David Blaize and the Blue Door

Fiction ~ novel (children's)
Published 1918
(First read 20/12/2013)

For once I can't find anything to knock about an E F Benson novel.  David Blaize and the Blue Door is, of course, a book for kiddies, for little kiddies at that.  The eponymous hero is six years old; he goes to bed one night, passes through a blue door situated behind his pillow, and has a ~ fairly lengthy ~ series of adventures à la Alice through the looking-glass.  The adventures were humorous and quirky enough to keep me interested; the prose light and easy with just the right Oh do tell us a story, dear Uncle Fred! tone to them; the author doesn't pontificate or moralize (much); and the whole thing is very Edwardian, cozy 'n' comfy, even when, towards the end, it gets a bit 'soldiery'¹.
All in all, a jolly read.  Mind you, I daresay today's kiddiwinks would be bored shitless with it.  ["Don't you mean 'witless', Ewie?"]

I really think ~ not that anyone asked ~ that Benson should have written more for children, preferably on the subject of animals: this, and his sketches Jill's Cat (1916) and the pair 'Puss-Cat' and There Arose a King (both 1920) are not only charming but appear somehow both effortless and inspired, unlike so very much of his adult fiction.  Ah well, not a lot we can do about that, unfortunately.

P.S. DB & TBD should not be considered a prequel to David Blaize and David of King's: it stands up entirely on its own merits.

¹ I can imagine EFB's publishers saying to him, "Could you at least make some kind of acknowledgment that there's a war on? ~ you don't have to send David to Passchendaele or anything ... just a teeny little mention of soldiers or something, if only to let the parents know you're aware it's happening?"






THE CRITICS

Several years ago Mr. Benson wrote a story about this same David in his lively schoolboy stage. Here we have David as a small child. Jolly things happened to him when he went through the blue door, and only Alice in Wonderland saw more wonderful and topsyturvy queer sights than David.

~The Outlook (US; in 'Books for Young People' column), 26/11/1919

Up and Down (1918) and David Blaize and the Blue Door (1918) were composed during and after [Arthur Benson's] committal to a mental home, yet they are innocent of any reference to it, even by implication. This was probably quite deliberate, for both books are an evasion, a denial of the real and the important. […] David Blaize and the Blue Door is a book of fantasy for children, in the manner of Alice in Wonderland.  It enjoyed much success in its day, but now seems contrived.

~Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991.  (Hmmm, I wouldn't call it any more contrived than ~ to take a random example ~ Alice in Wonderland.) 

 

David Blaize and the Blue Door is an imaginative fantasy that departs radically from the more traditionally structured David Blaize school stories. […] Searching for answers to important questions that adults dismiss as nonsense, David finds behind the door a Wonderland-like realm where nonsense is taken seriously by the inhabitants. The Times Literary Supplement [19/12/1918] notes similarities to the Alice books, but observes that Benson “carries the sincerest form of flattery just far enough to be clear of any charge of attempted concealment; and he weaves it into a story that is, in its main lines, his own invention.” Benson's inventive dream-fantasy anticipates some of his later supernatural fantasies, exploring the nature of 'nonsense' in order to question the limitations of conventional notions of 'sense'.

~Carolyn Sigler in Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books, 1997

David of King's

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1924
Approx. 88,000 words
(First read 12/06/2012)

In which our hero David Blaize goes through university without doing any 'sap' because it's such 'rot'; instead he just 'gasses' and 'rags' and talks 'piffle' with his pals, most notably the 'ripper' Frank with whom he is, by all modern standards, very obviously in love; and everything is 'awfully jolly'.  Unfortunately Blaize is almost entirely a cypher ~ hidden depths are hinted at but never explored.  By the end of this he's no more 'mature' a human being than he was at the beginning of David Blaize (1916); and, apart from developing a vague notion to become a writer, the only thing he's actually learnt is how to study foreign languages without their seeming an absolute bore.  Ah! correction ~ the other thing he's learnt to do is babble exactly like Dodo, with equally unamusing results.  The babble of the minor character A.G., who Benson allows to

be as camp as he pleases (without, of course, ever being 'gay'), is far funnier by comparison.  It's a pity EFB never wrote a whole book about an A.G. figure.  Well, anyway, there's a lot of stuff to enjoy in David of King's, most of it, or rather almost all of it, supplied by the minor characters (A.G., Bags, Crowfoot, even David's still-embarrassing dad); and of course there's all the minutiae of life in early-1920s England.  But I couldn't really rate it higher than 5/10 ~ at the same time as I was quite enjoying it I was wishing they'd all shut the phucque up and go away.

