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Like The Woman in Black (2012) meets Coco(2017)

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Internet Archive - we are getting there...

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"Self-censorship was a practical necessity, but it was also part of the process of self-discovery, which makes it doubly unreasonable to accuse writers like Proust or James of failing to support the cause. Far more damage was done by the mutilations and incinerations of embarrassed readers. A diarist might turn his closet into a time-machine, but when it arrived in the future heirs and editors would be waiting to barricade the doors.

Some crude attempts at censorship are easily reversed - hims replaced with hers, and so on - but a great deal of the unread corpus was destroyed forever. Edmund Gosse and the librarian of the London Library organized Symond's papers into a pile in the library garden and set fire to them. Richard Burton's extensive research notes on 'pederasty' were probably destroyed by his widow. Minnie Benson's son Arthur left behind 'a packet of letters of very dangerous stuff' and another packet 'that had to be burned unopened', according to his brother Fred. Edward Lear's papers seem to have been selectively destroyed after his death by the man for whom Lear had harboured a 'twarted, frustrated, impossible love'.

To judge by the large number of known destructions (most presumably went unrecorded), at any moment in the 19th century someone, somewhere, was burning the papers of a homosexual relative. People who were almost certainly homosexual, like Thomas Gray or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, can now have no firm place in the record, especially since the standard of proof demanded of biographers is far stricter for homosexual than for heterosexual subjects. It is almost as if the surviving testimonies to forbidden love were written 2000 years rather than four or five generations ago. Ancient Greek literature and 19th-century confessional gay literature probably survive in approximately the same proportions."

From: 'Strangers. Homosexual love in the nineteenth century', by Graham Robb

Crying a little at the thought of all the queer records we've lost

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Thanks @eclare1000 this one is really creepy! Something about the deadpan delivery and the sheer darkness of the idea 😱 And to me, particularly creepy given that Fred's younger brother Hugh (who died in 1914) left specific instructions about making sure that he was really dead before his body was buried! Apparently he had been freaked out by reading another ghost story. These guys are so weird 😲

This week on Reading the Weird, AU Mycroft Holmes and the perils of reincarnation!

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Lit Hub: How Oscar Wilde Created a Queer, Mysterious Symbol in Green Carnations

In London in 1892, everybody—or, at least, everybody who was anybody—was talking about one thing: green carnations. Nobody was sure, exactly, what wearing a green carnation meant, or why it had suddenly become such a deliciously scandalous, dazzlingly fashionable sartorial statement. All anybody knew was that one day, at a London theater, someone important (stories differed as to who exactly it was) wore a green carnation, or maybe it had been a blue one (stories differed about that too).

Green carnations may have had something to do with sexual deviance. They may also have had something to do with the worship of art. And the whole thing somehow had to do with Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant playwright, novelist, and fame-courting dandy who—as he never tired of telling the press—put his talent into his work but put his genius into his life. Wilde lived his life as a work of art (or let people think he did). The affair of the green carnation gives us a little glimpse into how.

One story about what exactly happened comes from the painter Cecil Robertson, who recounts his version in his memoirs. According to Robertson, Wilde was keen to drum up publicity for his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. A character in the play, Cecil Graham—an elegant and witty dandy figure who rather resembled Wilde himself—was ostensibly going to wear a carnation onstage as part of his costume. And Wilde wanted life to resemble art.

“I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde allegedly told Robertson. “People will stare…and wonder. Then they will look round the house [theater] and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green”—a new and inexplicable fashion statement. And then, Wilde gleefully insisted, they would start to ask themselves that most vital of questions: “What on earth can it mean?”

Robertson evidently ventured to ask Wilde what, exactly, the green carnation did mean.

Wilde’s response? “Nothing whatsoever. But that is just what nobody will guess.”

Within days, carnations were everywhere. Just two weeks later, a newspaper covering the premiere of another play, this one by Théodore de Banville, reported a bizarre phenomenon: Wilde in the audience, surrounded by a “suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower,” two flowers that had previously been associated with Wilde and with fashionable, flamboyant, and sexually ambiguous young men more generally.

A little over a week after that, a London periodical published another piece on this mysterious carnation. It is a dialogue between Isabel, a young woman, and Billy, an even younger dandy—heavily implied to be gay—about the flower, which Billy has received as a gage d’amour (the French is tactfully untranslated) from a much older man. Billy shows off his flower to the curious Isabel with the attitude of studied nonchalance: “Oh, haven’t you seen them?…. Newest thing out. They water them with arsenic, you know, and it turns them green.”

The green carnation is something desperately exciting, understood not by ordinary society women but by Brummell-style dandies, shimmering with hauteur. It’s deliciously dangerous, perhaps even a tad wicked; the carnations are colored with poison, after all. It’s also, in every sense of the word, a little bit queer.

