Scarlet and Hyssop

Fiction ~ novel
Published March 1902
73,800 words
(First read 03/06/2014)

Here's the basic plot: Lady Marie Alston and her husband Jack have been married several years ~ both are still fairly young (late 20s? early 30s? ~ I forget); they have no children; she has never loved him though he once loved her.  Shortly before their marriage Marie thought she might be in love with a chap named Jim Spencer, but didn't go through with it.  Jim went off to South Africa 'to forget', and has just come back a millionaire.  In the meantime Jack has been having an affair with a married woman named Mildred Brereton; he supposes he loves her; she loves him about as much as she loves the average footman, which is to say not one whiff.  Marie and Jack resume their 'friendship' and soon realize they're in love; but they're too noble to consummate their love.  Marie finds out about Jack's affair with Mildred; he breaks it off with Mildred and falls in love with his wife all over again.  (I may be getting some of this in the wrong order: the whole thing was instantly forgettable.)  Marie wants none of him but is persuaded to carry on with the marriage for appearances' sake.  Mildred goes, "Ho hum ~ next!"  Jack gets flattened by an omnibus.  Marie and Jim (and Mildred too, for that matter) live happily ever after.  The End.

Hyssop

I could list 101 reasons for disliking Scarlet and Hyssop but will limit myself to just four:
(1) The wild, glaring improbability at the heart of it: everyone on Earth (i.e. everyone in London Society, because nothing else exists) knows about Jack's affair with Mildred ... except Marie.  This is despite the fact that they all see each other 250 times a week and do nothing but gossip.
(2) None of the characters is in the least bit likeable, with the possible exception of Jack.  (I could add Jim to this except that he can hardly be called a 'character' ~ he's just a shadow.)  Benson's heroine, Marie, is a cold, condescending, snooty witch ~ and knows it.  At one point Jack says to her:

"You are a cold, passionless woman, and will not understand," he said.  Then he paused a moment, for a long sigh lay suspended in her breast.  "You object to my saying that?" he added.

"No; go on," said she.

It's no bleedin' wonder he went off and had an affair (though he could have chosen better), married to that sanctimonious icebox ~ he's just the average man.  And yet he's the one who, in order that a happy ending may take place, gets squashed by a bus.  Ah well.
Mildred is a piece of toxic waste: Dodo on acid.  She'd have to be buried underground for 40,000 years for me to go anywhere near her.

Bloody omnibuses! ~ they get everywhere

(3) If you've already read Daisy's Aunt and Mammon & Co. and umpteen of Fred's short stories that deal with adultery, there's no need to read this: it has absolutely nothing different to say.
(4) The supposedly comic relief, Lady Ardingly, who is another of EFB's preposterously-born-in-Russia Queens of London Society, isn't in the least bit funny.  She's a tedious old hag.  Still, she gets the best line in the book, which you have to wait till the last page of the epilogue for:

"Ah! my dear, we are lepers," said Lady Ardingly.  "We are all wrong and bad, and we roll over each other in the gutter [...].  We strive for one thing, which is wealth, and when we have got it we spend it on pleasure.  [...] and the odd thing is that the pleasure we get does not please us.  It is always something else we want.  I sit and I say 'What news?' and when I am told I say 'What else?' and still 'What else?' and I am not satisfied.  [...] we go after remedies for our ennui, for our leprosy, and there is no such remedy unless we become altogether different."

This pretty neatly sums up all the worst of the Edwardian period ... and of Scarlet and Hyssop. 
Okay, I think that's enough.  You can read the whole thing online here ... but I wouldn't bother.


THE CRITICS

In Scarlet and Hyssop […] Mr E. F. Benson has returned to his earlier manner. He opens by introducing us to a couple of ladies whose talk overflows with studied smartness in a way that may choke off some readers. But as many as persevere will not find their courage very well rewarded. Mr Benson's society ladies tire one very soon. Their affections and their affectations are equally a bore. We crave for something a little more natural, a little more healthy.

