Book review by George Simmers: The Pretty Lady (1918) was Arnold Bennett’s novel of wartime London. It centres on the relationship between Christine, a French prostitute who had fled from the invading Germans at Ostend, and G.J. Hoape, her privileged client.
Prostitution was a subject that Bennett had previously kept away from; in 1910, he had written:
More than once publishers of the highest rank have suggested to me that I might write a novel dealing with prostitution in London [….] But I have not yielded to the temptation, and I do not think that I ever shall. The British public is not sufficiently educated, in an artistic sense, to be able to accept such a novel on its merits.
In wartime London, however, the topic was back in the news. The West end of London was full of soldiers on leave, many looking for female company. On February 6, 1917, this letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appeared in The Times :
Sir – Is it not possible in any way to hold in check the vile women who at present prey upon and poison our soldiers in London? A friend of mine who is a Special Constable in a harlot-haunted district has described to me how these harpies carry off the lonely soldiers to their rooms, make them drunk with the vile liquor which they keep there, and finally inoculate them, as likely as not, with one or other of those diseases which, thanks to the agitation of well-meaning fools, have had free trade granted to them amongst us?
A few days later, a Westminster magistrate, referred approvingly to Conan Doyle’s letter when sentencing some women for importuning soldiers in the streets; (Times, 12 February 1917). The 1917 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Venereal Diseases Act were official responses to the problem that blamed and penalised women, not the men who paid them.
It was in the context of this moralistic ferment that in May 1917 Bennett began to write The Pretty Lady. His Christine is no harpy preying on innocent soldiers; her principal client, G.J.Hoape, is well above the military age. As Margaret Drabble wrote in her Bennett biography, ‘the extreme calm with which Christine, G.J. and the author accept her profession is unusual in English fiction, to say the least.’ Christine may be ‘the professed enemy of society’, but Bennett shows how she is able to continue her business because of the connivance of society, and because she pays the expected bribe to society’s protectors, the police.
In the respectable part of Hoape’s life, he is a member of the Lechford Committee, a close fictional equivalent of the Wounded Allies’ Relief Committee, for which Bennett had worked hard since the beginning of the War. Bennett presents this as useful work, but also as a subtle way of giving the committeee-members ‘considerable self-satisfaction’ . These committee-members, in life and in the novel, were an assortment of the great and the good, mostly titled. Star of the fictional committee is the rather flamboyant Lady Queenie Paulle, who ‘had few rivals as a war-worker’, because she attended so many societies and sat on so many committees, and had, Bennett sardonically notes, ‘done practically everything that a patriotic girl could do for the war, except, perhaps, join a Voluntary Aid Detachment and wash dishes and scrub floors for fifteen hours a day and thirteen and a half days a fortnight.’ (79)
The Lechford Committee assumes the right to discuss the private lives of the staff at their French hospital, with an interest clearly shown as lubricious. There are hints that Queenie’s own private life is liberated, but when the committee discusses whether the doctors and nurses should be able to accompany one another to the cinema, her casting vote decides (for reasons of respectability) that they should not have that freedom. Bennett may here be hinting at another wartime moral panic; the Metropolitan Police had asked the National Union of Women Workers to investigate concerns that the darkness of cinemas was encouraging immoral behavior. (The Times reported that these vigilantes checked 248 halls but ‘failed to find any indecency.’)
The novel’s tone is often satirical, but it strikes darker notes when the War and ‘the incredible fact of death’ impinge on the lives of the characters. A woman receives the news of her husband’s death; an air-raid kills a child, and anti-aircraft fire kills Queenie; a shell-shocked soldier seeks oblivion in drink. This last is the other significant man in Christine’s life. She forms a bond with him, and offers him a human comfort that is outside the range of the respectably charitable.
The prostitute and the soldier become a judgment on the wartime society that passes judgment on them. The committees of the rich and powerful who populate the book pride themselves on doing good for war’s victims, while benefiting from the power and status conferred by their do-gooding. Christine, meanwhile, is a refugee who does not request charity or claim victim status, but copes efficiently for herself. This was not a message that commended itself to some of the book’s first readers. James Douglas, (whose moral indignation had helped provoke the prosecution of Lawrence’s The Rainbow in 1915, and would go on to incite trouble for Despised and rejected (1918) and The Well of Loneliness (1928)) wrote in The Star:
Our boys are being martyred by the millions. Hearts are being lacerated by incalculable sorrows. This is no time to regale our hurt minds with glimpses of the nether world. We are not in the mood for idylls of the promenade and pastorals of the pavement.
