introduction to by the fireside

Walter Benjamins review of The Old Wives Tale (1908) by Arnold Bennett
was written in Ibiza in AprilMay 1933. Benjamin had left Berlin for good
three weeks after the Reichstag fire, travelling via Paris and Barcelona. The
German atmosphere in which you look first at peoples lapels, and after that
usually do not want to look them in the face anymore, is unbearable, he wrote
to Scholem. Sources of remuneration had begun to dry up a few years before;
his radio work ended with the dismissal of sympathetic programme heads,
though he could still publish short pieces under pseudonyms in parts of the
German press. (By the Fireside appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 23
May 1933, under the name of Detlef Holz.) Benjamins response to the Nazi
ascendancy moved between the political and the private. In the early thirties
he and Brecht were talking of launching a new journal, Krisis und Kritik
(potential contributors: Lukcs, Korsch, Kracauer, Adorno, Musil, Dblin),
and planning to annihilate Heidegger. Theories of German Fascism was
written in 1930, the Kraus essay and the attack on social-democratic moderacy,
Left-Wing Melancholy, in 1931, The Author as Producer in 1934. Yet he also
wrote of his profound fatigue, his horror and disgust at events in Germany,
the hopeless situation of cultural politics there. After his first visit to Ibiza
in summer 1932, when von Papen had suspended the Prussian government,
paving the path for Hitler, Benjamin had gone to Nice, planning suicide. Back
on the island in the spring of 1933, he was preoccupied by Arnold Bennetta
striking departure from his career-long dedication to the French and German
cultural worlds. Russia was of course his other point dappui, and Benjamins
fascination with Bennett would help lay the foundations for the study of
Nikolai Leskov, The Storyteller, first published in Orient und Okzident in
1936. Here the story, rooted in practical and experiential forms of knowledge
transmitted through narrative, is again linked to fire: the storyteller is the man
who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of
his story. I continue to read Arnold Bennett, Benjamin wrote to Jula Radt
in July 1933, in whom I increasingly come to recognize a man whose stance
is very much akin currently to my own and who serves to validate it: that is
to say, a man for whom a far-reaching lack of illusion and a fundamental
mistrust of where the world is going lead neither to moral fanaticism nor to
embitterment but to an extremely cunning clever and subtle way of living.
This leads him to wrest from his own wickedness the few respectable ways to
conduct himself, that amount to a human life.
 walter benjamin

BY THE FIRESIDE

O
scar wilde is said to have told a story about finding himself
in a group of people talking about boredom.1 Everyone had
something to say; Wilde was the last to speak, When I am
bored, he said, I take out a good novel, sit down by the fire
and gaze into it. In fact, the two things go well together: a blazing fire
in the hearth and an open novel. And since we have such a novel in our
handsArnold Bennetts greatest work has only now been translated
into German, twenty-five years after it first appearedwe shall gaze into
the fire without closing the book.2 No one is so unimaginative as to be
able to stare into a fire without some thought occurring to him. We shall
see why the spectacle it presents is a metaphor for the novel itself.

The reader of novels differs from those who immerse themselves in a

poem or follow the course of a play. Above all, he is alone, unlike the
member of an audience, but also unlike someone reading a poem. The
former has subsided into the crowd and shares its response, while the
latter is willing to turn into a partner and lend his voice to the poem. The
novel reader is alone and remains so for a good while. Moreover, in his
solitude he takes possession of his material in a more jealous and exclu-
sive way than the other two. He is ready to appropriate wholly what he
reads, to consume it down to the very last drop. He destroys and devours
its contents as fire consumes the logs in the hearth. The tension that
pervades the book resembles the gust of air that causes the fire to flare
up and fans the dancing flames.

This metaphor reveals a different picture to the one usually evoked in

discussions of the novel as a genre. Such discussions, in Germany at
least, begin with Friedrich Schlegel. The fact that Schlegel is alive only to
the artistic form of the novel as it is to be found in Cervantes or Goethe,
rather than to the broader tradition of epic narrative, is not without
its consequences. That the novel shares this tradition with the story is

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most evident in the writings of the English: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,

Stevenson and Kipling are primarily storytellers in their novels. Through
them, stories flow into the book and then flow out as stories once again.
In contrast, Flaubert, who represents the opposite principle, was in the
habit of reading his sentences out loud to himself. The rhythmic per-
fection that he constantly tested in this way encloses the reader inside
his grandiose works, sealing him within them. Sentence is joined on to
sentence here like bricks in a wall. This was all that was needed to create
the cult of construction, with its echo of sonorous prosodyall very
much in furtherance of an ambitious form of impotence. But if the novel
is an edifice, it looks less like an architects design than the pile of logs
the servant girl has heaped up in the grate. The aim is not that it should
keep forever but that it should burn brightly.