The green carnation’s appeal as a symbol of something esoteric persisted. Two years after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan, an anonymous author—later revealed to be the London music critic Robert Hichens—published The Green Carnation, a novel that appears to be very obviously based on Oscar Wilde’s real-life homosexual relationship with the much younger Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

The Green Carnation, though it is certainly a satirical exaggeration, can tell us much about this strange, new class of young men cropping up not only in London but also in Paris, Copenhagen, and so many other European capitals during the nineteenth century: the dandy. Inheritors of the mantle of Beau Brummell but far more flamboyant in their affect—John Bull would certainly have turned around to look at them in the street—these modern dandies didn’t just live their lives artistically.

These dandies believed—or at least made out that they believed—that the highest calling a person could have was a careful cultivation of the self: of clothing, sure, and of hairstyle, but also of gesture, of personality. And behind that belief lay a kind of bitter nihilism, as poisonous as arsenic itself. Nothing meant anything, unless you decided it did. A green carnation could signify homosexual desire, or aesthetic dandyism, or “nothing whatsoever,” depending on your mood and what you felt like conveying to the world that morning.

(Full article)

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Oh, weird ways of saying things, I wonder if that's EF Benson, I thought to myself. It is.

People who try to copy historical writing styles don't say enough weird stuff in them. I'm listening to a 1909 story about a ghost car right now, and the narrator just said he honked the car horn a bunch of times, but the way he phrased it was "I wrought a wild concerto on the hooter".

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EF Benson's Life of Alcibiades

From the introduction to 'The Life of Alcibiades' by EF Benson, 1928. Makes an interesting companion piece to The Last of the Wine.

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#canon: the time frank maddox sat by david blaize’s bedside for 12 hours and saved him with the power of love

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The Benson brothers in 1907. From left to right: Arthur Christopher "A. C.", Robert Hugh and Edward Frederic "E. F." (or Fred).

All the three brothers were writers. Arthur wrote the lyrics of the English patriotic song "Land of Hope and Glory", Hugh wrote the notorious Catholic novel Lord of the World and Fred wrote the popular series Mapp and Lucia and David Blaize. The Bensons authored multiple ghost stories as well.

All the three also had homosexual inclinations. In Fred's case, this often served as inspiration for a number of his novels. None of them married or had any children.

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Writing characters.....

I just wanted to share this passage on writing from Fred.  It feels strikingly modern and actually reminds me of an almost identical quote by the dramatist David Mamet.  I am always amazed at how vividly a character can be portrayed on the page with no access to their interior thoughts at all – Mr Rochester from ‘Jane Eyre’ springs to mind, and of course Ralph Lanyon from ‘The Charioteer’.

Indeed, there seemed to be as many methods as there were Masters, but as I emerged from this sea of fiction, I found that a certain fluid belief of mine had now been churned by study into the solid conviction that the only sure method of revealing your characters in fiction is by their direct speech, and the certainty of that outweighed all else that I had learned. No amount of discussion or comment or analysis on the part of the author will ever give any of his puppets the vividness and reality which the puppet himself can create when he talks. “Out of the heart the mouth speaketh” has no truer application than in the world of fiction. Sincerity, pomposity, simplicity, love, honour, rascality, and all the gamut of qualities, are far more trenchantly conveyed by direct speech than by action, paradoxical though it sounds, and though it may not be applicable to the world where conduct is supposed to be nine parts of life. Yet even action is better than mere analysis, for the more you only dissect, the more indubitably dead your subject becomes. A large school of modern fiction is, for this reason, quite unreadable, for its talented authors are under the melancholy delusion that half a dozen clinical reports from the waste-paper basket of a psycho-analyst, loosely strung together, are sufficient to give vitality to the corpses which they mistake for characters.

Mother, EF Benson, 1925

Trouble is, apart from some notable exceptions, by his own admission, he doesn't seem to take his own advice very often!  

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I love this letter so much, also particularly poignant because Benson himself said of it that "It was to be boyhood again before war was invented," in his memoir, Mother in 1925. She liked it too by all accounts 😊

I have just been reading David Blaize and think it lovely — the best school story yet written bar none. Here we have a continual stream of young officers to train as scouts and snipers and there has been a great run on David, as many as three copies of him on one course. Many of the lads who have come have few if any memories of anything but home and school as this is a young man's job. I think you would perhaps like to know the pleasure your book has given to these very fine and gallant lads who come to first army training school from the trenches.

A letter from WWI's Major Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard to E. F. Benson over David Blaize's popularity in the British army.

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The Life of Alcibiades

I always love this bit from David of Kings where Frank Maddox is musing on archaeology......

