The Freaks of Mayfair

Fiction ~ sketches
Published 1916
Approx. 39,000 words
(First read 18/06/2011)

Dodo Wonders

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1921
Approx. 66,000 words
(First read 05/05/2011)

THE CRITICS

One wonders whether the recent discussion of the memoirs put forth by the prototype of Mr. Benson's original Dodo have had an influence in leading him to give us a picture of Dodo in middle age, during and after the Great War. Whatever the reason, we are glad to find her still chattering away with the utmost cheerfulness, saying clever things half consciously and half instinctively, audacious, kind to every one, even to the intolerable German Prince and Princess she is called on to entertain just as war begins. Here is what Dodo at the age of fifty-five liked: "I like the fox-trot and going in an airplane and modern pictures

which look equally delicious upside down, and modern poetry which doesn't scan or rhyme or mean anything, and sitting up all night." Dodo, with all her liveliness and social impudence, is a large-hearted, generous soul. Readers liked her a generation ago, and they will like her now.

~R. D. Townsend in The Outlook (US), 05/10/1921

Dodo the Second

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1914
Approx. 102,000 words
(First read 04/04/2011)

THE CRITICS

Dodo the Second [...] by E. F. Benson. Doesn't the very title-page sound like a leaf from your dead past? I protest that for my own part I was back on hearing it in the naughty nineties, the very beginning of them indeed (the fact that I was also back in the school-room did little to impair the thrill) and agog to read the clever, audacious book that all the wonderful people who lived in those days were talking about. And behold! here they all are again—not the people who talked, but the audacious characters. Only the trouble is that we have all in the interval become so much more audacious ourselves that their efforts in this kind seem to fail to produce the old impression. This is by no means to say that I didn't enjoy Dodo the Second. I enjoyed it very much indeed; and so will you. For one thing, it was the jolliest experience to recognize so many old friends—Dodo herself (now of course the Princess Waldenech [sic]), and the wicked Prince, and the rest of them. Of Dodo at least it may be said, moreover, that she has matured credibly; this middle-aging lady is exactly what the siren of twenty years ago would have developed into, still beautiful, still alluring, and still (I must add) capable of infecting everyone else in a conversation with exactly her own trick of cheap and rather fatiguing brilliance. Added to all this there is now a new generation of characters, several of whom are quite pleasant company; for them and for one very impressive piece of descriptive work in the account of a gathering storm, this Twenty Years After may be heartily welcomed. Indeed one leaves Dodo of 1914 so vigorously alive that I am not without hope of her turning up yet again as a grandmother in 1934.

~Punch, 22/04/1914

It is twenty years since the author made a sensation with his Dodo. The book was talked of partly because it was alleged that some of its characters were taken from life, partly because Dodo was rather more than unconventional in her irresponsible talk. In the critical opinion of the day, the story was not so much immoral as fashionably improper. But that 'Dodo' was likable and amusing no one ever denied. She is still so in Mr. Benson's new story—far more than her over-sophisticated and excessively modern daughter. 'Dodo' still talks with lively inconsequence, and sometimes about things not commonly made the subject of general conversation. It is as if she had a prankish humor in shocking people. But there is no great harm in her; nor is there in the younger set now introduced, except that they rather tire and displease by their strained efforts to appear blasé and clever.

~The Outlook (US), 02/05/1914

Here she is again, dear, delightfully irresponsible Dodo, forty-five years young, with a daughter of her own, Nadine. We are introduced to the party when bedtime has been officially announced "in order to get rid of bores who secluded themselves in their tiresome chambers." Nadine, Berts, and Esther are all lying on Nadine's bed, smoking and chatting, or 'chattering.' Mr. Benson has the gift of reproducing scintillating nonsense. There is many a clever word and thought voiced in the constant repartee of his varied characters. We wonder sometimes how people of such markedly Bohemian tendencies and elastic consciences should have such acute mental perceptions, apparently unaffected by late hours, cigaret-smoking, and social dissipations. There is no 'respecter of persons' among them. All love 'Aunt Dodo,' and Nadine speaks frankly of 'Daddy,' just divorced, and his chronic state of intoxication. She is also interested in 'Jack,' one of Dodo's discarded lovers who has again shown up and who, as a matter of fact, marries his old love with happiest results. The whole book is full of brilliant conversation on all kinds of subjects. Nadine's love-affairs nearly come to grief, but a tragic shipwreck reveals her true love, and all ends happily.

