Mr. Prohack

by Arnold Bennett

Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British novelist. He was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. At age 21 he went to London as a solicitor's clerk. He won a literary competition in Tit Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full time. From 1900 he devoted himself full time to writing, giving up the editorship and writing much serious criticism, and also theatre journalism, one of his special interests. In 1902 Anna of the Five Towns, the first of a succession of stories which detailed life in the Potteries, appeared. In 1908 The Old Wives' Tale was published, and was an immediate success throughout the English-speaking world. His most famous works are the Clayhanger (1910) trilogy and The Old Wives' Tale. These books draw on his experience of life in the Potteries, as did most of his best work. Among his other books are: The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (1907), Hilda Lessways (1911), The Author's Craft (1914), The Lion's Share (1916), and The Roll-Call (1919).

Genres: Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

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.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

Bennett is always a remarkable read. This one is fantastic on a hard-working man become suddenly rich. The tension in his attitude to money, the shame and stupidity along with the frank enjoyment. A lot of acute observation of human nature throughout. Particularly interesting is Charlie, his embittered son, awarded the Military Cross for war heroism then left to twist in the wind post war with no available work or scope for his talents. Charlie sets out very deliberately to become a spiv, and other writers would have centred the book on him, but that's not Bennett's way. He's the author of the ordinary person, the poet of everyday. This isn't his best but okay Bennett is still worth about 400 self conscious Great Literary Novels.

[Elsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr Prohack is my hero. I think he is really AB in the persona of an upstanding, respectable but ever-so-quietly-eccentric civil servant unexpectedly plunged into a new life of luxury and complications. Acutely self-aware and yet self-deceiving at times, making mistakes but never failing to learn from them, keenly alive to love, pleasure and the ridiculous, Mr Prohack still lives today.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arnold Bennett is sadly underrated these days. At his prime in the 1910s and '20s he was one of the most popular authors in the world, but today, his reputation rests mainly on 1908's The Old Wives' Tale. He turned out dozens of novels and plays before death claimed him in middle age. Some are broadly comic and some stiff and Puritanical, but all are told in the same flowing, descriptive, seemingly effortless prose.

The 20th century comedy of manners Mr. Prohack explores the boundaries between the English middle and upper classes and the corrosive effects of too much money. Arthur Prohack is a Treasury official admired and feared by people at all levels of government. At home, he is affection itself to his quiet, ever-anxious wife, Marian, and to their two grown children, Charles and Sissie. Then Mammon enters the picture in the form of a bequest from a debtor whose loan Mr. Prohack had long ago written off. In a matter of days, the frugal Marian has become "Eve," a neurotic who purchases chauffeured autos and rents mansions without so much as a word to her husband. Army veteran Charles begins squandering his patrimony on used motorcycles and questionable stock options. Sissie flees to the suburbs to open a dance studio and spoon with a lisping, monocle-wearing Bright Young Person. Unable to continue in his comfortable middle-class rut, Mr. Prohack gives in and devotes himself to idleness, the one sin he has never been able to abide. The love of money has spoiled the perfect English family...but not irretrievably, as all four Prohacks discover when their true natures begin to crack the "U" veneer.

Originally a magazine serial, Mr. Prohack rambles on for about half again as long as would have been effective. Its plot seems to have inspired Sinclair Lewis' Dodsworth (1929), except that in the latter the only person to succumb fully is the title character's social-climbing wife. The Prohack family are snobbish and exasperating and their attitudes sometimes inexplicable to an egalitarian Yank. Yet this typical Arnold Bennett fiction has a charm to it that a reader can savor even 90 years and an ocean away.

[António · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bennett conta a história do sr. Prohack e da sua adaptação a uma vida com dinheiro. Os diálogos são inteligentes, espirituosos e bem ritmados, o humor mantém uma boa linha todo o romance, as personagens são suficientemente caricatas para serem divertidas e interessantes, a intriga, sempre ligeira, tem peripécias entretidas e desenhadas com engenho que baste. O sr. Prohack, sempre contradizendo nas acções e palavras empáticas, inteligentes e bondosas os pensamentos refilões e intolerantes, é um caso interessante de sabedoria de vida revelada por manifestações que no princípio nunca a anunciam. Duvidosa fica apenas a moralidade que usa, ou de que abdica, quando se mostra compreensivo demais sobretudo com os desmandos financeiros do filho. Mas a obra é demasiado bem-humorada para isso preocupar o leitor.

[Nancy Carson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic Arnold Bennett. Wonderful dialogue, humour and characterisation. Every sentence is a gem.

[Anicius · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's not really a plot. The amusing outlook of Mr. Prohack carries it.