It definitely feels like a self-insert, and when I read EF Benson's Life of Alcibiades, it was rather like having Frank over to tea to explain all about ancient Athens to me. It's a cracking good story, very well told, and Fred's barely concealed crush on the man himself is delightful.

I have previously gone on about this book and its relevance to Mary Renault's works on my other blog but for Benson fans looking for an interesting read, I highly recommend it......

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Final Edition (1940) was E. F. Benson's last autobiography, finished just a few days before his death. The book's publisher notes "the gay courage that shines on every page."

Well, sir, I'll take your word for it!

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Cribbing as a metaphor for……..

I have been dipping into Isabel Quigly’s book ‘The Heirs of Tom Brown’, (thank you again @alovelywaytospendanevening) and I found this really interesting section on cribbing:

Alec Waugh in his book ‘Public School Life’  attempts a spirited if ultimately unsuccessful defence of cribbing, to me anyway.

But EF Benson takes no prisoners on this issue!  The violence meted out as a result of it is memorable to say the least……but the solution he provides is also most entertaining and satisfying.  The idea that cribbing might be a ‘more discussable’ moral problem, as Quigley puts it, is a really interesting concept, and I wonder if it points to something about the book at a deeper level.

A sense of fair play pervades the books – the whole saga of the tennis match in David of King’s is particularly good example.  Unequal power and its abuse does seem to be a topic close to his heart.

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The fight to keep obscure books available continues.....

For those of you who have been following the court case, here is an update and a link to the petition if you want to check it out. Fair enough to want to ensure writers get their royalties, but in some cases these books are not even available anywhere else due to publishers keeping them out of print.

And......if you are not familiar with the Internet Archive or Open Library, check it out. If you feel bad about reading books for free you can always give them a donation 😉

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Fred and his masterful put-downs

I just had to share this excerpt from the Brian Masters biography.....

Nicolson reviewed The Outbreak of War in a manner applauded by journalists who spoil for a fight.....Not content with being clever, Nicolson proceeded abjectly to apologise to Fred in private before the review appeared, as if to protect himself from any ill-feeling. He sent the following letter: My dear Benson, I have written a perfectly bloody review of your Great Occasions book which will appear in the Daily Telegraph on Friday. You will probably be amused, as you must feel yourself that the book is not among the more immortal of your works. But I hate being impertinent to the eminent behind their backs, even as I hate being rude to an old friend who has always been very kind to me. So I write to apologise in advance, and to assure you that I should never have reviewed the book at all had I not felt that you are impervious to such abuse.  I expect you will forgive me all the same. As this was a florid example of the kind of hypocrisy he had spent his life mocking, Fred might well have exploded. But he did not. Instead, he sent a note of devastating restraint: I have now read the gem you refer to in the Daily Telegraph of some day last week, and agree with you: very regrettable. But why apologise if you think it will only amuse me? I don’t quite understand, but of course I fully accept your apology, and there is the end of the matter. This neat and dignified rejoinder stung Nicolson, who obviously felt guilty, into a lengthy further excuse. Fred also mis-spelt Nicolson’s name as ‘Nicholson’, a point upon which the ambitious career man was particularly touchy, as Fred probably knew all too well. I really mind having hurt your feelings [Nicolson wrote]. It has given me a sore place inside for three days ... I am not a shit and you have made me feel like one. You may be right. In that case it will be of some satisfaction to you to feel that your reproof has gone home like a lance . . . But seriously I think you have hurt my feelings far more than I can possibly have hurt yours.

"The Life of EF Benson" Brian Masters, 1991

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Mapp and Lucia Podcasts

Well, well, well, look what I found on the dusty shelves of the Internet Archive while I was looking for something else.......

Paul Bines' Radio Tilling podcast series was short-lived but contains some very interesting discussion! Free on the Internet Archive, I don't think you need an account, but anyway, set one up, it's free:

Episode 2: Author Guy Fraser-Sampson talks about how he became interested in EF Benson, and how he was inspired to write a new novel for the 'Mapp and Lucia' series, 'Major Benjy'

This is particularly interesting for the discussion about the books which I hadn't realised spanned nearly twenty years. They discuss how the series evolved and ultimately became the showcase for the iconic duo we know today. Plus lots of insights into the difficulties of publishing and the numerous sequels and 'fan' novels that Mapp and Lucia spawned over the years.

Episode 4: Alistair Kerr talks about the LWT/Channel 4 TC adaptation of 'Mapp & Lucia', first broadcast in 1985.

Some very interesting discussions on the creation of the series, the casting and locations, and I will be making full use of this information when I get round to my pilgrimage to Rye/Tilling to visit Lamb House.