The Challoners

Fiction ~ novel
Published July 1904
Approx. 100,000 words
(First read 08/08/2014)

Like most E F Benson novels, The Challoners is a simple tale ~ so simple, in fact, that it's a wonder the author managed to make it so long.  It tells the story of twins Martin and Helen Challoner and their relationships with ~ or rather: against ~ their widowed clergyman father.
In the Reverend Sidney Challoner EFB gives us a sort-of-portrait of his own august parent and namesake, Edward White Benson, these days best remembered ~ probably only remembered ~ as the father of E F Benson.  But he produced better portraits, most notably in Our Family Affairs (1920): Rev. Challoner is much smaller fry.  Though the two men share the same somewhat grim, single-minded, slavish devotion to His Almighty Upstairsyness, Challoner has none of the spontaneous warmth which EWB could and did (apparently, occasionally) exhibit towards his children.  He wants no more for his son than that he be a brilliant scholar and [dang! I've forgotten what his ultimate aim for Martin was, probably the clergy], and no more for Helen than that she devote her life to the service of the Church and ... well, him, really.

The snag is that the son is a dunderhead when it comes to your Greek and Latin ~ but a musical prodigy.  The dad has as much appreciation of music as, say, Caligula had of charity work.  While Helen's 'rebellion' is to commit the crime of falling in love ... with an atheist!
So Martin goes off to be a concert pianist, against his dad's wishes.  His teacher, Herr Something-or-other, delivers what is without doubt the most interesting ~ and revealing ~ speech in the whole book.  His general instructions to his pupil:

Work, and live also.  Do not forget that any experience in life, so long only as it is not sensual, — for whatever is sensual blurs and deadens the fineness of any gift —, gives richness and breadth to your power in music.

I don't really need to add any emphasis here, do I?  Along the way he falls in love (most non-sensually, it goes without saying) with a girl, and, the most genuinely rebellious thing he does, converts to Roman Catholicism, entirely ~ it has to be said ~ because they have better tunes, etc.  "Aha!" you may be thinking, "the perfect opportunity for EFB to imagine how EWB would have reacted, had he lived, to finding out that one of his own sons (Hugh) did exactly the same thing!"  Alas, no, this is E F Benson: he pretty much completely evades that particular issue.  Anyway, long and short, Martin is a resounding success as a joanna-player ... but not for long.
Helen, meantime, is much more timid in her rebellion against the pater: she tries to bring him round to the idea of having a no-better-than-a-heathen for a son-in-law, is impossibly virtuous and noble à la victorienne about it all, and has some success on that front.
Well, I'm not going to labour this review any longer ~ see below for more plot details.  There's a happy ending ... kind of.
The main and major drawback of it all, for me at least, is that Benson spent far far far too much time on Martin, who I found comprehensively boring, and on his ruddy music, ditto, and not nearly enough on Helen and Sidney, who I found far more ~ potentially ~ interesting.
But, like all Benson novels [this is the moment where I sound positively schizophrenic] it has a certain old-fashioned charm ... not a lot, mind you ... and is a pleasant enough read.
And the critics (see below) seem to have loved it, so what do I know?

The novel is available online here.

 
THE CRITICS

The theme is a father’s concern lest his children become contaminated by what he considers an unwholesome social atmosphere. The book is filled with Mr. Benson’s clever observations on the English smart set, and the love-story shows him at his best.

~quoted in endpapers of the US edition of The Angel of Pain

It is an admirably written story, given us by a man who thinks, feels, and observes, who expresses himself with a brilliancy which never fails him, yet does not spare us the sometimes bitter truths that belong to the life he is depicting.

~The Sketch, quoted in front endpapers of An Act in a Backwater and Sheaves

Mr. Benson has here more of a serious purpose and less of surface smartness than in some of his stories. His main theme is the absolute need of individual character and independent action. He pictures the anguish of a saintly, and at heart, affectionate clergyman who is a Philistine as regards art, literature, and imagination, when his son becomes a professional musician and a Roman Catholic, and his daughter marries an agnostic. The merit of the novel is that this situation is not treated roughly or with excessive emotion, but finely and with real feeling. The play of circumstance upon character, of temperament upon prejudice, and of Puritanism upon æstheticism,is subtly and truthfully worked out.

~The Outlook, 30/07/1904

He has written a very simple, a very moving, and a very beautiful story about a situation that is in the present day continually real. A story in which the inevitableness of the tragedy is the keynote.

