Mr Teddy

Fiction ~ novel
Published June 1917
Appeared in the United States as The Tortoise
Approx. 83,000 words
(First read 28/08/2014) 

Mr Teddy is not at all bad.  Like EFB's 'masterpiece' An Autumn Sowing, which appeared just a few months after this, it tells the story of a middle-aged man.  The hero of that book is 50; Mr Teddy has just turned 40¹.  Both novels offer intimate² portraits of gentlemen very conscious of the fact that they've reached the second half of their lives ~ and haven't had totally successful first halves.  Teddy ~ Edward Heaton in full ~ has dedicated his to the care and entertainment of his not-really-an-invalid mother.  In breaks from these activities he's made a career of being the life and soul of Society in the village on the Sussex Downs where the novel takes place in its entirety.  A few years ago ~ well, fifteen, if we're honest ~ he came close-ish to developing an 'understanding' (no more than that) with the village's jeune première, Daisy Macdonald, now rapidly approaching middle age herself and still burning a candle for Mr T.  But alas, Mother came first.

Telscombe, East Sussex

The novel tells the story of the 'reuniting' of these star-crossed lovers.  Naturally, this being E F Benson, their path doth not run smoothlieth, but they get there in the end.  For once I'm not going to say any more about the plot ~ if you'd like more details, have a look at the reviews below.
The pace is, as ever, leisurely, but there's a sufficiency of plot for it not to appear dragging.  The characters are nicely drawn, particularly Daisy and her sister Marion, a very distant relative of Quaint Irene from Mapp and Lucia with a mannish maid-of-all-work named Parkinson³.  The humour is mostly gentle ~ EFB is kinder on Mrs Heaton (Ted's mum) than he was, for instance, on Mrs Hancock in Arundel (1914): the two are much the same character.  Everyone is impeccably EFB-Edwardian-English: gentlemanly, naïve, kind of innocent; only the vicar's wife ~ Mrs Vickary, who lives at the Vickary-age ~ comes in for anything like a vitrioling.
Its main defect ~ apart from the habitual excess of internal monologue, and even that's smaller than usual ~ is that, as often happens, Fred takes his eye off the ball to concentrate on the story's (true) Young Lovers for too long, and they're as hackneyed as all his other young lovers.
Oh and there's an ice-skating scene which goes on too long ... but does at least serve a purpose.
Apart from that, I recommend Mr Teddy.  But it doesn't appear to be available online, unfortunately.


¹ I'm tempted to believe that EFB wrote Mr Teddy in 1907 when he was 40, and kept it on the shelf for a decade, for unknown reasons.
² Very intimate in Teddy's case: we first meet him as he's contemplating his face while shaving on the morning of his 40th birthday.
³ Not the only Benson maid to bear that undistinguished surname ... which happens to be my surname [angry face].

THE CRITICS

It is my deliberate verdict that Mr. E.F. Benson is (as my old nurse used to express it) "in league with Somebody he oughtn't." I hope, however, that he will understand this for the extorted compliment that it is, and not magic me into something unpleasant, or (more probably) write another book to prove to my own dissatisfaction that I am everything I least wish to be. That indeed is the gravamen of my charge: the diabolic ingenuity with which he makes not so much our pleasant vices as our little almost-virtues into whips to scourge us with. All this has been wrung from me by the perusal of Mr. Teddy (Fisher Unwin). Even now I can't make up my mind whether I like it or not. The first half, which might be called a satire on the folly of being forty and not realising it, depressed me profoundly. I need not perhaps enlarge upon the reason. Later, Mr. Benson made a very clever return upon the theme; and, with a touch of real beauty, brought solace to poor Mr. Teddy and consolation to the middle-aged reader. I need give you only a slight indication of the plot, which is simplicity itself. Into the self-contained little community of a provincial society, where to have once been young is to retain a courtesy title to perpetual youth, there arrives suddenly the genuine article, a boy and girl still in the springtime of life, by contrast with whom the preserved immaturity of Mr. Teddy and his partner, Miss Daisy, is shown for an artificial substitute. Baldly stated, the thesis sounds cynical and a little cruel; actually, however, you will here find Mr. Benson in a kindlier mood than he sometimes consents to indulge. He displays, indeed, more than a little fondness for his disillusioned hero; the fine spirit with which Mr. Teddy faces at last the inevitable is a sure proof of the author's sympathy.

~Punch, 20/06/1917

Mr E F Benson must have written Mr Teddy […] in a very leisurely manner. It is a story which has scarcely any plot and the lightest of character sketching. There is something indefinite about all the persons who revolve in the orbit of Mr Teddy, who is a bachelor of forty, a dabbler in art, and the slave of a mean, hypochondriacal mother who tyrannises over the meek son. With her death he obtains freedom, and as he somehow contrives to look and act like a young man of twenty-five, he begins to plan the recapture of his sacrificed youth. So we follow Mr Teddy through a maze of tea parties, picnics, and tennis tournaments until he mentally resolves to marry. His late decision, however, is marred by the quicker wit of his young friend Robin, a delightful creature who makes all his companions seem like dolls in comparison. So in the end meek, indecisive little Mr Teddy takes a back seat and proposes to another lady in a bored moment. It is all very simple and clearly written, but Mr Teddy is not a man, but an amiable abstraction. Remembering Mr Benson in his more successful moments, our thankfulness for this novel is tinged with a little melancholy.

~Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury, 20/06/1917

There is nothing remarkable or ambitious in this quiet tale of middle-aged romance, but Mr Benson, with his inimitable power of satire and character portrayal, his exquisitely pointed epigrams and worldly wise generalisations, gives us a faithful study of English South country village life, its snobbishness, its unconscious humour, its petty gossip and easy-going pleasures. Mr Teddy, the heor, a happy-go-lucky artist of forty, has frittered away his early days and best opportunities in devoting himself to his somewhat querulous mother of many imagined maladies. After her death ~ and nothing in her life became her so well as her exit from it ~ Mr Teddy sighs for opportunities lost and gone, and on the entrance into the peaceful village circle of real youth, he endeavours to regain his lost youth. In this he is warmly seconded by a spinster friend; but seeing how youth goes out to youth, they recognise that the exuberant 'joie de vivre' of youth has passed from them, and they therefore sensibly console themselves with the ripe mellowness of autumn and leave the fragrant roses of June to the winsome boy and girl.

This quaintly picturesque novel, redolent of peaceful summer days in a sunny, rose-embowered cottage, is written with the touch of a true artist. None but Mr Benson could have given us the striking psychological portrait of Mr Teddy as so piquantly revealed in the first chapter; and who but Mr Benson could turn out such neat satires of snobbishness as he regales us with in every other chapter? Mr Teddy, though marked by little of the brilliancy of technique and finish of Dodo or Mr Blaze [sic], is yet a delightful production, fragrant and restful in these war days.

~The Aberdeen Daily Journal, 02/07/1917

Mr E F Benson writes every word of his charming stories with a fastidious pleasure that is quickly communicated to the reader, and it is good to find that in Mr Teddy […] he continues in this agreeable habit. He polishes the personalia of the minute village of Lambton with the quiet zest of a connoisseur of characterisation. The still fragrance of life as it surely is not lived now-a-days pervades the pages of his story, in which also Mr Benson does not scorn to give the tender spirit of romance and the mild, querulous humour of the elders a wise proportionate scope. One instantly appreciates Teddy, and traces his progress with leisurely satisfaction, while such delicate portraits as that of Rosemary, and the more robustly drawn Daisie and Marian, bear the authentic stamp of the artist in words. It is a book over which one lingers, not wishing to reach the end.

~The Yorkshire Post, 18/07/1917

A pleasant and peaceful little story of life in a provincial town. The hero, is a delightful person, but he was obviously a more than indifferent artist.

~The Spectator, 17/08/1917

[Mr. Benson's] pleasant England [...] is of the village neighbourhood rather than the 'county' aristocracy. Property and the social plane mean less to him than simple human nature as touched with personal whimsy and coloured by environment. His Honourable Mrs. Heaton, who is unable to forget that she is daughter of a peer, and exercises a sort of ex officio authority as 'invalid Empress of Lambton,' is one of the two persons in the present book to be drawn with a pen dipped in acid. For the most part, these friends and neighbours form an affectionate as well as close corporation for the conduct of the business of living; and the hand of satire with which Mr. Benson touches their foibles and quaintnesses is a gentle one. Teddy, the belated youth who at forty has not begun to live, is a delightful portrait. He is the 'tortoise' who, for all his sloth, is, after one desperate snatching at the vanished ecstasy of youth, to find quiet happiness in the person of his old 'pal' Daisy, waiting at his side. His mother the Honourable is a rather dreadful person, a lifelong 'mollusc,' toned down by a sort of death-bed repentance. The other members of the neighbourhood group are painted with deliciously good-humoured satire. The best of them all is Daisy's sister Marion, her labours as the literary genius of the community being not more absurd than her nature is doughty and loyal. Excellent also are the young pair who set the aging dwellers of Lambton to emulating their youthfulness, and are so blamelessly and hopelessly beyond emulation. This is a far better story than The Oakleyites, in which similar material was handled with less spontaneity and freshness. Mr.

Benson has no idea or 'message' to convey unless it be that the humours of ourselves and our neighbours are among the best sources of refreshment the Lord has given us, and that beneath them, we may flatter ourselves, there wells many a pure fountain of kind feeling and honest purpose.

~H. W. Boynton in The Bookman (US), 12/1917

 

The Murder of Alan Grebell

Non-fiction ~ essay
First published in The Spectator, 18th November 1932¹
1,250 words
(First read 24/06/2014)

In his capacity as Mayor of Tilling Rye and spinner of unlikely yarns, EFB recounts the grim story of the town's most notorious, blunderous, and ever-so-faintly-humorous, murder: that of local big cheese Alan Grebell by the butcher John Breeds, in 1742.  Breeds, in the manner so typical of 18th-century killers, was knocked off his trolley by something-and-nothing: the mayor had fined him for selling meat at short weight.  That mayor ~ the intended victim ~ was none other than James Lamb, owner of the famous Lamb House in which Benson (amongst others²) lived.  The tale is constructed of plot contrivances such as impenetrable fog, and improbabilities such as the victim dying without even realizing he's been murdered, but, unlike the overwhelming majority of the author's own similarly themed stories, it rings absolutely true ~ well, it is true.  Still, Fred tells it with great relish.
You can read it online here.




¹ The article was collected in Sea Mist: Collected Spook Stories Volume 5 (2005).
² Elizabeth Mapp, Henry James, Emmeline Lucas, no doubt a whole herd of other terrifying old women.

