Queen Victoria

Non-fiction
Published 1935
(First read 22/02/2014)

A clever and witty biography in which Benson deals mainly with Victoria as woman and wife rather than queen and empress.  The tone is light, anecdotal, even a bit gossipy; there's humour, some of it ever-so-gently in mock of Her Royal Shortness and killer consort; EFB doesn't bore the pants off us with endless politics and politicians, instead sketching them in with a few skilled strokes; in short, the reader's left feeling that he probably knows enough about Queen Victoria now.  (The edition I have ~ Chatto & Windus, 1987 ~ also has the advantage of being 'lavishly illustrated', which always helps ...)  Not available online.

STOP PRESS

I just came across this in Mother (1925):

Once only had I seen [the Queen] close and quietly.  For one year, towards the end of the eighties, my father had taken a house on Deeside for August, and we were all invited to Balmoral.  And the diminutive old lady with the prominent blue eyes that looked very fixedly at you and the really beautiful voice, who was so small and so significant, was the head of everything, the incarnation of stability and security, something cosmic. ...  There was, too, something vividly individual about her, and if, never having seen her before, I had observed her walking into some very unexpected place, like a small restaurant in Soho, I verily believe I should have known her for Queen Victoria: nobody else could possibly be quite like that, nor could she possibly have been anyhow different.

Other critics

As a biographer, Mr. Benson has several outstanding qualities, all of which were won, perhaps, from his long apprenticeship to the novel. He has a remarkable ease of narrative, which makes event follow event with precision and grace; he has the collector's fancy for knowing all the facts, no matter how trivial; he has a quiet humor, quite free from any bitterness of wit, that enjoys gossip for its own sake and savors it as a kind of art in itself; and, most important of all, he has the suavity and gentleness of the born spectator, whom nothing can move very deeply but who understands even themost extraordinary aberrations of conduct without feeling contempt for their authors. These are very great gifts for a biographer, since they lead almost inevitably to the production of books which are rich in entertainment and full of information, books that have charm and vivacity and the polish that marks the elegant drawing-room. If they lack power and compelling prophetic insight, it is because they have the defects of their virtues.

~Charles David Abbott in The Saturday Review, 20/04/1935

  

There is no end to books on Queen Victoria, as, stunned, we contemplate the decay of her world. It is much as if admirers of the full-rigged ship devoted their talents to minute descriptions of the figurehead at the bow. Benson cannot possibly lend her life the acid contrast necessary to such a work, for he is the chief dispenser of Victorian memorabilia, and his volume, As We Were, successfully concealed, with innate charm, just what the Victorians were.

The chief interest to be found in a biography of Victoria is the attitude of the biographer. Granted that Lytton Strachey presented her unfairly, it must be admitted in the concession that he made a brilliant job of it. Benson treads in fearfully, being of angelic disposition, and sets about gracefully admitting the basis of Strachey’s libel, mitigating it with an amused tolerance which never swerves from printing, when pressed, the approximate truth. Where the author of Eminent Victorians once toyed wittily with a vast machine of politics, Benson is more concerned with giving a domestic background to Victoria’s life, though the facets of her career which must delight all amateur psychologists glitter occasionally by reflection in Benson’s amused eyes. Just why such a lush field is permitted to lie fallow, when the psychologists are so thorough in digging into the past, must be only a matter of diminishing royalties if such liberties are ever taken with a Royalty considerably diminished herself.

I read the book with interest chiefly in perusing an estimate of England’s queen by a gentleman antithetical to Lytton Strachey’s attitudes. Though it may be true that the latter lost considerable esteem in the obituaries the English critics paid him, Benson’s work, with its access to official archives, at least absolves Strachey of mendacity and rehabilitates much that the wittier man belittled. Benson’s book is the last word in gentleness. Until another Strachey - preferably John, or any other good Marxian - cares to survey the past of this remarkable queen, Benson’s biography will remain a standard work.

