Backlisted - Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

Arnold Bennett's 1923 novel Riceyman Steps is the subject of this episode. Joining John and Andy to discuss it are journalist Charlotte Higgins and novelist Kit De Waal. In addition, John has been reading The Northumbrians by Dan Jackson while Andy talks about Never Let Me Go - and other books - by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'41 - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro15'40 - The Northumbrians by Dan Jackson19'56 - Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Hey, John. Yeah. What's that at the end of the table,

gleaming like a great monolith from 2001? It looks like it's got some kind of writing on there, Andy, but it's almost impossible to read because it's transparent. Oh, look, it's an award that Backlisted won the other day. Oh, enough of this. On Monday, you said to me, do you think we should mention it on the podcast, winning the award? Because, you know, I'm worried it seems a bit, you know, arrogant.

And I said, I think we should power through that pain. We won this award. We won it. Because, you know. Put in the hours, let's be honest. Exactly. And also, when it was announced, we should say how blown away we were by the number of lovely people, listeners to this podcast,

who tweeted us or called us or emailed us to say how much they love the podcast and all the rest of it. Thank you very much. Incredible responses. And it is, you know, we shouldn't have to say it, but obviously you're only as good as the people who listen to what you do. But is that really true? No, I think, no.

Oh, as good as your guests is what I would say. I think we're as good as our guests. I think the thing We would do it even if no one listened to it, is that what you're saying? Maybe that's true actually. We probably just enjoy it. You do it if less people listen. Few. This is

backlisted. I think we should dedicate it to someone or at least have a mention about a former producer Matt Hall who... Oh, that's a lovely thing This is backlisted. I think we should dedicate it to someone. Or at least have a mention. About former producer Matt Hall. Who? Oh, that's a lovely thing, Nicky. Yes. Do you know what's happened to Matt?

No. He's only gone and slipped over some leaves and broken his leg very badly. Oh, no. Yeah, and has had to have an operation. Mucilage, as it's known. Is that right? That's what you slip on.

That's what goes on. That's the thing that makes the trains run slowly. So he'll be listening in his bed probably where he can't move to this episode. Absolutely. Let's raise a decaffeinated coffee to Matt, founder of this particular feast. We should also say that not only are we the Future Book Podcast of the Year, but we have the Future Book Person of the Year in the studio. Indeed.

Because we are in a studio today rather than around the table of Unbound. So Kit, you won Future Book Person of the Year, didn't you? Indeed, I did. And you gave a stirring speech. I gave a speech basically acknowledging that I've been in the industry for five minutes and don't really know what I'm doing, but thank you all the same is basically what I said to the industry for tolerating my criticisms thereof.

That's great. I love that thing you said about you sent it to Penguin and they turned it into a book, and that was your understanding of the publishing process. And I honestly believe that. I didn't know about an agent, didn't know about an editor, and I really thought they'd turn it around in about six weeks. You sent it in.

They went, we like that. They got some sort of photo artwork put a wrapper on it three for two table job done i was really shocked i mean i i signed with penguin and my book came out a year and a half later i was really what were all those people doing right yeah that was the theme of your show get it out but also on today's episode, it is prizes for all because our other guest, Charlotte, is also a prize winner. Please tell us which award you recently won. I won the Arnold Bennett Literary Prize.

I am the most appropriate guest to have on this particular podcast owing to my incredible prize-winning cast. It's all Bennett-based. So should I tell you, the prize, eligible for the prize, were writers either born in or writing about, not Staffordshire, but North Staffordshire. So you can see it was an extremely wide field. I'm incredibly proud to have won it, actually, but yes.

Right, shall we... More of Arnold Bennett later. Let's not rest on our laurels. No. Crack on. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us literally in the back streets of Edwardian Clerkenwell,

browsing in a dusty shop every available inch of space covered in tot back streets of Edwardian Clerkenwell, browsing in a dusty shop every available inch of space covered in tottering piles of books. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And to quote Arnold Bennett, like all authors, I feel deeply convinced that I am not understood as completely as my amazing merits deserve. Not a modest man. No. And joining us today for the second time, welcome back Kit Duvall. Thank you. Kit is a writer and activist whose debut novel My Name is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award,

longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and which won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. Her second, The Trick of Time, was published to great acclaim in 2018, and her most recent, a young adult novel called Becoming Diner, was published earlier this year by Orion Children's Books. Furthermore, she is the editor of the anthology of working class writers, Common People, published by our sponsors Unbound, and the force behind the Kiptoval Creative Scholarships for budding writers from low-income households or marginalised backgrounds. Open brackets, continuing the work of Arnold Bennett. Indeed.

Amazing. Closed brackets. We'll talk about that later. For all this and for being generally a force of good in the book industry, she was named 2019 Future Book Person of the Year. Her previous appearance on Backlisted was on episode 26. God. Back in the archive, which we recorded on wax cylinder, where she talks about So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Yes. That's a terrific book, terrific episode, right?

