The Inheritor

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1930
Approx. 108,000 words
(First read 14/08/2013)

SHORT VERSION: A young man of great beauty believes that (1) he is cursed, and (2) he needs to get away from the modern world and 'back to nature'.  Things don't turn out well for him so he goes for the simple unhappy ending option.  I guess this one might be classed 'a supernatural[ish] psychological melodrama', with the usual caveat about the Benson brand of melodrama.
LONG VERSION: Blimey! ~ never has an author taken so long (316pp.) to tell a story so insubstantial.
It kicks off at Cambridge University, more precisely at King's College [surprise!].  Steven Gervase, a student¹ is 20 years old [surprise! again] and [surprise! ~ okay, that's enough of that] has the looks of a Greek god and is a popular chap.  One of the dons watching over his career is Maurice Crofts, who is 25 ~ how he's got to be a don at that age isn't explained, maybe it was perfectly normal in those days.  'Those days', by the way, are 1929-30 ~ EFB mentions a date again, though really all his books are set in one and the same time: Benson Meantime, somewhere between 1890 and 1914, a magical period in which, though an occasional 'motor' might flash by on its way to a 'cinematograph', nothing really ever changes.

Where was I?  Ah yes.  This post-adolescent Maurice², this donkin is, despite his tender years, pretty much the stereotypical elderly Oxbridge don: rather stuffy, a shade over-devoted to the academic life, a confirmed bachelor dismissive of persons of the female persuasion ...
Maurice thinks he sees hidden depths in Steven, or rather, he thinks he sees another mysterious side to his character.  Steven, who has just unceremoniously dumped his best pal (who is known as 'The Child'!) and is on the look-out for a new one, obligingly gives Maurice a glimpse of what that other side is ... by charming a squirrel out of a tree.  [No, I'm not making this up.]  It turns out that this Greek god of a young man is ...

No, you really do have to read it to fully appreciate the unutterable daftness of the plot.  I'll just sum it up as follows: Maurice suddenly comes to the realization that he loves ~ no, not 'loves': adores ~ no, not 'adores': worships (these are all his own words ~ honest!) Steven and wants to be initiated into his mysteries.  Oh but it's not sexual, no! ~ Maurice is always very careful to point that out, immediately after he's alluded to his idol's breath-taking beauty for the umpteenth time ~ barely a page goes by without someone alluding to it³. 

Steven is wonderfully, miraculously, sublimely gorgeous, and Maurice loves-adores-worships him ~ despite not really knowing him to any great extent ... OH BUT IT'S NOT SEXUAL!
I was meant to be summarizing, wasn't I?  Well, Maurice goes for a holiday at the Gervases' ancestral home in Cornwall, over which there hangs a preposterous I-can't-be-arsed-to-dream-up-an-explanation-for-it curse.  He proves to be de trop and is effectively told, like 'The Child' before him⁴, to sling his hook.  He does.
After various tribulations (most notably marriage, y'know, to a woman), during which yet another perfectly blameless but sadly inconvenient character is summarily bumped off, Steven attempts to reform himself, but fails.  The End.

The Inheritor has one of the most idiotic plots I've ever laid eyes on, even by EFB's generally rather low standards.  With the exception of Maurice, who's really only interesting by virtue of being such a clear-cut case of violently repressed homosexuality, and who pretty much disappears halfway through (though he does at least manage to avoid the Benson guillotine), and Steven's aunt, who has some comic potential, the characters are sub-cardboard-cutout.  And vast swathes of the novel are endless interior monologue ... of the dull variety.  Nothing categorically and incontrovertibly supernatural happens, unless you count one case of squirrel-charming.  The whole thing is simply asinine.

P.S. If I was a serious literary critic with psychoanalytical tendencies [possibly a contradiction in terms] and, more importantly, if I gave at least half a stuff, I could perhaps cobble together a theory which would feature the phrase 'a metaphor for E. F. Benson's homosexuality' very heavily.  But I'm not, and I don't, so I won't.

