Final Edition by E.F. Benson – #1940Club

I have read E.F. Benson novels for previous club years, and they’re always a frothy and fun addition to any reading project. When I saw that 1940 also had a Benson book, and I had it on my shelves, it was a non-brainer. And it was a really interesting and valuable reading experience – but quite different from anything else I’ve read by him.

The subtitle is ‘An informal autobiography’, and the first words we see are a publisher’s note which opens thus:

Ten days after the manuscript of Final Edition was delivered to the publisher, its author died in University College Hospital on the 29th of February, 1940.

There is no indication of this ill health through the book and, since he sadly died of throat cancer, presumably it was something he knew was quite possible would come soon. Well, I say there is no indication of it – but perhaps it explains the contemplative, slightly subdued tone that is there throughout. Certainly he does not write about his own life and circle with the same flippant wit that he shows in Mapp and Lucia and all the books like it.

And having said that, I did find he started out the book in his most sparkling mode…

I read not long ago in some essay full of witty fireworks that by the time that most autobiographical writers address themselves to their task they seem to have forgotten, through the lapse of memory, everything in their lives which was worth recording. That discouraging verdict haunted me: I turned it over and over in my mind while I was meditating on the pages that follow, but came to the conclusion that, however just it might prove to be in the case that now concerned me, a court of appeal would not, in nine cases out of ten, uphold it. Indeed, as I thought over various very entertaining volumes of the sort which I had recently read, it appeared to me that not only had their writers retained their recollective powers in the most amazing manner, but that some of them had brought up, as an unnecessary reinforcement to memory, imaginations of the most magical kind.

He then goes on to give a few examples of memoirists who wrote in detail about events that couldn’t actually have happened. Is it a warning of what we are expect, or is he setting himself from the sort of autobiographer who gets carried away into greater detail than memory can guarantee?

Certainly, in the pages that follow, Benson keeps himself to stories that couldn’t easily be checked by an external verifier. Final Edition is his chance to reminisce about the places he has lived and the people he knew, and there is surprisingly little about his writing. Only a handful of books are mentioned, and the longest period he lingers on his work is during an extended lament that he spent too much time on frothy books that don’t matter and not enough on well-written books with a point. (I should mention that he doesn’t dismiss the craft of light-hearted, funny novels – but believes he published too many sub-par titles. He doesn’t give any examples of the ones he regrets, so I can’t say if I agree with his assessment or not.)

Thankfully, he does write a bit about Mapp and Lucia. I remember the delight I felt when I first heard that this was a brilliant crossover – Lucia had already appeared in two novels, and Miss Mapp in one, before he decided to bring them together. Can you imagine how fun that would have been as a contemporary fan? Here’s what he says about the genesis of the idea:

I outlined an elderly atrocious spinster and established her in Lamb House. She should be the centre of social life, abhorred and dominant, and she should sit like a great spider behind the curtains in the garden-room, spying on her friends, and I knew that her name must be Elizabeth Mapp. Rye should furnish the topography, so that no one who knew Rye could possibly be in doubt where the scene was laid, and I would call it Tilling because Rye has its river the Tillingham… Perhaps another preposterous woman, Lucia of Riseholme, who already had a decent and devout following, and who was as dominant as Mapp, might come into contact with her some day, when I had got to know Mapp better. 

These reflections come from another vein that flows through Final Edition – Benson’s experiences with Rye. He started as a visitor, to Henry James, and ended up living in the same house that had previously been home to James. Two more different novels it would be difficult to imagine, so it’s fun that they both knew each other and called the same place home. I always love people writing about their homes, and Benson is engaging and touching when writing about Lamb House, about local Rye lore, and about his tenure as mayor.

Otherwise, the main focus of Final Edition is the people that Benson has known – particularly his brothers, A.C. Benson and Robert Benson. While there is clearly some deep-seated love between the three, there were minimal affinities between them. E.F. Benson lived rather longer than either of his brothers, so he has the last word on their reputations – and certainly doesn’t appreciate the modes in which they chose to specialise. A.C. Benson wrote essays and academia, and EFB believes that he quashed his natural spiky wit to turn his hand to something toothlessly comforting. Robert Benson, meanwhile, became a Catholic – later a Catholic priest – with a fervour that EFB obviously can’t appreciate. He also wrote a good deal of fiction, which EFB doesn’t think highly of – perhaps an unfortunate choice as literary executor. He tells a story of a time when they all impersonated one another’s writings, at their mother’s suggestion – and everybody enjoyed the satires that were not of their own work. A fascinating demonstration of how brothers can be so different, and the slanted ways they view one another.

