Fiction ~ novel
Published June 1919
Approx. 98,400 words
(First read 22/05/2013)
A supernatural romantic melodrama, very much in the same vein as The Image in the Sand (1905). The novel starts off extremely well ~ in fact so well
that I was moved to tell my partner (who I rarely talk to about the
rubbish I read) that I literally couldn't put it down until I got to the
end of Ch. 2: it was some of the best stuff I'd ever read by EFB. The
first book deals with the early childhood of our hero Archie, the son of
an aristocrat ~ well, a lord at least. At the beginning he's a
babe-in-arms; at the end of the section he's six ~ a rather precocious
six, it has to be said. What makes the opening chapters so unusual is
that, though it's a third-person account, it's told very much from the
point-of-view of Archie himself: it's an account of 'awakening
consciousness', of an entirely new human being gradually coming to the
realization that he's a person, just as much as all those
surrounding him are individual people. The reason I found this part
(Chapters 1-3, at least, before the plot starts intervening) so unusual
is that it is utterly real, believable, convincing.
Archie's
earliest memory is of his nurse (Blessington ~ not 'Miss' or 'Mrs' or
'Bessie' Blessington: just 'Blessington') leaning over his cot and
comforting him; she reappears throughout the novel and is always drawn
with great charm and love, to the extent that it's impossible to believe
EFB wasn't painting a portrait from life ~ the Benson kiddies' nurse
was called Beth and was a family fixture, staying with them till her
death. Archie also has two sisters, as did EFB in life, and a deceased
older brother, ditto. He's written his two real-life real-world
brothers out of the novel (inconvenient!), but his distant forbidding
father has survived the cut.
Now
then. It turns out that Archie has mediumistic powers, when he's
contacted by the aforementioned deceased brother, named Martin ~ as was
EFB's. At the end of Book One Archie is taken to Switzerland for his
health ~ he's consumptive ~ to the exact place where Martin died of the
same disease a few years earlier. Great plan! There the
deceased contacts him again, saying that he won't be able to come
another time but, by so doing, 'proving' to Archie's mum that his powers
are real.
Book
Two, pp.105-205. We've now moved on something like 15-20 years and
Archie has ~ with dull inevitability ~ grown up to be EFB Stock
Character No.1, all 'slim, strong arms, incredibly browned with a month
of sea-bathing' and crisp, blond curls; he's also something of a poet;
in short, all the usual stuff. And, my dears, he is thick: Benson seems to have been peculiarly wedded to the notion that young men totally lacked the gift of insight,
clairvoyant or no. For lo! Archie is in love with a cold, calculating,
heartless, soulless vixen of a young woman (Helena), one of a pair of
sisters. Obviously she isn't in love with him, though her sister
(Jessie) is.
Well,
to cut a very long and decidedly predictable story short: Archie, blind
to Helena's true
character, falls deeper in love with her and is just
about to propose when she goes and marries someone richer. (Obviously
she doesn't love him either.) He's devastated and turns once more to the shade of
Martin for solace. Unfortunately it soon becomes clear ~ to the reader,
and to Jessie, but obviously not to Archie, totally devoid as he
is of the gift of insight ~ that the shade he's communing with
regularly isn't Martin at all, but some 'evil spirit' who promptly ~ very
promptly ~ sends him to the bad: he becomes addicted to absinth (yes,
you read that right) and resolves to have an affair with Helena behind
her husband's back.
Just
then some war or other starts in Europe (details are vague), the
husband is conveniently killed in action, and Archie is 'rescued' by
Jessie > The End. Yes, it really is like that: after maundering on
for 300 pages or so, EFB suddenly realizes he's getting near his
permitted word-count and wraps the whole thing up in about 20 pages with
thoroughly unseemly haste.
VERDICT: 'uneven' doesn't come anywhere near covering Across the Stream:
the first part is very good, uncharacteristically good; the remainder
suffers from EFB's sadly all-too-typical ropey plotting and bletheriness;
the ending feels more like afterthought than logical and consequential
conclusion.
THE CRITICS
It is quite undeniable that within the last few years
there has been an immense increase in the number of those who take an
interest in matters relating to fortune-telling, telepathy, thought
reading, and things broadly classed as spiritual. To some individual
temperaments the occult has a great lure. It would not be true to
say that these persons are all neurotic, or victims of a disordered
imagination. Many of them, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver
Lodge, Mrs Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Mr E. F. Benson, and many others are
men and women whose honesty of purpose no one doubts. […] Young
people should be warned against the folly of attempted intercourse
with the powers of the unseen universe. Mr E. F. Benson's latest
novel, Across the Stream,
shows the perilous possibilities of haphazard traffic with spirits
which may be bad as well as good […]
~The Daily Mail [Hull, UK], 12/06/1919
Mr. Benson has never written with greater charm than in his picture
of the child life of Archie in this story. There is a psychic
element, delicately treated in its inception but as it grows to be
the real theme less interesting to the imaginative appreciation of
those who are not believers in psychic phenomena.
~The Outlook
(US), 25/06/1919
[...]
Across the
Stream
possess[es] [...] the merit of fine workmanship. […] Mr. Benson has
his inevitable touch of the garish and the excessive. But the art
[...] is ripe and flexible. […] the fine Italian landscapes of Mr.
Benson, are admirably rendered; [the] characters live with a strong
if not very lasting life. [...] Mr. Benson uses all his dash and
color to make the figure of Archie both brilliant and exquisite. And
yet [the
book is],
in any deep and serious sense, unimportant. It is not because [Mr.
Benson has] chosen
these people and not others. It is because in drawing
[his]
characters
and telling [his
story he has] been
too little concerned with memory, which is the mother of the creative
imagination, and too much concerned with a fancy that grows out of
emotional impulses and builds a vain and fleeting shadow world above
that reality from which arises all our suffering but likewise all
that we know of beauty. [Across
the Stream deals]
with
the supposed communication between the living and the dead. Facts of
the utmost questionableness and theories of the most baseless
improbability are treated as established in the practice and
experience of life. [...]
Mr. Benson [has
never] faced
the real nature of the problem or the limitations of average minds,
or [...]
reflected on the insurmountable difficulties of the question of human
evidence. [He
has]
deliberately built [his
novel]
upon a foundation more insecure than the shifting sand. And no amount
of talent or skill in the details of execution can save [it]
from the result. "Thought," wrote Rémy
de Gourmont, "is the man himself. And style and thought are
one."
~The Nation,
02/08/1919 [wow, what a
stupid
review!]
Mr E F Benson's literary talent is as
remarkable as ever, for his latest book ~ Across the Stream
[…] ~ is distinguished by the charm of its phrasing, its balance of
light and shade, its technique, and that quality, elusive as light,
which is usually known as 'style'. The book is divided into three
parts, of which the first is the most remarkable as a study of the
psychology of a child, and of scenes and pictures of his earliest
days of childhood from the time when his powers of memory were only
just beginning to germinate; and the horizon of his outlook on life
was ~ only very gradually ~ widening through scenes and situations in
which he was “still a detached observer, looking at them as through
a telescope.” Mr Benson has either a marvellous memory of his own
childhood, or has made a vital study of the floating impressions and
untranslatable instincts of other children he may have known. In any
case, we follow the pilgrimage of the hero of his book from childhood
to manhood with unabated interest to the end. It is an admirable and
convincing piece of literary craftsmanship.
~The Yorkshire Post, 30/07/1919