~Laurence Stallings in The American Mercury, 06/1935

Daisy's Aunt

Fiction ~ novel
Published May, 1910
Approx 59,000 words
(First read 04/02/2014)

To describe Daisy's Aunt as 'slight' would be a massive understatement: it has all the substance of a soap bubble, albeit quite a fat soap bubble.
Once again Benson dabbles in the world of heterosexual love, with his usual complete lack of understanding of how people really work.  Over a trio of automata unlikely 'characters' he casts the flimsiest, cobwebbiest plot imaginable, which goes like this:
Daisy Hanbury is a society gel, aged 22; her favourite aunt, Jeannie Halton¹, aged 30, is a widow; both are ~ obviously ~ great beauties.  It turns out that Daisy's married elder sister (Diana), who everyone thought had died five years previously, hadn't: what had actually happened was that she 'fell', i.e. she failed to love her husband and ran off with another bloke ... who was followed by another ... etc. ... in fact her 'ruin' was so complete that she ended up living in a flat in Paris where, at the beginning of her (Jeannie's) widowhood a year previously, Jeannie rediscovered her just in time for her (Diana) to die in her (Jeannie's) arms.  [I'm sure there must be a more concise way of wording this ...]  Diana's dying wish was that Daisy never find out the depths of her (Diana's) depravity (nor, presumably, that she'd been playing possum for four years ~ EFB skims over this consideration).

Now it just so happens that the elderly (32!) society gent who's been dangling after Daisy, Lord Tom Lindfield by name², was Diana's Bloke No. 2 ... or was it 3? ... might even have been 4.  Okay, that's the background, now the plot: Jeannie decides that the only way to stop Daisy finding out her sister was a fallen woman is to prevent Lindfield from marrying her; and the best way to do that is to come between them; and the only way to do that is to make him fall in love with her (Jeannie).
All of which comes to pass, in scenes of excruciating triteness and fatuity.  This thin broth is beefed up³ ever so slightly by Daisy's actually falling in love with Lindfield and wondering WTF her belovèd auntie is up to, and by Jeannie's being engaged to a man she does love while all this has been going on.  But the worst is yet to come: In the end, for no especially good reason, Jeannie bleedin' tells everyone why she's inveigled a man she doesn't love into loving her; she tells Daisy about Diana ~ contrary to everyone's expectations, Daisy doesn't immediately drop down dead on the spot; ... and everyone lives happily ever after: Jeannie marries her fiancé and lives in bliss; Daisy ~ again inexplicably ~ falls instantly out of love with Lindfield and decides to marry the ever-faithful Willie⁴; and [I tremble to write it] Lindfield happily settles down to a life in which he's best mates with Jeannie and her new hubby and more than happy to go on loving her from a short distance.
I put the book down at the end and called out across the years to E F Benson, "Do me a favour, Fred! ~ people just don't work like this!"

STOP PRESS
Given the similarity in the names, and EFB's propensity for recycling his own material, it's entirely reasonable to assume that he based Daisy's Aunt on his unpublished play Aunt Jeannie, which ran on Broadway, starring Mrs Patrick Campbell, for about a month in the autumn of 1902, and which, according to Brian Masters, received 'a most frosty reception and was deemed neither amusing nor a suitable vehicle for the famous actress.'

A fair chunk of the 'action' takes place at a house party in Bray,
Berkshire, in a house rather like this one, at Bray, Berkshire.

P.S. A few hours later, around 4.30am, as I lay there racked with sleepless neuralgia, a theory came to me: EFB's persistent delusion that a heterosexual man can be content ~ even happy ~ to live in close proximity with the woman he loves, to carry on loving her despite her being in love with (married to, etc.) another man, is, either consciously or subconsciously, a metaphor [this is where the theory starts getting ropey] for his own experiences of loving other men unrequitedly: he had no choice but to love the men he loved from close proximity, in silence, suffering nobly, etc.  Then ~ luckily ~ I nodded off. 

¹ The novel was published in the USA as The Fascinating Mrs Halton, a rather better title, IMHO.
² Not to be confused with (e.g.) Lord Tony Limpsfield in Lucia in London.
³ I was going to say 'the plot is complicated' but that would be absurd: it's only my inexpert recounting that's making this sound like War and Peace.  I find retelling plots ~ even, or especially wafery asinine ones ~ consummately tedious.
⁴ Don't ask.

THE CRITICS

Daisy's Aunt is so cloying it is like having toffee stuck to every tooth.  It was after this book that the rival novelist Hugh Walpole, about twenty years Fred's junior [...], accused Fred of being a fraud.  'E. F. Benson is a charlatan in literature,' he said, 'and writes solely for money [...]' [Arthur Benson's retort was this] 'If I were to refuse to meet everyone who thought me a literary charlatan, I should dine alone constantly.'