~The Literary Digest, 09/05/1914

Mr. Benson is supposed to have regretted Dodo as a youthful indiscretion, but his penitence on that score may be doubted since twenty years after he comes out, effervescent and unashamed, with Dodo's Daughter. His last novel is not nearly as shocking as was his first, but that is probably less poor Mr. Benson's fault than our own. The science of moral anti-seismography has been highly developed since Mr. Benson, an archbishop's son, tickled pleasantly the naughty aspirations of the British middle classes, and to-day it takes something particularly strenuous from Germany or the Scandinavian countries to make us feel even the semblance of a shock.

The bitter truth must be admitted; Dodo is not as naughty as we had pictured her through the telescope, no, opera glasses, of youthful recollections, and Dodo's daughter and her friends are

almost mid-Victorian in the propriety with which they marry and are given in marriage—Ouida would turn in her grave at the domesticity to which the British aristocracy has descended. For not only does Dodo's daughter, after some rather perfunctory misadventures with a character whom in essentials Mr. Benson has used in a previous book, contract a happy alliance with an ideally commonplace young man, but Dodo herself, having divorced Prince Waldenech [sic], the bibulous nobleman with whom we left her twenty years ago, marries her first love, the fiancé whom she so unceremoniously jilted early in her career, and, of all bourgeois achievements, at the age of forty-five, presents him with an heir. As Dodo herself says, "Isn't it ridiculous?"

The author has not wholly lost his knack of social satire, and his tongue is in his cheek when Nadine and her friends patronize the Victorianism of the 'souls' among whom Dodo in her heyday was a daring leader. Dodo's Daughter is a readable book, and it is plain that Mr. Benson has mellowed with the years, but it is not as clever either as Dodo or as some of the other novels that he has written in the interim.

~The Nation, 14/05/1914

Dodo: A Detail of the Day

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1893
Approx. 84,000 words
(First read 01/03/2011)


THE CRITICS

We do not object to novels with some 'go' in them, but we feel obliged to say that Dodo, by E. F. Benson, is something more than 'breezy'—it is vulgar. We have heard that it has had considerable success in England. If that be true, then we do not think that Mr. Howells need to regret that he is anAmerican. Dodo is a loud, vulgar, stupid young woman, whose character we should suppose might have been sketched in the demi monde.

 

~The Outlook (US), 23/12/1893

Dodo is a delightfully witty sketch of the 'smart' people of society […] The writer is a true artist.

~The Spectator, quoted in front endpapers of The Luck of the Vails

(Hold on to your hats for the next one: it's looooooooong)

Mr. Benson has had the good fortune to involve himself in a controversy about social ethics and the functions of art. Some very 'smart' people are supposed to be indignant because his novel [Dodo] is a transcript of their interesting and useful lives. He is even charged with having made his heroine a literal portrait of what is called 'a well-known society woman,' a definition which is a valuable contribution to sociology and the English language. Deeply stirred by this unfounded accusation, Mr. Benson has written an article in one of the reviews, in which the whole duty of a novelist is laid down with academic precision. Nothing is more inartistic in fiction than to photograph your friends. You must study them, of course, with a view, not to an exact likeness, but to representation of types. If Jones accosts you at the club with “What d'ye mean by drawing me as a confounded idiot in your confounded book?” you must point out to him that the character to which he objects contains only one-fifteenth of Jones, the remaining fourteen-fifteenths being collected impartially from his acquaintances. The serious trouble is, as Mr. Benson lucidly explains, that when you represent a strongly marked type in a particular milieu the limitation of the survey increases the chances that some actual person will be singled out—of course, in the most wrong-headed way—as your one and only model. Your heroine may be a most artistically designed epitome of a certain variety of womankind, and yet some obstinate people may insist that she is one of those abnormal women who combine the qualities of the type and the portrait.

