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E.F. Benson’s artefacts

I did not expect to find much physical evidence of Fred’s time at Lamb House, especially since he never owned it and the contents were more or less cleared out by relatives after his death.  The room I would have loved to have seen, the 'Garden Room', which contained his beloved piano, was bombed to smithereens in 1940 (thankfully after his death). This lovely garden covers part of that site (the wisteria is where the bay window would have been):

But I do think Fred the archaeologist would have been amused to know which objects found their way into the glass cases inside:

The calling card holder (which no doubt in his heyday would have been bulging) contained ‘The Medallion of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780 – 1839)’.  I immediately think of his dear friend Francis Yeats Brown, author of the Bengal Lancer, or even of Fred’s visit to India.  But was it a treasured keepsake with some kind of special meaning he kept with him always, or a trinket he picked up randomly and forgot about?

As for the cigarette case, engraved with his nickname ‘Dodo’ – had it been stuffed out of sight in a drawer somewhere, an embarrassing reminder of the novel which had been both a blessing and a curse to him?  Or was it easily found because it was in constant use?

In the telephone room there used to be a large bookcase containing all of Fred’s first editions.  The bookcase remains, but not the first editions.  Instead, it is stuffed full of cheap old copies of Fred’s books. Still there was something hugely satisfying about gazing on this shelf where the David Blaize trilogy nestles alongside Dodo, and his book on English Figure Skating, that other great passion of his.

Fred’s beloved dog Taffy has a more lasting memorial in the garden next to some older pet headstones.  Fred’s love affair with the town of Rye is well documented, but for my final instalment I will cover the church, host to the ‘Benson windows’, which are so remarkable they need a post all of their own.

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When I visited Lamb House the sexual orientation of its literary inhabitants (chiefly Henry James and EF Benson) was conspicuous by its absence......

On my way out, however, I spotted a small sticker with a QR code in the corner of the ticket office window inviting me to try a 'queer audio trail of Rye', named, ironically enough, 'Against our vanishing'.

You do not need to be in Rye, or have visited at all, to enjoy this podcast by Diarmuid Hester and David Bramwell, which features some interesting reflections on Fred's writing, commentary on the famous gay inhabitants of Rye, interviews with current residents on Rye's history and 'queer sensibility', and great gossip on the rival EF Benson societies and what they disagree on!

I will be posting in more depth about my findings on Fred over at @fredbensonenthusiast

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Henry James and the Bensons at Lamb House

In her book ‘EF Benson and his family and friends,’ Gwen Watkins points out that Fred’s rather rose-tinted version of his first meeting with Henry James wasn’t quite all it seemed.  He claims that he was invited down to Lamb House in the Summer of 1900.  It turns out he did the inviting, as Henry James proclaimed in an exasperated letter to a friend:

Dodo Benson has invited himself and another young man for the weekend!

Fred was after all only the annoying younger brother of his actual friend Arthur. Still, James replied indulgently thus:

I love the ‘Dear “Fred” Benson and companion’!  If it is possible to write a letter through gritted teeth, then surely this is the proof.  I note that he is anxious to emphasise that he will be ‘alone’, perhaps because he did not want Fred meeting his serious literary friends. Fred here reminds me of a certain other cheeky young man.

Fred writes amusingly in ‘Final Edition’ of the feedback he had received from James on the unpublished 'Dodo' several years before:

He wrote acknowledging the safe receipt of a sheaf of ill-written text, saying that he had not realised that it was so substantial a work....... He wrote me two or three long and kindly and brilliantly evasive letters about it. He called it “lively,” he called himself “‘corrosively critical” though he made no criticism, except that he did not find it as “ferociously literary” as his taste demanded. “Hew out a style,” he said; “it is by style we are saved,” and I drew the obvious conclusion.

Sixteen years later, on Henry James’ death, Fred had the opportunity to move in himself.  In ‘Final Edition’, he paints a picture of a series of fortunate coincidences leading to his residency there.  We know it was a little more rocky than that, especially his attempts to secure George Plank as a house-mate.