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

For the sake of returning at one leap not merely to the centre of social life, but to that variety of it which is most insistently and fluffily feminine, it is profitable to take up next Mr. E. F. Benson's latest volume, The Fascinating Mrs. Halton. Now, there is no English writer, not even Anthony Hope himself, more expert in turning out idle little Dolly Dialogues that begin nowhere and end in the same place—feminine studies of the tinsel jewelry type, all sparkle and glitter but without the sterling mark. A generation has passed since he created the Dodo type, a perfectly good type so far as it goes, and one of which no intelligent student of human nature would venture to say that the Dodo of real life does not do such things. But here, at last, in The Fascinating Mrs. Halton, the author has failed to carry conviction with it. His heroine, to be sure, finds herself in a serious dilemma. Returning after a year of

widowhood upon the Continent, as the betrothed bride of another man, she discovers her favourite niece, Daisy, on the brink of accepting the proposal of a certain Lord Lindfield. Now, Mrs. Halton happens to know that the tragic death of Daisy's wayward and unhappy sister is mainly to be laid at Lord Lindfield's door. Daisy herself knows nothing of the matter, and even Lord Lindfield does not dream that there is any connection between a half-forgotten episode in Paris and the object of his present serious intentions. Now Mrs. Halton is represented to us as a woman of rather sterling qualities. Below a blithe and inconsequential surface, one feels that she is a woman who is distinctly worth while—and yet, in the face of this, what does the author ask us to believe her capable of doing? Why, here is the best way that this intelligent, warm-hearted, frank-natured woman can hit upon: she flings herself bodily at Lord Lindfield. She matches all of her maturer charms and finished arts against poor Daisy's youth and inexperience. With her own betrothed lover looking on and marvelling in patient and dumb trustfulness, she stoops to coquetries that are almost wanton in their boldness—and when finally Lord Lindfield falls into the snare and forgetful of Daisy offers himself, she assumes a sudden hauteur and becomes insulting in her attitude of disdainful and outraged dignity. Now it is obvious that Mr. Benson knew better; he felt that all this was preposterous—and the proof lies in the fact that despite the absurdity of this false position his people all act like sensible human beings; they get together, talk things over and refuse to have their lives wrecked by a bit of melodrama. Yet even here it is unnecessary to say that people don't do such things. If Mrs. Halton had not done this particular thing, Mr. Benson would have had no story to write. The real explanation is that Mrs.Halton was just a plain, garden variety of fool, and Mr. Benson was either not clever enough or not honest enough to tell us so.

~Frederic Taber Cooper in The Bookman (US)

Mr. Benson has an advantage over many current novelists in being sure of his métier. He never attempts too much. His plane is that of the social-humorous romance. He is content with few characters and simple plot. After a few of these pages, it is perfectly clear what the fascinating Mrs. Halton is going to do. Her task is an unusual one, though not unheard of: there is a very passable stage plot involved in the narrative. Mrs. Halton is a young and not over-mournful widow. She is, indeed, when the story opens,' already pledged to a second mate, and on the way to a first happiness. But an unpleasant duty intervenes. Returning to England from a season of mourning and recuperation abroad, she finds her favorite niece and companion almost engaged to be married to a certain young lord (of course a lord). He is a pretty fair sort of lord, but he has had his experiences, one of them connected with a lady in Paris, whom Mrs. Halton knows to have been the sister of Daisy, the girl. There is your situation. It is impossible for Mrs. Halton to tell Daisy, for the sake of her memory of the erring sister, who is now dead. And she cannot bring herself to tell the nobleman, since she regards him as a rascal. Evidently, there is only one thing to do. Mrs. Halton is almost as young and quite as beautiful as the fair Daisy. She determines to steal away Daisy's lover before Daisy actually promises herself to him. The thing is easily done: the gentleman is quite ready to change his objective. As soon as his fickleness is made clear to Daisy, Mrs. Halton's engagement to the other man is announced. Her game has been open, and both Daisy and his lordship demand an explanation—which the fascinating Mrs. Halton is forced to give. They agree that she has done right. Daisy promptly pairs off with her original second choice; milord is content to remain the adoring friend of the no longer Mrs. Halton. For her part, she has come to like and admire him very much: there is a touch of pure Briticism in the toleration with which she looks upon him as a man who has had a mistress, though the thought of his marrying the sister of that deceased mistress is a horror to her.

~The Nation (US), 02/06/1910

A Reaping

Fiction ~ novel (kind of)
Published 1909
Approx. 72,000 words
(First read 21/01/2014)

... is the sequel to The Book of Months and is really just more of the same, only longer: it's no better, no worse, just more.