If this question has increased the general interest in Dodo, I am bound to say she thoroughly deserves it. She is a heartless little jade, but her piquancy, her facile vivacity, never flag, and her aptitude for reconstructing the world at a moment's notice to suit her temporary point of view—an eminently feminine capacity—amounts to genius. Dodo is the daughter of an ironfounder, generally supposed to be “looking after his affairs in the country while the rest of the family were amusing themselves in London.” Dodo's mamma and sister are merely satellites of that social luminary. Maud Vane has a great devotion to worsted, and when she marries a parson she makes more stockings than ever to supply the wants of his parish. Mrs. Vane's ambition is to bask in the glory of her brilliant daughter, especially when Dodo is engaged to a marquis. She receives visitors on the evening when the engagement becomes public property, “So kind of you to come. I know Dodo is dying to see you and be congratulated. Darling,” she says, turning to Maud, “run and tell Dodo that Lord Burwell has arrived. So good of you to come. And how do you do, Mr. Broxton? Of course, Dodo has told you of our happiness. Thanks, yes; we are all charmed with her engagement. And the Marquis is your cousin, is he not? How nice! May I tell Maud she may call you Cousin Jack? Such a pleasure to have you. Dodo is simply expiring to see you. Did she see you this morning? Really. She never told me of it, and my sweet child usually tells me everything.” That morning, in the Park, Dodo has acquainted Mr. Broxton with her destiny, much to his discontent, for he is very sweet upon her himself, and he is genuinely concerned about his very simple-minded cousin, Chesterford, who is going to marry this butterfly. “I must have lots of money,” she explains to the disappointed lover. “Yes; a big must and a big lot. It's not your fault that you haven't got any, and it wouldn't have been your fault if you had been born with no nose, but I couldn't marry a man who was without either.” As for Chesterford, “I shall be very good to him. I can't pretend that I am what is known as being in love with him—in fact, I don't think I know what that means, except that people get in a very ridiculous state, and write sonnets to their mistress's front teeth; which reminds me that I'm going to the dentist to-morrow … Ah, Jack! I wish that I really knew what it did mean. It can't be all nonsense, because Chesterford's like that and he is an honest man, if you like. And I do respect and adore him very much, and I hope I shall make him happy, and I hear he's got a delightful new yacht; and oh! do look at that Arbuthnot girl opposite with a magenta hat.” In the evening she is a little more serious. “Oh! my God, I don't know what to do. It isn't my fault, and I am made like this. I want to know what love is, and I can't—I can't.” This is the note of the tragedy—that is to say, the tragedy for Chesterford. He is an honest, guileless gentleman, who adores his wife, and when she has a child he adores the child. It lives only a few weeks, and dies one morning when Dodo is riding in the Row with Mr. Broxton. For a moment—she has her resourceful moments like the immortal Becky—Dodo is stricken with compassion for her suffering husband, but her “eminently practical way was to forget everything and absorb herself in something else.” She remembered King David's consolation when his child died. “What a sensible man David was! He went and oiled himself, which, I suppose, is the equivalent of putting on one's very best evening dress.” The untameable spirits of the woman surge over every serious thought. Three weeks after the baby's death she is preparing for a fancy ball. “I feel like a vampire who's got hold of blood again. I feel like a fish put back into the water, like a convict back in his own warm nest. No charge for mixed metaphors. Supplied free, gratis, and for nothing.”

