Englishman

THE JOURNAL OF ARNOLD BENNETT: 1921-28--Viking ($3).

This third and final volume of the late Enoch Arnold Bennett's Journal (a selection from the million-word record he kept from 1896 till shortly before his death) brings to a close one of the liveliest diaries ever written. Arnold Bennett, like the great Sam Johnson, was that rare and peculiarly English product, the apotheosis of brilliant common sense. Unlike Sam Johnson, Bennett was naturally energetic, ambitious, insatiably curious, versatile. Life had an appetizing savor to him; he lived it and wrote about it with zest. Coincident with this third volume of the Journal the Viking Press publishes a one-volume edition ($5), which the Literary Guild has made its June selection.

No cloistered literary man, Bennett knew so many prominent people of his day that it would be easier to list those he did not know than those he did. Member of no literary school, he was on friendly terms with such irreconcilables as the Sitwells, H. G. Wells, Shaw, Noel Coward, "Max" Beaverbrook, T. S. Eliot, Otto Kahn, Winston Churchill, Andre Gide, John Galsworthy, Lord Birkenhead, George Moore. He liked most people. Of an evening when Shaw was present he notes: "Shaw talked practically the whole time, which is the same thing as saying that he talked a damn sight too much."

Two reappearing themes run through his Journal: insomnia and work, habits he never shook off. "Last night I had what I call a goodish night for me. 12.30 a. m. to about 2.55 a. m. Then about 3.15 a. m. to 5.45 a. m. Then a few short snoozes, totalling perhaps 40 minutes at the very most. In all 5 1/2 hours." In 1926 he "contracted" with himself to write 365,000 words during the year--an average of 1,000 words a day--fulfilled the contract by December 20. Whenever his ideas gave out he would go for an "idea-gathering"' walk, through the shopping district of London, to picture galleries or churches. Frank even in public, he was doubly so in his diary. "I also bought Legouis and Cazamian's Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise, chiefly in order to read the pages on myself." Though he knew it was a weakness, he was often attracted to patent medicines. Once he took six boxes of anti-fat pills, which upset his heart. His doctor mildly rebuked him, said "that I oughtn't to take medicines without con-suiting him. And of course he is quite right. It is perfectly staggering the idiotic things even a wise man will do." Though Bennett wrote for money and made a good income (as high as $75,000) he was not extravagant; but he had foibles. "In the morning, early, I went into Selfridge's, which ought not to have been open, and bought a pencil that writes in four colours and a combination magnifying-glass, inch rule, and letter opener. All very attractive, indeed irresistible."

Never naive, usually well-informed about the people he met, on one occasion Bennett was a little slow on the uptake. After a lunch with Mrs. William Randolph Hearst he confided to his Journal: "The lunch was a great lark, and I enjoyed it. Mrs. Hearst very pretty, even beautiful and well preserved. She had a 'down" on film-stars."

In 1921 Bennett and his wife separated. Two years later he met Dorothy Cheston, actress in the Birmingham Repertory Company. Since his wife would not give him a divorce, Bennett and Actress Cheston lived together openly as man & wife. In 1926 their daughter Virginia Mary was born. Bennett describes the event very characteristically: "I went up to Welbeck St. [the hospital] at 9.30 and saw the child at 10 a. m., two hours old. She weighed 8 Ib. 1 oz. and had a big head."

One of Bennett's keenest appetites was for yachting. In his own (much overpublicized) yacht, the Velsa, a 55-ft. Dutch cutter with an auxiliary engine, a piano and an encyclopedia, with timbers that recalled the Constitution and "a cockpit in which Hardy might have kissed Nelson,'' he voyaged amiably on the Zuyder Zee, the Baltic and numerous friendly canals and English estuaries. During the War Bennett lent the Velsa to the Admiralty, and it was afterwards sold, but he rarely turned down an invitation to go cruising. In 1927 he shipped as a guest of Otto Kahn on a Mediterranean yachting trip. Though he dressed the part of yachtsman, he never forgot his main business: in spite of bridge and cocktail-parties and sightseeing, he continued to log; his 1,000 words a day.

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