Yeah. Kitty's joined by the writer and journalist Charlotte Higgins. Hello. Hello, Charlotte. Charlotte is the chief culture writer of The Guardian. She's the author of several books on aspects of the ancient world. Under Another Sky, Journeys in Roman Britain, which was published by Cape in 2013,

was shortlisted for the Bailey Gifford Prize for nonfiction. Her latest book, Red Thread on Maids and Labyrinths, won, as discussed, the 2019 Arnold Bennett Prize. And Charlotte has written for The New Yorker, The New Statesman and Prospect, and written and presented documentaries for BBC, radios three and four. In 2010, she won the Classical Association Prize

for her books and journalism, awarded for the person deemed to have done most to bring classics to a broad audience. Excellent work. And in 2019, she was chosen for a British Council showcase by novelist Elif Shafak as one of 10 brilliant women writers working in Britain today. Thanks, Elif.

Yeah, it doesn't get better than that, does it? And that is just, those are the edited highlights of your CV. Yeah, well, the sort of awful, shameful fact that I was on deadline. I was trying to write a Guardian leader on negative capability. Wow. I like that subject. Yeah, we all like that subject. Don't read it.

It's probably terrible. And I was in a bit of a faff and a state, and I got an email asking for my biog, and I just sent the one that I had on my email at work, which was the one that I'd sent to Hillary Clinton's people, trying to persuade them that I was worthy of interviewing her. So as I said to Andy and John, I had pumped up to full fuck you levels with essentially all my swimming certificates. It was like an Arnold Bennett novel.

It was shaming. So well, we should get into the matter in hand. Kate and Charlotte are here joining us to talk about Reissim and Steps by Arnold Bennett. First published, I hadn't realised, but of course it was published by Castle & Co. that I briefly was managing director of

back in the 90s. First published by Castle & Co. in 1923 and it won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in that year. That prize founded in Edinburgh, one of the oldest literary prizes with the Horthenden Prize,

and still going. So a prize-winning Arnold Bennett novel. But before we limp towards the shabby streets of Clerkenwell, Andy, what have you been reading this week or this year? So this week I have been reading another novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, in this case Never Let Me Go. And we've talked about Ishiguro on the podcast before. When his last novel, The Buried Giant, came out,

we were up in Durham and it's where we were recording an episode about Alma Cogan by Gordon Byrne. And, John, you just read The Buried Giant and we talked about it, so you can hear John talking about The Buried Giant by Ishiguro back on episode 54. But over the last few years, I have been, for pleasure, rather than self-improvement, reading novels by Ishiguro, who until about five years ago, I had never read anything by. And when we were in Bath, recording our Angela Carter episode about 18 months ago, I was reading Ishiguro's novel The Unconsolable,

I can remember being in the B&B or walking around the streets thinking about and reading The Unconsolable, thinking, what is this book? I don't understand this at all. And I decided about two weeks ago, 18 months after I'd read it, that I really like it. But it took me that long to let it settle in my brain. And so I've come to Never Let Me Go as the, I think maybe the fifth of Ishiguro's,

maybe the sixth novel of his that I've read. I really loved it. I'm sure many listeners have read Never Let Me Go. It is, you know, one of the most widely acclaimed literary novels of this century so far. It's been made into a film, lots of people know about it. One of Ishiguro's most popular books along with the remains of the day. The two things that occurred to me about Never Let Me Go are, the first thing is, I'll tell you a thing I really dislike in reviews or in blurbs. It always seems like the absolute refuge of a critic who doesn't

really have anything to say about a book is when they say something like, and this novel asks us profound questions about what it means to be human. Right, it means they haven't got anything. But that's, you know, there's a good 15 to 20 words they've got there. It's right up there with Master Storyteller, isn't it? Right. It's right up there with Master Storyteller. So I was reading Never Let Me Go. I finished it.

And as I was reading, I was thinking, the thing about Never Let Me Go, which is a book about cloning, spoiler, is it is a book that asks us questions about what it means to be human. That, in this case, is literally true. And then I was looking in the front, like you do, about what the reviews had said. And the first review says, Ishiguro asks us profound questions about what it means to be human.

And the second one says, Kazuo Ishiguro is a master storyteller. So I like to think on Backlisted, we're making reviewing books harder and harder for the lazy hacks out there who do it. We are watching and we are listening and we are reading. Yeah. So that's the first thing.

And the second thing is, more seriously, that what I found with Ishiguro, as I've read more of him, it's a sort of object lesson in one of the things that I think we do usefully here on Ballasted that each one of his books I read I don't like each one more than the previous one necessarily but I do feel more at ease in the world he creates and his approach to putting you slightly ill at ease i think is one of the great ishiguro things that he he likes writing about people who can't admit something or don't have access to all the information they should have that you the reader perhaps do have or in the case of the unconsoled and the buried giant you the reader don't have, that you, the reader, perhaps do have. Or in the case of The Unconsold and The Buried Giant,

you, the reader, don't have. You know, the literal walking around in a fog in The Buried Giant, literally there is a fog. But there's also, it's a book about forgetfulness. The Unconsold is a book about dreams. I had a conversation with somebody the other night. I was trying to explain this thing that Ishiguro has, which I think is quite rare in a writer,

is that he, another cliche, he never writes the same book twice. But actually what he's like, I was thinking he's like a sort of a child's demon in Pullman. He has this ability to change so that the books seem completely different from the outside,

and yet somehow there's an Ishiguro-ness that links them all together. And I don't know what that is i mean i think you'd have to it would you know you'd probably have to sit down and really really study and think and and notice but it's it's an amazing thing don't you yeah i agree i think that's a really good point it's partly because the prose he does this thing in the prose in the books, where he, and certainly in Never Let Me Go, the character who narrates the novel, stroke Ishiguro, the writer behind her, is constantly playing chicken with cliché in the prose. So superficially the prose is almost bland and almost made up

