The Book of Months

Fiction ~ novel (kind of)
Published May? 1903
Approx. 56,000 words
(First read 15/12/2013)

I said in my introductory paragraph that I wouldn't pull any punches, that if I found something bad, I'd say so.  Well, The Book of Months isn't bad ~ it's atrocious.  
As with most of these books, I had no idea what to expect before reading this ~ I'm never even 100% sure whether it's going to be a novel or something else.  (See for example As We Are ~ opinion is divided as to whether it's fiction, current affairs, or ... well, something else.)  Well anyway, here's what happened when I picked up The Book of Months [this review contains spoilers, not that there's much to spoil]:

I see it's divided into twelve chapters, a month each, starting with January.  Fair enough, I think, it's a diary-type novel, nowt wrong with that.  The narrator starts off by moaning about the weather in London; then, it having become clear that he's an author, he recounts a couple of anecdotes of his daily life.  Then he goes off to Switzerland for a skating holiday.  At this point I'm starting to think Erm, who is this chap? ~ surely the resemblance between him and the author is more than coincidental.  The episode closes with the narrator befriending a little girl staying at the same hotel.  Hmm, well, maybe not then.

February (don't worry: I'm not going to go through every month like this) arrives and we're treated to a really quite heart-wrenching anecdote about a street newspaper-boy who the Great-God-Benson shows us just long enough for us to like ... then summarily kills off.  Please note: This is the only passage in the book worth reading ~ it lasts two or three pages.  Our narrator then goes to a house party where, one night, he goes 'rain-running' (the hero of Ravens' Brood does exactly the same thing), which is to say that he strips down to his pants and goes running around outdoors soaking up nature (etc.)  I say, this is terribly bold of EFB to admit that he's done this himself.
March is nothing but maundering waffle, in the unmistakeable voice of E F Benson (or is it?).  So is April.

Then comes May and [quote] "Dick Alington and I were very old friends: we had been at school together, and his father's house was next to ours in the country, the woods belonging to each running contiguous, separated only by the park paling."  The mystery deepens: I have no recollection of that name in EFB's biography ... and besides, the Bensons surely never lived in a property like that ...  Then, lo and behold, not only is there a 'Dick' but there's a 'Margery' too and [wait for it, another quote]: "Then quite suddenly I became aware that I had fallen in love with her."*
This is page 47 of 124.
It's a novel: the narrator is a fictional author who just happens to be exactly like the real one; and these people are characters.  Reader, I swallowed my own tongue.  Now I realize I might sound like a complete dullard saying this but up until page 45 I was convinced I was reading "A Year in the Life of the Author of Dodo".  It's not till one third of the way through the novel (p. 48) that we even find out the narrator's damned name (Jack).  It felt like a confidence trick ... or a cheap magic trick ... or a hoax ... or something.  And the worst of it is that at no point in the remaining 250-ish pages (counting this and the sequel A Reaping as one) do we ever really know who Jack is.

Well, that's the long and the short of it.  I should add that not only is Jack a complete and utter zero, but he must surely be the most crashing bore Benson ever created: he just rambles on and on and on and on and on ... about nothing ... for pages and pages and pages.  For example, virtually the whole of August (once the plot's been safely cleared out of the way) is devoted to him going to Bayreuth to watch Wagner operas and he describes their plots in minute detail ~ it was horribly, painfully, sickeningly, stomach-churningly, brain-rottingly boring to read.
So, my advice, steer well clear of this one.

Still and all, if you are that kind of masochist, the whole book is available online here.  (Don't say I didn't warn you, though.)

For the sequel, go to A Reaping.


*There follows the inevitable dull love triangle: Dick loves Margery too; Margery chooses Dick (as who wouldn't?); the narrator chooses to hang around suffering nobly.  Dick, like so many a doomed character, is mildly likeable, so Benson kills him off in the Boer War.  Margery dies of a combination of grief-at-the-news and childbirth.  The baby (for once) survives Benson's mad axe ... but thereafter vanishes off the face of the earth.

