The Everlasting Silence

Fiction, kind of ~ short story or prose poem or something
First published in Lady's Realm, January 1898
Collected in Sea Mist, 2005
(First read 13/02/2015)


The story ~ such as it is ~ goes something like this: before God created Eve to keep Adam occupied, his best pal was ... erm ... a thing called Silence, and the pair of them had a whale of a time together.  Now Eve, being a woman like what she was, talked, and Silence didn't like this, so took umbrage ... or something ... then spent the next few thousand years observing the Sons of Adam and their wicked ways ... until ... erm ... did I mention that Silence looked rather like the Sphinx? ... or may actually have been the Sphinx? ... well anyway, the centuries passed and Silence carried on with his dudgeon, then one day he was dug up ~ okay that's enough ...
What to make of this muddy twaddle? what can the gentle readers of Lady's Realm have made of it in 1898? what is the point of it? what was EFB thinking?  Perhaps it's best just to draw a veil of silence over it ...

Thorley Weir

Fiction ~ novel
Published September 1913 (previously published in serial form in Cornhill magazine)
Approx. 84,000 words
(First read 25/10/2014)

Thorley Weir is the story of an art patron's 'adoption' of two young geniuses, one a painter, the other a playwright, and of his attempts to win the hand in marriage of a young lady.  And, or maybe or, it's the story of a young painter's adoption by an art patron, and of his love for a young lady.  Then again it's the story of a young playwright's adoption by an art patron, and of his subsequent disillusionment.  At the same time it's the story of a hypochondriac, his elderly nymphomaniac mother, and his virginal young daughter.  Have I mentioned the pinkish donkey? ~ it's also the story of a pinkish donkey.  What I'm trying to convey is that, like several other E F Benson novels, the thing lacks focus.
The art patron (Arthur Craddock) is an interesting character, as well as being not at all EFB's type ~ we're constantly reminded that he's fat, fifty-ish, very pale, with soft hands and black hair worn in a comb-over, etc.  A professional art critic of long-standing, discovering untapped genius is his favourite sideline after fleecing Americans out of their bucks for British art.  He's so inured to devious business-dealing that the habit has spilt over into his private life.  Despite all this, he is at heart a good egg, and certainly a shrewd, generous, and enthusiastic promoter of young talent.

Not that kind of painter, dummy

The painter (Charles Lathom) is merely Benson Male Type A, the devastatingly handsome and youthful genius, so it's only natural that EFB should be most drawn to him.  Unfortunately, as we all know, Benson Male Type A is only matched in dullness by Benson Female Type A: the impossibly sweet and virginal young gel.
The love interest (Joyce Wroughton) is Benson Female Type A.
Joyce's dad (Philip W) is the perfect Bensonian hypochondriac: petty, mean-spirited, niggardly, self-obsessed, querulous, etc.  He's also very funny.
Philip's mum (for some reason called Lady Crowborough) is another in EFB's long line of 'spunky' old dames, don't ya know, much given to talking in what passed for slang in the 1860s, and to flirting with chaps a quarter her age.  She isn't very funny.
The pinkish donkey [see below under Quotables] is part of the hired help when Arthur, Philip, Joyce and Lady C are having a totally unnecessary holiday in Egypt about halfway through the proceedings.

"That's not really 'ugly', is it, Ewie?"

Who does that leave?  Ah yes! ~ the most interesting character in the book.  Frank Armstrong, the playwright, is so rara an avis in the works of E F Benson that he doesn't even have a Type.  That other struggling young dramatist Rex Whatsisname (of Rex fame) is a mere shadow next to Frank, a petulant-brattish scribbler.  Frank is ~ believe it or not ~ an Angry Young Man, forty years before his time.  Not only is he ugly on the outside¹, he's a seething mass of violent mood swings, careering through life with a massive chip on each shoulder, believing that the world owes him a living, that his patron, despite launching his career very nicely indeed thankyou, is the embodiment of evil, etc.  Ah if only Benson had written Frank rather than the dreary Rex!
The plot goes like this: Arthur realizes he's getting on and lonely so falls in love with Joyce; at the same time she falls in love with Charles, Arthur's new protégé, and he with her; Arthur tries to put her off him but fails; Charles and Frank become good pals, then discover the 'truth' about Arthur, that he's attempted to blacken Charles' name so as to win Joyce's hand, and that he's been exploiting them ~ a bit; Charles forgives him; Frank doesn't; The Happy End.
If you're planning on reading Thorley Weir², prepare yourself for a long leisurely read in which virtually nothing happens and what does happen is blown out of all proportion.
Needless to say, I quite enjoyed it! ~ I've made it sound a lot worse than it is.
It's available online here.