The 'action' picks up two or three years later: our faceless, originless, characterless, surnameless author-hero has now been married two years to the woman (Helen) he selected at the end of Months and Months for pretty well the sole reason that she was the dead spit of the departed Margery.  The couple mooch about between London and their house in the country (mostly the latter), often accompanied by Jack's cousin 'Legs', a kind of elongated 20-year-old puppychap, very likeable.  Jack has lost none of his chronic habit of tedious maundering.  I won't bore the pants off everyone by recounting any of the 'plot', just give selected 'highlights':
(1) September¹: Jack and Legs ~ and the dog Fifi² ~ have a mildly supernatural experience involving a so-called revenant.  It's a lot less interesting than it might sound.

(2) October: Jack and Helen do some gardening.
(3) November: Jack and Helen do some more gardening.  Legs nearly gets engaged.  And ... into this teeth-grindingly dull farrago of dusty drivel EFB sees fit to drop A Comic Character, in the shape of Mr Holmes, one of their neighbours in the country.

"He is a kind little gentleman, about forty-five years old, who lives with his sister, and does not do anything whatever³.  He is generally known as the Bun-hander, because no tea-party has ever been known to take place for miles round at which Mr. Holmes was not handing refreshments to the ladies.  That is his strength, his forte.  His weakness is just as amiable ~ though, perhaps, hardly so useful ~ for his weakness is Rank."

Before anyone gets excited at the prospect of an undiscovered Bensonian comic hero, I hasten to point out that Mr H isn't actually all that funny: as with the character of Mrs Murchison in Mammon & Co., EFB describes with glee everyone's (especially Legs') reaction to him without bothering to make the character himself especially comic.  Oh and he's gone in a flash.

(4) February: Edward Frederic Benson murders Legs for no reason whatsoever.
(5) April: Jack and Helen, but mainly Jack, goes on holiday to Greece and bores us rigid with that for what feels like 300 pages but is in fact only 14.  As an example of how supremely turgid the Benson prose gets when he's waxing lyrical about the ancient world, I'll quote this stupefyingly bad sentence:

"Never, so we must believe, during that wonderful century and a half, when from the ground, maybe, of the lifeless hieratic Egyptian art there shot up that transcendant flower of loveliness, of which even the fragments that remain to us now, battered and disfigured as they are, are in another zone of beauty compared to all that went before or has come afterwards, was anything ugly produced at all, except as deliberate caricature."

I defy anyone not to turn blue with tedium reading this section.
Okay enough! ~ I've already wasted far more time than I intended to on this.
NOT RECOMMENDED, but if you're feeling very brave it's available online here.


¹ Like it's predecessor, A Reaping is divided into twelve month-long chapters.  But for no discernible reason it starts at June this time.
² Yes: Fifi.
³ Jack presumably hasn't heard the thing about casting the beam out of one's own eye ...

THE CRITICS

A Reaping (1909) is not a novel to shine.

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

There is nothing to hold against the Benson brothers but their unfailing industry. Nothing can swerve them from the path of producing a book or two a year. It remains, therefore, for their readers to accept the fact that the matter contained in the books must be slight. A Reaping, by E. F. Benson, is slighter than usual. It is unconventionally invented, the chapter headings bearing the names of the months and the structure being of a rather straggling and casual kind. The usual ingredients, however, are to hand; meditative à la A. C. Benson; the third brother's unfailing interest in the god Pan; also his lasting interest in women's hair, which the author brushes and describes much as he has done in The Climber and other volumes. There is also a ghost, a warning, reflections upon death, à la R. H. Benson, as well as a great deal of charming landscape and light laughter. The doctrine is Stevenson's of cheer and kindness at all costs; excellent doctrines, but not gripping nor vitalizing. It is sad, but somehow the ultimate amiability of all things was always and remains still a tepid inspiration. The book is very gentle, sweet-spirited and kindly, and if it were by a young and unknown author we should hail it with pleasure and delight; but Mr. Benson must submit to the criterion of his past. Our demand upon him is like that the little schoolgirl made of the readier elder sister who wrote her compositions for her week by week: "Now be sure and make me improve a little since last time," she would urge. We want Mr. Benson to improve a little each time. He is still quite young enough, and we recommend a stern experience of deprivation and misery or a very undermining course of reading; not so much that he may, as Nietzsche might say, hold more correct views, but that he should liberate himself from what is customary either successfully or disastrously. It is a great doctrine to set one's faith upon, that a big failure is better than a slight success.