An Act in a Backwater

Fiction ~ novel
Published 25th January 1905
Approx. 62,000 words
(First read 08/06/2014) 

The more I read of EFB, particularly but not exclusively the early novels, the clearer it becomes that he wasn't really cut out to be a novelist ~ his short stories (and non-fiction, essays, articles, reviews etc.) are much much better as writing.  His novels, sadly, have a marked tendency to be inchoate, uneven, lumpy, sometimes even incoherent ... well, no, not that exactly ~ it's as if his mind kept wandering and he forgot what he was doing.
Anyway, enough musing.
Having read some of the reviews below, I'd been looking forward to An Act: "Oh goody," I thought, "a very early example of a Benson smalltown comedy."  Well, for the first few chapters I wasn't disappointed: we're introduced to the inhabitants of the small cathedral town of

Wroxton, and a very promising bunch of characters they are.  Colonel Raymond, late of the India Service (or so he wants people to believe) is a fore-runner of Colonel Chase in Paying Guests, and to a lesser extent of Major Benjy in 'those novels': a blustering, buffoonish braggart; his wife is obviously completely squashed by him, while his three little children are merely terrified.  The Misses Clifford are 40-something spinsters with harmless eccentricities.  But pride of place goes to Mrs Collingwood: EFB pulls off quite a trick with this character ~ he patently doesn't care for this cold, puritanical and (perhaps) rather stupid woman, but he somehow contrives to make her fairly sympathetic, particularly when, after an uncharacteristically personal conversation with her artist son, she melts ~ just once.

Now the unfortunate thing happens: EFB takes his eye off this promising material and relegates it to the background.
Enter the supposed hero and heroine of the piece: Mrs Collingwood's son Jack, and the Honourable Jeannie Avesham¹.  The former in fact is pretty much of a cypher, a young chap with vaguely artistic leanings but who's obviously more passionate about bloody golf than anything else.  Most of the book revolves around Jeannie, who is Benson Cliché Number 3, naught but an agglomeration of tedious saintly virtues ... after a while of her one almost starts to wish a Dodo would appear ~ she doesn't.  Instead EFB regales us with the preposterous story of an orphaned baby, which Jack and Jeannie 'adopt' ('appropriate' would be nearer the mark), treat much like a pet dog, and never bother to give a name to.  Jeannie becomes literally addicted to do-goodery, and faces her greatest challenge when there's an epidemic of typhoid fever in the town², but she sails through it triumphant, falls in love with Jack, The End.

Well no, that's not quite the end.
One of those long-neglected Clifford sisters makes the mistake of moving in the background; she catches EFB's eye and is instantly stricken with cancer, which she promptly dies of just before our hero and saint tie the knot³.  Benson commits this monstrous act of character-murder purely so he can trot out the platitude "While life begins for some, it ends for others."  An Act in a Backwater has nothing more profound than that to say, just like the vast bulk of Benson books.
I'm absolutely convinced that he sat down to write a Mapp and Lucia-style comedy ~ why else go to such lengths to introduce all one's minor characters? ~ but soon either changed his mind or forgot what he was doing.  The result is neither fish nor fowl.
The whole novel is available online here ~ it's fairly short.


¹ For heaven's sake, EF, don't you know any other christian names?
² For heaven's sake, EF, don't you know any other diseases?
³ Benson pulled off exactly the same 'trick' in Mr Teddy, but at least in that novel the character is allowed to die on the page, at some length, and with humour and dignity.  Poor Miss Clifford is merely bumped off.  Nastily. 
 

THE CRITICS

Mr E. F. Benson's new story will be published by Mr Heinemann at the end of this month. It is a story of love and courtship in a quiet cathedral town, and is somewhat in the vein of The Challoners. Mr Benson, who never neglects his 'minor characters', here gives them special attention.

~The Western Times [UK], 10/01/1905

Love and courtship in a quiet Cathedral town form the theme of Mr E. F. Benson's new novel, An Act in a Backwater, which Mr Heinemann announces for Wednesday [i.e. 25/01]. The society of the place is depicted in Mr Benson's happiest vein, and the story is told with his customary neatness and vivacity. It may be worthy of remark that Mr Benson's book, The Challoners, has been the greatest of all his successes.

~The Courier [Dundee, UK], 23/01/1905

 Mr. Benson has given us a slight but pleasing study of life in a small Cathedral town. The brother and sister of a poor nobleman settle there, and introduce a novel element into the placid life of the place which gives many opportunities for comedy. The son of a Canon, an artist, and therefore a rebel against the tyranny of the Close, falls in love with the sister, and the progress of their romance is the main interest of the book. Almost the only disagreeable person is a retired Colonel of Volunteers, who is aptly described by one of the characters as "the sort of man you find in a book on the Army by a lady." He is a snob and a coward, and provides the necessary relief from the intense amiability of the others. Jeannie Avesham is an attractive heroine, but the author is so anxious to show her goodness to the reader that he overdoes it and makes her a little theatrical. A deserted child and an epidemic of typhoid were surely enough, without afflicting a poor old spinster with cancer in order to bring out an unselfishness which was already sufficiently established. The best portrait seems to us to be the Canon's wife, Mrs. Collingwood, a type of the narrow good woman; but the treatment, as in that of the others, is spoiled by an undue sentimentality. It is a pleasant, wholesome story, but it might well have ended with Miss Avesham's engagement, for the later chapters read like the elaboration of a tale already told.

~The Spectator, 04/02/1905

Mr. Benson always tells a good story. An Act in a Backwater is a little comedy of an English town, dealing with the love story of a nice English girl and a young painter, neither of whom possesses a bit of morbidness. The book is one that puts the reader in a good humor with himself and other people, and so is a good book to read.