Bennett has compressed the events of over five decades into a single
space. Within that space he loosely builds up the lives of three genera-
tions. These three generations rest peacefully on the ashes of those who
went before them, tradesmen living in the Five Towns. In the course
of these five decades the family line has become concentrated in two
sisters, the younger of whom will die without issue, while the elder will
leave only one charming but spoilt offspring to inherit the estates of the
two women. The Five Towns, where they have their cradles and then
later their graves,

are unique and indispensable. From the north of the county right down
to the south they alone stand for civilization, applied science, organized
manufacture, and the centuryuntil you come to Wolverhampton. They
are unique and indispensable because you cannot drink tea out of a tea-
cup without the aid of the Five Towns; because you cannot eat a meal in
decency without the aid of the Five Towns. For this the architecture of the
Five Towns is an architecture of ovens and chimneys; for this its atmos-
phere is as black as its mud; for this it burns and smokes all night, so that
Longshaw has been compared to hell.3

Bennett does not open up this hell in the same way as Dickens exposes
the early industrial hell of London in The Old Curiosity Shop. The lives of

1
Reprinted with permission of Suhrkamp from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 3, Frankfurt 1991, pp. 38892.
2
Arnold Bennett, Konstanze und Sophie oder Die alten Damen [The Old Wives Tale],
translated from the English by Daisy Brdy, Munich 1932.
3
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives Tale, Harmondsworth 1983 [1908], p. 39.
 benjamin: By the Fireside 55

his two sisters are sealed off from it. If he does not say this in so many
words, he does show it metaphorically by making them grow up in a
drapers shop, for which they were both predestined from the outset.
At what cost the younger sister avoids this destiny, and how very closely
the force that tears her away from the shop resembles the force that
ultimately undermines it! For towards the end of the novel, the town in
which her ancestors built up their business begins to change its face.
The world in which work and pleasure balanced each other outwhich
made the business profitable and life worth livingis dying out. Big
business and the trusts start to cast their shadow over the town. At the
beginning of the century competitors come onto the scene, with post-
ers, gramophones and knockdown prices, and force the old shopkeepers
onto the defensive. The sisters lives are lived in changing times. One,
the older one, remains loyal to what was tried and tested, takes over the
shop, gives birth to a son and keeps up the house into which she wel-
comes her sister, who returns home after thirty years.

This house has a story of its own. It is the womb in which the family
wealth was incubated. Starting out as three dwellings, it developed over
the years and decades into a single labyrinth in which shop front, work-
shop and living quarters have melted down into a single building, which
provides little comfort but offers all the more convenience to habits that
have become immutable. This house is the subject of one of the nar-
rative magic tricks in which the novel is so rich. Despite all the blows
of fate that await the two women in it, the house is basically nothing
but the setting for the lives of two sisters at play, and then of two old
women; lives that are strangely intertwined and difficult to disentangle.
The sense of the vast-obscure of those regions which began at the top of
the kitchen steps and ended in black corners of larders or abruptly in the
common dailiness of Brougham Street, a sense which Constance and
Sophia had acquired in infancy, remained with them almost unimpaired
as they grew old.4

This is a dry subject with which to feed the readers burning curiosity.
What does it mean? Moritz Heimann once remarked that a man who
dies at the age of thirty-five is a man who dies at the age of thirty-five at
every moment of his life. I do not know whether he is right; indeed, I
hope and believe that he is mistaken. But in this novel it is absolutely

4
The Old Wives Tale, p. 69.
 56 nlr 96

spot-on; indeed the nature of the characters in the novel could not be
better summed up than by this sentence. It asserts that the meaning of
their lives can only be understood by reflecting upon their deaths. Now,
the reader meets characters in the novel the meaning of whose lives he
must be able to grasp. Thus somehow or other he must know in advance
that he will learn about their deaths; if need be, only in a metaphorical
sense, i.e. the end of the novelbut, even better, in their actual deaths.
How do they signal that death awaits them, a specific death, moreover,
that will occur at a particular point in the novel? That is the question the
reader finds so irresistible and which binds him to the text, just as he is
hypnotized by the flames in the hearth. He actually identifies with death
and he finds himself licking at the characters in the novel much as the
flames lick at the log before it finally catches fire.

It turns to ashes. That is why this novel, which begins with the girls
in their youth, is nevertheless called The Old Wives Tale. In the pref-
ace, which regrettably has been omitted from the otherwise exemplary
German translation, Bennett relates how, long before he set to work on
the novel, the idea for it had come to him from seeing an old woman
who came into his favourite restaurant in Paris. Ideas of the sort that
were aroused in him by her wretched appearance can occur to any-
one. In his case, such ideas were translated into literature so that
nothing was lost.

No one, says Pascal, dies so poor that he does not leave something
behind. And that includes memoriesonly memories do not always
find an heir. It is the novelist who enters into this inheritance; and sel-
dom without a profound sadness. Hers had not been a life at all.5 The
judgement passed by the survivor on her dead sister is more or less
the sum total of the inheritance left to the novelist. The dead womans
entire experience of love had played itself out against a world-historical
backcloth. How threadbare it appears, in the memory of it the author
creates! Sometimes the character herself has a premonition of this:

Sometimes she would think in an unoccupied moment, How strange it is

that I should be here, doing what I am doing! But the regular ordinariness
of her existence would instantly seize her again. At the end of 1878, the
Exhibition Year, her Pension consisted of two floors instead of one.6

5
The Old Wives Tale, p. 585. 6
The Old Wives Tale, p. 457f.
 benjamin: By the Fireside 57

The novel is divided into four books; the final book bears the title What
Life Is. And its last two chapters are called End of Sophia and End of
Constance. Of all the gifts it brings, this is the most certain: the end. Of
course, we have no need of novels to tell us this. However, this novel is
not important because it depicts another persons fate but because this
fate, exposed to the flames that consume it, imparts to us something
of the warmth that we can never glean from our own. What impels the
reader to return to it again and again is its mysterious ability to warm a
shivering life through its contact with death.

Translated by Rodney Livingstone