Loe raamatut: «Ghosts in the House: Tales of Terror by A. C. Benson and R. H. Benson»

INTRODUCTION

No other family has approached the Bensons for sheer volume of printed words. Between them, Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925), Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) and Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) published over one hundred and fifty books, and their unpublished works include Arthur’s four-million word diary. Were that to be published in its entirety, it would occupy thirty-six volumes the size of this one.

Ghost stories formed the merest fraction of their output, yet they produced some of the finest in the genre, Fred becoming one of the best ghost story writers Britain has produced. But it was not without good cause that these three very different brothers – teacher, socialite and priest – found themselves producing literary terrors. Horror for the Bensons really began at home.

Arthur, Fred and Hugh were the surviving sons of Edward White Benson, one of Queen Victoria’s favourite Archbishops of Canterbury. Another son, Martin, died in his teens. The whole family was, to put it mildly, odd. To all appearances the epitome of an upper-class Victorian family, their history reads like a TV soap opera – a child bride, a ruthless patriarch, lesbianism, homosexuality, child death, religious mania and homicidal lunacy.

Edward Benson married Mary Sidgwick when she was eighteen (he’d had his eye on her since she was eleven). They produced six children, two of whom died young. The surviving daughter, Maggie, was to become totally insane and attempt to murder her mother, who was embroiled in a lesbian affair with one of Maggie’s friends.

The father became an ogre to his children, who spent much time in their copious autobiographical works trying to allay his ghost. None of them married and the Benson line died out with them.

With this gloriously dotty background, it is amazing that the brothers managed to keep both feet on the ground, though Arthur and Hugh had some alarming one-legged patches.

As Fred’s life is so well known, and his ghost stories very familiar and not included here, I do not propose to dwell on his career any more, but turn instead to his brothers, who are less familiar and still unjustly neglected.

Arthur became a schoolmaster, teaching first at Eton in 1892 and moving to Cambridge in 1903, where he rose to become Master of Magdalene College. He seems to have attracted some curious circumstances in his life. His main literary fame was founded on a string of books consisting of somewhat scholarly homilies, full of sweetness and light, which brought him a huge audience. One of his admiring readers was an anonymous American woman, wealthy in her own right, who had married an equally rich man. Touched by Benson’s description of the penury of Magdalene College, in 1915 she offered him, out of the blue, a large sum of money to improve the college. Understandably taken aback, Arthur eventually agreed, provided he was a trustee only, and over the next few years the American lady’s largesse enabled him to turn Magdalene into one of Cambridge’s leading colleges. Strange as it may seem, Benson and the American lady never met.

Arthur suffered from depression, often for years at a time, and this affliction was made doubly crippling for him as it was such depression that heralded his sister Maggie’s descent into madness (happily, not the case with Arthur). In one of his books, Fred recounts how Arthur, in the grip of depression, thought he had locked his servants into the house and that they would be starving to death. He urged Fred to investigate, but it was a baseless alarm: he had made provision for them and then forgotten all about it.

On a happier note, Arthur Benson is unwittingly celebrated every year at the Last Night of the Proms, when a rapturous audience bellows out his words to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, better known as Land of Hope and Glory.

Known to the world at large as the serene author of his rather sickly essays, he was in real life very big, very jovial and a born mickey-taker. His lifelong friend was M.R. James, our finest ghost story writer, and like Benson, large and inclined to a good laugh.

It is not unlikely that they both had a quiet snigger from time to time at the antics of Hugh Benson. He seemed to have found a good antidote to the Benson blues: religion. Despite being the son of the head of the Church of England, and being ordained by his father into that church, Hugh Benson turned to the Roman Catholic church and was ordained into that faith in 1904. He did well; he rose to become a private chamberlain to Pope Pius X in Rome, returning to England in 1914 when Pius died (and dying himself soon after).

While Arthur was happy with his small Cambridge circle, Hugh Benson became famous as a public speaker and went on tours preaching the faith all around the world. He was a fiery convert indeed – as is shown in his ghost stories – and his passion for all things Catholic is perhaps the greatest flaw in his writing. He was not without human failings: he became involved with the unsavoury Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo). The fascination of this seedy character is hard to understand, yet he excites the interest of writers to this day. Rolfe latched on to Benson as Hugh was a Catholic priest and a famous author – the two things Rolfe most coveted – and a plan to write a book together was to turn sour in the extreme. For reasons not too clear at this late date, but more to do with Rolfe’s lack of balance than Benson’s lack of judgement, the project fell through. Rolfe saw this as one more stage in his imagined persecution by the Catholic church, and the result was a very long hate campaign against all the Bensons. Rolfe was quite prepared to include the odd brother or two in his war against Hugh, and both Fred and Arthur got vitriolic letters from him.

