Published October 1906
I haven't read such a poor novel since ... well, since 40 or so of the other E F Benson novels I've read.
The whole of this story could have been told in the space of a novella (20-30,000 words); instead EFB stretches it out to mind-boggling proportions, until you can see right through it to the void beyond.
The only things to recommend it are two rather brief comic interludes which have little to do with the turgid, preposterous, and unbelievably boring 'romantic melodrama' going on in the foreground: these have echoes of the funnier bits of An Act in a Backwater ~ themselves few and far between.
Few writers of fiction give so
much hope to its readers as Mr. E. F. Benson. His versatility is
unquestioned, and his style is ever attractive. No other novelist is
quite his equal in word-painting of the rarer phases of Nature, and
the back-grounds of his works are always admirable. In analysis of a
character he is able and convincing, while his men and woman act on
each other in a most logical manner. Nevertheless, Mr. Benson has
not yet found a subject quite worthy of his powers. In the present
case, the mis-mating of a gifted girl with a vampyre-like, loathsome
man of wealth, we have unquestioned power, but despite the clever
development of the plot, we have a suspicion that a better might well
have been found.
[Here I’ve omitted a
fairly detailed description of the plot.]
Unquestionably there is power in the story, and some of its passages
are redolent of beauty. The comparison and analysis of character are
excellent, both in Paul, Norah, and Beckwith, while in such minor
skethces as Mrs Mundy, Archdeacon Harold and his wife, and Lady
Anstruther, the humour is unfailing. Paul's temptation suggests that
of Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda,
but there is no plagiarism.
~The
Manchester Courier, 16/10/1906
The amazing power and subtlety
of Mr E. F. Benson's Paul […]
almost takes one's breath away. It is a novel which the reader can
never forget. Theodore Beckwith is a very wealthy young man, with a
withered and contorted frame, but with a gift of insight and a
strength of personality which are both entirely out of the common.
He marries Norah Ravenscroft, a bright and buoyant girl, who has, in
the spirit of good comradeship, a healthy and sun-browned friend,
Paul Norris. The motives which inspire Norah to accept Beckwith are
difficult to state in brief, but her mother's unfortunate
speculations are no small factor. The motives which inspire Beckwith
are equally compounded of different elements, but among them is the
desire of a morbid soul to have brightness and cheerfulness near to
him. He is delighted when he sees Paul and Norah together; their
natural chaff, the joy of their sunny friendship, their infectious
hilarity, all have their influence upon him. So he invites Paul to
become his secretary, and Paul, at Norah's express wish, accepts the
position. Soon Beckwith discovers that Paul loves Norah, and that
Norah loves Paul; indeed, he is the witness, with his eerie insight,
of their own silent discovery of the fact. Then he begins to play
upon their passions, flinging them together, playing wild music, to
which he bids them dance, acting, in short, a diabolical part with a
friendly face. One time he plays eavesdropper, and hears that spoken
which was inevitable. With the utmost calmness he speaks to Paul.
No, Paul must not go away; he must stay to be forced “to dance on a
hot plate.” It is a terrible situation, and the portrayal of the
three characters is beyond praise. Here, indeed, is fine psychology,
with admirable restraint, relieved by dialogue between the subsidiary
characters which never poses as brilliant, but is joyful and bright
as the sunshine itself. On the day after Norah has communicated the
fact of her impending motherhood to Beckwith he is killed by a
motor-car which Paul, in a frenzy of hatred, is driving at his
master's behest. Once again subtle questions enter. Was it murder?
The line is difficult to draw, and the remorse-stricken Paul spends
agonised months in drawing it, nor does he find peace until one
morning he attends a Communion service at St Paul's, and the
'comfortable words' go home to his heart. Then he goes and confesses
his murderous hatred of Beckwith to Norah, taking his courage in both
hands. In itself this chapter is a triumph of spiritual analysis; it
brings Mr Benson to us on an astonishing plane of achievement. Of
course, afterwards, he wins Norah. We have no compunction in telling
the plot. It is of the smallest consequence. That which matters in
this remarkable novel is the analysis of complex motives, the laying
bare of abortions in psychological structure and of unusual
subtleties in the affections, such as most of us have found in
practical life, the deep and even profound realisation of the meaning
of sin and of its awful Nemesis. In the school of the psychological
novel, which in our days seems to be the conquering form, not even Mr
Henry James, with all his precision of subtle analysis, has carried
the art farther than Mr Benson in this book. It is a novel which
will abide in the hearts of readers with some half-dozen, and no
more, of the hundreds which have appeared in the last few years.
