The Judgment Books

Fiction ~ novella
First serialized in The Graphic November 1894
Published in full 1895
24,405 words

A very posh portrait-painter paints a self-portrait, neurotically.
When you boil all the rotting flesh off this bloated carcass of a story, that's all you're left with.
Even if Benson had told it at his customary short-story length (5-6,000 words), it would still have been vastly overlong.
The author doesn't blush to mention that he's been inspired by (voir plagiarized) Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); what he singularly does fail to mention is that the yarn owes as much to Wilde's Dorian Gray (1890/91).  At the exact time The Judgment Books was being published in full, Wilde was engaged in his idiotic trials.  So that might have had something to do with the omission.


A truly mind-blowingly atrocious piece of writing.

QUOTABLES
There's one very brief interlude in all the tedium.  Our toff hero and his toff wife have invited the vicar and his wife to dinner ~ for no reason other than to have a break in the tedium, it seems.  The vicar's wife, Mrs Greenock, is ceaselessly inquisitive:

[Asking questions of everyone], she was persuaded, was the best way of improving an

 already superior intellect, as hers admittedly was.  There is a great deal to be said for

 her view—there always was a great deal to be said for her views, and she usually said

 most of it herself.

Now that you've read the one good line in this yarn, please forget about it.  Under no circumstances should you attempt to read it.

THE CRITICS

An odd, suggestive story … The tale is well told, the conceit a striking one.

~Hartford Courant, quoted in front endpapers of The Vintage

Mr. Benson is at his best thus far, in this new book rather than in Dodo, and that best is excellent.

~Boston Advertiser, quoted in front endpapers of The Vintage

The new work of the author of Dodo is much less ambitious and somewhat better written than that amusing story. It is hardly long enough to be called a novel, and treats of a single episode in the life of a portrait-painter. This gentleman, who is not very strong in the mind, reads Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde whilst he is casting about for a new piece of work, and it fires his imagination to “put his Jekyll and Hyde on the canvas for men to wonder at and be silent before.” He would paint himself, he decided, “as the husband and lover of Margery, the Jekyll of himself who had known and knew the best capabilities for loving in his nature; and he would paint his Hyde, the man who had lived as other men live in Paris, a Bohemian, careless, worthless, finding this thing and that honey in the mouth, but to the soul wormwood and bitterness.” Unfortunately Margery, who was not only his wife, but his backbone, went away on a visit, and the consequence was that Hyde got the upper hand on the canvas. One is then led to expect a sort of Dorian Gray transformation, but nothing comes of it. The wife returns home, the picture is destroyed, and everything goes on as before. There is a good deal of moralising about the immortality of all our deeds, and how they are inscribed in the 'judgment books', but it is not particularly new. One is left with a distinct feeling that in this little work Mr Benson, to use an expressive American phrase, “has bitten off more than he can chew.”

~The Glasgow Herald, 18/07/1895

The Judgment Books, by E. F. Benson, tells the story of an artist who painted himself as he was, influenced by the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is rather horrible, but the conception is well carried out. Frank Trevor had “lived the life of a man,” in Paris too, and his wife accepted him, declining to hear his story. She was consistent, however, and when he had painted a terrible picture of himself as he was (or, rather, of the 'Mr Hyde' part of him), she saved him by her love from madness, and accepted him as he was, good and bad. A book like this cannot be read without one gaining an impression not merely of its cleverness; the brief, concentrated story is one that haunts the imagination and awakens thoughts which the best of men would willingly let die out of his memory.

~The Leeds Mercury, 31/07/1895

A curious, imaginative, introspective study of character. An artist of singularly sensitive temperament paints a portrait of himself, and knowing of certain dark passages in his life is driven to express them in his picture. The result is a 'horror' that terrifies his wife and well-nigh deprives him of reason. How he is saved by her courage and devotion must be learnt from the book itself, which is well worth reading from more than one point of view.