of inevitable doublings of phrase. And yet at the same time, there's a certain constant veering away from that as well. Can I just ask about what you said about two years later, 18 months later, you think, oh, that was a great book, not really rating it at the time. Has the converse happened where you've read a book and thought god that was really great and then two years later or a year later go actually wasn't that good

absolutely yeah yeah we've done books on here which i'm not going to spoil for anybody so they then go back retrospectively and think and think oh but he liked it then yeah but it's an inevitable fact of life that we for instance we've done books on here where it's fortunate we've recorded them the the episode the week after we read the book because then i'm still thinking about the positives about it and as time goes on i will often look back and think wait a minute i kind of i can't remember i remember quite like to relate to this i mean some quite well reviewed books yes the last year, actually, which I've read and thought, wow. And then either people have worked on me with their doubts,

which is a different category maybe, or I've kind of somehow the scaffolding's fallen away. And then, yeah, there's a whole category of slow burn books, aren't there? Books that nudge at you. Yeah, stone in the shoe books where you kind of, they're sort of annoyed by them, but actually theance turns into into kind of admiration at a certain point because there are two categories of coming away from book one is that public opinion has got to you you've read in a review and you thought oh actually that was true or someone said i didn't like it because and you've had to go along with

it and then there's just the reflections on a book that you have, and that's a better coming away somehow. It's you choosing to see the flaws of a book rather than liking it and then being swayed by people's opinion. Arnold Bennett has something to say on this topic, so we'll come on to that later. Well, that's miraculous. But first, John, what have you been reading this week? I've read a book called The Northumbrians by Dan Jackson.

It's a history of the northeast of England,. It's a history of the northeast of England. And it's a history of the northeast of England from the prehistory right through to Cheryl Cole, who makes a small appearance in the book towards the end. It's sort of an exemplary of its kind. I mean, you know, it's easy to do this and to make it very boring. I'll read a tiny little passage to give you the flavour. He does it with humour. He's a historian, but he's also a great popularist. It's full of amazing stuff. I mean, my family are from

there, so I have a strong interest in it. But I learnt a massive amount from this book. And there's some marvellous, marvellous details. Muhammad Ali getting his second marriage blessed in the mosque at South Shields. There's a in the mosque at South Shields. There's a huge Muslim community in South Shields. The detail is wonderful. But what I like about his approach is it's very easy to sentimentalise northern working class life. He goes into the drinking culture and he said there is something to admire

about the seriousness of a night out in the big market and the attention that people put into their appearance. But he also then writes, I think, movingly about Catherine Cookson and alcohol and how paralysing that's been. It's been very, very well reviewed from famously tough critics like Jonathan Meads on one side to Tom Holland to radical historians like Robert Coles. Jonathan Meads on one side, to Tom Holland, to radical historians like Robert Coles. He's personal, but he doesn't get into self-indulgent psychogeography. It's also important at the moment in the middle of Brexit,

the region that gets tarred with the Brexit brush. This was the part of Europe that saved Western civilisation, you know, Jarrow, Monk Wearmouth. It's got such an interesting and rich history. Can I ask you a publishing question that occurs to me around the publication of this book? Yeah. Is it a tough sell for the publisher, or can they look at it and think to themselves,

what we don't sell in Surrey we will sell more of locally? It's a really interesting question because one of the things I've noticed, it's published by Hearst, who are a kind of specialist history publisher, but it's out of print on Amazon. I mean, it's one to two months on Amazon. And I think that's because it has been so brilliantly reviewed. And I think what the reviews have said, don't think you have to be from the northeast or living in the northeast

to find this, but Northumbria was a pretty important. It was very important to the Romans. And there were Iraqi sailors patrolling the mouth of the Tyne, Syrian people buried in South Shea. I mean, it's so rich. Too many studies of the north of England can take on a tiresomely rhapsodic tone. We should be wary of a sort of regional jingoism

lest we turn into a pastiche of the character from the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me who claims everything of any worth is Indian. Locomotive engines? Northumbrian. Lucas-Ade? Northumbrian. I can be guilty of that feeling myself, a certain chippiness, a sense of being overlooked, underestimated and occasionally patronised. The sense that in its industrial heyday Northumbria was a great civilisation that has now gone with the wind was summed up by the South Shields miner Tommy Turnbull, who described the Northumbrian proletariat as a great tribe of people now decimated, degraded and dispersed, and their demise has left the country

forever as impoverished by this loss as have the Americas by the loss of their Apaches and their Incas. The Yorkshireman Frank Atkinson, the founder of the Americas by the loss of their Apaches and their Incas. The Yorkshireman Frank Atkinson, the founder of the North of England Open Air Museum at Beamish in County Durham, where I used to go all the time as a kid, wrote that he built the museum to inculcate pride for the people of the region, have a curiously sad chip on the shoulder. We lack the benefits that the people of the South have, mixed illogically with the belief that we have a marvellous, self-reliant region.

