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

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