Mr Teddy by E.F. Benson

I have a teetering pile of E.F. Benson novels I’ve not read – he was so prolific, and some of his books aren’t that easy to come across, so I always snap up any that I find in the wild. Most of the time, I love reading the results of this foraging – occasionally, some of his earlier novels haven’t worked as well for me. But mostly he has a witty view of small-town communities that revels in their competitiveness and bitchiness and interdependence, and I lap it all up.

Mr Teddy (1917)  – published in the US as The Tortoise – falls somewhere in the middle of his writing career. On the first page, ‘Mr Teddy’ – Edward Heaton – is shaving in the mirror and reflecting on the fact that he has just turned 40 years old. That felt apposite, as I am a few months away from the milestone myself. He is a decent, kind man who has enough wealth to make decency and kindness fairly easy on the whole, though he struggles to achieve his potential – his potential being artistic. He has made plenty of very good, half-finished portraits… and nothing more. The morning of his 40th birthday is a time for reflection on such incomplete achievements.

One area of his life where kindness is very much evident is in dealing with the true monster of the book – his mother, Mrs Heaton. I say ‘monster’. She is also the novel’s greatest delight, for me. In her, Benson has created an exceptional portrait of long-suffering, where the suffering is entirely confected and the complaints about it weary everyone around her. She is constantly saying that nobody must consider her feelings, that they clearly don’t care about her opinions or her anguish, all the while refusing to allow anybody to help her and deliberately misinterpreting anything as a personal barb.

“I know I have have no say in the matter,” said his mother, instantly proceeding to have a pretty good ‘say’,”because you are master of this house, and I am your pensioner. Whether that was or was not a kind and considerate way of your father to leave his money, so that I was necessarily dependent on you for the ordinary comforts of life, I hope I have too great a loyalty to his memory to say. Nothing shall induce me to open my lips on that subject. You will perhaps tell me when you have decided what room to give Robin; and if you settle to give him my bedroom, I’m sure I will sleep wherever you choose to put me without a murmur – not that I sleep much at the best of times.”

Benson is so adept at this sort of character, and Mrs Heaton is both consistent and infuriating. Edward puts up with her in a manner befitting a saint, only occasionally allowing impatience to creep into his voice (and being made to pay for it). Perhaps a little more impatience would have made him a little more realistic. Certainly, I found myself deeply frustrated by Mrs Heaton – in a way that I loved reading about.

Teddy’s dearest friend is a younger woman called Daisy, in and out of their house constantly in the manner of villagers who have known each other forever, and who belong to the very select upper class of the community. (The lower classes may as well not exist except as servants, in Mr Teddy, and there is no indictation of their experience of village life.) While notably younger than Teddy, she has reached an age where she considers herself on the shelf – somewhat south of 30. But if Teddy were to ask her…

A fun side plot is Daisy’s sister’s career as an author. Her novels appear in instalments in the parish magazine, and from thence are published under a pseudonym and pretty popular with the wider public. As publishing approaches go, I suspect that was always unusual. Marion takes her writing career extremely seriously, not least as the moral compass of her readers. She considers it both shocking and an enormous responsibility when one of her characters loses her Christian faith (though she will resume it after a decent interval). Benson – and Marion’s readers – take her career rather less seriously.

Now in late October the era of ‘winter dessert’ had begun, and while Daisy ate a small green apple, which quite resisted the cutting edge of a silver knife, Marion chose a hard ginger-nut which was nearly as intractable to the teeth. She announced about this period the news of the impending salvation of Mrs Anstruther.

“Well, that’s a great relief to me,” said Daisy. “I have often felt quite depressed in thinking of her. I wondered if you would find you could touch her heart.”

“Yes, but I think she must die,” said Marion.

Speaking of dying – a spoiler for about a third of the way through the novel – Mrs Heaton’s self-pity for once is justified, and she dies. Her behaviour is, indeed, rather more tolerable during this trying period. Like so many self-obsessed nuisances, she deals better with crises than with everyday inconveniences. Sadly for Mr Teddy, I think this is where the novel loses a lot of its momentum. In the remaining two-thirds of the novel, new neighbours arrive and Edward’s possible romantic life becomes more significant. I enjoyed Mr Teddy right through to the end – but it had lost its main spectacle.

We are often told that conflict is necessary for action in a novel, and I think that is only true if ‘conflict’ is considered in the loosest possible manner. It’s perfectly possible to write an excellent novel without anybody as dislikable as Mrs Heaton. But her selfishness is not only an exceptionally good, funny portrait – it also, somehow, gave the novel its momentum. If only to see which character might finally snap and murder her. With Mrs Heaton off the page, it became a pleasant, witty comedy of manners – but without any obvious driving force.

Such plot as there is seems to come in rather a rush at the end, and Benson does rather try to have his cake and eat it with some genuinely poignant moments – perhaps falling a little too near the writings by Marion that he is teasing about. I think Mr Teddy would have been more successful if he had kept his antagonist alive – and resisted a little self-indulgent bathos. But E.F. Benson is E.F. Benson, and I really enjoyed my time in this novel even with those quibbles. And there are plenty more on the Benson tower to enjoy next.