Other people that E.F. Benson concentrates on are largely people I haven’t heard of. It is perhaps self-indulgent of a memoirist to write at length about his friends, but somehow Benson does it in a way that is fascinating even to the stranger. I think, perhaps, because he builds them like literary characters – albeit with more realism than his most witty creations. He does not spare them by being dishonest. Here, for instance, is his take on a friend called Brooks whose dream was literature and whose output was poor:

Browning tells us of the scholar who aimed at a million and missed it by a unit. Brooks aimed at a million and missed it by a million. But I respect that aim; it was sincere, and, though utterly barren in result, there was no sort of pose or sham about it. I daresay that if instead of aiming at a million, he had aimed at a unit, he would have missed that too, and in that case I should have found nothing to say about him that could warrant pen on paper, for a man who aims low and is eternally incompetent of hitting his mark, does not arouse either pity or interest. But to aim high, though with whatever futility and indolence, is a different matter.

Benson obviously takes writing intensely seriously, and I’ll end with a couple of passages I enjoyed on that topic – chiefly the ‘modern’ mode of writing in 1940 (which goes to show that every generation ends by thinking the next generation is choosing shock over beauty, even within the relatively unshocking world of 1940s fiction). I could have read Benson’s thoughts on writing for many more pages:

My other business, that of getting some sort of status again as a writer, was proving very difficult. The back-water into which my industrious laziness had drifted me, had carried me a long way, and by diligently reading some of the admired authors of the day I perceived how completely, as regards fiction, I had dropped out. Some I found hard to follow, and others, as regards style, had acquired lucidity by a blank disregard of euphony: they were full of jerks. To make your meaning clear, as everybody knows, though your meaning may be difficult to grasp, is an essential of decent prose, but I did not care so much about this jerkiness. I had always found an aesthetic pleasure in appreciating with the ear the sentences which the eye followed, and my ear was offended by the abrupt noises which it sensed below the print. I demand — for myself — that prose should have a certain intrinsic beauty of its own quite apart from the meaning it conveys. This beauty is quite consistent with the utmost lucidity and does not depend at all on decoration. The best example I know of it is the Gospels in the Authorised Version of the New Testament: their style reminds one of Holbein’s portrait of the Duchess of Milan.

[…]

I should have liked some of these authors, just for a change, to expose (even with a furtive air of betraying guilty secrets) fine impulses and high endeavour. The mirror which it is the function of Art to hold up to Nature, seemed to be always adjusted to reflect what lies below the belt: the heart and the brain (with the exception of the department of sexual urge) were outside the field of vision. I did not miss the message that this literature conveyed: it said, plainly enough, that sexual desire is as natural a craving as hunger or thirst, which everybody knew before.

So Final Edition wasn’t at all the sort of autobiography I was expecting from E.F. Benson, but I wholeheartedly enjoyed it. More sombre and steely-eyed than I was expecting, and a bit of a revelation into the nature and perspective of a witty novelist whose creations I have so enjoyed.

Paying Guests by E.F. Benson – #1929Club

I suspect E.F. Benson is like toffee – a little is a total delight, but you wouldn’t want to have too many in a row. It’s been a few years since I last picked up an EFB, and so I absolutely loved heading to Paying Guests for the 1929 Club.

Though the novel is called Paying Guests, the people in this book are very much living in a boarding house. ‘Paying guests’ or ‘PGs’ was a polite fiction that people used in the period to make the arrangement seem more genteel – often it would be just one or two people staying as paying guests in the home of people they knew, at least tangentially. Here, the residents are a mix of long- and short-term, mostly longer, and they aren’t likely to go anywhere any time soon.

The boarding house is run by two widowed sisters, one quite fluttery and inclined to panic, the other less invested and more inclined to enjoy seeing the worst in people. Their residents include retired Colonel Chase who nightly shares his triumphs in walking or cycling; Mr Kemp the hypochondriac and his daughter Florence who is permitted no will of her own; Miss Howard the amateur artist and musician who performs ‘improvisations’ that she has practised for many hours beforehand; Miss Bliss who is at Dolton Spa to take the waters but insists that Mind will heal her – and a handful of others, less prominent.

