Rex

Fiction ~ novel
Published March/April 1925
Approx. 109,000 words
(First read 12/04/2014) 

[21/04/14] It's now well over a week since I finished Rex and I'm still trying to think of something good to say about it ... 
[24/04/14] This isn't what you'd call a 'good' thing: it's just something that came to me while I was lying there racked with insomnia (etc.) at 3.30 this morning.  When EFB had finished writing Colin (1923) and Colin II (1925) he found he had about 100,000 words left over: these he published under the title Rex.
Okay, serious now.  The plot: Rex is a young chap (24 in this case) who wants to be a playwright.  When he's not living in London and working as a solicitor's clerk, or something like that, he lives with his parents in Norfolk, or somewhere like that, somewhere with a beach nearby.  He and the said father, who's Benson Father Type A (much older than his

wife; cold; forbidding; cantankerous, etc.) don't get on at all; in fact they live in a state of

constant hostility.  During one of his spells in London, Rex meets a woman, a divorcée of 32 years, a certain Mrs Winton; he doesn't reckon much to her at first, but is happy enough to live rent-free in her flat while she goes off on holiday for a couple of months.  The pater finds out about this; incensed that his son should be living off a woman, he confronts Rex; there's a Big Scene, after which he just has enough time to cut the troublesome son off without a penny, get the train home, have tea with his wife, during which he tells her the news, then drop dead on the drawing-room carpet.
This comes more or less exactly half way through the book ...
... and is the point at which it turns into just another Bensonian 'drama', with not the least shred of humour, about a not-especially-interesting young man pursuing a not-at-all-interesting career.

Rex has a best friend named Oliver who is ~ I'm not going to beat about the bush here ~ a poorly repressed homosexual who's in love with our hero.  His declarations to Rex, coming from a supposedly straight man, are toe-curlingly embarrassing.  Rex, having no great liking for anything other than his 'work', finds Oliver a nuisance at best, and they have a falling-out, then eventually a reconciliation of sorts.  So that's one thing that happens.
The other ~ the Big One ~ is that Rex, despite having no soul to speak of, gradually realizes he's 'in love' with his divorcée, and convinces himself that it's reciprocal.  In a scene which I can only describe as 'risible', he declares himself, and goes into a clinch with said woman; after which, she turns round¹ and says to him, "If you think I'm in the least bit in love with you, you're a total div ~ I was just messing with your head."²  Rex is devastated and has a kind of nervous breakdowny affair.  He says to Oliver, of Mrs Winton:

She's a spiritual Sadist, of great intellectual and physical refinement, but with a passion for the torture and heart's blood of nice young men like you and me.

No, like you, Rexie.
Does any good come of all this?  Well, yes and no.  Mainly the latter.  Our hero, who's been plugging away at plays all this time only to have them all rejected, suddenly realizes that he needs to pander to the public's love of cruelty and cynicism, so he dips his pen in bile and pens a piece about a cruel and heartless woman etc.  And it's a hit!  (The funny thing is that from what EFB tells us of Rex's work before and after his Road to Damascus experience, it's all exactly the same!)

Is that the end?  No, the end is that Mrs W conveniently develops some mysterious illness or other; Rex visits her on her deathbed; and he forgives her.
Rex is, not to put too fine a point to it, a hopeless farrago of idiotic plotting, unbelievable characters you couldn't care less about, dead ends, red herrings, extremely feeble attempts at humour, missed opportunities, turgid dialogue, creaking moralities (difficult to believe EFB and, for example, D H Lawrence even inhabited the same planet, let alone the same country and time) ~ in short, it's a mess. 


¹ Oops, this sounds rather like he was kissing the back of her head.  He wasn't.
² This isn't a direct quote, obviously. 




THE CRITICS

There are some writers whom it is somewhat difficult to place. Mr E F Benson is one of them. He can be ethereal one minute and mundane the next. You never quite know ~ when you hear that he has a new book on the stocks ~ whether he is going to describe the stars or discuss the slums ~ as witness his several David books and Dodo the Second. But whether it relates to the heavens above or the earth beneath, a new book by him is a great literary event. In Rex […] we are moved by high moral considerations at one moment and are brought down to such everyday problems as the evacuation of the Ruhr the next. The title of the book is the Christian name of its chief character.

Rex Goodwin and his doings and his sayings provoke thought and reflection. No ordinary man is this, and the study of his character as portrayed by Mr Benson not only provides delightful reading, but stern teaching. My advice to those who like to think while they read is ~ read Rex. It is a really great novel.