¹ His ugliness, as Fred never tires of telling us, seems largely to consist of his having a big black beard.
² I should probably add that the actual weir in the novel might as well not be there: it doesn't drown or even almost drown anyone.

QUOTABLES
EFB goes into homoerotic overdrive describing Charles' portrait of his brother Reggie diving into the river:

 […] his face and the side of his body seen almost in profile were brilliantly illuminated by the glint from the shining pool below him. But underneath these surface lights there had to be indicated the building and interlacement of the firm muscles and supple sinews of his body.

 Arthur Craddock commits the sin of Not Being Young:

It was not until he had walked as far as Hyde Park Corner that he knew he was waging a war instead of merely conducting a child's education. He was at war, he with his obese person and half-century of years, with the generation that had sprung up after him, and was now realising the zenith of its youthful vigour. Already it trod on his heels, already he seemed to hear in his ears its intolerable laughter at his portly progress, and his first acute attack of middle-age stabbed him like the lumbago from which he occasionally suffered.

A telling image of Charles:

To-day he had no touch of [guilt or anxiety]: he felt entirely untrammelled: his soul stood nude and unimpeded, like some beautiful runner or wrestler. There was nothing to hinder its leap and swiftness.

On holiday in Egypt the rather prissy Craddock and the rather prissy Philip are selecting their donkeys for a trip into the desert ~ this is the comic highlight of the book:

[Craddock] highly approved Philip's penchant for the pinkish donkey, and selected for himself a small one that resembled in some essential manner a depressed and disappointed widow. His large legs almost touched the ground on either side of it, he could almost have progressed in the manner of the ancient velocipede.

Craddock on Philip Wroughton [same scene as previous quote]:

Till he heard this rapid staccato speech, Craddock felt he had never really known what egotism meant. Here it was in excelsis: almost grand and awe-compelling in this gigantic and inspired exhibition of it … crowning it “Do not leave my donkey, Mohammed.”

Charles and Joyce wax 'philosophical':

She was silent a moment.

“In a way an injury done to oneself is easier to forgive than an injury done to somebody else.”

Charles rudely interrupted.

“Painfully noble sentiment?” he enquired.

“Yes; perhaps it was. Let us be careful: we might die in the night if we became more edifying.”

Quite. 


THE CRITICS

Mr Benson at his cheeriest. An excellent novel.

~The Times, quoted in a newspaper ad of 19/09/1913.  (I suspect this reviewer hadn't read the whole novel: it's certainly not my idea of 'cheery'.)

This is very good. Written in a light and cheerful vein, in a spirit of delightful comedy.

~Daily Chronicle, quoted in a newspaper ad of 19/09/1913.  (Ditto)

The best book he has published for years.

 ~Daily News, quoted in a newspaper ad of 19/09/1913

Those who want the safely pleasant should put down Mr E. F. Benson's new novel, Thorley Weir. It is very like the other Benson books, but quite without the uncomfortable attempts to deal with big problems that has spoiled the later ones. The heroine is a dear, and there is an even dearer old lady, nominally eighty, but essentially about eighteen ~ a Mrs Wroughton.

