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

Our Family Affairs 1867-1896

The Benson family, circa 1866*

Non-fiction ~ memoirs
First published October 1920
Approx. 98,000 words
(First read 19/06/2014)

[written 03/10/14] I'm afraid I completely forgot to review this at the time of reading.  Like EFB's other books of memoirs (Mother and Final Edition), this first instalment is beautifully written and consistently interesting.  It's also extremely gossipy.
Anyway, it's available online here.  Oh and it has a nice handy index too. 

*See that twinkle in Edward White Benson's eye? ~ that's Fred.  The photo, by the way, is from Arthur's reminiscences of his father, published as The Trefoil (1924).


QUOTABLES
Our Family Affairs is ram-full of quotables ~ here are just a few things I noted down:

EFB's childhood infatuation with a chorister in Lincoln Cathedral:

That emotion […] touched such religion as I had ecstasy, and I added to my prayers the following petition, which I said night and morning.

“O God, let me enter into Lincoln Cathedral choir, and abide there in happiness evermore with Thee!”

Who 'Thee' was I cannot determine: I believe it to have been a mixture of God and the chorister, and, I think, chiefly the chorister.

EFB on EWB [his dad]:

I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was continually pulling us up, for nothing is further from the truth. Continually we played to him, and he danced the most fascinating measure; continually he played to us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchanting airs. He could render us speechless with laughter at his inimitable mirth, or breathless with suspense at his stories. But all the time there was this sense that at any moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable rebuke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea we had committed.

EFB on music:

[…] all my life music has been to me as a celestial light, shining in dark places for the mitigation of their blackness, and flooding the serene and sunlit with its especial gold, but [as regards my own budding ~ and thwarted ~ musical talent] from that soil there withered a little herb that once grew there, a nest with incubated eggs was despoiled, and the bird came not back.

A touching father/son moment. Young EFB has been dreading another paternal chastisement for some bizarrely trivial misdemeanour:

[…] I went stiff and resigned, not knowing whether there was not to be some renewal of his anger …. Instead, he put me in an arm-chair close by the fire and wrapped a rug round my knees, and asked if I was quite comfortable, and shared with me the tea that had been brought in for him, since he was too busy to come into the nursery as usual and have it with the rest of us. And then he somehow gave me a glimpse, sitting tucked up by the fire, of the love that was at the base of his severity. How, precisely, he conveyed that I cannot tell, but there was no more doubt about it than there was about the heaviness of his displeasure.

O. Browning (1837-1923)

EFB on Oscar Browning, whom he also portrayed in The Babe, B.A. (I think) and David of King's (I think):

[…] he wandered from room to room, bald and stout and short yet imperial with his huge Neronian head, and his endless capacity for adolescent enjoyment. Age could not wither him any more than Cleopatra; he was a great joyous ridiculous Pagan, with a genius for geniality, remarkable generosity and kindliness, a good-humoured contempt for his enemies, of whom he had cohorts, a first-rate intellect and memory, and about as much stability of purpose as a starling. His extraordinary vitality, his serene imperviousness to hostility, his abandoned youthfulness were the ingredients which made him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at him, many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely remained the most outstanding and prominent personality in Cambridge. Had he had a little more wisdom to leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a little more principled belief to give ballast to his friskiness, he would have been as essentially great as he was superficially grotesque.

After sending Henry James (a family acquaintance/friend) his manuscript ~ handwritten, no less! ~ of Dodo, EFB received a reply couched in typically Henry-James-ian terms:

In case the reader has given a glance to Dodo, can he imagine a more wiself expressed opinion, that opinion, in fact, being no opinion at all? Never by any possibility could that MS. have seemed to him worth the paper it was written on, or two minutes of his own time. With what a sigh of relief he must have bundled it into its wrapper again!

Pirates

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, October 1928
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
7,115 words
(First read 06/12/2012)

Pirates isn't just my favourite of Benson's spook stories, it's one of my favouritest of all his stories.  In truth, to call it a spook story at all is fairly misleading: there's a lot more to it than that.  It's a story about nostalgia and loneliness and longing and belonging.
It is, furthermore, by far the most autobiographical of EFB's stories, spook or otherwise.  The protagonist, Peter Graham, is a widowed gent of 56 years; Benson was 61 when Pirates was published, and, as we all know, a lifelong bachelor.  Both spent parts of their childhood in Truro, Cornwall: the Graham family home was named Lescop, the Bensons' Lis Escop ['The Bishop's House'].  Both came from largeish families: the Grahams totaled five siblings, the Bensons six, though the eldest of

Truro

Fred's (Martin) died shortly after they settled in Cornwall.  Graham's childhood memories centre on his sisters rather than brothers, as did Benson's; they even have a memory in common ~ that story of the stickleback recounted in Our Family Affairs and Once reappears here.  Anyway, here it is in a nutshell:

there was another loneliness which neither married life nor his keen interest in business had ever extinguished, and this was directly connected with his desire for that house on the green slope of the hills above Truro. [...] the youngest but one of a family of five children, he alone was left.  One by one they had dropped off the stem of life.  [...] None of that brood of children except himself, and he childless, had married, and now when he was left without intimate tie of blood to any living being, a loneliness had gathered thickly round him. [...] sometimes he ached with this dull gnawing ache of loneliness, which is worse than all others, when he thought of the stillness that lay congealed like clear ice over these young and joyful years when Lescop had been so noisy and alert and full of laughter ...

Graham pays a brief visit to Truro after an absence of 40 years, during which he walks round the town and sees sights which seem to be 'echoes' of a particular day in his own childhood; he also goes to look at the old family home, now abandoned and falling into disrepair ~ here too he seems to hear echoes of the past.

Lis Escop, Truro.  (Very poor image, I'm afraid)

He resumes his everyday life and time passes.  One day his doctor tells him he has a heart condition and needs rest in a warm climate.  "Would Cornwall be warm enough?" he asks.  And so it comes to pass that, after having from the house agent the merest hint of a hint that Lescop has stood empty for so long because it might be 'haunted', he moves back into his childhood home and continues to reconstruct his memories of that idyllic time.  And the hauntings ~ if, indeed, such they were ~ ... stop.  I won't give away the ending, though it's fairly easily guessable.

The major factors that differentiate Pirates from most ~ if not all ~ other Benson spook stories are these:
(1) It's a third-person narration.  While this distances the reader somewhat from the protagonist (and, more importantly, the protagonist from the author), at the same time it gives you a better view of Graham as an in-the-round person, and one with emotions!  It also helps that he's a businessman, not just some amateur dabbling toff whose name you don't even know.
(2) The genuineness of the autobiographical detail ~ from the game of pirates that the kiddies used to play, to the attic stairs the young Peter would take in one jump ~ make it all feel peculiarly real.
(3) And ~ the biggest of the lot ~ EFB leaves it entirely up to the reader to decide whether there are any ghosts in it at all, whether the extremely level-headed Mr Graham is imagining things, or 'conjuring' things ... and if there are ghosts, why are they there? what are their intentions? and, most interestingly for me, have they conjured him?   

Well, anyway, I can't recommend this one highly enough.  And luckily it's available online here.