An Average Man

by Robert Hugh Benson

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Genres: Fiction, Catholic

390 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Mrsgr. Robert Hugh Benson AFSC KC*SG KGCHS was an English Catholic priest and writer. First an Anglican pastor, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and ordained therein the next year. He was also a prolific writer of fiction, writing the notable dystopian novel Lord of the World, as well as Come Rack! Come Rope!.

His output encompassed historical, horror and science fiction, contemporary fiction, children's stories, plays, apologetics, devotional works and articles. He continued his writing career at the same time as he progressed through the hierarchy to become a Chamberlain to Pope Pius X in 1911, and gain the title of Monsignor before his death a few years later.

Reviews

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

ENGLISH: Like other novels by Benson, this is a conversion story. In fact, the story of two conversions, one heroic, the other one dragged to failure by the pressure of the world. Several Benson novels deal with conversions, such as By What Authority?, which is also a historic novel about the persecution against Catholics in the time of Elisabeth I of England.

Both novels differ because "An Average Man" is modern (the action takes place at the beginning of the 20th century), while "By What Authority" corresponds to times of persecution, which complicates the issue, although perhaps it is more appropriate for our time (the beginning of the 21st century), when the persecution of Christianity (at least underhanded) takes place in almost the entire scope of Western Christian civilization.

ESPAÑOL: Como otras novelas de Benson, esta es una historia de conversión. De hecho, de dos conversiones, una heroica, y otra que se deja arrastrar al fracaso por la presión del mundo. Varias novelas de Benson tratan sobre conversiones, como By What Authority?, que también es una novela histórica sobre la persecución contra los católicos en la época de Isabel I de Inglaterra.

Ambas novelas difieren porque "An Average man" es moderna (la acción tiene lugar a principios del siglo XX), mientras "By what authority" corresponde a tiempos de persecución, lo que complica la cuestión, aunque quizá resulta más apropiada para nuestros días (principios del siglo XXI), cuando la persecución del cristianismo (al menos solapada) tiene lugar en casi todo el ámbito de la civilización cristiana occidental.

[Mariangel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of two conversions happening in the same London suburb and affecting families in different ways.

About Father Hilary: "He knew nothing at all of the world, in the ordinary sense of the word; but he appeared to know a great deal about the next, and spoke as if he lived there -which he probably did."

"First, there had been the astonishingly easy friendliness of this priest. There was no stiffness, no pose, no rigidity of propriety about him at all. Percy had half expected signs of the cross to be wavered at him, oracles uttered, and even perhaps threats of warning. Or if not these, he had thought that the friar would be insinuating or silky or disingenous. (It must be remembered that this boy's acquaintance with Catholicism was entirely drawn from literature). But, on the contrary, Father Hilary had been exactly like everyone else, only far more accessible than most; he had not patronized the boy at all. (...)

So far from urging him to become a Catholic instantly, he had told him what a very serious step it was; how much consideration it needed; what a respect, he must remember, was due to his parents and their wishes -"short of offending God", the priest had said; and, finally he had remarked that a course of instruction was absolutely necessary. (...)

"And even that would not commit you in the least. If, at the end, you felt that you were not entirely convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion, it would be your duty to draw back."

[Rinstinkt · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Average Man by Robert Hugh Benson

The protagonist is Percy Brandreth Smith, our average man. A young man who is introduced as having as his main interest "women", while to contrast this, his main friend at the start of the novel, Reggie Ballard, has as his main interest "faith" (Roman Chatholic).

When he is introduced Percy's main love interest is a girl from Yarmouth (we later learn she is called Maud). But Percy is a dreamer... One day on the train he meets a new girl, and the old girl is just an afterthought..

And the two went' off into severe discussions and comparisons. But Percy's heart grew warm again within him at the thought that she lived now, at any rate, on the same railway line as himself, and that he might, if he were fortunate, travel up with her quite often. He wondered whether it were possible that she could really be in business. . . . Certainly she did not look like it. Once he thought of the Yarmouth girl, and bitter laughter rose in him. He was as one who has climbed a snow-peak, and looks back in disdain at the steaming valleys from which he has come. The Yarmouth girl indeed! Maud was her name! . . . Maud! . . .