~The
Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury,
17/10/1906
The
author of Dodo and The
Challoners has a talent
curiously feminine, by which we do not mean precisely effeminate. He
does not mince in his gait or speak in falsetto; but his progress is
attended by a kind of emotional frou-frou. His characters are always
in a flutter of spirits, whether high or low; it is hard to take such
volatile persons with becoming seriousness, however grave the
predicament into which the author may for the moment immerse them.
There are really
only four persons in this present story: an Englishwoman of pleasant
manners and a ruinous passion for stock-gambling, who is kept pretty
well in the background; her daughter Norah, who loves Paul, but does
not know it; Paul, who loves Norah, but does not know it; Theodore
Beckwith, the villain, a loathsome person who naturally marries the
heroine. Beckwith is a kind of vampire; physically
a weakling, with the monstrous power of feeding his strength by
contact with youth and vigor. His chief pleasure is in the exercise
of a wanton malice. Having married Norah, he induces Paul to
become his secretary, thus securing the companionship of two healthy
young creatures whom he may feed upon and in due time torture. He
sees to it that they remain in no doubt of their feeling for each
other, taking pains to throw them literally into each other's arms.
The disappointing
thing about the tale is that it is only striking, and not moving at
all. The villain is too villainous
to be true, and the hero too amiable to engage sympathy; the heroine
is simply a nice girl in an awkward
position. Paul respects the rights of the husband. Eventually,
however, he crushes Beckwith under a motor-car, nearly killing
himself in the desperate attempt to save the vampire. But he really
does kill the other man, and he really has had a momentary impulse to
do it deliberately. This fault-preys on his mind for over a hundred
pages, during which he takes to drink, and otherwise enjoys himself
very little. Finally he atones by rescuing Beckwith's child from
being run over by a train. This makes everything as comfortable as
possible.
~The
Nation,
13/12/1906
There is just a
tinge here of that diabolism toward which Mr. Benson seems to have a
bent. It is seen in the malignant and superhumanly clever creature
who, himself all but a cripple, thrives in a ghoulish sort of way on
the good health and spirits of others. This distressful person
pervades the book. His tragic taking off by an automobile steered by
an enemy, who is never quite sure whether or not the killing was
intentional, gives an opportunity for some dexterous juggling with
questions of conscience, remorse, and love. Mr. Benson always makes
his books readable, and this is no exception.
~The
Outlook
(US), 15/12/1906
Some
dozen years ago when his Dodo
appeared it was realized that a writer of more than ordinary ability
had entered the field. In the years that lie between that relatively
crude effort and the work
under notice there
is evident an improvement both in literary style and conception of
plot. The individuality and distinction of phrase are maintained, but
the obtrusive 'smartness' which marred the first novel has been
carefully eliminated.
Paul
is a modern love-story, the scenes of which are laid in Italy and
England. The principal characters, Paul and Norah, are healthy,
normal, English
types, who from the
first are attracted to each other and in the natural course of events
should have married and been happy ever after. A very different
destiny, however, has been ordered for them.
Their Eden has an
intruder in the person of Theodore Beckwith, one of the strangest and
most sinister characters that ever issued from the brain of a
novelist. Puny, anemic, irritable, and a victim of insomnia, he
presents a sufficiently striking contrast with the handsome young
athlete who is the hero of the drama. Tho[ugh] the novel ends happily
and the true lovers come by their own the reader can hardly forgive
the author for the untimely death of the best-drawn character in the
book.
~The
Literary Digest
(US), 19/01/1907
Another
novel of the month which has Italy for a setting is Paul,
by E. F. Benson, best remembered as the
author of Dodo.
Frankly, it is a purposeless
book and an unpleasant one. Its interest suddenly drops at the
half-way point, like an underdone loaf of cake, and what is meant to
be its most solemn chapter is more apt to provoke a desire to laugh.