Like Fred, Arthur and Hugh wrote extensively and sold well. They may not have matched their brother’s output, or achieved his more enduring fame, but he had more time on his hands than they did.

Arthur churned out his books of essays and a few novels; he edited Queen Victoria’s letters for publication; and he produced books of Benson family autobiography and biography, including a book each on his father, Hugh Benson and Maggie Benson.

Hugh wrote books on religious practice and thought; some novels, both historic and prophetic, with lots of religion included; and contributed to the Benson catalogue of family history. For a line which died out, the Bensons left behind a vast amount of personal history which makes interesting reading now. There is certainly much left unwritten which would make even more interesting reading; and it should never be forgotten that the Bensons were supreme self-publicists – we read what they wanted us to know and nothing more, true or not.

And all three of them wrote ghost stories. Their individual aims in writing them, however, varied enormously. Fred wrote his for money and entertainment. Arthur wrote his, in the main, as allegorical tales for his pupils, and kept fairly private some darker stories that were only published after his death. Hugh wrote his as glorifications, often unctuous, of his new Catholic faith. That Arthur and Hugh managed to produce such good material despite all this speaks worlds for their talent.

The family and its background provided much overt influence. For instance, all three brothers wrote of rooms in towers: Fred in the title story of his 1912 collection, Arthur in ‘The Closed Window’, and Hugh in ‘Father Maddox’s Tale’. The tower room was a feature of their home in Truro, Lis Escop, when Edward Benson was Bishop of Truro from 1877 to 1882.

Fred Benson was by far and away the most successful ghost story writer of the three and was not interested in moral lessons or religious tracts. He wrote his stories to frighten, and said so. Yet Arthur’s and Hugh’s stories contain some pretty scary stuff, and if Arthur wrote his for his pupils, they must have had a few nasty moments when he read them aloud. Hugh seems to frighten us almost in spite of himself at times.

Arthur had met M.R. James in 1873, when they were both pupils at Temple Grove School, East Sheen (the setting for MRJ’s ‘A School Story’), and they stayed close friends until Benson’s death. Arthur would sit in on James’s Christmas readings of his stories, with friends such as Herbert Tatham, E.G. Swain and Arthur Gray, all of whom also wrote ghost stories. James’s influence on this genre is quite remarkable; it is possible to trace his influence in the work of over sixty writers.

While neither Benson nor James overtly copied each other, there are some interesting parallels. In ‘The Uttermost Farthing’, Benson introduces a phantom that could have stepped from the pages of James. ‘The Red Camp’ bears an interesting resemblance in tone to MRJ’s later work ‘A Warning to the Curious’, where archaeological treasure hunting brings a grim reward.

Arthur’s published ghost stories were written to entertain his pupils, and collected into book form later. One of his Eton pupils, E.H. Ryle, has described a typical Benson reading:

We used to assemble in his dark and deserted study … exactly at the appointed moment [Benson] would emerge from his writing room … He would turn up the light in a green-shaded reading lamp on a little table, bury himself in his great, deep armchair … and then, in a low, conversational tone of voice, he would narrate an absorbing tale. I loved those Sunday evenings. The darkened room, the little pool of light … a silence which could be felt, the blurred outline of the huddled-up figure of the big man, the quiet, even flow of words …

Considering the still sharp scenes of terror in some of those stories, that ‘low, conversational tone’ of Benson must have caused quite a few nightmares! These stories for his pupils were collected into two volumes, The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1905).

Another book of A.C. Benson stories had quite a different origin. When Arthur joined in James’s reading sessions, he would contribute one or two himself. We know of at least one by name, ‘The House at Trehele’, which Benson read out in 1903. When Arthur died, E.F. Benson went through his papers and came across a file of ghost stories. He quite liked the look of two of them and duly got them published by one of his own publishers, Hutchinson, in January 1927 (under the dreadfully nondescript title Basil Netherby, which might explain the volume’s neglect since). The title story was a renamed ‘The House at Trehele’. There is no record of what happened to the others.

Arthur Benson suffered from extraordinary dreams all his life, extraordinary both in their content and the clarity with which he recalled them, and described some in his diary. He dreamed of an execution: ‘A man with an axe cut pretty deep into [Lord Morton’s] neck. I saw into the cut, it was like a currant tart.’ Then he had this vision some years later:

… a terrible dream of the hanging of some person nearly related to me at Eton; the scaffold, draped with black, stood in Brewer’s Yard; and I can’t describe the speechless horror with which I watched little black swing-doors in it push open at intervals, and faces look out. The last scene was very terrible … the prisoner stood close to me … I could see his face twitch and grow suddenly pale. When the long prayers were over, he got up and ran to the scaffold, as if glad to be gone. He was pulled in at one of the swing-doors – and there was a silence. Then a thing like a black semaphore went down on the top of the scaffold – (which was nothing but a great tall thing entirely covered with black cloth) – and loud thumps and kicks were heard inside, against the boards, which made me feel sick.