Quite remarkably, these conflicting views are almost true. As a result, Northumbrians can be as tediously chauvinistic as the most boring Yorkshireman, though, as the teesider Harry Pearson put it in a piece on the charms of Tyneside, its atmosphere of almost pathological friendliness and good humour stems from one simple thing. All Geordies believe themselves blessed to have been born here. Anyway, it's a really readable and really interesting bit of history. Now it's commercials. The first thing to say about Reisman Steps is that every bookseller

should be issued this, shouldn't they? God, yeah. From the dirt, the boredom, the tedium. His fundamental absolute as a bookseller lack of interest in what he's selling nobody reads in this book apart from apart from the doctor who comes in and buys a book out of politeness as far as the shakespeare and yeah and he doesn't know what he's buying no he would be fobbed off with anything and mr earl forward who is the the proprietor of said bookshop,

what I love in that scene where the doctor's buying it, he's dissing the guy as he's watching me, like every bookseller does. He doesn't know what he's asking for. He's just trying to impress me. He doesn't really want the book at all. For anyone who's worked in a bookshop, the unexpected joy of this book is huge. I, Kit and Charlotte, i felt as i was reading it your suggestion i i felt ashamed yeah not of the behavior of the booksellers because that's just

true but that i hadn't read it before because given that i you know i was a bookseller and i i have written about bookshops and I'm endlessly fascinated by those transactions between reasons why we buy a book, you know, without number and wanting to read it is only one of them. And this is such a great book on that topic and the reality of shifting stock around and all that stuff. Because I thought, why haven't I read this? Yeah. So we're going to return to this question.

Great. Why isn't Arnold Bennett more widely read? I honestly don't know. Because when we were doing the 100 novels for the BBC, and I was one of the judges, we all had to lose something in that 100. You know, we were putting forward the books that we thought should appear on the list. And I was sort of trying to get because there were categories so there were categories like family there was class there was identity there was adventure and for every category I was putting an Arnold Bennett in I was putting an Arnold Bennett in and I lost them all in the cot I mean he doesn't appear in the hundred and it is

it is tragic I mean it's, but I had to lose one. And so, Charlotte, which books would we have expected might have made it in there by Bennett? I think The Old Wives' Tale is an absolute masterpiece, which is a novel about two sisters. Right, that's my next one, great. Yeah, who are born in Burslem, who live in a sort of upper working class respectability in Burslem and one of them leaves and goes to France and becomes slightly scandalous and then there's a whole section that

is about the Paris Commune and it's wonderful anyway she comes back and it's about the bifurcation of these two lives and it's got enormous range he He did, as with every book, minimal historical research. No one's ever been able to find anything dreadfully wrong with it. That's fabulous. And what about Anna of the Five Towns? Yes. It's wonderful. Clay Hanger.

The Card. The Card is one of the great comic novels, and I do think it's an entry-level drug for potential Bennett lovers. Yes, Helen with the High Hand is exactly the same. Now, there was some talk that we were going to do Helen with the High Hand, and I read it a couple of weeks ago. That is a funny book. Very funny.

Isn't it? It's a power struggle. That's what the whole book's about. But it turns on the position of the salt cellar. I think it goes just there, whereas you think it goes there. Actually, it goes just there, whereas you think it goes there. Actually, it goes there. And this fight between these two people for the supremacy and the control of this house, it's the most minuscule domestic drama

and it's absolutely beautiful and hilarious. So some connections to this novel, to Rosamund's steps in that. And I think maybe this might help answer the question, why is he so unfashionable? Possibly, because that is possibly to do with the long tale of Virginia Woolf's article, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, or is it the other way around, in which she is responding to quite a mild criticism by Bennett of her Jacob's Room,

which he said he loved, but he didn't think the characters were memorable. And so she writes in response a kind of evisceration really of these old-fashioned Edwardian authors, Gouldsworthy, Wells and Brown, who in particular Bennett, she thinks he constructs character

by I suppose the thingness of objects and how many times an old lady's glove has been mended and how her property is mortgaged and what rent she pays and the specificity of very ordinary things that might, as it were, be the position of a salt cellar on a table. But I love Wolf. Come on. But to me, I think she didn't know that stuff.

She didn't know about ransom. I mean, you know, she's got her 500 a year in a room of her own. This sort of texture, the minutiae of getting by and how important tiny objects are to the texture of someone's life, I think is Bennett all over, but I don't think she really kind of got that. We're going to talk a bit more about the chilling effect on Bennett's reputation of that specific essay a bit later on. But in terms of Bennett's reputation, if he's known for anything, it not for literature but here is a clip from a television program that was broadcast just a week ago about the thing for which he is now most famous 48 chefs from across the uk are putting their reputations on the line in a bid to become professional MasterChef champion.

We have six chefs outside waiting to perform a skills test. Marcus, three of them obviously going to do yours. Yep. What are you going to get them to do? I'm going to ask our chefs to make us an omelette Arnold Bennett. An omelette Arnold Bennett is a flat omelette served in a dish. I'm going to add a little bit of a twist. I'm going to take away the smoked haddock

that normally goes with this dish, and I'm going to ask our chefs to use crab meat instead. It's got a gruyere cheese, it's served with a hollandaise sauce over the top, and gratinated under the grill. How long have they got for your Arnold Bennett? I'm going to give them 20 minutes. Right, OK, let's see how it's done.