~The Daily Chronicle, quoted in front endpapers of An Act in a Backwater

The story, as may be seen, is essentially serious, but, being by Mr Benson, it is, of course, also very interesting. The characterisation and dialogue are, as usual, excellent. There is a Lady Sunningdale, who is as amusing as the irrepressible 'Dodo,' but is a much more lovable creature, and frequently displays streaks of unexpected wisdom and breadth of view. Mr Benson's style is full of vitality. […] Of course, he never is dull; but in The Challoners he has gone further than producing a vivid and amusing book. It is full of suggestion, and permeated throughout with a generous philosophy of life.

~Pall Mall Gazette, quoted in front endpapers of An Act in a Backwater

It is a fine story [...] The story, simple in its development, is very touching and deeply interesting […] The literary merit of this beautiful story reaches a high mark […] The care and completeness of the character drawing by action and in speech are remarkable; each invididual is known to us and remains with us […] The consistency of Mr Challoner's action throughout the story is maintained with great skill, the struggle with his feelings reaching its utmost pitch of agony at the end. One of the finest scenes in fiction within our knowledge ~ is a grand and solemn study of the human heart.

~World, quoted in front endpapers of An Act in a Backwater

The Challoners […] must be pronounced not only the best book he has given us, but one of the best novels published so far this year. Well known as an accomplished author, with an unusually wide range, he shows a surer touch, a deepening maturity, if the expression may be allowed, with advancing years.

~The Daily Mail, quoted in front endpapers of An Act in a Backwater

Not counting the head of the family, Lord Flintshire, who plays but a minor part in the story, the Challoners are three in number: the Reverend Sidney, who is a widower, his son Martin, and his daughter Helen. Sidney is a profoundly religious man, of rigid and somewhat bigoted piety.

Martin is a musical genius wholly out of sympathy with his father's Puritanical ordinances, as his father is opposed to all his aspirations, and considers his passionate devotion to music nothing but a sinful waste of time. Helen, who teaches in the Sunday school and helps in the parish work, is a girl of some individuality, and has also strayed far beyond the limit of her father's narrowly conventional ideas, and stirs him to bitterest anger by insisting on living by her own light, even to the extent of engaging herself to the man she loves, though he confessedly has no belief in God. Although these three love each other and shrink from hurting each other, “the result was tragedy, tragedy in no grand and great style, but a pitiful little tragedy of misunderstanding and estrangement." Their differing characters are analysed with subtlety and insight. Lady Sunningdale is a delightfully humorous creation—she and her ridiculous pet dogs move through the book to a never-failing accompaniment of good-natured laughter. It is an intensely human story, written at times with epigrammatic cleverness, and at times with a larger humour, and with occasional touches of pathos that always ring true. Altogether a novel of marked originality and interest.

~The Bookman (UK), 08/1904

Mr Benson has broken some fresh ground in his latest novel. Always clever and amusing, he has the knack of blending the light with the serious things in a well-judged proportion that renders him one of the most charming writers of the present day. But in this book he gives the serious element the upper hand, and the result has the merit not only of success, but of comparative novelty […] Mr Benson's work throughout the book is so excellent […] He has produced, indeed, a not unworthy comparison to his brilliant success of the past, and that is saying a good deal.

~St James's Gazette, quoted in front endpapers of An Act in a Backwater

Of Helen Challoner and her brother it need only be said that their virtues and failings make them a fresh and fascinating couple, and they play their part as the storm of the story in a manner which holds the interest of the reader. Altogether, the novel is one that is sure to be read with pleasure and amusement, and, we believe, with profit.

~The Daily Telegraph, quoted in front endpapers of An Act in a Backwater and Sheaves

When we remembered that E. F. Benson was the author of Dodo, a book about which everyone was talking a few years ago, we expected to find that he had given us something pretty good in The Challoners. We read it, breathlessly and absorbedly, and then we were of the opinion that he had given us a novel that is better than the book which made him famous.

~Newark Advertiser, quoted in endpapers to US edition of The House of Defence

Mother

Non-fiction ~ memoirs
Published 1925
Approx. 62,000 words
(First read 20/03/2014)

Mother is the highly enjoyable sequel to Our Family Affairs: 1867-1896 (1920).  I presume the only reason Fred didn't call it Our Family Affairs: 1896-1918 is that he wanted to leave an enduring tribute to his much-loved mother.  Yes, Mary (Sidgwick) Benson (1841-1918) is the focus of the book but she's far from being the exclusive focus.  A good two-thirds of it is devoted to other family members, in this order: EFB himself, his doomed sister Maggie (1865-1916), brother Hugh (1871-1914), the family nurse Beth (1819-1911), and, somewhat bringing up the rear, brother Arthur (1862-1925). 
Rather than whiffling on endlessly I'll just pick out a few highlights.

