![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI’ve finished both David Blaize and David of King’s, by E. F. Benson. I’d been meaning to read these for a few months—I found fic featuring the main character, David, and his good friend Frank Maddox, sometime over the summer. The vibe was right, the setting and stakes matched my interests, and it was a matter of getting around to the books. (Only the first is on Project Gutenberg; I purchased used copies of both, as the reissues are quite cheap.)
I enjoyed the novels! Benson is a charming writer who employs character sketches to great effect: especially in King’s, he caricatures notable people from his own undergraduate studies, though they really float on their own merits as archetypes of people, often devoting multiple pages to the absurdities of their behavior. David, as a keen observer, is always kind to these eccentricities, so you get to have a laugh at the most excessive things without ever feeling mean about it, and David is generous about acknowledging his own faults, on top of that.
A whole lot of nothing happens during either of the books: they detail mostly mundane events in the life of a schoolboy and then a university man, with one high-stakes event happening in the final chapter of David Blaize and otherwise nothing much occurring. The first book has truly excessive descriptions of cricket, and I’m afraid I came away no more certain how the game is played, whereas the second has excessive descriptions of tennis that I couldn’t follow all that much better, despite knowing how the game is played. David would describe all of this as jolly, and he would be right. The books are suffused with such good feeling that even when I was relatively bored, flipping through cricket matches, I felt positively about the reading experience.
And despite all that sport, Benson has a surprisingly economy with words. He does a marvelous job of skipping ahead in time, so that each book covers multiple years (I think it’s about three for the first, and definitely three for the second) in under 100k. Benson very neatly skips entire school terms when he’s decided there would be nothing interesting to say about them, and he back-fills as necessary with exposition. It all works, and it allows him to do those descriptive, carefully-rendered scenes with rich detail about characters and setting. This is something I always admire and strive for in my own writing, and it was wonderful to see again, an utter fearlessness to drag the reader along at speed, instead of holding our hands to prove that time still passes one day at a time.
Peter Burton, the author of the forewords on my copies, provided some context about Benson’s life. Most significantly, that he was likely gay, and that he also seemed to have been a spinster—Burton speculates on a few personal details. Burton also does not shy away from calling these books, and others like them, “schoolboy romances,” which I love. It’s how I understood the books when drawn into their fanfic, and absolutely how they read. David, our protagonist, is shining and bright and young and absolutely in love with Frank, our slightly-older mentor, who guides him through life and sport and studies, until David reaches his own maturity at the end of the last novel. They consistently refer to their relationship as loving, to each other as the most significant person in their lives, and so forth. David’s other close friend (“Bags,” for the way his trousers looked sometime before the beginning of the series) not-infrequently laments that David and Frank are an exclusive pair, and that David only spends time with Bags when Frank is not around.
Frank, by the by, is very much my type. He’s academic and self-serious and very frighteningly competent in a way that you see him work for. He’s also a bit tortured and brooding, as much as this series allows, given—we’ll get to that.
David is less so my type. He’s golden and athletic and very lucky, the sort of person for whom intellectual labor always comes secondary to other things, and I can follow but am not convinced by his late-series turn to writing as his passion. Or, rather, I believe it—he’s clearly a reflection of Benson himself, who was all of these things—but I’m not sure that it erases the hundreds of pages of cricket and tennis and practical jokes and studies-are-so-dull which preceded it. I might like David at 40, quite a bit, only I’m not motivated to create the David at 40 that I would like, having spent so much time with a David who is not him. David’s gotten enough of my time already.
But Frank—Frank sits at the heart of what makes this a romance, and what also marks the books as not that. See, in the first novel, Frank propositions David. For sex. And Frank’s had sex with a different boy before that, we’re made to know. It’s all very British Public School. Only, David is innocent and very virtuous and turns him down, then scarpers, and Frank is made to realize that he’s the absolute worst and most beastly of men for ever wishing to engage in that sort of behavior. There’s an internal monologue from Frank’s POV, which was one of my favorite bits to read, but it’s very painful through a modern lens: Frank has a very believable feeling of disgust with himself for, well, being queer, and wanting to have a relationship with a boy he fancies. And it’s Frank, a character of my favorite self-serious mold, so when he commits to giving all that up he truly does, no more public school dalliances. He’s become a good sort now, unlike the boy he used to see, who gets himself expelled. Which is all heartbreaking. Whenever this is referenced again in the books, and David himself brings it up a few times, at least once in a very low moment where he uses it to lash out at Frank, I feel absolutely miserable for poor Frank! God, what repression.
I buy that David is also repressing attraction to men, for what it’s worth. He is in love with Frank, and when asked about women in King’s, he tells off Bags for wasting time with flirtation at all. It includes this memorable description of feeling up a woman: “pinch their fat places.” David is not… uncomplicatedly straight. But David is also given a crush on a woman, in the first novel, and reinforces a few times that he’ll marry someday, and Frank has another devastating internal monologue in King’s where he reckons with David’s inevitable marriage and how Frank will likely be left behind. Frank’s own discussions of marriage are more on the “maybe it’ll happen for me” side. But there’s something about David that makes it difficult for me, personally, to reconcile the character from the books with someone who will happily, if quietly, choose a gay relationship later in life.
I don’t know. I feel a bit like I played myself, reading the novels and developing opinions like this, such that I can’t as easily go along with the shipfic that brought me here. Whoops!