It comes to her after a time that her life with Chesterford is unbearable. She discovers that she knows what love means, and that it means Mr. Broxton. That revelation is broken to him with the customary frankness, and he is not slow to reciprocate it; but Dodo has made a mistake. Here is the inevitable sequel of such a marriage; husband, wife, lover—the conjunction is not new; the disjunction is not unknown. But the very precipitatioj of Dodo's arrangements for an elopement saves her from that blunder. While she is explaining to Jack that she has ordered the carriage after dinner, at half-past ten, the disgrace of the position comes over him like a flood. His loyalty gets the better of his passion. “Think of your duty to him. Think of our love for each other. Let it be something sacred.” It is characteristic of the woman that she acquiesces with a burst of the irrepressible humour. “I believe I have an ideal—which I have never had before—something to respect and keep very close. Fancy me with an ideal! Mother wouldn't know me again—there never was such a thing in the house … Poor little ideal. I suppose it would endanger its life it you stopped, wouldn't it, Jack? It must live to grown up. Poor little ideal, what a hell of a time it will have when you're gone!” By an accident Chesterford has an inkling of what has happened. It confirms his suspicion that his wife is tired of him. The explanation between the two men is the strongest scene in the whole book, revealing by its simplicity and directness how great a model in fiction Mr. Benson has had in his mind. The tragedy for Chesterford is reaching its claimax. He has resolved to have no quarrel with his wife, who has recovered all her cheerfulness, and talks amusing nonsense with greater fluency than ever. But one day Chesterford is thrown in the hunting field, and dies after an operation. It is one of Dodo's brief seasons of genuine remorse. As she says of herself, she always rises to an occasion, and this is obviously the moment to confess all to the husband, who gives the last proof of his unfaltering devotion by begging her to marry Jack. Though the injunction consorts well enough with her inclination, this wayward creature never obeys it, for, in a fit of pique, after a tiff with her lover about an Austrian prince who pursues her pertinaciously, she rushes into a registry-office and emerges as 'her Serene Highness.'

The subsidiary characters are of little account, and the victorious Austrian is a mere shadow; but as a product of modern society Dodo, in her frivolity, her fleeting impulses, her rapid decision, her sparkling fascination, is so admirably lifelike and complete as to make Mr. Benson's novel a notable achievement.

~L. F. A. in The Sketch, 27/09/1893

Mr E F Benson's Dodo […] is not a biped of an extinct species; it is heartily to be wished she were. She is not even Antipodean ~ which, for the sake of distance, would be the next best thing to extinction. 'Dodo', to give her the only name by which she is known, is a girl without even a rudimentary heart or soul, coarse in mind, vulgar in manner, and selfish and licentious from hair to heel, yet with some mysterious charm about her which every man, woman, and child who has to do with her experiences, with the sole exception of the reader of her story. It is difficult to decide whether Mr Benson intended to satirise society by giving such success to so repulsive and contemptible a creature as Dodo, or whether he essayed the difficult but frequently successful task of compelling sympathy with an outrageously unconventional heroine, and found it too much for him. We incline to the former opinion, suspecting him of a belief that such unconventionalities on the part of even a pretty girl as bad language and tobacco are considerably more socially attractive than they actually are. Nobody, however, can safely say that Dodo is an impossibility, even when taken at her worst; and if she is inartistically exaggerated, Mr Benson deserves credit for a caricature which is not the less clever in its way for its failure to be interesting. He certainly writes with spirit, and his characters appear, at any rate, to be very real as well as very much alive.

~The Graphic, 15/07/1893

The Renewal

Fiction ~ short story
Published in The Cosmopolitan, November 1894
6,540 words
(First read 16/02/2011) 
Available to read on The E F Benson Webpage

As We Are: A Modern Revue

Non-fiction (kind of) ~ social history
Published October 1932
Approx. 87,000 words
(First read 04/02/2007)

Not in fact a novel at all, though there are times when it feels like it's in danger of turning into one, as I remember it.  My review at the time was sketchy and somewhat skathing:

A kind of history of the UK in the years 1918-31.
  Entertaining in one way, pretty dull in another.

To do it 'justice' I should really reread it but, to be honest, I don't have happy memories of it and would really rather not ...

THE CRITICS

When E. F. Benson wrote that fascinating study of Victorianism, As We Were, it was inevitable that he should follow on with his views on the present.

This he has given us in As We Are […].

This is no peep-show like his previous work, but a revue. He holds up for our entertainment and thought the war and the post-war period ~ sometimes in the guise of parable, sometimes in direct review.

He sums up the effect of four years of war on the social, economic, and religious conditions of the nation. And what is his verdict?

“In every respect except with regard to the enfranchisement of women,” he writes, “the change has been destructive, and not a single constructive betterment or illumination had resulted.”

Whatever one's conclusions may be after digesting Mr Benson's work, one must at least congratulate him in making the immediate history so attractive. The book is full of wisdom, anecdote, and wise observations.

