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.

Spinach

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, May 1924
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
6,570 words
(First read 17/08/2012) 

So-called automatic writing

Spinach is one of EFB's rare comic spook stories¹.  Or rather, it starts off promisingly as a comic story, degenerates into a humdrum spook story, and only comes alive again in the last paragraph.
Brother and sister Ludovic and Sylvia Byron are a couple of phoney mediums ... oh don't listen to me, here's Fred's opening paragraph, the best in the story:

Ludovic Byron and his sister Sylvia had adopted these pretty, though quite incredible, names because those for which their injudicious parents and godparents were responsible were not so suitable, though quite as incredible.  They rightly felt that there was a lack of spiritual suggestiveness in Thomas and Caroline Carrot which would be a decided handicap in their psychical careers, and would cool rather than kindle the faith of those inquirers who were so eager to have séances with the Byrons.

Spinach (not actually relevant)

EFB has great fun describing their methods and results, as he always does when poking fun at fake spiritists.  Anyway, one of their top customers, Mrs Sapson ('a large, emphatic widow'), arranges for them to go and spend a holiday at her recently vacated cottage near Rye².  There they discover that they have genuine mediumistic powers and are actually able to photograph the extremely 'fresh' ghost that besieges them, though one suspects he would have manifested himself to pretty much anyone who happened to be available.  I'll not give away the climax ~ just say that I found it only mildly amusing.
So: starts well, long saggy middle section, ends well.  It's available online here.

¹ For the others click on the 'comic spook' tag.
² Yes, actually named as such, for once.

Roderick's Story

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, May 1923
Collected in Visible and Invisible, October 1923
5,690 words
(First read 04/08/2012) 

Lamb House, Rye, in EFB's day

I have only one good thing to say about Roderick's Story but I'll say all the others first.  In it EFB displays all his worst habits as a writer: the 'plot' is absurd, risible, ludicrous; the 'characters' are nothing more than pawns to be shunted this way and that, stricken with mysterious but oh so convenient diseases, and/or prematurely culled; the dénouement is signposted well in advance; the 'emotions', including a sizeable dollop of Victorian sentiment, are stereotyped, phoned in from Sentiments'Я'us; the whole is a clumsy, garbled mess.
I'll not trouble you with the storyline (you'd think I was making it up anyway) but here are one or two of Roderick's most salient features: (i) a minute description of Lamb House (not named thus or at all) in Rye (named Tilling) which belongs to Unknown and Featureless Narrator ~ more of him soon; (ii) a case of such extreme stiff-upper-lip that it's actually tipped over into insanity; (iii) a typical Bensonian love-hate triangle: a woman suffers nobly while her horrid husband lives and ~ for reasons known only to EFB ~ continues to suffer after his death; (iv) two handsome lads (18, 19) dying in the European War; (v) a certain amount of uncertain thinking re spiritism; (vi) some golf ~ as if we weren't already miserable enough!; and (vii) I repeat: a plot so preposterous that I can't think of adequate terms to describe it.

Anyway, the one good thing I mentioned earlier is this: Our Unknown Narrator has asked his pal Roderick to read and comment on some of his (U.N.'s) ghost stories for a forthcoming volume.  Quote Roddy:

"[...] you will make a book that not only is inartistic, all shadows and no light, but a false book.  [...] You play godfather to your stories, you see: you tell them in the first person, [...] and that, though it need not be supposed that those experiences were actually yours, yet gives a sort of guarantee that you believe the borderland of which you write to be entirely terrible." [etc.]

Now that I come to look at it again, Roderick's thought is about as clear as U.N.'s ~ or E F Benson's ~ thinking on spiritism and revenants, so even the thing I thought was good isn't.
Enough!
It's available online here.

 

Bagnell Terrace

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

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

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

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


* Renamed Hugh Abbot for this particular outing. 