~The North American Review, April 1910 (edited for crap spelling etc.)

David Blaize and the Blue Door

Fiction ~ novel (children's)
Published 1918
(First read 20/12/2013)

For once I can't find anything to knock about an E F Benson novel.  David Blaize and the Blue Door is, of course, a book for kiddies, for little kiddies at that.  The eponymous hero is six years old; he goes to bed one night, passes through a blue door situated behind his pillow, and has a ~ fairly lengthy ~ series of adventures à la Alice through the looking-glass.  The adventures were humorous and quirky enough to keep me interested; the prose light and easy with just the right Oh do tell us a story, dear Uncle Fred! tone to them; the author doesn't pontificate or moralize (much); and the whole thing is very Edwardian, cozy 'n' comfy, even when, towards the end, it gets a bit 'soldiery'¹.
All in all, a jolly read.  Mind you, I daresay today's kiddiwinks would be bored shitless with it.  ["Don't you mean 'witless', Ewie?"]

I really think ~ not that anyone asked ~ that Benson should have written more for children, preferably on the subject of animals: this, and his sketches Jill's Cat (1916) and the pair 'Puss-Cat' and There Arose a King (both 1920) are not only charming but appear somehow both effortless and inspired, unlike so very much of his adult fiction.  Ah well, not a lot we can do about that, unfortunately.

P.S. DB & TBD should not be considered a prequel to David Blaize and David of King's: it stands up entirely on its own merits.

¹ I can imagine EFB's publishers saying to him, "Could you at least make some kind of acknowledgment that there's a war on? ~ you don't have to send David to Passchendaele or anything ... just a teeny little mention of soldiers or something, if only to let the parents know you're aware it's happening?"






THE CRITICS

Several years ago Mr. Benson wrote a story about this same David in his lively schoolboy stage. Here we have David as a small child. Jolly things happened to him when he went through the blue door, and only Alice in Wonderland saw more wonderful and topsyturvy queer sights than David.

~The Outlook (US; in 'Books for Young People' column), 26/11/1919

Up and Down (1918) and David Blaize and the Blue Door (1918) were composed during and after [Arthur Benson's] committal to a mental home, yet they are innocent of any reference to it, even by implication. This was probably quite deliberate, for both books are an evasion, a denial of the real and the important. […] David Blaize and the Blue Door is a book of fantasy for children, in the manner of Alice in Wonderland.  It enjoyed much success in its day, but now seems contrived.

~Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991.  (Hmmm, I wouldn't call it any more contrived than ~ to take a random example ~ Alice in Wonderland.) 

 

David Blaize and the Blue Door is an imaginative fantasy that departs radically from the more traditionally structured David Blaize school stories. […] Searching for answers to important questions that adults dismiss as nonsense, David finds behind the door a Wonderland-like realm where nonsense is taken seriously by the inhabitants. The Times Literary Supplement [19/12/1918] notes similarities to the Alice books, but observes that Benson “carries the sincerest form of flattery just far enough to be clear of any charge of attempted concealment; and he weaves it into a story that is, in its main lines, his own invention.” Benson's inventive dream-fantasy anticipates some of his later supernatural fantasies, exploring the nature of 'nonsense' in order to question the limitations of conventional notions of 'sense'.

~Carolyn Sigler in Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books, 1997

The Book of Months

Fiction ~ novel (kind of)
Published May? 1903
Approx. 56,000 words
(First read 15/12/2013)

I said in my introductory paragraph that I wouldn't pull any punches, that if I found something bad, I'd say so.  Well, The Book of Months isn't bad ~ it's atrocious.  
As with most of these books, I had no idea what to expect before reading this ~ I'm never even 100% sure whether it's going to be a novel or something else.  (See for example As We Are ~ opinion is divided as to whether it's fiction, current affairs, or ... well, something else.)  Well anyway, here's what happened when I picked up The Book of Months [this review contains spoilers, not that there's much to spoil]:

I see it's divided into twelve chapters, a month each, starting with January.  Fair enough, I think, it's a diary-type novel, nowt wrong with that.  The narrator starts off by moaning about the weather in London; then, it having become clear that he's an author, he recounts a couple of anecdotes of his daily life.  Then he goes off to Switzerland for a skating holiday.  At this point I'm starting to think Erm, who is this chap? ~ surely the resemblance between him and the author is more than coincidental.  The episode closes with the narrator befriending a little girl staying at the same hotel.  Hmm, well, maybe not then.