 ~Derby Daily Telegraph, 20/09/1913

Mr E. F. Benson in Thorley Weir has added another success to his list of fine novels. No one else gives us quite the same sort or the same quality of books. They abound with gaiety, and they are full of delightful people. There is always a fascinating romance, and as a rule charming dissertations on music and painting. His subjects vary much, and he never can be charged with monotony, yet his novels are all of the Society type, and his characters always include one delightful, inconsequential old lady, who is thoroughly welcome once again in Thorley Weir. As a writer, too, Mr Benson is by no means always equal. Indeed, he can at time be very thin, but Thorley Weir belongs to the best of his works.

'Thorley Weir' is the name of the house in which the heroine, Joyce Wroughton, and her father live, and into the district there come on holiday Charles Lathom and his brother, Reggie. The former is a painter of very considerable promise. While visiting the Wroughtons, the villain of the book, Mr Craddock, a connoisseur in art and the drama, sees Charles's work, and, acting as a 'middleman', purchases his pictures, and makes a business agreement with him, very much to his own advantage. The same thing happens to Frank Armstrong, an unknown but talented dramatist. Charles Lathom and Craddock are both in love with Joyce, but Craddock does not scruple about disparaging his rival to Mr Wroughton, so that the door of Thorley Weir may be closed to him. Here, however, comes in Mrs Wroughton, Mr Benson's favourite type of elderly lady referred to. She helps to disentangle the situation, and the end is interesting. The book is fresh and bright, and written with all the peculiar charm which the author can infuse into his novels.

~The Aberdeen Daily Journal, 22/09/1913

Now that Mr. A. C. Benson has found his power as a novelist, it is open to Mr. E. F. Benson to step into his place, and betake himself to a gentle philosophy. It might be a good experiment. Mr. Benson has changed much as a writer of late years: his novels are no longer of the school of Dodo. We are far less concerned with what Mr. Benson's puppets do, or even with what they think; we look rather for his view of this world of ours, for his opinion of men and women, for his knowledge of art and music and the drama—in short, for his gentle philosophy of life. Thorley Weir is good; it shows no sign of that exhaustion and exaggeration which are the danger of the prolific novelist; it has a good central plot woven round the super-dealer in the arts, the trafficker in men's brains, who meets his final defeat at the hands of the young dramatist and the young artist; it has a pleasant, out-of-door, early-morning setting of the river and loose-strife and kingfishers; it has some charming pieces of writing, and it has several of Mr. Benson's early friends, and ours, thinly disguised under new names. Here is Lady Sunningdale as Mrs. Wroughton, and Hugh Grainger has given up his music and taken to art; here is Bensonian dialogue and freshness and freedom. The book has its faults, of course. Mr. Benson must beware of exaggeration in his drawing of character, for Philip Wroughton's neurotic tempers are on the edge of farce, and the atmosphere of farce is by far too coarse and heavy for Mr. Benson's spirit of pure comedy; we wonder why such a word as "eyne" should find a place in his vocabulary; and we grow almost a little weary over the repeated transports of the young artist. But, when all is said, it is Mr. Benson, and Mr. Benson at his best, which is good enough for the most blasé reader of novels.

~The Spectator, 04/10/1913

A novel kind of a villain is the 'middleman' in this story. He is a connoisseur in art and also knows a lot about the stage. So when he finds a struggling young artist or play-writer of genius, he pets him, buys his first work, and then exacts an option-contract by which he gets future good work at a trifling price. He buys masterpieces, too, from friends after he has bargained to resell them to rich collectors at an enormous profit. All 'within the law,' but mean and tricky. The novel has a delightful old lady and a pretty love story. It is not Mr. Benson's best book, but it reads easily and is amusing.

~The Outlook (US), 01/11/1913

With pleased marvel at the freshness of a pen which has to its credit twenty-eight successful novels, I have been reading Thorley Weir, Mr Benson's latest. In his father's house were many Bensons, four being regular and prolific contributors to the literature of the day. The author of Thorley Weir is E. F. Benson, who, some years ago, captured the attention of the town by the publication of Dodo, a novel which the lady whom the public insisted had served as lay-figure for the heroine* once told me she had never read. The scene of his new story shifting to Egypt, the glow and colour of which flood his pages, Mr Benson writes how the lover of the charming Joyce told her of Sen-mut, the architect of Deir-al-Bahari, to whom the queen showed all her heart, and entrusted with the secrets of her will, and how Thothmes, on his mother's death, erased from the inscriptions all mention of the low-born fellow. [the writer then wanders off onto a different subject and never comes back to this one]

~'Our correspondent' in the 'London Letter' column of Gloucester Journal, 28/02/1914 [from BNA]. * i.e. Margot Asquith, née Tennant (1864-1945).

