“Stench!” Arnold Bennett’s End and the Beginning of Finnegans Wake

Abstract

[Arnold Bennett] said that nothing was so insular and absurd as to suppose that ordinary water of Paris, indeed of France, was dangerous, since hundreds of thousands of French people drank anything else. Drink it he would. --Dorothy Cheston Bennett (156) Arnold Bennett died on 27 March 1931 after contracting typhoid from glass of water he drank in Paris that January. His spouse, Dorothy Cheston Bennett, records that he drank Parisian tap water at least twice--just before and just after dining with James and Nora Joyce for first time (156). Although little is known about particulars of Bennett and Joyce's encounters in Paris, for Joyce at least, they seem to have been business meetings; he hoped to enlist support for Finnegans Wake from who had suggested only year before that novel would never be anything but wild caprice of wonderful creative artist who has lost his way (Evening StandardYears 307). (1) Instead of critical support, however, Bennett inadvertently provided Joyce with more material for his work, for after Bennett's Joyce revised Mutt/Jute dialogue in first chapter of Finnegans Wake, figuring Jute as Bennett and using his from drinking contaminated water to suggest that water cycle, like all cycles in novel, is subject to second law of thermodynamics--in other words, it is closed system in which entropy increases. (2) Like many early twentieth-century writers, it seems, Joyce was influenced by work of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who wrote that universe would eventually come to a state of universal rest and death unless God intervened (388). (3) In Finnegans Wake Joyce suggests that universe is indeed running down as generations pass and human world becomes increasingly polluted. Arnold Bennett's life--and Although most of Bennett's work is out of print today, in 1920s he was one of England's best-loved writers, and story of his life as man from North was well known to his contemporaries, if only because he celebrated it in both his fictional and autobiographical writing. (4) Born in industrial region known as Potteries, Bennett was disadvantaged only by his modest, provincial upbringing but also by persistent stutter--an impediment that remained with him throughout his life. Fortunately for Bennett's prospects, his father, potter by trade, switched professions when Bennett was young, eventually becoming solicitor and moving his family to prestigious neighborhood (Waterloo Road in Burslem), change that, according to Margaret Drabble, symbolized the ascent of Bennett family into middle classes (30). Although he was an outstanding student, Bennett left school at 16 to become clerk in his father's law office. After twice failing his legal examinations, he moved to London, and in 1891, parody he wrote of Grant Allen's What's Bred in Bone was published in Tit-Bits (Drabble 54). Three years later he began his career in letters, becoming an assistant editor of Woman, popular weekly magazine, and writing short stories. From this point on, Bennett's fortunes rose quickly. In 1898 his first novel, A Man from North, was published, and in 1902 he established himself as professional writer with The Grand Babylon Hotel, society novel of sorts that was not only sensational but sensationally successful (Drabble 79). With ensuing publication of more literary works such as The Old Wives' Tale (1903), Clayhanger (1910), and Riceyman Steps (1926), Bennett became critically acclaimed author, and as reviewer for New Age and then Evening Standard, he became one of Great Britain's most influential critics. By 1920s he was figure, as Walter Allen notes: He was ... character; he was news; he lived always in fierce limelight of public gaze; and he was abashed. …