I have blogged before about my
passion for E. F. Benson's memoirs, and over
at the Newtown Review of Books I write a more general
essay about why I loveBenson so much. I always
cite him as one of my foremost literary influences.
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| E. F. Benson |
Suffering so often as I do with ghastly migraine, I am occasionally forced to
escape into reading for pleasure - something I can't always do. My pleasure of
choice is often
Benson's final book, a gentle, funny and constantly fascinating
memoir called, appropriately,
Final Edition.
Though he was at death's door, Benson is at the height of his literary
powers in this book, and his gift for storytelling is at its very best. I love
when he describes a visit to
Henry James, strangely enough living in the very
house that Benson himself would eventually occupy and make famous in his
Mapp and Lucia novels. His stories about
James are hilarious (though, true to his
gallant form, he claims that his brother, the famous Edwardian diarist A. C.
Benson, wrote a much better account), and I was fascinated by them.
James was
old fashioned and self-consciously literary, and he could not bear disloyalty.
Benson
tells us he said: "I am singularly accessible to all demonstrations of
regard." I recognised instantly the fragile writers’ ego, and the way non-writers
(or just the terminally insensitive) think they can make some throwaway
derogatory comment about one's writing and imagine one will take it in good
spirit and forget it instantly. Anyone who tried it with James was met with a
lifetime's shunning.
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| Henry James in the garden of his house |
Benson's mother, Mary, was a great literary character all on her own, a
short, plump lesbian who was married for 40 years to the
Archbishop of Canterbury. Upon the
Archbishop's death Queen Victoria, who revered him,
offered Mary Benson a cottage on the grounds of Windsor Palace, but
Mary
refused, preferring the freedom and independence of her own digs, where she
could more openly shack up with her girlfriend.
The recent book about Mary Benson,
As Good As God, As Clever as the Devil by
Rodney Bolt is well worth reading and makes a perfect companion volume to
Final Edition.
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| Mary Benson while still a young woman |
His sister
Margaret Benson was a noted Egyptologist, but in this book Benson
recounts her sad final years when, a housebound manic depressive, she makes her
mother's life a misery by seeking to control everyone around her. Benson charts
the bittersweet relationship between she and his mother, and his pain is
palpable.
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| Mary and Margaret Benson |
Final Edition is a brilliant evocation of Edwardian life, of literary
gossip, and is a fascinatingly intimate memoir of one of the strangest families ever to have
existed in Britain. Do find a copy.
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