 

~The Courier and Advertiser [Dundee, UK], 21/10/1932

[…] Mr E. F. Benson has written two most interesting books. One is As We Were, a Victorian peepshow. It is a picture gallery of great personages in the Queen's record reign; and the other now given to the public is As We Are, a modern revue […]. We have, carefully drawn by the writer, one of the little territorial kings of England, Lord Buryan, and his countess. We see society modelled on the old scale, with the peer boasting of his mansions, his land, his retainers, and his boundless hospitality. There is the countess, who is lady bountiful. The characters are well drawn, and can be recognised by mature readers. On the other hand, there are the young people to whom old-time usages and stiff hospitality are a bore, and so, too, is at least one of the Commandments. Mr Benson sketches brilliantly the great change that has come over Britain with the disappearance of the great house, the sale of the land and furniture, and heirlooms. The young people concerned see the whole affair go without a sigh; their only concern is the financial proceeds and well-lined pocket-books. Change there must be. Does it make for high character and that sound morality which stands the test well in a crisis? That question is always arising as one reads Mr Benson's witty and biting survey of the new society.

Mr Benson has not a great deal that is personal to say; but in a chapter on 'Eminent Men' he protests against the persecution of Sir Ernest Cassel and Sir Edgar Speyer during the Great War, and he writes in most appreciative terms of Lord Balfour and Archbishop Davidson. […] The author is critical of literary developments, and notes that a feature of post-war fiction has been the flood of novels which were wholly concerned with sex, and which treated it with a frankness and wealth of physical detail. Nor does he welcome the appearance of excessively long novels. In considering the war period Mr Benson says that in every respect, except to the enfranchisement of women, changes were destructive, and not a single constructive betterment or illumination resulted. His brief review of politics or what passes to-day as statesmanship is not cheerful. He argues that to-day, while the nations are still suffering from exhaustion and disorganisation, and while their representatives at Geneva are trying to render war impossible, precisely the same provocative causes are at work again, making it every day more possible, and in the long run as inevitable as it was in 1914.

~Edinburgh Evening News, 24/10/1932, abridged

It was close upon forty years ago, when I was sub-editing the New Review, that it fell to my lot to write to Mr. E. F. Benson and ask whether he would "do" us an article upon "Country-House Parties." Both the subject suggested and the choice of author were my own ideas; and I remember thinking it rather a creditable decoration in my sub-editorial cap when Mr. Benson responded with a lively, chatty article, attracting the immediate attention which articles of that sort always do attract from journalists avid for topical "copy." For those were the days of Dodo, when the drawing-rooms of rural manors were fluttering with curiosity and protest. "Do people really do such things?" And "if they do, ought those who know to tell?" . . . "It is so bad for the shopkeepers and the servants to have such things to talk about!" . . . Faint echoes of forty years ago; they come drifting back on the breeze of memory, and once more the wind blows from the Benson quarter—a gentle, tonic autumn wind at first, stiffening with a touch of frost and winter bitterness towards the finish. For this "modern revue" of "as-we-are" is quite as much a peep-show of "as-we-were"; and, to be frank, the more distant the prospect the pleasanter the vision. It may be a weakness of middle-age, when the historian grows sentimental about the past, but "the weakness is so strong," as Celia says in Iolanthe, and the sentiment so universal that everyone but the prig and the pessimist must share them. At any rate, they lend to the earlier part of this richly reminiscent and very human book a charm of maturity and urbane grace which vanishes all upon a sudden when the author turns his searchlight upon the scene around him. To idealise the past is more companionable than to scold the present.

[...]

the last section of the book is noticeably inferior to the first.

[...] His "revue" is a keen and moving entertainment for the hour, and it would not be surprising if it took its place among those records from which a world that we shall not know will refresh its imagination of the days and the ordeals which were ours. If that happens, the picture it derives will be both illuminating and true. Indeed I cannot at the moment think where it would be likely to find a truer one.

~Arthur Waugh in The Bookman, 11/1932 [Very heavily edited: Mr Waugh's review is pompous, long-winded and decidedly boring.  You can read the whole thing online here.]

