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David Blaize (1916)

de E. F. Benson

Sèrie: David Blaize (1)

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Set in England before World War I, the novel describes David's years at prep school and public school, his studies, sports and friendships, and finally, his brush with death when he stops a runaway horse.
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Naturally, E.F. Benson published three books in 1916. Most of his books took him three weeks to write. He described himself as “uncontrollably prolific.” His biographer suggests that the whole Benson family’s prodigious output is due to mania. I say, a preferred kind of mania if you could pick and choose.

I read David Blaize many years ago. This is today one of Benson’s most popular novels. It is a boarding school story. I enjoy those, and it has everything you want in one, including terrifying but secretly kind headmasters, beatings, cricket, and lots of pranks. The heart of the story is the friendship that the title character develops with an older boy named Maddox. The most memorable part is when Maddox is ogling David in the shower, David doesn’t like it and leaves, and Maddox comes to apologize to him. Then later another character is expelled for bringing disgrace onto himself for writing love letters to another boy. Maddox says that it could have been himself and that David has made him “uncorrupt” himself, and David thanks Maddox for shielding him from filth. Because they have chosen the path of purity, they then basically get to have a love scene, lying next to each other on the grass, wriggling shyly closer, feeling intense happiness, and then playing sports. Forever after they are the greatest of friends. David and Maddox get to hold hands at the end because David almost dies (of injuries from heroically stopping a runaway horse on the high street.) A brush with death is the only situation where males are permitted to hold hands, and one of them has to be delirious or unconscious. I think you could read every book on the planet and never find a more striking example of an author desperately trying to repudiate sexual feelings and at the same time elevate the purity of love between two boys. When I read David Blaize as a young person it just made me roll my eyes, but as a withered-up middle-aged person I find it very touching and a bit sad.

According to Benson’s biographer Brian Masters, David Blaize was the first positive treatment of a romantic friendship at a boy’s school and while it was a critical success it was “dangerously new.” E.F. Benson’s brother Arthur wanted him to leave all that stuff out but Fred didn’t listen. So Fred received lots of fan mail about the book, including one from the Front saying “the lads in the trenches are sharing it and passing it around.” Masters says Fred would “not have been pleased to learn that the novel is still on the list of homosexual book clubs” and that “it does not belong there.” (This biography was written in 1991.) So Masters and I have opposite ideas about how Fred would feel if he were re-animated, and that is because *no one knows.* (Who is this guy Brian Masters anyway? He also wrote biographies of a serial killer and necrophiliac, a wicked zoo owner, British dukes, and Marie Corelli.)

Years later Fred said, “I have had more correspondence about [David Blaize] than any other book I ever wrote. That I think has been because there was no ‘book-making’ about it, but it was a genuine piece of self-expression.” And now we have a pleasing moment where I actually agree with both Brian Masters and the guy who wrote the introduction to Freaks of Mayfair, Christopher Hawtree. They both say that 1916 was a turning point in Benson’s development as an artist, as he stopped writing those unconvincing sentimental romances centering on a man and a woman, and began writing the comedies he is now known for. I think it is the fact that Benson is writing about things he actually cares about (in his peculiar way) that makes both David Blaize and Freaks of Mayfair so appealing and yet painful. (I don't mean peculiar in a bad way. He is one of a kind. He sort of has no heart, but usually in a kindly way, and how can someone be kindly with no heart? So it must be there but he is very coy, plus clearly he is not motivated by the same things as most other people. You go read some E.F. Benson and you'll see.)

Two years earlier Benson’s brother Hugh (the Catholic one) died of pneumonia, and in 1916 his sister Maggie died of heart troubles. Based on Final Edition, one of E.F. Benson’s memoirs that he completed just days before his own death, it looks like during 1916 all the extant members of his family were suffering from mental illness or just about to die themselves. So it’s really remarkable that Benson could be so funny and was only about to get funnier.

