I have become a different person after reading this strange aberration of literature.

ARNOLD BENNETT: The Death of Simon Fuge

“My belief is that I am to this day known and revered in Bursley, not as Loring the porcelain expert from the British Museum, but as the man who first, as it were, brought the good news of the Rossetti Limericks from Ghent to Aix.”

This is quite a discovery for me, covering aesthetics in and out of its social history and art’s place of where it’s being shown and earthenware like Wedgwood, with coincidences of Knype and the artist Fuge whose recent death being reported by chance in the newspaper that I read on the train getting there, Fuge as part of the swarming fugue — Richard Strauss, Mozart and Brahms notwithstanding, and the Domestic Symphony of two families with mumps or not mumps in the Five Towns and its grit and ugliness — a swarm of people that bombard our narrator (me) at the Knype train station in the Five Towns of the Potteries, and the later swarming at the reading room, the wink of my host, me from the British Museum to help him with the Wedgwood of the parochial museum, and my host’s final quasi-wink, his wife, and his friend’s wife who was the more stolid sister of the other sister (the latter now a barmaid as a sort of Goddess of the Private Bar), two sisters who had both been on the bosom of the lake with Fuge when they were younger. “And his dalliance, his tangential nocturnal deviations in gondolas with exquisite twin odalisques!” What I find out about them is apotheosised by the tension between them in the heavenly light of the Fuge painting as seen in a parochial museum, a painting of a girl that one will never forget reading about! Only ordinary human men can create such perfect art.

But what elbows!
Mr Brindley is my host, and the text talks about bridling and unbridling. And how to roll cigarettes. And a love of the Manchester Guardian. And does he say women will be women at one stage? Or women are all alike? Well, this story transcends those questions of mysogyny with a sublime character study of women and art. This is a masterpiece, and I am rambling randomly around in my own fugue of a review to nail it down. I never shall, nor will you!
Not forgetting Oliver Colclough and his work in sanitary wear.
And the Tiger pub in interface with Hortulus Animae.
And Anna Brett, the barmaid sister in the Private Bar, one of the sisters from the lake jaunt with Fuge, is also seen with the mole-meticulousness of a Sansom Beauty Queen above…
The lake was a crucial lake for canals and railways, too.
Fixed up finally by the book doctor, for alcoholic hangover if not for aesthetic overdose…

“the clean-faced southerner, who is apt to forget that coal cannot walk up unaided out of the mine,…”

“In truth, I felt myself to be a very brittle, delicate bit of intellectual machinery in the midst of all these physical manifestations. Yet I am a tallish man, and these potters appeared to me to be undersized, and somewhat thin too! But what elbows!”

“My drawbridge goes up as if by magic, my postern is closed, and I peer cautiously through the narrow slits of my turret to estimate the chances of peril. Nor was Mr Brindley offensively affable.”

“…through which the train wound its way. It was squalid ugliness, but it was squalid ugliness on a scale so vast and overpowering that it became sublime.”

“This ‘Ha!’ was entirely different from his ‘Ah!’”

“…and down the main road a vast, white rectangular cube of bright light came plunging – its head rising and dipping – at express speed, and with a formidable roar.”

“They bore down the steps, hands deep in pockets, sweeping over me like Fate.”

“If you undermine the moral character of your fellow-citizens by a long course of unbridled miscellaneous philanthropy, you can have a funeral procession as long as you like, at the rate of about forty shillings a foot.”

“It had the terrible trite ‘museum’ aspect, the aspect that brings woe and desolation to the heart of the stoutest visitor, and which seems to form part of the purgatorio of Bank-holidays, wide mouths, and stiff clothes.”

“…and yet Simon Fuge had somehow caught in that face a glimpse of all the future of the woman that the girl was to be, he had displayed with exquisite insolence the essential naughtiness of his vision of things. […] It was Simon Fuge, at any rate all of Simon Fuge that was worth having, masterful, imperishable. And not merely was it his challenge, it was his scorn, his aristocratic disdain, his positive assurance that in the battle between them he had annihilated the Five Towns.”

In that Tiger’s Private Bar as shrine or theatre of footlights …

“Three perpendicular planes. Back plane, bottles arranged exactly like books on book shelves; middle plane, the upper halves of two women dressed in tight black; front plane, a counter, dotted with glasses, and having strange areas of zinc. […] A private bar is as eternal as the hills, as changeless as the monomania of a madman, as mysterious as sorcery. Always the same order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the same time tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing champagne on the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-trays on the counter, the same odour that wipes your face like a towel the instant you enter; and the same smiles, the same gestures, the same black fabric stretched to tension over the same impressive mammiferous phenomena of the same inexplicable creatures who apparently never eat and never sleep, imprisoned for life in the hallowed and mystic hollow between the bottles and the zinc.”

“The boxes of light were flashing up and down it, but otherwise it seemed to be quite deserted. Mr Brindley filled a pipe and lit it as he walked. The way in which that man kept the match alight in a fresh breeze made me envious. I could conceive myself rivalling his exploits in cigarette-making, the purchase of rare books, the interpretation of music, even (for a wager) the drinking of beer, but I knew that I should never be able to keep a match alight in a breeze. He threw the match into the mud, and in the mud it continued miraculously to burn with a large flame, as though still under his magic dominion. There are some things that baffle the reasoning faculty.”

“I knew my deplorable tomorrows.”

“No, there are no half-measures in the Five Towns.”

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘we shall see – in fifty years.’
‘That’s just what we shan’t,’ said he. ‘We shall be where Simon Fuge is – dead! However, perhaps we are proud of him. But you don’t expect us to show it, do you? That’s not our style.’

I have become a different person after reading this strange aberration of literature.

***

Penguin anthology context of this work: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1207-2/

PS: I am sure Aickman would have enjoyed this work. I wonder if he read it?