Mr Benson calls his book a modern revue, the fictional portion of which exemplifies the passing of the old Edwardian and Victorian regimes, as example by the Earl and Countess of Buryan and their ancestral home ~ Hakluyt. The Buryans have a son and heir whose war-time experiences intensify a natural tendency to decry family traditions and its inherited formalities. The week-end parties he introduces to Hakluyt are as incongruous as a clog dance with a stately minuet setting. He takes to marriage, followed by a course of extravagance and infidelity, culminating in a double divorce and the premature death of the Earl. The estate is disintegrated and sold, Hakluyt becoming a country club ~ tragically typical of the passing of the old order. The remaining chapters are mostly devoted to shrewd comments on types before, during and after the war, and a chapter is given to 'Eminent Men', which is Bensonian to a degree. Arthur Balfour and Archbishop Davidson are specially reviewed, and in the author's opinion their vocations should have been reversed. One incident in connection with the Archbishop and the non-publication of the third series of Queen Victoria's Leaves from my Diary will be news to many. The book is very readable, but over all hangs the shadow ~ Ichabod.

~Western Daily Press [UK], 12/11/1932

A delightfully urbane volume.

~The Evening Telegraph [Angus, UK], 06/12/1932

TWO GENERATIONS

GULF WIDENED BY WAR

Not long ago Mr E. F. Benson presented the public with As We Were, a Victorian peep-show. He has followed this with a modern revue, As We Are, in which ho discusses some of the changes which have occurred in England since the first decade of the century. There is in this volume an unevenness of writing and the 'we' of the title is a restricted we. The masses of English men and women were but indirectly concerned with much that is narrated. Often, however, the author attains a high level, the first chapter being exceptionally good. Here we have a picture of upper-class Edwardian society. The occasion is a week-end party given by Lord and Lady Buryan at their country seat, Hakluyt. The host and hostess belonged to that class,"with broad lands and exalted titles, who in their hearts knew that God was the real head of the Tory party.” As we follow the doings of this gathering we are given a glimpse of social traditions which were soon to disappear. This is Mr. Benson at his best. The author tells the story of the parable house, as he terms Hakluyt, and shows the changes that it underwent. After a party to celebrate her son's engagement Lady Buryan was puzzled, she was disquieted: the young generation, when in force like this, was very hard to understand, and she felt she had set up no kind of relationship with any of them." 'With time the gulf between the two generations widened. Indeed, when wo take leave of Hakluyt, its ancestral park has already been converted into golf links, croquet lawns and tennis courts, and tho house into a residential clubhouse. Possibly, had it not been for the war," says Mr. Benson, the habit and outlook of tho generation then passing through the decade of its twenties would not have grown more widely divergent from those of their fathers, than those of their fathers had been from tho generation that preceded them." The war changed everything. In the last 100 pages Mr. Benson turns to other topics. He discusse's A. J. Balfour and Archbishop Davidson. "It is quite conceivable," he might have rendered even greater services to their generation and beyond, if tho politician had devoted, himself to philosophy and the archbishop to politics." Various literary movements of to-day are analysed: the Book Society and the methods of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey and Arnold Bennett. There are in As We Are passages which the reader will wish to re-read as soon as he has finished the book.

~The New Zealand Herald, 10/12/1932

The successor to the widely popular As We Were, Mr. Benson doesn't think very highly of modern morals and manners, but his account of them ~ partly under the guise of fiction ~ is extremely readable. The best sections deal with the decline of a once great Victorian house.

~The Forum, 01/1933

As We Are ~ But Are We?

[...] As We Are, sets out to describe a period extending from just before the war down to our own day. The book is divided into two parts that differ as much in method as, I venture to suggest, in merit. In the last three chapters

Mr. Benson writes, as he did in his last book, about people and things of which he has positive knowledge, and about which he is attempting to say no more than he positively knows. His portraits of Mr. Balfour, of Archbishop Davidson, of Sir Ernest Cassel, of Sir Edgar Speyer, are not only delightful to read, but are contributions to history of the highest value. His account, by no means flattering, of recent developments in literature, is as stimulating a piece of criticism as we should naturally expect from one who was already a novelist of note in the nineties, and to whom years have brought no diminution of vigor. And the almost unrelieved pessimism of his final chapter, in which he takes stock of the present situation, must surely command our respect, if not necessarily our agreement.