~Buffalo Express, quoted in endpapers to US edition of The House of Defence

An Act in a Backwater is in Mr Benson's lighter vein, but written with all his accustomed cleverness and humor, and it forms a delightful commentary on human nature in general as well as on its particular manifestations in the quiet, not to say dull, English town of Wroxton. That is to say, Wroxton was undoubtedly dull to the casual, unobservant eye of any but its most devoted inhabitants, but a quite different state of affairs is revealed when Mr Benson begins to examine it for literary purposes and discovers the possibilities for entertainment in the vanities and pomposities of Colonel Raymond, in the pathetically innocent enthusiasm of the elderly Miss Cliffords, the strenuous but irritating virtue of Mrs Canon Collingwood, the doings of the Ladies' Literary Union, where 'very improving and sometimes amusing pieces were read,' and in the contrasting unconventionality of 8 Bolton Street, whither the exigencies of fortune had brought a son and daughter of the late Lord Avesham to live while the son was initiated into the vulgar but lucrative mysteries of brewing beer.

In the eyes of Wroxton the intrusion of beer did not at all detract from the brilliance of a noble name, and for all sorts and conditions of Wroxtonites a new interest was added to life by the settling in their midst of these two youthful but exceedingly wideawake members of the house of Avesham. Even on the day they moved into Bolton Street a consuming curiosity kept the younger Miss Clifford wobbling back and forth past the house on her bicycle, from which she had to dismount when she needed to turn round, while on the same occasion Colonel Raymond happened once at least to be near enough to lend a hand with an abnormally heavy bookcase. Colonel Raymond's interest in the newcomers was more painful than pleasurable, as he had all his life been shining in the much-diluted glory of having a wife whose brother-in-law's sister was the late Lady Avesham, and if some of his much-boasted noble relatives, who did not know him from Adam, were actually coming to live in Wroxton he had an irritating consciousness that his habitual conversation would have to be curtailed or, still worse, corrected. It therefore behooved the Colonel to obtain a suitably familiar footing in Bolton Street at the earliest possible moment, and he hovered in the vicinity like the traditional moth round the candle. His experiences in this process of introduction, and even afterward, were of a variety calculated to pierce even his thick-skinned egotism, and in fact the exposure of the Colonel's character in all its devious ramifications is quite the best thing in the book, and amusing enough by itself to pay for its reading.

Mrs Collingwood, whose horizon was bounded by the Cathedral Close, and who waged fierce warfare upon the use of stimulants and modern fiction, adds uninterruptedly to the gayety of the story, and is unique in her narrow British bigotry, as is the Colonel in his unblushing pretenses. The Miss Cliffords are delightful types of the kind of maiden lady who never grows old in her tastes. Miss Clara was forty-two, her sister, Phoebe, a year or two older; but Clara rode her bicycle and wrote lyrics, while Phoebe accompanied sentimental ditties on her mandolin with exactly the same flow of youthful spirits as in their teens. They were happy and satisfied and felt no tragedy in their lives, but it was there all the same as they floated slowly around in a backwater of life, while the adventure and romance of living swept by them.

Nothing has been said so far of the heroine and hero of Mr Benson's charming little story, but it has both of those indispensable adjuncts, and naturally they bear no small part in the proceedings. Mr Benson has been known to draw smart English society in terms hardly complimentary to either its brains or its heart, but the aristocrats in this book are of the true-blue variety. There was not a drop of snobbish blood in Jeannie or Arthur Avesham, or in their wonderful Aunt Emma, and all that was sincere, natural, and worth while in Wroxton was accepted by them with a simplicity quite disarming; things like the Colonel and Mrs Collingwood were, as simply, kept at arm's length and made game of, greatly to the reader's satisfaction.

An epidemic of typhoid fever in the village gives the Aveshams an opportunity altogether to win the hearts of their neighbors by nursing them, regardless of weariness or danger, and it also convinces Mr Jack Collingwood, an artist, and therefore the black sheep of the Canon's family, that Jeannie Avesham's safety is of infinite importance to himself. Strangely enough, that was exactly what Jeannie had unconsciously been waiting for him to find out, and so all went merrily ever after,

As an example, not of Mr Benson's power, but of his wit, cleverness, and knowledge of human nature, An Act in a Backwater is a delightful bit of work.

~The New York Times, 11/03/1905

In some ways it is one of the best of Mr. Benson's books, for it develops certain quiet characters with considerable skill, and it is pleasantly and evenly written. It is eminently pleasant and wholesome; has many touches of nature in it.

~The Westminster Gazette, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut

In An Act in a Backwater Mr. Benson gives us at least the shock of a surprise. For no one would have expected from the author of Dodo a mild and moving story, which we might describe as the apotheosis of Family Herald fiction. There is a Colonel, of course, and an Earl's daughter—the former a braggart and a coward, the other an angel of democratic tendencies. The Canon's rebellious artist son falls in love with the Earl's daughter. When fever breaks out in the village, the Earl's daughter is to be found by the bedside of the humblest, and the Canon's artist son is meanwhile heroically watching over the illegitimate child of his oldest friend. To complete the pathos Mr. Benson cruelly causes the charming village spinster to die of cancer. The plot of the book is banal to a degree, and only the obvious sincerity and seriousness of much of it forbid our consideration of it as an extravagant skit. The characterisation is often excellent, and, thanks to Mr. Benson's skill, the story makes very agreeable reading. But the wit in the book is not sufficient to save it from being not only surprising, but a little ridiculous. Mr. Benson is not at his best in a backwater. He is more himself in a house-boat on the Thames.