Perhaps the most eccentric arrangement followed in 1922-25, when Fred and older brother Arthur leased the property jointly.  Apart from a period of time when Fred took care of Arthur while he was suffering from depression, they made every effort to ensure they would see as little of each other as possible:

[Arthur] very naturally wanted sole occupation for himself and his friends in his vacations......All the morning, strictly undisturbed, he wrote his letters or his diary. In the afternoon he and his friend drove or walked or bicycled, timed to be back for the sacred hours from tea till dinner. For a few days at Christmas and possibly at Easter, I stayed with him at his invitation where lately I had been host helping him, as best I could, to get through the heavy days.

In 1925, Arthur's death left Fred in sole possession of the lease, ready to become a pillar of the Rye community.

More on that soon...........

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Remembering Mapp and Lucia 40 years on – pictures & memories of an iconic tv series

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Thank you so much for sharing this, sounds like it was fun! I like Goldhill in anecdote mode, I enjoyed reading his afterword to his other book on the Bensons where he talked about his own experiences of Kings and meeting one of Arthur's 'boyfriends'! The amount of research he must have done is exhausting even to think about! It occurs to me that by naming his David Blaize sequel 'David of King's' Fred was making a statement that would be clearly understood at least in some circles 🤔

I am reading 'Our Families Affairs' and hope there might be a bit of bonus material here, especially on Eustace Miles, but I am also very tempted to read the Cambridge novels - let me know if you get there first!

Hello, asking for a friend! You mentioned that you had read the latest Simon Goldhill about H staircase, and been to the book launch, I would love to hear more. Were there any little gems from Goldhill? Any highlights from the book?

Of course! So most of what was discussed were anecdotes from the book that were expanded on, mainly focusing on just how normalised being gay at King's was (but not at any of the other colleges). He mentioned one anecdote about someone from Trinity being mistaken for someone from King's because he was gay.

The talk was held with another King's alumni who recounted his experiences from King's in the 90s and said that when about a third of everyone in that college was queer, which was interesting to see how the tradition continued.

A few of the anecdotes he discussed were just how open and candid everyone was about their queerness to give argument that King's was one of the first proto-queer communities.

Goldhill discussed Arthur Benson (of course) and while discussing his fire and brimstone views on sexuality, revealed that he has read every single one of Arthur's diary entries.

He also found the casual hook-up culture at King's quite fun and discussed the journals Keynes kept - one recording who he hooked up with and another journal recording a secret code of what they did together (no one has managed to decode it though!). There was also discussion of the relationship between students, prospective students, and dons and the dynamics between them (that we would 100% take issue with today). One of the racier stories: one of the dons was caught cottaging in Bristol and through a series of well connections, managed to get away with no charges. When he returned to King's, he walked into the first dinner to a hushed silence only for the silence to be broken by another don basically saying 'welcome back, don't worry about it, it could have happened to any one of us!' and then silence broke and everything carried on as normal.

This sounds so mundane, but one of the highlights for me was that he told a story about one of the dons who was married and his wife actually lived on the university grounds but in separate rooms and barely spent time together. It was an unusual marriage for a host of reasons, but he said that there were no children and the whole crowd (full of academics) gave a knowing laugh. It was so refreshing to see a bunch of academics aware of the tell tale signs that someone was gay, rather than brush it off.

I will say that the book and the discussion/agreement among King's alumni very much how I view David of King's and The Inheritor and has pushed up The Babe, B.A. on my TBR!

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Sex education..........Victorian Style

Apologies for the long excerpt - this is interesting background to David Blaize, describing an incident at Fred's prep school which made a big impact at the time. For him the 'conspiracy of silence' around the issue of boys' sexuality was unforgiveable.

Our Family Affairs, E.F. Benson, 1920

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I send you my love, if I may make so bold...

This is the story of the whirlwind 'affair' between EF Benson and George Wolfe Plank, as told in Dominic Janes’ intriguing 2017 essay, Early twentieth-century Vogue, George Wolfe Plank and the ‘Freaks of Mayfair’

Plank encountered Fred not long after moving to England from the US, writing in February 1915 to ask if he might become better acquainted with him, with the proviso that he was ‘not trying to force an acquaintanceship upon you.’  He need not have worried:

Plank had embarked on an intense correspondence with Mary Benson [Fred’s mother], who wrote to him on 28 March 1915 to say how pleased she was that he had got to know her son Fred, especially since ‘you understand him so well’.