Norah Ravenscroft would have married Paul Norris if her mother had
not gambled away her money. As it was, she married Theodore Beckwith
instead. Mr. Benson expects us to like Norris; he is just a strong,
clean-limbed, clean-minded
young Englishman, a good-natured, grown-up boy, and on the whole
rather colourless. Beckwith, on the contrary, we are expected to
dislike; he is a weak, undersized, obnoxious little animal, almost
uncanny in his ability to gather strength and energy from those
around him, sapping their vitality in a manner almost vampire-like.
But unpleasant as he is, Beckwith has the merit of being original,
and when, half way through the story, the author strikes off his head
with a sweep of his pen, the
interest of the
book dies with him. A husband who is not only devoid of jealousy, but
actually foresees that his wife is likely to fall in love with
another man, and makes that man his secretary
so as
to secure his constant presence in the house, and amuse himself by
watching the struggles of the luckless couple against their growing
infatuation, is at least a novelty in fiction, although a rather
morbid one. But after Paul has simplified the situation by running an
automobile over Theodore, there follows a wearisome delay while Paul
is mentally outgrowing his boyhood and becoming enough of a man to
decide whether he really meant at the last moment to run over
Theodore, and if he did mean to do so, whether it is his duty to
confess to Norah that he is the murderer of her husband. And when he
finally does muster up the courage to tell her, she just looks at him
and intimates that she has known it all the time and loves him all
the better for it. This ought to satisfy Paul, but it doesn't. He
continues to feel that he ought to make some sort of atonement for
his sin. The idea stays by him, even after he and Norah are married.
But the dead Theodore has left behind him a constant reminder in the
shape of an infant son; and after the manner of infants, it learns in
time to use its feet, and one day manages to toddle away from its
mother across the railway tracks, directly in the course of an
oncoming express train. Paul knows at once that the hour for his
atonement has come. He flings himself before the train, fishes
Theodore's child from under the engine's wheels and tumbles headlong
beyond the tracks. Then the train is gone, and Norah is saying to
him, "You gave your life for the child. You gave it to
Theodore!" And Paul answers in all seriousness, "Yes, at
least I meant to." Mr. Benson must have lost the last vestige of
that sense of humour which he apparently possessed when he wrote
Dodo.
~Frederic
Taber Cooper in The
Bookman,
01/1907
In
Paul, Mr. E. F. Benson
shows himself one of the most daring of modern novelists. I do not
use this epithet in the cant sense of the term, as denoting that he
deals with subjects that it would be more wholesome to leave alone,
for we have here no example of tainted or neurotic fiction. He is a
daring writer because of his extraordinary presumption upon the
confidence and good-will of his readers. He deliberately constructs
the first half of his plot in such a way as to produce the maximum of
irritation, not to say resentment. Our natural impulse at the end of
this section of the book is to throw the whole thing aside and refuse
to allow our patience to be abused any longer. The picture of the
physically puny but intellectually formidable Theodore Beckwith is
too cleverly wrought to be incredible and too subtle to be
disgusting, but we feel as though the writer were taking an unfair
advantage of us in compelling us to make the acquaintance of so
abnormal a creature. If he had not established a claim upon our
attention by his previous work, we should ask indignantly whether our
imaginations were given us to conceive such a ghoulish figure as
this, and should joyfully accept the killing of Beckwith as
liberating us from an evil dream and exempting us from the necessity
of pursuing the fate of the other characters any further.
But
Mr. Benson goes placidly on with his story in the conviction that we
shall hear him out, and we do. We then find that the grewsome
Beckwith episodes are the fitting and necessary background for a
character study of remarkable power and thrilling interest. At first
we had thought that the book should properly have been entitled
Theodore, for until
the end of the thirteenth chapter he was the outstanding figure and
Paul Norris merely one of many victims of his ingenious cruelty; but
from this point onward we recognize that what has gone before is
preparing the way for the great conflict between inclination and duty
that has been fought out in the soul of Paul.