But, well, I do really like Frank. And I liked the books, very much enjoyed reading them, and I’m sad that they’re through. I’ll have to find some other “schoolboy romances” to follow this up!
I enjoyed the novels! Benson is a charming writer who employs character sketches to great effect: especially in King’s, he caricatures notable people from his own undergraduate studies, though they really float on their own merits as archetypes of people, often devoting multiple pages to the absurdities of their behavior. David, as a keen observer, is always kind to these eccentricities, so you get to have a laugh at the most excessive things without ever feeling mean about it, and David is generous about acknowledging his own faults, on top of that.
A whole lot of nothing happens during either of the books: they detail mostly mundane events in the life of a schoolboy and then a university man, with one high-stakes event happening in the final chapter of David Blaize and otherwise nothing much occurring. The first book has truly excessive descriptions of cricket, and I’m afraid I came away no more certain how the game is played, whereas the second has excessive descriptions of tennis that I couldn’t follow all that much better, despite knowing how the game is played. David would describe all of this as jolly, and he would be right. The books are suffused with such good feeling that even when I was relatively bored, flipping through cricket matches, I felt positively about the reading experience.
And despite all that sport, Benson has a surprisingly economy with words. He does a marvelous job of skipping ahead in time, so that each book covers multiple years (I think it’s about three for the first, and definitely three for the second) in under 100k. Benson very neatly skips entire school terms when he’s decided there would be nothing interesting to say about them, and he back-fills as necessary with exposition. It all works, and it allows him to do those descriptive, carefully-rendered scenes with rich detail about characters and setting. This is something I always admire and strive for in my own writing, and it was wonderful to see again, an utter fearlessness to drag the reader along at speed, instead of holding our hands to prove that time still passes one day at a time.
Peter Burton, the author of the forewords on my copies, provided some context about Benson’s life. Most significantly, that he was likely gay, and that he also seemed to have been a spinster—Burton speculates on a few personal details. Burton also does not shy away from calling these books, and others like them, “schoolboy romances,” which I love. It’s how I understood the books when drawn into their fanfic, and absolutely how they read. David, our protagonist, is shining and bright and young and absolutely in love with Frank, our slightly-older mentor, who guides him through life and sport and studies, until David reaches his own maturity at the end of the last novel. They consistently refer to their relationship as loving, to each other as the most significant person in their lives, and so forth. David’s other close friend (“Bags,” for the way his trousers looked sometime before the beginning of the series) not-infrequently laments that David and Frank are an exclusive pair, and that David only spends time with Bags when Frank is not around.
Frank, by the by, is very much my type. He’s academic and self-serious and very frighteningly competent in a way that you see him work for. He’s also a bit tortured and brooding, as much as this series allows, given—we’ll get to that.
David is less so my type. He’s golden and athletic and very lucky, the sort of person for whom intellectual labor always comes secondary to other things, and I can follow but am not convinced by his late-series turn to writing as his passion. Or, rather, I believe it—he’s clearly a reflection of Benson himself, who was all of these things—but I’m not sure that it erases the hundreds of pages of cricket and tennis and practical jokes and studies-are-so-dull which preceded it. I might like David at 40, quite a bit, only I’m not motivated to create the David at 40 that I would like, having spent so much time with a David who is not him. David’s gotten enough of my time already.
But Frank—Frank sits at the heart of what makes this a romance, and what also marks the books as not that. See, in the first novel, Frank propositions David. For sex. And Frank’s had sex with a different boy before that, we’re made to know. It’s all very British Public School. Only, David is innocent and very virtuous and turns him down, then scarpers, and Frank is made to realize that he’s the absolute worst and most beastly of men for ever wishing to engage in that sort of behavior. There’s an internal monologue from Frank’s POV, which was one of my favorite bits to read, but it’s very painful through a modern lens: Frank has a very believable feeling of disgust with himself for, well, being queer, and wanting to have a relationship with a boy he fancies. And it’s Frank, a character of my favorite self-serious mold, so when he commits to giving all that up he truly does, no more public school dalliances. He’s become a good sort now, unlike the boy he used to see, who gets himself expelled. Which is all heartbreaking. Whenever this is referenced again in the books, and David himself brings it up a few times, at least once in a very low moment where he uses it to lash out at Frank, I feel absolutely miserable for poor Frank! God, what repression.
I buy that David is also repressing attraction to men, for what it’s worth. He is in love with Frank, and when asked about women in King’s, he tells off Bags for wasting time with flirtation at all. It includes this memorable description of feeling up a woman: “pinch their fat places.” David is not… uncomplicatedly straight. But David is also given a crush on a woman, in the first novel, and reinforces a few times that he’ll marry someday, and Frank has another devastating internal monologue in King’s where he reckons with David’s inevitable marriage and how Frank will likely be left behind. Frank’s own discussions of marriage are more on the “maybe it’ll happen for me” side. But there’s something about David that makes it difficult for me, personally, to reconcile the character from the books with someone who will happily, if quietly, choose a gay relationship later in life.
I don’t know. I feel a bit like I played myself, reading the novels and developing opinions like this, such that I can’t as easily go along with the shipfic that brought me here. Whoops!
But, well, I do really like Frank. And I liked the books, very much enjoyed reading them, and I’m sad that they’re through. I’ll have to find some other “schoolboy romances” to follow this up!
Blazes!
Date: 2024-08-24 05:35 pm (UTC)