But for the rest of the chapters, ten out of thirteen, Mr. Benson is experimenting with a new and different method. So anxious is he to depict in the most vivid colors the changes that have taken place since pre-war days, that he abandons the safe path of the historian, and peoples his stage with frankly imaginary characters. He takes a great country mansion, that he calls the Parable House, and proceeds to trace the fortunes of its inmates and of those intimately connected with them. But a parable house, and still more a parable family, are dangerous things for the historian to start creating. For it is the nature of parables not to deal with real people or things, but with types. And to be of any historical value, the types must be in the fullest sense typical. If Mr. Benson was writing a novel, it would be open to him to select the most exceptional characters, and present them in the most unique circumstances he could conjure up. It is no criticism of Dodo to say that the heroine is not a typical woman of the nineties. But it is an entirely legitimate criticism of Mr. Benson's parable puppets that they are not normal but newspaper types, that they are, in fact, just such striking abnormalities as make excellent copy and—let us concede at once—excellent reading.

[...] 

Mr. Benson no doubt could, if he had stuck to his role of historian, have given us a fascinating account of this diseased excrescence on the social system. But instead he takes up his unfortunate parable as if the whole youth of England were infected.

All the great majority of modest, well-mannered young people that one meets everywhere today might never have existed at all so far as Mr. Benson's parable is concerned.

If only Mr. Benson had not hit on this unfortunate device of a story that is neither history nor straightforward fiction, and had fashioned his first ten chapters on the model of his last three, how immeasurably this book would have gained in value as a chronicle of the time! Even as it is, with all its faults of distortion and exaggeration, it makes excellent reading, and if it is not exactly history, it is no doubt what will pass for history at some future day.

~Esmé Wingfield-Stratford in The Saturday Review, 07/01/1933 [Also heavily edited, for much the same reasons as Alec Waugh's was.  The whole thing is available online here.]

[…] Benson's novel [sic] ~ I think it is his masterpiece ~ is more up to date [than Archibald Marshall's Two Families]. His parable house is one of the stately homes of England, and its noble owners are not driven out of it by taxation. But when the old earl dies, heartbroken by a matrimonial scandal in his family which, as he thinks, has brought disgrace upon an honourable name, his son and the divorcée whom he has married refuse to live in it, and the mansion is broken up, to be turned into a country club.

This is what is happening all over the country. It is not only, perhaps not even chiefly, a question of money. When a great house like Benson's 'Hakluyt' comes into the market it is no longer snapped up by a profiteer.

~Dr W R Inge in 'The Stately Homes of England' in The Yorkshire Evening Post, 11/08/1937

In As We Are [Benson] contrasts the ways of the modern post-war world with those he knew before, without loud lamentation because he did not realise how much there was to lament. He observes and records an annoying shift in manners, but little more.

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

[…] his best work—the three autobiographical books As We Were (1930), As We Are (1932), and Final Edition (1940) […]

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

 

The Blotting-book

Fiction ~ novel/novella
Published August 1908
36,800 words
(First read 22/08/2006)

I need to read this one again to give a full appraisal: my 'review' at the time was very sketchy: 

7/10.  Despite this being a detective story ('crime story' would be more accurate, as precious little visible detecting takes place), I found it highly enjoyable, though it was more for its old-fashioned Edwardian charm than the crime stuff.  Needless to say, I didn't get the crime part once it was explained.

The book is available online here.