THE CRITICS

The Book of Months is not, properly speaking, a novel at all; if we may coin an expression to fit this style of novel, we should call it "fictional autobiography." At the beginning the reader takes the book as a real description of the mental processes of Mr. E. F. Benson; but later on, when two love-stories are worked into the text, the same reader must conclude that the book is pure fiction. The earlier and less narrative parts of the book are the best reading, and the author when he describes his midnight outing in his friend's grounds to enjoy the full delights of the first night of spring is singularly successful in getting the young man's joie de vivre "over the footlights." There is a delightful optimism about the book which renders it very pleasant reading, and some of Mr. Benson's theories of life are shrewd enough to give food for reflection. As a whole, The Book of Months is well worth reading.

~The Spectator, 02/05/1903

 

It is full of charm ~ real, persuasive, penetrating charm ~ the charm of a wayward, irresponsible, winning personality. There is sentiment, and sometimes sentimentality; but there is an underlying manliness, which renders even the most sentimental reflections strong and unaffected. The book is, above all things, sympathetic. Many notes are sounded, and in all of them there rings the sincerity of real feeling and purpose … [we] recommend it unreservedly to all sorts and conditions of readers.

~The Daily Chronicle, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Juggernaut

 

The book contains fine work, notably the beautiful word-pictures of 'Spring in April', 'Capri in September,' and half a dozen others, which in themselves make it well worth reading.

 

~The Athenæum, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Sheaves

 

It is an uncommon and a charming book.

~Illustrated London News, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

Mr. Benson, the author of Dodo and many other novels which have been severely criticised and widely read, now turns to a new field. These little prose essays, one for each month, record the out-of-door experiences and the reflections of a London man-about-town. In a measure, they suggest the work of Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, but they are in a manner simpler and less affected. A single reflection may be quoted: "The man who rings a bell for a small child who cannot reach it has done his duty and his part in the world's work far better that day than any philosopher who thinks a great deal and does nothing." A slender vein of humor and a considerable knowledge of society may be found beneath the surface of Mr. Benson's writing. The book is put in holiday dress with elaborate decoration in colors.

 

~The Outlook (US), 28/11/1903

Certainly, Mr. Benson is here at his best: quaintness, originality, some powerful descriptive passages, and very human nature gives an intimacy and charm.

 

~Daily News, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

The author reveals himself a keen observer and the possessor of a poetic fancy, expressed in vivid incident and sketches of human nature and scenery in all parts of the world. It is a book to be taken up at any time, and opened at any part.

 

~British Weekly, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

In some of the twelve episodes which Mr. Benson gives us in this volume he goes deep to the foundations of joy and sorrow. Much of the book is narrative; one or two of the stories are deeply and poignantly melancholy; other parts of the book are throbbing with vitality and the delight of life. Passages of descriptive writing, gay and sombre, occur which are wonderfully good work.

 

~Vanity Fair, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 

It expresses the thoughts and feelings of a sane and mortal man; it reveals him in his private moments, and it throbs with his pleasure and his pain. It is all eminently natural, and it is 'mind-narrative' of a kind that will win the sympathy of average people by awaking echoes of their own emotions. Add to this that in style it is scholarly, in many pages lofty and poetic, and there is no need to explain away a charm which will be instantly felt. Besides the arts of sympathetic self-revelation and moralising, Mr. Benson has the rare gift of humour, and a talent for description and for narrative.

 

~St. James's Gazette, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 

The charm of the book lies in its perfect sincerity, and no one will take it up but will find in it something which will bring him into closer relation with himself, and inspire in him a greater sense of the joy of life.

 

~The Bookman, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

And finally: I can only conclude from this that all these people were reading some other book of the same title, by an author of the same name.

The Book of Months [(April 1903)] is an agreeable if rather desultory book which is difficult to categorise, being neither a novel, diary, collection of essays, autobiography, nor a gardening book, but an amalgam of all of them; a record of experiences, both material and emotional, with the thoughts to which they have given birth, within the space of one year.

The critics were caught off guard by this change in tempo and direction and did not know what to make of it. Most of them praised it highly, in a rather surprised kind of way; only the Saturday Review, never a fan of E. F. Benson, spoke of “these maunderings on lumbago, and the gibberish he talks in his bath, and above its dreary humour, its wilted sentiment, is the amazing insensibility with which the thing is done.”

~Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd in E. F. Benson As He Was, 1988

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

 

As We Are: A Modern Revue

Non-fiction (kind of) ~ social history
Published October 1932
Approx. 87,000 words
(First read 04/02/2007)

Not in fact a novel at all, though there are times when it feels like it's in danger of turning into one, as I remember it.  My review at the time was sketchy and somewhat skathing:

A kind of history of the UK in the years 1918-31.
  Entertaining in one way, pretty dull in another.

To do it 'justice' I should really reread it but, to be honest, I don't have happy memories of it and would really rather not ...

THE CRITICS

When E. F. Benson wrote that fascinating study of Victorianism, As We Were, it was inevitable that he should follow on with his views on the present.

This he has given us in As We Are […].

This is no peep-show like his previous work, but a revue. He holds up for our entertainment and thought the war and the post-war period ~ sometimes in the guise of parable, sometimes in direct review.

He sums up the effect of four years of war on the social, economic, and religious conditions of the nation. And what is his verdict?

“In every respect except with regard to the enfranchisement of women,” he writes, “the change has been destructive, and not a single constructive betterment or illumination had resulted.”

Whatever one's conclusions may be after digesting Mr Benson's work, one must at least congratulate him in making the immediate history so attractive. The book is full of wisdom, anecdote, and wise observations.

 

~The Courier and Advertiser [Dundee, UK], 21/10/1932

[…] Mr E. F. Benson has written two most interesting books. One is As We Were, a Victorian peepshow. It is a picture gallery of great personages in the Queen's record reign; and the other now given to the public is As We Are, a modern revue […]. We have, carefully drawn by the writer, one of the little territorial kings of England, Lord Buryan, and his countess. We see society modelled on the old scale, with the peer boasting of his mansions, his land, his retainers, and his boundless hospitality. There is the countess, who is lady bountiful. The characters are well drawn, and can be recognised by mature readers. On the other hand, there are the young people to whom old-time usages and stiff hospitality are a bore, and so, too, is at least one of the Commandments. Mr Benson sketches brilliantly the great change that has come over Britain with the disappearance of the great house, the sale of the land and furniture, and heirlooms. The young people concerned see the whole affair go without a sigh; their only concern is the financial proceeds and well-lined pocket-books. Change there must be. Does it make for high character and that sound morality which stands the test well in a crisis? That question is always arising as one reads Mr Benson's witty and biting survey of the new society.

Mr Benson has not a great deal that is personal to say; but in a chapter on 'Eminent Men' he protests against the persecution of Sir Ernest Cassel and Sir Edgar Speyer during the Great War, and he writes in most appreciative terms of Lord Balfour and Archbishop Davidson. […] The author is critical of literary developments, and notes that a feature of post-war fiction has been the flood of novels which were wholly concerned with sex, and which treated it with a frankness and wealth of physical detail. Nor does he welcome the appearance of excessively long novels. In considering the war period Mr Benson says that in every respect, except to the enfranchisement of women, changes were destructive, and not a single constructive betterment or illumination resulted. His brief review of politics or what passes to-day as statesmanship is not cheerful. He argues that to-day, while the nations are still suffering from exhaustion and disorganisation, and while their representatives at Geneva are trying to render war impossible, precisely the same provocative causes are at work again, making it every day more possible, and in the long run as inevitable as it was in 1914.

~Edinburgh Evening News, 24/10/1932, abridged

It was close upon forty years ago, when I was sub-editing the New Review, that it fell to my lot to write to Mr. E. F. Benson and ask whether he would "do" us an article upon "Country-House Parties." Both the subject suggested and the choice of author were my own ideas; and I remember thinking it rather a creditable decoration in my sub-editorial cap when Mr. Benson responded with a lively, chatty article, attracting the immediate attention which articles of that sort always do attract from journalists avid for topical "copy." For those were the days of Dodo, when the drawing-rooms of rural manors were fluttering with curiosity and protest. "Do people really do such things?" And "if they do, ought those who know to tell?" . . . "It is so bad for the shopkeepers and the servants to have such things to talk about!" . . . Faint echoes of forty years ago; they come drifting back on the breeze of memory, and once more the wind blows from the Benson quarter—a gentle, tonic autumn wind at first, stiffening with a touch of frost and winter bitterness towards the finish. For this "modern revue" of "as-we-are" is quite as much a peep-show of "as-we-were"; and, to be frank, the more distant the prospect the pleasanter the vision. It may be a weakness of middle-age, when the historian grows sentimental about the past, but "the weakness is so strong," as Celia says in Iolanthe, and the sentiment so universal that everyone but the prig and the pessimist must share them. At any rate, they lend to the earlier part of this richly reminiscent and very human book a charm of maturity and urbane grace which vanishes all upon a sudden when the author turns his searchlight upon the scene around him. To idealise the past is more companionable than to scold the present.