By 1916 he is collaborating with Fred as his illustrator:

A letter of Plank to his sister Amy of 11 February 1916 includes mention of a set of drawings that he had recently made for Benson. These showed ‘snobs, climbers, scandalmongers, High-Church fiends, and the usual lot of asses that infest any great city. My 7 drawings are in black and white and rather cruel in their satire but oh, such fun!’ He and Benson, we hear, giggled over them. Early in that year, Plank wrote to Amy that he was seeing Benson ‘all the time’ in London and would be ‘lost without him'.

One clue to the nature of their relationship may be that Fred refers to him but does not name him in his memoirs, which is unusual for him:

Following Henry James’ death in February 1916, Lamb House ‘was let to an American lady, and she, being obliged to winter in the south, left her housekeeper there, and asked a very intimate friend of mine to occupy it if he wished for a month or so, and he in turn asked me to share his tenancy’. Benson also notes that ‘Lamb House began faintly to assume a home-like aspect, for coming back [from London] on Friday afternoon I knew I would find my friend there. He was of neutral nationality, an artist of whimsical and imaginative work’.  It seems clear, therefore, that this unnamed artist was Plank and that it was he who had brought Benson into residence at Rye.

We are told that Fred

had come up with a plan to rent the place on a longer-term basis.  Amy [Plank’s sister] was told that ‘I am so much in love with the house and garden, with the village and all the country about that I feel like staying here forever and ever.’  ......Plank, it seems, was in love with England, with Lamb House and, implicitly with Benson.....he tells Amy, ‘Spring is here with all its magic, and there is an intimacy and gentleness and luxuriousness in England at this season that is beyond belief.’ The house is like ‘one happy family’ and he felt ‘so lucky to be in the country in this lovely house with a good friend.'

But it was not to be.  Practical issues seemed to get in the way:

By 27 September, Plank is reporting that Benson wants to take Lamb House permanently: ‘He wants the house but said he wouldn’t take it unless I went there with him’. Plank then relates his concerns that he could not afford to pay his part of the expenses that this would involve and that Benson was becoming very stressed.  Later still Mary Benson was writing, perhaps significantly, to Plank’s London address and complaining that Plank had ceased to write to her.  Nevertheless, through 1917 and 1918 affectionate letters were being sent by Benson to Plank, such as the aforementioned example which concluded, ‘I send you my love, if I may make so bold’.

Worse still, the stress of the situation drove them further apart.  Fred became depressed, and George became bored and irritated with him, complaining of his love of long walks ‘even in bad weather’.  After a brief Summer of respite in Cley beach in Norfolk where they bathed and ‘baked’ naked, the break came soon after.  George complained to his sister in 1921 that:

Benson had become peculiarly religious and snobbish. He had become given to ‘unbalanced views about things and people’ and, pretending to be an aristocrat, was wont to rail against the lower classes. Consequently, Plank, we read, planned to give him ‘a pretty wide berth’ in London.....

It is poignant to imagine Fred’s state of mind.   He had recently lost his sister, younger brother and mother within a few short years, and it would appear that his plans to set up a permanent home with a companion he clearly adored did not come to fruition.

As always when it comes to Fred there are more questions than answers......

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In preparation for my trip to Rye (of which Tilling is the fictional version), I have been reading this book, available free on the Internet Archive. It's well worth worth a read for all kinds of reasons, not least a wealth of detail about Fred, from the people who knew and loved him towards the end of his life, and an astonishing array of social connections.

Here's a typical little gem:

......almost every morning when he got up Mr Benson would go downstairs and play the tune 'An English Country Garden' on the piano, which was a sort of signal that he was ready for breakfast.

So, not an annoying person at all 😉 It's a great bit of oral history, and fills in some interesting gaps in his own memoirs.

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Fred Benson on his father.....

Our Family Affairs, E.F. Benson, 1920

This seems to owe a great deal to Edmund Gosse's ground-breaking autobiography 'Father and Son', published anonymously 13 years earlier. We know Fred greatly admired his honest yet tender appraisal of his father.

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Article and short video promoting the new book by Simon Goldhill 'Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History'.