~The Yorkshire Post, 19/03/1902

All Mr E. F. Benson's stories may be said to make for righteousness, inasmuch as virtue always somehow finds its reward. But it must be frankly confessed that generally it is not the goal but the way we travel to it which interests his readers. Marie, Lady Alston, in [Scarlet and Hyssop] […] stands for right-doing, her friend Mildred, Mrs Brereton, for the opposite. Jim Spencer is the decent but poor young man who is sent out to South Africa to make his fortune. Like so many other young men in novels, he succeeds, and comes home to find Marie, whom he loves, married to Lord Alston, who loves Mrs Brereton. We sit at a game of whist, see the cards shuffled, cut, and dealt, note the mistakes made, and the cheating, and see how the wiles of the wicked are fruitless against the straight play and good cards of Marie and Jim. The best-drawn character in the book is Marie's husband Jack, Lord Alston, who wins popularity as a politician by preaching the doctrine of 'efficiency'. He finds, too late, that his mistress is not nearly so clever or beautiful a woman as his wife. His death was a necessity for Marie's reward on earth, and it comes about somewhat melodramatically, at the hands of Mildred, or rather at the feet of her horses. The characters all move in an atmosphere where the first law of life is apparently to be very amusing or very rich. Cleverness is pardoned if it can contrive to be interesting; stupidity is condoned if set in a gold frame. Men are apparently of little account except as counters in the game. That in spite of so much that is unreal, and our indifference as to the fate of the characters, we can enjoy the depiction of their little plots and counterplots, is the best testimony to the cleverness of the book.

~The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 29/03/1902

The author of Dodo gives us here another study of the decadent aspects of certain circles of London aristocratic and wealthy society. The book has not the dash and cleverness which inclined one to condone some of the disagreeable features of Dodo. On the other hand, it has a very plainly put moral; the only man and the only woman in the book who have strong and true characters are duly rewarded. Nevertheless and despite this fact, the presentation of vice, artificiality, and insincerity in modern society has a depressing rather than a tonic effect, and the whole leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

 

~The Outlook (US), 19/04/1902

Mr. Benson here plays the part of social satirist. He whips the manners and fashions of the smart set, not exactly with scorpions, but severely enough, and, we believe, in all sincerity of indignation. Through the mouth of his heroine, Lady Alston, he calls them vulgar, and he shows convincingly that their vulgarity does not even purchase enjoyment. “'Ah! my dear, we are lepers,' says one open-eyed old sinner. 'We are all wrong and bad, and we roll over each other in the gutter like these Arabs scrambling for backshish. We strive for one thing, which is wealth, and when we have got it, we spend it on pleasure . . . and the odd thing is that the pleasure we get does not please us. It is always something else we want. I sit and I say, "What news?" and when I am told, I say, "What else?" and still "What else?" and I am not satisfied.'" That is one of the mildest arraignments; Mr. Benson's favourite term of reproach for the vulgar woman of society, 'a cook,' is a slander on a highly respectable class, but at least he means to indicate unspeakable depths of stupidity and hopeless moral and mental obtuseness. It is some satisfaction to note also that, as none of the satirised are made to appear charming, their originals in real life are left with little consolation. A more brilliant exhibition of their weak wickedness might have tickled them; Mr. Benson's can hardly fail to annoy. So far good. But he has not chosen the most effective way of reform. To ignore entirely the stupid whirl after money and senseless pleasure is perhaps too slow, too doubtfully efficacious a method of showing contempt; but, at least some stalwarts might have been introduced into the story, uninfected by the general corruption and untempted by what the 'smart set' have to offer. Of course, there is Jim; but he is a shadow; and there is Lady Alston, but she is an abstraction, or little more than a mouthpiece for Mr. Benson's tirades of reproach. Contrast is wanted in the book—a picture of the other people. These need not have been saints, they might have filled their place admirably with a moderate amount of virtue, provided they were endowed with active brains, and were minded to demand from life some of its realities.

~The Bookman (UK), 05/1902

Scathing in satire and relentless in exposure. In point of construction, Scarlet and Hyssop seems to us to mark a distinct advance in the author's work. Nothing is out of place, nothing superfluous, but all is in due order and sequence, while the interest never flags for a moment. There are many pages of witty dialogue, and quite enough clever people who talk epigrams, and, on the whole, Scarlet and Hyssop must be accounted a really brilliant piece of work, unsurpassed by anything Mr. Benson has given us.