Do you know the history? Did Arnold Bennett, the author, order it in the Savoy? That's it. And it's become famous. You worked at the Savoy, didn't you? I did, yeah. That was one of the first jobs I had in London. For part of my time, I worked on what they... It was the potage and the egg section, so I've made a lot of these over the years.

LAUGHTER That might be my favourite clip we've ever had on here. I was so overjoyed when that came on the telly, which I watched... My boyfriend, on, like, third date made me omelette as an homage to my origin and literary taste. And how do you feel about it? It would have passed the Marcus Waring test,

but I do not approve of his non-canonical use of crab. What is he thinking of? Come on, smoked haddock. No, as one of the chefs who made that dish said, it's very nice but you need a bit of a lie down afterwards. It's so rich. One of the things about Bennett is that he is the epitome of the late 19th century, earliest 20th century literary panjandrum.

He's the self-made chap issuing edicts. He's Somerset Maugham. He's Priestley. He's one of that lot. Tremendously popular, widely read, influential in their day, all of whom have faded significantly. And certainly in the case of Bennett. I mean, how many novels did Arnold Bennett write?

It's an incredible number. In 1929, he wrote a little note in his diary saying, I have written between 70 and 80 books. I mean, some of these were non-fiction. Some of these were things like journalism for women, which I only half recommend that one he wrote i've written between 70 and 80 books to the general public i've only written four and this is a quote they are the the old wife's tale the card clay hanger and riceyman stats all the others

are made a reproach to me because they are neither The Old Wives Tale, nor The Card, nor Clayhanger, nor Reissman Steps. And Reissman Steps would have been made a reproach too if the servant Elsie had not happened to be a very sympathetic character. Elsie saved Reissman Steps from being called sordid and morbid and all sorts of bad adjectives, as if the niceness of a character had anything to do with the quality of the novel in which it appears. But authors are never satisfied. Well, no, this is the...

Cue rapturous applause, please. But he was peeved, wasn't he? That basically he wrote Reissman Steps to be a portrait of a miser and he felt that that was the great strength of the book well the book comes out is widely recognized as a very good book one of his best immediately it's a bestseller but then he has to put up with people telling him thank goodness for we love elsie so so he felt he was, as you say, never happy, being praised for the wrong stuff. Kit, when did you first encounter Arnold Bennett? Or this book? So I started reading at all. I didn't read anything until I was about 23. Not a thing

except what I had to read at school. And at 23, I read 10 books, which were really recommended to me by a military man but one of them apart from riddle of the sands and war and peace and red badge of courage was madame bovary so i came to arnold bennett via france really because i found uh flobert and then i found Zola and Maupassant. Zola, absolutely, right. And then in reading about that sort of coterie of French realism at that time, it said, and Arnold Bennett was influenced by these people. I thought, who's Arnold Bennett? So I would have been 28, 29 when I found him and as soon as I found him, and that was The Old Wife's Tale.

I read everything. I could get my hands on Mr. Prohack buried alive, Grand Babylon Hotel, everything. I was like, here he is at last. And the very thing that Wolf criticized him for, those little tales, that was the magic for me. That was what I loved. So he wasn't saying she was nervous. He would say she buttoned and unbuttoned her cough. And you knew she was nervous or you knew she was poor or whatever. These were things where he's not having to tell you what she's feeling or where she's been or where she fancies herself because he's going to describe the angle of her scarf,

the jaunty angle of her hat. And to me that is absolutely beautiful. So one of the things I think is really interesting about Woolf's response to Bennett is partly it was a fit of pique because he had been mildly unkind about her novel, Jacob's Room. I mean, it's really mild as well. Very mild. About Jacob's Room.

Again, another subject of a backlisted past episode, but also because Bennett was very influenced by Zola and realism, naturalism. By the late 1920s, naturalism was seen as being passé and therefore Bennett is synonymous with two regrettable tendencies. It was published the year after Ulysses and the year after The Wasteland was published. He told Eliot he didn't really see the point of The Wasteland. So Kit, could you read us, just set the scene for us,

but also these couple of paragraphs are a good demonstration of that specificity Charlotte was talking about. This is the very beginning of Reisman's Steps. On an autumn afternoon of 1990, a hatless man with a slight limp might have been observed ascending the gentle, broad acclivity of Reisman Steps, which lead from King's Cross Road up to Reisman Square in the great metropolitan industrial district of Clerkenwell.

He was rather less than stout and rather more than slim. His thin hair had begun to turn from black to grey, but his complexion was still fairly good, and the rich, very red lips under a small grey moustache and over a short pointed beard were quite remarkable in their suggestion of vitality. The brown eyes seemed a little small. They peered at near objects. As to his age, an experienced and cautious observer of mankind without previous knowledge of this man would have said no more

than that he must be past 40. The man himself was certainly entitled to say that he was in the prime of life. He wore a neat dark grey suit which must have been carefully folded at nights, a low white starched collar and a made black tie that completely hid the shirt front. The shirt cuffs could not be seen. He was shod in old black leather slippers, well polished. He gave an appearance of quiet, intelligent, refined and kindly prosperity, and in his little eyes shone the varying lights of emotional sensitiveness. into two series of ten. The man stopped on the half-landing and swung round with a casual air of purposelessness, which, however, concealed imperfectly a definite design. The suspicious and cynical, slyly watching his movements

would have thought, what's that fellow after? The description that you just read there kit right i love what what bennett does with pushing you to the edge of why why why are you telling me this why why are you why are you this is almost sort of too much um obsessional yeah god i must write everything down in order to then free you up but what he does at the end of that bit you read is he then makes it clear that that's just the bedding for the drama which he's going to build on top of it right like john in the in the bookshop there are specific details one of the things about bennett that i and this is the only arnold bennett i've ever read my

mother was obsessed with clay hanger whenanger when I was a kid. So I watched those and it had that brilliant Peter McHenry as one of the characters, wonderful actor. But I'd never actually grappled with one. But I completely fell in love with Reissman's Steps. And part of it was because I like everything, like Kit, I like everything that Virginia Woolf was attacking I like detail and I mean check this out as a former bookseller the shop had one window in

