The Centenary of 'Colin II' by E.F. Benson: A Guest Post by John Howard

E.F. Benson (1867-1940) is probably best known today for his tales of supernatural horror and the six novels, dripping with campery and back-biting, portraying the rivalry between Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Lucas (‘Lucia’). Benson was a prolific and efficient writer, producing books of all kinds and qualities, including history, biography, memoir, and current affairs – as well as many other novels of social comedy and satire. A number of these blurred genre labels and could perhaps be described as explorations into dark psychology, terrible secrets, and obsession, with touches of the gothic and sensational, sometimes crossing further borders and venturing into the supernatural. Many also contained strong homosexual or homoerotic elements. Several of Benson’s novels in this vein were reprinted in paperback during the 1990s by publishers specialising in gay literature. Among them were The Inheritors (1930) and Raven’s Brood (1934); others were Colin (1923) and its continuation or sequel, Colin II – which was first published one hundred years ago in August 1925.

Although Colin II might seem a somewhat uninspired choice of title, it is certainly an accurate one. As Benson stated in his spoiler-friendly Preface to Colin: ‘“Colin” comprises the first part only of this romance: it will be completed in a second volume which will tell of the final fading of the Legend with which the story opens.’ Colin Stanier was not the first member of his family to bear the name; there was the ‘old Colin’ whose pact with Satan made in the late sixteenth century took him from life as a shepherd boy to becoming a close confidante of Queen Elizabeth, ennoblement as Lord Yardley, and given the riches and continuing prosperity for him and his descendants that flowed from the bargain.

This part of the story so far is summarised in the Introduction to Colin II, which makes clear that not only evil, but its redemption, will be the theme of the story. This provides an ongoing tension between good and evil, love and hate, obligation and liberty, that may only be resolved at the end: ‘Often Violet [Colin’s wife] wished he could have killed her love for him, for then would have died withal that eternal struggle within her between love and her horror of him, whose soul, whether in fulfilment of the legend, or from his inherent wickedness, was as surely Satan’s as if with his own blood he had signed the fabled bond. Yet as often as she wished that she cried out on herself at so blasphemous a desire, for she knew that by love alone, though in some manner inscrutable, could redemption come to him’ (11).

Colin divides his time between Stanier, the great house near Rye in Sussex built by his ancestor, and his villa in Capri. At Stanier he lives with his wife and young son Dennis, playing the role of an influential local grandee who is also a loving family man. His grandmother, aunt, and wife’s parents also live at Stanier, and within its walls provide opportunistic outlets – relief – for Colin’s endless store of barbed wit, sarcasm, and scarcely concealed mixture of contempt and hatred. Benson knew Capri well, sharing the lease on a villa for many years; the island was a haven for writers and artists whose lifestyles would be deprecated – if not illegal – in their own northern European countries. The ancient shadow of another regular visitor, the Emperor Tiberius, cast as a background contrast to the heat, glaring light and glowing colour of Capri, is inescapable – and necessary – as a symbol to depict Colin’s two aspects and double life. Colin is looked after by his valet Nino, who ‘had the morals of a sleek black panther’ (39). Nino is Colin’s willing accomplice – although always still a servant who can be put in his place when required.

Colin learns that Mr Cecil, the British Consul in Naples, possesses a missal of the Black Mass which once belonged to his ancestor. Now determined to build a chapel to Satan at Stanier, Colin quickly forces Cecil to give it him: ‘Never had he felt himself so truly in harmony with the spirit that inspired his life. Here, under the symbolism of the rite, was his own spirit revealed to him, his hatred of love, his love of hate. Here was the strengthening and refreshing of his soul; the renewal, mystically, of the bargain made in Elizabethan days…’ (91f).

Traditionally fathers told their sons the truth when they came of age: ‘They had, so he pointed out to them, the free choice of disassociating themselves from that bargain, and of taking the chance of material prosperity here and of salvation hereafter…’ (Colin 20). Colin begins to consider how he can influence Dennis, now in his teens, towards choosing the same allegiance that all previous generations of Staniers had, so he could initiate his heir into the ‘evil sacrament’. Disregarding all opposition from Violet, Colin decides to do so through hate and cruelty; however, no matter how hard he tries he cannot get Dennis to hate him. The novel ends dramatically with Colin, apparently a victim at last, confronted and in mental agony, asking his tormentor whether he is ‘the Lord whom I have served so well’ (254).

