There Arose a King

Faction ~ sketch
Published in The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories, 1920
Approx. 4,500 words
(First read 14/04/2014)

As I said in my post on David Blaize and the Blue Door, it's a real shame EFB didn't write more stuff about animals as he always excelled himself in charm and ~ particularly here ~ humour when he did so.  There Arose a King picks up where 'Puss-cat' finishes and recounts the formative years of his Persian cat Cyrus, king of the household from day one.  As I say, it's very funny in parts ~ in large parts: it actually had me laughing out loud.  I'll just give one example ~ this happens during a heatwave:

The heat also increased [Cyrus'] somnolence, and one morning, when he came up to breakfast with me, he fell asleep on the sofa before I had time to cut off the little offering of kidney which I had meant to be my homage.  When I put it quite close to his nose he opened his mouth to receive it, but was again drowned in gulfs of sleep before he could masticate it.  So it stuck out of the corner of his mouth like a cigarette.  But eventually, I knew, he "would wake and remember and understand."

The story is available online here.

'Puss-cat'

Faction ~ sketch
Published 1920
(First read 18/08/2013)

Jill's Cat

Fiction ~ short story
Published 1916
2,720 words
(First read 26/06/2013)

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.

 

The Cat

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Illustrated London News, 27th November 1905
Collected in The Room in the Tower (1912)
5,510 words
(First read 14/06/2012) 

More a psychopathological mystery than a spook story ~ in fact there aren't any spooks at all in it.  Jack Dick Alington Alingham, a portrait-painting toff, is on the rebound from Lady 'Society Hag' Madingley, who jilted him for someone with more dosh, as Bensonian society hags have a habit of doing.  Nevertheless, observes his doctor pal Merwick, he's made a miraculous recovery from the trauma ~ to hear them talk you'd think Dick had witnessed the machete-massacre of his entire family rather than merely being dumped by a worthless cow.  Anyway, Dr Merwick reckons he's in a (kind of) physiopsychiatrical state of shock (or something) and is bound to come a cropper sooner or later.  Confident that he's fully and permanently recovered, our Dick agrees to complete a portrait of the said witch; everything's going fine until ... a cat appears ...
This one has to be read to be believed: apart from 'the shock thing', which probably wasn't new even in 1905, it's entirely devoid of sensible, coherent or even interesting ideas; the 'climax' is laughable; the pace is sluglike, and it is absurdly over-long.
Well, you may think differently: it's available online here.


THE CRITICS

The same criticism ['an uncustomary failure in artistic judgement'] applies to the third story [in The Terror by Night and Other Stories (1999)], The Cat. As a lover of both women and cats, I'm somewhat out of sympathy with the Fred who can write: 'She was one of those blonde, lithe, silken girls who, happily for the peace of men's minds, are rather rare, and who remind one of some humanised yet celestial and bestial cat.' Here again, a sensitive artistic chap is laid low by powerful natural urges, most often sexual, if always fatally repressed . . . Readers may still enjoy the skilful writing and the predictably ghastly conclusion, provided they can accept the general misogyny and lads-togetherness for what they are—all-too-sadly widespread Edwardian attitudes. Such attitudes were by no means exclusive to Fred Benson, though in his case—life and writings—they often quite openly erupted despite himself, whether quasi-hysterically or in the more controlled guise of satire.

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' The Terror by Night, first published in All Hallows magazine, 02/1999