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General Introduction
'How I envied Winifred Holtby,tall and fair and handsome ... that lovely speaking voice, that precision of English, that flat in London, that post on Time and Tide, those interesting well-cut clothes, that Oxford degree.’
Phyllis Bentley,
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n12/susan-watkins/determined-to-spin
As the above quotation shows, Phyllis Bentley positioned herself as an outsider, a provincial, unable to identify with or benefit from the independence and feminism modelled by Winifred Holtby. Casual readers of this remark would not realise that Holtby emerged from a non-literary Yorkshire background and most of her novels are set in Yorkshire, for Bentley's remark does not contain the word' Yorkshire'. Holtby herself was happy to ironically class herself amongst 'second-rate provincials' [Marion Shaw,The Clear Stream (London, Virago, 2011 [1999] 239) but Bentley's comment sees Winfred as more rival than co-worker. The situation is complicated by the fraught emotional relationship that formed between Phyllis, Vera Brittain and Winifred, when Phyllis developed what would at the time have been called a 'crush' on Vera, and possibly on Winifred as well. Marion Shaw explores the complexities in her biography of Winfred on pages 221-6 of The Clear Stream . She points out that Holtby encouraged Bentley's exploration of the family saga; 'Stick to your own genre' (221) and Brittain encouraged her to come down to London to buy smarter clothes to avoid looking 'provincial & all hung about with beads and things' (222). Nevertheless London was never to be Bentley's home. She spent a life in or near Halifax writing books that fulfilled the credo her 1966 monograph on The Regional Writer 'a conscientious presentation of phenomena as they really happen in ordinary everyday life on a clearly defined spot of earth,' [Shaw, 239] .
Halifax from the east; the view from Siddal Top.
The view of this 'clearly defined spot of earth' shows the Halifax that Bentley would have been familiar with in the last twenty years of her life when small high-rises were displacing mills as the dominant building of the town.
Phyllis Bentley was born in 1894 into a family who made their living through the textile trade that was to form the major subject of her works. Starting off as a teacher, she aspired to support herself through her writings. She did not succeed in this ambition until the left-wing publisher Victor Gollanz saw the potential of her novel Inheritance and published it in 1932. The popularity of this book and its successors allowed her to achieve independence and to pursue her interest in 'My Yorkshire' called 'Halifax and Hebden Bridge, Sowerby Bridge, Norland, Barkisland, Huddersfield, Beacon Hill and Queensbury' [Alan Burnett http://www.halifaxpeople.com/Phylis-Bentley.html] Despite the evident delight displayed in this recital of names, Bentley changed the names of most of the locations of he novels, often through small, teasing alterations that a local might recognise but not an outsider. Though she was classified as a 'regional novelist' because of her concentration on the West Riding of Yorkshire, her most successful novels focus on the 'universal' theme of family conflict. Even so family conflict is overshadowed by Bentley's exploration of the economy of Yorkshire for she shows how this reflects or embodies the economics of Britain. The 'family saga' plots ensured that she had a large readership, perhaps reaching a peak in 1967 when Granada adapted Inheritance and its successors as a TV drama. Since then her works have more or less disappeared but they have much to offer readers interested in Yorkshire Social Realism through their exploration of sex and economics and their loving evocation of landscape:
'I loved the hills rolling away into the distance, springing out of each other in complex folds which, as it were, smiled sardonically at my efforts to find a word to describe them'
[Gary Beaumont http://www.halifaxpeople.com/Phylis-Bentley.html]
Looking north from Hag Lane, a green lane running north out of Halifax, into Shibden Dale.
Completing Inheritance: The Rise of Henry Morcar, A Man of his times, Ring in the New
It is every regional novelist’s misfortune to be compared to Thomas Hardy and Phyllis Bentley is no exception: ‘during the thirties and the forties she was often called perhaps the finest English regional novelist since Thomas Hardy,'
[Alan Burnett http://www.halifaxpeople.com/Phylis-Bentley.html]
The comparison has more strength than most. Both writers have strong fatalistic/deterministic strains dominating their work; both writers equate economics and fate and both writers are concerned to document a vanishing way of life. However the two authors operate in distinctly different territories:
Hardy Bentley
Setting:
Landscape. Millscape.
Economy:
Rural. Industrial.
Psychology/Philosophy;
‘Imminent Will’. Freud.
