Fiction ~ novel
Published very very late 1907, or very very early 1908
Approx 137,000 words
(First read 25/03/2014)
Y'know, the more I read of E F Benson, the more I become aware that the Problem of age gap in relationships was something of a preoccupation of his. I've recently discovered (or rediscovered) it in a couple of short stories: The Eavesdropper (1924) and Adjustments (1923?); it's the theme of Sheaves and also of Mezzanine (1926). And these are only the Older Woman / Younger Man examples.¹ There's probably something to be learnt in all this but it'll have to wait.
Sheaves, then, tells the story of 42-year-old Edith Allbutt² and her marriage to 24-year-old Hugh Grainger³.
When the 'action' begins, Edith is a widow-woman of three years' standing; her first marriage was to a drunk and consequently one of never-ending misery, heartache, etc. Despite all this she's come out of it as exquisitely pretty as all the other impossible Benson heroines. She's spent the past few years 'recovering' and writing a play about it (like you do) which turns out to be a massive hit, obviously.
Hugh is a young toff of no-fixed-utility who, unsurprisingly, is like this:
His huge, high spirits were clearly natural to him. [...] his slight, slender frame; his quickness of movement and gesture; his thatch of thick, close-cropped hair; his vivid, handsome face, with its dark eyes and clear white skin.
Oh and he sings like an angel. In fact he sings like such an angel that Edith and her sister Peggy persuade him ~ though it doesn't take much doing ~ to become an opera singer. So he becomes an opera singer (like you do) and is a massive hit, obviously. (Peggy ~ Cynthia Lady Rye in full ~ is another utterly utterly impossible heroine: a combination of society hostess and Mother Teresa, but likeable enough, once you get past the fact that only EFB could have created her.)
Where was I? ~ ah yes, so Edith and Hughie get married; they have a baby, which dies of neglect⁴; Edith develops consumption so everyone troops off to Davos where a jolly time is had by all ... except Edith who, when she's just on the road to recovery, dies of heart failure instead. The End.
This postage stamp of a tale takes approximately 137,000 words to tell.
It's not so much the thinness of the plot that rankles, nor is it the country-ramble-over-very-uneven-ground pace of the thing⁵, nor the unremitting preposterousness of the plot and characters.
No. What rankles is that Benson takes an interesting premise and problem ~ "What happens when a woman approaching middle age marries a man still in the flush of youth?" ~ and almost totally ignores it! Sure, before the marriage is actually decided on, Peggy has a bit of a go at talking her sister out of it, and, once hitched, Edith does occasionally fret a bit about the age gap ... but, to put it plainly, Edith and Hughie could have been any age (her 62, him 22; the pair of them 32; you name it) and the novel would've turned out exactly the same: 'doomed love story' is all it is, in the final analysis. An opportunity spectacularly missed.
(P.S. Comic Relief Note. The sole bits of comic relief in Sheaves ~ and they really are like oases in a desert: one longs for them ~ come in the shape of Edith's neighbours at her home in Wiltshire: Hugh's brother-in-law Canon Dick Alington, an insufferable pompous prig, and his son Ambrose ditto, and their pal Mrs Owen, a scheming hypocrite in the best tradition of Bensonian small-town harpies. But, as I say, they're woefully under-utilized.)
¹ Older Man / Younger Woman novels include Juggernaut (1911), An Autumn Sowing (1917) and Alan (1924).
² No, I haven't made this name up, in case American readers are wondering.
³ Not that Hugh Grainger, not [unnamed narrator]'s ghost-hunting pal from the latter spook stories. This is an entirely unrelated chap who just happens to have the same name.
⁴ Oh don't panic: it doesn't really die of neglect, though for all the attention that's paid it, it might as well.
⁵ In fact I'm so thoroughly inured to the leisurely pace of late Victorian and Edwardian novels ~ especially EFB's ~ by now that if I read anything faster I tend to get nose-bleeds.
