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The Freaks of Mayfair (1916)

av E. F. Benson

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MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
1813149,460 (3.35)15
In a series of hilariously dry fictional sketches, E F Benson introduces us to some of the more bizarre inhabitants of Mayfair's Edwardian high society - a world he knew intinately. Each is a distinct representative of an anthropological 'type': Sir Louis and Lady Mary Marigold turn snobbery into an art form; 'Aunt' George is a bachelor with a passion for embroidery; Mrs Weston, a devotee of every new health-cult and spiritual fad; Horace Campbell, the jealous and poisonous society gossip; the socalled 'grizzly kittens' Babs Begum and Charlie Gordon, refuse to grow old gracefully; Mrs Sarah Whitehand is the social-climbing wife of an American toilet-bowl magnate; and Mr Sandow, the socialite vicar who seems interested in everything but real spirituality. These and a number of other intriguing specimens, all greedily jockeying for social standing in this most exclusive of societies, are impaled, Iabelled and preserved for our entertainment on the razor-sharp scalpel of Benson's savage wit.… (mer)
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E.F. Benson (1867—1940) was the eccentric child of the Archbishop of Canterbury. A prolific writer, he’s most well known for the Mapp and Lucia series. In the literary constellation of British wit, he stands beside the likes of Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse. (And, to a lesser degree, Saki and Jerome K. Jerome.) Full disclosure: I’ve read Waugh and Wodehouse, but not Saki or Jerome.

Waugh and Wodehouse satirized the Jazz Age, although both created works well into the Sixties, by that time producing novels and stories fossilized in nostalgia. Benson, meanwhile, creates an Edwardian menagerie of folly in The Freaks of Mayfair. Published in 1916 as the Great War raged in a mustard gas-choked abattoir, Freaks has a decidedly Edwardian ambiance. It celebrates an era that will soon be buried in the Somme and the trenches of Verdun.

Comedy can sometimes age poorly. But make no mistake, this isn’t some Anglo-Catholic glaucous idolatry like Brideshead Revisited. Freaks pokes fun at the eccentrics, oddballs, faddists, and climbers (both vertical and horizontal) of the Edwardian Era with a sharp eye and refined pen. The Hogarth Press edition I read has charming illustrations by George Plank. On the cover is Aunt Georgie engaged in his embroidery.

Aunt Georgie’s tale begins thus: “He was in fact an infant of the male sex according to physical equipment, but it became perfectly obvious even when he was quite a little boy that he was quite a little girl.” As a boy “he hated roughness and cold weather and mud, and his infant piety developed into a sort of sentimental rapture with stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical rites and church music.” Benson paints a portrait of a gender non-conformity and religious faith.

Aunt Georgie’s story still has relevance today, since “Occasionally, for no reason, he roused violent antagonism in the breasts of rude brainless men, and after he had left the smoking-room in the evening, one would sometimes say to another ‘Good God! What is it?’” More than one hundred years later, the world is still populated by rude brainless men hellbent of meddling in the lives of others with their sanctimonious hypocrisy and weak-ass frail masculinity. So often the butt of jokes and turned into the “sissy” caricature, Benson turns the tables and makes the effeminate, delicate, effete aesthete the subject of adulation.

Other eccentrics and oddballs populate Freaks, including a faddish curate. He showers his parishioners, the well-heeled types of Curzon Street and Park Lane, with such topics as “Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Fire Worship, Christian Science, and has even been known to find something totemistic, if not positively sacramental, in the practice of cannibalism.” Like the portrait of Aunt Georgie, the faddish preacher’s comic foibles are all in good fun, but this is par for the course for the son of an eccentric ecclesiarch.

Amid the picture gallery of weirdos, the normal can stand out. In the story, “The Sea-Green Incorruptible,” traces the biography of one Constance Lady Whittlemere. Her story is one of mundane ordinariness that sticks out like a sore thumb amid tales of effeminate aesthetes doing embroidery and preachers sermonizing about cannibalism and Christian Science. Every comedy needs a Ralph Bellamy character and Lady Whittlemere epitomizes a kind of idealized absolute of human dullness. Benson presents many colorful characters and Lady Whittlemere is the color beige. She’s the elevator music version of a Matchbox Twenty song. If variety is the spice of life, Lady Whittlemere is a rice cake.