Plot:
Tragedy. Sociology.
Setting has such an influence on character that frequently places not only determine the character of the people who work there but appear to have distinct characters of their own. In Return of the Native the name‘Egdon Heath’ sounds as if it denotes one of the inhabitants rather than the place. There is a similar ambiguity about some of Bentley’s place names, especially ‘Syke Mill’ and ‘Daisy Mills’. Not only does ‘Daisy Mills’ sound like a name for a female character but her owners feel protective towards ‘her’.
Where Hardy was writing about the decline of the skilled rural labourer, tied to a particular location, Bentley finds herself writing about the decline of the wool industry in Yorkshire. Economics is fate in so far as it constrains the choices of the characters in the Ire Valley. Though the last three books of the Inheritance tetralogy concentrate on owners rather than workers, Bentley recognises that the mill directors of the 20th century are more at the mercy of international economic forces than the owners of the late 19th century. Chuff, the last independent owner of the Morcar mills more or less disappears from the narrative of Ring in the New once he loses his independence through an enforced merger. Where Hardy might have fashioned this plot into a tragedy, Bentley prefers to observe the sociology. In Jude the Obscure Jude’s drive towards education and self-improvement traps him in an unfulfillable and frustrating dream. In Bentley education is frequently the path by which characters escape their class limitations. Indeed by the time the tetralogy ends education appears to offer Yorkshire a way out of the decline of the woollen industry. As Chuff gets marginalised three quarters of the way through Ring in the New, so Bentley’s attention turns to Jonathan’s endeavours. Jonathan teaches in a new ‘plate glass’ Yorkshire urban university. As early as 1969 she uncovers the possibility that in a Post-Industrial Yorkshire the new ‘industry’ will be the creation of skills not products.
Bradford University 2017
Nevertheless the literary conventions Bentley observes are those inherited from the Edwardian family saga in the mould of Bennet and Galsworthy, which constrains her idea of character as much as the economic patterns of her books. She is not alone in finding it hard to produce a form and ethos appropriate for writing about the experiments in living that characterised a significant elite of the young of the 1960s. Like her contemporary Elizabeth Taylor, the female characters she approaches with most sympathy and understanding are those who are not sexually liberated. In Ring in the New the promiscuous Lois is given less attention and inner life than the vulnerable orphan Susie. Similarly in Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season the sexual drive of the promiscuous Araminta is neither explored nor sympathised with in contrast to the understanding shown for Kate’s sensuality. Despite Hardy’s reputation for pessimism, death rates in his novels tend to be low and mostly involved the major characters. By contrast the death rate of Bentley’s novels is often as high as those of Victorian ‘sensation’ novels, though most of the violent deaths do occur in the war sections of the Rise of Henry Morcar when random death from air raids is to be expected.
However, as most of the characters killed off in The Rise of Henry Morcar are characters from Inheritance, the suspicion remains that the deaths are a convenient way of removing old characters and making way for new; ring in the new with a funeral bell... A Man of His Time repeats the process, killing off Cecil and Fan in South Africa so their children can be brought to the Ire Valley. The pattern is repeated even more swiftly at the opening of Ring in the New when Henry Morcar dies in the first chapter. The use of an old literary genre and conventions often makes Bentley’s work appear more old fashioned than it is but Bentley is not alone in being drawn to the family saga form. Virginia Woolf followed her most experimental stream-of-consciousness novel The Waves (1937) by writing The Years (1937), a novel that traces the Pargiter family from 1880 to the 1930s.
The strongest sociological point Bentley makes is imagining that there are only two possible reactions to capitalism from energetic or thoughtful men, entrepreneurial involvement or ethical opposition. The confrontation between Brigg and Joth (Jonathan) in Inheritance, is repeated throughout the Morcar books. Ring in the New ends abruptly with the Jonathan of the 1960s being badly injured in a demonstration against the Vietnam War alongside students who see the war as the logical end of capitalism. Competition is set against compassion but both parties engender confrontation. David’s small profit-sharing mill at Old Syke briefly looks like it might provide a synthesis to reconcile the thesis and antithesis but David is killed and his mill absorbed by other Morcar enterprises before its worth can be proved (The Rise of Henry Morcar) .
Butterley Reservoir from Standedge.
Top Bank Mill, like Old Syke Mill was sited at the head of a small valley. There is no trace of it left.