The title of Mr. Benson's new book is not descriptive, for, as usual, he is concerned with the development of one character, the presentation of a certain type of man who, this time, is embodied in a middle-aged, stout, and not overattractive Arthur Craddock. Craddock possesses discriminating taste and judgment, seeming to know by instinct the best in literature, music, and art, and particularly what would be commercially available. He utilizes this power to bind to himself the

young artist who has not yet 'arrived,' and so makes for himself a fortune and reputation. When he decides to win Joyce Wroughton, however, his methods become involved and his means questionable. Two of Craddock's victims hasten the catastrophe that finally reveals his underhand methods and duplicity. He overreaches himself, and Joyce, in spite of Craddock and his contracts, is allowed to be happy with the young artist Charles.The strength of the story lies in its clear and subtle analysis of the different characters, whose development presents to us many interesting and exciting episodes.

~The Literary Digest, 21/03/1914

Thorley Weir (1913) is a simple romance and nothing more. No titled ladies, no society chatter, no supernatural goings-on: it is the story of an artist who finds fame, and of the girl he loves, restored to him after a series of understandings.

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

Account Rendered

Fiction ~ novel
Published February 1911
Approx. 107,000 words
(First read 09/07/2014)

The first character we meet in Account Rendered is Mrs Winthrop, a middle-aged woman with a 'piercingly aromatic' temper and a face which "looked rather as if hens had trampled it, and it had subsequently been raked over" (a wonderfully witty description ... though I must admit I can't actually picture what that looks like!)  Mrs W is far and away the best thing in the whole book and ~ yes, you guessed it, she's just a minor character who pops in occasionally.
Ah well.
Our heroine Violet Allenby, on the other hand, is just your standard EFB Young Lady Type 1: so nauseatingly saintly that you feel like reaching into the book and twanging her bra strap (or worse).  The orphaned Violet is nanny to the Winthrops two little kiddies, aged about 8 and 9 and known to all as 'the imps'.  Mr & Mrs W also have a grown-up son ~ no, no-one ever explains why they chose to have two additional kids after a gap of 15 years or so ~ named Jack (Young Gent Type 1): army, curly hair,

Spot the budgie

broad shoulders, strong swimmer, the usual stuff.  In one another's presence he and Vi feel stirrings within their nethergarments but alas! she's too poor even to consider falling in love with.  So he trots off back to Egypt where, presumably, he's on guard duty at the Pyramids.
Enter Lady Tenby (dwgr) and her son Lord Ted¹.  The latter also feels unwonted emotional upheavals in his trizers when gazing upon Vi's gorgeous halo, puppies, and wings ~ well, when he's not too busy playing golf, that is.  But his mater, though well-disposed towards our latterday Teresa of Avila, also wouldn't countenance his marrying a pauper.
Then whammo! ~ Violet very conveniently, totally out of the blue, and for no good reason whatever, inherits a colossal fortune: I believe it was £1.5M, which in today's money would be around £90M!!!  This, obviously, is where the plot starts to ... I was going to say 'thicken' but 'form a thin surface film' would be more appropriate.  Overnight Vi becomes everyone's flavour of the month ~ I wonder why.
Anyway, to cut it short: Lady Tenby schemes to keep Vi and Jack apart and get her to marry Ted, which she does.  Jack comes back from Egypt and he and the Sainted One² realize they still love one another.  Lady T's true character and dastardly scheme are revealed to all parties involved and ... are you ready for this? ... Ted, realizing that his wife will never love him and he'll forever be de trop, decides to do the noble thing and throw himself off a cliff.  The End.

