The Book of Months by EF Benson (1903)

 This one is well-known as a contributor to the story of Benson as a bad author. My interest lies in how accurate that story is. It's certainly a mixed affair. This purports to be a record of a recent year in Benson's life, presented in twelve essays, one for each month. These have a personal-philosophical musing quality, where the author recounts experiences which challenge him, or contrastingly confirm his beliefs. The early part of the year conforms to this prospectus; but when, during the summer months, he is taken up by recent memories of the love of a woman, her marriage to one of his closest friends, that friend's death in the Boer War, and her subsequent death in childbirth, the focus narrows greatly. And then as the year closes he meets a relative of hers who looks a lot like her, and love comes to him again, this time returned. December figures its bliss. By modern standards, this last piece is mawkish indeed, though that criticism is too easy to dash off. Of course, the elephant in the room is the now-current story of Benson's homosexuality. My exposure to this in any detail came from a reading, long ago, of Brian Masters' biography. I only remember it vaguely, but there was a suggestion of the fact that it was a tendency upon which Benson never acted, regarding the sexual act as "beastly". I wonder whether his sexual history was quite complicated, with internal conflict seething - he was still a young man when he wrote this. And all this fed through a classicist mindscape, whereby war raged in the image of the chaste love of beauty at odds with its potential physical results. And of course the times and Benson's upper middle class milieu of boarding schools and single-sex education, and what no doubt that will have exposed him to, even further snarling the picture. What the literary world needs, dare I say it (!), is a proper psychological study of Benson. The style and content here is the other issue, and I can see why first-past-the-post types have seen this very simply as a bad book, typifying the weaknesses inherent in the author. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. It does have a somewhat self-satisfied air, where he breezily dismisses subtle explanations, and opts for homespun moralities. At other times, though, he begins to push at the envelope a little, and sees himself as much less certain, and subject to bad impulses. It is carefully kept anodyne, in the spirit of his age, where decorousness is vital. What's interesting is examining the account-book of this piece in the light of its times and the personality of its author - given when it was written, and by whom, how much is that envelope pushed? How self-critical is it? And the conclusion one can come to is 'a little'. It's not the atrocious book some claim it to be, but neither is it markedly revealing. It's a cautious book, which, by its own faulty internal compass, claims much more challenging territory than it discovers. 

Commonplace Book

 "...The poor souls whom the Will of God caused to be made - have they not a right to resent their birth, if they are born to pain only and hopeless struggling? And if for a while they forget the evil plight into which they by no fault of theirs have been born, by tasting pleasures which a code - to them merely arbitrary - has labelled sinful, by what justice shall they be punished? Human justice at least would be less merciless. Is it just to make a frail thing like a man, place him in the midst of temptation, and then punish him because he falls? Supposing I buy a doll at a toy shop, and place it insecurely on the edge of a table and it falls off, is it just that I should then whip it?..."

from October, a piece in The Book of Months by EF Benson

Commonplace Book

 "...There is nothing in the world which, if I got, would make me happy. There are a million things in the world which the desire to get and the hope of getting make me happy. And it is this which a man sets out to seek when he falls in love, which is the best form of happiness devised in the world at large, and, thank God! the commonest. If man or woman knew all of the man or woman each sought, would either be content? On the contrary, the world would be full of spinsters and bachelors...."

from July, a piece in The Book of Months by EF Benson

Scarlet and Hyssop by EF Benson (1902)