Despite the opposition of moralists like Douglas, the book was a commercial success, selling 30,000 copies within six months.
The book is written in short chapters, which together provide a jigsaw picture of wartime London. The settings range from the Empire promenade to a munitions factory, from a street in an air raid to a fashionable art gallery.
Bennett’s commitment to realism is made clear in the chapter which describes a 1915 exhibition at the Reynolds Galleries, whose supposed purpose is to raise funds for a war charity; its actual purpose is to bring society women crowding to see an exhibition consisting mainly of flattering portraits of themselves: ‘[T]he sitters liked them because they produced in the sitters the illusion that the sitters were really what the sitters wanted to be, and what indeed nearly every woman in the galleries wanted to be; and the ideal of the sitters was a low ideal.’
The fashionable crowd at the gallery support in each other the illusion that the pictures are wonderful, and the exhibition a success, just as they collude with the newspapers who tell them the war news that they want to be told: ‘British troops were triumphantly on the road to Kut, and British forces were approaching decisive victory in Gallipoli.’ (By the time Bennett wrote the novel, both these references to expected victories were bitterly ironic.) Bennett’s scornful satire on those who pander to their audience’s vanity or wishful thinking defines by contrast his own artistic aim in this novel.
The novel has three crucial female characters. Christine, the practical but humane prostitute is the least complicated of them; the other two are society women. Queenie is an adventurous and vital woman, half in love with the war, which has given her new opportunities for glamorous self-expression: “[S]he dressed with the utmost smartness in black—her half-brother having gloriously lost his life in September.” However, when she sits on the Letchford Committee, her vote goes with the puritans who want to prevent doctors and nurses going to the cinema together; she needs to keep up moral appearances. Concepcion, by contrast, internalises the war, and finds it hard to cope with them. war’s horrors. When she hears that her husband has died, she conceals the fact, to keep emotion at bay. She volunteers for work at a munitions factory, but the aftermath of an accident sends her home deeply disturbed.
J.G. Hoape has certain things in common with his author. He is a prosperous man of nearly fifty, Bennett’s age when writing the novel. Like Bennett he joins (and eventually runs) a charitable committee. We are told that ‘his war work, had re-vitalised him’, which may also have been true of Bennett, whose journalistic output and fame increased during the war years. Hoape’s relationship with Christine may also have an element of fictional autobiography. Bennett’s letters to his close friend Henry Davray reveal that when in Paris in the first decade of the century, he had enjoyed relationships with ‘cocottes’. He writes remarks that separate love from sex, in much the same way that Hoape does:
I can understand a man taking the trouble to sleep with a woman who is not a cocotte if he is in love with her, but if he is not in love with anybody I can’t understand a man in easy circumstances worrying himself with an ‘honest woman’ when he would have so much less worry & so much more fun, & less expense too, with a cocotte. Until I fall in love I swear I will never sleep with aught but cocottes.
Bennett was proud of his wartime committee work, but through Hoape he expresses a scepticism about the motives of the charitable; the results may be useful, but membership of such an organisation is a way of advertising one’s own nobility (in much the same way that modern celebrities and others advertise themselves by supporting ‘green’ causes). Bennett notes that when Hoape mentions that he is off to a committee meeting, he does so with “careful unconcern, masking a considerable self-satisfaction”(46).) Hoape is not exactly a self-portrait of the author, but is perhaps a picture of what he might have been tempted to become.
This is not a novel that aims to show how war changes society; rather, it shows how war’s disruptions can help us to see clearly what was already there. Towards the end of the novel, a character decides: “The supreme lesson of the war was its revelation of what human nature actually was. Humanly imperfect.”
Maybe this is not Bennett’s very best novel – that would be The Old Wives’ Tale – but it is a remarkable one. This is about the fifth time I have read it through, and it is as good as ever.
