Back in October I wrote about Arnold Bennett's Old Wives Tale, considered by many to be his masterpiece. It's certainly a very fine novel, but I'm tempted to say I've enjoyed Clayhanger even more. This obviously something to do with the central character, Edwin Clayhanger, in whose consciousness most of the novel takes place.
I suppose you could describe Clayhanger as a bildungsroman -- a novel which follows a character from youth to maturity -- as the story begins when Edwin is sixteen and ends with him in his late thirties. In many ways he is a very ordinary man, and doesn't achieve anything at all spectacular in his life. The son of a successful printer in the Five Towns (Bennett's name for his native Stoke on Trent), Edwin has just left school when the novel begins, and is burning with the ambition to become an architect. But his father Darius, a self-made and domineering man, absolutely insists that his son must come into the family business and so Edwin does. Gentle, sensitive and intelligent, Edwin is full of aspirations which he is generally unable to fulfil. At the beginning of the novel Bennett shows him through the eyes of the old women of the town, who see 'a fresh lad passing along, with fair hair and a clear complexion, and gawky knees and elbows, a fierce, rapt expression on his straightforward, good-natured face'. But what they can't see, says Bennett, is 'the mysterious and holy flame of the desire for self-perfection blazing within that tousled head'. That desire is destined to be quashed again and again by the dreariness of his mundane existence, but Edwin treasures his collection of books, his nicely decorated and arranged room, and the valuable periods of calm and reflection he allows himself.
I'm sorry if all this makes him sound like a bit of a wimp. The thing is, Edwin is essentially a good man, but he is also very human. He makes a lot of mistakes in his life and often knows he is making them even as he does so. And because we are always privy to his thoughts and feelings, we are seldom out of sympathy with him even when -- as sometimes happens -- we see more than he does and wish he'd do something different. His inability to see what's under his nose is very evident in his relationship with women -- lovely, kind, warm Janet Orgreave, who lives next door and never marries, and who everyone but Edwin knows is waiting for him to ask the question he never does ask -- and, above all, Hilda Lessways, the mysterious, moody, unconventional girl who becomes the love of Edwin's life though they hardly get to know each other before she disappears. Edwin's feelings for the absent Hilda -- composed about equally of love, anger and confusion -- persist for many years and dominate his inner life to a remarkable degree. But one of the most impressive things in the novel is the depiction of Edwin's relations with his father.
It's fairly well accepted that Bennett based Darius Clayhanger on his own father (and Edwin no doubt on his own younger self). Bullying, insensitive, proud, Darius makes the lives of his children pretty intolerable, though the reader knows -- as they do not -- the story of Darius's terrible childhood in the workhouse and its subsequent effect on his character. But one of the most powerful parts of the novel shows Darius in his last sad decline. Suffering from what the doctor calls 'softening of the brain', and I assume is what we call Alzheimers, Darius becomes increasingly childlike, dependent, difficult and unpredictable. Edwin and his unmarried sister Maggie are left to take care of him for much of this period, and a more moving and convincing description of the agony of it all would be hard to find.
Though it's Edwin himself who is the centre of the novel, it's also fascinating for its social and political background. Although published in 1910, it is set in the last decades of the nineteenth century and obviously draws heavily on Bennett's own experience of growing up in industrial middle England. Although the Clayhanger family, thanks to Darius's business acumen, has risen from its working-class roots, Bennett shows a wide range of characters from the tremendous Big James, a jobbing printer but also a fine singer, through the conservative and hypocritical middle classes of these Pottery towns, to the cultured Orgreave family, who provide Edwin with intellectual and artistic nourishment. The whole novel proceeds against a background of Home Rule, elections, riots, and influenza epidemics, all wonderful food for those who enjoy a good dose of social realism.
I'm happy to say that this is just the first novel of a trilogy (which is actually three books plus another one). I'm immediately leaping into Hilda Lessways, the second novel, so you'll be hearing about that before too long. Brilliant and highly recommended -- Bennett deserves a renaissance.