~The Liverpool Mercury, 28/08/1895

The Judgement Books [sic] is Fred's attempt to emulate Dorian Gray, and was published in the year of Wilde's disgrace (1895 also saw The Importance of Being Earnest). The hero, Frank, is an artist who believes that each time he paints he loses part of himself which is, as it were, kidnapped and absorbed by the picture in hand. He is now embarked upon a self-portrait, but is frightened by the prospect that he may paint himself as he really is ~ dissolute and depraved ~ and not as the good and decent man his loving wife Margery sees. For Frank, before he married, had been rather a cad and risks raising the ghost of that past life. Indeed, as the picture progresses, it grows more vicious and reveals a loathsome personality, which Margery flees from in fear. Eventually, Frank persuades Margery to help him, to rescue him from himself, and the painting is dramatically ripped to pieces.

Not only is the theme Wildean, but there is a Wildean principle at stake which Fred seems to question. The preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray makes the famous claim, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” Benson has Frank make an analogous point about art:

You call one thing pretty, another ugly. Believe me, art knows no such terms. A

thing is true, or it is false; and the cruelty of it is, that if we have as much as grain

of falsehood in our measure of truth, the thing is worthless. Therefore, in the

picture I am now painting, I have tried to be absolutely truthful; as you said at

dinner, I have tried to paint what I am, without extenuation or concealment. Would

you like to see it? You would probably call it a hideous caricature, because in this

terrible, cruel human life, no man knows what is good in him, but only what is bad.

It is those who love us only, who know if there is any good in us.

In other words, a portrait may be well-painted (honest) or ill-painted (deceitfully), but it cannot be accused of evil. It can only depict what is, and not be blamed for failing to depict what ought to be. With the denouement of the story, however, it is clear that Benson is challenging this view. He does not believe the artist has a responsibility towards his audience as well as towards his art, that there is evil in the world and the artist must neither glamorise nor excuse it. Fred's moral view is simple, and it occurs again and again in his work. It is this: evil can be banished by good, and salvation is always possible, but the struggle, the conflict, are unceasing. In The Judgement Books it is Margery who saves Frank. […] Since many of Fred's books are made of incidents in his life, stitched together in varying ways, or reflect moments in his intellectual and moral development, we are bound to ask, who was it who saved Fred from himself.

The Judgement Books was a dismal flop …

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

A Creed of Manners

Fiction ~ short story
First published December 1894¹
Reprinted in Bensoniana No. 2 (Hermitage Books, 1993)
(First read 14/11/2014)

Oh dear ... oh deary dear ... oh very very dear indeed ~ A Creed of Manners is an unbelievably stupid story, the 27-year old E. F. Benson at his worst².
It consists largely of a fatuous, epigram-sodden³ dialogue between two male friends, Claude Ackersley and his stooge Jack Anstruther.  Claude is an early example of ... well, this:

[...] rich, good-looking, well-born, perfectly healthy, entirely unambitious, and twenty-five years old.

He also has 'an insatiable appetite for loafing' ~ nice.  As you'd expect from this type of Bensonian person⁴, he describes himself as a 'harmless, unnecessary young man' ~ too right; and his 'creed' is this:

My hope and aim are that under every circumstance, however trying, I may behave like a gentleman.  My fear is that circumstances may be too strong, and that I shall fail, and behave like a coward or a cad.

Luckily the Mad Axe-Murderer EFB is on hand to put him to the test: Claude swallows a piece of glass from a broken soda siphon ['Death by Whisky and Soda'] ... and, despite being in agonizing pain, dies the most excruciatingly gentlemanly and noble kind of death the 19th century had to offer.
As I said, a stupid stupid story ~ by 21st-century standards, obviously ... though I'm willing to bet it caused a certain amount of tittering even in 1894.  Anyway, it's available online here.  



¹ Not sure where this first saw the light of day, either in Phil May's Winter Annual (UK) or in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine (US).  Of course it's conceivable that it was published in both places simultaneously.
² Well, at his worst after Dodo, that is.

³ At one point, in reply to a particularly inane epigram, Jack actually says, "How very Oscaresque!"  A mere two months after this story was published, Wilde was engulfed in the scandal that ended his career.  EFB, who knew him personally if not especially well, continued with the epigrammatic style for the next 40 years, long after the rest of the world had pretty much abandoned it, and, to a degree (see As We Were), remained faithful to the memory of the Great Irish Windbag's supposed genius.
⁴ I admit this wasn't my first choice of word here.

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.