New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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Bennett, Wells, and the Persistence of Realism
REALISM is not primarily a matter of confining a story to the realm of the possible or even the probable; rather, it involves a particular philosophical position. Realism assumes reality, that is, the existence of a phenomenal world separate from and knowable by consciousness. The struggle to recognize that separation and gather that knowledge is the chief theme of realist work. By the same token, the realist novel purports to sharpen a reader's perception of the real world exterior to it. Realist fiction tends toward comedy when the protagonist achieves the competence to distinguish reality from unreality-to choose the truly admirable mate, to disentangle the good from the pleasurable, to discard false gods for true. Realist fiction tends toward tragedy when the protagonist remains an incompetent judge, misled by romantic phantasms into some fatal misstep. Other factors complicate the identification of any single work as realist; one might argue, for instance, against identifying Madame Bovary as a 'realist novel,' despite its virulent antiromanticism, on the grounds that Flaubert's technique insistently draws attention away from the realities it exposes and toward the means of exposure. Every novel both makes meaningful reference to a world outside itself and is a self-contained, self-referential world of meaning. One may thus think of realism as an element more or less present in a work, rather than as a defining characteristic of it: whether or not one identifies a particular novel as realist will always depend on the context in which one makes the identification. Certainly, by comparison with the twentieth century, the nine -658- teenth was a realist era. The modernist concentration on the phenomenal world as a production of language pushed the concerns of realist fiction to the margin, if not entirely off the page. Modernist novels undermine the very division between the «exterior» world and the «interior» consciousness on which realism is founded. They similarly deny the realist transference of interest from the fictive to the real world. James Joyce's Ulysses, for example, has a greatly diminished effect if read as a depiction of lives; it has little anecdotal power. Rather, the characters Joyce deploys are continually revealed to be fictional constructions that gloss other fictions.
The reputations of those Edwardian novelists perceived to be upholding the realist tradition consequently sank when the attitudes of modernism became predominant in academia. While the modernist tide has receded, the reputations of the chief Edwardian realists, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, have only slightly recovered. Wells is known to most nonacademic readers as the ebullient founder of science fiction-he has even appeared as a fictionalized hero in this genre, pursuing Jack the Ripper down the ages in the film Time After Time, (1980). Bennett, especially to American readers, is not known at all. Academics tend to identify Wells and Bennett as the opposition, whetstones against whom two better-regarded authors sharpened their theories-Henry James against Wells (but also Bennett) in a bitter controversy of the teens, Virginia Woolf against Bennett (but also Wells) in a less vitriolic dispute of the twenties. In both cases, the charge was abetting the persistence of realism. But to regard Wells and Bennett as collaborators in the same realist enterprise distorts both; indeed, they differ most profoundly in their relation to the realist tradition. Realism persisted in the works of both Bennett and Wells only in that each felt obliged to respond to it. But they wielded the conventions of realism to opposite effects. H. G. Wells reworked the form he had inherited in the hope of achieving a greater realism, of extending the range of unrealities he might expose. Arnold Bennett, on the other hand, used realist conventions in order to subvert them.
The coupling of Wells and Bennett as realists had less to do with the novels they wrote than with the image of the novelist they promulgated. The partly self-created public images of Wells and Bennett are worth examining in some detail. That the two most prominent serious novelists of the Edwardian period should be spoken of as one is not sur-659- prising; the names Wells and Bennett were frequently linked by the authors themselves. Wells sketches the dual portrait in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934):
We were both about of an age; to be exact he was six months younger than I; we were both hard workers, both pushing up by way of writing from lower middle-class surroundings, where we had little prospect of anything but a restricted salaried life, and we found we were pushing with quite surprising ease; we were learning much the same business, tackling much the same obstacles, encountering similar prejudices and antagonisms and facing similar social occasions. We both had a natural zest for life and we both came out of a good old English radical tradition. We were liberal, sceptical and republican.
Wells might have added that neither claimed to have set out to be an author of any sort, let alone a novelist. Nor was the slope of Parnassus as gently graded as Wells implied. Enoch Arnold Bennett, born on May 27, 1867, in Burslem, half-purposefully failed the bar in 1889, having no interest in becoming a lawyer. This intentional accident released him to London, where he became a law clerk for the firm of Brasseur and Oakley. To his delight and surprise, he fell in with artists. 'It was soon afterwards,' Bennett wrote in his anonymous autobiographical sketch, The Truth about an Author (1903), 'that the artists whom I had twitted about their temperament accused me of sharing it with them to the full.' Faced with such incontrovertible proof of his calling, Bennett surrendered his clerkship in 1893 to become assistant editor of the magazine Woman, the editorship of which he purchased in 1896 with money borrowed from his father. But his artist friends continued to twit Bennett until they had squeezed from him a 'Yellow Book' short story ('A Letter Home,' 1895) and then his first novel, A Man from the North (1898). Publication did not mean security, though Bennett achieved a steady enough income to resign his editorship of Woman in September 1900. He recalled in an Evening Standard review of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own that 'I have myself written long and formidable novels in bedrooms whose doors certainly had no locks, and in the full dreadful knowledge that I had not five hundred a year of my own-nor fifty.' It was not until 1912 that Bennett struck literary oil, earning sixteen thousand pounds for the year, which he calculated to equal his combined income for all the years since his first paycheck in 1889.
Herbert George Wells, born September 21, 1866, in Bromley, took to literature even less purposefully than Bennett-not at the point of a -660- dare, but of necessity. In the winter of 1893 -94, a married teacher who had eloped with a student despite lacking the benefit of a divorce, Wells found himself unable to continue in his chosen profession due to tuberculosis. He took up the pen, he wrote in Experiment in Autobiography, because it was less taxing than the chalk: 'Fate was pushing me to the writing desk in spite of myself. I decided that henceforth I must reckon class teaching in London as outside the range of my possibilities.' After stunning early success- The Time Machine (1895) alone established a popular, if not quite a literary, reputation-Wells recovered from the controversies and setbacks of the early teens only with the commercial triumphs of Mr. Britling Sees it Through (1916) and The Outline of History (1920).
Whether Bennett or Wells might not have become novelists is, of course, impossible to determine, but it is
