As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow

Non-fiction ~ memoirs
Published September 1930
Approx. 112,000 words
(First read 01/05/2012)

Like As We Are, not actually a novel: a straight book of memoirs, memoirs of other people, that is.  If you're at all interested in late Victorian England, I highly recommend it.  My 'review' at the time was short but sweet:

"A very gossipy affair which I found highly entertaining, weirdo that I am.  In it EFB tells one anecdote about Gladstone talking about a book called George Eliot's Life.  Quoth Mr G: "It is not a life at all.  It is a Reticence, in three volumes."  Pretty much the same could be said of As We Were ~ Fred himself only appears sporadically, and the appearances are brief.  (Mind you, it wasn't supposed to be autobiographical, I admit.)

I would definitely at least think about reading it again. 

You can read it online here.

THE CRITICS

MODERN WOMAN: Outspoken Criticism By Noted Author

E. F. Benson, the author and writer of Dodo, has an outspoken criticism of modern woman in his memoirs published by Longman's to-day, entitled As We Were. Lipsticking in public, kippering of arms, legs, bosom and back on the sands of Lido and inability to remain in one place more than a week are not habits of the great lady in the Victorian and Edwardian times.

The great ladies at least possessed dignity. They had not any push, because there was no one to push. They did not want their daily doings mirrored in the papers. The professional beauties of the Edwardian era liked their photographs in shop windows, but they were not the great ladies. To-day society has so broadened out that it has become quite flat. King Edward, when Prince of Wales, was the chief cause of the breaking up of the mid-Victorian social tradition of frozen dignity with all its reticences and repressions. He beckoned in quantity lively and gay young persons.

~The Auckland Star [New Zealand], 11/09/1930

A book full of racy anecdotes.

~The Evening Telegraph [Angus], 28/11/1930

Those of my readers who, like myself, are able to call themselves Victorians, who remember the great Queen's Golden Jubilee as if it happened yesterday, and who have a lively memory for the gay nineties of the last century when bicycle riding was a crazy joy, will find delightful entertainment in As We Were by E. F. Benson [...]. Mr. Benson, now a grizzled veteran, then a callow youth, is a member of one of the most famous families of that period, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury [...] To his home came many of the leading men and women in society, in politics, and in letters; his father was friend of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, of the Prince of Wales, of Gladstone, and of other great ones of the earth, and he tells not only interesting stories about these celebrities, but in racy chapters informs us how Victorianism ate, slept, made love, amused itself and died. Incidentally, he provides us with vivid portraits of his father and mother and gives a compact sketch of the Archbishop's career. [...]

~The Winnipeg Tribune [CAN], 13/12/1930

[As We Were] is delightfully urbane, but never smug; a good-humoured, witty picture of eminent Victorians ~ Jowett of Baliol, Alfred Austin, Swinburne, and very many others.

~The Evening Telegraph [Angus, UK], 26/12/1930, in 'Best-Sellers' of 1930

Mr Benson, in this fascinating volume, comes to bury Victorianism, not to praise it. Into the clamour of the critics of the Good Queen's long reign he steps like another Antony. One almost hears him, in suave tones, declaring that he comes not to dispute what Brutus spoke, but is here to speak what he does know.

The lean and hungry Cassius Strachey and the general mob of Neo-Georgians may have reported their enemy rightly or wrongly: this witness is not concerned with their testimony, but merely to deliver his own. And, as the son of that Archbishop of Canterbury who owed his elevation to his first See to the appreciation which Victoria and her Albert had had of his work as the first Head of Wellington School, Mr Benson saw with eager eyes not only the reign and its customs as they shaped themselves in the last few decades, but the Queen as she influenced it. [...]

Much of the charm of Mr Benson's book is in the continuity of its own mood, a mood of slightly cynical tolerance for the idiosyncrasies of all generations and of humorous readiness to recall the gaucheries and misjudgments of ingenuous youth; but much of its charm is also in the atmosphere he re-creates, his pen portraits of celebrities, and his easy re-narration of familiar events[s]. [...]

After weighing his judgment in scrupulous psychological balances, Mr Benson is forced to reaffirm that the statesmen and hostesses of the Victorian times seem to him to have been greater figures ~ men and women of more cosmic mould ~ than are his contemporaries. To one who, reading these pages, recalls the objects of his gaze in much the same mood, that judgment seems sound.

But even to those younger, who see the perspective inverted, to whom contemporaries appear far to transcend the dull, inhibited bourgeoisie of Victorianism in cosmic stature, this book will give no cause for irritation. It is too full of humorous pictures and anecdotes, of frank unveilings, of equally frank adulations, to be a gage flung into the Georgian arena.

