Dodo's Progress

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Lady's Realm, May 1897, as The Progress of Princess Waldeneck*
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 5,100 words
(First read 29/05/1992) 

"Pull yourself together, woman!"

This story picks up exactly where the previous one, The Return of Dodo (1896), ended.  The day after her triumphant relaunch into London Society, Dodo goes to see her old pal Edith to try and make friends again.  During their interview Her Dodiness has a genuine moment of weakness: she breaks down in tears ('hopeless, desolating sobs', in fact) and tells Edie about the state of her horrible marriage to Prince Waldeneck.  Dodo and Edith are reconciled ~ well, whoop-di-doo.

As I said in my write-up for The Return of Dodo, I suspect EFB may have had a serialization in mind when he produced these two stories.  The fact that Lady's Realm left a gap of six months between the first and the second suggests that they weren't keen on the idea ~ if indeed it was an idea.  As far as I know, Dodo's next outing was the first sequel novel Dodo the Second (1914), so Fred may have realized that the whole world in fact wasn't itching to know what happened to his creation next.
 

* Why the editor of Desirable Residences felt he needed to change the title is anyone's guess. 



QUOTABLES
Dodo explains to Edith why it was she was swept away from marrying Jack at the end of Dodo: A Detail of the Day:

'I was blind, deaf, dumb: I could not, I was morally incapable of resisting.  If Waldeneck had told me to throw myself out of the window instead of coming to Paris with him, I should have done it.  I might have begged for a minute to put on my hat, but I should have done it.  He is strong ~ good heavens! he is strong.  You don't understand what that means ~ to find someone stronger than yourself, and who can beat down resistance as an iron bar can beat down a weaker thing.'

Yeah, whatever, Dodes.

THE CRITICS

[Mr Anthony Hope Hawkins, whose somewhat laboured attempt in a recent lecture to draw a clear distinction between a romance and a novel was not very successful, intends to produce a sequel to his romantic novel The Prisoner of Zenda. It is to be hoped that he will not afford such] an object-lesson of the dangers of 'continuations' as Mr E. F. Benson has lately offered us with regard to Dodo.

~The Morning Post, 20/05/1897

Number 12

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Eve, 10th May 1922
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 2,000 words
(First read 22/05/1992) 

Our Unnamed Narrator has always dreamed of living in a particular house in a particular London square.  He eventually gets his wish, moves in, discovers there's a ghost in residence, and moves out.  That's it.  It's as brief and sketchy as that.  There's nothing more to be said of it.
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991).

The Return of Dodo

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Lady's Realm, December 1896
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 5,400 words
(First read 15/05/1992) 

At the end of Dodo the novel (1893) the eponymous witch, having pretty much ditched her fiancé Jack (who'd been pining for her throughout the novel, despite her previously marrying his cousin) at the altar and taken as her second victim-I-mean-spouse the Austrian diplomat Prince Waldeneck, sent herself into a kind of self-imposed exile.  In The Return of Dodo ~ unsurprisingly ~ she makes a triumphant re-entry two years later onto the London Society scene, after being invited to open a charity bazaar¹.  The story deals with this comeback: the success of Dodo and, for the titillation of the Lady's Realm readers, the concomitant failure of her marriage.
I suspect ~ but have no evidence ~ that EFB may have intended this as the opener of a magazine serial².  Dodo is okay in small doses like this, particularly when she doesn't actually show her face till halfway through the story.


¹ It's a great pity she didn't stay in Paris just six more months and attend this ill-fated bazaar, then I might not have had to wade through the two sequel novels.
² For more on this see the entry for the next Dodo story, The Progress of Princess Waldeneck [aka Dodo's Progress], which followed in May 1897 in the same magazine.



QUOTABLES
A favourite joke of EFB's:

Dodo had been out of England for two years, and it might have been supposed that London, or rather that momentous fraction of it called 'All London', would have entirely forgotten about her.

As I said earlier, the first half of the story, before Dodo turns up, is actually quite good fun.  In this passage Benson has a little dig at the Society charity bazaar phenomenon:

All London had suddenly realized that the greatest of all things was charity, and it had pricked its fingers terribly over the discovery.  Everybody brought little silk bags out to dinner with them, in which they kept their work, and after dinner sewed away diligently at squares of silk bedcovers and embroidered stoles.  [...] Several young men even followed the fashion, and sat them chastely at their needlework in the manner of Penelope, and talked about rucking and tacking.

