Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

The modernist attack on Arnold Bennett has been pretty successful. His books, which crowded the shelves of bookstores in my youth, are nowadays hard to find. Yet his best two novels are far more satisfactory as records of what it is to be human than Virginia Woolf’s best two, which seem snobbish and fluttery by comparison. She never retracted her attack on Bennett, but Ezra Pound, at least, later qualified his dismissal of Bennett when he “finally got round to reading” “The Old Wives’ Tale,” which is surely a neglected masterpiece if ever there was one. To it I would add Bennett’s “Riceyman Steps,” which I came to only this year. The great virtue of these two novels is in their detailed and sympathetic treatment of people who are largely unsympathetic: Bennett is humane and sturdy, witty and delicate, never boring, never condescending and never superficial. Read them!