Skating on thin ice
Francis King
he problem faced by any biographer of E.F. (Fred) Benson is that the life was the writing, and that the writing for the first three-quarters of the life was mostly tosh.
There are parallels here with a far superior novelist, L.P. Hartley, who knew Benson, albeit merely as an acquaintance, and to whom similarly little happened. Both men, their moustaches bristling in horror at any effeminacy or camp, would retreat from the assiduously cultivated society of women of title in England to the discreetly cultivated society of men of the working classes in Italy. (In one of the poems which Benson wrote while staying with Lady Radnor in Venice, he rhapsodic- ally described such men as 'nude white pillars of manhood beneath the night-. Elsewhere he wrote of them: 'Pleasure sanctified all they did; they gave it and took it, and slept it off, and sought it again').' Both novelists had menservants who also became close confidants and friends. Both, when not writing, had an athletic pursuit: rowing for Hartley, skating for Benson. The question inevitably posed by such discretion is Did he or didn't he?' In Hartley's case the answer is an unequivocal 'Yes, he did.' In Benson's it can only be an equivocal 'Well, probably.' For years he and Somerset Maugham paid the rent of the Capri villa inhabited throughout the year CI came for lunch and stayed for life') by the homosexual dilettante John Elling- ham Brooks. Briefly the husband and subsequently the pensioner of the lesbian painter Romaine Brooks, Brooks dedicated his life mostly to pleasure, but from time to time to the labour of attempting to produce flawless translations of the sonnets of Heredia. It seems unlikely that Benson would live in such proximity to Brooks if he did not also share his lifestyle. In addition, there were close friendships with a number of young men in England — among them Francis Yeats-Brown, author of the best- selling The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
Where so much is surmise, it is difficult
to give either an extended or a coherent account of Benson's personal life; and there is little to his public life other than the sensation created by the publication, when he was only 25, of his now totally unreadable Dodo, the eponymous charac- ter of which was based on Margot Asquith; the wartime years of producing anti-Ger- man propaganda for what might have been called the Ministry of Misinformation; and the unexpected honour of being invited to become Mayor of Rye, the 'Tilling' of his deservedly still popular Lucia and Mapp novels, in his old age.
Because of this dearth of things to write about Benson, Masters has included in his book a great deal about the whole Benson clan. Their extraordinary story has already been told twice, by Betty Aslcwith in her admirably succinct Two Victorian Families, and by David Williams in his Genesis and Exodus; but it it is worth telling yet again when it is adorned with so much insight, sympathy and wit.
Benson's father, who became in turn
headmaster of Wellington, Chancellor and Canon of Lincoln, Bishop of Truro and Archbishop of Canterbury, forcefully betrothed himself to poor little Mary Sidg- wick when she was only 11. One of those men, fortunately more common in Victori- an times than in ours, who make them- selves in the image of the sternly autocratic God of whom they believe that they are vicars on earth, Benson simultaneously loved his family, demanded their love, and was tireless in his efforts to improve their minds and spirits. After his premature death, Mary, by then known as 'Ben', found solace with Lucy Tait, daughter of a previ- ous Archbishop of Canterbury, with whom she shared the family double bed. Maggie Benson, a brilliant blue-stocking, became literally insane with jealousy over her mother's liaison, and spent her last years under restraint. Arthur (A.C.) Benson, as prolific an author as Fred and, during their lifetimes, an even more successful one — it was he who wrote the words for 'Land of Hope and Glory' — suffered from clinical depression so crippling that, extraordinary for a Benson, he was no longer able to put pen to paper during an attack. Robert Hugh Benson, who rose to the rank of Monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church and who wrote as profusely and indiscrimi- nately as his two brothers, became emotionally involved with the disreputable and destructive Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo). Rolfe eventually caricatured Hugh as the Reverend Bobugo Bonsen in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole; and Hugh then retaliated by portraying Rolfe as the diabolical Enid in his posthumously pub- lished Initiation. (Masters omits mention of this).
Of the four siblings — a brother died at the age of 19 — Fred was both the least neurotic and the most happy. It was he, therefore, to whom the others looked when things went disastrously awry in their lives. Like his mother, he was one of those people whose superficial bonhomie is like a fire of twigs crackling on a granite slab; but his lack of deep emotion — Arthur once remarked of him that he tad never lived with life, only stayed with it or lunched with it' was precisely what made him so effec- tive in dealing with family crises. Masters demonstrates how sensibly and compas- sionately he comforted now his mother in her bereavement, now Maggie in her mad- ness and now Arthur in his depressions.
Masters, in one of those felicitous com- ments in which his book abounds, writes that 'Arthur was inclined to look for the meaning of life, Fred for its comedy.' The two men had little in common, other than the extraordinary fluency which enabled them to complete a book in two or three weeks. Of Fred, David Williams has written: 'His fiction aimed low and hit the target.' But, by one of those frequent and happy ironies of literature, his 'Tilling' novels have ensured that his reputation has outlived that of many a 'serious' contempo- rary, such as Hugh Walpole, who despised him for his commercial triviality.
In Desirable Residences Jack Adrian has collected together 27 E.F. Benson stories previously published only in magazines. The majority of these are merely blobs of creme patisserie left over from the confec- tions served up by Benson to the customers of the lucrative tea-room of his art; but there are at least six gems — most notably a charateristically eerie spook story, 'Sea Mist', and a lovely account of yet another summer intrigue at Tilling.
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