[...]

the last section of the book is noticeably inferior to the first.

[...] His "revue" is a keen and moving entertainment for the hour, and it would not be surprising if it took its place among those records from which a world that we shall not know will refresh its imagination of the days and the ordeals which were ours. If that happens, the picture it derives will be both illuminating and true. Indeed I cannot at the moment think where it would be likely to find a truer one.

~Arthur Waugh in The Bookman, 11/1932 [Very heavily edited: Mr Waugh's review is pompous, long-winded and decidedly boring.  You can read the whole thing online here.]

Mr Benson calls his book a modern revue, the fictional portion of which exemplifies the passing of the old Edwardian and Victorian regimes, as example by the Earl and Countess of Buryan and their ancestral home ~ Hakluyt. The Buryans have a son and heir whose war-time experiences intensify a natural tendency to decry family traditions and its inherited formalities. The week-end parties he introduces to Hakluyt are as incongruous as a clog dance with a stately minuet setting. He takes to marriage, followed by a course of extravagance and infidelity, culminating in a double divorce and the premature death of the Earl. The estate is disintegrated and sold, Hakluyt becoming a country club ~ tragically typical of the passing of the old order. The remaining chapters are mostly devoted to shrewd comments on types before, during and after the war, and a chapter is given to 'Eminent Men', which is Bensonian to a degree. Arthur Balfour and Archbishop Davidson are specially reviewed, and in the author's opinion their vocations should have been reversed. One incident in connection with the Archbishop and the non-publication of the third series of Queen Victoria's Leaves from my Diary will be news to many. The book is very readable, but over all hangs the shadow ~ Ichabod.

~Western Daily Press [UK], 12/11/1932

A delightfully urbane volume.

~The Evening Telegraph [Angus, UK], 06/12/1932

TWO GENERATIONS

GULF WIDENED BY WAR

Not long ago Mr E. F. Benson presented the public with As We Were, a Victorian peep-show. He has followed this with a modern revue, As We Are, in which ho discusses some of the changes which have occurred in England since the first decade of the century. There is in this volume an unevenness of writing and the 'we' of the title is a restricted we. The masses of English men and women were but indirectly concerned with much that is narrated. Often, however, the author attains a high level, the first chapter being exceptionally good. Here we have a picture of upper-class Edwardian society. The occasion is a week-end party given by Lord and Lady Buryan at their country seat, Hakluyt. The host and hostess belonged to that class,"with broad lands and exalted titles, who in their hearts knew that God was the real head of the Tory party.” As we follow the doings of this gathering we are given a glimpse of social traditions which were soon to disappear. This is Mr. Benson at his best. The author tells the story of the parable house, as he terms Hakluyt, and shows the changes that it underwent. After a party to celebrate her son's engagement Lady Buryan was puzzled, she was disquieted: the young generation, when in force like this, was very hard to understand, and she felt she had set up no kind of relationship with any of them." 'With time the gulf between the two generations widened. Indeed, when wo take leave of Hakluyt, its ancestral park has already been converted into golf links, croquet lawns and tennis courts, and tho house into a residential clubhouse. Possibly, had it not been for the war," says Mr. Benson, the habit and outlook of tho generation then passing through the decade of its twenties would not have grown more widely divergent from those of their fathers, than those of their fathers had been from tho generation that preceded them." The war changed everything. In the last 100 pages Mr. Benson turns to other topics. He discusse's A. J. Balfour and Archbishop Davidson. "It is quite conceivable," he might have rendered even greater services to their generation and beyond, if tho politician had devoted, himself to philosophy and the archbishop to politics." Various literary movements of to-day are analysed: the Book Society and the methods of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey and Arnold Bennett. There are in As We Are passages which the reader will wish to re-read as soon as he has finished the book.