Account Rendered is extremely humdrum routine EFB turgid-romance fare.  It's far far far too long; the pace is absolutely elephantine; the four main characters are no more than types; and the ending is as preposterous as anything Marie Corelli (the butt of so many Benson jokes) ever wrote.
This is the part where I say "Having said all that, I quite enjoyed it", isn't it?  Having said all that, I quite enjoyed it.


Not to be confused with the short story To Account Rendered (1925).  The whole book is available online here.

¹ It's only just this second occurred to me what a daft name Ted Tenby is.
² Okay, I owe Violet a kind of apology: when she comes into her stupendous fortune it turns out she's no better than your average lottery winner, splashing out on fancy houses, flash cars, fur coats, jewels, etc.  Admittedly a fair bit of it is for her best mate Lady T ~ but not all of it.  And EFB seems completely unfazed by, seems not even to notice, her shocking vulgarity.


THE CRITICS

From Mr Bennet's brilliant and realistic fantasy [The Card], I turn to the work of a more popular, but certainly less important author. Mr E F Benson has written many excellent stories in his time, but unfortunately his time is not the present. His last few books have shown an almost progressive decline from the sparkle and brilliancy ~ even though it was a little nuretricious [sic! ~ presumably he meant meretricious] ~ that marked Dodo and the stories of five years or so since. For Mr Benson is becoming dull. He has become the preachers [sic] and now writes rather 'goody-goody' tales which only his long experience as a writer and his undoubted ability save from absolute tedium.

There is really only one character in Account Rendered and she is over-done while the grand finale is crude and unconvincing melodrama. Frank, the young soldier, and Lord Tenby who commits a kind of suicide which would be the last thing that stolid young nobleman would ever have thought of doing in real life, are mere puppets while the heroine, the governess who becomes a millionairess and a peeress, is little more life-like. There remains Lady Tenby who begins as just another voluble Lady Sunningdale, apparently a prolix good-hearted woman, and who ends as the villainess of the piece.

[...]

Mr Benson's mannerisms are growing upon him. In ordinary conversation ordinary people do not call each other 'dear' whenever they speak. We have 'dear Violet', 'dear Aunt Maggie', 'dear Mr Frank', with exasperating frequency. Mr Benson can do so very much better than this. Mrs Winthrop, who disappeared just as he [sic] was interesting me, is a proof of this as indeed are several of the early chapters before the play began to get out of the author's hands. Let Mr Benson put aside his pen for two years and take a long rest. Then he might give us something worthy of his early promise.

~'A. C. W. L.' in Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 23/02/1911

Archbishop Benson had three sons, all of them writers. Edward Frederick, the author of the present volume, has come to be known as the Dodo man. The number of books to his credit is large. In this volume Mr. Benson has told a very conventional love story. His real strength lies in his character sketches. The book opens with a really delightful description of an English family, some real children, an atmosphere of English country seashore life, a pretty governess, and a hint of a love story involving the eldest son of the family. When Violet inherits an American fortune from a childless uncle, the story loses its refreshing qualities and becomes strictly conventional. Lady Tenby, a neighbor and a matchmaking mother, comes onto the scenes, and with the aid of all kinds of deceit wins the affection of the girl for herself and her son 'Ted.' When the parted lovers meet again, the "murder is out," and the solution of the difficulties furnishes the dramatic element in the story. Poor Ted, with his loyal and immovable affection, deserved a better mother and a happier fate!

~The Literary Digest, 06/05/1911

 Mr. Benson is most successful in his masterly portrait.

~Truth, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut

The story will be widely read, and deserves to be.

~The World, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut

Account Rendered is a distinct success.

~Literary World, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut 

It is written with his customary skill and artistic method. The novel should be read if only to make the acquaintance of the clever, astute Lady Tenby.

~The Globe, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut

The characters are real enough: they are well-observed studies of ordinarily decent people seen through the enlarging spectacles of romance. There are some scenes which flash and remain in the memory, like that in which Violet comes unexpectedly into the box in the theatre just when Lady Tenby is volubly lying about her to Frank.