This is Benson in mainly serious mode, and sultry with it. Set largely in London, it details a tearing confrontation between two society women, conducted in the most blithe tones. Married Mildred Brereton has been having an affair with Jack Alston, which everybody knows about and doesn't comment on. Jack's wife, Marie, is the other party. She is the only one who has no idea of the affair. She is known in some quarters as the snowflake, because she is seen as a little chilly and unmeltable. She has very little interest in Jack, having some time ago come to the conclusion that she ought to have married her early sweetheart Jim Spencer. When Jim comes back from his post-disappointment exploits in South Africa and other places, Marie realises ever more that he ought to have been hers. They see a lot of each other, and we as readers are let into the knowledge that Marie is anything but a chilly snowflake, admitting to herself her care for Jim, and having to control herself in relation to him so as not to let herself down and cause a scandal. Marie is also known as a cool head in terms of the giving of advice. Mildred's daughter Maud, who despairs of her mother's dilettante, loud and bitchy carry-on, but has no idea of the affair either, turns to Marie for advice about a wealthy young man her mother is throwing at her head as a potential husband. Once she hears Maud's feelings Marie advises her to refuse him, knowing the measure of wedded disappointment so well as she does. Mildred is furious at Marie's interference when Maud reveals it, and devises a scheme to set Marie up as an adulteress (the melting of the snowflake), using Jim as convenient but unaware accessory. She's always deemed Marie her friend but in reality has always suffered dreadfully in comparison to her and has resented her distanced coolness and seeming superiority. When the plan starts to work, and the rumours begin to spread, Mildred doesn't realise how obvious it is that she's the origin. A superbly bitchy associate, Lady Ardingly, takes her to task in a very careful way, making it clear that Mildred could in fact be putting Jack's career at risk with their own affair. With several very deft moves she outflanks Mildred and helps to save Marie from an unfair slur. Jack begins to see Mildred in a new light, and doesn't like the view. He begins to avoid her, and to attempt a reconciliation with Marie, which to her mind is too little too late. At a party in the country Maud and Marie are conferring about her young man, the nature of whose approaches has changed. Quietly occupying a lost corner of the garden, they hear footsteps approaching. It is Jack and Mildred. They overhear Jack attempting, in misery and lostness, to get back together with Mildred after Marie's rejection. Mildred is delighted, and smiles victoriously. It is the first either Marie or Maud know of the affair - the bombshell has dropped. Both are horrified - and the real measure of things becomes clear. Marie escapes unseen back to London. When Jack sees her there the next day, orchestrated by Lady Ardingly, who is his political sponsor in the upcoming election, she agrees to stay his wife as long as they have nothing further to do with each other. Jack, horrified at his own culpability and realising his admiration of her, has yet another meeting with Mildred, who assumes pleasurably that her victory is complete, only to find him deserting her once again. The last scene is of Mildred, as a damaged but fighting survivor of all this, driving in Hyde Park. Her two frisky cobs are getting dangerously flighty, and after a fright head off toward the main road. A series of passers by try to restrain the out of control phaeton which goes slamming into an omnibus. The last passing person who tries to help Mildred recognises at the final moment. It is Jack, who is run down and appallingly mutilated by both the phaeton and the omnibus - she has killed him. An epilogue contains a conversation between Marie and Lady Ardingly at a hotel in Cairo, which reveals that Mildred is becoming yet more loud and shrill in London society, and that Jim and Marie will at last marry. Benson seasons this with plenty of low-key wit in heavily biased exchanges. It is also firmly ensconced within a slightly cynical milieu. In this it reminded me a little of the more broad-based works of another writer, Lucas Malet, having the same sense of thoroughgoing worldliness and sultry bite. But of course where Malet had two main modes, Benson had many. And it has been some of his undoing in terms of reputation that he can't be pinned down; from bright comedy to ghost stories to historical saga to sultriness like this....and on through several other manifestations. His multiplicity was both mark of talent and great confuser for the public. Here's hoping that whatever he continued to attempt, his main attention was given to quality.

Commonplace Book

'She rose, feeling that the only hope of victory lay in turning away from thoughts like these, and not, under the specious pretext of consciously fighting them, in reality making them familiar to her mind; for familiarity in such things breeds, not contempt, but acquiescence, half contemptuous it may be, but half consenting, and she knew that in face of certain temptations it is cowardice not to run away...'

from Scarlet and Hyssop by EF Benson (Chapter XI)

Commonplace Book

'"...It is the most difficult thing in the world to say what one likes best until one is forty or thereabouts. All one's youth - which, I take it, extends to about forty - is passed experimentally in determining what one likes best, and one does not know till it is crystallized. By then also it is probably unattainable."'

from Scarlet and Hyssop by EF Benson (Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'...one of the biggest, and perhaps the best effects of age is to give one tolerance, to make one realize that it takes all sorts to make a world.'

from Scarlet and Hyssop by EF Benson (Chapter II)

The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (1901)