~The Bookman (UK), 03/1905

This story is so slight and uneven as compared with Mr. Benson's last published novel, The Challoners, that it seems like a sketch of a larger story abandoned because the author was dissatisfied with it. It has some pleasant bits of human nature and one or two lovable characters, but, considered as a novel, it is wretchedly constructed.

~The Outlook (US), 04/03/1905

A typical English novel

Much that goes to the make-up of a goodly section of modern English life may be found in this novel. There is the retired Indian official now turned garrulous clubman, the bishop, bishop's wife and bishop's son, the titled man and his relatives. A sister of the titled man and the bishop's son become hero and heroine, and an interesting couple they make, altho[ugh] they never wander outside conventional paths. A bevy of lesser lights circulate about these; gossip bubbles, babbles, and overflows. Nothing of unusual import really happens, yet interest is sustained by the force and vividness with which the people flitting before us are held up to the mirror that reflects the narrow,gossipy interests of an English provincial, town in which the intimate personal note is paramount and the large interests of the outside world play no part. And yet there is an ethical value in the minute exposition of this seeming inconsequent everyday life, because of the unlooked forheroisms that underlie it and crop to the surface as the story unfolds. As for the rest, it is sprightly in movement, well seasoned with the salt of humor, marked by literary skill in the construction, and in general fidelity to detail might be called Jane Austen-like—almost.

~The Literary Digest [US], 10/06/1905

The Morning Post has some very amusing criticisms of Mr. E. F. Benson's new novel An Act in a Backwater. Commenting on the wonderful achievements of artists in fiction, as for instance Charles Reader's sculptor, who could carve the bloom on a plum, the writer goes on to state that 'Jack Collingwood', Mr. Benson's hero, is worthy to stand with the best of them. When walking by a river he sees a girl playing with a dog, and from an instantaneous mental photograph, so to speak, paints a large canvas in three days, which is accepted by a local exhibition. “In the middle of it, cutting the picture nearly in two, was the figure of a girl, dressed in black, hatless, and keeping off a puppy with her parasol. Round the dog was a halo of spray, and he was in the middle of shaking himself, for his head was curly, his flanks and tail still smooth. It was an inimitable representation of a moment. One almost expected to see the halo of spray spread further and the hind part of the dog grow curly.”

~The Manchester Courier [UK], in the 'Painters at Work' column, 22/08/1905

A number of vivid and entertaining character sketches, and dialogue that is quite spontaneously witty and amusing.

~Daily Graphic, quoted in endpapers of Sheaves

It is a delicious world into which he takes us. There are scenes in it which 'catch hold'. The breaking down of the barrier between Jack Collingwood, the artist, and his mother, the canon's wife, is told as only a writer who has felt the pulse of humanity could tell it. It is a powerful study in high-strung emotion. In short, the author has given us a very kindly picture of a quiet life. Humour is to Mr. Benson as the circumambient air.

~Daily Express, quoted in endpapers of Sheaves

In An Act in a Backwater, published at the beginning of 1905, Fred returned, in a literary way, to a quiet cathedral town to recount a story of love and courtship, which he wrote in a gently flippant style, only at the end dropping into sentimentality.

An Act in a Backwater did not please the critics as had The Challoners. The Bookman called it the apotheosis of Family Herald fiction and Academy hoped that it was an early work of Mr Benson's, slightly touched and re-written in parts ~ 'certainly a very disappointing piece of work'.

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

An Act in a Backwater (1903), set in Winchester, is sentimental, slushy, mawkish, too sweet.

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

Arundel

Fiction ~ novel
Published December 1914
Approx. 115,000 words
(First read 18/06/2013)

As with The Relentless City [qv], I came to this one completely blind.  'Arundel' is the name of the suburban house where most of the 'action' takes place.  The novel is set very specifically (EFB actually mentions a date) in 1912-13.  I'd classify it as a 'romance with social comedy'.
It opens in ~ of all places! ~ India, where the 18-year-old music-loving Elizabeth Fanshawe lives with her English colonel father and stepmother.  The last of these has some comic potential: a thoroughly selfish and self-indulgent 'married merry widow' ~ she doesn't reappear till near the end, but her return is worth the wait (more anon).
Elizabeth is, like every good Benson girl-heroine, utterly devoted to her daddy ... but not to the extent of really objecting to being sent back to England for the summer for no discernible reason.  So off she trots.
Next we are introduced, in fine detail, to the metro town of Heathmoor, specifically to the inhabitants of 'Arundel'.  Mrs Hancock, a widow, and her 20ish-year-old daughter Edith, who are Elizabeth's paternal aunt and cousin.  Heathmoor is a place of perfect smug comfort and contentment, never a hair out of place, never a feather ruffled, and Mrs Hancock is the embodiment of that ethos.  Here is one of EFB's comic meistermonsters: Mrs H is only 48 but she always comes across as about 30 years older ~ her entire existence revolves around ensuring and perpetuating her own comfort, both physical and emotional (not that she actually has any emotions), to the exclusion of all else, including other people's comfort.  And she contrives to do all this while maintaining the fiction that she never thinks of herself: a typically Bensonian conceit ~ her whole life is an elaborate lie.  On top of this she is extremely miserly, only prepared to spend money on things that will conduce to her own all-important comfort ~ a scene in which she sits down with herself to decide what settlement to make on Edith for her marriage, starting with £400 p.a. and gradually whittling it down to £0 p.a. is very funny.  Luckily, she's no minor character: a good half the book is hers.

