H.L. Mencken

The Morning Union/September 13, 1925

A little book on Arnold Bennett by his wife, a French lady, has given me great pleasure, and, as a bachelor, great comfort. It is, so far as I know, the first absolutely honest book that any wife has ever written about her husband, during his lifetime or afterward. This Mrs. Bennett has all the peculiar literary virtues of her race; she writes very clearly and she is unblushingly realistic. Moreover, she is authentically female, and does not try to think or write like a man. Thus her little volume rises from the particular to the general. It offers, I believe, a brilliantly vivid and typical picture of the figure that every husband cuts in the eye of every wife.

And how is that figure to be described? Imagine a child in arms with all the pride and circumstance of an archbishop, and you have it. Is Mrs. Bennett impressed by her husband’s extraordinary talent, his immense capacity for grueling work, his high achievement and wide fame? She is not. What arrests her chiefly is the fact that, as husbands go, he is a bad one. When he is at work, he bars her out of the room; it is a black mark. When she recites French poetry, he doesn’t come to hear her; it is another. He has his opinions, he loves his ease and peace, he likes to be master in his own house; it is a whole congeries of black marks, gradually taking forms as a skull and cross bones. 

Is he kind? Is he a good provider? Does he bring in interesting friends, people worth knowing? Has he, by his incessant labor of 37 years, made it something to be Mrs. Arnold Bennett? Yes to all. Mrs. Bennett does not forget. She is, in her sad way, grateful. God has been kind to her. But every day her eyes fall upon that closed door, and every day she is thrilled sospirando by the immemorial martyrdom of her sex. 

II.

Let no scoundrel assume that I here poke fun at a suffering lady. To the contrary, I am full of a genuine sympathy for her. It must be a ghastly business, at best, to be a woman and have to marry a man. It must be an experience equal to laparotomy to be an American woman and have to marry a Babbitt. But a thousand times worse, and infinitely accursed, must be the adventure of marrying an artist. 

Mrs. Bennett’s account for her honeymoon is almost unbearably tragic. The bridegroom, at the time, was 40 years old, and set in his ways as firmly as a fly in tertiary amber. Certain hours of the day he gave to his writing, and certain other hours to his recreation—then piano playing. What is there in the movies to make it credible that he stuck to this program exactly? Yet here is the testimony of the bride, signed and sealed: “The thrilling, exciting, delightful episode of his honeymoon did not make him give up his hobby of the moment for one single day, any more than it led him to stop his writing!”

Try to imagine those gruesome Flitberwochen—the bridegroom locked up with his writing tablets from breakfast until luncheon and dogging the piano for hours every afternoon, and the bride mournfully reading the newspapers or window shopping like a lost soul! Most American girls, I dare say, would have left the fellow to his sinister devices and gone back to the country club for another shot. But few American girls, if any, have married artists. In France it is commoner, and so this French bride stood to the music. She has survived 17 years as a wife.

But now she sets down the story, and no wonder! The Freudian urge must be patent even to an orthodox psychologist. We get rid of our woes in this world by telling someone about them. Mrs. Bennett does it discreetly. Her book is in excellent taste. But the bitter truth is in it and that bitter truth, as I have hitherto suggested, is that the woman who marries as artist, and, marrying him, refrains from poisoning him, deserves monument so high that it bulges the very floor of heaven. 

III.

Bennett, indeed, is vastly superior to the general run of his kind–that is, as a husband. He is, as has been mentioned, an excellent provider. In fact, his wife marvels that he should keep on working so hard, now that the wolf’s hide is safely nailed to the door. He is, moreover, very neat and cleanly in his habits and keeps his workroom in apple-pie order. He likes his wife’s countrymen and the cooking of her native land. His friends are, in the main, decent fellows, and many of them are amusing. He is faithful to his vows. 

Certainly, this is a strange sort of artist, and one whose strangeness is all in favor of the natural prejudices of a wife. The average must be far less satisfactory. I run over a few notorious specimens—Wagner, Shelley, Byron, Tolstoi, Anatole France. The list could be run down this column and up the next. Schumann used to go crazy and jump into the Rhine; Gauguin eloped to the South Sea Islands and carried on lamentably with ladies of color. Shakespeare deserted Ann Hathaway for 20 years. Poe was a drunkard. But such things are too unpleasant to be rehearsed in a family newspaper.

The point is that artists are nearly always improvident and nearly always given over to appalling vices. The virtues that one finds in a Babbitt are simply not in them. Their wives knew the pinch of poverty and the sharp sting of jealousy. They bring home rowdy companions, male and female, and are pursued by bailiffs, rivals in amour, Christian critics and the Polizei. One hears much scouting at Minna Planer; I myself have mocked her. But what a life she must have led with Wagner! He was a fugitive from justice—what would be called today a bolshevik or I.W.W. Whenever he passed a woman he winked at her. He wore preposterous clothes. And, while the music publishers thronged his door offering him hard cash for his excellent cornet arrangements of the music of Rossini, he locked himself up by the day and wrote such “advanced” rubbish as “Lohengrin.” 

IV.

This last, I take it, was the unkindest cut of all—that is, to poor Minna, with her sturdy common sense and thrifty German ways. What broke her heart in the end was not the fact that Richard was always poor, or the fact that he went too far now and then with a 180-pound soprano, or the fact that his political ideas were subversive and against God; what fetched her was simply the fact that he thought more of his abominable work than he did of her—in the language of wives, that he did not love her fully, up to the neck, and without reservation.

Therein lies the failure of the artist as husband, and the tragedy of his wife. He is one not like other men. When he strives and struggles it is not that he may gain something to bring back to the darling of his heart, to adorn her person and prove his love: it is simply that he is driven by an irresistible inner necessity, that he cannot stop. He is not, strictly speaking, a man with a talent; he is a talent riding a man. Is he seized with as idea on the first day of his honeymoon? Then the honeymoon must be adjourned until he has got it out. Is he beset when his wife has asked the neighbors in to hear her recite the verses of Baudelaire? Then the neighbors must do their own applauding while he writhes and sweats at his desk. 

That such men are unsatisfactory husbands must be plain. There can never be anything courtly about these. It is impossible for them to defer, attend, yield, be considerate. When frenzy is on them they are like men with the gout; there is no handling them until it is over. Worse, it puts them into an appalling humor. And it takes talent to write “Die Meistersinger”? Rather say colossal agony; terrific swearing. The Fifth Symphony is full of the most dreadful profanity. If there had been a Mrs. Beethoven she would have had to listen to it. Bennett, I assume, is less violent. But I can’t rid myself of that picture of Mrs. Bennett watching the closed door.