~'The Bookworm' in The Western Morning News and Mercury, 06/04/1925

It is a hard thing to say about the author of the once daring Dodo (by the way, isn't Dodo's granddaughter almost ripe by now for analysis?), but Mr. Benson is an incorruptible Victorian. One has a rather Rip Van Winklish feeling about the people of his latest novel—that they went to sleep sometime in that relative age of innocence, the naughty 'nineties, and on awaking in the age of flapper went on behaving themselves as though nothing had happened. Rex Goodwin is not really of this day and generation, but of Mr. Benson's own, and it was about the time of the Boer War that he should have come down from Cambridge with an Ibsen in his pocket and in his heart the determination to go and do likewise. Even the successful play that he finally writes with a cynical snarl, prostituting his art because a lady has been unkind, is the sort of play that was ridiculed by the young intellectuals of the beginning of the century.

If Rex is a Victorian, or at latest an Edwardian, heredity may account for it, for more Victorian figures than his parents could hardly be imagined—an irascible, unreasonable father, a sweet, docile mother, palpitating with love and sacrifice for both the superior, and mutually irreconcilable, males of her family. There may still be fathers like Rex's, but one prefers not to believe it.

After all, however, Mr. Benson has a perfect right, if he pleases, to postulate Victorian survivals in a post-war world; and in this case it happens that the play is not the thing (Rex could have been an insurance broker just as well as a dramatist), but the character of the playwright. In Rex Goodwin the author has drawn a character probably more unusual in fiction than in life— hard, glittering, intellectual, able to stimulate love, but seemingly incapable of feeling it. As foils and victims are his mother and a man friend of school and Cambridge days. The interplay of the three characters, with the preposterous father appearing and disappearing as a diabolus ex machina, is dexterously handled and interesting to watch. The experienced reader would no doubt guess the dénouement even had the publisher's blurb not obligingly given it away. Love cavalierly treated will have its revenge, and in Rex's case the vampire lady chosen as the instrument of vengeance makes a remarkably good job of it The conclusion is just the sort of thing that Rex and his sophisticated young intellectuals (of the 'nineties) would have become ribald over, and if the novel were ever filmed there would undoubtedly be a title about the 'cleansing fires of love'; but there it is,— and Mr. Benson has again given us an entertaining novel in his second best style.

~The Saturday Review, 20/02/1926

Mr Benson's novels are always so fresh, full of the sage of life, and Rex is one of those stories, that, once begun must be finished. It savours of undergraduate repartee being so rich in finesse. It concerns parental responsibility and filial devotion. Parents would learn from it much wisdom, and sons and daughters much understanding of their duty and age. It clearly shows that the demands made by age from youth should not be demanded so much as a right but received as the bouquets from human understanding and direction. Rex is a highly-strung boy who whilst ready to be friends is quite as keen to be at variance with his father. He wants a reason for every action demanded of him. He is a sort of Cassabianca standing always on the burning deck, and even when friendly is always on guard for an undiplomatic word which will give him his chance. Mr Benson has [gauged] the psychology of youth in aspersed fashion. The criticisms are healthy, affording a much desired mental tone. Rex has his problems to face and faces them, even maintaining his sang froid against all the conventions. He accepts the flat of a woman friend who bears all expenses, yet sees nothing wrong, until his mother sees his predicament. Rex is selfish, always taking, and at times he thinks it is too much trouble even to receive.

~The Daily Mail [Hull], 20/03/1925. A curiously incoherent bit of writing. When he says 'Cassabianca' does he mean 'Cassandra'?  Also: I get the distinct impression the reviewer only read about one third of the book.  EDIT, after doing a bit of that research thing: No, the reviewer meant Casabianca ~ he just didn't know how to spell it.

 

Colin II

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1925
Approx. 118,000 words
(First read 07/07/2002)

In his introduction to the 1994 Millivres edition of Colin II (pictured here), Mr Peter Burton recounts the following anecdote:

'I have just finished Colin,' Lord Halifax wrote to E. F. Benson on October 6th 1923.  'I have been deeply interested in it ~ first rate plot and most exciting.  Colin is a real devil ~ rather he is the devil ~ and yet one is interested in him and something more than interested [...]  Now I am longing for the sequel.  Please be sure to make the next volume as good as the first.'

I shared Lord H's sentiments exactly the last time I read Colin (13/01/2014).  I wonder if he shared the feelings of disappointment I had the last time I read the sequel (17/02/2014)¹ ...