Anyway, next door to the Hancocks lives Edward, a young stockbroker (he's about 27: EFB's heroes and heroines are rarely the same age) who ~ and EFB makes no apologies about this, indeed he gives it emphasis ~ is a kind of 'paragon of averageness' ... except in two respects: (1) [Experienced Benson readers will already have guessed] He's extremely good-looking; and (2) [They won't have guessed this one] He has a dreamy passion for music.  Sadly he has no such passion for Edith Hancock, nor she for him, but, it being universally 'expected' that they shall marry, he proposes to her and is accepted.  Alas for Edith! the moment she becomes engaged she starts to fall in love with him.

Into this supremely comfortable ~ and dull ~ world steps Elizabeth Fanshawe on her visit from India.  And ~ alas for Edith again! ~ as soon as Edward hears Elizabeth play the piano after his own disastrous performance (one presumes that if EFB had given him actual performing talent, it would have been 'unmanning'), he realizes she is the other half he's always dreamed of, and that he's made the greatest mistake of his life in proposing to Edith.
The remainder of the novel deals with this impossible love, which is (obviously) utterly sexless, formulaic, Victorian and, frankly, pretty unconvincing.  There's a passage towards the end where Elizabeth, having finally renounced all hopes of having Edward (well, he's gone ahead and married Edith, she having refused to 'release' him), goes to a concert and has some kind of Road to Damascus experience in which the meaning of ~ possibly ~ the entire universe becomes clear to her: it's impossible to say just what happens because EFB goes into Waffle Overload here ~ it's kind of mystical ... or something ... or maybe not.

Just when you think (p. 379 of 382) the story can't possibly have a happy ending (!), Benson performs his once-in-a-million-years-of-literature ~ or in his case once-every-other-novel ~ sleight of hand and the pregnant Edith is taken suddenly ill.  Did I say 'suddenly'? ~ it's practically in mid-sentence.
And lo! within one paragraph of this, she's dead, the baby's dead* ... and the survivors all live happily ever after.
Almost forgot: Mrs Fanshawe's return is worth waiting for because near the very end she and Mrs Hancock meet and spar in a scene reminiscentish of Mapp and Lucia**, the big difference being that Hancock and Fanshawe are kind of trying to outdo one another at exactly the same game, trying to 'out-sweetness' one another.
Like so many of Benson's other novels, Arundel contains quite a lot that is good (Mrs Hancock, the subsidiary inhabitants of Heathmoor) but rather a lot more that is bad (the hero, the heroine, the plot, EFB's extremely dodgy notions of what 'love' is ...). 

The whole novel can be read online here.

STOP PRESS: For a sequel to Arundel, see the short story The Economies of Mrs Hancock (1925).

*No, EFB doesn't even draw the line at infanticide when the infant in question would be 'inconvenient'.
**Dang! ~ I mentioned them! 

THE CRITICS

Mr Benson at his subtle best.

~Pall Mall Gazette, quoted in newspaper ad of 18/12/1914

Arundel is truly E F Bensonian. That is, it is full of delightful chatter, more or less irresponsible, about a group of people who are all socially charming, though one or two of them may be trying to live with. They enjoy croquet, love Wagner, become engaged, marry, and even die ~ and we are entertained, in fact, quite touched, by their adventures, but we know that all is for the best, and that their ineptitudes will be more kindly dealt with by Mr Benson than they would by life. [...] The story is most readable throughout.

~Manchester Courier, 28/12/1914

Mr E F Benson is much too practised a novelist to write a book which is not clever and interesting. In Arundel the womenfolk are undoubtedly the most convincing, and while Mrs Hancock is not the principal person in the somewhat limited community into which we are introduced, she is certainly the most amusing, and her inconsequential volubility, endeavouring as she does to [illegible: probably 'hide'] her intense desire that all should minister to her comfort, is thoroughly entertaining. The hero is a strange creation. Mr Benson has imagined a Stock Exchange man of so little knowledge of himself that you would have believed he had always lived a quiet and retiring life. [...]  [Edith and Elizabeth] are very human, and the strength of characterisation is equal to the powers which Mr Benson has already shown himself to possess. “And for those who follow the gleam there is always light sufficient to show them their way” quotes Mr Benson, and this is the text of a good story.

~Western Daily Press, 04/01/1915

Arundel (Fisher Unwin) is one of those stories that begins with a Prologue; and as this was only mildly interesting I began to wonder whether I was going to be as richly entertained as one has by now a right to expect from Mr. E. F. Benson. But it appeared that, like a cunning dramatist, he was only waiting till the audience had settled into their seats; when this was done, up went the curtain upon the play proper, and we were introduced to Arundel itself, an abode of such unmixed and giddy joy that I have been chortling over the memory of it ever since. Arundel was the house at Heathmoor where lived Mrs. Hancock and her daughter Edith; and Mrs. Hancock herself, and her house and her neighbourhood and her car and her servants and her friends—all, in fact, that is hers, epitomize the Higher Suburbia with a delicate and merciless satire that is beyond praise. I shall hurry over the actual story, because that, though well and absorbingly told, is of less value than the setting. Next door to the Hancocks lived a blameless young man called Edward, whom for many reasons, not least because their croquet-lawns, so to speak, "marched," Mrs. Hancock had chosen as her daughter's husband. So blamelessly, almost without emotion, these were betrothed, walking among the asparagus beds on a suitable May afternoon "ventilated by a breath of south-west wind and warmed by a summer sun," and the course of their placid affection would have run smooth enough but for the sudden arrival, out of the Prologue, of Elizabeth, fiercely alive and compelling, the ideal of poor Edward's dreams. Naturally, therefore, there is the devil to pay. But, good as all this is, it is Mrs. Hancock who makes the book, first, last and all the time. She is a gem of purest ray serene, and my words that would praise her are impotent things. Only unlimited quotation could do justice to her sleek self-deception and little comfortable meannesses. In short, as a contemporary portrait, the mistress of Arundel seems to be the best thing that Mr. Benson has yet given us; worth—if he will allow me to say so—a whole race of Dodos. For comparison one turns instinctively to Jane Austen; and I can sound no higher praise.