THE CRITICS
The marriage
question in relation to disparity of age is less often touched upon
in fiction than are some other phases. This aspect is the pivot of
Mr. E. F. Benson's novel in which Hugh Grainger, a man of
twenty-four, marries a widow of forty-two, whose earlier marriage was
a disastrous one. In this union there is
perfect harmony of tastes and mind and a passionate mutual love;
there is nothing to prevent its being an ideal coupling of two human
beings except the great gulf between twenty-four and forty-two—with
the seniority on the wrong side. No 'little rift' appears to open
gradually
and silence the
music of this marriage, though the wife feels an occasional qualm as
she glances into futurity, knowing that the years that will bring
only maturity to Hugh will bring old age to her; what will be the
outcome? There is only one ending that can avert unhappiness in such
a case, and Edith's qualms were needless. Mr. Benson's most admirable
point as a writer is his hatred and clever setting forth of cant and
priggishness and his clear contrasting of it with the real goodness
it attempts to mimic. In Edith Grainger is portrayed a thorough
Christian gentlewoman. She is a creation any
novelist might be proud of. Several of the other characters display
clever handling, particularly a pushing would-be society woman whose
snobbishness and hypocrisy form a foil to Edith's genuine refinement
and goodness; also Ambrose and Perpetua, a delightful pair of
juvenile prigs.
~The Outlook,
04/01/1908
Though Sheaves
[…] by E. F. Benson is a fascinating novel, with many interesting
characters and notable passages, still it is less satisfactory than
most of his work. The reason is not far to seek, since the author
has set the problem of the consequences of disparity of age in
marriage and has evaded its difficulties. Into the everyday word of
society people, which Mr Benson presents so artistically and so
accurately, come Mrs Allbutt, a middle-aged widow, who has written
anonymously a play which proves successful, and Hugh Grainger, an
attractive youth with a glorious voice, which secures his immediate
entry into Grand Opera. The pair love and marry and enjoy an ideal
life, crowned by the birth of a son, yet the woman dreads the
approach of old age, but the test is not applied, for she is stricken
with consumption, which proves fatal. Of the minor characters, which
show extraordinary knowledge and penetrating insight, the most
convincing are Lady Rye, the heroine's sister, Canon and Mrs Alington
and Mrs Owen, as well as some delightfully contrasted children. As
is always the case with Mr Benson's books, the descriptions are
admirable; and, whatever the subject, the writing is brilliant. The
sole objection to the novel is that the problem which the author has
pressed on the attention of the reader, and which has succeeded in
raising great expectations, remains unsolved.
~The Manchester
Courier, 24/01/1908
Sheaves,
by E. F. Benson, purposes at the start to be a study of discrepancy
in age between husband and wife. It needs no argument to show that
the story of a marriage between a man of twenty-seven and a woman of
forty-four must depend for whatever interest it has upon development
of character. Only in the rare case where the man and woman are by
some freak of fate strangely fitted for one another in every respect
save that of years, that a problem of this kind is worth the working
out. Hugh Grainger and Edith Allbutt are two people thus
miraculously intended for each other. In both the dramatic and
artistic temperaments are highly developed. Hugh has a voice which
in Lohengrin sets all musical
Europe aflame. Mrs. Allbutt is the author of a new play which has
taken London by storm. With the blindness of a dreamer Hugh refuses
to look ahead; Edith looks ahead, but, because her early life has
been embittered and she is hungry to snatch a little joy from the
years still left her, she defies the future. Mr. Benson is undeniably
a careful worker. He builds up character with a leisurely
thoroughness and a clear-eyed appreciation of the value of little
things that one often misses in writers of larger calibre than he.
For this reason one regrets to see him deliberately shirk his responsibility
in this book. The one purpose of the story, the one justification for
its existence, is to follow down these ill-assorted lives for ten,
fifteen, twenty years, and show in what particular form the
inevitable tragedy will take place. Instead of doing this, Mr.