~The New Zealand Herald, 10/12/1932

The successor to the widely popular As We Were, Mr. Benson doesn't think very highly of modern morals and manners, but his account of them ~ partly under the guise of fiction ~ is extremely readable. The best sections deal with the decline of a once great Victorian house.

~The Forum, 01/1933

As We Are ~ But Are We?

[...] As We Are, sets out to describe a period extending from just before the war down to our own day. The book is divided into two parts that differ as much in method as, I venture to suggest, in merit. In the last three chapters

Mr. Benson writes, as he did in his last book, about people and things of which he has positive knowledge, and about which he is attempting to say no more than he positively knows. His portraits of Mr. Balfour, of Archbishop Davidson, of Sir Ernest Cassel, of Sir Edgar Speyer, are not only delightful to read, but are contributions to history of the highest value. His account, by no means flattering, of recent developments in literature, is as stimulating a piece of criticism as we should naturally expect from one who was already a novelist of note in the nineties, and to whom years have brought no diminution of vigor. And the almost unrelieved pessimism of his final chapter, in which he takes stock of the present situation, must surely command our respect, if not necessarily our agreement.

But for the rest of the chapters, ten out of thirteen, Mr. Benson is experimenting with a new and different method. So anxious is he to depict in the most vivid colors the changes that have taken place since pre-war days, that he abandons the safe path of the historian, and peoples his stage with frankly imaginary characters. He takes a great country mansion, that he calls the Parable House, and proceeds to trace the fortunes of its inmates and of those intimately connected with them. But a parable house, and still more a parable family, are dangerous things for the historian to start creating. For it is the nature of parables not to deal with real people or things, but with types. And to be of any historical value, the types must be in the fullest sense typical. If Mr. Benson was writing a novel, it would be open to him to select the most exceptional characters, and present them in the most unique circumstances he could conjure up. It is no criticism of Dodo to say that the heroine is not a typical woman of the nineties. But it is an entirely legitimate criticism of Mr. Benson's parable puppets that they are not normal but newspaper types, that they are, in fact, just such striking abnormalities as make excellent copy and—let us concede at once—excellent reading.

[...] 

Mr. Benson no doubt could, if he had stuck to his role of historian, have given us a fascinating account of this diseased excrescence on the social system. But instead he takes up his unfortunate parable as if the whole youth of England were infected.

All the great majority of modest, well-mannered young people that one meets everywhere today might never have existed at all so far as Mr. Benson's parable is concerned.

If only Mr. Benson had not hit on this unfortunate device of a story that is neither history nor straightforward fiction, and had fashioned his first ten chapters on the model of his last three, how immeasurably this book would have gained in value as a chronicle of the time! Even as it is, with all its faults of distortion and exaggeration, it makes excellent reading, and if it is not exactly history, it is no doubt what will pass for history at some future day.

~Esmé Wingfield-Stratford in The Saturday Review, 07/01/1933 [Also heavily edited, for much the same reasons as Alec Waugh's was.  The whole thing is available online here.]

[…] Benson's novel [sic] ~ I think it is his masterpiece ~ is more up to date [than Archibald Marshall's Two Families]. His parable house is one of the stately homes of England, and its noble owners are not driven out of it by taxation. But when the old earl dies, heartbroken by a matrimonial scandal in his family which, as he thinks, has brought disgrace upon an honourable name, his son and the divorcée whom he has married refuse to live in it, and the mansion is broken up, to be turned into a country club.

This is what is happening all over the country. It is not only, perhaps not even chiefly, a question of money. When a great house like Benson's 'Hakluyt' comes into the market it is no longer snapped up by a profiteer.

~Dr W R Inge in 'The Stately Homes of England' in The Yorkshire Evening Post, 11/08/1937

In As We Are [Benson] contrasts the ways of the modern post-war world with those he knew before, without loud lamentation because he did not realise how much there was to lament. He observes and records an annoying shift in manners, but little more.

~Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991

[…] 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