Like a lot of Benson novels, the joy mostly comes from the combination of people who have nothing to do but gossip about each other and try to come out top in a relatively amiable, never-ending tussle for dignity. Some have their eyes on something outside of this community – marriage, perhaps – but most have resigned themselves to staying exactly where they are. Or perhaps ‘resigned’ is not the right word – they are perfectly content with their minor gripes, antipathies, observations. It could be a much sadder novel if you didn’t suspect that most of the characters wouldn’t change a thing.

The biggest plot point in Paying Guests is probably Miss Howard’s exhibition of her paintings. Which is described with Benson’s typically merciless observation of the way a certain sort of person speaks:

“Are you going into town?”

“Yes. I’ve got to see about my little pickies being framed. Just fancy! I’m going to hold a little teeny picture-exhibition of some of my rubbishy sketches. So rash! But nobody would give me peace until I promised to.

This was approximately though not precisely true: Miss Howard had told the group in the lounge that Mrs Bowen had said that everyone was longing for her to do so, and the group in the lounge had all said “Oh, you must!” again and again and again. She had to yield.

“So frightened about it,” said Miss Howard, “I shall certainly leave Bolton the day before it opens, so as not to hear all the unkind things you say about it.”

The fate of this exhibition is probably the highest stakes in Paying Guests, and I did find it as compelling as much more dramatic plots in other novels.

The other element of the book I really loved was Miss Bliss and her Mind. Benson doesn’t use the term Christian Scientist, but she is certainly something of that ilk – trying to persuade everybody that their illnesses are illusory, and that even lost objects can be found with sufficient application to Mind. She herself is clearly severely unwell, but finds plenty of excuses to explain this away. Again, in another novelist’s hands this could have been desperately sad – but, in Benson’s, it is deeply funny.

I still have a few other 1929 titles on the go, but I think this is going to be my favourite 1929 Club read. Sheer fun.

 

British Library Women Writers 12: Which Way? by Theodora Benson

Two new British Library Women Writers titles have just been published, and I’m quite behind with keeping up to date with my posts about the previous ones. The new ones will turn up here before too long but, before that, let’s talk about the others!

Which Way? by Theodora Benson is the first book in the series where I didn’t have a copy previously. I read it many years ago in the Bodleian, and re-read it as a photocopy that the kind people at the British Library arranged, but it was impossible to get hold of otherwise. Which makes it feel all the more exciting to have rescued it.

I think I first read it after seeing a publisher’s advert – the premise intrigued me. I still think it’s a brilliant idea. Fans of the film Sliding Doors will recognise the idea – what if a small moment had been different? Something seemingly inconsequential could make a huge change in the way a life pans out.

For Claudia Heseltine in Which Way?, it’s choosing which invitation to accept. We get to know Claudia in the opening section of the novel, and it ends with her walking into a room with two letters and a phone call about to be answered. It’s a scene that is repeated a few times in the book – and each time she accepts a different invitation for the weekend.

There was a fire in the room, very comforting and gay. It threw a lovely sheet of orange on the big armchairs on each side of it….An antique clock marked time in a hushed monotone. Only the fire was alive, consuming its life – for what? Then the door opened and as Claudia came with hurried steps into the fire’s glow, two open letters in her hand, the telephone began ringing. She shut the door and turned up the lights.

What I particularly liked about Which Way? is that, though initially set up as a choice between three men, the different outcomes aren’t really about them. Yes, different paths lead Claudia to marriage or relationships or singleness, but what they really draw out of her are different ways to be a woman in the 1930s. Facets of her personality, occupations (domestic or otherwise), friendship groups, even taste in popular culture – all of these are influenced by the metaphorical door she chooses.

The main reason I wanted Which Way? to be part of the series is the innovation. There is nothing strictly fantastic here – Claudia doesn’t jump between timelines; she isn’t aware of the multiverse she inhabits – but it’s such a clever way to look at how circumstances can bring out latent aspects of a person.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“I read this book around two weeks ago, and it’s still hovering heavily in my thoughts. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone interested in women’s fiction or social history.” – Asha, A Cat, A Book, A Cup of Tea

“An excellent plot idea, then, and carried out impressively. But there’s more to enjoy here. It’s hard not to feel a sort of fascinated horror at the complete emptiness of Claudia’s life, or lives.” – Harriet, Shiny New Books

The Poor Man by Stella Benson – #NovNov Day 9

I first read Stella Benson when I was writing about witches for my DPhil – Living Alone is perhaps her best known novel, and is certainly well known in particular academic circles. I was so beguiled by her quirky worldview and witty writing style – and so I was delighted when Michael Walmer started reprinting her novels. He has done The Poor Man, I only just realise, though my copy is a paperback from the 1940s. The novel was originally published in 1922.