There is an odd little essay by Benson in his book Escape (1915) which merits a mention. In ‘The Visitant’ he tells of a recurring vision of a house and its occupants. He can see them and the rooms with great clarity, but is unable to see past some doors or into the hall or passage. It is not sinister in itself but it does bear an uncanny resemblance to the recurring dream in E.F. Benson’s ‘The Room in the Tower’. Fred was not averse to the occasional lifting of his brother’s material, as with The Luck of the Vails.

E.H. Ryle recalled that ‘shortly after its publication in 1903 I started to read The Luck of the Vails, by E.F. Benson, my Tutor’s brother. I wondered why it seemed familiar, and then it flashed upon me that the story, no doubt in a less elaborate form, had been spun out to us on the ten or eleven Sunday evenings of (I think) the winter half of 1899–1900. I imagine that A.C.B., after realising the pleasure it had given to a youthful audience, passed on the plot to E.F.B. – but I write subject to correction.’

It would seem that Arthur Benson wrote no more ghost stories for publication that we know of. He did write a mildly interesting novel, The Child of the Dawn (1912), dealing loosely with reincarnation. Its significance here lies in its introducing, in the midst of the hero’s wanderings in the afterlife, the unnamed figure of Herbert Tatham, a fellow ghost story writer of Benson, and his greatest friend, who had died in 1909, and to whom the novel was dedicated. According to Hugh Macnaghten, Eton Vice-Provost at the time of Arthur’s death, Herbert Tatham suggested the plot of ‘The Gray Cat’ to Benson.

It was Arthur’s ‘pupil’ stories that inspired Hugh Benson to try his luck at ghost story writing, albeit of a much more different sort. He records that he started writing the stories in The Light Invisible (1903) in the summer of 1902 and that they were of a semi-mystical and imaginative nature. They were that all right, but more besides. Purporting to be the narratives of an old priest and the writer himself, the fifteen tales vary wildly from genuinely creepy stories, such as ‘The Traveller’, to quite unpalatable religious maunderings. One story, which I have not included here, invites us to witness a spiritual being pushing a child under a horse and cart as evidence of God’s love for humanity. If Benson’s religious convictions led him in this direction, we can only be grateful he never wrote any more stories for that volume.

The book was nonetheless a huge success, being reprinted nine times within four years of its first appearance in March 1903. Hugh’s religious leanings deprived him of the enormous royalties that flowed from all this. At the time he wrote and published the book, he was a member of the Community of the Resurrection, a religious order based near Bradford. As such, he was obliged to donate to the order all his worldly goods – book royalties and all!

His other book of ghost stories, A Mirror of Shalott (1907), was a different kettle of fish altogether. It was the book form of a set of stories he had published over the years in the Ecclesiastical Review and the Catholic Fireside, which purported to be stories told by a group of priests in Rome. Stronger than the earlier book, A Mirror of Shalott suffers in large part from a bit too much Catholicism, but makes up for it with some genuinely scary tales. ‘Father Meuron’s Story’ is an old favourite with editors, and ‘My Own Tale’ is not without reprinting over the years, but in the main, the stories used here should be refreshingly unfamiliar.

His only other essay in the supernatural is the novel The Necromancers (1909), an openly stated warning against the dangers of Spiritualism, which has been reprinted in paperback in the past forty years. I think it is also the only piece of work by A.C. or R.H. Benson to be dramatised in any form: it was filmed in 1940 under the title Spellbound, directed by John Harlow and featuring Derek Farr and Vera Lindsay. The film has also been titled Passing Clouds and The Spell of Amy Nugent.

Hugh Benson was also interested in real-life hauntings, as shown by his article ‘Haunted Houses’, written for the Pall Mall Magazine, January 1913. He takes the view that it would be foolish to ignore what he calls the ‘overwhelming’ weight of human evidence for haunted houses; an eminently satisfactory attitude for a ghost story writer. The article has not been reprinted since it first appeared, and makes an interesting counterpoint to Hugh Benson’s fictional ghost stories.

It is surprising that the E.F. Benson revival of the past thirty years has not sparked interest in the work of his brothers. All three were best sellers and all three wrote equally interesting ghost stories (though perhaps not equally entertaining). I hope this selection from Arthur Benson and Robert Hugh Benson will help restore them to their rightful place in the history of the English ghost story.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

January 2018