King's Cross Road but the entrance with another window was in Reissman steps the King's Cross Road window held only cheap editions in their paper jackets of popular modern novels such as those of Edith M. Dell, Charles Garvis, Zane Grey, Florence Barclay, Nat Gould and Jean Stratton Porter. The side window was set out with old books, first editions, illustrated editions and complete library editions in Carth 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, 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. Fabulous. Great I mean you're in the story. And we are to discover how much of this book is about the body and so much of that is bodily detail isn't it? Life, death, accidents, drama, food and these characters the bookshop owner and his lover becomes wife, who owns the shop next door, are kind of going to starve themselves to death through their sheer meanness. Spoilers. Kit was saying, I saw Kit the other day, she was saying one of the things about the novel as it goes on is you keep thinking,

it's going to turn a corner now. It can't get any worse for these people. They can't really be about to do that. But actually it's the single-mindedness of them, right? Yes, absolutely. The way that they're almost toying with one another, it's almost a race to the bottom between them. And that bloody-mindedness, obviously, of Mr Earl forward,

that she sort of thinks, well, if he's not going to do it, I'm not going to do it. It's terrible. And it is sort of saved by the sort of comic and sensitive person of Elsie, but I don't see her as anything other than this is how it could have been. I'm really fascinated by the two main players. I completely agree. It's almost gothic in the way that he takes respectable middle-class

middle-aged people and i mean destroys them essentially but they destroy themselves they eat themselves up with their own pretension and their own stubbornness and and you're thinking all the time we who are these people why what drives them to such? And it's a passion, isn't it? Mr. Earl Ford's miserliness, which is really the sort of enticing, the inciting kind of. His great passion. It's a passion, yeah. It's a passion. It's almost sexual.

It's kind of perverse. And then they sort of enable each other, don't they? Yes. As you say, there's this race to the bottom. He really reminded me of another writer who writes about fatally dysfunctional relationships in dingy surroundings in back alleys of London. Patrick Hamilton.

It's absolutely Patrick Hamilton. Who I did get into the 100. Well done. Hangover Square. Oh. How good was that? Hangover Square is kind of next door to the square here in a sense, isn't it? Yes, right on the steps, twinned with.

What a nice thought. Did you think he had satirical purpose in this book, Bennett? I was trying to think that. Is he trying to kind of make us think that these people, it's because of their venality and their lack of culture that they are like this. I didn't really feel it was a set-up. I just thought it's like almost a novelist setting himself a task.

I'm going to just, let's follow the logic and see where we end up. Which I think is massively a Bennett thing to do. You mentioned the book with Priam Fahl in it, Buried Alive. Buried Alive is a lovely, tiny novella which Jorge Luis Borges included in his favourite 70 novels or 100 novels. That's brilliant. But this book, Buried Alive, rests on a single incident which is a painter, a reclusive famous, famous painter who has lived abroad for a long time comes back to England comes to London falls ill no his valet falls ill oh I can't remember how it works it doesn't really matter the point is that when the doctor arrives oh that's right Priam the painter the reclusive

painter opens the door and the doctor assumes that he is his own valet. And the valet is in bed upstairs and dies. Anyway, there's a kind of switcheroo. Because he is so shy and so reclusive, the painter, a primophile, cannot bear to tell the doctor that he's wrong. So he just pretends to be his own valet. And so when the real valet dies, to be his own valet and so when the real valet dies he takes on the valet's identity so he just follows in other words the whole of this little book rests on one tiny thing which is the painter famous painter is too shy to reveal

his own identity to the doctor on the doorstep and he just follows the logic of that and it's it's a beautiful... I think there is that. I think there's a bit, do you see what I mean? There's a sense of, you know, what would happen if someone was so miserly that they would refuse even to feed themselves? And I think you'd have to ask in this book, what would have happened to Earl Ford had he not got married?

Because he was absolutely... I mean, he was a miser, but he was very in control of his miserliness until he got married. So he had his seven suits or whatever it was waiting to wear these identical suits. He had his charwoman and he was eating very little, but he was eating and he seemed to have, maybe that was his love affair. And the minute he got married, everything started going wrong because I think he felt now I'm going to have to start spending money. Even though she bought her own wealth, he felt quite threatened, I think,

by the marriage. And I think he would have survived longer had he not got married. Because by starving himself, he is proving a point, right it's about control as indeed many eating things are disorders yes yeah about proving control over the self and others in this but it is a marriage for both sides really of convenience rather than a passion charlotte have you got a bit to um well i was just think when you said what is this book really really about? I think Bennett tells us what it is about at the end of the novel when he gives us the newspaper headlines describing the incident that has resulted in bad things happening. Sorry, spoilers, everybody.