For the same book 30 years younger, and less of an effort, see The Babe, B.A. (1896/97). 




THE CRITICS

This is Mr Benson's original David Blaize, only David is now at Cambridge. David of King's is, in short, the breeziest, happiest and, at the same time, the most convincingly truthful tale of undergraduate life that anyone has written. A real book ~ a remarkable book ~ a thoroughly enjoyable story.

~Hodder & Stoughton publicity blurb, so probably not a review at all, found in The Yorkshire Post for 21/05/1924

The charm of David as a child made Mr. Benson's first story about him delightful. There is charm still left in David the undergraduate, but his college life is described in a breathless and inchoate fashion.

 

~The Outlook (US), 22/10/1924

A pleasant picture of undergraduate life at Cambridge.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 11/1924

David Blaize

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1916
Approx. 98,000 words
(First read 12/11/2011)

There's a longish passage in his autobiographical Mother (1925) where Benson, unusually for him, talks at some length about the creation of one of his books, this one:

[...] I had long thought to myself [...] to write a school story not about cheats and bullies and sopranos, [but] to deal with affairs that conceivably have happened: to imagine a boy clean-minded and instinctively revolting from sentiment, who is yet absorbed in such passionate friendship as is characteristic of the fiery age. [...] this had churned in my head for years past, and now, just now, what completer escape from the tragedy and boredom [of the First World War] could a scribbler find?  It was to be boyhood againbefore war was invented or sex manifested, [...] when perfect bliss could be enjoyed with half-a-dozen racket balls and a friend, and when anyone over the age of twenty seemed already ripe for the winding-sheet¹.

And then, with half a page written, and the half page torn up, and a page written and the page torn up, the door at which I was thus rapping swung open, and let me in to a domain where I had no need to invent but only to remember and rediscover.  For there, in the forest of years in which my boyhood had wandered and lost itself, I seemed to find it again, quite alive and happy and ready to talk, and the whole business of recording appeared to be taking down the dictation of some external agent. [...]  Now the door of that storehouse was open and it was lit within and full of lively folk, and chapter after chapter came bubbling on to the paper without effort or selection or arrangement on my part.  The lively folk had settled it all among themselves: I had only to put down what they told me.  So, on most evenings for six months or more, I locked out the war and tiptoed back to where David and his friends were waiting for me. ...  When it was published, I found, with a thrill of amazed pleasure, that at last I had written something which my mother hailed and rejoiced in².

¹ My bolding to highlight the reference to Benson's Golden Age.
² In a passage shortly before this one he'd been complaining ~ well, kind of ~ that his mother never liked any of his books.  For that episode see the entry for Mother.

Other critics

This is actually EFB's old pal Hugh Walpole.

The latest of our novelists to succumb to the temptations of the school story is Mr. E. F. Benson; and I am pleased to add that in David Blaize (Hodder and Stoughton) he seems to have scored a notable success. It is the record of a not specially distinguished, but entirely charming, lad during his career at his private and public schools. Incidentally, as such records must, it becomes the history of certain other boys, two especially, and of David's relations with them. It is this that is the real motive of the book. The friendship between Maddox and David, its dangers and its rewards, seems to me to have been handled with the rarest delicacy and judgment. The hazards of the theme are obvious. There have been books in plenty before now that, essaying to navigate the uncharted seas of schoolboy friendship, have foundered beneath the waves of sloppiness that are so ready to engulph [sic]  them. The more credit then to Mr. Benson for bringing his barque triumphantly to harbour. To drop metaphor, the captious or the forgetful may call the whole sentimental—as if one could write about boys and leave out what is the greatest common factor of the race. But the sentiment is never mawkish. There is indeed an atmosphere of clean, fresh-smelling youth about the book that is vastly refreshing. Friendship and games make up the matter of it; there is nothing that I could repeat by way of plot; but if you care for a close and sympathetic study of boyhood at its happiest here is the book for your money. Finally I may mention that, though in sympathetic studies of boyhood the pedagogue receives as a rule scant courtesy, Mr. Benson's masters are (with one unimportant exception) such delightful persons that I can only hope that they are actual and not imaginary portraits.

~Punch, 12/04/1916

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