The Freaks of Mayfair is a forgotten classic, not only because it is less well-known among E.F. Benson’s voluminous output, but also because his minor star has been sidelined by the likes of Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse. Yet it is worth the time to read and enjoy. Amid the flaming shitshow that is modern living, a comic confection like The Freaks of Mayfair offers pleasant distraction and humane portraits of freaks, faddists, climbers, and fakers.

https://driftlessareareview.com/2023/01/21/forgotten-classics-the-freaks-of-mayf... ( )
  kswolff | Feb 20, 2023 |
E.F. Benson is one of the most reliable writers. He always serves up something tasty. Freaks of Mayfair is not a novel but a series of comic sketches of the kinds of “freaks” who lived in Mayfair, an area of London that I know mainly as one of the properties on the Monopoly board; I believe it is dark blue.

This book made me kind of cross with E.F. Benson but then I love E.F. Benson so I felt bad about that. In the end I wound up feeling sympathetic to him as well as sorry for him.

I thought the highlight of this book would be his sketch of Aunt Georgie, who will reappear later as Georgie Pillson in the wonderful Lucia books. In the Lucia books, Georgie lives in the fictional town of Tilling, doing his needlepoint and playing cards with Lucia and Miss Mapp and all the other colorful town characters. Eventually Georgie and the title character Lucia make their platonic relationship official by embarking on a marriage in name only.

Unfortunately, the “Aunt Georgie” sketch was the lowlight. While I don’t think E.F. Benson would have self-identified as gay (anyway, how could he, having died in 1940?), he is famous for his romantic friendships with other men, etc, so I felt let down to see his portrayal of Georgie was on the vicious side. The last thing anyone needs to read is a humorous skewering of someone who was born “an infant of the male sex according to physical equipment, but it became perfectly obvious even when he was quite a little boy that he was quite a little girl.” In a way it gives a little frisson of “I am seen, I exist” to see an Edwardian character who “formed a violent attachment to another young lady, on whom Nature had bestowed the frame of a male, and they gave each other pieces of their hair... and they probably would have kissed each other if they had dared.” But I hate that Georgie has to be a figure of fun.

“Public-school life checked the outward manifestation of girlhood, but Georgie’s essential nature continued to develop in secret. Publicly he became more or less a male boy, but this was not because he was really growing into a male boy, but because through ridicule, contempt, and example he found it more convenient to behave like one.” Depressing. But I think I’m starting to understand the enduring nature of the confusion between gender identity and sexual orientation (for example, when people get transgender people and gay people mixed up.) The original reason for this confusion is purposeful: sexual orientation could not be named at this time but it was okay to say Georgie was a woman. The “problem” is not really who you like, it’s who you are, hence all this tedious focus there still is on “same sex relationships” which throws everything back on yourself when you thought it was about how you felt about other people. Alternately, perhaps E.F. Benson really did conceive of Aunt Georgie as a (transgender) woman: because of the customs of the age, it’s *impossible to tell.*

“[Although] he did not care for girls in any proper manly way, he liked, when he was sleepy in the morning to hear the rustle of skirts.” “[H]is guests were chiefly young men with rather waggly walks and little jerky movements of their hands and old ladies with whom he was always a great success, for he understood them so well.” “Occasionally, for no reason, he roused violent antagonism in the breasts of rude brainless men, and after he had left the smoking-room in the evening, one would sometimes say to another, ‘Good God! What is it?’”

On the plus side, Georgie leads a happy life, drawing pictures and being arty and visiting with his friends. We should all be so lucky. At the end of the sketch, Benson points out that Georgie has never hurt anyone and that it would cruel to send him to hell, but it would be “very odd” for him to be an angel in heaven. The whole book has a light satirical tone, but it was meaner in the Georgie sketch than all the others. But clearly, as with all hating people, E.F. Benson hates himself (again, back to self, who you are is the problem.) Before reading this book I always thought that Georgie was Benson. Fred is trying to draw some kind of line in the sand between himself and Georgie. Oh, Fred is not like Georgie because Fred is quite butch! That’s where I started feeling so sad for Fred Benson and why did he have such terrible misfortune to be born in Victorian England to pious parents instead of (for example) in New York in the 1970s to atheists? And wouldn’t E.F. Benson be fun to have around if he were alive today?

Moving on to the more entertaining parts of the book, it was much more amusing to see Benson hating on his brother, who is skewered in “The Spiritual Pastor.” I mean, I don’t even know that much about the Benson family but even I could see it has to be his brother. All the other freaks of Mayfair have something unusual and undesirable about them, except for this vicar, whose undesirable quality is that he’s too good looking, too good at sports, too well-liked, too upbeat, too humble. What really makes writer Benson gnash his teeth is how successful the vicar is with his writing career, publishing commonplace religious essays. The examples of the kinds of things the vicar writes were fun, because they were exactly the same as some uplifting self-help type stuff you might read today (eg don’t be so upset about being late for the train, pay attention to the fluffy clouds in the sky!) But honestly not even bad enough to make fun of. Pure sibling rivalry!