George I of Greece

EFB, after performing relief work in Greece following some kind of war they had there in the 1890s¹:

When I got home I was told by Lord Wantage, the head of the Red Cross, that King George of Greece had expressed an amiable desire to decorate with the Order of the Redeemer two of those who had been engaged in this relief work, and that my name had been recommended.  But from that day to this I never heard a word more about it, and the mystery as to whether the Order of the Redeemer was lost in the post, or whether King George, on second thoughts, considered that it would be too much pleasure, remains unsolved.

 EFB on Oscar Wilde in his prime²:

[...] Oscar Wilde was producing the plays which, however artificial they may seem now, sent his audiences reeling into the street, intoxicated by epigram and paradox.  None of them had the smallest spark of immortality, except possibly The Importance of Being Earnest, but they were very new, and their audacious nonsense was very like wit.

No comment.

My and EFB's sentiments on this subject tally exactly:

[...] the greatest wizard of all was Emily Brontë: how many times I have read Wuthering Heights I have no idea, but never, in spite of the clumsiness of its narration, have I laid it down without the firm conviction that it stands alone at the head of all novels in the English language.

(Rather like Mother, EFB's Charlotte Brontë (1932) is as much ~ if not actually more ~ about the other members of the family, especially Emily.)
EFB on what his mother thought of the Benson brothers' books, particularly Fred's, circa 1905:

Mary Benson at 19

[...] it was becoming common knowledge between her and me that she found the sort of book that I was writing now quite intolerable, [...] none of us yet had written anything that gave her any sense of personal pride. [...]  Some struck her as too quietist for the world [Arthur's], and some too worldly for her own quietism [Fred's]; some were propagandist of beliefs she did not share [Hugh's], and some were sentimental, and some were crude, and I feel convinced that she never read twice anything that any of us had written, nor indeed would have read much of it all once, if it had not been we who had written it.  She liked "bits" in most [of them], but not one spark of inspiration, not one crumb of the bread of life, did she find in any of them.³

Francis Yeats Brown

The section in which EFB talks about his close friendship with the young Francis Yeats Brown⁴ is interesting and ~ possibly ~ more revealing than he intended.  FYB was about 20 years younger than EFB and, at the start of their friendship, which apparently lasted several years, aged about 20.  And oh my! do those holidays they spent together in Italy ever sound idyllic under Fred's pen!

[...] the love of the sea and the swimming and the basking, and presently we spent inseparable days among rocks and sea-caves, or climbed, perspiring, through the woods of chestnut and laburnum to the Portofino Kulm [...]  another summer I settled down with him from May to August in that enchanted castle of Portofino.  [They slept in hammocks side by side in the garden]  And as long as I live I shall bear in my inward heart of happiness that nightly falling to sleep in the open, with the scent of stocks, and the drowsy pulse of the sea below, and the stars burning in the boughs of the stone-pine, and the black shadow of the castello lying across the white, moonstruck garden, and the sense of a drowsy friend in the hammock close by.

Now I ask you, Gentle Reader, if that isn't Love, what is?  (By contrast, there's none of this kind of rapture ~ in fact, there's no rapture at all ~ when he talks about his dealings with John Ellingham Brooks, the shirt-lifting pal he shared a house with on Capri ...)
The section in which the author recounts the final decline and death of the family nursemaid Beth, who served the Sidgwicks and the Bensons faithfully and with love for 77 years, is pretty well guaranteed to have you reaching for a hanky.  It did me.  [For more on Beth, see Across the Stream.]
Gaaah! this is going on forever! ~ okay, I'm going to wrap it up here.  I highly recommend Mother for anyone who has the least interest in the Benson family, Fred in particular: the book is ram-full of goodies, far too many to mention.

¹ "Don't blind us with details, Ewie!"
² Benson returned to the subject of Wilde ~ and was slightly less dismissive ~ in As We Were (1930).
³ For the happy ending to this subject see under David Blaize.
⁴ (1886-1944); author of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930). 

STOP PRESS:
A certain Mr Rodney Bolt has produced a biography of Mary Benson, the splendidly titled As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson, published by Atlantic Books in 2011. 

A Reaping

Fiction ~ novel (kind of)
Published 1909
Approx. 72,000 words
(First read 21/01/2014)

... is the sequel to The Book of Months and is really just more of the same, only longer: it's no better, no worse, just more.