Percy and Reggie are honest friends:

They had discussed religion, of course, as solemnly and judicially as every other subject in heaven and earth. Percy had stood up for the Church of England; he had said that he didn't like candles and incense and fuss: he liked a plain sung service (and might have added, with attractive tenor parts in it) ; and Reggie, on his side, had become incoherent altogether on that mysterious scheme of faith and art and life that the world calls Roman Catholicism. [...]
Neither, of course, had known anything whatever about the subject that they discussed; the only difference between them was that Reggie used more or less first-hand observations of his own, and Percy second-hand arguments of other people.

Early in the book, in Chapter 4, we have a description of Percy's family (before their wealth substantialy increased) and by extension of most other people around them. (Who has watched the movie "My Dinner with Andre (1981)", will recognise this as 'automatic living'):

It was a typical evening. None of them, except perhaps Helen, were really interested at all in their occupations. Yet upon them all had descended a Scheme of Life that gave them no choice except to submit — a scheme which tightened its grip on them every month that went by, and was gradually crushing out every elastic instinct that they possessed. The doctor doctored because it was his profession; his wife managed her household because it was her household; Percy went up to the City and did accounts, because there was nothing else for him to do; and even Helen, though just now she did rather enjoy what she believed to be an artistic life, would presently find that even that was no more than a convention; her Greek costumes would cease to seem odd or bold; her ideas of art would become formulae which, having learned rigorously, she would teach to others with equal rigour. There was no spice in life anywhere, no sting of conviction, no ardour of enterprise. The one soul among them who had real competence in her work was the mother, and she had no scope. There was everything necessary to Life, except Life itself.

...

Reggie Ballard is a convert, and he manages to incite some interest towards Roman Catholicis in Percy too. Hence Percy embars in a journey, and he starts to fantasize than not only he will convert to Catholicism, but that he might also become a Franciscan priest one day. He honestly and convincinly embarks on his journey and he thinks he is starting to see the world truthfully:

He had reduced his raging turmoil of happy bewilderment to some kind of coherence by the time that he got into the slow Sunday train for Hanstead, and he looked upon his fellow-creatures now with a completely unconscious contempt. 
These people — this group of loud-voiced young men in black coats with buttonholes; that dismal family party of father and mother and three children — all this strange jetsam that the Sunday tide throws up in the terminal stations; the bleak-looking woman selling Lloyd's News behind a counter — these people did not understand at all. He felt like a dragon-fly looking down on grubs that had once been his fellows. . . .
 He had arrived at some sort of coherence. First, he must be entirely different at home. Now that the " Love of God which is in Christ Jesus " had displayed itself, he must give up once for all that tiresome, critical, prickly attitude that had grown on him of late. But, of course, he would give it up: it was gone already. It was unthinkable.
 Next, he must be exceedingly conscientious about his work ... he must not draw pictures on the blotting-paper any more. . . .
 Next, a certain entire plane of imagination must cease. It had ceased. It was unthinkable. Fourthly, he must say his prayers always . . . not less than a quarter of an hour every morning and evening. Fifthly, he must go to Evening Prayer after tea — (that reminded him; he hadn't had any lunch: he had walked all the way to Liverpool Street instead) — and sing in " Gadsby in C."
 Sixthly, he must convey to his family — one by one if possible — where he had been and . . . and what had happened to him.
 These things, then, he pondered, looking dreamily out at the stations where the train stopped, sitting all alone in a third-class carriage, with his hands pressed between his knees. He thought once or twice of the girl over whose bag he had tripped last Thursday, though from an infinitely remote distance of emotion; and wondered whether she knew all about those things too. . . . He supposed not. . . . He pictured himself telling her. . . . He wondered whether he could make her understand. . . . He supposed not.
Anyhow, it did not matter. He understood, at least.

Yet, this will demonstrate a long and very difficult journey for our average man. Even though he appears resilient at first, and seems steadfast in his conviction, he encounters shadowy obstacles, some of which are natural to life, some of which artificially created by the people around him.
Her mother is one of such people and her means and influence and dominion over his life and others around them greatly increase in her favor when she inherits everything Uncle James left behind after his death.

I will stop here... Ultimately our protagonist attention and objectives are derailed... hence the title An Average Man.
I rarely read fiction, but this was one of the most engaging fiction books I've ever read.

What follows are some other selected quotes from the book:


-

Helen, Percy's sister. A brief description of her womanly mind and thought.