~The Daily News, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut

E. F. Benson's literary career sped along in the pre-war years, earning him popularity, wealth, but very little critical respect. Within less than two years (1910-11) he produced Daisy's Aunt, The Osbornes, Account Rendered, and Juggernaut, of which only The Osbornes […] shows some maturity of characterisation.

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

May 29th, 1928

Non-fiction ~ article
Published in The Spectator, 1st June 1928¹

835 words
(First read 20/04/2014)

29th May 1928 was, apparently, one of those days, like the one we had a couple of years ago², when the kind of folk who believe in ropey old prophecies (Nostradamus etc.) believe that the world is going to end.  Speaking with the authority of someone who knows what he's talking about, which he does, and in his best quietly sarcastic style, EFB pooh-poohs the very notion that the precise or, as he wittily points out, precise-ish measurements of the Great Pyramid foretell anything whatsoever.  The article is available online here and jolly good fun it is.


¹ The article was collected in Sea Mist: Collected Spook Stories Volume 5 (2005).
² 21st December 2012.

The Ape

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Storyteller, May 1917
Collected  in The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories, 1920
Approx 6,400 words
(First read 13/04/2014)

We're firmly on Image in the Sand territory with this tale of the supernatural.  The action takes place in Luxor/Karnak in Egypt; it's the everyday tale of a rich young gent (Hugh: no relation) who acquires a whatchacallit ... a talisman, in the shape of a monkey, which, so we're told, the owner merely has to say the name of three times, while carefully clicking together the heels of his ruby slippers*, in order to become 'lord of all apes'.  This poor sap has the misfortune to be in love with Benson Bitch Type No. 1, a posh young lady "whose mission in life appeared to be to make as miserable as possible the largest possible number of young men."  Having arranged to go and gawp at Karnak by moonlight with Hugh, she throws him over at the last minute for the newly-arrived man she really intends to marry.  She even has the brass neck to ask our Hughie if she and her marital victim can borrow his horses to make the same excursion!  At this our hapless hero feels himself to be 'one shaking black jelly of wounded anger'.  (I rather like that.)  In despair (presumably) he asks the heartless hag to marry him; she fobs him off; he lends the pair his geegees but decides to follow them to Karnak in secret.  Coming across them snogging in one of the temples there he does the incantation thing, summoning a zillion apes which are entirely in his power, it's all (for once) fairly exciting, and then ... Benson bottles it.
A crushingly disappointing tale.  It's available online here.

*Okay, I invented this bit.

THE CRITICS

The Passenger and The Ape—for all their professional verve seem somewhat perfunctory and hence don't quite make it [as first-rate].

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' The Passenger, first published in All Hallows magazine, 02/2000

Monkeys

Fiction ~ short story
First published* in Weird Tales, December 1933
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
6,240 words
(First read 23/12/2012)

Monkeys/apes, an ancient Egyptian mummy and the curse that inevitably goes with it, a London surgeon who experiments on live animals (among them, obviously, monkeys) ~ all the ingredients for ... well, a routine Benson spook/horror story in which the author cannot resist the temptation to tell you, around the halfway point, what's going to happen in the end, making it not worth your while to read to the end.
It's available online here.  

*Apparently. 

The Step

Fiction ~ short story
Published in the Windsor Magazine, December 1926
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
5,505 words
(First read 04/11/2012) 

The Step is unusual for being set in Egypt (Alexandria), and for leaving the reader on the edge of his seat, literally staring into the face of an unspeakable and inexplicable horror.  It also contains a very large well-baked red herring, not something EFB generally went in for much.  These make it, in my opinion, a decidedly superior spook offering¹.
The moment we learn that the protagonist John Cresswell is 'a big plethoric man' we suspect things won't end well for him; when Benson goes on to tell us he practises that absolute-bottom-rung-of-the-ladder profession of money-lending², we know he's doomed.  Anyway, the plot: After a particularly profitable bit of usury, the result of which is his being cursed by the victim's crone of a mother, our 'hero' Cresswell finds himself being followed through the dark streets of the city.  Given that the story has a genuinely surprise twist (for once), I'll say no more about it.
It's available online here.