It is, rather, an invitation card, lighly flicked between the contestants, inviting them to abandon for a time the wrangle about period significances and to view from a comfortable and well-upholstered seat the pageant of a past which, while it too aggressively paraded its prophets, priests and kings, its charlatans and its pretenders, had also its beauties and its clowns, its conscious farceurs and its flaneurs.

In a word, Mr Benson's book is what he calls it, a peepshow and not an arraignment. It does not arrest the Victorians to judge them. Rather does it arrest the Georgians to entertain them.

~The Yorkshire Post, 11/09/1930 [much abridged]

Messrs. Longmans, Green have issued cheap editions, priced at 5s each, of two outstanding works, first published within the past year or two. One is Mr E. F. Benson's As We Were, a book of truly charming studies of Victorianism, with biographical and autobiographical details. In delightful fashion he re-creates the days that are gone and the people of those days.

~Aberdeen Press and Journal [UK], 26/02/1932

… the most amusing of all Victorian memoirs …

~Raymond Postgate in The Spectator, 03/05/1962

The following is from a column entitled 'The Westcountry Bookman' and signed C. D. B. Mr B begins: “The following article introduces a fresh series on newly published books calculated to interest the Westcountry reader.”

Mr E. F. Benson looms large in my first list, and, having been a Benson enthusiast from my youth up, I am not sorry that it should be so.

Neither As We Were nor Charlotte Brontë has made such demands on my devotion as, for instance, that ponderous romance The Capsina ~ to have read which I consider the ultimate qualification of the Benson enthusiast.

Both volumes are eminently readable. The first named (which is a cheaper reprint of the volume of reminiscences originally published in 1930) is in the intimate, anecdotal, yet earnest style which first won me to the author through The Book of Months. […]

Here [readers] have the story of the appointment of Mr Benson's father as the first Bishop of Truro, his zealous attack on the colossal task of organizing the diocese and building a Cathedral, and his meteoric promotion to the Archbishopric of Canterbury in December, 1882. There is only space for the quotation of one story ~ and that I cannot omit. Writing of the 'queer pastors' his father met in Cornwall, Mr Benson says:~

The most remarkable of all was a vicar who never set foot in his church at all, far less held any kind of service there. Occasionally some neighbouring parson came over to minister to his unshepherded parishioners, but their rightful parson would not even then consent to attend church as a member of his own congregation. It was quite in vain that the patron of his living pleaded with him.  “I don't ask you to do anything,” he said, “but for the sake of example couldn't you just go to church yourself sometimes?” But it was no use: he preferred to stroll to the garden gate of the vicarage which adjoined the church clad in a flowered dressing-gown and smoking a hookah, and when his parishioners came out he chatted with them very amiably. There he was, living in the vicarage, a beneficed priest performing no duties of any sort, and there was no ecclesiastical process by which he could possibly be deprived of his house and his income.

~The Western Morning News and Daily Gazette, 25/05/1932. For the continuation of this article see under Charlotte Brontë

… bright and engaging …

~Brian Masters in The Spectator, 12/05/2001

[…] his best work—the three autobiographical books As We Were (1930), As We Are (1932), and Final Edition (1940) […]

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' The Terror by Night, first published in All Hallows magazine, 02/1999

 

The House with the Brick-kiln

Fiction ~ short story
Published in London Magazine, November or December 1908
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
4,450 words
(First read 25/04/2012) 

The ingredients of an E. F. Benson spook story:
(1) Two gents in an old rented house in the English countryside
(2) The house is haunted, obviously
(3) The two gents get haunted ...
(4) ... the narrator is a bit of a wuss; his pal is made of sterner stuff
(5) The haunting gets so bad they flee the house
(6) They find out the ghost was of a former tenant, who murdered someone ~
And there you have The House with the Brick-kiln ... and a whole host of other yarns.  Utterly formulaic; entirely predictable; crashingly dull.
Still, don't let me put you off [!]: you can read it online here.

For an alternative version of the EFB Spook Story Formula see here.

The Other Bed

Fiction ~ short story
Published April 1908
4,305 words
(First read 16/04/2012)

The Room in the Tower

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Pall Mall Magazine, January 1912
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
5,290 words
(First read 09/04/2012)

Our Unnamed Narrator has had a recurring dream for 15 years or so.  In it he goes to stay at the country home* of a former schoolmate he barely knew, is shown out into the garden where the family are assembled for tea, then to his room in the tower, where he encounters an unseen horror.  Obviously this premonitory dream eventually comes true.

For me the most interesting aspect of this yarn was the nature of the dream itself: as the years go by in U.N.'s waking world, so too do they pass in his dream ~ members of the family age or get married and disappear from the 'stage', new details emerge, but always the 'punchline' remains unchanged.  The climax is nicely handled, reminiscent of the ending of The Dance (1934) in that the attacker is invisible.  Sadly, though, as with so many of EFB's spook stories, the sewing-up of the story somewhat flattens the effect.
It's available online here. 

