists, inferences from Bennett's completed novels, glimpses of Bennett at his task, and fragmentary remarks by Bennett himself. The image of Zola, notebook in hand, going down into the mines to gather material for Germinal is the image of Bennett interviewing an elderly couple to gather material on the Siege of Paris for The Old Wives' Tale. The ninety volumes of Zola's notebooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale are matched by dozens of notebooks that Bennett kept. J. B. Atkins asserts that Bennett “would divide his scheme [for a novel] into parts which he numbered and divide each part into sections. He knew in advance what he would put into each part and each section.” And George Doran recollects, in Chronicles of Barabbas, that on one of many silent walks in the forest at Fontainebleau he interrupted Bennett's thoughts to say, “I suppose in these silences you are actually phrasing your thousand words for tomorrow,” and got “yes” for an answer. Some of Bennett's voluntary remarks about his writing support the image. In his Preface to The Old Wives' Tale he comments upon the tedious but necessary research that he undertook for the novel. In an article in the Evening Standard he writes about “moving … an entire bookseller's shop with all its books and dust from a South Coast port to … [Clerkenwell]” to use in Riceyman Steps. And in his Journal, 1929, he says about Imperial Palace, then being written: “I have the whole of the material for the novel; and it is indexed, in a notebook. I would sooner lose fifty pages of the manuscript than that notebook.”
1 This article is part of a study of the making of Bennett's novels. I wish to acknowledge two grants from the Grant-in-Aid Fund of the Department of English, Cornell University, which made possible the necessary research in England.
2 Incidents and Reflections (London, 1947), p. 177.
3 New York, 1935, p. 142.
4 Quoted in Reginald Pound, Arnold Bennett (New York, 1953), p. 301.
5 London, 1930, p. 130.
6 In “Some Curious Realism in Riceyman Steps,” Modern Fiction Studies, VIH (Summer 1962), pp. 116–126,1 have attempted to show that Bennett's assertion about modelling the shop in Riceyman Steps upon one in Southampton is merely playful. His remark about the index for Imperial Palace seems to be of the same piece: no such index exists among the notebooks for the novel. (The notebooks and manuscript for Imperial Palace are owned by Miss Bridget D'Oyly Carte of the Savoy Hotel, London; they are on loan to the directors of the Savoy, who granted permission to examine them.)
7 The notebook for Riceyman Steps is held in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. I am grateful to the Library and to Mrs. Dorothy Cheston Bennett for permission to use it. Notebooks for The Price of Love are held in the Walpole Collection in the Library at King's School, Canterbury, and for Dream of Destiny at University College, London. An extensive search has turned up no other notebooks than these and the notebooks for Imperial Palace (see previous fn.).
8 In my article in Modern Fiction Studies.
9 In an unpublished article.
10 Bennett first definitely conceived the novel in the summer of 1922. See Pound, p. 301. He began writing the novel on 10 October 1922.
11 Riceyman Steps (New York: Doran, 1923), Part i, Chapter xiii. All subsequent references to the novel are to this, the first American edition.
12 I discuss the psychological aspect of the novel in some detail in my forthcoming book, The Art of Arnold Bennett.
13 New York, 1934, p. 536.
14 Quoted in Pound, p. 3.
15 The Journal of Arnold, Bennett (New York, 1933), pp. 346, 349, 357.
16 “Arnold Bennett's Unfinished Novel,” Bookman (New York), LXXV (September 1932), 497–500.
17 Arnold Bennett's Letters to His Nephew (New York, 1935), p. 333.
18 The Old Wives' Tale (London: Benn, and New York: Doran, 1927), p. v. The edition is a facsimile reproduction of the original manuscript.
19 The manuscript of Riceyman Steps is held in the Berg Collection. The manuscript of The Old Wives' Tale is held in the Library at Indiana University.