After recapping the yarn of the original Colin's pact with the Divvel, EFB resumes the action a while after the close of the first novel.  Our Colin and his first cousin Violet have been married a couple of years and are the parents of a 14-month-old boy named Dennis.  We're then treated to another recap of everything that happened in Colin.  Here we have Problem No. 1 with Colin II: it is endlessly repetitive ~ if EFB isn't recapping what happened in Colin he's recapping what happened two pages ago.  I fully realize that recapitulation was one of Benson's besetting sins, but here he takes it to absurd and irritating lengths.
Not a lot happens in this section: Colin and Violet bicker; he flits back and forth to Bloody Capri; he reads a book written by his Elizabethan namesake and as a result takes up Satanism; he drives a frankly pretty stupid woman to suicide; and he flirts with his new Italian manservant Nino.  (EFB wearied of the last one so bumped him off.)  You have to hand it to Colin: he is ~ in my opinion ~ by far the most sexually ambiguous of all Benson's heroes.  In the following passage, when he and Nino have gone for a skinnydip in the lake at

Stanier, comes what I think is the most overtly gay bit of stuff in the whole œuvre:

Nino, but for a towel round his loins was still as Nature had made him.  But she had done it very nicely, and as he handed his master his clothes, Colin looked at his shapely shoulders and broad chest.

"You'd make an awfully good bronze statue, Nino," he said.  "You'd look nice in a museum, covered with verdigris, and with an arm and leg missing [...]

But enough of this frivolity ~ on with the show!
"Erm ... can we just back up a bit here, Ewie? ~ did you say 'Colin takes up Satanism'?"  Alas, yes.  This is the second Major Problem with Colin II.  Benson's

fascination with spiritualism I can cope with; his fixation with the god Pan, and attendant malarkey, is just about tolerable; but Satanism? ~ do me a favour.  But luckily he doesn't go overboard with it; his hero gradually loses interest too.  Anyway, Part II shifts the action on a dozen years and largely deals with Colin trying and failing to resist the charms of his adolescent son, who's a facsimile of David Blaize.  This internal struggle is probably the best, and the only believable, stuff in the whole book.  Then it ends.
Huh?  Yes, that's it: Then it ends.

Colin II is poor.  If you've read and enjoyed Colin, you ought to read it, if only to find out How Not To Write A Sequel.


¹ Mr Burton neglects to tell us the follow-up to the anecdote. 

THE CRITICS

The redemption of a gentleman whose soul had sought the devil and found him wanting.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 11/1925

Two years ago appeared Mr. Benson's Colin, with a preface announcing that the narrative would be completed in a later volume. Therefore, says a new note, Colin II must not be regarded as a sequel to Colin, but as the second half of that romance. We are not to take it as an afterthought. It is a tale of demoniac possession. The first Earl of Yardley was a handsome yokel who made Faust's contract with the Devil, became a darling of Queen Elizabeth, and was by her made Earl and endowed with a great estate. His bargain (duly signed in his own blood) is fulfilled. The Devil gives him material prosperity in return for worship and service. The Earl even practices the blasphemous rites of the Black Mass, and plans to raise a chapel to his master's honor. In every generation of his descendants there is found one to renew the bargain. The Colin of our story is the physical and spiritual counterpart of Elizabeth's Colin; radiant in beauty, and utterly committed to the worship of evil.

The first part of Colin told how the youth grew up, married, and by the accidental death of his elder brother, came into his great inheritance. Here the tale is taken up some years later. The young Earl is in his prime. He has great surface charm which he deliberately employs for his purposes. The only thing he fears is love. Very soon after her marriage, his young wife has discovered his true character: or rather, has discovered that there is more in him to fear than to love. Yet she still loves him, sure that there must be some secret goodness in him to have aroused her love. He treats her with mockery, when they are together; to her alone shows himself freely as a servant of hate and evil. Their one child, Dennis, much resembles Colin in body, but has his mother's nature. What ensues is a conflict between Colin's will to hate, and the natural love that stirs in him for his son. In the end the victory goes to love, and we are to suppose that the long devil-service of the house of Yardley is at an end.

A difficult theme for any story-teller, most difficult for one of Mr. Benson's light satiric bent. He says in his prefatory note: "The interval between the appearance of the two books has been longer than I anticipated, for I was not aware of the difficulties that lay ahead." The narrative bears signs of scrupulous and even painful effort. Indeed, this is matter for a Hawthorne or at very least a Powys. Mr. Benson could not fail ignominiously at anything. But he could hardly attempt a much less hopeful enterprise than the present one. The witty purveyor of social comedy cannot muster for this occasion a deep-going fancy or a sustained and stately manner. The story of Colin is, you may say, frank romance; but it is romance which just fails to convey the necessary if fleeting illusion of reality. Colin and Violet and Dennis never get to be more than brilliant figures of the theatre.

~H. W. Boynton in The Saturday Review (US), 10/10/1925