Finally, EFB slips into Dickens mode with the woman who was to have been the star attraction of the bazaar until Dodo deigned to accept her invitation:

[At the bazaar] no change was to be given, no silver taken, no untitled lady except Miss Anastasia M. Blobs, who was the rage just then ~ she could whistle through her fingers ~ was going to hold a stall [...]

The Bridge Fiend

Fiction ~ playlet/dialogue
Published in Lady's Realm, November 1903
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 3,100 words
(First read 13/05/1992)  

As with others of EFB's 'special interest' stories¹, you don't absolutely have to be an expert or at least an initiate ~ but it would certainly help.  All it is is a game ('rubber') of bridge in dialogue form.  There's a bit of the usual epigrammatic banter between Lady Witham, the fiend of the title, and her pal Mrs Spencer at the beginning, and the interplay between the four players ~ the two men turn out to be far more vapid and distracting chatterboxes than the ladies ~ is vaguely amusing, but if you happen not to know how to play bridge², about 80% of it will go over the top of your head.  It is at least fairly brief.





¹ The ones I can think of off-hand are George's Secret (1894: fishing) and The Valkyries (1903: cretinous operas).
² I tried teaching myself once but had to give it up due to a lack of: (1) three other people to play with; (2) an ability to absorb anything in How To Play Bridge; and (3) an overwhelming sense of tedium.  Yes, I've always felt at something of a disadvantage when reading E. F. Benson, where the game often features pretty highly.



QUOTABLES
After dinner and before they sit down to their game, the bridge fiend and friend comment on the trials of house-party life.  The fiend speaks thusly:

Really, I think that to join in a flow of polite conversation is the most fatiguing thing that can happen to one ~ so enfeebling to the intellect, too, especially sitting in the open air.  I have been flowing, leaking rather, for the last hour and a half.  Well, a rubber will restore us, I hope.

Doggies

Fiction ~ short story
Published in The Windsor Magazine, January 1928; collected in Desirable Residences (1991)
Approx. 3,700 words
(First read 09/05/1992) 

Alas! this is the last of the Amy Bondham stories¹.  In this one she's come into a vast sum of money from an eccentric uncle and is determined to put it to best use to advance her 'career'.  Devoted husband Christopher longs for a yacht and has a stab at persuading his seasickness-suffering better half of the advantages that would accrue from swanning about

the Med between Monte Carlo and Naples.  Obviously, though, Mrs B has a better idea, that of taking a house in the country for the winter so she can keep in with her County friends.

'But I should be expected to hunt,' said Christopher in some dismay.  'So would you.'

'Well, I don't see why you shouldn't hunt,' said she.  'Anyhow you can see what it's like first, and then if you feel you can't manage it, you can easily get out of it.  If there's a meeting of the hunt ~ don't they call it a meeting? ~ anywhere close, you can have a cold or be obliged to go up to London.  As for me, I shall certainly say that I don't hunt, but why should that cut me off from all my friends?

And so it comes to pass.  Christopher spends a large part of the winter on the train back and forth between Leicestershire and London while The Good Lady tries to inveigle herself into hunting circles.  Alas!² Amy Bondham is, like her more famous cousin Lucia, a hilarious blend of the deeply cunning and the woefully ignorant and ... horrors! she blows it!  I won't say any more as the whole thing is a hoot I'll leave you to discover (if you haven't already read it).  Available in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991).


¹ I mean "the last one I've revisited recently" rather than the last chronologically, though it 's that too.
² Oops, must stop saying that.

Entomology

Fiction ~ short story
Published in The Windsor Magazine, August 1925
Approx. 3,900 words
(First read 05/05/1992) 

An Amy Bondham story.  In this one our social-climbing heroine, "whose career was to collect round her all who were famous for intelligence, artistic ability, social distinction, or even birth," sets her sights on the prophet of the Next Big Thing*, by name Mr Vincent Fleet who happens to be spending Easter at Slepe House in the town of Tillingham.  Foregoing her own usual Easter bash in Le Touquet, Mrs B takes herself off to Tillingham where she finally succeeds in bagging her man, or capturing her moth, to look at it another way.  But is her moth the right moth?  Highly recommended, to lovers of Mapp/Lucia and Benson's other Mapp-and-Lucia-y stuff.  Available in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991).

* 'New Psychology': it doesn't matter what it is.  