Benson’s novels from the years of Colin and Colin II seem to have provoked very different reactions from his biographers. For example, Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd wrote in E.F. Benson – As He Was (1988): ‘They may be a tribute to Fred’s industry, but not to his talent. He seems to have been marking time, waiting in a literary limbo, content to drift along. The seven books are either exceedingly silly or exceedingly sentimental or just dull’ (190). In The Life of E.F. Benson (1991) Brian Masters discussed Colin and other novels in very different terms, stating that ‘Fred was periodically obsessed with the notion of people who are the epitome of evil while bearing the appearance of consummate good’ (267). He went on to describe The Inheritor as combining ‘mystery, terror and a goodly chunk of healthy male beauty to make a tantalising cocktail. Beneath it all lies Fred’s serious, reiterated purpose, to demonstrate that inherent evil can only be destroyed, and the victim whose lot it is to carry evil within him be saved, by the intercession of human goodness’ (273). The same could be said of Colin II.

(John Howard)

At the Change of the Moon by Bernard C. Blake

Johnny Mains has passed on news of a reissue of his discovery of the 1902 collection of nine tales At the Change of the Moon, by Bernard C[ecil] Blake (1882-1918). 

The nine stories tell of a competition between two men during a lengthy storm as they relate stories of madness and horror, each in an attempt to top one another. This reprint from Mislaid Books is considerably expanded, not only by Johnny's lengthy and well-illustrated Introduction and additional matter, but also with other items the author wrote around the same period, including five tales, two poems and one piece of non-fiction from issues of Vectis from 1903.  

It is available in hardcover from Amazon.co.uk at this link for £19.00; and at Amazon.com in the US at this link for $25.38. 

Johnny writes in his introduction that:

In 1901, aged nineteen, he wrote his only collection of weird stories, At the Change of the Moon—an example of horror portmanteau, and possibly inspired by the Dickens-curated ‘The Haunted House’, published in All the Year Round in 1859—about two men who swap strange tales while stuck in an inn during a storm. It was published the following year. 

Here are some extracts from original reviews that are quoted in an appendix:

“This book, itself not long, strings upon a narrative of strangers entertaining one another by story-telling at a mysterious village inn, eight short tales of ingeniously imagined horror. There is madness—fancied madness—in them all to make the background appropriately lurid. The particular motives are like those of Poe, and the smaller shudder-bringers who have followed him. In one tale a man tells how he took delight in poisoning his friends and watching the symptoms of their agony. Another is philosophically fantastic, and tells of murder as a homeopathic remedy for lunacy. Then there is one of an ominous bird, the sight of which brings the coldness of death to him who sees it; another of horrific mesmerism, and another in which the teller asseverates that the sun is hell, for he has been there, and he knows. All are short and he writes with a rapid lightness which gives them as much verisimilitude as this sort of story need carry to be convincing to a complacent reader. They make a suitable book for holiday reading.” —The Scotsman, June 23, 1902 

“At the Change of the Moon by Bernard C. Blake (2s. 6d.). We have not had the pleasure of meeting with any of Mr. Blake’s work before the present volume. If it be his first effort, we can only say it is a very fine one, proving him to be a writer of rare imaginative power. The stories in the volume are nine in number, and are supposed to be told to the author by a strange old being named Pharaoh and a doctor who has made lunacy his special study. The tales are weird and uncanny, and here and there somewhat morbid. The latter feeling, however, by no means predominates, and the reader, while now and again getting a creepy feeling, finds his sympathy with the personages brought before him thoroughly enlisted. Mr. Blake has the touch of a fine artist, and knows the value of a suggested horror as against a plainly elaborated one. All who like weird literature and are fond of thrills.” —Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, June 29, 1902

“This is a weird book, as might be expected from the fact of its material having been gathered in a hitherto untilled, but certainly fruitful, field—the lunatic asylum. The writer has evidently made a study of the morbid as seen in such places, and has out of his knowledge put together some curious and startling stories. Not the least of these is the man who killed his father, and in so doing considered that he had performed a service to humanity, because his father was in the habit of wearing a collar without a necktie!” —Weekly Dispatch (London), August 3, 1902

 

'An Exciting Weird Plot': Ducdame by John Cowper Powys

 

 

I have always greatly admired the fiction of John Cowper Powys, while finding the length and spread of his novels rather formidable. I like the beginnings of them, which settle the reader into interesting surroundings, with enjoyably eccentric characters, and I usually set off with high hopes. But at some point I almost invariably break off, and do not then resume. It is not that the plot is complex or tedious, but simply that it does require stamina, and other things are calling.