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Postscript! @alovelywaytospendanevening I should have looked at Our Family Affairs first! These are my favourite bits:

He had a set of four rooms (the first being a bathroom) which were all thrown open to anybody, and if you had said you wanted a bath in the middle of the party, O.B. would certainly have said, "Ha, ha ! awfully jolly," have given you a sponge and a towel and have come in to help.

And this summing up:

His extraordinary vitality, his serene imperviousness to hostility, his abandoned youthfulness were the ingredients which made him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at him, many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely remained the most outstanding and prominent personality in Cambridge. Had he had a little more wisdom to leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a little more principled belief to give ballast to his friskiness, he would have been as essentially great as he was superficially grotesque.

The portrait of A.G. feels tame by comparison....

Hello there, I have just been reading about the theory that 'A.G.' in David Blaize of King's is based on Oscar Browning. I can sort of see it but not sure if it is that simple. Anyway, I wondered if you had any thoughts on it?

Hey,

It's quite possible this is true. Just look at the Dodo/Margot Asquith case. This wasn't the first time Benson created a character based on a famous person, and it probably wasn’t the last. Of course, this doesn't mean that A.G. is exactly what Browning was; it's more of a persona thing. Browning was also a friend of Henry Sidgwick, Benson's dear uncle.

I had never heard of Browning before reading David of King's, so I am certainly grateful to Ol’ Fred for introducing me to these now-forgotten Victorian/Edwardian figures!

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Oh yes, I'd completely forgotten the Dodo connection! So yes probably a fair assumption then. I'd never heard of him either and what an intriguing character he is! I was actually drafting a little post about uncle Henry and his role in founding Newnham College so I was pretty gobsmacked to find that OB had also had a major role in supporting women's education through his connection with Sidgwick and Newnham - not that he seems to have got much credit for it 😭

Hello there, I have just been reading about the theory that 'A.G.' in David Blaize of King's is based on Oscar Browning. I can sort of see it but not sure if it is that simple. Anyway, I wondered if you had any thoughts on it?

Hey,

It's quite possible this is true. Just look at the Dodo/Margot Asquith case. This wasn't the first time Benson created a character based on a famous person, and it probably wasn’t the last. Of course, this doesn't mean that A.G. is exactly what Browning was; it's more of a persona thing. Browning was also a friend of Henry Sidgwick, Benson's dear uncle.

I had never heard of Browning before reading David of King's, so I am certainly grateful to Ol’ Fred for introducing me to these now-forgotten Victorian/Edwardian figures!

[fredbensonenthusiast]

Isn't this a great title? Don't be put off by the formality and academic language, this is an interesting and fun piece that suggests that E.F. Benson was doing something new with David Blaize,

David Blaize is subversive, and sets out to clarify some of these questions, even though it appears to be as reticent as its mid-nineteenth century school story counterpart in its evasions on the subject of expressions of affection in male friendship. It does offer an alternative reading position and model of masculinity which resists hegemonic masculinity by including 'feminine' values in its version of masculinity.

Full article here

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No need for his fatherly prussic acid.....Fred on the journalist who got 'The Well of Loneliness' banned.

In 1932, Fred took a brief break from bemoaning the 'sexual perversion' of post WWI literature to fiercely defend the honour and literary credibility of his friend Radclyffe Hall, author of 'The Well of Loneliness'.

..... it formed the main motif in the wittiest and most amusing farce of the decade, Mr. Compton Mackenzie’s 'Extraordinary Women'. In the same year the topic appeared, no longer pour rire, but as the basis of a serious study, in Miss Radclyffe Hall's 'The Well of Loneliness'. The book had the respectful reception that it deserved as an able and sincere piece of work, it was spoken of with high commendation in so responsible a journal as 'The Times Literary Supplement,'

He goes on to describe the beginnings of the extraordinary campaign that was waged against the book:

..... a certain journalist (the time of the year being the "silly season of early August) started a crusading campaign against it. We must, of course, credit him with being absolutely honest and conscientious in his intentions; the subject of the book genuinely shocked him, and he assured his readers that he would prefer to put a phial of prussic acid into a girl’s hands than let her read it. It seemed to him most dangerous in tendency, and likely to corrupt the soul of a normal girl. Better the prussic acid which would only kill her body. So violent was the agitation that he raised that the Home Secretary intervened and, after a trial before a police-magistrate, in which witnesses who wished to speak on behalf of the book were not given a hearing, the order was made that it should be withdrawn from circulation, and the appeal against this decision failed.