The poor man of the title is Edward Williams – a Briton in California, overlooked and ignored by all. He is self-pitying and feeble, and on the outskirts of a society made up of fashionable bohemian types who speak authoritatively and often stupidly about any manner of art. There is a glorious scene where he hosts a party at which each guest submits a poem anonymously – they are read in turn, mocked and disparaged by everyone except the poet in each case. The only one which meets with wide approval turns out to be a letter that had been submitted by mistake. And how could anyone resist this portrait of Rhoda:

Rhoda Romero never asked people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.

You either love this sort of thing or you do not – and I emphatically do. In all the novels I’ve read by Benson, she has that cutting authorial voice undermining all her characters – including her ‘hero’. Edward falls for a woman called Emily – self-assured and impressive, though not obviously besotted with Edward.

She doesn’t hang around when he has a sudden illness – unclear exactly what – which requires immediate operation on his brain and some time of recovery. Indeed, she heads off to China to be the assistant of a noted journalist. And, when recovered, Edward decides he must follow her there.

He doesn’t have any money (the ‘poor’ of the title has multiple applications), and so we enter perhaps my favourite section of The Poor Man: where Edward tries to raise money to travel to China. And the most glorious way in which he tries to do this is with ‘a company that seemed inexplicably anxious that young America should become acquainted with the works of Milton’ – albeit in prose because poetry is ‘unhealthy for children, unmanly for Our Boys’. I have been giggling about the ‘inexplicably anxious’ line most of the day. Just perfect.

Edward does eventually get to China, and so the adventure continues, but that’s probably enough of the plot for now. The main thing with Benson’s writing in the exuberant ridiculousness of the prose, particularly the way that everyone’s intentions and impressions of themselves are consistently proved to be absurd and false. I loved The Poor Man, and I think it’s a shame that such an astonishing tour de force ever fell out of print. Thank goodness Michael Walmer is restoring her works steadily, and fingers crossed he is going to bring us the next of her books soon…

Mrs Ames by E.F. Benson

Mrs Ames (1912) by E.F. Benson has been on my shelves since 2010 – indeed, it is the final book from the two batches of Bloomsbury Group reprints that I had to read. These reprints are renowned round these parts for including Miss Hargreaves (and me quoted on the back!) and they were the best thing to happen in publishing for ages. But I guess they didn’t sell as well as had been hoped, so we only got two batches and ten books in total. All of ’em wonderful!

And I’m happy to add Mrs Ames to that number now. I’ve read quite a few Benson novels including, of course, the Mapp and Lucia series, and the setting will come as no surprise to those who like him. Yep, it’s upper-middle-class people squabbling in a small community. Doubtless said community (Riseborough) has various people who aren’t upper crust, but we don’t care about them. We care about Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans, and (to a lesser extent) their male relatives. And we are introduced to the community through Mr and Mrs Altham, who are keen gossips, though they wouldn’t use the word. I did enjoy that this married couple seem to delight equally in observing and talking about their neighbours – even if they have to cover it with a veneer of pretending they discover things by accident.

Mrs Ames is the accepted leader of the village. She sets the trends for the community, whether that be her outfits, her dinner parties, or her printed menu cards (little do the others know that she found them ready printed, and has been ordering food to match). She has an earnest son at Oxford who is keen to tell everyone that he’s an atheist, and a husband who is ten years her junior. The husband and the son have something in common – they’re both attracted to Mrs Evans. She is a recent addition to the village, with a charming husband and a willingness to accept the flirtations of others. She is also casually angling to be top dog of Riseborough… can Mrs Ames defend her position and her marriage?

Benson is in usual witty form as he documents the rivalries in the village, and we spend much of the novel not taking these would-be adulterers particularly seriously. Or, rather, there are other things that are more important – like new age treatments, how to one-up each other at dinner, and which Shakespearean character they can appropriately dress as for a costume ball. Here’s a fun bit on Mrs Ames addressing her advancing years:

Mrs Ames might or might not have been run down when she left Riseborough the following week, but nothing can be more certain than that she was considerably braced up seven days. The delicious freshness of winds off the North Sea, tempering the heat of brilliant summer suns, may have had something to do with it, and she certainly had more colour in her face than was usual with her, which was the legitimate effect of the felicitous weather. There was more colour in her hair also, and though that, no doubt, was a perfectly legitimate effect too, being produced by purely natural means, as the label on the bottle stated, the sun and wind were not accountable for this embellishment.