The 'action' picks up two or three years later: our faceless, originless, characterless, surnameless author-hero has now been married two years to the woman (Helen) he selected at the end of Months and Months for pretty well the sole reason that she was the dead spit of the departed Margery.  The couple mooch about between London and their house in the country (mostly the latter), often accompanied by Jack's cousin 'Legs', a kind of elongated 20-year-old puppychap, very likeable.  Jack has lost none of his chronic habit of tedious maundering.  I won't bore the pants off everyone by recounting any of the 'plot', just give selected 'highlights':
(1) September¹: Jack and Legs ~ and the dog Fifi² ~ have a mildly supernatural experience involving a so-called revenant.  It's a lot less interesting than it might sound.

(2) October: Jack and Helen do some gardening.
(3) November: Jack and Helen do some more gardening.  Legs nearly gets engaged.  And ... into this teeth-grindingly dull farrago of dusty drivel EFB sees fit to drop A Comic Character, in the shape of Mr Holmes, one of their neighbours in the country.

"He is a kind little gentleman, about forty-five years old, who lives with his sister, and does not do anything whatever³.  He is generally known as the Bun-hander, because no tea-party has ever been known to take place for miles round at which Mr. Holmes was not handing refreshments to the ladies.  That is his strength, his forte.  His weakness is just as amiable ~ though, perhaps, hardly so useful ~ for his weakness is Rank."

Before anyone gets excited at the prospect of an undiscovered Bensonian comic hero, I hasten to point out that Mr H isn't actually all that funny: as with the character of Mrs Murchison in Mammon & Co., EFB describes with glee everyone's (especially Legs') reaction to him without bothering to make the character himself especially comic.  Oh and he's gone in a flash.

(4) February: Edward Frederic Benson murders Legs for no reason whatsoever.
(5) April: Jack and Helen, but mainly Jack, goes on holiday to Greece and bores us rigid with that for what feels like 300 pages but is in fact only 14.  As an example of how supremely turgid the Benson prose gets when he's waxing lyrical about the ancient world, I'll quote this stupefyingly bad sentence:

"Never, so we must believe, during that wonderful century and a half, when from the ground, maybe, of the lifeless hieratic Egyptian art there shot up that transcendant flower of loveliness, of which even the fragments that remain to us now, battered and disfigured as they are, are in another zone of beauty compared to all that went before or has come afterwards, was anything ugly produced at all, except as deliberate caricature."

I defy anyone not to turn blue with tedium reading this section.
Okay enough! ~ I've already wasted far more time than I intended to on this.
NOT RECOMMENDED, but if you're feeling very brave it's available online here.


¹ Like it's predecessor, A Reaping is divided into twelve month-long chapters.  But for no discernible reason it starts at June this time.
² Yes: Fifi.
³ Jack presumably hasn't heard the thing about casting the beam out of one's own eye ...

THE CRITICS

A Reaping (1909) is not a novel to shine.

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

There is nothing to hold against the Benson brothers but their unfailing industry. Nothing can swerve them from the path of producing a book or two a year. It remains, therefore, for their readers to accept the fact that the matter contained in the books must be slight. A Reaping, by E. F. Benson, is slighter than usual. It is unconventionally invented, the chapter headings bearing the names of the months and the structure being of a rather straggling and casual kind. The usual ingredients, however, are to hand; meditative à la A. C. Benson; the third brother's unfailing interest in the god Pan; also his lasting interest in women's hair, which the author brushes and describes much as he has done in The Climber and other volumes. There is also a ghost, a warning, reflections upon death, à la R. H. Benson, as well as a great deal of charming landscape and light laughter. The doctrine is Stevenson's of cheer and kindness at all costs; excellent doctrines, but not gripping nor vitalizing. It is sad, but somehow the ultimate amiability of all things was always and remains still a tepid inspiration. The book is very gentle, sweet-spirited and kindly, and if it were by a young and unknown author we should hail it with pleasure and delight; but Mr. Benson must submit to the criterion of his past. Our demand upon him is like that the little schoolgirl made of the readier elder sister who wrote her compositions for her week by week: "Now be sure and make me improve a little since last time," she would urge. We want Mr. Benson to improve a little each time. He is still quite young enough, and we recommend a stern experience of deprivation and misery or a very undermining course of reading; not so much that he may, as Nietzsche might say, hold more correct views, but that he should liberate himself from what is customary either successfully or disastrously. It is a great doctrine to set one's faith upon, that a big failure is better than a slight success.

~The North American Review, April 1910 (edited for crap spelling etc.)