themselves become the stuff that tabloids are made on, only the narrator's scrupulous identification with their point of view (and Elsie's) has prevented such a recognition. Such people as the Earlforwards never imagine their own lives as tabloid headlines.
The narrator does deploy the ambiguous «seems» in his early description of how the bookseller fits into Clerkenwell; it seems possible that an alert reader might distinguish reality from appearance in the world of the novel-or, rather, that the novel might constitute an education in such distinctions. But the more carefully one reads Riceyman Steps, the more clearly it reminds one of the indeterminacy of reading-that interpretation never depends solely on the object under interpretation, but on the angle of its relationship to the interpreter. Violet Arb enters the novel almost as an emblem of vivacity, as Henry's inverse. She continually, if affectionately, belittles his beloved Clerkenwell. But from another, more distant perspective, Violet is Henry's twin, not his opposite. When a new proprietor converts the nondescript confectioner's shop she had run into a wholesale cheese shop, Violet (like Henry) scoffs at its nightly «waste» of electricity, declaring that it must soon fail. The Earlforwards do no business there, it not being Violet's 'sort of shop.' But when Violet has entered London Hospital for her operation, Henry instructs Elsie to check on her condition by using the phone (he has none) at the cheese shop, Belrose's. The shop lives up to the pleasant associations of its name, exuding 'a fine odour of cheese and humanity,' making Violet and the dismal shop she had managed appear perfect representatives of the shabby Clerkenwell she had so often defined herself against. The Belrose perspective is no more real than Henry's, only different. -681-
Such perspectivist ironies operate on every level of the novel. They invest the smallest details: on the honeymoon visit to Madame Tussaud's, Violet mistakes a wax figure for a human being, a human being for a wax figure. They determine the largest frame of its construction. The novel begins and ends from the perspective of a casual observer whose point of view is ultimately incommensurate with that of the characters, but that does not correct their perspectives. This observer sees Elsie at the end of the novel as 'a dowdy, over-plump figure, whom nobody would have looked twice at. A simple, heavy face, common except for the eyes and the lips; with a harassed look; fatigued also.' A scant few chapters earlier, Henry Earlforward, looking outward through the eyes of his illness at Elsie's triumphant health, dwelt upon: 'Her youth, her reliability, her prettiness (he thought she was growing prettier every day-such dark eyes, such dark hair, such a curve of the lips), and her physical power and health!' Indeed, the novel hints that transfiguring sexual desire may contribute to Henry's image; 'I'm only a stranger coming between you,' Violet charges in one of her rages of honesty against her husband, noting that Elsie had been attached to Henry earlier than she. But none of these mirrors captures the one true image of Elsie because there is no such image to be captured.
The novel's plot reiterates the implications of its style. When Henry expires at the sight of an IOU for sixpence from Elsie, who has used his keys without his knowledge to abstract that amount from his safe, the prose seems merely an ossified remnant of Victorian melodrama: 'There was no security at all in the world of perils. The foundations of faith had been destroyed… His splendid fortitude, his superhuman courage to re-create his existence over the ruins of it and to defy fate, were broken down. Life was bigger, more cruel, more awful than he had imagined.' The tone, however, mingles Henry's sensibility with the narrator's. Moreover, the theft represents the last step in the extinction of Henry's belief in the authority of his own judgment; the miser's death is the death of a faith. Elsie's act forces him to recognize a competing center of consciousness threatening his little patriarchy-the death of a realist faith has political implications as well. Elsie's relation with the Earlforwards reflects a number of sociological conditions. When the shop is vacuum-cleaned, Henry marvels to himself that it costs 'the wages of a morning charwoman for over three months!' but he does not draw the obvious conclusion that charwomen are underpaid. Elsie, the underpaid servant who gradually asserts her power over him, is a cousin -682- to Pieta Spinelly-who waitressed in the communist club where the murder that so horrified the Earlforwards occurred. At news of this relation, the Earlforwards feel that 'communists seemed to have invaded the very house, and civilization itself was instantly threatened.' Throughout the novel, Henry fears Elsie's defection, particularly when he is ill and she is strong; the emergence into a consciousness of power by the working class is the greatest fear of property holders.
At the same time, Riceyman Steps reiterates with brilliant compression the leading insight of Bennett's earlier The Old Wives' Tale: that the shifting of the reference points by which one lives cuts the ground from under one's own identity. In the later novel, however, no temporal change is necessary to unmake a life; recognition alone suffices. Henry's demise is the tale of just such an extinction. The phrase 'he wanted to know where he was'- according to Dorothy Cheston Bennett, her husband's own formula-echoes through the novel. It occurs first on the honeymoon, marriage being the initial disorienting blow to Henry's version of reality, when Henry wields it to cut the trip short. But he eventually overcomes the temptation of love, and over a year later congratulates himself, after refusing Elsie a shilling to send a message to learn Violet's condition at London Hospital, on the grounds that 'he alone had kept a true perspective, and he would act according to his true perspective.' One threat dispatched, however, another arises. Twice Henry reflects of the newly assertive Elsie, who is feeding his invalid food to the malarial lover she has secretly sheltered in the house, that 'he did not quite know where he was with her.' Confirmation of his unknowing-his discovery of Elsie's theft-kills him. After Henry's death, after his stock has been auctioned, his shop sold to the effervescent Belrose, the phrase appears one last time, but now almost as a benediction. Elsie agrees to serve as Dr. Raste's table-maid, after first refusing the offer because she has decided she can best guard Joe by returning to charring; in the resultant confusion, 'no one quite knew where he was.' Insecurity, accepted, is life.
Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, the beginning of whose careers virtually coincide with the start of the new century, embody the literary conflict that would dominate it. The demand that art serve the cause of social reform or revolution has at times seemed undeniable in this century of unprecedented institutionalized brutality; at other times, the idea that art constitutes a cause in itself has won the day. Both Wells -683- and Bennett felt this tension keenly. But while Wells restricted himself to one set of interests, Bennett attempted to reconcile the two demands. His work, still considerably less known than that of Wells, let alone such contemporaries with similar concerns as Conrad, E. M. Forster, and Ford Madox Ford, constitutes one of the century's most intriguing responses to its continuing riddles.
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Joseph Conrad
JOSEPH CONRAD is not only one of the greatest novelists who has written in English, but he is particularly important for understanding twentieth-century British culture. Although English was his third language, Conrad combined his unique personal background as a Polish émigré and as a seaman with the traditions of his adopted country to change permanently the English novel. He brought a new psychological and