Benson falls back upon the rather cowardly expedient of letting the
heroine develop a weakness of heart and lungs and, after lingering for a few
months between hope and fear at the famous consumptive resort of
Davos, suddenly sink during her husband's brief absence to London and
pass away almost before he could return to her. In a somewhat
over-subtle way Mr. Benson apparently holds the difference of years
responsible for the wife's death. He seems to argue that her morbid
sensitiveness causes her to fear constantly that her young husband
will become bored if tied too long to a frail invalid in a health
resort. Accordingly, she forces herself to persuade him to go to
London, thinking she is acting most wisely for both;
but it is really the lack of the daily stimulus of his presence that
robs her of her last chance of recovery. In this sense the death may
be called logical, but Mr. Benson ought to have remembered that it
is even a bigger thing to make his characters live logically.
~Frederic Taber
Cooper in The Bookman, 01/1908
SHEAVES
DISPARITY OF AGE IN MARRIAGE
In Sheaves Mr. E.
F. Benson has attacked one of the most difficult
problems a story-teller can set himself ~ the problem of disparity of
ages. It is one that constantly recurs in fiction, as for example in
Henry Esmond, Indian Summer, Alice-for-Short
~ the list of novels old and new might be stretched out
indefinitely. The problem occurs in four variations: (a) he is too
old, happy ending; (b) the same, unhappy ending; (c) she is too old,
happy ending; (d) the same, unhappy ending. Speaking in a general
way, there is no such thing in fiction as a hero's being too old so
long as he retains the use of his faculties, and romance has a
specially kind regard for the match between the worn warrior of forty
and the debutante. If he is uncommonly strong, brave, and unhappy, he
may be fifty, and a widower, or divorced, or anything one pleases.
But inasmuch as the largest consumer of fiction is the young person
of the unsentimental sex, it is unreasonable to expect a similar
toleration where the disparity is in the opposite direction. It is
seldom indeed that a novelist has dared so greatly as Mr. Benson.
Thackeray and Mr. Howells cravenly hedged— propounded the problem
with a string attached. Harry Esmond marries Lady Castlewood,
certainly, and is moderately happy ever after, but after all there is
less disparity than there would have been in a marriage with Beatrix.
The scales are cleverly loaded to tip as they were meant to tip. Mr.
Howells has made them tip in the same direction, but with a different
loading, so that they settle more naturally and inevitably in their
place. Here the disparity is to the man's disadvantage, but his hero
is no square-jawed figure of romance, but an ordinary, middle-aged
American who feels draughts and has lost his enthusiasm for dancing
all night. He is fascinated by the young heroine's charms and grace,
but after trying books and life with her, he is forced to recognise
that he is a contemporary of her mother. Now Mr. Benson,
except at the very end, has faced his problem with the utmost
gallantry, put it in its most difficult form, and then employed all
his literary art to make it 'go down'. He has put the disparity of
age on the wrong side, and has made it, for that side, almost
excessive. The heroine is forty-two, the hero twenty-five. There are
the figures baldly put. Turned about, they would be admirable: it has
been commonly urged by experts in these matters that a wife should be
twelve years younger than her husband, and if seventeen years'
difference is excessive for a beginning, time will operate to reduce
it. But as Edith's sister Peggy pitilessly points out, for love of
her, in ten years Hugh will be but thirty-five and still a young man,
an opera singer at the height of his career, while Edith will be
fifty-two. In another decade the disparity will be greater yet; at
forty-five Hugh would be well mated with a wife of twenty-five, but
what of one of sixty-two Well, what would have happened? Even Mr.
Benson's
courage has fallen short of letting his tale run out into the dry
sands of middle age to see which stream would evaporate first. Quite
arbitrarily he has provided Edith with a phthisis which operates to
end the story at the right moment, attcr a brief and happy married
life. This is better than the altruistic simile that seems to be the
fashion, as for example in Hamlin Garland's Money Magic, where
the elderly husband obligingly hastens by poison the question of
disease. Nevertheless, the case Mr. Benson
has put is one that occurs within everyone's observation in real
life; it should be within a novelist's province to find out what
happens and make a report in literary form. The phthisis confuses the
issue, eliminates the question of age, and substitutes at the last
moment the problem of engines offered by Elizabeth Robins in The
Open Question. But Mr. Benson
does not write problem fiction. He is much more bent upon his story,
and it is to be said that if his dose is not of the most palatable
sort to the young person of the unsentimental sex, he has artfully
sugar-coated it till it is hardly to be distinguished from caramel.
