{"id":498,"date":"2025-06-03T14:29:58","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T14:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/chainlink\/?p=498"},"modified":"2025-06-03T14:29:58","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T14:29:58","slug":"writing-home-arnold-bennett-stoke-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/2025\/06\/03\/writing-home-arnold-bennett-stoke-and-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Home: Arnold Bennett, Stoke and Me\u00a0 – Jonathan Taylor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jonathan Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo-one ever comes to Stoke, no-one ever leaves Stoke, except for Arnold Bennett, and even he had to write about it\u201d: when I was growing up in Stoke-on-Trent (aka the Potteries) in the 1970s and 80s, this was a saying that everyone knew. It conveyed Stoke\u2019s insularity, its proud tradition of isolation. At the time, the city was (almost) never mentioned on TV or in books, and felt – to some extent – cut off from the rest of the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The saying haunted my father: he\u2019d come to Stoke before I was born to take over the headship of a comprehensive in an especially deprived area of the city. The first day he was here, a neighbour poked their head over the hedge, reeled out the saying, and then added: \u201cThey never appoint outside the area, you know\u201d \u2013 as if his job were imaginary, as if he couldn\u2019t possibly be here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In retrospect, the neighbour\u2019s throwaway remark might seem a kind of curse: my father\u2019s final job was a slow-motion iceberg, which eventually sank him. Ten years later, he felt \u2013 rightly or wrongly \u2013 that he was driven into breakdown and early retirement by a sort of Stoke-educational-mafia, all of whom grew up together, all of whom ganged up against the \u201cforeign\u201d in-comer. The truth, no doubt, was more complex, but the actual events got buried under layers of subsequent illness, paranoia and eventually dementia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, his fifth and sixth children \u2013 me and my sister \u2013 were born and bred in Stoke. We had a Stoke education and Stoke accents, to our parents\u2019 mock-horror. We were Potteries-babies, through and through. Nonetheless, we also inevitably imbibed our parents\u2019 ambivalent love-hate attitude to our home-city. As I grew into adolescence, I felt alienated from where I came from \u2013 like most teenagers \u2013 and desperately wanted to get away. Eventually, at nineteen, I moved away to university, and since then have never lived permanently in Stoke-on-Trent \u2013 though I have spent a lot of time there, off and on, seeing friends and family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To some extent, the development of my writing is obscurely tied up with that progressive alienation from home. I decided I wanted to be a writer, oddly enough, at more or less the same moment my father quit his headmastership; I was about ten years old, and was teetering on the brink of adolescence. Subsequently, as a teenager, I came to see writing as an escape from my father\u2019s progressive illness, an antidote to the (mental and geographical) place he seemed to have got stuck in. Back then, I\u2019d have laughed in the face of anyone who\u2019d suggested to me that I\u2019d end up writing about the Midlands in general, and Stoke in particular. I wanted to write Tolkienesque fantasy (little realising how Midlands-inspired Tolkien\u2019s Middle Earth is).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter Arnold Bennett, whom I discovered when I was seventeen, while attending Stoke-on-Trent Sixth-Form College. As part of our General Studies A-Level, we were all asked to research and write a project on some aspect of our home city. I asked if I could do something on the Stoke-born author Arnold Bennett. The General Studies teacher was bemused. He told me \u2013 believe it or not \u2013 that no-one in the history of the course had ever asked him this. Things have changed, but, at the time, Bennett had a very mixed reputation in Stoke. Many people just weren\u2019t interested in him; others felt he had betrayed the city by leaving for the metropolis, and writing about it in a disparaging, if not snobbish, way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this sense, Bennett functioned as a kind of city-scapegoat: not unlike the ancient tradition of the pharmakos<\/em>, he both haunted (maybe even embodied) the city\u2019s consciousness, while being ritually expelled from it; he was both singled out, as a famous ex-Potter, and castigated. I can\u2019t help feeling Bennett\u2019s position in this respect encodes the ambivalent role played by storytellers in Western society generally. Storytellers are their home town or city\u2019s pharmakoi<\/em>: celebrated (often posthumously) and castigated, praised and critically hounded, paraded through the streets and expelled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We hold onto an ideal of the (oral) storyteller as the centre of a community, the voice of it \u2013 the village elder who is the repository of collective memory, regaling everyone in the square with fantastic variations on the people\u2019s history. But that ideal is a vanishing point, a fantastic myth in itself: ever since Homer, the storyteller has also been the outsider, the exile, the elder who resides not in the village square, but just beyond the village boundary. Most of the epic poets were exiles, in one sense or another. And most authors of the last two centuries, from Blake onwards, have been, metaphorically or literally, (semi-)exiles from their communities, in terms of geography, or social class, or gender, or ethnicity, or language. Perhaps the latter is most fundamental: language lies at the heart of this outsiderness, and there are lots of reasons people feel linguistically marginalised. That\u2019s why (for example) there are so many modern writers who are dyslexic, neurodiverse. Such linguistic alienation can be both painful and <\/em>liberatory for an author-storyteller: as Gilles Deleuze puts it, the writer is like \u201ca foreigner in his [sic] own language,\u201d making that language \u201cscream, stutter, stammer, or murmur.