What a lovely thing. This book is your classic Christmas confection, or two-part BBC number on consecutive Sunday nights. I had it cast within the first few chapters and it played out brilliantly. Harry Vail starts out as a serious young man, in his early twenties, and newly master of Vail, his sizeable country house somewhere between Marlborough and Bath by the way Benson describes it. His only other near blood relative is his aged Uncle Francis, who is living there in some reclusion, as much earlier in the century he was involved in an accidental shooting, from any culpability in which he was absolved, but socially suspicion has lingered. Harry also has his very good friend Geoffrey, his own age and a schoolchum of long standing, who knocks around with him. As Harry is deciding what he'll do with Vail, he comes up to London on occasion and sees an old family friend, Lady Oxted. Soon from overseas she also welcomes Evie, the young and just out daughter of a good friend, to stay. The problem is that Evie's mother is the sister of the young man who was shot in Uncle Francis' accident all those years ago, and her mother is one of those who believes insistently in Uncle Francis' guilt. Needless to say, at Lady Oxted's Harry and Evie meet and fall in love. But the idea of anyone in Evie's family being even friendly to a Vail is horrifying. However, the worldly Lady Oxted manages very carefully and strategically to calm the waters, and, with reservations by Evie's mother, their marriage date is set. Meanwhile, in organising and tidying at Vail, Harry discovers, tucked away in an attic in a disused part of the house, an extraordinary kind of large jewelled cup. His Uncle Francis perks up enormously and takes him to a portrait of a forebear, explaining that he has found The Luck, as it has been known, which had been assumed lost. There is a legend that goes with it, which gives the warning that the owner shall go through three ordeals, by fire, rain and frost. They clean up the piece, and are amazed by its beauty - it is made of glowing gold, and elegantly encrusted with jewels of extraordinary value. Their attention is grasped by it and it begins to sit on the table every time they dine. To cut a long story short, Harry goes through three accidents at Vail very soon after, associated with those three same elements, but he and Geoffrey scoff at the idea of the legend and regard it firmly as a coincidence, or at least Geoffrey does. After this, Harry and Evie's marriage is announced, and she and Lady Oxted come down to Vail for a visit. While out on a walk with Uncle Francis, Evie thinks she sees Harry canoodling with a local lass, and Uncle Francis, instead of pooh-poohing the idea, asks her to be forgiving toward Harry. It turns out that it isn't Harry, but a groom who looks a lot like him, and it is our first proper uneasiness about Uncle Francis, who seems, despite all his wide-eyed bonhomie, to be angling for the marriage not to take place. Soon all are swept up into a melee of suspicion and disbelief, involving the visits of a suspicious doctor and the possible truth of the old accusations against Uncle Francis, who would inherit the estate and, very importantly, The Luck, if Harry were out of the way. Other 'accidents' take place, each more worrying than the last, in each of which Uncle Francis is obliquely involved, or, as Geoffrey soon believes, not so obliquely. Finally, after much manoeuvring, the scene is set with the sun setting and a heavy mist drifting over the estate all round the house; our fingers are crossed that the now co-opted and believed doctor is who he says he is, and will do what he says he'll do, to prevent Uncle Francis, whom he claims is mad and trying to kill Harry and secrete away The Luck. Will he be successful in his complicated plan, with the help of Geoffrey and the groom? Well, I can say the payoff is good. This is a classically managed tale of great entertainment value, and Benson, when he's on form, is the equal of many a writer with a better reputation.

Commonplace Book

'The threatening of a storm grew every moment more imminent, and the two young men, who had intended to ride over the downs, decided to postpone their expedition. They stood together at the window of the smoking-room watching the awful and mysterious mobilization of cloud, the hard, black edges of thunder, ragged, as if bitten off some immense pall, coming up against what wind there was, and rising higher every moment towards the zenith, ready to topple and break. Once a scribble of light, some illegible, gigantic autograph, was traced against the blackness, and the gongs of thunder, as yet remote, testified its authenticity. Before long a few large drops of rain jumped like frogs on the gravel path below the windows, and a hot local eddy of unaccountable wind, like a grappling-iron let down from the moving vapours above, scoured across the lawn, stirring and rattling the dry-leaved laurels in the shrubbery, and expunging, as it passed, the reflections on the lake. It died away; the little breeze there had been dropped like a broken wing; the willows by the water were motionless as in a picture; a candle on the lawn would have burned with as steady a flame as in a glass shade within a sealed room. The fast-fading light was coppery in colour, and the darkness came on apace as the great bank of congested cloud shouldered its way over the sky, but, despite the gloom, there was a great precision of outline in hill and tree.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part IV, Chapter XV)

Commonplace Book

'"Elephantine wit," sighed the lady. "When Harry is so kind as to make a joke, which is, unfortunately, not so rare as one might wish, I always feel as if heavy feet were tramping about directly overhead."

