Non-fiction ~ article/essay
Published in The Century Magazine, February 1914
Collected in pamphlet The Heart of India (Hermitage Books, 1994)
4,060 words
(First read 26/11/2014)
E. F. Benson visited India in 1912¹ and stayed for several months. In The Heart of India he talks about life on the River Ganges in the city of Benares², the home of Hinduism.
He begins by describing ~ somewhat imperiously ~ the stereotypical reactions of the average Western tourist to all that he sees. Then goes on at some (but not excessive) length to describe the hordes of faithful doing their ablutions, making offerings, and cremating their dead, about the waters of the river itself, about fakirs, beggars, brahmans, chelas, and ... well, as much 'local colour' as you can fit in to 4,000 words.
Despite having never been noticeably interested in India, Eastern religions, etc., I found the article remarkably absorbing: it's beautifully written, with Benson's characteristic blend of detailed, almost sensuous description and (erm ...) emotional restraint.
And it's available
online here.
¹ It might be more accurate to say that he visited his old-young chum Francis Yeats-Brown who was living in India at the time. But I won't.
While there he fell ill, and pains of increasing severity caused him to return home. He was found to have a tumour on a kidney which was so far advanced that an operation for the removal of the kidney was inevitable. This took place in May 1913.
~E. F. Benson As He Was by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd. For more of EFB's Indian 'colour' see the opening section of Arundel.
² Which we now have to refer to as Varanasi.
Non-fiction ~ review
Published in The Spectator, 11th July 1930¹
930 words
(First read 28/03/2014)
In which E. F. Benson commits an act of Extreme Naughtiness by reviewing the book of a very good friend and not acknowledging that they're even acquainted². The friend in question is Francis Yeats-Brown ~ for more on this chap see the entry for Mother (1925). The book is titled The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and was subsequently turned into a film, Airfix kit, beer, and restaurant. In a nutshell EFB likes the book but thinks it sags in the middle when, in the 1910s, FYB leaves India to go and take part in some war or other in Europe. Fred very successfully manages to entirely put me off reading it³ by saying this:
Going deeper yet, we are introduced to the topic which we rightly augur will be the main motif of the book ~ namely, the study of Yoga and the visit to Benares where he first gets into touch with the lore that is the life of India.
The review is available online here.
¹ The review was collected in Sea Mist: Collected Spook Stories Volume 5 (2005).
² STOP PRESS [06/12/14]: Since writing this back in April I've discovered that EFB did far worse than this. Here are Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd on the subject ~ the bolding is mine:
Fred had opened a new world to Francis. He had great literary ambitions but [circa 1910-12] they only amounted to a few articles published in Indian papers, and he had never before met a professional writer. Many years later he wrote, and re-wrote with Fred's help, Bengal Lancer, the story of his life in India.
(From E. F. Benson As He Was, 1988). So Benson was reviewing a book he actually had a hand in writing. Shocking.
³ The chances of that happening were minuscule to start with, I admit.
Non-fiction ~ memoirs
Published 1925
Approx. 62,000 words
(First read 20/03/2014)
Mother is the highly enjoyable sequel to Our Family Affairs: 1867-1896 (1920). I presume the only reason Fred didn't call it Our Family Affairs: 1896-1918 is that he wanted to leave an enduring tribute to his much-loved mother. Yes, Mary (Sidgwick) Benson (1841-1918) is the focus of the book but she's far from being the exclusive focus. A good two-thirds of it is devoted to other family members, in this order: EFB himself, his doomed sister Maggie (1865-1916), brother Hugh (1871-1914), the family nurse Beth (1819-1911), and, somewhat bringing up the rear, brother Arthur (1862-1925).
