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Lord Raingo, written in 1926, is a political novel based on the wartime dealings of Bennett's friend Lord Beaverbrook.
Sam Raingo is a successful fiftyish millionaire business magnate with a wife and mistress. His life is stagnating and his health is not good and he has a yen to do something more with his life. The British government needs a propaganda machine to buoy up the hopes of the British people during the First World War. Both needs are fulfilled when Sam Raingo is offered, and accepts, the post and a peerage is thrown into the package.
Arnold Bennett takes us through a short period of this anxious man's public and private life and lets us know what he is thinking behind the "mask falsifying all his wishes and emotions".
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John Potter, Chairman of the Arnold Bennett Society, has written this review especially for the website:
Lord Beaverbrook first met Arnold Bennett in November 1917, eleven months after his peerage had been confirmed (reluctantly) by King George V. The two men liked each on sight and a friendship based on this mutual liking and respect grew rapidly; in fact, Bennett became for some years Beaverbrook's most intimate friend, a position later filled by another journalist -Michael Foot. In April 1918, at Beaverbrook's request, Bennett accepted a post in the Ministry of Information, as Director of British Propaganda in France; as a result of living in Paris for some years and marrying a French wife, he spoke fluent French. He soon moved up to become overall Director of Propaganda, but accepted no salary for the post and refused the offer of a knighthood made to him in 1919. However, his experience in the Ministry left him with ample material for a novel which, not begun until 1925 with the help of much additional information from Beaverbrook, was completed in Rome in January 1926 and finally published in October that year.
The autobiographical content of the novel is mainly circumstantial; for instance Raingo lived in a village in Essex, as did Bennett himself during the war and Wrenkin, factotum on Raingo's estate, bears a considerable resemblance to Lockyer, Bennett's own head-gardener.
Most of the political characters can be traced to real-life politicians, allowing for a judicious mixture of fact and fiction. This was well understood at the time, and Winston Churchill, whom Bennett knew socially, is supposed on one occasion to have greeted him jovially with the words "Receive the congratulations of Tom Hogarth", his counterpart in the novel. There can be little doubt that the political in-fighting and its parallel within the higher ranks of the Civil Service is part truth and part satire. But the storyline is not entirely political and at times does produce echoes of AB himself--not necessarily as he was but perhaps as he might in different circumstances have been. Raingo is a shrewd, self-made man. Unlike Bennett, he has a son, but he also has a mistress, and that is something which Bennett, too, had at the time the book was being written, and he knew by then that this lady was carrying his child (a daughter, as it happened.) There is no evidence for supposing that he was similarly involved during the war, but certainly his novel The Pretty Lady, published in 1918 is very much on that theme and it has been suggested that he undertook field research for that book, in the same way in which he so thoroughly acquainted himself with the symptoms and details of the illness from which Raingo dies.
What makes Lord Raingo a book worth reading is, firstly, the sheer apparent authenticity of it all, from politics to personalities and from sex to sickrooms. As almost always in Bennett, the characterisation is naturally credible, and one of the novelist's tricks which he shared with so many other eminent writers was the ability to expand a short, simple story effortlessly and painlessly into a full-length novel, and then to produce a master-stroke by way of an unexpected twist at the end. Although the circumstances and the events are different, the twist in Lord Raingo produces a very similar effect to the last word uttered by Orson Welles in his character as a newspaper magnate in the film "Citizen Kane"--a sort of sigh of relief and enlightenment that an answer has been given to a question which has remained unresolved throughout the story.
© John Potter, 2002
Page created 18 November 2002 and last
updated 19 November 2002
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