11/18/21, 1:09 PM No sex please, we’re Bensons - TLS
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Social & cultural studies
No sex please, we’re Bensons
A. N. Wilson on approaching changing ideas of love and religion through a
‘very unmarried’ family
By A. N. Wilson
November 11, 2016 Read this issue
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Arthur,
Arthur, Hugh
Hugh and
and Fred
Fred Benson;
Benson; from
from A
A Very
Very Queer
Queer Family
Family Indeed
Indeed
IN THIS REVIEW
A VERY QUEER FAMILY INDEED
Sex, religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain
344pp. University of Chicago Press.
Simon Goldhill
My much-read omnibus edition of E. F. (Fred) Benson’s most famous novels is
adorned with the words “‘We will pay anything for Lucia books’ – Noël Coward,
Gertrude Lawrence, Nancy Mitford, W. H. Auden”. The roll-call sends out
inevitable messages, but the appeal of the Mapp and Lucia stories is clearly not
limited to camp audiences before the Second World War. Witness two highly
successful television adaptations of the rivalry between Mapp and Lucia, in the
little town of Tilling – a scarcely disguised version of Rye. Mallards, the most
beautiful house in the town which Mapp is forced through poverty to concede to
her arch-rival Lucia, is Lamb House, which Fred Benson inhabited after the
Master – his hero and mentor Henry James – had quit it. A friend who recently
visited the place in order to address the local Benson appreciation society told me
that he had devoted a small part of his talk to Henry James, but that this had not
gone down too well. The Benson fans did not wish to waste time on the author of
The Golden Bowl, when they could be reliving their delight in Dodo: A detail of
the day (1893), The Luck of the Vails (1901), or David Blaize (1916) – perhaps the
best novel ever written about public school homosexuality.
Fred Benson was one of six children born to Edward White “E. W.” Benson,
Archbishop of Canterbury, 1883–96, and his wife Mary “Minnie” Sidgwick Benson.
The great thing about being a Benson fan is that the siblings left behind so many
volumes to cherish. Fred wrote dozens of novels. His brother, Monsignor (Robert)
Hugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, was the author of thrilling recusant tales
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such as Come Rack! Come Rope! (1912). And my own favourite, A. C. (Arthur
Christopher) Benson – lyricist of “Land of Hope and Glory” – was one of the most
prolific, as well as the sharpest and funniest, diarists in the language. In the Pepys
Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Arthur was Master from 1915 to
1925, there are 180 volumes of the diary, largely unpublished. Very few people
have read them in their entirety, but one is Simon Goldhill, author of the present
study, and Professor of Greek at Cambridge.
Extracts from A. C. Benson’s diaries were published by his old pupil Percy
Lubbock (1927); and more recently by David Newsome under the title On the Edge
of Paradise (1980). Arthur suffered from periodic breakdowns, admitting himself
to Fulbourn Mental Hospital when at his most anguished. He was never as mad as
their sister Maggie, a distinguished Egyptologist who died in the asylum,
absolutely raving. Though much of Arthur’s diary is devoted to his depressions,
and to his unfulfilled yearnings for boys and young men, they are a truly
wonderful celebration of life. Richly comic, always observant. Who can forget the
picture of G. K. Chesterton, asked to dinner in college? He “sweated so that when
he shook hands and held his cigar downwards, the sweat ran down and hissed at
the point”. The judgements are astute, as when Randall Davidson became
Archbishop of Canterbury – “That he should be the chief exponent of the religion
of Jesus of Nazareth is strange. Randall would have listened to Xt politely, but
without interest, and then would have gone back to the Sadducees and arranged
a little matter of legislation”. Or of his brother Hugh – and how true this is, not
only of Hugh Benson but of most deeply religious people – “he is like a child, a
transcendent egotist and utterly unaware of it”.
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For Goldhill, though, the task of reading through Arthur’s diary was “long and
painful . . . . The more he wrote about his depression, the more gloomy I became
(though I had other reasons to feel miserable too, that summer)”. You seldom get
the sense, in this book, that two of the Bensons were (intentionally) very funny
writers. One wonders whether those “other reasons” clouded Goldhill’s
judgement of Arthur. I have only read A. C. Benson in print – his superb Life of his
father the Archbishop, his wonderfully vapid semi-autobiographies and
meditations such as The Upton Letters (1908), and the diary extracts already
mentioned. He was also the first editor of Queen Victoria’s letters. For me, Arthur
is a cheering author. He confronted his demons. And, as Simon Goldhill
acknowledges, he had some truly Jamesian insights into life. Even in that prolix
age, few of their contemporaries wrote quite so fluently or so compulsively.