~Punch, 03/02/1915

One piece of superb characterisation lifts Arundel […] to the plane of its author, Mr E. F. Benson's best work. The story in itself is excellent. It is at least a human situation, when a young man somewhat hurriedly becomes engaged without loving to his full capacity, without even waiting for friendship to turn to love at all, and then meets the perfect she who can evoke his deepest feeling and stir him to passion. This situation Mr Benson handles with a transcendental regard for love, and with rhapsodical devotion to music, particualrly Wagner's. The interest in the story is well maintained. But it is not the story which lifts the book to greatness ~ it is the perfectly-drawn figure of Mrs Hancock. It may seem strange that the delineation of an odiously selfish woman should do what ideal thinking and fine eloquence fail to achieve; but Mr Benson has sung of love and Wagner's Siegfried before now. The ecstasies of Arundel may be matched elsewhere in his works. Not so the wonderful Mrs Hancock. Here is an absolutely selfish person, yet she is no mere personification of a single quality, an abstraction clothed in human form. She is individual and alive. Her whole life is a selfish concern for her own comfort; her entire energy is devoted to securing that comfort in all the trivial details of well-to-do suburban existence, and yet she is forever pretending even to the point of fussiness to be concerned for the happiness of others. Mr Benson indulges in no direct attack upon the lady, no note of bitterness mars the suave gravity, almost geniality of his depiction of Mrs Hancock. Yet despite the author's unbroken graciousness, the matron rustles through the pages one of the most worthless beings that ever arrayed herself in the finest pink of all the proprieties. Mrs Hancock is a rare achievement, and would make remarkable any story, and Arundel is sufficiently good a story to be able to do without her. But what a difference her absence from the pages would make.

~The Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury [UK], 24/02/1915

 By no means the best of Mr. Benson's many stories—two selfish and talkative women of middle age are too much for any one novel. Nor are the unhappy love affairs of the humdrum man and young woman of a quiet English village very exciting, even when the brilliant, witty, and highly energetic lady from India converts their tepid affection into a tragedy of the passions.

~The Outlook (US), 31/03/1915

Mr. Benson has written a musico-psychological novel in a prologue, three books, and 350 closely printed pages. It is all about a young girl who, in addition to all the virtues, moral and physical, that young womanhood ought to possess, has a passion for music and much skill in its execution. Into her life enters a young man, also endowed with a musical, but inarticulate, soul. The obvious plan would have been for the two to get married and spend the rest of their lives going to the opera together—as, being in prosperous circumstances, they could very well have afforded to do. This, however, would have entailed a short book and an unpsychological one; so the author astutely arranges that the young man, shortly before his first meeting with Elizabeth, shall have carelessly engaged himself to her cousin, and many pages are devoted to a conscientious analysis of the feelings of the three parties to this blameless triangle. Truth to tell, the result is a somewhat dull book, written in a style of laborious realism, reminiscent of Arnold Bennett in his most determined moments, and only in part redeemed by illuminative sketches of some of the minor characters, and by occasional flashes of the humor that we know Mr. Benson can display. One feels on laying the book aside that the reward has been incommensurate with the pains, for one remains unconvinced of the reality of any of the three principal characters.

~The Nation, 13/05/1915

Arundel (1914) opens in Peshawar in India but subsequently moves to London. The story is banal and the prose thick, and there is a lack of the amusing peripheral characters that Fred often uses to lighten a turgid atmosphere*. The best scenes are those set in India**; they bring out all the scents and colours of the country that Fred had absorbed during his stay there with Francis Yeats-Brown a couple of years before.

 

~Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd in E. F. Benson As He Was, 1988. * !!! ~ I can only imagine Mrs Hancock had completely slipped Messrs Palmer and Lloyd's memory when they wrote this. ** i.e. the first two chapters, about 50 pages of the 370.

Ravens' Brood

Fiction ~ novel
Published August? 1934
Approx. 104,000 words
(First read 30/07/2002; second read 28/11/2013)

There's no two ways about it: Ravens' Brood is fun ... in comparison with a lot of the rest of EFB's output.  Okay so it's fun of a rather rarefied, perverse kind, but what the hell.

Set in the second half of the 19th century, it tells the story of a consummately dysfunctional family all living in a heap (well, in a farmhouse, actually) in rural Cornwall: John Pentreath, a part-time religious fanatic and full-time alcoholic; his second wife Mollie, a demented harridan supposedly gifted in folkloric supernatural stuff; his widowed daughter-in-law Nancy, a preening gadabout with an eye for anything in trousers; his stroppy-strapping grandson Dennis; and Mollie's niece Nell.  John and Mollie are estranged, to put it mildly; he lusts after Nancy when he isn't slagging her off for being a jezebel; Mollie lusts after him; Dennis and Nell lust ~ fairly chastely ~ after one another.

Well, obviously, lust is the key.  As Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd say in their introduction to my copy¹, amongst Benson's other stuff Ravens' Brood "stands out like a cromlech in a cornfield ... black magic, sexuality, blasphemy, violence and ecstasy surround and penetrate the plot and characters."
I'm not saying any more: I recommend it.  But don't read it in the expectation of finding light social comedy in it.  Expect, rather, to put it down and say, "Blimey, did the author of Mapp and Lucia really write this?"

