Words by the Day

ARNOLD BENNETT (385 pp.)--Reginald Pound--Harcourt, Brace ($5.75).

"I am a writer," Arnold Bennett once confessed, "just as I might be ... a grocer, or an earthenware manufacturer." Bennett set himself the task of 1,000 words a day, and through most of his 40 productive years, managed to maintain that rate. In 1907 he announced he would write a major novel of 200,000 words, on Aug. 30, 1908 noted: "Finished The Old Wives' Tale at 11:30 a.m. today. 200,000 words." The last entry in his journal, in the last full calendar year of his life, ends: "Total of words for the year, 353,250. Not bad."

Such productivity brought Bennett fame, fortune (an annual income in later years of as much as $100,000), a yacht, a grand house in Cadogan Square, a wife, a mistress, and the friendship of such contemporaries as H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Lord Beaverbrook, Bernard Shaw. During his lifetime, his love of good clothes and good living gave Bennett a reputation as a fop, a popular caricature which the publication of his Journal in 1932-33 did little to change. Biographer Pound now takes a look behind the dandyism, the snobbishness and the preoccupation with money, and finds them the defenses of a suddenly successful man from the pottery towns of Staffordshire against a world he never quite made terms with.

Tears Never Fell. Pound's Bennett rarely comes to full life except when Pound is quoting from his subject's own prolific notes and letters. But Pound has done a satisfying job of culling the word-master's words, and the result is a picture of a skillful stylist and keen observer who kept his artistic standards high, even when turning words into gold at the rate of $10,000 a month.

Bennett's difficulty--and it kept him from ever fully scaling the literary heights--was his inability to feel deeply. He once said if he had to choose between the collected works of Shakespeare and Roget's Thesaurus, "I would let Billy go, upon my word." He could write perceptively, but he had to lament, while trying to write about love: "I have never been in love. Sometimes the tears start to my eyes, but they never fall."

He was as agnostic about religion as about love. The human brain, he said, was not constructed to exercise itself in the realms of the infinite. This conviction shut out poetry as well as God, and Bennett could only sigh: "I should not object to having a religious creed. I should rather like to have one."

Artistic creation gave Bennett only some of the satisfaction he missed in love and religion. He noted the "ineffable happiness" of creating, but could wail a few years later: "I am in a position to state that constant honest artistic production does not produce in the producer any particularly ecstatic source of bliss. At best it is an anodyne."

"Insomnia Worse." Bennett was constantly in need of anodynes. He suffered torments from neuralgia, headaches, liver trouble, stomachache, boils, and a "speech chaos, not stammer, not stutter, a paralysis which . . . made him throw back his head epileptically and bite the air until release came." His most horrendous affliction was insomnia, a subject which seems to occupy more space in his diaries and letters than even his obsession with word productivity. Day after day, he noted "3 1/4 hours last night," "half dead with fatigue and nerve strain," "great state of exhaustion" or "no creative energy left. Insomnia worse."

On March 27, 1931, Arnold Bennett finally settled into an insomnia-free sleep, having produced close to 40 novels, more than a dozen plays, and such pocket philosophies as How to Live on 24 Hours a Day and Mental Efficiency. He left a literary reputation and personal legend which justifies Biographer Pound's evaluation : "Like a man of the Renaissance, he seemed to be greater than his work."

Verbalist Bennett himself in 1929 gave a judgment on his own literary output with which few critics in 1953 would disagree : "I have written between 70 and 80 books. But also I have written only four: The Old Wives' Tale, The Card, Clay-hanger and Riceyman Steps. All the others are made a reproach to me."

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