Doesn't matter. This is what the newspaper said. Mysterious death of a miser in Clerkenwell. Astounding story of love and death. I actually think itwell. Astounding story of love and death. I actually think it's the astounding story of love and death. Midnight tragedy in King's Cross Road. But I think astounding story of love and death is sort of fine as a potential blurb. So it's almost like, yeah, so it's almost like let's take that sensational headline

and then let's forensically pick it, pick at it, to see how we can do a round trip back to it, right? So the idea is, as you say, Kit, he's not going to do that, is he? Yeah. No, don't do that. Oh, he is going to do that. It's the remorselessness of Bennett pursuing the logical progression of the character that he's built.

For me, one of the funniest bits in the novel is when it's their honeymoon and the new Mrs. Elford has arranged for the disgusting, stinky, dusty, kind of our mutual friend-like bookshop to be vacuum-cleaned. They come back and he says, the shop's on fire. Because the lights are on. The lights are on. And then anyway, the vacuum cleaners do their work. And as they're leaving, he says to one of the vacuum cleaning men,

what do you do with the dirt? Do you sell it? Which is a very fascinating. It's the psychopathology of miserliness. No one has ever written it as brilliantly. I mean, it is both comic but also horrifying. Horrifying. Because we've all been there, you know,

maybe I should just turn these lights off. You know, it's quite easy to get into that sort of mindset. Are you saying it's relatable? One of the things I think might surprise listeners about Arnold Bennett's key fact is he invented the word sexy. Oh, no. That is good. He invented the word sexy in a letter

In 1896 And he is in the Oxford English Dictionary As the earliest Recorded use of the word sexy No way In the meaning that we would Understand it here in 2019 That's so impressive

Was that before he left Stoke? He discovered sexy in Stoke, not in Paris. Put the sexy back in Stoke. That's great fact. I mean, you know. That's brilliant. Fabulous. I'll just say a little bit about Arnold Bennett himself. So Arnold Bennett was born on May

the 27th, 1867 in Hanley Staffordshire, the Potteries. Charlotte, I'm going to give you a quick quiz. I will give you the name of the actual town in the Potteries, and I want you to give me the Arnold Bennett name for that same town. That's the difficult way around. Do you want it?

We'll give it a good go. All right, okay. So the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent are Turnstall. Oh, Turnstall is Turnhill in Bennet. Hanley is Hanbridge. Stoke is Knipe. Burslem is Bursley Have I missed any? Fenton doesn't exist

That's the trick one, that's right And there's one more Oh, Longton is Longshore Unbelievable Now I know why you won the Arnold Bennett prize It wasn't a pop quiz It should have been, I would have won it Anyway, so he was born in

Hanley in Staffordshire in 1867. He was, as is outlined in several of the books, he worked for his father, who was a miser, who made him be a rent collector, which he hated. And so he ran away to London, became a journalist, was a prolific journalist. He was the editor of Woman magazine, which he edited until about 1900. And then in 1903, he moved to Paris, where he lived until 1911. And very much in the kind of demi-monde of artistic Paris at that time, in the same circle as... It was mixed with Ravel and very glamorous. And that was where he got his kind of taste for Zola and Barbizon. And then he comes back to the UK.

Between 1914 to 1918, he is Director of Propaganda for France, for which he is offered and then refuses a knighthood. I know. In 1918, good man, right? He's then offered, Lord Beaverbrook offers him a weekly column about books in the Evening Standard. And that is another reason why younger writers disliked him so much. That although he did great work in terms of distributing money

to younger writers and was very supportive of younger writers, many of them perceived him as part of the problem because he was seen as a pontificator and a big personality. You know, the will self of his day, pontificating about the death of the novel or whatever. But the personality becomes more notorious than the work. Yes. Let's just not call him the Will Self.

God. Anyway, yes. But nonetheless, he's also prolific and he writes, as we say, many novels, but also nonfiction. And Kit, you were going to read us a bit from a book which was a real bestseller in its day. It's very short. The first real self-help book.

It's called How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. And it's still really popular, this book. There are about half a dozen different versions of it on Audible. Absolutely. And in the States, it's clearly far and away the book for which Arnold Bennett is known. It is genuinely considered to be the first popular self-help book. It's also best title of anything I've ever read. Okay, this is from the beginning, but it's not at the beginning.

Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible. Without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning and lo, your purse is magically filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life. It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions,

a highly singular commodity showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself. For remark, no one can take it from you. It is unstealable and no one receives either more or less than you. Talk about an ideal democracy. In the realm of time, there is no aristocracy of wealth and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day, and there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say, this man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time. He shall be cut off at the meter. It is more certain than consoles and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt. You can only waste the passing moment.

You cannot waste tomorrow. It is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour. It is kept for you. Brilliant. It's a good one. You're taking a nice deep sigh of satisfaction listening to that. So good.