¹ Published by Millivres Books, 1993.

P.S. This has only just occurred to me today [28/01/14]: 'Ravens' Brood' isn't the name of the Pentreaths' farmhouse, which doesn't appear to have any particular name; also, to the best of my recollection, Benson never refers to the family as being like a bunch of young ravens; in fact, there's no mention whatsoever of ravens in the book.  There is an owl, though. 

"Rip me bodice, bigfella!"

STOP PRESS! ~ apparently the late Mr Rock Hudson owned a copy of Ravens' Brood ~ LOOK.

OTHER CRITICS

A bit far-fetched perhaps, but this suggests an English counterpart of Tobacco Road*, in its picture of degradation and its atmosphere of hate and depravity and sexual desires, in its ironical contrasts of belief and action, in the sense of its being a world removed from current life. Not a pleasant book, as one can guess by the above. Farm life in Cornwall against which is played out the drama of old John Pentreath's fear of God and love of the flesh and drink, and his growing hatred of his grandson Dennis, [whose] saneness alone lifts the story out of an abyss of degeneracy. A far cry from Benson's usual work.

 

~Kirkus Reviews, no date.  * A 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell.  Never heard of it, I'm afraid.

 

Fine Feathers

Fiction ~ short story
Published March 1914
Approx. 4,300 words
(First read 23/12/1994)

Fans of Mapp and Lucia will love this one.  Set in the little country town of Riseborough, it tells the story of  Mrs Altham and her arch-rival Mrs Amy Ames, 'a comely toad' and 'not well off' but nonetheless the Queen of Society.  Mrs Altham comes into a colossal fortune and decides, in a masterstroke of spite, to rent Hinton, the former home of Sir James Westbourne, who happens to be Mrs Ames' cousin ~ a thing Amy couldn't conceive of in her wildest dreams.  Mrs Altham, with her husband as more-than-willing accomplice, duly move in and make their best efforts to 'become county'.  Well, remember how Mrs Mapp-Flint felt when she moved in to Grebe, cut off from all the 'news'?  Added to this are the fact that Hinton is a 'great barrack' of a place, she's terrified of her inherited servants, and Mr A realizes he can't stand the discomforts of shooting, largely because

... the bathroom was an immense, chilly apartment, half a mile away from his bedroom, and the bath, put in by Victorian plumbers, let water slowly steal away with moribund gurglings into a sort of sieve at the bottom of a huge grey coffin ...

But by far her bitterest pill is that she cannot get Mrs Ames to come for a weekend of having her nose rubbed in it ...  A pure delight from start to finish: EFB at his very best.  Available in Fine Feathers and Other Stories (1994).

The Five Foolish Virgins

Fiction ~ short story
Published 25th March 1925
Approx. 2,800 words
(First read 21/12/1994)

An Amy Bondham story ~ for the others click on the appropriate tag below.  In this one our blood-sucking social-climbing heroine and patroness of the arts purloins a rival's up-and-coming young playwright and suffers a humiliating soirée when he reads from his latest meisterwerk at it.  She's ultimately rewarded for her efforts, though.  A charming bit of Lucian nonsense, available in Fine Feathers and Other Stories (1994).

Mapp and Lucia

Fiction ~ novel
Published September 1931
105,100 words
(First read 18/07/1992) 

Mapp and Lucia is the fourth in the Mapp and Lucia sequence of novels and (obviously) the first one in which our eponymous 'heroines' get together and lock horns.















THE CRITICS

In Mapp and Lucia, Mr E. F. Benson is in his gayest and most irresponsible mood. He has no story to tell, but his description of the deadly and long-drawn-out duel between Miss Mapp and Mrs Lucas for the social leadership of the pleasant but scandal-loving town of Tilling is replete with rich humour. Nobody with a sense of the ludicrous can fail to find excellent entertainment in a volume in which Mr Benson is at his best.

~The Western Morning News and Mercury, 14/09/1931

E. F. Benson, author of Miss Mapp and Queen Lucia, has achieved a great success by bringing these two entertaining characters together in his latest novel, Mapp and Lucia […]. With charming insincerity they almost fall on each other's necks, and in an equally charming manner they manoeuvre and skirmish in a 'war to the death' for struggle for leadership of a quiet old village.

~The Daily Mail [Hull], 26/09/1931

After [the effort of producing Ferdinand Magellan, The Inheritor and As We Were (1929-30)], Benson was able to relax with another frivolous adventure, bringing together his two outrageous heroines [in] Mapp and Lucia. [With this novel the two characters] reached the apogee of their absurdity [and] Benson, too, reached the summit of his powers. […] It was a bold stroke to risk the clash of Titans in Mapp and Lucia, effected in the simplest manner by having Mrs Lucas rent Miss Mapp's house in Tilling for a period of two months. No sooner is the redoubtable lady ensconced than, by 'showy little dinners and odious flatteries', she manages to supplant Mapp's position in the town, as a result of which the two women are locked in combat. Quaint Irene, with her 'dismal directness', observes the fun and remains the only character not to take these people seriously. It is much to Benson's credit that he contrives a preposterous climax without losing the reader's sympathy: a sudden flood sweeps Mapp and Lucia away on an upturned kitchen table! Fred read the scene aloud to [his friend] Steven Runciman on the evening of the day he wrote it, to test reaction. He was encouraged.

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