I’m going to read Final Edition and the slightly annoying biography more carefully instead of just skimming for the good bits. And I should probably read at least one of his other memoirs too. Then I’ll be fully ready for his two novels of 1917. I’m glad I have many more years with E.F. Benson before he dies of throat cancer in 1940. His best books are yet to come! ( )
  jollyavis | Dec 14, 2021 |
David Blaize is a vicar's son who is quite talented at--if uninterested in--school, good at mischief making, and very into cricket. OK, so I skimmed all the parts about cricket, but otherwise this boarding school coming of age story is quite strange and charming. It definitely seems like it's trying to be part of an already well-defined genre of British public boarding schoolboy narratives. (Presumably started by Tom Brown's School Days, which I have never read. My knowledge of British skoolboys is mostly limited to the immortal Molesworth.)

I thought the overt references to queer sexuality were interesting for the book's date, and even more odd was a not-very-subtextual caution about the possibility for grooming and sexual abuse by charismatic older boys. (I mean odd in the sense that I'm surprised an author would be so candid about that in, what, 1916?) David manages to escape such an outcome and forges a very sweet and supportive platonic love relationship with the older Maddox. This ideal socialization process is represented as the circle of life, as David in his turn takes an unpopular younger boy under his wing.

David is very admirable, in the end. Over the course of the book we witness his maturation. It's not particularly gripping as a novel (though I really enjoyed the chapter on the cheating scandal, which was very funny) but it's fascinating as a primary document of a kind of late-Victorian white masculine identity formation. We see pretty clearly how Benson thought the process of education and the more informal influence of peer networks should contribute to the creation of a certain kind of English Christian gentleman. ( )
  sansmerci | Oct 20, 2021 |
This novel follows the life of the eponymous character from his last year of prep school to public school: his friendship, varying attitudes to schoolwork, his passion for cricket, and hhis ero-worship/crush on one of the older boys, Maddox—the feelings are mutual but they hold back from anything else. The ending get very dramatic, even laughably so. ( )
  queen_ypolita | Aug 27, 2013 |
David Blaize is E. F. Benson's delightfully nostalgic novel of English public school life. Benson follows young David Blaize from his time at preparatory school to his entry to the sixth form at Marchester College. The novel draws heavily on the author's own schoolboy experiences when at Temple Grove and then Marlborough College. Benson, better than most writers in this genre, memorably evokes the trials and tribulations of life in an English public school during the late Victorian period. The pages resonate with wit and humour. The reader is invited to follow young Blaize as he deals with eccentric masters, experiences halcyon days on the cricket field, frets over dreaded parental visits, and experiences personal growth through a platonic friendship with Maddox, a senior boy at Marchester ...

This is a newly edited and corrected version of the text. It contains a specially commissioned introduction as well as explanatory notes by Craig Paterson ( )
  OrpheusBritannic | Sep 11, 2010 |
E.F. Benson is probably best known to American readers for his Lucia and Miss Mapp novels - humorous tales of life (filled with problematic interpersonal relationships, jealousies and small dramas made large) in smallish English villages. He is the author of more than one hundred books.

"David Blaize" is an autobiographical novel of school life and romance of the eponymous central character from ages thirteen to seventeen. According to the introduction to my edition, the book shares shelf space with quite a number of English novels of the Edwardian (and later) era involving male-and-male schoolboy romances set at boarding schools. As one might expect, the romances are largely platonic, and hand holding and brushing of shoulders are about as graphic as the physicality gets.

The book was written in 1916 and is set about thirty years earlier, but it is a fresh and almost modern read. Antiquated slang("rum", "piffle", "ripping", "juggins", "scrugs", "bang") is a bit of a puzzlement. Also, for the American reader, the pages and pages of cricket play-by-play are off-putting. But we discover David as a young man of some complexity, and we watch him dodge, with effort, the many pitfalls and temptations of his educational environment. As the novel ends, he's ready to go to Oxbridge. "David of King's" (unread by me) chronicles that adventure.
1 vota bbrad | Jan 8, 2010 |
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Set in England before World War I, the novel describes David's years at prep school and public school, his studies, sports and friendships, and finally, his brush with death when he stops a runaway horse.

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