Bibliographies, News, and Notes

225 BIBLIOGRAPHIES. NEWS. AND NOTES Compiled and Edited by H. E. Gerber and E. S. Lauterbach In this section of our last number in Volume 6 (1963), we once more summarize what we have published in the past six years on the authors regularly listed. The items previously published on each author are totalled for each number In which the individual author's name appeared. ARNOLD BENNETT By James G. Kennedy Annotated I terns on Bennett have appeared previously In EFT, as follows: 55 items in James G. Hepburn's selected list [l, 1 (1957-58)]; 15 Items [l, 3 (1958)1; 1 Item [11, 1 (1959)1; 4 Items [ill, I (1960)1; 3 items [ill, 2 (1960)1; 3 Items [IV, 1 (1961)1; 5 items [IV, 2 (1961)]; 2 items [IV, 3 (1961)]; 22 Items [Vl, 1 (1963)]; 7 items [Vl, 2 (1963)1; 3 Items [Vl, 3 (1963)1; 5 Items [Vl, 4 (1963)1. Gerber, H. E. "Arnold Bennett: Realist, Symbol ist—Artist," ELT, Vl: 4 (1963),242-44. Review of James G. Hepburn's THE ART OF ARNOLD BENNETT. Hepburn, James G. "The Notebook for RlCEYMAN STEPS," PMLA, LXXVlIl (June 1963), 257-61. "A close examination of the notebook for RlCEYMAN STEPS and a brief examination of other notebooks afford little support" for the "conventional image" of B as a writer who took careful and orderly notes on "the external social scene" before beginning to write a novel. Hepburn has located, in England, B's notebooks for THE PRICE OF LOVE, IMPERIAL PALACE, and DREAM OF DESTINY. The notebook for RICEYMAN STEPS is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Of the 4000 words in the latter notebook, only 150 refer to external scenes: 50 words refer to Clerkenwell, the London district of the novel, and 100 words, to Madame Tussaud's Waxworks. [There are, moreover, infrequent, illegible shorthand entries in the RlCEYMAN STEPS notebook.] Probably the "first twelve pages" of the thirty-six page notebook were jotted down before B began to write the novel on October 10, 1922. Most of the notes "focus upon the novel as an isolated work." The first note suggests that B's chief Interest was psychological, rather than sociological, and that he considered his miser's '"grand passion'" to be "'heroic.'" Other notes, of which Hepburn quotes examples, show that B reminded himself of the "psychological implications" of his characters and scenes. The novel shows "nightmare" and "daytime" aspects of !'human mentality." B does not seem to have needed to outline the time structures and plots of his novels. The RICEYMAN STEPS notebook includes no sign of the "chief images and symbols in the novel." In the Earlforward home, "imprisonment, entombment, and martyrdom" "occur" as the miser struggles against "invasion"'of his "home, safe, and soul by Violet and Elsie," and "invasion of his body by cancer." The "controlling images and symbols" probably "were firmly fixed"in B's mind. The "disorderly" 226 notebook probably "was not a necessary prologue to the novel," but rather served B's apparent compulsion to write continually. By the testimony of friends and of B himself, and by the amazing infrequency of corrections in the manuscripts of THE OLD WIVES' TALE and RICEYÎ1AN STEPS, one must grant that B had an "impressive" "conceptual grasp." Maugham, W. Somerset. "Some Novelists I Have Known" THE VAGRANT MOOD: SIX ESSAYS. NY: Doubleday, 1953. Pp. 229-43. [inadequately noted in EFT, I: 1 (195758 ); here enlarged.] B was the only "straight novelist" who was intimate with H. G. Wells, partly because "both were of modest origin" and had become successful, but chiefly because "Arnold was a very lovable man." In I905 he came once a week to "a restaurant in the Rue d'Odessa" where Maugham dined with "painters, illustrators, sculptors and writers" in "a little room to ourselves." [The restaurant was the Chat Blanc (B's JOURNAL, 6 Feb I9O5), and B had been there on 22 June 1904.] B was "older than most of us," was thin, and "looked like a managing clerk in a city office." Maugham's group condescended to B, who was known by THE GRAND...