The Godmother

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Nash's Illustrated Weekly, 6th December 1919
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 4,700 words
(First read 04/05/1992) 

Evie Shuttleworth seemingly has everything a 40-year old Benson widowlady could wish for: flawless and entirely natural good looks; a 'delicious doll's-house in Mayfair'; a flourishing hat shop; a talent for producing crayon portraits of her many friends ("Her women all looked thoughtful but dewy, and the men all looked like women"); a boy at Eton; and so on.  Naturally, though, she wants more: she wants ~ though EFB is never so vulgar as to put it in so few words¹ ~ more money, and she wants to hook herself a sound second husband.

E.S. picks V.J. up at the Ritz

With the first aim in mind she 'adopts' Violet Jordan, a stinking-rich widow recently arrived from Canada², and makes her her protégée, introducing her to everyone worth knowing, finding her a country house, etc.³  Unfortunately in doing so she inadvertently introduces Violet to the dull faceless diplomat she's set her 'heart' on as Hubbie No. 2.
The problem with The Godmother is that it's really all situation and no comedy: it toddles along fairly amiably, and not at too great a length, but isn't as funny as it might have been if Benson had been able to think up some plot for it. 


¹ In fact I'm just assuming this is her motive: I can't think of any other.
² Yes, Canada.
³ Benson reprised this theme in one of his 'Old London' novellas, Friend of the Rich (1937).










QUOTABLES
Evie decides to adopt Violet:

With an insincerity that was as characteristic of her as her beautiful bones, she put it to herself that here was this really charming little woman quite alone [...] in London where, as she so naïvely said, she did not know a soul.

Evie's obscure motives ~ this quote follows on directly from the last:

It was clearly, then, the part of any decent Christian to attempt to brighten so dreary a situation.  That there might conceivably be other lonely women in London, without the alleviation of the Ritz and rivers of diamonds, had not previously presented itself to Evie's mind nor roused the Christian spirit, but it was never too late to begin.  Besides (here sincerity popped out its head like a Jack-in-the-box), who knew what insidious people might get hold of Mrs Jordan [...]?

Evie apparently doesn't scruple to resort to bribery to get rid of the woman who would have been Violet's 'godmother' if she hadn't been delayed in Paris:

The companion from Paris, so luckily delayed in the first instance, proved to be no more than the widow of some perfectly unknown baronet, ... [who] after the briefest sojourn in town [...] returned to Paris with a suitable cheque, astonished to find how London had changed since her day. 

When Greek Meets Greek

Fiction ~ short story
Published in The Windsor Magazine, December 1926
Approx. 2,700 words
(First read 02/05/1992) 

An Amy Bondham story.  In this one Amy's social-climbing rival bears the splendiferous name of Theodosia Foxinglove.  Having failed to wangle herself an invitation to Theo's 'Elizabethan Fair' (now where have we heard that before?), Amy resolves to get herself into it at any cost.  Meanwhile 'The Foxinglove' is panting to have a real-life princess (it's that trusty Princess Isabel again!) attend her bash.  La Bondham hatches the cunning plan to 'accidentally' send Theodosia a note she's written to the princess saying how delighted she is the royal personage will be able to attend for dinner on the night of Foxy's fayre.   Needless to say, this Machiavellucian ploy pays off and once again Amy scores the point.  Delightful fun.  Available in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991).

The Peerage Cure

Fiction ~ short story
Published in The Windsor Magazine, July 1926
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories, 1991
Approx. 2,900 words
(First read 01/05/1992) 

Another story starring that most blatant of social climbers, Mrs Amy Bondham.  Mrs B is having a break from her 'literary, artistic and histrionic friends' (see Entomology and others) and is concentrating on blue-bloods.  Through sheer persistence she's finally managed to bag herself an invitation to the Duchess of Whitby's 'magnificent Norman pile'.  Unfortunately she overdoes it on the ice-skating rink at Doncaster Castle, but is quite happy to come home and develop pleurisy followed by pleuro-pneumonia: it was worth it.  Her devoted (and really rather nice) husband ~ 'Christophero mio': ring any bells? ~ tries to bring her back from the delirium in which her mind wanders constantly over her recent triumph, until finally he hits on the ideal thing: he reads to her out of Burke's Peerage.  That's it: it doesn't sound like much because it isn't much ~ but it's great fun, as are all the Amy Bondham stories.