Mezzanine

Fiction ~ novel
Published (July?) 1926
(First read 03/12/2014)

Mezzanine is yet another Benson novel in which very little happens at very great length.
At the end of Sheaves (1908), his other novel which deals with the problem of what happens when a woman marries a man much younger than herself (and which is only marginally more eventful than Mezzanine), EFB dropped this lukewarm potato by having the wife conveniently die of consumption at a swanky Swiss ski resort.  At the start of this one he picks it up and literally saunters with it for a few hundred pages before dropping it again because he's run out of space.  Our heroine in this case is Mrs Elizabeth Langdon; we meet her on her 47th birthday¹:

She was tall and solidly made, and like most big women carried herself well; she looked brisk and capable and serene, as if she had dealt very successfully with life hitherto, and was assured of efficiency in the future.

Alas, 'twas not to be.  Her husband Walter is ten years her junior; they've been married 10 or 12 years and have a 9-year old son, Tony.  Lizzie worries about getting old ... more specifically she worries that Walter, who's just been given a new lease on life after recovering from years of residual malaria, is, despite his unwavering devotion to her, starting to find her dull.
Enter Evie. [in progress]


¹ EFB also used this device in Mr Teddy (1917), which opens on that gentleman's 40th.

Caterpillars

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 1912
3,510 words
(First read 09/12/2011) 

At about half the length of one of EFB's regular spook stories, this is really more of a horror story or a ... erm ... psychomedical melodrama ...  Not sure what to call it.  Unnamed Narrator (let's call him Freddie) goes to stay with friends at their villa on the Italian Riviera.  Also living with them is a painter by the name of Arthur Inglis.  On his first night there, Freddie dreams ... is it a dream, though? ... of an infestation of hideous giant caterpillars in a particular unused bedroom.  The next day Inglis finds one of said bugs; he plans to keep it but Freddie is so horrified that he throws it into a fountain; the caterpillar survives its dunking but is eventually squished by Inglis.  Again that night Freddie dreams (¿?) of the infestation, but now it's on the move.  Well, the long and short of it is that the creepie-crawlies (if they exist) are harbingers of Inglis' death from cancer.  The story ends with the villa-owner ~ or the author ~ expressing the extraordinary belief that cancer is in some way infectious.
I'm fairly sure EFB uses the insects-as-cancer motif in something else I've read; he certainly uses the insects-as-consumption motif in Sheaves (1907).  The man himself died of throat cancer in 1940.  I'm not saying a single word about EFB having presaged his own death here.  That would be almost as daft as the story itself, whose main virtue is that it's short.  Available online here




THE CRITICS

Caterpillars […] tells of a vile dream in which millions of the insects are crawling in through keyholes and covering the floor with their writhing mess, which on waking turns out to be a presentiment of cancer. [It] is such a long way from the arch humour of Benson's English village novels that it scarcely seems credible they were written by the same man …

~ Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991

Other memorable stories [from The Room in the Tower and Other Stories] include Caterpillars, with its zodiacal pun (a relentless tide of huge, writhing caterpillars with crablike pincers instead of suckers, force their way into a painter's bedroom, after which the painter contracts cancer) …

~Richard Dalby in introduction to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson, 1992