One possible way in, therefore, is with his earlier novels, which are a bit shorter: these, however, are not so rich in theme or engaging in the telling. A compromise might be found with the fourth of them (though the third published), Ducdame (1925).

John Cowper Powys wrote to Dorothy Richardson, author of the Pilgrimage sequence of autobiographical novels, about his first three published novels (another, After My Fashion, though written in 1919, was not published until 1980):

‘The truth is in Wood & Stone & Rodmoor I exploited most wickedly a certain sadistic vein in my disposition. Then I became more virtuous; & resolved that it was wrong to do this – unless the thing was ‘spiritualized’ as in Dostoevsky – for fear of actually spreading the ‘aura’ of it around. And in Ducdame my third novel I left it out altogether and tried to make an objective work of art using none of my own secretest feelings (except my love of Nature and of simple Romantic sensuality & of an exciting weird plot & of abnormal characters).’

Ducdame, which was published at the end of July one hundred years ago, may be seen as signalling the deep interest in landscape and its influence on contemporary lives, which dominates his noted set of four ‘Wessex’ novels, starting with Wolf Solent (1929), and continuing with A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Weymouth Sands (1934) and Maiden Castle (1936). In many respects it is a sort of prologue to these major works, with the advantage for the rather daunted reader of being not quite so extensive. It has not had the same attention as these four. There was a Village Press paperback edition in 1974 alongside other Powys reprints, and a Faber and Farber reissue in their Classics series in 2008.

What did Powys mean by Ducdame’s ‘weird plot’? In the opening chapter we are introduced to the brothers Rook and Lexie Ashover, of Ashover, scions of a line of squires going back to Norman times. Their indomitable mother is conspiring to ensure this centuried lineage continues, despite certain awkward circumstances. As well as her, there are three other leading women characters: Rooks’s lover Netta, who lives with him at the Manor, in defiance of convention; his cousin Lady Ann, invited as a guest by his mother, with matchmaking in mind; and Nell Hastings, the vicar’s wife, for whom both brothers have a passion. This family lineage theme and the emotional complications are not in the least “weird”.

However, the novel also picks up two of the themes Powys mentioned to Richardson. The Romantic love of nature finds expression in poetic evocations of the countryside. In the opening chapter, he conjures up the eerie effect of bright moonlight on the local landscape and wonders if certain places have a particular affinity to the moon, and in the second chapter he conveys well how rain changes the light, the sound and the atmosphere of rooms, and how a drenched terrain may have a grey magic. This sense of a country steeped in a deep, elemental magic recalls the lyrical work of de la Mare, Blackwood or Machen.   

Secondly, Powys’ mystical idea that sinister writing might spread its “aura” is also presented in his novel. There are hints of an ominous mystery concerning a book being written by the vicar, William Hastings. The vicar’s library includes volumes of “Philo, Iamblicus, Plotinus, Paracelsus”, three ancient Neoplatonists and a Renaissance alchemist, suggesting he is delving in arcane matters.  His scratching away at the book in his study affects his wife’s nerves with “an almost supernatural terror”. Powys ponders, “Is there, perhaps, a power of destruction in human thought capable of projecting its magnetism beyond its own realm of immaterial ideas?” (pg, 45). The vicar’s wife thinks so: “he’s—thinking something—that destroys—you know?—that destroys everything!” (pg. 54).

The novel’s landscape mysticism and idea of the uncanny power of certain writing do offer some of the “weird” elements Powys claimed for the book. But they are not its main thrust, which remains a concern with the fate of the family’s ancient line, and the way this might be resolved by various permutations of relationships. That is by no means an original plot, but a common device in Victorian inheritance melodramas, and it cannot be said Powys much surpasses this origin, however idiosyncratic and unusual his style and way of thinking. We might prefer the sense of place and the Vicar’s book to come more to the fore. If Ducdame is weird, as Powys said, the reader of fantastic literature might wish it were weirder still. Even so, the evocation of the elements, the pantheism, the full-flavoured characters, and the hints of bibliomancy are certainly compelling enough.

 (Mark Valentine)