Janet

Fiction ~ novella / long short story
Published 17th September 1937*
Approx. 19,000 words
(First read 07/10/2013)

This is the second in Benson's quartet of novellas published under the title Old London.  There's no connexion between the four other than the setting, which in this case is Victorian ... I didn't spot any particular clues as to the exact year, probably 1840s or 50s. 

Original dust jacket

Unlike the first in the series ~ Portrait of an English Nobleman, qv ~ this is a humdrum domestic drama, hardly likely ever to set the world on fire.  Read it if every other book on Earth has been burnt.  Otherwise, don't bother.

*These four little books were never published in the UK, only in the US.  I assume that they were specially commissioned for the American market.
 

Thursday Evenings

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Pears's Annual, 23rd November 1920
Collected in More Spook Stories, 1934
4,385 words
(First read 14/01/2013) 

Frith's Derby Day (1856-58), featured in this story

Mrs Wallace has been holding her artistic salons (her Thursday evenings) since the height of the Victorian era.  When she dies in her eighties in 1920, the last link between that world and the modern is broken.  Her flat, including the piano at which she used to sing her favourite song "in a faint far-away voice which sounded as if it came from the next house but one", is sold to a pair of consummately modern artists, Mr Humphrey Lodge (composer of symphonies featuring 'siren whistles, pieces of emery-paper rubbed together, watchman's rattles, and penny whistles') and his wife Julia (painter of Cubist portraits whose faces looked like 'a series of planes separated from each other by coloured lines').  It's only natural that the recently departed spirit of Mrs W should be disgusted with all this tomfoolery.
Thursday Evenings is a fun spook story: EFB derives as much pleasure from satirizing the two artistic sensibilities ~ the worst excesses of High Victorianism, in particular the song The Lost Chord, and the idiotic garbled pretentions of the modern ~ as he does from describing the antics of La Wallace's 'Poltergeist' ~ his word.  So, very definitely designed to amuse ~ which it does ~ rather than appal ~ which it doesn't. 
The story's available online here. 

Roderick's Story

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, May 1923
Collected in Visible and Invisible, October 1923
5,690 words
(First read 04/08/2012) 

Lamb House, Rye, in EFB's day

I have only one good thing to say about Roderick's Story but I'll say all the others first.  In it EFB displays all his worst habits as a writer: the 'plot' is absurd, risible, ludicrous; the 'characters' are nothing more than pawns to be shunted this way and that, stricken with mysterious but oh so convenient diseases, and/or prematurely culled; the dénouement is signposted well in advance; the 'emotions', including a sizeable dollop of Victorian sentiment, are stereotyped, phoned in from Sentiments'Я'us; the whole is a clumsy, garbled mess.
I'll not trouble you with the storyline (you'd think I was making it up anyway) but here are one or two of Roderick's most salient features: (i) a minute description of Lamb House (not named thus or at all) in Rye (named Tilling) which belongs to Unknown and Featureless Narrator ~ more of him soon; (ii) a case of such extreme stiff-upper-lip that it's actually tipped over into insanity; (iii) a typical Bensonian love-hate triangle: a woman suffers nobly while her horrid husband lives and ~ for reasons known only to EFB ~ continues to suffer after his death; (iv) two handsome lads (18, 19) dying in the European War; (v) a certain amount of uncertain thinking re spiritism; (vi) some golf ~ as if we weren't already miserable enough!; and (vii) I repeat: a plot so preposterous that I can't think of adequate terms to describe it.

Anyway, the one good thing I mentioned earlier is this: Our Unknown Narrator has asked his pal Roderick to read and comment on some of his (U.N.'s) ghost stories for a forthcoming volume.  Quote Roddy:

"[...] you will make a book that not only is inartistic, all shadows and no light, but a false book.  [...] You play godfather to your stories, you see: you tell them in the first person, [...] and that, though it need not be supposed that those experiences were actually yours, yet gives a sort of guarantee that you believe the borderland of which you write to be entirely terrible." [etc.]

Now that I come to look at it again, Roderick's thought is about as clear as U.N.'s ~ or E F Benson's ~ thinking on spiritism and revenants, so even the thing I thought was good isn't.
Enough!
It's available online here.

 

The Jamboree

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Tatler, 1st December 1922
Collected in Fine Feathers and Other Stories, 1994
Approx. 3,100 words
(First read 23/12/1994)

In which arch-bitch-and-snob and Victorian-to-boot Caroline Lady Camber spars with her thoroughly-modern new American niece-in-law Margaret over a 'jamboree' to be held by the latter.  Caroline will not have it that her former home shall be the scene of young gels with bobbed hair, young chaps in their braces, the stars of the Ballet Russe, etc. sitting on cushions on the floor drinking cocktails and laughing, etc.  When her aunt (no relation to the new Lord Camber [Tony] and certainly none to Margaret) dies she insists that the jamboree be called off.  To keep the peace, Tony and Mags agree to this, but go ahead with it all the same, never imagining that the old dragon might actually show up in the middle of it.  It goes without saying that the dowager Camber ends up thoroughly bested. Quite a jolly jape.

QUOTABLES

Opening sentence:

Caroline Lady Camber took it almost as a personal insult when her nephew, who, on the death of her husband, had succeeded to the title and the house and the impoverished estates and the famous Camber pearls, succeeded to the pigs also by his marriage with Margaret Joicey, daughter and heiress of the Chicago millionaire.

More on our delightful 'heroine':

Caroline had an apt and acid wit and a soft, dreamy, meditative way of saying the nastiest things, which made them doubly telling, and her murmuring enunciation when she realized that the pearls would no longer be worn by her was peculiarly venomous.  "So suitable," she said, "that Margaret should have the pearls, for 'Margaret' means 'pearls', does it not?  And the pigs!  Isn't there some text about pearls and swine?"

A smidgeon of social commentary:

[...] while Margaret stood for the present in the society of today, Caroline Camber quite as typically stood for the past, and for the order of things that had vanished.