`What a Queer Spot for a Bookshop!'

Some years ago I saw Steven Millhauser in the public library in the city where both of us lived. I mentioned I was rereading The Old Wives’ Tale, the only one of Arnold Bennett’s many novels I had read but one I recalled with pleasure. Steven grimaced and made it clear he had no use for Bennett. I was surprised. His fiction is certifiably “post-realist” but his tastes are admirably broad. I’ve heard him praise Trollope, Zola and Maupassant, and while I was writing a lengthy paper on Henry James he encouraged me to read “Madame de Mauves.” I finished rereading The Old Wives Tale, enjoying it again, but never pursued Bennett’s 29 other novels.

On Jan. 5, the “Five Best” feature in the Wall Street Journal was assembled by Edward Mendelson, a literature professor at Columbia University and the literary executor of W.H. Auden’s estate. Mendelson selected five works that “explore marriage with uncommon clarity,” and among them he included Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923). The only other book on the list I have read is Theodor Fontane’s incomparable Effi Briest, made into a great film in 1974 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Monday evening I started reading one novel but lost interest after four chapters. I put it aside and opened Riceyman Steps. It was already late and I read only 40 pages, but I’m enjoying myself. Henry Earlforward is a bookseller in the Clerkenwell district of London. His shop is located on the title steps, modeled by Bennett on Granville Place, now called Gwynne Place. The area is rundown but not yet a slum. Here’s how Bennett describes the book shop:

“The King’s Cross Road window held only cheap editions, in their paper jackets, of popular modern novels, such as those of Ethel M. Dell, Charles Garvice, Zane Grey, Florence Barclay, Nat Gould, and Gene Stratton Porter. The side-window was set out with old books, first editions, illustrated editions, and complete library editions in calf or morocco of renowned and serious writers, whose works, indispensable to the collections of self-respecting book-gentlemen (as distinguished from bookmen), have passed through decades of criticism into the impregnable paradise of eternal esteem. The side-window was bound to attract the attention of collectors and bibliomaniacs. It seemed strangely, even fatally, out of place in that dingy and sordid neighbourhood where existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter, where the familiar and beloved landmarks were public-houses, and where the immense majority of the population read nothing but sporting prognostications and results and, on Sunday mornings, accounts of bloody crimes and juicy sexual irregularities.”

You would never know, reading Bennett’s prose, that Ulysses had been published the previous year. He’s wordy and graceless but possesses a modest gift for detail (“sporting prognostications”) and gentle satire (“as distinguished from bookmen”). Of his six authors of “popular modern novels” I recognize only Zane Grey (Riders of the Purple Sage). Grey and Porter were Americans, the others English. They were the Danielle Steeles and John Greshams of their day, and Bennett’s casual assessment of journalism, circa 1919, remains pertinent. And the mention of “bibliomaniacs” reminds me of another bookshop, Bibliomania, owned by my old friend Bill Healey in Schenectady, N.Y. Bennett continues:

“To the secret race of collectors always ravenously desiring to get something for much less than its real value, the window in Riceyman Steps was irresistible. And all manner of people, including book collectors, passed along King’s Cross Road in the course of a day. And all the collectors upon catching sight of the shop exclaimed in their hearts: `What a queer spot for a bookshop! Bargains. . . .’”

Bookshops have always been magnets for the pretentious and those wishing to appear as something they are not. Even 85 years ago they were ripe for satire. Here’s an exchange between Earlforward and one of his customers, “a short, carefully-dressed man, dapper and alert”:

“`I suppose you haven’t got such a thing as a Shakspere [sic] in stock, I mean a pretty good one?’

“`What sort of Shakspere [sic]? I’ve got a number of Shaksperes [sic].’

“`Well, I don’t quite know. . . . I’ve been thinking for a long time I ought to have a Shakspere [sic].’

“`Illustrated?’ asked the bookseller, who had now accurately summed up his client as one who might know something of the world, but who was a simpleton in regard to books.’

“`I really haven’t thought.’ The customer gave a slight, good-humoured snigger. `I suppose it would be nice to have pictures to look at.’”

This sort of thing goes on for another three pages, until we learn the customer’s true identity and purpose. Then Bennett reveals something about the character of Earlforward:

“`Afraid your books outside are getting a bit wet,’ he cried from the doorway.

“`Thank you. Thank you,’ said the bookseller mildly and unperturbed, thinking: `He must be a managing and interfering kind of man. Can’t I run my own business?’

“Some booksellers kept waterproof covers for their outside display, but this one did not. He had found in practice that a few drops of rain did no harm to low-priced volumes.”

Those panjandrums of Modernism, Ezra Pound (in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”) and Virginia Woolf (in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”), effectively derailed Bennett’s reputation for right-thinking readers. The loss is ours. He is a greater, more sophisticated artist than his second-hand reputation implies. Consider the following review of Sturge Moore’s Art and Life, written by Bennett in 1910 and collected in The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett (1968, edited by Samuel Hynes):

“His value is that he would make the English artist a conscious artist. He does, without once stating it, bring out in the most startling way the contrast between, for example, the English artist and the Continental artist. Read the correspondence of Dickens and Thackeray, and then read the correspondence of Flaubert, and you will see. The latter was continually preoccupied with his craft, the two former scarcely ever – and never in an intelligent fashion. I have been preaching on this theme for years, but I am not aware that anybody has been listening. I was going to say that I was sick of preaching about it, but I am not. I shall continue. . . .”