ABSTRACT
I want to try then to make amends for this too-long neglect. All this work, all these people, deserve some critical response. It is true I shall have some difficulty in recounting the story-line. It isn't that it wasn't there, but there was this profusion of surface detail: by my :ount five beers, a cider, four patent drinks, three wines, a tea, three patent medicines, three disinfectants, a flykiller, a hairspray, a toothpaste, five deodorants (though three of these were identical in what seemed the leitmotif), bath salts, a bra, high-speed gas, petrol and oil, a razor and two kinds of blade, two newspapers, a paper towel, sweets, two dogfoods and a dog medicine, cigars, tobacco, paint, film, a gardening centre, bread, butter, cheese, a breakfast food, two ice-creams, three kinds of biscuit, salad-dressing, condensed milk, potato mash, chicken pie, tomato ketchup, canned ham and fruit and risotto, two soaps, a washing-powder, and a bottle of washing-up liquid that one of the guest-stars autographed. Describe, describe, as Virginia Woolf said, ironically, about the novels of Arnold Bennett. But then that is where, with this kind of art, we can all very easily go wrong. Perhaps six or seven of these varied things were what you could call described. This feature of the art was indeed almost incidental. What was really there was what happened in the novel after Bennett, when things, objects, became instrumental, active; when it was the life that flowed through and around them that came to count. Take the patent drinks. One, it is true, was being mixed to be drunk. But in the others the flow of feeling was different. A young man and a girl were running by the sea, in the cool spray, and then, in one of those characteristically rapid modern associations of idea,
the drink was good, also, for morning sickness. Consider the subtlety of that.