Ch7

Then Helen launched out into her gospel. It was the convention of unconventionality ; and there is nothing more conventional. The ideal life appeared to her to consist in living in a particular sort of house, almost precisely the opposite of the house in which she happened to live: there must be a great deal of whitewash in it, and red tiles, and rough-cast, and copper fireplaces. There must be large bare rooms, with floors stained with permanganate of potash, and rugs on the top of it. It must have divans; there must be leaded lights in the windows, and doors of stained deal ; there must be a large "studio'' with plaster casts on a shelf all round it. There must be little oak beds in the bedrooms and a green-tiled bath-room. There must be an orchard all round it, with anemones in the grass in spring-time, and a stream running through it, and a perpetual liquid sunshine.

-

Ch 12

There are few differences in this drab-coloured world so startling as those between various kinds of minds. One man, after a glance at a fragment of bone, will reconstruct Hercules; another, after the entire skeleton stands before him, will even then question whether it is Hercules at all. One man will by intuition discover, or believe himself to have discovered, an entirely new philosophy; another will spend laborious days in working out a sum, with the help of the most prosaic of all faculties, and, even then sometimes will get it wrong, or, what is worse, doubt his own accuracy.

-
Mr Main, (former) curate of an anglican church, also converts to Catholicism. (Him and his wife are also involved in a sub-plot, and I wonder if the title "An Average Man" is intended for Percy only, or - subverted - applies to Mr Main too...?) Here is a brief (humorous?) description how Mr Main s conversion is met in the comunity around him.

Ch2

" I understand perfectly," said the friar as unemotionally as the other, striving to say the plain thing as he knew the other would wish. " I see that it must be very painful and difficult for you to be supported by your wife. . . . You say that she has no sympathy at all with Catholicism?"
" No, father. I tried to explain to her once or twice, but she would not hear me. So I followed your advice and said no more. I left one or two books about too; but she put them away at once."
"How have your old friends treated you?"
The bleak eyes blinked once or twice.
" They have not been very kind, father. It ... it was said that I had taken to drink."
The friar smiled.
" They haven't said you have had a fall off a bicycle, then ? "
"Why, no; father. I don't ride a bicycle."
" That's all right then. The last clergyman convert I had was supposed to have injured his brain by a fall. Unfortunately, it was quite true that he had had one. You see, they must say something, mustn't they ?”
A glimmer of a pained smile went over Mr. Main's face and passed again.

-

Ch 3

Conversation, in the intervals of shooting, is capable of becoming strangely intimate. There is no time for frills and periphrases. Things must be said quickly, or not at all. Further, there is a kind of primitiveness, a sense of companionship in the wild that favours intimacy. And, lastly, the sexes are in their original relations to one another; the man is performing, and the woman is admiring: the brave is hunting, and the squaw, so to speak, waiting as if to cook.

-

Gladys Farham (the train girls that displaced, the former love itnerest of Percy Brandreth Smith. She will on her turn get displaced by another love interest)

Ch 6

However dramatic may be a woman's temperament, until the age of thirty at any rate, there is always a place of complete reality somewhere underneath. Until after that age, there simply has not been time to dramatize the whole, or to get rid of the underlying character.
Miss Gladys Farham's character had been reached at last; at any rate she thought so, and that comes to the same thing. And it appeared to her now as if she had arrived at a reality which she had only guessed at before. Her first marriage seemed to her a dream: she had been an ignorant girl whose ignorance had been rapidly disillusioned; and she had taken refuge, after her divorce, in a sham kind of cynicism. And this cynicism had showed itself for the fraud that it was; and she had become, a girl again, with a strange kind of motherliness woven into it, as gold into fine silk.
Her conversion was as real as anything of which she was capable. A photograph or two disappeared from her walls; her dress showed modifications which I am not competent to describe; the tones of her voice lost a particular kind of ring that they had, up to now, occasionally manifested.
It may seem remarkable that all this had been effected by Percy; and it would be safer to say that it had been effected by her conception of Percy. She had taken at once to this ardent slim boy who had such an assurance and such an engaging innocence; and she had viewed him, with the aid of her dramatic nature, as a kind of Parsifal who knows nothing, and can therefore accomplish anything. She did not now trouble to inquire how far his sudden access of wealth had illuminated him in her eyes; for even an illumination cannot reveal what is not there to be revealed. But, from the moment in which he had told her of his good fortune, he had taken on a significance that she had scarcely been aware of before; he had become, so to speak, adequate and possible. And when he had, in a sudden fit of manhood, spoken to her as man to woman, she had answered him genuinely and sincerely. Her friends remarked on it.