¹ I'm not sure EFB ever gets round to mentioning what he's studying, but one can safely assume it's Classics.
² It has to be said that if Benson had made him 60 years old, the traditional age for your average literary don, the whole thing would've been creepy beyond belief.
³ After 50 pages or so you feel like punching Steven's perfect mush.  The feeling lasts until the last page.
⁴ Who EFB sees fit to kill off while he's off-stage, for no reason whatever.

The Wishing-well

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, February 1929
5,620 words
(First read 12/12/2012) 

Interestingly-named Cornish pub

A tale of superstition and magic, with no real spooks to speak of, The Wishing-Well starts like others of EFB's stories set in Cornwall with a lengthy description of the setting: the remoteness of the spot and the superstitiousness of the locals.  Yes, despite being set in the present, the Cornwall of Benson's imagining is still grubbing about in the Middle Ages¹.  I forgive him, but half a million Cornishmen in 1929 might not have.
Anyway, the long and the short is that an inhabitant of the village of St Gervase, a 40-year old gentlewoman² spinster by the name of Judith Eusters³, falls in love with a strapping young local lad, and makes a bit of an ass of herself.  When she finds out he only has eyes for a buxom wench his own age she [yawn] puts a curse on him using the tried-and-tested wishing-well method ... the curse backfires ... or she ends up counter-cursed ... or something ... I forget the rest.
Despite my dismissive tone I really quite liked The Wishing-Well ~ yes, it's as daft as it sounds, but it's fun.
You can read it online here.



¹ See The Inheritor (1930), amongst others.
² Well, as much of a gentlewoman as it's possible to be in the backwoods of Cornwall.  Her father, the vicar, appears to be the only other person 'of breeding' around.  Oh that reminds me: Benson pulls what I can only call a dazzlingly brazen cheap literary trick by having her father a devotee of folklorey stuff, with a particular interest in wishing-wells, enabling him (EFB) to explain the 'theory' behind the story by getting the Rev. Eusters to dictate a big chunk of it to Judith for the book he's writing on the subject ...
³ A name apparently unique to EFB ~ where he got it from I've no idea.

The Temple

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, November 1924
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
6,655 words
(First read 30/10/2012) 

A distinctly long, leisurely, rambling journey into the wilds of northern Cornwall, not far at all from Ravens' Brood and The Inheritor country.  Unnamed Narrator, who's a writer, and his chum Frank Ingleton, who's an archaeologist, tip up in the village of St Caradoc's for one of those work-cum-golf-cum-piquet holidays of which U.N. was such a fan, provided he could find the right chap to accompany him.  Anyway, they eventually stumble across a vacant cottage; they rent it so as to avoid the hotel crowds; they discover it stands in the centre of a prehistoric stone circle (the temple of the title), and that it and the house come with one of those barmy curses Benson specialized in.  Still, it all ends happily.
Though the idea at the heart of The Temple is singularly gruesome (the yarn is more 'horror' than 'spook'), the story itself sadly contains about as much tension as a pan of spaghetti you've accidentally left on the boil for an hour and three quarters.
It's available online here.



QUOTABLES
There is, I feel, a certain air of unseemly relish in U.N.'s description of the temple's sacrificial stone:

It was on that stone that young boys and maidens, torn from their mother's arms and bound hand and foot, were laid, while the priest, with one hand over the victim's eyes, plunged the flint knife into the smooth, white throat, sawing through the tissue till the blood spurted from the severed artery ... 

"Does it come with chips?"

The Man Who Went Too Far

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Pall Mall Magazine, June 1904
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
8,385 words
(First read 15/02/2012) 

The Man Who Went Too Far is quite a comical tale, though it's not meant to be.  U.N. tells the story of his pal Darcy¹ going to visit his pal Frank Halton.  Darcy, 37, is recovering from a bout of typhoid; Halton, 35, lives in an obscure corner of the New Forest (Hampshire); both men are successful painters.