There were other examples of things the freaks did that Benson thought were totally ridiculous which today are commonly accepted, such as practicing yoga and having a vegetarian diet. But yoga practitioners are not members of a persecuted minority, so it didn’t make me get all up on my high horse to read the “Quack quack” sketch. The chapter where I actually felt personally most skewered, and found most hilarious, was “The Eternally Uncompromised” about a person with too much imagination, just like me. Winifred Ames’ particular problem was always imagining that men were looking at her with eyes of silent longing. (She read too much sentimental trashy literature from the circulating library, same as Miriam in Backwater.) But Winny-Pinny’s greatest dream, of being talked about as being in a compromising situation with a man who’s not her husband, recedes from her as fast as she chases it. “Indeed, it is receding faster than she pursues now, for her hair is getting to be a dimmer gold, and the skin at the outer corner of those poor eyes, ever looking out for unreal lovers, is beginning to faintly suggest the aspect of a muddy lane, when a flock of sheep have walked over it, leaving it trodden and dinted.”

Other quite funny sketches are about snobs, social climbers, and older people who cling to their lost youth (“grizzly kittens.”) Just once Benson alludes to the war, saying “the myriad graves in France and Flanders bear a testimony [to the manliness of the British, maybe the war is why he has this topic on the brain] that is the more eloquent for it being unspoken.”

I noticed how often in my book reviews I start out by saying, “I expected x, y, and z to happen, but...” or “I thought it would be the same as n, but...” (In this case, expecting the sketch of Aunt Georgie to be the best part.) Or occasionally I say, “Just like I expected, such-and-such happened!” If this habit is tedious for me, it must be tedious for you. Is there any way I could stop having expectations about novels, and stop making up a projected plot the instant I lay eyes on it? I would really like it if that could happen.
( )
  jollyavis | Dec 14, 2021 |
The Freaks of Mayfair is a series of portraits of fictional inhabitants of Mayfair. The stories, in so far as they are stories rather than vignettes, are not related to each other, and I think the book would have worked better for me if they had been.

Without this connection, the portraits, while funny in part, are not all that memorable. I think, I would have enjoyed these better if they had been connected because it would have allowed the characters to interact and develop another dimension outside of the small snippet we get in each story. I guess, what I was missing was that characters cross over into the stories of other Mayfair inhabitants, much like characters in Wodehouse's Wooster stories pop up throughout various books and we get to recognise people we have already met.

So, while this was an amusing way to spend a few hours, The Freaks of Mayfair is not on par with the Mapp and Lucia stories simply because the is too little of the various characters before we move on to the next story, whereas we get to follow Mapp and Lucia through several trials of their relationship.

Still, there was one story called Aunt Georgie that seems to introduce us to the blueprint for George Pillson in the Mapp and Lucia series, and it was fascinating that Benson must have already assembled the cast of Mapp and Lucia when he wrote The Freaks of Mayfair in 1916. ( )
  BrokenTune | Jun 21, 2020 |
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Författarens namnRollTyp av författareVerk?Status
E. F. Bensonprimär författarealla utgåvorberäknat
Hawtree, ChristopherInledningmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Hitch, DavidOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Plank, GeorgeIllustratörmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat

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In a series of hilariously dry fictional sketches, E F Benson introduces us to some of the more bizarre inhabitants of Mayfair's Edwardian high society - a world he knew intinately. Each is a distinct representative of an anthropological 'type': Sir Louis and Lady Mary Marigold turn snobbery into an art form; 'Aunt' George is a bachelor with a passion for embroidery; Mrs Weston, a devotee of every new health-cult and spiritual fad; Horace Campbell, the jealous and poisonous society gossip; the socalled 'grizzly kittens' Babs Begum and Charlie Gordon, refuse to grow old gracefully; Mrs Sarah Whitehand is the social-climbing wife of an American toilet-bowl magnate; and Mr Sandow, the socialite vicar who seems interested in everything but real spirituality. These and a number of other intriguing specimens, all greedily jockeying for social standing in this most exclusive of societies, are impaled, Iabelled and preserved for our entertainment on the razor-sharp scalpel of Benson's savage wit.

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