It was situated where the present banking for the Butterley Reservoir is, centre left in the picture above.
Alan Burnet sees this pattern of opposition as having a biographical foundation derived from Bentley’s own family:
Phyllis’s grandmother’s two brothers had taken two very different paths and it was that partition that Phyllis later claimed
was the idea behind her great “Inheritance” trilogy of novels. Joseph had stuck with manufacturing, the very model of a
millstone gritty Victorian entrepreneur. James had sought education, become a political radical, started a left wing newspaper
and reformed the secondary schools of Bradford. [http://www.halifaxpeople.com/Phylis-Bentley.html]
Carr, New York, Macmillan, 1933 [1929]
The 'NOTE' to the second edition of Manhold classifies Carr as one of Bentley's books on 'public themes', part of a historical pattern:
Take Courage 1625-1672
Manhold 1720-1805
Inheritance 1812-1931
Carr 1857-1927
A Modern Tragedy 1928-1936
Sleep in Peace 1894-1936
Despite this declaration 1929's Carr looks like apprentice work, written before she had discovered her distinctive interest in precise setting, economic history and Freud. It foreshadows Bentley’s interest in families with powerful economic interest but she creates a perfect imitation of a respectful Victorian family biography. This means that the novel consists of a deferential recounting of the deeds of the central character, Philip Joseph Carr, by his grand-daughter Mary Elizabeth Carr. The precise imitation of Victorian prose and conventions prevents any close contact with the protagonist. The text does not inscribe Carr’s life into the social geography of the Halifax/Huddersfiled are as precisely as books like The Rise of Henry Morcar will do but the name ‘Carr’ comes from a word often used in Yorkshire to denote ‘marshy woodland’. The word appears to be of Viking origin:
http://www.viking.no/e/england/yorkshire_norse.htm
The book begins with a PREFACE describing the sources from which the biography is drawn and then offers a chapter list in which Carr’s rise is chartered by subdivisions following the convention established in the 19th century:
II
EDUCATION AND APPRENTICESHIP (1867-1878)
Death of Hammond Carr – Illness of Mrs. Ainsley –
Carr at school – Reminiscences of his school days by
Sir Bales Newton, Sir Charles Gill and Mr Nicholas Whitley
Despite using extracts from diaries, such as that of Catherine Ainsley: ‘In the evening I wore my new dress of periwinkle blue…’(Chp III, p 36), the tone of the narrator is one of distance not insight: ‘We may imagine how they gazed out together over the familiar, well-loved lawns of Carr Fold,’ (Chp III, p35). Bentley does not yet use Freud’s methods to explore the depths of the characters and there is no detailed coded geography of the Halifax/Huddersfield region. Paradoxically the book’s Yorkshire geography only comes into focus when the characters go on holiday and visit Scarborough or Bridlington or picnic at Bolton Abbey.
Spa Bridge leads from the Grand Hotel to the prestigious buildings above Scarborough's fashionable South Bay; no doubt Carr's preferred part of Scarborough.
Carr presents an idealised portrait of a pater familius at the expense of insight or drama. The mills in Carr exist to provide Carr’s income; readers do not see their effect on their operatives, or their effect on the economy of Yorkshire and Britain. Indeed towards the end of the text Carr feels that 'their West Riding life looked somehow rather dull and small and out of date,' (XI.363), compared to Torquay! The book's final chapter falls somewhere between an apology and a manifesto for a type of writing Bentley will later practise more successfully:
It must be stated frankly that Carr's modest opinion of himself, which appeared over and over again in this record of his life, is the correct
one. He was a completely ordinary man. He accomplished no great thing. He did not invent anything, or improve anything, or make a
name for himself in any branch of human activity. His place in literature and history is, undoubtedly, as one of the crowd (XII 384)
In a rare move Bentley uses a quote from the Biblical book Ecclesiasticus to justify Carr's significance: "But they will maintain the state of the world...." (Cp XII 385). Significantly absent is any account of class-tension. In future novels Bentley will attend to the conflict between those with an interest, both psychological and economic, in maintaining 'the state of things' and those who oppose the status quo creating a dynamic by showing the opposition of the conservative and the radical and the clashes of master and operative in a way that reflects her family history.
Bolton Abbey where Carr picnics (III.67)
Life for Bentley's later owners will not be a picnic...
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