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

Ravens' Brood

Fiction ~ novel
Published August? 1934
Approx. 104,000 words
(First read 30/07/2002; second read 28/11/2013)

There's no two ways about it: Ravens' Brood is fun ... in comparison with a lot of the rest of EFB's output.  Okay so it's fun of a rather rarefied, perverse kind, but what the hell.

Set in the second half of the 19th century, it tells the story of a consummately dysfunctional family all living in a heap (well, in a farmhouse, actually) in rural Cornwall: John Pentreath, a part-time religious fanatic and full-time alcoholic; his second wife Mollie, a demented harridan supposedly gifted in folkloric supernatural stuff; his widowed daughter-in-law Nancy, a preening gadabout with an eye for anything in trousers; his stroppy-strapping grandson Dennis; and Mollie's niece Nell.  John and Mollie are estranged, to put it mildly; he lusts after Nancy when he isn't slagging her off for being a jezebel; Mollie lusts after him; Dennis and Nell lust ~ fairly chastely ~ after one another.

Well, obviously, lust is the key.  As Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd say in their introduction to my copy¹, amongst Benson's other stuff Ravens' Brood "stands out like a cromlech in a cornfield ... black magic, sexuality, blasphemy, violence and ecstasy surround and penetrate the plot and characters."
I'm not saying any more: I recommend it.  But don't read it in the expectation of finding light social comedy in it.  Expect, rather, to put it down and say, "Blimey, did the author of Mapp and Lucia really write this?"

¹ Published by Millivres Books, 1993.

P.S. This has only just occurred to me today [28/01/14]: 'Ravens' Brood' isn't the name of the Pentreaths' farmhouse, which doesn't appear to have any particular name; also, to the best of my recollection, Benson never refers to the family as being like a bunch of young ravens; in fact, there's no mention whatsoever of ravens in the book.  There is an owl, though. 

"Rip me bodice, bigfella!"

STOP PRESS! ~ apparently the late Mr Rock Hudson owned a copy of Ravens' Brood ~ LOOK.

OTHER CRITICS

A bit far-fetched perhaps, but this suggests an English counterpart of Tobacco Road*, in its picture of degradation and its atmosphere of hate and depravity and sexual desires, in its ironical contrasts of belief and action, in the sense of its being a world removed from current life. Not a pleasant book, as one can guess by the above. Farm life in Cornwall against which is played out the drama of old John Pentreath's fear of God and love of the flesh and drink, and his growing hatred of his grandson Dennis, [whose] saneness alone lifts the story out of an abyss of degeneracy. A far cry from Benson's usual work.

 

~Kirkus Reviews, no date.  * A 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell.  Never heard of it, I'm afraid.

 

Colin II

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1925
Approx. 118,000 words
(First read 07/07/2002)

In his introduction to the 1994 Millivres edition of Colin II (pictured here), Mr Peter Burton recounts the following anecdote:

'I have just finished Colin,' Lord Halifax wrote to E. F. Benson on October 6th 1923.  'I have been deeply interested in it ~ first rate plot and most exciting.  Colin is a real devil ~ rather he is the devil ~ and yet one is interested in him and something more than interested [...]  Now I am longing for the sequel.  Please be sure to make the next volume as good as the first.'

I shared Lord H's sentiments exactly the last time I read Colin (13/01/2014).  I wonder if he shared the feelings of disappointment I had the last time I read the sequel (17/02/2014)¹ ...

After recapping the yarn of the original Colin's pact with the Divvel, EFB resumes the action a while after the close of the first novel.  Our Colin and his first cousin Violet have been married a couple of years and are the parents of a 14-month-old boy named Dennis.  We're then treated to another recap of everything that happened in Colin.  Here we have Problem No. 1 with Colin II: it is endlessly repetitive ~ if EFB isn't recapping what happened in Colin he's recapping what happened two pages ago.  I fully realize that recapitulation was one of Benson's besetting sins, but here he takes it to absurd and irritating lengths.
Not a lot happens in this section: Colin and Violet bicker; he flits back and forth to Bloody Capri; he reads a book written by his Elizabethan namesake and as a result takes up Satanism; he drives a frankly pretty stupid woman to suicide; and he flirts with his new Italian manservant Nino.  (EFB wearied of the last one so bumped him off.)  You have to hand it to Colin: he is ~ in my opinion ~ by far the most sexually ambiguous of all Benson's heroes.  In the following passage, when he and Nino have gone for a skinnydip in the lake at

Stanier, comes what I think is the most overtly gay bit of stuff in the whole œuvre:

Nino, but for a towel round his loins was still as Nature had made him.  But she had done it very nicely, and as he handed his master his clothes, Colin looked at his shapely shoulders and broad chest.

"You'd make an awfully good bronze statue, Nino," he said.  "You'd look nice in a museum, covered with verdigris, and with an arm and leg missing [...]

But enough of this frivolity ~ on with the show!
"Erm ... can we just back up a bit here, Ewie? ~ did you say 'Colin takes up Satanism'?"  Alas, yes.  This is the second Major Problem with Colin II.  Benson's

fascination with spiritualism I can cope with; his fixation with the god Pan, and attendant malarkey, is just about tolerable; but Satanism? ~ do me a favour.  But luckily he doesn't go overboard with it; his hero gradually loses interest too.  Anyway, Part II shifts the action on a dozen years and largely deals with Colin trying and failing to resist the charms of his adolescent son, who's a facsimile of David Blaize.  This internal struggle is probably the best, and the only believable, stuff in the whole book.  Then it ends.
Huh?  Yes, that's it: Then it ends.