THE CRITICS

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

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

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

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

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

 

James Lamp

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Weird Tales (USA), June 1930
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
5,560 words
(First read 17/06/2012) 

In this one our intrepid Unidentified Narrator goes to stay with his retired doctor pal in Rye¹.  The wife of the pal's manservant (James Lamp) has just disappeared; it's known that she was having an affair with a chap from Hastings and that Lamp wasn't best pleased about it.  Pal and U.N. have a few sightings of a mysterious woman; Lamp is jittery.  One night our two gents awake to find the house full of fog and the manservant being coerced out by his revenant old lady.  The twist ~ if you can call it that ~ in this one is that Mrs Lamp's ghost doesn't come back merely to point the finger at the hubby who bumped her off: she comes back to take him with her to t'other side ~ their bodies are found in a sluice the following morning.
A very characteristic EFB spook story in that (1) it's entirely predictable, and (2) the tension level remains firmly at zero throughout.
The one novel thing ~ a house which has uncannily filled with fog ~ is under-exploited.  In fact, it's not exploited at all: it's made to seem positively routine.  HoHum.
It's available online here.



¹ Renamed Trench for this particular occasion.

Machaon

Swallowtail butterfly ~ Papilio machaon

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, January 1923
Collected in Visible and Invisible (October 1923)
6,055 words
(First read 15/06/2012)

Another ~ frankly ~ idiotic story about a medium and a random message from beyond the grave.  In this one the visitor turns out to be none other than some Very Ancient Greek named Machaon, son of Aesculapius (y'know, the one who invented medicine), who struggles through the ether or ectoplasm or whatever to deliver to our Unnamed Narrator, who just happens to live in a little town named Tilling, in a house with a garden room, the verdict that U.N.'s faithful manservant, currently lying in hospital stricken with cancer, should be treated with X-rays.  [No, I'm not making this up: EFB is.]  The whole thing is so preposterous that I'm not prepared to spend any more time on it.
But maybe you'll have better luck with it: it's available online here. 

Miss Mapp

Fiction ~ novel
Published October 1922
78,400 words
(First read 16/07/1992) 

Miss Mapp is the second in the Mapp and Lucia series of novels and short stories, and is (fairly obviously) the first to feature Miss Elizabeth Mapp (later Mrs Elizabeth Mapp-Flint), and the first to be set in EFB's fictional version of Rye, i.e. Tilling.
I've read all these umpteen times and have long been a confirmed 'Mappite' rather than 'Luciaphile'.










THE CRITICS

Clever, amusing, E. F. Benson's new novel, Miss Mapp, is a chronicle of the doings of a group of women and men in a seaside township. Of this group, Miss Mapp is the dominating personality. Not too passe, she has set her mind on one day marrying one Major Flint, retired. The book is a great example of the versatility which enables the author to create new characters in new settings, all types of diverse human nature, and each in their own way delightful. The characterisation and dialogue are of Mr Benson's usual high order. The reader is carried along easily; it all makes entertaining reading, true to life as lived by the comfortably placed human beings in an English township.

~Western Daily Press, 14/10/1922

SMALL TOWN TABBIES

In her delineation of small-town life in Cranford Mrs Gaskell kept her eyes mainly on the sunny, lovable side of human character. Mr Benson does precisely the reverse. In this story of leisure, comfortably-placed elderly people in a little English seaside town he can see only the meanness and pettiness and scandal-loving natures of people in whose hands too much leisure is a curse. His central figure is Miss Mapp, a middle-aged spinster of independent means who lives in perpetual smiling warfare with her female neighbours. All of them are cats, but none of them have the claws so well sharpened or the Cheshire grin so prominent as she has. There is an unceasing interchange of feline amenities over rival tea-tables, dress designs and the like, particularly between Miss Mapp and her deadly rival, Mrs Plaistow, whom she addressed with acrimonious fondness as 'dear' or 'darling Diva'. Her cattish inclinations towards her own sex are aggravated by the proclivity Miss Mapp has for a member of the sterner sex, the old bachelor Major Flint. Not too passé, she has set her mind on marrying the retired Major, and how the latter ultimately falls a victim to her blandishments is matter for the purest comedy.