Rather than whiffling on endlessly I'll just pick out a few highlights.
 |
| George I of Greece |
EFB, after performing relief work in Greece following some kind of war they had there in the 1890s¹:
When I got home I was told by Lord Wantage, the head of the Red Cross, that King George of Greece had expressed an amiable desire to decorate with the Order of the Redeemer two of those who had been engaged in this relief work, and that my name had been recommended. But from that day to this I never heard a word more about it, and the mystery as to whether the Order of the Redeemer was lost in the post, or whether King George, on second thoughts, considered that it would be too much pleasure, remains unsolved.
EFB on Oscar Wilde in his prime²:
[...] Oscar Wilde was producing the plays which, however artificial they may seem now, sent his audiences reeling into the street, intoxicated by epigram and paradox. None of them had the smallest spark of immortality, except possibly The Importance of Being Earnest, but they were very new, and their audacious nonsense was very like wit.
No comment.
My and EFB's sentiments on this subject tally exactly:
[...] the greatest wizard of all was Emily Brontë: how many times I have read Wuthering Heights I have no idea, but never, in spite of the clumsiness of its narration, have I laid it down without the firm conviction that it stands alone at the head of all novels in the English language.
(Rather like Mother, EFB's Charlotte Brontë (1932) is as much ~ if not actually more ~ about the other members of the family, especially Emily.)
EFB on what his mother thought of the Benson brothers' books, particularly Fred's, circa 1905:
 |
| Mary Benson at 19 |
[...] it was becoming common knowledge between her and me that she found the sort of book that I was writing now quite intolerable, [...] none of us yet had written anything that gave her any sense of personal pride. [...] Some struck her as too quietist for the world [Arthur's], and some too worldly for her own quietism [Fred's]; some were propagandist of beliefs she did not share [Hugh's], and some were sentimental, and some were crude, and I feel convinced that she never read twice anything that any of us had written, nor indeed would have read much of it all once, if it had not been we who had written it. She liked "bits" in most [of them], but not one spark of inspiration, not one crumb of the bread of life, did she find in any of them.³
 |
| Francis Yeats Brown |
The section in which EFB talks about his close friendship with the young Francis Yeats Brown⁴ is interesting and ~ possibly ~ more revealing than he intended. FYB was about 20 years younger than EFB and, at the start of their friendship, which apparently lasted several years, aged about 20. And oh my! do those holidays they spent together in Italy ever sound idyllic under Fred's pen!
[...] the love of the sea and the swimming and the basking, and presently we spent inseparable days among rocks and sea-caves, or climbed, perspiring, through the woods of chestnut and laburnum to the Portofino Kulm [...] another summer I settled down with him from May to August in that enchanted castle of Portofino. [They slept in hammocks side by side in the garden] And as long as I live I shall bear in my inward heart of happiness that nightly falling to sleep in the open, with the scent of stocks, and the drowsy pulse of the sea below, and the stars burning in the boughs of the stone-pine, and the black shadow of the castello lying across the white, moonstruck garden, and the sense of a drowsy friend in the hammock close by.
Now I ask you, Gentle Reader, if that isn't Love, what is? (By contrast, there's none of this kind of rapture ~ in fact, there's no rapture at all ~ when he talks about his dealings with John Ellingham Brooks, the shirt-lifting pal he shared a house with on Capri ...)
The section in which the author recounts the final decline and death of the family nursemaid Beth, who served the Sidgwicks and the Bensons faithfully and with love for 77 years, is pretty well guaranteed to have you reaching for a hanky. It did me. [For more on Beth, see Across the Stream.]
Gaaah! this is going on forever! ~ okay, I'm going to wrap it up here. I highly recommend Mother for anyone who has the least interest in the Benson family, Fred in particular: the book is ram-full of goodies, far too many to mention.
¹ "Don't blind us with details, Ewie!"
² Benson returned to the subject of Wilde ~ and was slightly less dismissive ~ in As We Were (1930).
³ For the happy ending to this subject see under David Blaize.
⁴ (1886-1944); author of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930).
STOP PRESS:
A certain Mr Rodney Bolt has produced a biography of Mary Benson, the splendidly titled As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson, published by Atlantic Books in 2011.
_-_1922.jpg)