Goldhill amusingly reminds us that Arthur, who could sometimes write as many
as eighty pages a day in his diary, could not stop recording, even as life ebbed
away. “I have just woken up with a terrible pain in my left arm. I hope I die with
dignity like Dr Arnold.” Which he then did. Fred, likewise, was busy dictating his -
latest lightweight camp comedy, even from his hospital bed in 1940.
The more prolific the Bensons became, the more they concealed, both of
themselves, and of those baffling creatures their parents. One of Goldhill’s best
sentences is “The self is not to be given away”. Yet he is determined, in this rich
Bensonian stew of a book, to gouge out the Benson selves, and he takes the view,
common enough since Freud, that the best way of exploring these essentially
sexless creatures is to explore their sexuality. One sees why he wants to do this,
since, at some stage along the road of Benson addiction, the fan recognizes that
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part of their fascination is that they all, in a very Jamesian way, don’t write about
sex, while writing about it all the time. (Only David Blaize is a more obviously
sexual work.) What is clear is that the siblings did not actually have sex.“No Sex
Please, We’re Bensons” would have been an alternative title for Professor
Goldhill’s study. Fred, one imagines, was like Georgie in the Mapp and Lucia
books. Arthur, for all his obsessions with a string of boys, was horrified by the
idea of bodily expression – as was Henry James himself. Martin, the boy martyr, as
it were, of the tribe, died aged sixteen of meningitis and was canonized by the
parents. Maggie had close female relationships but was not fully lesbian. Nelly,
the other sister, threw herself into good works and contracted diphtheria from
the poor children among whom she taught. Hugh, having embraced celibacy as
an Anglican monk, became a Roman Catholic to make the celibacy even surer,
and Arthur was Arthur. Not only were they unmarried; they were what John
Betjeman used to call very unmarried, which probably justifies Goldhill’s title.
This is not a biography. Goldhill, indeed, very early in his search, announces, “I
find biography a ludicrous genre”. Rather, having steeped himself in the Bensons
and their works, he produces a reflection on the changing attitudes to sex, and to
God (and a few other things too, but chiefly those two), during the protagonists’
lifetimes. “My story in this book has been how a narrative of change across the
period from 1850 to 1940 – in writing, sexuality, and religion – can be traced
through the Benson family’s history, not because they are normal and thus
exemplary but because they are queer and yet paradigmatic.”
There was nothing queer about Archbishop Benson, as far as one can tell. In
literary history, he is perhaps best known as the man who, one evening over
dinner, told Henry James the anecdote which became The Turn of the Screw.
That in itself speaks volumes – given the material covered by Goldhill’s book – of
childhood demons, buried sexuality, and innocence, lost or invented. The
Archbishop was a vigorous, manly figure, highly intelligent, and – in terms of
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simple job description – one of the very best archbishops of Canterbury in
history. Today he is remembered as the inventor of the Service of Nine Lessons
and Carols from Kings College, Cambridge, which signals, for so many radio
listeners, the onset of Christmas. (Goldhill records that it was “a service my
grandfather, a Jew from Liverpool, loved to listen to, religiously, as it were”.)
Benson, who had been the first Master of Wellington College, and the first Bishop
of Truro, was a brilliant administrator. He understood the Church of England
through and through. He understood Queen Victoria and her precarious
relationship to that Church, and though she seldom respected a bishop, she had a
very high regard for his intellect and character. Goldhill flounders when he tries
to come to terms with the Victorian Church. He does not understand Edward
White Benson’s religion, and there are howlers, as when he says, twice, that the
Archbishop died in “Gladstone’s private chapel”. It was in the parish church at
Hawarden, at the very beginning of the service, and – as A. C. Benson tells us in
his description of his father’s death, Gladstone’s clergyman son Stephen informed
the congregation, as the corpse was carried out of the church, and then “gave out
the appointed hymn; by a strange and beautiful coincidence, it was, ‘For Ever
with the Lord’”.