A young man of much
personal charm and of habitual gayety of spirit is suddenly staggered
by a tragedy in which his own share is so strangely complicated that
it is impossible for us who know all to pronounce him either innocent
or guilty. It was an accident and no murder, an accident in which
Paul even risked his own life to save that of his enemy; yet, paradox
though it may be, there was in the deed a sufficient element of
murderous intent to plant a sting of ceaseless self-reproach in the
conscience of the
unhappy cause of it. This agony of the man who cannot acquit himself,
though the world holds him blameless and even admires his
magnanimity, presents to the novelist a much more intricate problem
than that familiar subject, the inexorable remorse of the undetected
criminal.
The terror of Paul
Norris is not that of Bill Sikes. But the alleviation which is open
to the most brutal offender against the laws of society tempts him
also. There is one unfailing means of expunging the sense of evil and
of removing what its victim persuades himself is a morbid sense of
responsibility. The alternate exhilaration and despair, the comfort
and the burden, the valorous resolutions and the ingenious
self-deceptions of the secret drinker are here portrayed with graphic
power. The steady
degradation of character that we are watching is the result not of
sensual self-indulgence — for Paul does not drink for drink's sake
— but of an almost panic-stricken impulse to snatch at anything
that promises an anodyne for the poison of remembrance. Until within
a few pages of the close, we are kept in suspense as to whether
Paul's enemy and persecutor, by the mere memory of the tragedy that
cut him off, is to work more havoc after death than in life and is to
drive
him to utter
collapse, body and soul.
It is no small
triumph for a writer to make us admit, when so near the denouement,
that we have not the least idea how it will all end and that whether
Paul goes to the bad or pulls himself together the conclusion will in
either case be entirely credible. The passage in which the crisis is
reached and Paul is delivered at one stroke both from his mental
obsession and from his debasing habit is, for its dramatic interest,
the culmination of the whole story. If we laid the book aside now it
would be with the satisfaction that comes from the relief of an
almost personal anxiety. Yet. the two chapters that remain by no
means produce the effect of an anti-climax. For one moment we
apprehend that we were over-hasty in our anticipation of a 'happy
ending,' and that though Paul has been saved from the curse that has
been dogging him, he is to have but a brief enjoyment of the expected
boon. The apprehension passes and the incident that has caused it is
found to be the one thing that was needed to complete and assure the
happiness that it threatened.
A book which
appeals so strongly to the deepest emotions requires a considerable
intermingling of lighter elements if it is not to produce at times a
sense of unbearable strain. This need is supplied by the cleverness
of the dialogue, the variety of the minor characters, and the
artistic quality of the descriptions of Italian and English scenery.
The figure of Mrs. Mundy shows that a cheerful contribution to the
general effect of a story may be made by the introduction of a person
who is incurably pessimistic. Such is her habit of mind that as she
is engaged on a watercolor of the Bay of Salerno she manages to
infuse into the radiant Italian sunshine something of her own
melancholy. "One felt that it might begin to rain any minute."
The Archdeacon's wife also adds much to our pleasure, as does Lady
Ravenscroft, who "did not like money in the least — she only
disliked the absence of it, which is a far different matter."
~Herbert
W. Horwill in 'Present-day Tendencies in Modern Fiction', The
Forum,
04/1907
A genuinely fine novel; a
story marked by powerful workmanship and glowing with the breath of
life.
~Daily
Telegraph, 1907
It is a fine study of a soul
stricken with remorse, brought through the depths to God's peace at
last. It is marked by a high seriousness, and an understanding and
sympathetic tact.
~The Guardian, quoted
in endpapers of Sheaves
Written
with uncommon intensity and brilliance. Somehow it has presented to
him a problem that has appealed to all that is warm and human within
the sphere of his own gifts, and the result has been that he has
given us a novel that is marked by deep thought, clever construction,
and a most intimate knowledge of the play of emotion between real men
and women. He has achieved a triumph.
~The
Standard,
quoted in endpapers of Sheaves
The
lighter side of the story is characteristic of Mr. Benson at his best
and gayest. Nothing could be more natural or more amusing than most
of the dialogue, and a whole handful of the subsidiary figures; it is
full of admirable portraiture and an abundance both
of
humour and of
humanity.
~The
Outlook (UK),
quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut and
Sheaves
[…]
another story of salvation [is] Paul
[…] in which the eponymous hero has an affair with a married woman,
murders her husband, repents, and finally saves her child from being
squashed by a train.
~Brian
Masters in The
Life of E. F. Benson,
1991