February (don't worry: I'm not going to go through every month like this) arrives and we're treated to a really quite heart-wrenching anecdote about a street newspaper-boy who the Great-God-Benson shows us just long enough for us to like ... then summarily kills off.  Please note: This is the only passage in the book worth reading ~ it lasts two or three pages.  Our narrator then goes to a house party where, one night, he goes 'rain-running' (the hero of Ravens' Brood does exactly the same thing), which is to say that he strips down to his pants and goes running around outdoors soaking up nature (etc.)  I say, this is terribly bold of EFB to admit that he's done this himself.
March is nothing but maundering waffle, in the unmistakeable voice of E F Benson (or is it?).  So is April.

Then comes May and [quote] "Dick Alington and I were very old friends: we had been at school together, and his father's house was next to ours in the country, the woods belonging to each running contiguous, separated only by the park paling."  The mystery deepens: I have no recollection of that name in EFB's biography ... and besides, the Bensons surely never lived in a property like that ...  Then, lo and behold, not only is there a 'Dick' but there's a 'Margery' too and [wait for it, another quote]: "Then quite suddenly I became aware that I had fallen in love with her."*
This is page 47 of 124.
It's a novel: the narrator is a fictional author who just happens to be exactly like the real one; and these people are characters.  Reader, I swallowed my own tongue.  Now I realize I might sound like a complete dullard saying this but up until page 45 I was convinced I was reading "A Year in the Life of the Author of Dodo".  It's not till one third of the way through the novel (p. 48) that we even find out the narrator's damned name (Jack).  It felt like a confidence trick ... or a cheap magic trick ... or a hoax ... or something.  And the worst of it is that at no point in the remaining 250-ish pages (counting this and the sequel A Reaping as one) do we ever really know who Jack is.

Well, that's the long and the short of it.  I should add that not only is Jack a complete and utter zero, but he must surely be the most crashing bore Benson ever created: he just rambles on and on and on and on and on ... about nothing ... for pages and pages and pages.  For example, virtually the whole of August (once the plot's been safely cleared out of the way) is devoted to him going to Bayreuth to watch Wagner operas and he describes their plots in minute detail ~ it was horribly, painfully, sickeningly, stomach-churningly, brain-rottingly boring to read.
So, my advice, steer well clear of this one.

Still and all, if you are that kind of masochist, the whole book is available online here.  (Don't say I didn't warn you, though.)

For the sequel, go to A Reaping.


*There follows the inevitable dull love triangle: Dick loves Margery too; Margery chooses Dick (as who wouldn't?); the narrator chooses to hang around suffering nobly.  Dick, like so many a doomed character, is mildly likeable, so Benson kills him off in the Boer War.  Margery dies of a combination of grief-at-the-news and childbirth.  The baby (for once) survives Benson's mad axe ... but thereafter vanishes off the face of the earth.

THE CRITICS

The Book of Months is not, properly speaking, a novel at all; if we may coin an expression to fit this style of novel, we should call it "fictional autobiography." At the beginning the reader takes the book as a real description of the mental processes of Mr. E. F. Benson; but later on, when two love-stories are worked into the text, the same reader must conclude that the book is pure fiction. The earlier and less narrative parts of the book are the best reading, and the author when he describes his midnight outing in his friend's grounds to enjoy the full delights of the first night of spring is singularly successful in getting the young man's joie de vivre "over the footlights." There is a delightful optimism about the book which renders it very pleasant reading, and some of Mr. Benson's theories of life are shrewd enough to give food for reflection. As a whole, The Book of Months is well worth reading.

~The Spectator, 02/05/1903

 

It is full of charm ~ real, persuasive, penetrating charm ~ the charm of a wayward, irresponsible, winning personality. There is sentiment, and sometimes sentimentality; but there is an underlying manliness, which renders even the most sentimental reflections strong and unaffected. The book is, above all things, sympathetic. Many notes are sounded, and in all of them there rings the sincerity of real feeling and purpose … [we] recommend it unreservedly to all sorts and conditions of readers.

~The Daily Chronicle, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Juggernaut

 

The book contains fine work, notably the beautiful word-pictures of 'Spring in April', 'Capri in September,' and half a dozen others, which in themselves make it well worth reading.

 

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

 

It is an uncommon and a charming book.