In early-to-mid Benson, he often throws in the serious among the trivial. Rather late in the day, the novel becomes (albeit briefly) about women’s suffrage, and there are sections of impassioned writing about women’s rights that are entirely straight-faced. (And, of course, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be – but it’s tonally a bit jarring.) He also aims for some emotional heights that he hasn’t quite earned, given the enjoyable triviality of the rest of the novel. I always think Benson found his firmest ground when he stopped trying to have emotionally climactic moments. Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans are good rivals, but they are only a foretaste of what he would achieve with Mapp and Lucia.

I have yet to read a Benson that was a dud, nor one that was a particular outlier in terms of the society, style, and content. Mrs Ames is every bit as enjoyable as the bulk of the others and, if it isn’t quite Benson at his absolute peak, it’s very good. Vale, Bloomsbury Group reprints!

 

The Oakleyites by E.F. Benson

I’m not doing well for A Century of Books choices at the moment, because I keep deciding that I ABSOLUTELY MUST read something written at the wrong time. Recently I was convinced that nothing would suit except for an E.F. Benson, and all the remaining slots of my ACOB list come after he died – so, sorry ACOB, but I turned to 1915’s The Oakleyites. For context, this falls roughly in the middle of Benson’s extraordinarily prolific output, and a few years before he started what would become the Mapp and Lucia series.

There are definitely marks of Lucia et al all over this, particularly in the first half of the novel. Oakley-on-Sea has the same sort of community – dimly aware that the rest of the world exists, but also certain that the only part of the world worth considering is Oakley. People vie for dominant position in society, and a newcomer is treated like the epoch-altering event that it is – especially when the newcomer is a noted (albeit not necessarily respected) novelist, Wilfred Easton.

There are even events in The Oakleyites that are directly repeated in the Mapp and Lucia series – such as an exhibition of paintings in the village hall that are judged by the community. A brief mention of a guru shows that Benson had such things on his mind. I don’t recall a replica of the three daughters squabbling over what they’ll receive as inheritance when their father dies (even while one of them, a Christian Scientist, maintains that he is not ill and could not be) – but it’s all of a piece. And it’s all great. Benson has such an eye for politely feuding communities. And that seeps in the narrative, as well as the dialogue – as a vegetarian, I self-deprecatingly laughed at the following:

Mrs Andrews had a sharp nippy way of movement and speech, and the brightness of eye which is noticeable in vegetarians and is attributed by them to their perfect health and entire absence of toxic ferments in the blood, might apart from that be supposed to have a sort of hungry look about it, which no amount of cauliflowers wholly dimmed.

Our focal point is Dorothy, who is nobler and less ambitious than other Oakleyites. No Lucia she. She is a bit subtle in her interest at Easton’s arrival, but not deceptive – and furiously embarrassed that she once read a paper about how unworthy his novels were to be feted. If Oakley has a moral compass, it is Dorothy.

It is also Dorothy who takes us into a different world within Benson’s oeuvre. For she is a spinster (of all of 35) and wishes that her life had not turned out quite as it has – and starts to wonder if Easton might make her a suitable husband. In Dorothy’s storyline, Benson gets rather more serious and earnest than one might expect. Increasingly so, as Dorothy’s sister Daisy arrives – selfish and dramatic, and not necessarily in an amusing way.

Benson was not a novice novelist at this point, but I did find that The Oakleyites wasn’t a universal success. It’s a curate’s egg. But too many scenes – whether comic or not – lingered too long, so it felt a bit odd to move between them. And the mix of sombre and comic tones didn’t quite work, for me. They remained too separate, as though they belonged in different novels.

I still enjoyed reading it, and it’s always interesting to see a novelist do something a bit different – but I wouldn’t recommend you seek it out over Benson’s zillions of other novels, and I doubt I’ll re-read. But, still – a mediocre Benson is better than no Benson at all.

