Things That Have Interested Me

by Arnold Bennett

Excerpt from Things That Have Interested Me
I have never seen a reasonably good all-round performance of the grand opera. Nevertheless, though not a melomaniac, I am extremely fond of grand opera, and have seen it in the following cities: Antwerp, Brussels, Florence, Ghent, Henley, Lisbon, London, Milan, New York, Paris, Ostend, Philadelphia, Rome, San Remo, and others which I cannot recall. If operatic performances succeed in several particulars, as they sometimes do - though rarely in more than one - they always fail in at least one particular, generally in several, sometimes in all. The best show I ever saw anywhere on the operatic stage was a performance of Le Manage de Figaro in English at Drury Lane under Sir Thomas Beecham. The production had been superintended by Nigel Playfair. The translation was quite neat, and often very witty indeed. The acting was good. There was an ensemble. The scenery was not really good, but it was so immensely better than ordinary scenery in world-renowned opera-houses that it gave the illusion of being good. I was as well satisfied by this affair as by a faulty performance of Strauss's absolutely enchanting Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden: which is saying a great deal. It would be impossible for me to decide which was the worst show I ever saw - the choice would be too embarrassing.
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363 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.