"And when Lady Oxted makes a joke," said the lad, "which is not so often as her enemies would wish, she always reminds me of a sucking spring directly underfoot. I give one waterlogged cry, and am swallowed up. Do pour out tea for us, Lady Oxted. You are such an excellent tea-maker."

"The score is fifteen all," remarked Evie.

"When did Harry score?" demanded Lady Oxted, seating herself at the urn.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part III, Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

'Evie laughed.

"Dear Aunt, have you been very honourable lately?" she asked, "or has Uncle Bob been doubting your first qualities?"

"Cynicism always ends in disappointment," remarked Lady Oxted, leaping a conversational chasm, "but since it is cynical, I suppose it expects it."
[...]
"I will never waste an ounce of resolution again in determining to abide by my word," she announced.

Evie laughed again, with a great ring of happiness in the note.

"Then you will confirm Uncle Bob in his cynicism," she replied, "and disappoint him of all his pleasant little disappointments."'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part III, Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'...a long box hedge, once cut into tall and fantastic shapes. But it seems long to have lacked the shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night-hag into things inhuman. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part I, Chapter I)

Six Common Things by EF Benson (1893)

Although this was published in Osgood McIlvaine's 'Short Stories by British Authors' series, most of it isn't really short stories at all. The majority of these are essays, philosophical musings, some of them with vaguely fictionalised backgrounds. There is a small group which are more directly fictional. The overwhelming theme is melancholy and loss. This second book must have been quite puzzling for readers of his first, which had been published earlier the same year, and was a tearingly successful society comedy - Dodo. The pieces range around between loss of a child, loss of a wife, the terribly pathetic conditions of the poor and personal losses seen at a greater distance, those of others in our lives. There are a few which also incorporate a little humour, mainly involving children and animals, which lighten the load considerably. The few true short stories included tend to character study: one of a nurse-governess missing the welcome of a former charge returning home from school, and two of another governess being squashed flat by society's prejudices in the dining room and then later gaining her revenge when she marries well. The big puzzle is the title. I can't find a good reason for it. The phrase is mentioned in the last story as covering the ground of the fifteen which have gone before, so it's obviously not a bibliographic numerical reference. If it's thematic, I'm darned if I can find a clear group of six anywhere. Is it a reference to the seven ages of man, with the last story representing Death, the final one? It's definitely about that, but it's difficult to assemble the others into even vaguely coherent summaries of other stages. The only other option is that the phrase was more commonplace in 1893 than it is now, and refers to - what? A line from a hymn? A song? A poem? A proverb? Anyway, the twenty-first century is unlikely to fall in love with this sad little deeply Victorian book, in fact is likely to dismiss it out of hand. It is minor, but not so dismissable.

The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (1900)

This novel is Benson's attempt at his own spin on Ruritania, which had been made popular, to put it mildly, by the phenomenal success of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda earlier this decade. It is Bensonian in that it is light in tone, lacking what I take to be (haven't read it yet) the serious historical element in Hope's work. Sophia is reigning in Rhodope, which roughly coincides with the bottom third of Albania, and is an inveterate gambler. After foiling a pretty unbelievable plot by her dashing but rather limited prince and her prime minister in a delightfully dramatic way, she realises that her son Leonard needs to be protected from the gambling instinct prevalent in him through simply being her child! He is sent off to Eton and then round the world on improving travels, she resumes her frequent trips to Monte Carlo on her royal yacht, and also gambles at the club she has established in the gardens of Rhodope's royal palace. One stormy night in Monte, an incognito Leonard proves himself a force at the tables, reveals himself, and manages to win the throne of their country from his mother as their highest stake! Fantastic madness, followed by an epilogue describing his benevolent reign which returns Rhodope to its former brilliance (by banning all gambling), which had been dulled by Sophia's introduction of the fascinating but morally enervating games of chance. Enormous fun, even though, in its confusion over the attractions and attenuations of gambling, it really doesn't know whether it's Arthur or Martha.

Commonplace Book

'"At last I feel irresponsible. Nobody can do anything which concerns me, except to leave the door open when I prefer it shut. Really, if one has to be somewhere, to be on a death-bed is one of the very best places. Nothing can touch one; it is like getting out of a tunnel full of jarring noises."'

from The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'"When a thing is done, it is done, and things for the most part do not produce any consequences at all, though people who have addled their brains with trivial thinking tell us that they do. Moralists and philosophers are the most shallow people in the world, for argument is ever less sound than conviction..."'

from The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (Chapter IV)