THE CRITICS 

The Blotting Book […] by E F Benson, will come as a surprise to readers who have followed the comparatively even tenour of this author's way. The title is non-committal, but brings to mind The Book of Months. The first few pages open up the possibility of a tale in the Dodo vein. But gradually the truth dawns ~ this story is a fresh venture. The affairs of Morris Assheton, who does not attain majority until the age of twenty-five, but gains control of his fortune if he marries after the age of twenty-two, have been left entirely in the hands of Mr Taynton, the family solicitor. It is soon made clear that this apparently honest and genial man has gambled [a]way much of the fortune entrusted to his care. He has every wish to replace the money, for his chief instinct is self-preservation, and is just risking the remnants of the money in a scheme which has every chance of recouping him, when Morris places all in danger by falling in love. Taynton persuades his partner and accomplice, Mills, to slander Morris to Lord Templeton and so prevent an engagement. Shortly after this Mills is murdered, and suspicion points to Morris as his murderer, for he has discovered that he has slandered him, and been greatly enraged. Taynton, who has quarrelled with his partner and has actually killed him, builds up a case so cleverly against Morris that it seems certain he will be convicted. But a trifling slip betrays Taynton. He has forged a threatening letter from Morris to Mills, and blotted it in a blotting book which was not bought until some days after the purported date of the letter. From this the counsel for the defence is able to trace Taynton's movements and clear Morris, but the unhappy solicitor, who, having carried through a successful coup and restored Morris's fortune is now free from the fear that his defalcations will be discovered, escapes the ends of justice by suicide. Mr Benson has built up his story with much ingenuity. The personality of Taynton and the fears which drove him into crime are excellently suggested, and the other characters also fall naturally into their places. An adroit management of detail accounts quite lucidly both for the mystery and its unravelling. Without any of the usual paraphernalia of the book of this class Mr Benson has given us an interesting story. But when he could have given us a much more interesting story on his own lines was The Blotting Book worth the trouble? We are accustomed to the Bensonian manner and resent its absence.

~The Manchester Courier, 05/08/1908

[…] The Blotting Book [...] describes the devilish ingenuity with which a middle-aged barrister, of hitherto spotless reputation, contrived to cast suspicion upon his young client of having committed a murder which was in fact his own work. He was exceeding clever, but, as the event turned out, too clever for his own safety. Skillful detective work discovered the truth by means of the very things he had done to conceal his traces. The story deals chiefly with the crime and the trial; we wish the detection of the criminal had been treated in a less sketchy manner.

~The Outlook, 19/09/1908

There is more genuine workmanship in this slight detective story than in half the toilsome novels of the day, and everyone who can appreciate neat, effective, and finished artistry will enjoy to the full this clever and admirably constructed story. The story is 'the real thing'--life as it is, and crime as it occurs.

~The Daily Telegraph, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut 

The Blotting Book (1908) is much shorter than any of the previous novels, being in fact a long short story, and it is quite different in style and purpose.  This attractive little book, still available nearly a century later, is a clever piece of detective fiction with the obligatory surprise ending.  It cannot have taken Fred more than a weekend to write ...

 

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

This little 1908 novel is the story of a murder; rather unexpected from E.F. Benson [...]. Morris Assheton is a young man from a wealthy background; his inheritance is held in trust until his twenty-fifth birthday, unless he marries before that date. The trustees are Mr Taynton and Mr Mills, the family solicitors. Mr Taynton is an agreeable, avuncular sort; charitable, religious and fond of his routines, he contrasts with the much pricklier Mr Mills. Beneath the surface, however, they are more alike, since they have made some ill-advised speculations with Morris's money, hoping for personal profits. When it becomes clear that Morris is in love, and likely to marry, Taynton becomes alarmed. Can he buy enough time to restore Morris's inheritance, ensure his reputation and his prospects for a comfortable retirement?
The novel is set in Brighton [...] and many of the locations are still recognisable, although the murder scene, a quiet path over the downs from Falmer to Brighton, is much less rural nowadays and probably less conducive to violent crime. Benson's book is not really a whodunit ~ it's fairly obvious who the murderer is ~ but it still makes use of typical tools of the genre. Letters, railway timetables, calendars and the eponymous blotting book are all either clues or misdirections. Again, while the book doesn't include the psychological analysis you get in Golden Age detective fiction, it is interested in the boundaries between fantasy, memory and forgetting.
I thought Benson could have done more with the character of Mrs Assheton, Morris's mother ~ she felt very undeveloped to me, particularly in the context of Benson's more famous female characters ~ and the mouth-breathing Superintendent Figgis is a caricature. But the social milieu ~ upper-class luxury on the Edwardian scale ~ is very well evoked, and the book is an enjoyable, if slight, read. [...]

~Tanya Izzard at 20^th Century Vox, 23/12/2011