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.