Mr Benson's study is clever, amusing, almost amazingly shrewd in its observation of human nature. But at times throughout the book one is inclined to wish that he would concern himself just a little less with the meanness and vanity of petty human beings. There is not one of the characters in this study who is not as vulgar and stupid, as jealous and curious as Miss Mapp herself. The tabbies are of both sexes, and the vicar at least among the men seems to favour the feminine side. Clever and amusing as Miss Mapp is, it palls at times in its exasperating emphasis on all that is most mean, stupid, and petty in middle-aged character.

~Aberdeen Journal, 16/10/1922

In Miss Mapp by E. F. Benson, we have a cleverly written account of life in a seaside township.

Miss Mapp is the dominating figure. The reader will find much enjoyment in following her little adventures in small town society.

A real true to life story with real human beings with all their little foibles and failings.

~The Courier [Dundee], 09/11/1922

Gentle social comedy such as English villages exist to provide.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 03/1923

[…] I picked up Queen Lucia, by E. F. Benson. I really liked David Blaize, and the Mapp and Lucia books are supposed to be Benson’s best work, but I have a hard time seeing why one would enjoy these books, unless one likes really hateful characters.

That said, I’m still reading them. I’m halfway through Miss Mapp, which is book two, and apparently Mapp and Lucia don’t meet up until book four. I’m not sure I’ll last that long. It’s not much fun to spend time with  characters who hate each other, and Miss Mapp is an even worse offender on that front than Queen Lucia is.

 
~'Melody' at Redeeming Qualities, 04/10/2010

The Guardian Angel

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Woman, April 1928
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 3,800 words
(First read 01/05/1992) 

Another mildly diverting bit of Society froth from the late 20s.  Mrs Attwood is another in EFB's long line of widow-women living in 'poverty', which is to say in a delightful little house in Mayfair with a full retinue of servants.  In exchange for free lunches, dinners, and holidays on the Riviera, she makes it her business to act as guardian angel ~ and matchmaker ~ to her friends, such as that 'dear kind thing' Peggy, Lady Rye.  But this episode in her 'busy' life involves another pal Julia Soningsby who, unhappily married to a man she adores, has agreed to divorce him provided that he names himself as the guilty party.  Mrs A, having rented her house out for the Spring, goes for a holiday to Brighton where an entirely predictable (and credibility-stretching) misunderstanding ensues.  Needless to say, it all ends as prettily as you'd expect, and Adultery pops its head back below the parapet.


QUOTABLES
Mrs Attwood has gone to have dinner with her chum Julia.  Notice how Benson has a dig at flappers ... without being in the least bit insulting about it:

Julia came downstairs some ten minutes after G[uardian] A[ngel] had arrived at her house, looking like a handsome boy who had chosen to cut his hair shorter than usual, and to wear a sapphire-coloured sack which very nearly came to his knees.  [...] Julia always made Mrs Attwood feel Victorian: she felt even more so as the meal, which consisted chiefly of caviare and cocktails, proceeded.

The Mapp and Lucia series

Fiction ~ six novels, two short stories
Published 1920-39

Benson's Mapp and Lucia series consists of six novels and two short stories:
(1) Queen Lucia (1920; Lucia only)
(2) Miss Mapp (1922; Mapp only)
(3) Lucia in London (1927; Lucia only)
(4) The Male Impersonator (1929; Mapp only)
(5) Desirable Residences (1929; Mapp only)
(6) Mapp and Lucia (1931; both)
(7) Lucia's Progress (1935; both; known as The Worshipful Lucia in the USA)
(8) Trouble for Lucia (1939; both)

There are, of course, whole herds of proto-Lucias and pseudo-Mapps, not to mention Lucias-in-waiting, Mapps manquées, mini-Georgies, the odd Major Benjy, beefy parlourmaids with their lesbianic mistresses, snobs, cats, bitches, pseuds, prudes ... and umpteen stories (some comic, some spooky) set in Tilling, Tillingham, etc. etc. scattered throughout the works of E. F. Benson from 1893-1940.
I've read the whole lot of them umpteen times and the comedy never palls for me.