~Illustrated London News, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

Mr. Benson, the author of Dodo and many other novels which have been severely criticised and widely read, now turns to a new field. These little prose essays, one for each month, record the out-of-door experiences and the reflections of a London man-about-town. In a measure, they suggest the work of Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, but they are in a manner simpler and less affected. A single reflection may be quoted: "The man who rings a bell for a small child who cannot reach it has done his duty and his part in the world's work far better that day than any philosopher who thinks a great deal and does nothing." A slender vein of humor and a considerable knowledge of society may be found beneath the surface of Mr. Benson's writing. The book is put in holiday dress with elaborate decoration in colors.

 

~The Outlook (US), 28/11/1903

Certainly, Mr. Benson is here at his best: quaintness, originality, some powerful descriptive passages, and very human nature gives an intimacy and charm.

 

~Daily News, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

The author reveals himself a keen observer and the possessor of a poetic fancy, expressed in vivid incident and sketches of human nature and scenery in all parts of the world. It is a book to be taken up at any time, and opened at any part.

 

~British Weekly, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

In some of the twelve episodes which Mr. Benson gives us in this volume he goes deep to the foundations of joy and sorrow. Much of the book is narrative; one or two of the stories are deeply and poignantly melancholy; other parts of the book are throbbing with vitality and the delight of life. Passages of descriptive writing, gay and sombre, occur which are wonderfully good work.

 

~Vanity Fair, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 

It expresses the thoughts and feelings of a sane and mortal man; it reveals him in his private moments, and it throbs with his pleasure and his pain. It is all eminently natural, and it is 'mind-narrative' of a kind that will win the sympathy of average people by awaking echoes of their own emotions. Add to this that in style it is scholarly, in many pages lofty and poetic, and there is no need to explain away a charm which will be instantly felt. Besides the arts of sympathetic self-revelation and moralising, Mr. Benson has the rare gift of humour, and a talent for description and for narrative.

 

~St. James's Gazette, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 

The charm of the book lies in its perfect sincerity, and no one will take it up but will find in it something which will bring him into closer relation with himself, and inspire in him a greater sense of the joy of life.

 

~The Bookman, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

And finally: I can only conclude from this that all these people were reading some other book of the same title, by an author of the same name.

The Book of Months [(April 1903)] is an agreeable if rather desultory book which is difficult to categorise, being neither a novel, diary, collection of essays, autobiography, nor a gardening book, but an amalgam of all of them; a record of experiences, both material and emotional, with the thoughts to which they have given birth, within the space of one year.

The critics were caught off guard by this change in tempo and direction and did not know what to make of it. Most of them praised it highly, in a rather surprised kind of way; only the Saturday Review, never a fan of E. F. Benson, spoke of “these maunderings on lumbago, and the gibberish he talks in his bath, and above its dreary humour, its wilted sentiment, is the amazing insensibility with which the thing is done.”

~Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd in E. F. Benson As He Was, 1988

The Princess Sophia

Fiction ~ novel

Published April 1900

Approx. 75,000 words 

(First read 18/11/2013) 

Sophia is firmly in the Ruritanian romance category.  Benson's madey-uppy Eastern European principality is called Rhodopé and is situated in a coastal part of [wait for it]

Albania.  Luckily for EFB, no-one in Rhodopé speaks Albanian, or even seems to know it exists: everyone uses impeccable English.  After a brief tour of Sophia's childhood, we see her ascend her dad's throne at the age of something like 20 [as ever, I forget the detail].  She marries a neighbouring prince and settles down to a life of ... well, nothing much, really.The 'catch' or, to use a more technical term, the 'thing' about this princess is that she is, from an early age, addicted to gambling: she loves roulette far more than she ever does her husband, her son, her father, her country, or anything else.  Gambling is pretty much all there is to her: she can't be arsed with running her country, which bores her; her sole child (Prince Leonard) has to sit in the nursery twiddling his thumbs till he gets a look-in; she soon

realizes her husband (Petros) isn't up to much, but nonetheless appoints him regent while she's off in Monte Carlo for x months of every year indulging her ruling passion; the only idea she ever has is to save herself some travel by opening a casino in Rhodopé itself.

The plot: Petros and the evil prime minister [yah! boo!] decide to oust Sophia while she's out of the country tossing her civil list down the toilet.  In one of the weirdest conspiracies I've ever read, they plot together to pull off separate dethronements ... it's kinda complicated.  Inevitably all their efforts come to nought in the end.  The PM is jailed for life, the prince consort merely exiled and divorced.  This takes us to about three-quarters of the way through.  The remaining dollop is devoted to her life post-non-event, and to her 'relationship' with her son-and-heir, who eventually ~ at the age of 20 or so [yawn] ~ wins the principality off her in a bet.  Yes, you read that right.

