'Discreet Orgies of the Higher Intellectuality'

“There is an infection in the air of London, a zymotic influence which is the mysterious cause of unnaturalness, pose, affectation, artificiality, moral neuritis, and satiety.” 

For many years the semi-forgotten English novelist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) has been a reliable source of quiet pleasures for this reader. His novels – particularly The Old Wives’ Tale, Clayhanger and Riceyman Steps – seem quintessentially English in their plainspokenness and devotion to prosaic lives. He is conventionally described as a “realist,” whatever that means, and he certainly works as though his Modernist contemporaries never existed. Virginia Woolf’s exercise in snobbery damaged Bennett’s reputation, and her essay is probably best read as a parody of class-driven snottiness.

 

Theodore Dalrymple’s essay, “Knots About Knots,” in the October issue of New English Review, cites a book by Bennett I hadn’t known before – The Truth About an Author. Dalrymple read the first edition, published anonymously in 1903. From the library I borrowed the 1914 printing, published under Bennett’s name. Dalrymple’s theme is  obsessive readers and writers. Bennett’s book suggests he belongs in the latter category. Like any serviceable journalist, he knew how to crank it out, on deadline, as assigned. He was an honorable hack who occasionally transcended his limits. I’m reminded of something Kingsley Amis wrote in his 1974 essay “Writing for a TV Series” (The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990). He describes writing a television script as “a useful exercise in discipline,” and concludes: “I believe that any proper writer ought to be able to write anything, from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.”

 

In the passage quoted at the top, Bennett is characterizing literary London early in the twentieth century. Some things change little or not at all. Fashionable gatherings of writers tend to be zymotic, to use Bennett’s word, which the OED defines as “a general epithet for infectious diseases, originally because regarded as being caused by a process analogous to fermentation . . . causing such disease.” Based on his own experiences in this inbred literary environment, Bennett rises to exhilarating rhetorical heights:

 

“Such polite racketing, such discreet orgies of the higher intellectuality, may suit the elegant triflers, the authors of monographs on Velasquez, golf, Dante, asparagus, royalties, ping-pong, and Empire; but the business men who write from ten to fifty thousand words a week without chattering about it, have no use for the literary menagerie. . . . One loses grasp of the essentials in an undue preoccupation with the vacuities which society has invented. The distractions are too multiform. One never gets a chance to talk common-sense with one’s soul.”