Colin II is poor.  If you've read and enjoyed Colin, you ought to read it, if only to find out How Not To Write A Sequel.


¹ Mr Burton neglects to tell us the follow-up to the anecdote. 

THE CRITICS

The redemption of a gentleman whose soul had sought the devil and found him wanting.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 11/1925

Two years ago appeared Mr. Benson's Colin, with a preface announcing that the narrative would be completed in a later volume. Therefore, says a new note, Colin II must not be regarded as a sequel to Colin, but as the second half of that romance. We are not to take it as an afterthought. It is a tale of demoniac possession. The first Earl of Yardley was a handsome yokel who made Faust's contract with the Devil, became a darling of Queen Elizabeth, and was by her made Earl and endowed with a great estate. His bargain (duly signed in his own blood) is fulfilled. The Devil gives him material prosperity in return for worship and service. The Earl even practices the blasphemous rites of the Black Mass, and plans to raise a chapel to his master's honor. In every generation of his descendants there is found one to renew the bargain. The Colin of our story is the physical and spiritual counterpart of Elizabeth's Colin; radiant in beauty, and utterly committed to the worship of evil.

The first part of Colin told how the youth grew up, married, and by the accidental death of his elder brother, came into his great inheritance. Here the tale is taken up some years later. The young Earl is in his prime. He has great surface charm which he deliberately employs for his purposes. The only thing he fears is love. Very soon after her marriage, his young wife has discovered his true character: or rather, has discovered that there is more in him to fear than to love. Yet she still loves him, sure that there must be some secret goodness in him to have aroused her love. He treats her with mockery, when they are together; to her alone shows himself freely as a servant of hate and evil. Their one child, Dennis, much resembles Colin in body, but has his mother's nature. What ensues is a conflict between Colin's will to hate, and the natural love that stirs in him for his son. In the end the victory goes to love, and we are to suppose that the long devil-service of the house of Yardley is at an end.

A difficult theme for any story-teller, most difficult for one of Mr. Benson's light satiric bent. He says in his prefatory note: "The interval between the appearance of the two books has been longer than I anticipated, for I was not aware of the difficulties that lay ahead." The narrative bears signs of scrupulous and even painful effort. Indeed, this is matter for a Hawthorne or at very least a Powys. Mr. Benson could not fail ignominiously at anything. But he could hardly attempt a much less hopeful enterprise than the present one. The witty purveyor of social comedy cannot muster for this occasion a deep-going fancy or a sustained and stately manner. The story of Colin is, you may say, frank romance; but it is romance which just fails to convey the necessary if fleeting illusion of reality. Colin and Violet and Dennis never get to be more than brilliant figures of the theatre.

~H. W. Boynton in The Saturday Review (US), 10/10/1925

Secret Lives

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1932
Approx. 116,000 words
(First read 20/07/1998)

Paying Guests

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1929
Approx. 100,000 words
(First read 22/10/1995)

Colin

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1923
Approx. 116,000 words
(First read 10/01/1995)

Colin tells the everyday story of the Stanier family, of Stanier, near Rye, in the County of Sussex.  The first section recounts their history from around 1600, when the first Colin Stanier made a Faustian pact with the Devil, to 1900, when our hero the latest Colin is born.  At the start of the second section guess how many years have passed ...  I don't need to spell it out, do I?  Well, inevitably Colin is, on the outside, EFB Type A ~ blond hair, dazzlingly beautiful, wonderfully charming, etc.  Unfortunately, on the inside he's a psychopath¹.
Now it has ere been a Stanier family failing ~ amongst others (psychopathy, alcoholism, misogyny ...) ~ that they're all plain addicted to their family seat, built by the first Colin.  [My apologies, folks ~ I'm going to have to cut this one short, I'm afraid: I'm suffering from acute writer's block over it.]  The remainder of the book deals with Colin's attempts to secure the house for himself, despite his not being entitled to it ~ he has an older twin.

In some respects Colin is actually quite good; in others it suffers from all the customary Bensonian defects.  Among the latter are: the absurdity of the plot; too much repetition and recapping; and the absurdity of the plot.  [Joke.]  Its strengths ~ and these are very rare strengths for EFB books ~ are that the author has wholeheartedly let
rip with Colin Stanier, thrown himself into the character², with the result that, preposterous though he is, he is at least consistent and believable; and, preposterous though the plot might be, it's strangely compelling: I actually put it down eager to read the sequel, for which see Colin II.

¹ Benson never actually uses the term, despite its having been around for nearly 30 years at the time of his writing Colin.
² To the best of my recollection, Benson never actually condemns Colin: he merely tells us what he thinks and describes what he does.  His attitude toward the character is, at best, uncommitted. 

THE CRITICS

A reasonable explanation for many young men of the present day is here provided: Their ancestors sold their souls to the devil and the paper, discounted three centuries ago, has just come due.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 11/1923