The Osbornes by E.F. Benson

I’ve been off for a week in a beautiful chateau in the Loire Valley – this one, to be precise, in case you want to follow suit – though I left a couple of scheduled posts to tide me over. There were 17 of us, most of whom I’d only met a few times or not at all – but it was such a wonderful week. Beautiful surroundings, wonderful people, lots of fun, and lots of reading. I read four books in the five days we were there (because the first and last days were basically all driving) and one of those was The Osbornes (1910) by E.F. Benson.

The Osbournes

This is only the third book I’ve read by E.F. Benson that falls outside the excellent Mapp and Lucia series (which I’ve read twice). My shelves have plenty of his books on them, though, and I’d decided to stop buying them until I’d sampled some more – and loved Daisy’s Aunt around this time last year. Unintentionally, I picked a novel from the same year – yes, he had three novels published in 1910; check out his Wikipedia page to see how astonishingly prolific he was. Even more astonishing, both novels are really rather good.

The Osbornes considers a question that has echoed throughout English literary history almost from when it began: what happens when you love outside your own class? From Pamela to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and onwards, this topic has (in its different forms) been a peculiarly English preoccupation. And it is at the forefront of The Osbornes, where Dora falls in love with the Adonis-like Claude. Claude’s family is the Osbornes of the title – nouveau riche, and not ‘quite quite’.

Nobody disputes that he and his family are kind and good, but their money has not brought them a sense of what is right to say and what is not. Not that they have come from the gutter; Claude went to Eton and Cambridge, and the list of things that Dora’s family object to make for rather mysterious reading, over a century since the novel was written. Here is Dora’s (selfish, grabbing) brother on the topic of Claude:

“I think Claude has masses of good points: he simply bristles with them, but he gives one such shocks. He goes on swimmingly for a time, and then suddenly says that somebody is ‘noble-looking’, or that the carpet is ‘tasteful’ or ‘superior’.”

It’s not exactly spitting on the floor, is it? But it is enough to irritate Dora once they are married, and once the gleam of lust has worn off. She is very fond of his parents, but cannot help seeing the same things in them – Mr and Mrs Osborne (senior) come with them on a trip to Venice, but are more impressed by the metalwork they see than by the architecture. The size of the paintings in a gallery astonishes them, rather than the artists’ genius. It prickles Dora over and over.

You could draw a gallon of pure fresh kindness from that well-spring which also was inexhaustible, but even before you had time to put your lips to it, and drink of it, some drop – quite a little drop – would trickle in from the source of his vulgarity and taint it all. It was even worse than that; there was a permanent leak from the one into the other; the kindness was tainted at the source.

More on the kindness in a minute. But this did make me think – obviously we laugh at this sort of snobbery now, particularly when it’s so hard to see the nuances that bothered them so much. But I wonder if it has been replaced with other sorts of things – codes that we are used to in our families, and can’t imagine making new relations outside of that perimeter. This struck me when the topic of humour came up – I certainly wouldn’t say I looked down on people who had a completely different sense of humour from me, but it would make forming close bonds very difficult. We may feel angry with Dora and Jim from our 21st-century vantage (agreeing with the character who says “how God must laugh at our divisions of classes. We must look like children arranging books by the colour of their covers instead of their contents”) but that is to miss the point of the contemporary setting, perhaps? Any seismic class shift in England was still around forty years away.

The strength of this novel doesn’t lie, though, in this moral maze. It’s in the Osbornes – not Dora and Claude by Claude’s parents. I loved hearing all your suggestions for happy marriages the other day (and keep meaning to reply, not least because some of them certainly don’t meet my mental criteria!) and here is certainly one. Eddie and Mrs O (as they call each other) have one of the most beautiful marriages I’ve ever read about – and Benson treads just on the right side of saccharine for the reader to swallow it. They have been together since they had little, but in their riches want no more than each other’s company, laughing at the same weak family jokes that have occupied them for decades. There is a little wisdom in them, but only really a little – mostly, Benson paints strengths of character and, yes, kindness.

His wickedly funny cynical side doesn’t emerge in this novel, and an unkind reader might think there are moments in here that are too sentimental – but either I was beguiled by the beautiful French countryside, or Benson manages to get away with it. He remains funny throughout, and dodges a tricky societal quandary by having a bit of an easy out in the end, but somehow the ingredients all add up to another delightful offering from a pen that doesn’t seem able to do anything but delight.

Note: I accidentally wrote ‘Osbournes’ every time in my initial version of this post – thanks for noticing, Tony!