As good a case as possible, to begin with, is made out for Edith. Her
first marriage is shown as having been unhappy enough to entitle her
to large compensation. She is made a stately beauty, a Juno at forty,
without a gray hair, and looking twenty-five; Nature is not lacking
in such miracles. Then as 'Andrew Robb' she has won celebrity as a
playwright, revealed intellectual and emotional powers of the highest
order, and as the history of art and literature shows, if genius is
not exempt from the operation of time, it is much given to
overleaping such obstacles. Some of the affaires célèbres
to which whole libraries are not very profitably devoted, are of
precisely this sort, though on the wicked 'continent' it is not
always a question of marriage. Mr. Benson
has put his case well, and he has skilfully chosen his subordinate
matter to enlighten and enliven his tale. It is full of nursery
nonsense, frolics with children, games of imagination, in which Hugh
shows himself as good a child as the rest. Mr. Benson
does this sort of thing very well, and while it is a thing that can
be overdone, for adult readers of the sentimental sex who are not
frequently thrilled by the spectacle of six-year-olds playing Indian,
in this case the subject gives a logical justification, as does the
subject of The Younger Set. But Mr. Chambers has set his stage
in the more popular fashion— grizzled military hero, faithless
frivolous wife, tender debutante. In the filling out of his novel,
the selection of people and scenes and incidents, all the things that
in old-fashioned treatises of rhetoric were called 'amplification'
and to novel-writers are sometimes known as 'padding', Mr. Benson
has wisely chosen lightness and humour to offset his subject. The
book has the quality of The Challoners, not the harshness of
Dodo, The Relentless City, and Scarlet and Hyssop.
It is an amusing and agreeable satirical picture which he gives of a
narrow provincial life. The picture of Canon Alington is a little
awkward, and a very little exaggeration, but it is as good a
presentation as comes at the moment to mind of the prosaic,
kindhearted, narrow-minded man who has gone in tremendously for
culture, prides himself on his liberality of intellect, his
appreciation of art, and all that sort of thing. The portrait gives
very much the effect of having been done from life, and with just
little more geniality of tone it would deserve a place in any gallery
of noted prigs in fiction. Unluckily Mr. Benson
cannot quite keep out of such pictures a slight touch of resentment
as though he had not forgotten intolerable hours of boredom. [...]
~The Evening Post
[Wellington, New Zealand], 01/02/1908. Slightly edited for
punctuation, etc.
The most mundane of
Archbishop Benson's sons has written nothing better than this. By the
temper rather than the method of his treatment he has given new life
to an old story. The outcome of a marriage between the well-preserved
woman and the man in his first youth is a famous crux of fiction. Mr.
Benson's heroine has given her youth and beauty to a hopeless sot,
with whom she drags out a dozen weary years, before his death
releases her. She has endured the experience with a fortitude so
deep-rooted that she appears to have come out of it almost unscathed.
She wakes from it as from a long nightmare, her mind haunted with the
horror of it, but her body unimpaired. Childless, she takes up her
waking life alone, having attained the serenity of one who has
consciously put youth behind. But youth will not 'stay put'; it
assails her in the person of a man seventeen years her junior. Their
marriage, however, lacks nothing but parity of years, and except as
her consciousness of the actual disparity obtrudes itself, they are
absolutely happy. A son is born, and for a time the mother's cup runs
over. But after the first wonder of it is past, she wakes to the fact
that her triumphant joy finds but a faint echo in the father's heart.
