Synopsis
Traces the life of the British novelist and humorist, looks at his prominent, yet eccentric family, and discusses his major works
Reviews
British author of the popular Mapp and Lucia tales and such classics as Mrs. Ames , Edward Frederic Benson, who died in 1939 at age 72, won fame as a master satirist. His two brothers and sister were equally gifted but, like their father, were victims of manic depression, a fate E.F. escaped. Benson Sr., who became Archbishop of Canterbury, affianced himself to his cousin Minnie when she was 11 years old and trained her to become a selfless helpmate--until she rebelled and turned to women for love. E.F., on his part, was blessed with a sense of humor, was tolerant, kind and caring of his beleaguered siblings, none of whom married. Neither did he, preferring male lovers. Masters ( Sartre ) creates consuming interest in these lives--and lightens his somber biography with enchanting passages from the Mapp and Lucia stories. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940), clever, sociable, and film-star handsome, published 65 books--including novels, memoirs, histories, and texts on Ping-Pong and ice-skating--and innumerable ghost stories, essays, reviews, and plays, his effortless production attracting both enough admirers to form the E.F. Benson Society with its newsletter, Dodo, and such talented biographers as Masters--whose 17 books--including lives of Rabelais, Camus, MoliŠre, and one mass murderer--help him understand this prolific writer. However affable and charming on the surface, Benson apparently was as secretive, compulsive, egocentric, and sexually dysfunctional as his siblings. They included a sister who killed herself in an insane rage; a Roman Catholic monsignor who fantasized being beaten by Italian police and feared being buried alive; and another brother who was besieged by demons of melancholia and guilt--all of them writing obsessively about themselves, repulsed by human touch, idealizing the kind of hypothetically chaste homosexual relationships their mother preferred after the death of their broodingly depressive father, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Intellectually a trivialist, Benson studied Greek archaeology, mastered figure-skating, visited Capri with various young men, and ended up as the mayor of Rye. His major inventions: David Blaise, a faintly disguised account of his own schoolboy romances; Dodo, whose ``artful prattle'' influenced the expression of youthful society in 1893; the silly and sentimental Lucia and the ``malevolently curious'' Miss Mapp, both the subjects of a series of novels; and an evocation of Edwardian society in As We Were. With respect and sympathy, Masters explores the mania behind Benson's prolific writing--the conflicting motives to express himself and to deflect attention from his own anguish; his drive to control ``the overloaded circuits of his brain,'' writing for therapy, for concealment, for compensation, and producing, ironically, a terrible sense of futility and of unfulfillment. Masters creates a haunting and poignant story of misconstrued literary success, his pace, light touch, and elegant style evocative of Benson himself. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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