Daisy’s Aunt by E.F. Benson

I have so many E.F. Benson books on my shelves – they’re not tricky to pick up in secondhand bookshops, if you’re patient – but almost all of them are unread. Besides the excellent Mapp and Lucia series, which I’ve read twice (though not for years), I’ve only read Secret Lives. And I thought it was about time that I remedied that. I’m so glad I did – Daisy’s Aunt (1910) is faintly ridiculous, but entirely enjoyable.

Daisy's Aunt

The opening scene, and opening paragraph, is classic Edwardian insouciance of the variety that Benson does charmingly:

Daisy Hanbury poked here parasol between the bars of the cage, with the amiable intention of scratching the tiger’s back. The tiger could not be expected to know this all by himself, and so he savagely bit the end of it off, with diabolical snarlings. Daisy turned to her cousin with a glow of sympathetic pleasure.

If you are not instantly charmed by both author and character, then I don’t know if I can help you. The scene has no other purpose – she almost instantly leaves the zoo, with her subservient friend Gladys in tow, and the incident is scarcely mentioned again. But it has set Daisy up as reckless, amusing, and rather lovable – which is just as well, as we have to take it as read that she is charming for much of the subsequent novel.

The novel, indeed, has all the benefits of the typical Edwardian novel, as well as its drawbacks (if such they be). It is frothy and indulgently charming (that word again) – and the plot makes almost no sense. But I’ll do my best. Look away if you want no spoilers at all, but these are the main facts which lead to the bulk of the plot:

  • Daisy’s young aunt Jeannie (after whom the US title for this novel, The Fascinating Mrs Halton, is named) is returning from a year abroad, and finds that Daisy is hoping a Lord Lindfield will propose.
  • Jeannie knows that Lord L was (ahem) a cad with Daisy’s sister in Paris – but had made a deathbed promise to the sister never to disclose this.
  • Oh yes, the sister (Diana) is dead, but most people thought she’d died five years before this.
  • The only solution Jeannie can see is to flirt with Lord Lindfield until Daisy sees that he is no better than he ought to be, and foreswears him.
  • There’s another gent who loves Daisy, and one who’s secretly engaged to Jeannie.

Phew! There we have it. Obviously Jeannie’s plan is ridiculous, even given the mores of the day, and there is any number of better plans, but she apparently can think of none of them – and does all this from love of Daisy. Jeannie Halton is, indeed, a kind and lovable woman, otherwise sensible and (yes) charming. Little does she know that Daisy has gone from thinking she might as well marry Lord L as anyone, to actually loving him…

Tangled webs, and all that. We see most things from the perspective of either Jeannie or Daisy, and the events of the novel chiefly take place during a house party in a beautiful riverside cottage – lots of the idle rich staying for a few days together, and gossiping about each other. One of my favourite sections of the novel, actually, was the indulgently long time Benson spends describing this idyllic house – from informal, winding garden to the welcoming rooms. And particularly this bit:

At the other end, and facing it, the corresponding kitchen range of the second range had also been cleared out, but the chimney above it had been boarded in, and a broad, low settee ran around the three sides of it. Above this settee, and planted into the wall, so that the head of those uprising should not come in contact with the shelves, was a bookcase full of delectable volumes, all fit to be taken down at random, and opened at random, all books that were familiar friends to any who had friends among that entrancing family. Tennyson was there, and all Thackeray; Omar Khayyam was there, and Alice in Wonderland; Don Quixote rubbed covers with John Inglesant, and Dickens found a neighbour in Stevenson.

My version of this library would be updated by a couple of decades (I have to confess to never having heard of John Inglesant), but doesn’t it sound wonderful?

And so the novel goes – never sensational, and always at least a little witty, but with genuine stakes for those involved. But the reader has no real anxiety. We know that such a novel, from such an author, can’t end but happily. It reminded me rather of Herbert Jenkins’ delightful Patricia Brent, Spinster; it is the same sort of delicious silliness that passes a sunny day beautifully. I’m glad that I’ve finally looked in more depth at my Benson shelf – and must make sure to return to it before too long.