The sense of his youthfulness begins really to oppress her. At this
point Mr. Benson proceeds, in a way, to beg the question by killing
off the woman. For the question is not whether a man of twenty-four
can be happy with a woman of forty-two, but what is going to happen
later on. All along the road to seventy will they be lovers, a wedded
pair, or simply an old woman with a more or less dutiful spouse? This
is the knot which Mr. Benson
cuts, in effect, if not by intention. But one is rather grateful to
him for it. His way of taking off the wife is not so summary but that
it tests adequately not only the husband's patience and devotion, but
the depth of his love. Their relation is made perfect by suffering,
and there is no tragedy in its earthly surcease. Mr. Benson's
treatment of this sober theme is without a touch of sombreness. The
tone of the book is cheerful, and even merry. The boy-husband is of
the class called 'artistic,'
over whose total selfishness and irresponsibility lady novelists are
prone to yearn. Yet he succeeds in being charming without being
either a brute or a popinjay. His career as a Lohengrin who captures
Belgravia, and a Tristan who causes a popular riot in Munich reminds
one, to be sure, of the achievements of various other paper heroes of
recent date. But one ought to be willing to forgive him, as one
forgives the heroine for being the most successful dramatist of her day.
These two persons are credible and admirable in more essential
matters. There is not in either of them, a trace of morbid
self-consciousness. The man gives his voice to the world because the
woman thinks it his duty; and is glad of his strength and buoyancy
for her sake, as the woman is glad of her beauty and serenity for
his. The thought of her death does not make them frantic, does not
even rob them of laughter. Her sister, Lady Peggy, is a creation
worthy of the author of Dodo,
a delightfully intense, humorous, Puck-like spirit, wresting joy from
the most diverse activities, an ardent politician and mother's-club
woman, a patroness of balls and soup-kitchens. A certain rural canon
and his circle give scope for those broader 'character' studies which
your English novelist seems still bound to add, like a pinch of
coarse salt, to the more delicate ingredients of his composition.
~The Nation,
06/02/1908
It is always a
pleasure to read Mr Benson's books. Unique in style and original in
conception, his novels possess a fascination that no other works of
fiction can command at the present day. In Sheaves the gifted
author is at his best. There is infinite enjoyment in every page.
Stated bluntly, the plot is simple enough. A widow makes a love
match with a man much younger than herself. Both parties to the
wedding are thoroughly in love with each other, and the man is
exceedingly happy. But the woman is haunted by doubts regarding the
wisdom of the step she has taken, and her life is a curious blending
of misery and joy. It is on the whole a sad story, but Mr Benson is
not unkind to his reader. The sadness is never too prominent.
Inimitable in its character drawing, in its pictures of life and
scenery, and, above all, in its innocent charm, the book will be
perused from beginning to end with undiluted pleasure. There are few
books more worthy of repeated perusal.
~The Courier
[Dundee], 12/02/1908
He has done nothing
that comes near to the excellence and strength and beauty of this
love-story of a middle-aged woman who is one of the most charming and
exquisitely drawn characters in modern fiction.
~World,
quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut
Brilliant, clever,
full of wise observations and sage counsels.
~Standard,
quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut
Packed with sympathy
and sly satirical touches.
~Daily Chronicle,
quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut
The charm of Sheaves
lies in the essential human nature of the men and women who move in
it. … We live with these people, share their emotions and their
interests, worry out their difficulties, laugh and weep with them.
~Westminster
Gazette, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut
The thirty-eighth
novel by E. F. Benson is an event to be welcomed in the circle of
that worldly-wise author's readers. In Sheaves […] Mr
Benson tackles a problem that few novelists would care to try to
solve ~ that of the woman who married a man younger than herself.
There is always a
freedom from purple passages in Mr Benson's books, and few writers
have a happier knack of creating characters. It is a welcome change,
too, to be certain of a happy ending.
~'Penman' (who was
seriously ill-informed) in The Citizen [Gloucester],
24/10/1932 and in Gloucestershire Echo, 31/10/1932 [!]
Sheaves (1907)
tells the story of a marriage which appears happy yet conceals
distress, and ends with typical Benson sentimentality ~ a consumptive
death. The title, replacing the original Indian Summer,
is taken from Psalm 126*.
~Brian
Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson,
1991. *He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious
seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves
with him.