Frank embodies that philosophy or mode of living which recurs fairly often in the work of E. F. Benson, which might loosely be called paganism, or more precisely Pan-worship, or in more modern terms Back-to-Nature-ism.  He's long since given up painting and, buried in his rural backwater, has devoted the last six years to the business of

communing with nature so much and so deeply that, according to his theory, he will ~ inevitably and very soon ~ become one with it, be absorbed into it ... that kind of thing, y'know.  Frank's theory is generally more or less soundish ~ he even manages somehow to work 'God' into it, though obviously it's not the same one who suffered on the Cross and regularly took tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury².  Its main defect, which Darcy eventually hits on, is this:

The radical unsoundness of your idea [...] is this: "All nature from highest to lowest is full, crammed full of suffering, every living organism in Nature preys on another, yet in your aim to get close to, to be one with Nature, you leave suffering altogether out; you run away from it, you refuse to recognise it.

According to the Darcian hypothesis, when Frank's 'final revelation' comes

it will be the revelation of horror, suffering, death, pain in all its hideous forms.

"So be it," says Frank.  And it is.

Uncharmed moorhen

The Man Who Went Too Far is really only interesting³ in that it contains a full exposition of EFB's theories about Man's relationship with Nature, a theme he was always keen to explore.  But Benson, no matter how much he might have yearned for a closer connexion with Mother Nature, was ever the worldling: this is reflected (probably unintentionally) in the fact that Frank Halton ~ he who sleeps outside in a hammock in all weathers, who swims in freezing-cold streams, who can charm squirrels⁴, and so on ~ nonetheless keeps a young manservant, who glides in and out of shot, undignified even by a name, whenever his master needs a very heavy towel bringing to him or someone fancies a whisky and soda.
Apart from the 'climax', which is pathetic, the story's main fault is its absolutely inordinate length: it goes on forever.  It's available online here.

 

¹ This is the only name he appears to have. 

² I'm sure EFB's dad would've been appalled by this story.  To say that the presence of God in Halton's theory is something of an afterthought would be an understatement.  At one point he goes so far as to drop this bombshell, in response to Darcy's criticism that his ideas are unchristian:

"I can't accept [Christianity].  I can't believe in any creed of which the central doctrine is that God who is Joy should have had to suffer.  Perhaps it was so; in some inscrutable way I believe it may have been so, but I don't understand how it was possible.  So I leave it alone; my affair is joy.

I reckon these are very close to Benson's own feelings on the subject.
³ As a spook or horror story it's a complete flop: it's so slow and gabby that when the climax finally arrives, the modern reader can only be stupefied with boredom. 
⁴ It's actually a moorhen we see him charming, but I'm sure he could charm squirrels if they were available.  Baffled? ~ see under The Inheritor (1930). 

QUOTABLES

I forgot to mention that one of the side-effects, so to speak, of Halton's renaturing is that it rejuvenates him, allowing EFB once more to go into homoerotic overdrive to describe him:

He was of medium height and rather slender in build, but the supple ease and grace of his movements gave the impression of great physical strength: even his descent from the hammock was not an awkward performance.  His face and hands were of very dark complexion, either from constant exposure to wind and sun, or, as his black hair and dark eyes tended to show, from some strain of southern blood.  His head was small, his face of an exquisite beauty of modelling, while the smoothness of its contour would have led you to believe that he was a beardless lad still in his teens.  But something, some look which living and experience alone can give, seemed to contradict that, and finding yourself completely puzzled as to his age, you would next moment probably cease to think about that, and only look at this glorious specimen of young manhood with wondering satisfaction.

The E. F. Benson Credo ~ again.  Frank speaking:

Think what youth means!  It is the capacity for growth, mind, body, spirit, all grow, all get stronger, all have a fuller, firmer life every day.

Piggyback sensualists (gratuitous)

Another E. F. Benson Credo ~ again.  Darcy is the first to speak here:

"Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?" he asked.  "Food, food and mating."

Frank laughed gently in the stillness.

"Do not think I became a sensualist," [Frank] said.  "I did not make that mistake.  For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him.  I may be mad, it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that."

Frank finds his pal unable to sleep and, sitting on the edge of his bed, speaks to him this lullaby ~ which works so instantaneously that he doesn't even need to finish it:

"The birds are sleeping in the brake," said Frank softly, "and the winds are asleep.  The sea sleeps, and the tides are but the heaving of its breast.  The stars swing low, rocked in the great cradle of the Heavens, and ~"