*In 'the Ashdown Forest district of [East] Sussex'. 

The Terror by Night

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
2,880 words
(First read 06/04/2012) 

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Somewhat unusually EFB starts this spook story with a bit of background 'theory' on what he calls the transference of emotions:

[...] to take the analogy of wireless telegraphy, we are all of us probably 'receivers' to some extent, and catch now and then a message or part of a message that the eternal waves of emotion are ceaselessly shouting aloud to those who have ears to hear, and materialising themselves for those who have eyes to see.

Jack Lorimer, a friend of our Unnamed Narrator's, has been forced to pack his new wife Daisy off to Davos to recover from consumption in the pure Swiss air.  Obviously as soon as EFB/UN says "She's making a spectacular recovery" we know the poor lass is doomed.  Meanwhile, back in London, Jack and UN, now living together at the latter's house for convenience's sake, start to feel exactly the same sensation of dread ~ of what they don't know ~ at the same time.  In a bid to shake off this inexplicable fear the two pals invite a third (Philip) to come to the theatre¹.  That evening, as they're getting ready to go out, Daisy expires in Switzerland, but not before 'manifesting herself' to no fewer than four people: our three friends and (perhaps a shade incongruously) UN's 'man'.
For some unknown reason I've always been partial to stories about moment-of-death revenants, and this is a good example of the genre.  It also has the advantage that it's only about half the length of the average EFB spook and so seems to go at a decent clip, for once.
It's available online here. 

¹ To see The Man from Blankley's, by F. Anstey, another favourite author of mine.

Between the Lights

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
4,745 words
(First read 28/03/2012) 

In this reviewer's estimation Between the Lights¹ is not at all a bad horror story.  Like the later The Face (1924), it differs from the average EFB spook story in that the whole thing isn't neatly sewn up at the end².  It also differs from the routine in another major way: the story is told at one remove ~ our Unnamed Narrator merely sits back and lets his pal Everard Chandler tell it to him and his fellow house-guests on a snowy Christmas Eve.  (Definite shades of Mr M. R. James here.)  Benson handles this ploy extremely well: you can almost hear the background silence, the crackling of the logs on the fire, etc.  Well, the bare bones of it is that exactly a year previously, on an unseasonably warm Christmas Eve, while watching a game of croquet, Chandler had a vision ~ a really quite unsettling vision, doubly so because it has no apparent meaning ~ our hero is a completely run-of-the-mill toff, doing nothing in particular.  Later in the year, while he's on holiday deer-stalking in Scotland (Sutherland³), the vision 'became real' ~ I won't give any more away.  As I say, though, the 'power' of it is its randomness, its lack of explanation, its mystery.

¹ Please don't ask me to explain the title ~ I have no idea.
² A tentative theory is briefly put forward, but it doesn't really make any sense.
³ See also Gavon's Eve (1906) ~ the two stories are set in pretty much the same place.

The story is available online here.


THE CRITICS

EF Benson was a protégé of James, and it shows in his ghost stories, though Benson also brings much of his own style to the telling; a sense of fun and sly self-deprecation that never blunts the chill. Between the Lights may not be his best tale, as the teller in the story warns, “It has no apparatus about it at all. You will probably all say that it was nothing, and wonder why I was frightened.” But what it does have is a perfect Christmas Eve ghost story setting. A group of friends gather in a darkened room around a blazing fire to compete “with each other in blood, bones, skeletons, armour and shrieks.” If Between the Lights merely whets your appetite for more of Benson’s delightful “spook stories,” I recommend following it up with one of my favourites, How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery.

~Orrin Grey in 'Four eerie olde holiday ghost stories', in The Malay Mail Online, 24/12/2015

 

'And the Dead Spake ...'

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's magazine, October 1922
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)
7,560 words
(Last read 01/03/2012) 





THE CRITICS

Equally bizarre or ghastly are the fates met by these doomed, cruel, dismaying creatures, for Benson metes out fictional retribution with something close to relish. Thus females, even if not always villains, sadists - or mutant hags, as in The Horror-Horn - tend to be victims or suicides. In this collection alone they must be buried, impaled, hanged, incinerated, drowned, strangled, hacked with a skate, etc. […] Par too, for Benson's gruesome course, is 'And The Dead Spake...', whose murderess after a fit suffers a broken skull and then has her brain dissected. Serve the vile beast right Fred seems to say with something approaching glee, in this unusually H. G.Wellsian tale. But while some science-fictional aspects of this story may be Wellsian, its other recurrent themes, such as the misogyny and throatcutting, are not. (And there's more of the latter, by the way, in The Gardener.)

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' Mrs Amworth, first published in All Hallows magazine, 10/2001