Next he quotes 'the science' of the time which is echoed Hall's own book:

It is an admitted fact that many, if not most young girls and boys alike are first physically attracted by those of their own sex: the schwarms between girls, the school-friendships of boys are the awakenings of their uncomprehended passions, and must be regarded as normal not abnormal. Then with the maturity of their adolescence, the enormous percentage of these develop on normal, heterosexual lines, but there is a time when the emotional sex of both is in the balance: a girl may under a very strong stimulus, which puts homosexuality before her in an alluring and attractive light, be inclined over to that side, and her balance be permanently upset.

And finally he points out that given that it is "one of the saddest books in the world, painting, as it does, in the most convincing colours the misery and loneliness, the sense of being a pariah that awaits the unfortunate women of this type",

...it would be far more likely to make any girl who had wavering inclinations, to turn with a mixture of horror and, it is to be hoped, pity, from the curse of such a predisposition. The book is its own antidote against the poison it was supposed to contain: it is impossible to imagine a stronger deterrent. Indeed, if the journalist mentioned above wanted to save any girl from what he thought might be the effect of its perusal, there was no need for his fatherly prussic acid: the perusal of the book itself would produce the desired effect.

'As We Are: a modern revue,' EF Benson, 1932

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The Spectator 'Obituary'

Fred died on the 29th February, so we can only properly commemorate the anniversary of his death every 4 years, which seems strangely fitting. The 22nd anniversary of his death will be in 2028. Meanwhile, I didn't want to wait to share this affectionate and poignant tribute from the Spectator magazine.

Apologies for the quality - I had to screenshot it through a letterbox!

The Spectator, 8th March 1940

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How medical literature could help or hurt queer people of the past

Although studies of homosexuality in the end of the 19th and early 20th century gave rise to many hurtful stereotypes and ridiculous myths, they could be helpful for queer people or their families. 

For example, Magnus Hirschfeld recalled a case of two elderly parents whose son was a homosexual. The father was a doctor and at first he got upset. His colleagues could only offer useless advice. Then the man read literature on homosexuality, came to terms with the fact that his son was born this way, and decided that there was nothing wrong about it.

Furthermore, he blessed his son’s union with another man (who came from a poor family), and both parents accepted the partner. Before his death the father made sure to say goodbye to “his two children”.

For gay men and lesbians themselves studies of homosexuality were a reassurance first of all. Many of them have lived for years with the belief that they were alone in their “wrong tendencies” (like one priest who, according to Havelock Ellis, had lived with this belief for 64 years), so it was a relief to know that there were other people like them. 

Interestingly, those who had never read about homosexuality weren’t always the miserable lot. Some didn’t see their sexuality as an anomaly and easily accepted it or even thought that they were better than heterosexual peers.

And while literature could bring some relief, most of the studies were hardly favourable. It is no wonder then that queer people often got depressed after reading about their “condition”. One man read Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and, as the author himself wrote, came to the conclusion that his sexuality was abnormal. This led to intense anxiety and fears of getting caught. The man tried to avoid other men altogether, but ended up with neurasthenia and needed medical help. Another young man in a similar situation tried to kill himself.

Finally, medical studies caused rebellion in certain people. Ellis wrote of a Ms. M who had lived at peace with her sexuality for 28 years until she read Krafft-Ebing and learned that homosexuality was “unnatural” and was condemned in society. She could not agree with this and said she wanted “to help to bring light on the subject and to lift the shadow from other lives”:

“I emphatically protest against the uselessness and the inhumanity of attempts to ‘cure’ inverts. I am quite sure they have [the] perfect right to live in freedom and happiness as long as they live unselfish lives. One must bear in mind that it is the soul that needs to be satisfied, and not merely the senses.”

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Looks like you have an admirer 💗

Well it's Valentine's day, so let's have Francis Yeats-Brown's description of Fred, whom he clearly adores.

and as we know the feeling was mutal

Excerpt courtesy of Geoffrey Palmer's Biography of Fred 'As He Was', and you can find the original diary entry in John Evelyn Wrench's biography of Francis Yeats Brown, which also includes some interesting correspondence with TE Lawrence.