BensonS

I first read Stella Benson when I was writing about witches for my DPhil – Living Alone is perhaps her best known novel, and is certainly well known in particular academic circles. I was so beguiled by her quirky worldview and witty writing style – and so I was delighted when Michael Walmer started reprinting her novels. He has done The Poor Man, I only just realise, though my copy is a paperback from the 1940s. The novel was originally published in 1922.

The poor man of the title is Edward Williams – a Briton in California, overlooked and ignored by all. He is self-pitying and feeble, and on the outskirts of a society made up of fashionable bohemian types who speak authoritatively and often stupidly about any manner of art. There is a glorious scene where he hosts a party at which each guest submits a poem anonymously – they are read in turn, mocked and disparaged by everyone except the poet in each case. The only one which meets with wide approval turns out to be a letter that had been submitted by mistake. And how could anyone resist this portrait of Rhoda:

Rhoda Romero never asked people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.

You either love this sort of thing or you do not – and I emphatically do. In all the novels I’ve read by Benson, she has that cutting authorial voice undermining all her characters – including her ‘hero’. Edward falls for a woman called Emily – self-assured and impressive, though not obviously besotted with Edward.

She doesn’t hang around when he has a sudden illness – unclear exactly what – which requires immediate operation on his brain and some time of recovery. Indeed, she heads off to China to be the assistant of a noted journalist. And, when recovered, Edward decides he must follow her there.

He doesn’t have any money (the ‘poor’ of the title has multiple applications), and so we enter perhaps my favourite section of The Poor Man: where Edward tries to raise money to travel to China. And the most glorious way in which he tries to do this is with ‘a company that seemed inexplicably anxious that young America should become acquainted with the works of Milton’ – albeit in prose because poetry is ‘unhealthy for children, unmanly for Our Boys’. I have been giggling about the ‘inexplicably anxious’ line most of the day. Just perfect.

Edward does eventually get to China, and so the adventure continues, but that’s probably enough of the plot for now. The main thing with Benson’s writing in the exuberant ridiculousness of the prose, particularly the way that everyone’s intentions and impressions of themselves are consistently proved to be absurd and false. I loved The Poor Man, and I think it’s a shame that such an astonishing tour de force ever fell out of print. Thank goodness Michael Walmer is restoring her works steadily, and fingers crossed he is going to bring us the next of her books soon…

You’re probably quite used, by now, to my taste for odd books.  My doctoral research into fantastic novels has disproportionately weighted my blog towards ladies turning into foxes, imaginary children coming to life, old ladies being invented by accident etc.  So perhaps you’ll forgive me if another title hoves into view, which somebody mentioned to me in relation to Lolly Willowes, since it’s also about witches.  Living Alone (1919) by Stella Benson, as the post title suggests, is that book.  Before I get any further, I should mention that it is free on Kindle…

For those of you who live in the UK you, like me, might be vaguely familiar with Stella Benson’s name.  I seem to have stumbled across it time and again in secondhand books – usually espying the ‘Benson’ bit, getting excited thinking it was ‘E.F.’, and realising it wasn’t.  For some reason I put Stella Benson in the category of Marie Corelli or Ethel M. Dell – prolific writers who were rather sub-par.  I bought Living Alone as a Dodo Press reprint (original editions being prohibitively expensive) but had no high expectations.  Turns out, while Living Alone ended up being a little too weird for my tastes, Stella Benson is neither a poor writer nor an especially prolific one.  According to a rather scattergun Wikipedia page, she only wrote a dozen or so books – including poetry, short stories, and travel essays alongside novels.

Living Alone was her third novel, and is set during the First World War, although published shortly afterwards.  A note at the beginning states ‘This is not a real book.  It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people.’  That should have set me up for the oddness which follows, but the first section of the book (easily my favourite part) is in the very real, very recognisable world of committees (in this case, one for War Savings).  The assembled characters include, indeed, ‘Three of the women were of the kind that has no life apart from committees.’  They’re the sort of people that E.M. Delafield is so funny about – people who take themselves incredibly seriously, and are unable to see themselves as others see them.  Rather than the insipid romantic drivel I had somehow associated with Stella Benson’s name, her prose is delightfully dry and witty – I would happily have read a whole novel devoted to the committee meeting.  But… a Stranger runs in, and hides under the table.

The Stranger turns out to be… a witch.  She doesn’t seem to have a name (although this wonderful exchange does take place:)

She grew very red.  “I say, I should be awfully pleased if you would call me Angela.”


It wasn’t her name, but she had noticed that something of this sort is always said when people become motherly and cry.
‘Angela’ lives in a house called Living Alone, a sort of guest-house for eccentrics and those of a reclusive bent.  It is thus perfect for witches.  And it has all manner of curious rules – for example:

She has a broomstick called Harold, and flies about on this.  At one point she has a battle with a German witch during an air raid.  There isn’t much of a linear plot, and it’s all rather a jumble of mad characters and curiosities.  Some are too unusual to inhabit your average novel (such as another inhabitant of Living Alone, Peony, who speaks with a thick Cockney accent, mostly about a boy she once found in the street) but others would feel at home in Delafield or von Arnim or even Stella’s namesake E.F. Benson.  (Were they related?  I don’t know… but Stella’s aunt was Red Pottage author Mary Cholmondeley).  Lady Arabel (who ‘was virtuous to the same extent as Achilles was invulnerable’) is one such character – she would fit alongside any agitated, eccentric Lady anywhere.

I wish I could explain the narrative to you, but it dash all over the place without any real logic.  The overall impression is more or less surreal.  Certain paragraphs give a sense of this surrealism – for example, this family group observed in an air raid shelter:

Although I loved excerpts like this, I think it offers the key to my ultimate dissatisfaction with Living Alone.  I think novelists are most successful (or at least most pleasing to me!) when they chose either to write of ordinary life in a surreal way (Barbara Comyns, Muriel Spark, Patrick Hamilton) or of surreal events in an ordinary way (my oft-cited Pantheon of Edith Olivier, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Frank Baker, David Garnett.)  By writing of the surreal surreally, Stella Benson makes Living Alone feel rather overdone.  I felt the same with the small amount I read of Douglas Adams, incidentally.  I loved the unbalanced dialogue and exaggerated scenarios when feet were otherwise firmly on the ground – while we were in the world of WW1 committees – but as soon as broomsticks were given names, I wanted the dial turned down.  The writing was still good, but I was getting altitude sickness myself.  (A rather more positive review, and one which seemed to understand the plot better than I did, can be read here.)

I do not mean to say, as one reviewer of Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child did, that I wish her to:

I do not wish her narrative to be sober.  I want it to be eccentric and unusual, but I do want it to be outside the world of fantasy.  Lucky for me, it seems Living Alone was a one-off, in terms of topic.  There are plenty of others out there that might well fulfil what I’m hoping to find, and I certainly shan’t leave Stella on the shelf next time I stumble across her… have any of you read anything by Stella Benson?

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Other books to get Stuck into:

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner – mentioned a couple times above, this 1920s novel about a spinster becoming a witch is never over the top, and, even without the twist, is an exceptionally good domestic novel.


The War Workers by E.M. Delafield – nothing fantastic about this, except the quality!  If talk of WW1 self-important committees got you interested, this satirical novel is perfect.