~The Pall Mall Gazette, quoted in endpapers of An Act in a Backwater and Juggernaut and in newspaper ad of 04/06/1902

Mr. Benson has returned to the field which he developed with such signal success in Dodo, and his new novel reveals a brilliancy, social knowledge, and worldly wisdom that show how much the author has grown in force and pungency since the appearance of his first book. This remarkable story of London society may or may not afford reasons for identifications. It is certain that the author's range of acquaintances and his knowledge of the subject are exceptional, and in this amusing and striking picture of life as it is lived in London he has utilized his opportunities to the full.

 

"Look out, luv ~ E. F. Benson's about!"

~Pittsburg Press, spliced together from quotes in endpapers to US editions of The House of Defence and An Act in a Backwater

There is much pleasure, as well as philosophy, in the book; its satire is pungent, the characters are well sketched, and it is certainly a book to read.

~The Sketch, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Sheaves

It is astonishingly up-to-date: it brims over with chatter, with Saturday-to-Monday parties, with Bridge ~ everlasting Bridge ~ flirtation, motor-cars, semi-detached husbands and wives, and the Boer War; in fact with everything in which London society of to-day interests itself. An admirable picture, witty, cynical and amusing. It is full of brilliant things.

~The Standard, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Juggernaut

Portrait of an English Nobleman

Fiction ~ novella / long short story
Published 17th September 1937*
Approx. 22,000 words
(First read 23/09/2013)

This is the first in Benson's quartet of novellas published under the title Old London.  There's no connexion between the four other than the setting.
This was quite good fun.  It's set in the Georgian period ... to be precise in the very last year of that period, 1829-30.  It's the kind of romp you'd expect of Georgian gents (mistress in a pied à terre in London; frosty wife and kids at home in the country ...), and with lashings of historical detail ~ hardly profound but entertaining enough.

*These four books were only published in the United States.
[10/2014] I saw one of the originals in a secondhand bookshop in Wales the other day ~ the only one I've ever seen.  I didn't buy it because I've already got a set of the modern reprints.   At least, I assume they're modern reprints ~ if not, they're in remarkably mint condition, notwithstanding the lack of any dust-jackets.

The Dance

Rupert Grint (not relevant)

Fiction ~ short story
First published in the collection More Spook Stories, April 1934
5,290 words
(First read 26/11/2012) 

The Dance shows EFB at his most gleefully sadistic and (I have to add) morally censorious.  The 'hero' of the piece is Philip Hope; his description is worth quoting in full:

In person he was notably small and slight, narrow-chested, with spindle arms and legs.  He leaned on a stick as he walked, for one of his knees was permanently stiff, but he was quick and nimble in spite of his limping gait.  His clothes were fantastic; he wore a bright mustard-coloured suit, a green silk tie, a pink silk shirt, with a low collar, above which rose a rather long neck supporting his very small sharp-chinned face, quite hairless and looking as if no razor had ever plied across it.  His eyes were steel grey, and had no lashes on either lid: whether they looked up or down, they gave the impression of a mocking and amused vigilance.  They saw much and derived much entertainment.  He was hatless, and the thick crop of auburn hair that covered his head could deceive nobody, nor indeed did he intend that it should.

(The only elements missing from this rundown are his goatlike laugh and prominent ears.)  And he is, dear reader, a sadist ~ there's no other word for it.  At his clifftop house near Cromer (Norfolk) his wife [Benson Heroine Type A] who's less than half his age and who married him out of pity, and his secretary [Benson Hero Type A] have just fallen in love and for a week or so Philip delights in tormenting them at every available opportunity.  Then one day he and

Cromer lighthouse (has small part)

the sec, Julian, go for a walk along the cliff and, just after Phil's told him to sling his hook, the inevitable ~ okay, the predictable ~ happens and over he goes.  A year passes; Julian and the young widow are now married; they come to stay at the Norfolk house ...  You can pretty much guess the rest.
Now admittedly Philip is the great star of the show, and when he dies the story does sag a little ~ but his return is well worth the wait.  Of course The Dance is utterly daft, and EFB's habit of punishing all those who commit adultery or even think about it*, regardless of how loathsome the intended cuckold, rather sticks in the craw these days ~ but it's fun, it's not too long, and the bit just before the climax is actually rather good.  It's available online here. 

The Dance is a condensed version of EFB's own novel Paul (1906).

* See also Christopher Comes Back (1929).

 

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.