The Selected Works of Arnold Bennett: Essays, Personal Development Books & Articles. Arnold Bennett
simple. Years afterwards, a contributor confided to me that the editor had told her that he taught me nothing after the first day, and that I was a born journalist. I do not seriously think that I was a born journalist, and I mention this detail, not from any vainglory over a trifle, but to show that the arcana of journalism partake of the nature of an imposture. The same may be said of all professional arcana, even those of politics or of the swell-mob.
In a word, I was a journalist—but I felt just the same as before.
I vaguely indicated my feelings on this point to the chief.
“Ah!” he said. “But you know you’d been through the mill before you came here.”
So I had been through the mill! Writing articles at night and getting them back the next morning but one, for a year or two— that was going through the mill! Let it be so, then. When other men envied my position, and expressed their opinion that I had “got on to a soft thing,” I indicated that the present was the fruit of the past, and that I had been through the mill.
Journalism for women, by women under the direction of men, is an affair at once anxious, agreeable and delicate for the men who direct. It is a journalism by itself, apart from other journalisms. And it is the only journalism that I intimately know. The commercial side of it, the queer financial basis of it, have a peculiar interest, but my scheme does not by any means include the withdrawal of those curtains. I am concerned with letters, and letters, I fear, have little connection with women’s journalism. I learnt nothing of letters in that office, save a few of the more obvious journalistic devices, but I learnt a good deal about frocks, household management, and the secret nature of women, especially the secret nature of women. As for frocks, I have sincerely tried to forget that branch of human knowledge; nevertheless the habit, acquired then, of glancing first at a woman’s skirt and her shoes, has never left me. My apprenticeship to frocks was studded with embarrassing situations, of which I will mention only one. It turns upon some designs for a layette. A layette, perhaps I ought to explain, is an outfit for a newborn babe, and naturally it is prepared in advance of the stranger’s arrival. Underneath a page of layette illustrations I once put the legend, correct in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand—but this was the thousandth — Cut-to-measure patterns supplied. The solecism stands to all eternity against me on the file of the paper; and the recollection of it, like the recollection of a gaucherie, is persistently haunting.
And here I shall quit for a time the feminine atmosphere, and the path which I began by calling dusty, but which is better called flowery. My activity in that path showed no further development until after I had written my first novel.
VII
“By Heaven!” I said, “I will write a novel!”
And I sat down to my oaken bureau with the air of a man who has resolved to commit a stupendous crime. Perhaps indeed it was a crime, this my first serious challenge to a neglectful and careless world. At any rate it was meant to be the beginning of the end, the end being twofold—fame and a thousand a year. You must bear well in mind that I was by no means the ordinary person, and my novel was by no means to be the ordinary novel. In these cases the very essence of the situation is always that one is not ordinary. I had just discovered that I could write—and when I use the term “write” here, I use it in a special sense, to be appreciated only by those elect who can themselves “write,” and difficult of comprehension by all others. I had had a conte—exquisitely Gallic as to spirit and form—in the ‘‘Yellow Book” and that conte had been lauded in the South Audley Street Gazette or some organ of destructive criticism. My friends believed in Art, themselves, and me. I believed in myself, Art, and them. Could any factor be lacking to render the scene sublime and historic?
So I sat down to write my first novel, under the sweet influences of the de Gon-courts, Turgenev, Flaubert, and de Maupassant. It was to be entirely unlike all English novels except those of one author, whose name I shall not mention now, for the reason that I have aforetime made my admiration of that author very public. I clearly remember that the purpose uppermost in my mind was to imitate what I may call the physical characteristics of French novels. There were to be no poetical quotations in my novel, no titles to the chapters; the narrative was to be divided irregularly into sections by Roman numerals only; and it was indispensable that a certain proportion of these sections should begin or end abruptly. As thus, for a beginning: “Gerald suddenly changed the conversation, and taking the final match from his matchbox at last agreed to light a cigar.” And for an ending: “Her tremulous eyes sought his; breathing a sigh she murmured ...” O succession of dots, charged with significance vague but tremendous, there were to be hundreds of you in my novel, because you play so important a part in the literature of the country of Victor Hugo and M. Loubet! So much for the physical characteristics. To come nearer to the soul of it, my novel was to be a mosaic consisting exclusively of Flaubert’s mots justes—it was to be mots justes composed into the famous ecriture artiste of the de Goncourts. The sentences were to perform the trick of “the rise and fall.” The adjectives were to have colour, the verbs were to have colour, and perhaps it was a sine qua non that even the pronouns should be prismatic—I forget. And all these effects were to be obtained without the most trifling sacrifice of truth. There was to be no bowing in the house of the Rimmon of sentimentality. Life being grey, sinister, and melancholy, my novel must be grey, sinister, and melancholy. As a matter of strict fact, life deserved none of these epithets; I was having a very good time; but at twenty-seven one is captious, and liable to err in judgment—a liability which fortunately disappears at thirty-five or so. No startling events were to occur in my novel, nor anything out of the way that might bring the blush of shame to the modesty of nature; no ingenious combinations, no dramatic surprises, and above all no coincidences. It was to be the Usual miraculously transformed by Art into the Sublime.
The sole liberty that I might permit myself in handling the Usual was to give it a rhythmic contour—a precious distinction in those Yellerbocky days.
All these cardinal points being settled, I passed to the business of choosing a subject. Need I say that I chose myself? But, in obedience to my philosophy, I made myself a failure. I regarded my hero with an air of “There, but for the grace of God, goes me!” I decided that he should go through most of my own experiences, but that instead of fame and a thousand a year he should arrive ultimately at disillusion and a desolating suburban domesticity. I said I would call my novel In the Shadow, a title suggested to me by the motto of Balzac’s Country Doctor—“For a wounded heart, shadow and silence.” It was to be all very dolorous, this Odyssey of a London clerk who—But I must not disclose any detail of the plot.
So I sat down, and wrote on a fair quarto sheet, In the Shadow, and under that, “I.” It was a religious rite, an august and imposing ceremonial; and I was the officiating priest. In the few fleeting instants between the tracing of the “I” and the tracing of the first word of the narrative, I felt happy and proud; but immediately the fundamental brain-work began, I lost nearly all my confidence. With every stroke the illusion grew thinner, more remote. I perceived that I could not become Flaubert by taking thought, and this rather obvious truth rushed over me as a surprise. I knew what I wanted to do, and I could not do it. I felt, but I could not express. My sentences would persist in being damnably Mudiesque. The mots justes hid themselves exasperatingly behind a cloud. The successions of dots looked merely fatuous. The charm, the poetry, the distinction, the inevitableness, the originality, the force, and the invaluable rhythmic contour—these were anywhere save on my page. All writers are familiar with the dreadful despair that ensues when a composition, on perusal, obstinately presents itself as a series of little systems of words joined by conjunctions and so forth, something like this—subject, predicate, object, but, subject, predicate, object. Pronoun, however, predicate, negative, infinitive verb. Nevertheless, participle, accusative, subject, predicate, etc. etc. etc., for evermore. I suffered that despair. The proper remedy is to go to the nearest bar and have a drink, or to read a bit of “Comus” or “Urn-Burial,” but at that time I had no skill in weathering anti-cyclones, and I drove forward like a sinking steamer