Archbishop Benson was a man of great paradoxes. David Newsome, the doyen of
Benson scholarship, highlighted the perfectionism of James Prince Lee, Benson’s
old headmaster at King Edward VI School, Birmingham, as a factor in the future
Archbishop’s crashing descents into melancholy. Lee fostered some of the
greatest scholars of New Testament Greek, such as Westcott and Lightfoot.
Goldhill says that Benson was an Evangelical, but he wasn’t. He never knew – as
his wife would – the comfort of the conversion experience. He tried to follow Lee,
who was a Broad churchman who had taught at Rugby under Dr Arnold. (In later
life his spirituality assumed a more Catholic register, but not to a dangerous
degree.) Lee liked to print on cards his favourite Latin tags, and it was a line from
Persius which defined not only his own attitude to life, but that of Archbishop
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Benson and his family – Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta. It is a highly
Victorian sentiment – Let them see virtue, and should they forsake it, let them rot
away.
Goldhill sees the Bensons as peculiarly tormented because of their queerness,
however you define that term. This may well have been true in Arthur’s case,
though Fred seems to have been a sunnily untormented figure, and Hugh – a close
friend of Baron Corvo – seems to have understood and sublimated that side of life
rather successfully. He does not strike me as a tormented figure in the least. What
sometimes gets lost in Goldhill’s version is the fact that sexual repression was
normal for the Victorians, whether you were “queer” or not. Goldhill is, however,
especially good on the linguistic side of the story. Until the invention of psychiatry
and sexology, there simply was not a language to discuss this sort of thing. Arthur,
as an old man, described a conversation with Fred: “We discussed the homo
sexual question”. Goldhill adds, “spelled as two words, it is marked also as a term
of the moment, a Question, like the Woman Question or the Jewish Question”. At
a similar date in the diary, Arthur expresses astonishment that three
undergraduates are said to have had affairs with women. (It was not long after
this – though Goldhill does not mention it – that William Empson was suspended
from his fellowship at Magdalene because a college servant found what the other
fellows called a “contraption” in the drawer of his bedside table.)
Goldhill’s book begins with Edward White Benson proposing marriage to his wife,
and kissing her. She was twelve years old, and he was twenty-three – a young
master at Rugby – not “an evangelical student”, as Goldhill asserts. Nowadays, of
course, we would think his action something for which he should be reported to
the police, and the supposed “queerness” of their children, about which Arthur,
at least, felt torment, is something we would suggest could be cured by their all
coming out. This book makes you realize how much has changed. Goldhill states
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the obvious when reminding us that the expression “coming out” “is not yet
employable by Arthur”.
Their mother Minnie – who liked to be known as Ben by her female friends, and
shared a bed, during her long widowhood, with Lucy Tait – was daughter of
another archbishop of Canterbury. She seems to have been completely at home
with her emotional preferences for women, and to reconcile this with her faith.
Goldhill writes well about her, quoting one of the wisest reflections I ever read
about the religious psychology. It is a letter to her son Hugh when he became a
Catholic. “All your will power and determination and action are of no avail with
the deeper self which can’t decide – which doesn’t know – which won’t move one
way or the other. Mercifully this underground self HAS its laws . . .”. Certainly, her
relationships, whether it is right, exactly, to label them as such, fascinated her
sons, and Fred, in particular, wrote about them over and over again.
Archbishop Benson and his wife had a strange marriage. No wonder their
children were obsessed by it. The family, however, remained very close. Goldhill
makes much of Arthur’s first novel Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B.A. of Trinity
College, Cambridge (1886). Of the “fictitious” Arthur, the “real” Arthur wrote, “He
disliked his father and feared him. The tall, handsome gentleman, accustomed to
be obeyed, in reality passionately fond of his children, dismayed him. He once
wrote on a piece of paper, ‘I hate papa’, and buried it in the garden”. The desire
to bury the words was perhaps as strong as the desire to write them. In Arthur’s
dreams, recorded in the diary, a cheerful archbishop frequently appears, wearing
a purple cassock and joining in Arthur’s childish games. In the Goldhill version,
the two most articulate brothers, Arthur and Fred, spent a lifetime finding
“multiple and indirect ways to write, ‘I hate my father’”. Could Simon Goldhill
have written just as plausibly that, while they found many reasons, on the
surface, for hating the perfectionist father, they spent a lifetime trying to find
ways to write, “I love you”?
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