 

This Is The End by Stella Benson

A Shiny New Review from Shiny New Books – of an old book, now reprinted by Mike Walmer. I loved I Pose by Stella Benson (review here) and leapt at the chance of reading her next book, This Is The End. Even though I kept singing ‘Skyfall’ every time I picked it up…

Here’s the beginning of my review:

One of the more unusual novelists being reprinted at the moment is Stella Benson. Her work is issued by Michael Walmer, a one-man publishing house that is reprinting various neglected novelists in the order their novels were originally published. This Is The End is Benson’s second (from 1917), and comes immediately before the one that is probably most remembered now,Living Alone, about very curious witches.
I want to say that This Is The End is not supernatural, but any definite statement about a Benson novel feels like a trap waiting to happen; the reader never quite knows which genre they’re reading, or what sort of response is required. Except that laughter will always be involved somewhere.

I Pose – Stella Benson

I know some people are very keen to end a reading year on a high, but for me it is more important that the first book of a new year is good.  Of course, I would love every book I read to be good, but somehow it feels as though a bad first book sets off a bad tone for the whole year.  So I deliberately finished off a book which I was already halfway through, and knew was brilliant… I Pose (1915) by Stella Benson, reprinted by Michael Walmer and sent to me as a review copy (more on this exciting new reprint publisher here).

I had read one book by Stella Benson before – Living Alone, about witches living in a boarding house – and I liked it, but would have preferred Benson to keep her feet more firmly on the ground.  The opening pages, satirising a council meeting, were entirely delicious.  Well – I Pose more than answered my request, and I found it very amusing.  The style is so fresh, lively, and not for a moment taking itself remotely seriously.

I Pose is set up as an allegory – the main characters are referred to solely as ‘the gardener’ and ‘the suffragette’.  The idea of an allegory rather terrifies me, as it does suggest earnestness (which I’m allergic to in fiction), but Benson has the same feelings as me.  She definitely has some important things to say – I’ll come on to those later – but she uses these characters chiefly to lampoon the notion of allegory.

Both gardener and suffragette – but particularly gardener – live life through epithets.  They are continually posing; the title refers to the mixture of sincerity and insincerity with which they adopt their stances.  For, yes, the suffragette cares deeply about suffrage – but when she claims not to care about life or limb, or to be unlovable and unloving, then it is decidedly a pose.  The gardener, too, is forever choosing poses which permit him to speak in riddles and epigrams.  Some might find it wearying, but I loved every moment.  When the gardener meets the suffragette, he instantly knows that she is one – she has, after all, the stereotypical appearance of the militant suffragette…

The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in the eyes of a self-respecting young man.  She had the sort of hair that plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it prettily.  Her complexion was not worthy of the name.  Her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction.  Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to dress as if she were pretty.  And even this is not a very attractive virtue.
He doesn’t agree with her methods (she intends to blow up a church) and Benson is at her satirical best on the topic:

The gardener, of course, shared the views of all decent men on this subject.  One may virtuously destroy life in a good cause, but to destroy property is a heinous crime, whatever its motive.(Yes, I know that made you tremble, but there are not many more paragraphs of it.)
There are plenty of moments where Benson addresses the reader, always tongue-in-cheek and often defending her choices as a novelist, against imagined criticisms.  She freely admits that the suffragette is not a typical heroine…

I quite admit that the suffragette was an infuriating person.  I yield to none in my admiration for any one who could manage to keep their temper with her.
The suffragette and gardener end up on a boat sailing abroad, posing as a married couple (albeit briefly), and they dash madly around various foreign climes, meeting some extraordinary people along the way.  My favourite was probably the always-antagonistic Mrs. Rust…

“I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mrs. Rust, who now made this remark mechanically in any pause in the conversation.
Earthquakes and suffrage clubs come and go, as do the adventures of an obnoxious young boy and an adorable Scottie dog, but the plot is certainly not the most important aspect of I Pose.  I loved it almost entirely for Benson’s style.  It reminded me a little of P.G. Wodehouse – certainly she has his affinity for the pleasures of understatement (‘She was not in the least miserly of a certain cheap smell of violets’) alongside just enough of Oscar Wilde to make the prose frothy and delightful, and not enough to make it tiring (to me).  Her way with words is astonishing, and shows a confidence which no début author deserves to possess – but it is a confidence which is, at the same time, entirely well-deserved.  This sort of novel is so difficult to do well – it could have very easily felt self-indulgent and overdone – but I think it is a wonder.

And, while I spent most of the novel thrilling to the writing and not caring too much about plot and character, I surprised myself by growing to care considerably about the possible romance between the gardener and the suffragette… now, making the reader care about characters with no names, when the narrator is openly and proudly dismissing their suitability to lead a novel, where nothing is said with a serious tone… well, Miss Benson, that is an achievement indeed.