As so often seems to be the case with these reviews, I've ended up giving the impression that I didn't enjoy The Princess Sophia.  In fact I did quite enjoy it ~ but that's a  long way from being the same as thinking it was 'good'.  It wasn't: it was tripe.  But, despite having too many shortcomings to list, it was quite enjoyable tripe.  Lovers of Benson humour beware, though: 'light-hearted' though the general tone is, the novel is a zone almost entirely free of laughs, intentional or otherwise.  
It's available online here.

THE CRITICS

Mr Benson's novel is not void of entertainment, but it seems to have been written in an overwhelming hurry. Often enough in reading some volume of memoirs one says, “there is a novel here,” and would go on to write it, were it not for the fact that one realises that the story has got to be extracted from the material, the essential kept ~ some of it invented ~ and the inessential rejected. Mr Benson seems to have started with the intention of writing a novel, and to have succeeded only in producing a sketch history of an entirely fictitious character, on which a good story might be founded by anyone who had the time required for such achievements.  [...] There are several stories hidden away in the mass of material Mr Benson has got together. It is a pity he had not time to make up his mind as to which of them he desired to tell.

~The Morning Post, 26/06/1900

We are inclined to think that Mr. Benson's new book is the best thing he has yet done. It is a very clever study of gambling and a very clever study of human nature. In all the book there is not a character which is not natural, and there is also an absence of the superficiality which has sometimes been noticeable in Mr. Benson's work. He seems to be thoroughly at home with his characters, and describes them with truth and with originality.

~The Guardian, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 A gay and spirited performance, and the Princess herself a clever picture. It is lively reading, and the characters bubble along in true Bensonian fashion.

 

~The Westminster Gazette, quoted in endpapers of The Book of Months

As brilliant in execution as it is happy in conception.

 

~The Birmingham Daily Post, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

Told with verve and wit. If the novel is to amuse we cannot recommend a more agreeable companion than Mr. Benson's brilliant friend The Princess Sophia.

~Literature, quoted in endpapers of The Book of Months

The best of the book is undoubtedly the admirably-conceived and skilfully-drawn character of Sophia herself ~ princess, gambler, and very woman. Mr. Benson has written nothing fresher or more graceful than the chapter which tells the story of her courtship. The art with which he preserves his picture of the card-playing, betting, hard-riding girl from any taint of vulgarity or sordidness is not easily over-praised.

 

~The World, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

A rather long-drawn-out and not very creditable story of an imaginary principality lying between Greece and Turkey. Its Princess is a confirmed gambler, and in the end she stakes her kingdom in a game of roulette with her son, who is disguised, and whom she does not know. The book is decidedly inferior to Mr. Benson's historical stories of Greece, The Vintage and The Capsina. The last-named book seems to us to be the high-water mark of the literary achievement of the author of Dodo.

 

~The Outlook (US), 28/04/1900

The characterization is excellent, the humour pleasing, the satire true.

 

~The Daily Telegraph, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

There is brilliance, lightness of touch. The dialogue is neat and brisk, and the miniature Court and its courtiers are amusingly treated.

 

~The Athenaeum, quoted in endpapers of The Book of Months and Sheaves

The Unwanted

Fiction ~ novella / long short story
Published 17th September 1937*
Approx. 21,000 words
(First read 11/11/2013) 

The fourth and last of Benson's 'Old London' quartet and my favourite of the bunch.  It's a day-in-the-life story set in a world EFB was completely familiar with: the genteel microcosmic world of the Edwardian London square ~ think Secret Lives and a lot of the spook stories (and no doubt others I've not read yet).  Miss Dorothy Vincent is 'a short, energetic woman of middle age, of full figure and eager countenance' ~ remind you of anyone?  This classic Bensonian spinster

lives in the fictional Beaconsfield Square with her elderly ~ and unpleasant ~ aunt and her pekinese Chang ('known also as "Strong Mannie"'!)  She fills her own and other people's lives with the usual pastimes ~ walking the dog, pestering the local vicar, visiting, that kind of thing, and considers herself busy.  And, of course, of course, she has no idea how utterly unwanted she is.  It would have been easy for EFB to make a figure of fun of her, but he doesn't: I actually felt for her.  I won't give away the plot other than to say that she rounds off the day with a magnificently risky and utterly uncharacteristic 'adventure'.  Not available online.

* The four Old London books were only ever published in the United States, apparently.