[...]

These things, then, had borne fruit in her. There was no pose whatever in her acts of simplification ; no consciousness at all of effort. She moved more gently; she spoke more quietly; she wrote little notes now and again to her lover, and posted them all together once a week ; she opened his letters, with a distinct shock of pleasure, and kept them carefully, with his photograph, in a locked drawer of her writing-table. Out of the same drawer she had previously taken two photographs of another man, and these she had burned honestly. She was in love with Percy's youth, if not with his soul — with his temporal aspects, if not with his eternal being. She had found, she believed, reality at last.

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

In essence, the story of a year or so in the spiritual life of a young man and how he handled facing truth, challenges, and temptations in an English society that bears certain resemblances to our own.

I didn't love the ending, but there is a lot to appreciate here -- interesting characters drawn with great insight into their flaws and, at times, their strengths. One might find certain resemblances to one's own of these as well!

Benson's strength, aside from his lovely clear writing, is the examination of the inner life and how people are drawn to or turn away from God. This one isn't my favorite but it's a fascinating look at a different type of person than he usually has as a protagonist.

[Casey Ehrman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was perfectly true that the world had changed for him in the most fundamental way possible. Things were still entirely different, because the center of them all had shifted from himself to someone else.”

A story of two conversions to the Church that illustrates the importance of the cultivation of faith after an initial conversion. Beautifully written with a bit of a heartbreaking ending, showing the complexity of humanity past just a sugar-coated view of people coming into the Church

[Sebastian Fricke · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting story of two conversions, that I read through quite quickly (for my reading speed). I really enjoyed the writing style and the different characters' details.
The biggest regret for this book was to start by reading the foreword, which entirely uncovered the story, making its slow unraveling a bit less exciting than it should have been. Therefore I learned a good lesson to not start by reading the foreword.
Some of the actions felt a bit predictable, but the plot nicely highlighted the different pitfalls of certain characters. And I enjoyed, that the author presents his moral viewpoint and faith without delving into relativism, which allows me to think about his position.
All in all, I can recommend the book, to anyone that finds conversion stories fascinating.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a different age (Edwardian) and in different circumstances (first working middle class, then wealthy and privileged), do the heroic 'virtues' vary? Heck yeah and they do today as well. In the Edwardian era virtues varied with one's station in life. Courage for a middle class person meant being at the beck and call of the privileged, courage for the privileged meant being obsessively concerned with 'image'. There was no true and everlasting meaning of courage to this generation. No longing for eternal truth. Eternal truth was only found in doing one's duty in the particular station you were in. There was one that showed heroic courage in the book and suffered because of his conviction to the Truth. Nevertheless, I feel his eternal life would bear the fruit from the tree - and it would be good. Benson knew that society well and his writing is so descriptive that (although a 100 years ago) you feel you know the estate and surroundings. Great book.

[Emmanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is to be read bit by bit, chewing its contents and meditating about the intricate themes. We are talking about faith, conversion, and how vanity and intoxication with the world and wealth can ruin a soul. We follow two conversions, one expected, in a way, and the other completely unexpected, both complementing and paralleling each other. It's a study about Providence; it's also a study about the ways of Christian prudence and worldly craftiness. The ending shows us two tragedies, one in truth, the other in appearance only. And the final message echoes what Our Lord said on the mount: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be".

This novel is a slow burn, but it isn't as appealing as a work like "Come Rack! Come Rope!", and the hook comes only around the end of Part I. However, the payoff is superb if you're willing to keep reading. It's also spiritual food, in a sense, even if not an easy read like common spiritual writings, but the substance is there. I wish I had picked it up earlier at Lent's beginning.

Maybe this paragraph encapsulates the whole story: "The mind of an average man — above all when he is scarcely more than just a man — is all but infinitely complex. Yet if there's one thing that rises dominant and rigid out of the myriad motives and desires and faculties that twine and intertwine beneath, it is the power of an astounding self-deception".