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No doubt there are many causes of the progressive alienation between storytellers and the communities they are meant to represent: the dawn of writing for one, then the development of mass printing, and the growth of industrial capitalism. If all of that sounds a bit broad-brush, historically speaking, there are a web of connections between that macro-history and the micro-histories of individual authors\u2019 often-fractured biographies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the most basic level, you might say that an author is often someone who has left<\/em>: the author is someone who has moved (or been moved) physically away from a place, yet feels drawn back, imaginatively to it \u2013 compelled to tell stories about it. In that way, they have one (imaginary) foot in, one foot out of a particular community \u2013 are somehow both marginal and central to it. From a distance, they come to express not the collective consciousness of their home, but something approaching a collective imagination, or even collective unconscious. Hence why those confronted with such stories might feel both fascinated and horrified at the same time. Glimpsing the unconscious, albeit through a dream- or story-lens, will always be disturbing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, dreams are not all<\/em> nightmares. Certainly, on the one hand, Bennett doesn\u2019t spare us the grimness, the poverty, the grinding reality of economic determinism in his fiction; but, on the other, he is by no means wholly disparaging about his birthplace, despite his reputation among Stokies when I was growing up. He writes about it as a whole, and there\u2019s love as well as horror, obscure heroism alongside industrial Gradgrindism, high tragedy discerned through smog in the world of his novels. This isn\u2019t political quietism, or complacency: it\u2019s seeing the whole, both the ugliness and the beauty, the hope and deprivation. It\u2019s about being honest that the area has been ravaged again and again, first by the boom and bust of industrial capitalism, and then, since Bennett\u2019s time, by waves of Tory austerity and neoliberal economics. And yet human stories still thrive there, amidst both the infernos of Bennett\u2019s time, and the post-industrial wreckage of the later twentieth century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what affected me so much when I was seventeen, and what changed both my view of my home city, and also of literature more generally: Bennett manages to re-enchant the Potteries, finding beauty among the mines and pot-banks. In his Notebooks<\/em>, he writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting   off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colours; without making comparisons. The novelist should cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his great novel Clayhanger<\/em> (1910), he puts this theory into practice, describing various industrial scenes with the sort of language a Victorian poet might have reserved for nature:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On their left were two pitheads whose double wheels revolved rapidly in smooth silence, and the puffing engine-house and all the trucks and gear of a large ironstone mine. On their right was the astonishing farm, with barns and ricks and cornfields complete, seemingly quite unaware of its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture. In front, on a little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red architecture of Bursley \u2013 tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of the evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexions, and the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the whole. The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, of course, Bennett did <\/em>see it, and recorded it \u2013 and hence, decades later, made me cry. I\u2019d never cried at a book before; but Bennett was writing about a world I recognised \u2013 a world of chimneys and pit-heads, which was still just about there when I was young, albeit in decaying form \u2013 and re-enchanting it, making me see it anew as a place of drama and imagination. On top of that, Clayhanger<\/em> was also about a sick father with a mysterious \u201cdisease of the brain,\u201d so both place and plot induced an uncanny feeling of identification in me. I\u2019d never experienced that feeling before, having read mainly non-realist fiction, science-fiction and fantasy, up to that point. (I\u2019ve written more about this experience of reading Clayhanger<\/em> for the first time in a short essay here: https:\/\/www.letterpressproject.co.uk\/media\/file\/MemorialBookFinalWeb.pdf<\/a>).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From that formative moment onwards, Bennett\u2019s influence worked on me, on a subterranean level, and gradually turned me from a budding (and failing) speculative fiction writer to a (magical-)social-realist \u2013 a social-realist, that is, who found himself compelled to write about a city in which his family had never felt quite at home. Bennett taught me to look for the beauty, love, optimism, kindness, fantasy in the everyday, the importance for a writer of seeing \u201ccrudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic [sic<\/em>].\u201d It\u2019s all-too-common issue: many budding writers don\u2019t see what\u2019s under their nose, and I was one of them, until I discovered Bennett. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, it\u2019s no longer literally under my nose: like Bennett, I don\u2019t live there any more. Yet distance can make a place more vivid, more real. A place can appear more alive in the memory and imagination than when you\u2019re actually there. Wordsworth knew this, and it\u2019s also, in a different way, the message of memoir: that the meaning of a particular experience only comes into focus in retrospect (i.e. at a temporal distance). It\u2019s much harder to write about an experience while you\u2019re still living it; so perhaps it\u2019s much harder to write about a place if you\u2019re still living there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the imagination, then, if not in reality, I do now feel what my parents never did \u2013 at home in Stoke. The feeling was only enhanced when I returned (physically) the other day to visit the Arnold Bennett Society (https:\/\/www.arnoldbennettsociety.org.uk\/<\/a>). They kindly awarded me the Arnold Bennett Prize 2025 for my book, Scablands and Other Stories <\/em>(Salt, 2023), which has a beautiful magical-realist image of a potbank on the cover (by Stoke artist Jenna Goodwin). Of course, it almost goes without saying that the book would never have existed without Bennett or Stoke. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days, Bennett has a vibrant following in the city \u2013 in large part thanks to the Society \u2013 as well as a statue. He has finally been welcomed home. Or perhaps he never really left. This is the underlying implication of the saying \u201cNo-one ever comes to Stoke, no-one ever leaves Stoke, except for Arnold Bennett, and even he had to write about it\u201d \u2013 that you never truly leave Stoke, because you carry it around with you. Home haunts you, and that\u2019s perhaps especially the case for writers. I was half-right when I was a teenager: writing, for me, is<\/em> an escape. But it is also a return. It is at once leave-taking and home-coming, exile and reunion, alienation and reconciliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Taylor


<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His most recent books are the memoir A Physical Education<\/em> (Goldsmiths, 2024) and the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories<\/em> (Salt, 2023), winner of the 2025 Arnold Bennett Prize. Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire, with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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