¹ Mind you, that's not to say it doesn't suffer from the usual defects: it's overlong, the pace is too leisurely, and it's a tad repetitive.
² See also The Money Market (1898). 

Bagnell Terrace

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, July 1925
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,000 words
(First read 19/06/2012)

One of EFB's London spook stories.  Unidentified Narrator lives in Bagnell Terrace, a place so tranquil that ...

even the cats [...] have caught something of its discretion and tranquillity, for they do not hail each other with long-drawn yells of mortal agony like their cousins in less well-conducted places, but sit and have quiet little parties like the owners of the houses in which they condescend to be lodged and boarded. [this is the high point of the story]

U.N. lusts after the end-terrace house, which is occupied by a mysterious recluse, a man neither young nor old but, in the words of neighbour and intimate friend Hugh Grainger*, 'timeless'.  Well anyway, the long and the short is that after a purely coincidental trip to Egypt, U.N. takes ownership of the house, which, almost forgot to mention, has a 'garden room' exactly like EFB's in Rye, and the place turns out to be haunted ... or possessed ... by the previous owner ... or EFB's Egyptian cat souvenir ... or something.  As usual good old Hughie comes to the rescue and exorcises the place merely by invoking God's name once or twice.
I can't imagine it took Benson more than about 35 minutes to write this garbled twaddle.  Hardly his finest hour.
You can read it online here.


* Renamed Hugh Abbot for this particular outing. 

THE CRITICS

In several of [Benson's spook] stories, the lust to possess a particular house forms the fulcrum of the plot (as in Bagnell Terrace) and the unassuaged anger and revengefulness of the dispossessed owner is often what creates the haunt. Reconciliation and Naboth's Vineyard are two of his most successful stories, especially the latter, which has a really blood-curdling climax.

~Joan Aiken in foreword to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson 1992

The thematic unity of Spook Stories partly arises from its founding myth of Naboth, whose name is evoked in both Bagnell Terrace and Naboth’s Vineyard. Naboth, it should be remembered, would not sell his vineyard to King Ahab because it was his birthright. Ahab was persuaded to procure the land by using some rather underhand means, only to incite a prophet’s curse and the death of his own son. Ahab had violated the mystical connection between land and blood, and, even though he was a king, he should have accepted his allotted place.

Whilst Ahab was cursed for coveting the land of a lowly and powerless neighbour, Benson was altogether happier to imagine covetous social inferiors. If M. R. James’ ghosts penalised the “curious,” Benson imagines the spiritual world as revolving around the need to check human ambitions for the redistribution of property. The Naboth myth is overturned completely in Bagnell Terrace, in which the narrator reclaims a delightful suburban residence from a foreigner who does not justly belong there. The narrator nicknames the foreigner “Naboth” only because he personally “coveted” this fellow’s house, but Naboth will sell his house as a trap, unleashing a curse which the narrator will have to defeat. Yet the inferior Naboth is sent packing, allowing the virtuous king to enjoy his new vineyard.
[…] Unlike the uniquely Gothic disaster of The Face, the subsequent contributions [to Spook Stories] “And No Bird Sings” (which features an estate rather than a house), Bagnell Terrace, and The Temple are jolly frontier tales in which the bourgeoisie successfully impose their suburban will on to a place which is still haunted by ancient forces.

~James Mooney at “Tychy”, 25/07/2011. Quoted from here.

 

Professor Burnaby's Discovery

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Storyteller, June 1926
Collected in Fine Feathers and Other Stories, 1994
Approx. 6,750 words
(First read 21/12/1994)

Christopher Heaton and his wife own a hotel on the Nile in Egypt in 1919.  Business is bad so they decide to organize the biggest scam in the history of Egyptological scams: the discovery of the Queen of Sheba's tomb.  Luckily for Christopher, he just happens to be a dab hand at forging antiquities, etc.  Well, that's the premise of it.  The tone is ~ I think ~ meant to be light; but the whole thing is sadly somewhat leaden, and is about 5,000 words too long.