And you were saying to me, you find that quite inspiring. I really do. I can remember I read this when I was, you know, in my 20s. And I thought, yeah, it's really clever. Now that I'm nearly 60, you know, time is the thing that we run out of. And I'm reading this now thinking, yes, I'll have 24 hours. And the whole book is about, he divides the day into what you have to do, your eight hours of work, and what you want to do

and what you should do about reading and self-improvement and having fun. And he says, get up a bit earlier if you can. Don't say you can't get up early. Everyone can get up earlier. And it's that sort of tone that you're kidding yourself if you say you haven't got time for something because you have got time it's a brilliant brilliant book there is stuff in how to live in 20 on 24 hours a day and in another book i'm just going to share with you in a minute

where i was reading them thinking i thought i had cracked this stuff in the year of reading dangerously it's so close to some of the things i talk about about how how you should use your commute or or or not being scared of reading things that you don't necessarily get straight away because what matters is you train your brain up and all that kind of stuff and that's that's what bennett's doing in these books a mere hundred plus years before i came along to make the same point like there's a book called literary taste how Form It, which I go forward all the way through. Because first of all, he's got that journalistic, it's quite provocative. It's sort of, why shouldn't you try this? I sort of know I'm being slightly mischievous, but at the same time, I mean it. the same time I mean it. And there are a couple of bits that this quote could have come out of Year of Reading Dangerously. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative enough to decide. And the idea of that section is, why is a classic a classic? It's

trying to say to the reader you know if you read whatever book it is if you read rice human steps and you don't like rice human steps if enough people are telling you rice human steps is a great book it probably is a great book and it might be worth taking a step back and thinking about why you don't get it yes right and so we were talking about this earlier about have we read books that we've gone off or books that we you know the reverse process here's the beginning of chapter three of literary taste how to form it why a classic is a classic the large majority of our fellow citizens care as much about literature as they care about aeroplanes or the programme of the legislature.

They do not ignore it, they are not quite indifferent to it, but their interest in it is faint and perfunctory, or if their interest happens to be violent, it is spasmodic. Ask the 200,000 persons whose enthusiasm made the vogue of a popular novel 10 years ago what they think of that novel now, and you will gather that they have utterly forgotten it, and that they would no more dream of reading it again than of reading Bishop Stubbs' Select Charters. would not enjoy it, not because the said novel is a whit worse now than it was 10 years ago, not because their taste has improved, but because they have not had sufficient practice to be able to rely on their taste as a means of permanent pleasure. Now, I don't know if we agree with that or disagree. I think that's debatable. But I like the willingness to challenge the reader is actually the thing I like in that. It's quite old-fashioned in its thinking, you know,

that you read for self-improvement or you read to, you know, for edification rather than entertainment. That's quite an old-fashioned, you know, certainly when I was at school, that's what I would have been told. I think now people are much more likely to say, if you don't like it, dump it, it doesn't matter. I think also there's a generosity to it and a brio. And I think when I think about Bennett,

I always do think about brio and energy. You know, this is a man who left my dear old Stoke-on-Trent as fast as he jolly well could from absolutely nothing. You know, he paid his way. You know, he was obsessed with money and he did have a taste for fine living and he did die because he refused to pay for bottled water in France and drank tap water and died of typhoid. He did clearly have a...

In order to demonstrate that there was nothing wrong with it, yeah. Strange relationship with the world in some ways. But there's sort of energy and enthusiasm. And in a funny way, Reisman Steps is I'd say it's in some ways it's atypical because just because of the fun sponge kind of characterization of the central characters but a lot of the books do have these great sort of zest for life people at the center of them and I think I'm a bit sorry I haven't spoken a bit more about Staffordshire as the as the locus of his work because I do think that that sort of regional thing is terribly important and the way he makes

these rather glum industrial landscapes magnificent yeah so is there a problem with Bennett that he writes so much he doesn't do a lot of research he's an expert on the potteries, but as is inevitable with many writers or artists or musicians as they become successful, they're writing about a subject that's increasingly remote to them because Bennett's on his yacht in the south of France. He's not in Bursley. I don't know. I don't know about that.

I think sometimes to be away from your home or away from someone, only then can you see the entirety of it. It's like being too up close to a painting. You actually need 10 feet to be away. Like Joyce writing about Dublin. And James Baldwin writing about America. He was in Paris. But he had that distance which gave him whatever it required for him to say,

there it is, I'm going to tell you about it and sometimes when you're in it it's too much you can't do it 100 yeah i absolutely could and funnily enough i couldn't read bennett until i'd left stoke because he was too much part of the scenery mental sort of weather and so it took me to move to quite near Reisman Steps to read Reisman Steps and to read everything else. He's brilliant in this book about London I love Clark and Wells was a murmuring green land of ministerial springs wells streams with mills on their banks nunneries aristocrats and holy clerks who presented mystery plays this is Earl Forward when he's fantasizing about how he's going to seduce Mrs Arp with his deep understanding of Clark and Wells' history.

She just thinks it's a shabby, nasty neighbourhood. We're going to have to hang the close sign in the bookshop window. Move the cheap paperbacks out from their place on the pavement inside. I would love to thank Kit and Charlotte for recovering the brio and charm of Arnold Bennett. I'm going to read a lot more. To Nicky Birch for keeping our levels level. And to Unbound for setting out that stall of old and tattered books. You can download all 106 episodes plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading

by visiting our website at batlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter, Facebook, or Boundless. We'll be back in about a fortnight for our Christmas special, Sooner Than You'd Believe or Hope. So thank you for listening. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

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