Stella Benson and some travel nightmares

In addition to being a novelist, Stella Benson was a travel writer.

Despite her poor health, she took on many challenging journeys. She wrote articles about her travels and later compiled them into books. She also logged everything in her diaries. These records give many examples of the dangers and difficulties that she met and the risks that she took while on the road.

There is one particular episode that looks like a nightmare scenario to me. It has some familiar elements.

The walking tour nightmare

While Stella Benson was exploring the US in 1918, a new female friend in New England proposed a walking tour.

The final leg involved walking 18 miles through the night to catch a train at 05:30.

They left very little margin for error, which was a big mistake. They got lost and went several miles out of their way; it took a while to find someone to put them back on the right road. At 4:00 am they still had six miles or so to go. The backwoods people were infuriatingly unhelpful: no one would give them a lift.

They had only 15 minutes left when they met a man in a milk cart. They offered him money to turn round and take them to the station; after pondering for a while, he refused. Then they met a man in an empty car and waved and shouted. He slowed down a little then laughed, told them to get off the road and drove on.

When they were one mile from the station, they heard the puffing of the train and saw smoke; they gave up, assuming that they were too late. They walked slowly towards the station, feeling awful because after all their efforts they had missed their train.

When they were within 100 yards of the station, they noticed that the train had backed in again. They made one last, desperate, torturing effort, running as never before, and reached the platform only to see the back of the train disappear round the bend.

“Defeated and robbed of pride we threw ourselves on our backs in mid-platform.”

Stella Benson and the nightmare scenario

Joy Grant’s biography of Stella Benson makes her life seem like one long nightmare scenario!

Stella’s deafness, depression, chronic poor health and frequent medical emergencies made much of her life a misery.

Many of even her worst experiences would not seem so bad to strong, healthy, ‘real’ people with plenty of resources; other ordeals - the Zeppelin bombing raids on London during World War I for example - are not very relevant because she did not experience them as an individual: they were simultaneously endured by many other people. However, one or two very painful episodes in her life stand out; they are of particular interest because of some familiar elements. 

This article features a minor incident that affected her very badly.

The release of Sylvia Pankhurst

By the spring of 1914, Stella Benson had started a new life of independence. She came to live in London. She found work and became involved with the cause of women’s suffrage.

This led to an assignment that turned into a nightmare for her. Acting on instructions previously given, she went to Holloway Prison early one morning to witness the release of leading suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst.

From her diary:

“The policemen laughed at me, and pointed me out to their friends, the wardresses came out to shriek with laughter too. I got fainter and fainter...at last I began actually collapsing on the doorstep of a sort of church. The police, thinking it was a ruse, were more and more amused. I felt I should never see a friendly face again.”

Stella Benson cried and cried when she got back to her boarding house, fearing that she might not be strong enough for the life she hoped to lead.

On top of all the horrors she had endured, she was distressed to learn that Miss Pankhurst had been released the night before and her suffragette society had not bothered to let her know.

Magic and the Maharishi Yogi

This article is yet another in the series inspired by Joyce Collin-Smith’s account in Call No Man Master of the time that she spent with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1960s.

This topic for this article is the Maharishi’s magical practices; any remaining material of particular interest will be covered separately.

Levels of operation

I have described how I use a systematic, multi-level approach  when looking for causes and explanations, giving as an example someone who had behaved unprofessionally and out of character.

This approach also works well when looking for the reasons for the powerful effect that some people have on others.  People with a very strong influence, cult leaders for example, often operate on several levels.

Diana Wynne Jones’s fictional witch Aunt Maria used her powers and influence on several levels; the Maharishi Yogi is another person of interest who seems to have done the same.

Marianne and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson and Charlotte Brontë are not the only people whose descriptions of nightmare scenarios have inspired some articles.

The Marianne Trilogy by Sheri S. Tepper gives an example of someone who, just like Lucy Snowe in Villette, gets into the exact nightmare situation that she dreads the most.

In the article about the Marianne books I mentioned a laundry world. This alien dream world appears in Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods, the second book in the trilogy. The city that Marianne has been banished to by the evil witch Madame Delubovoska has a very strange attribute: it changes its name and rearranges itself every day around midnight, so the inhabitants need a new map for each day.

The rules are very strict; maps must be bought on the previous day, and it is a both a crime and extremely dangerous not to have one. Being without a map is something to be avoided at all costs.

Marianne runs a public laundry in the city. Her worst fear comes upon her one day when she forgets to buy her map for the next day. Despite increasingly desperate efforts in dangerous surroundings, she fails to get a new map.  This puts her into even more danger, and there is a good chance of permanent homelessness and destitution.

It all ends with a safe return to the laundry, but not before she has gone through a terrible ordeal which she has had to cope with entirely on her own.

Charlotte Brontë and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone (1919) ends with the arrival in New York of her autobiographical character Sarah Brown, who is ill, alone and penniless.

This scene in the book is my idea of a nightmare scenario.

Stella Benson put something of her own experience into the New York episode. She travelled by ship to America in July 1917. She had more in the way of resources than Sarah Brown did, but it was still an ordeal. Approaching New York Harbour, she was:

 “...sick with excitement and fright at such an unknown day before me.”

She wrote in her diary on the evening of her first day in New York:

“I never wish for a more wretched thirty hours than this last.”

She was so overcome by loneliness, confusion and the great heat that she started to cry. She awoke the next morning from dreams of death and despair.

The Living Alone scenario and others from Stella Benson’s life sound familiar; they remind me of other writers’ accounts of permutations of isolation, desperation, dangerous situations, going into the unknown, lack of resources and dreadful inner states.

The many common elements make me wonder whether these scenarios are engineered, perhaps subconsciously or perhaps by sinister unseen influences.

Some of Charlotte Brontë’s writings are of particular interest here; they say to me that she knew the terrible feelings well and had experienced a few nightmare scenarios of her own.

How the bureaucrats’ plans backfired

A recent incident provides a good example of the backfiring feature, which I something I have mentioned a few times in various contexts as I find it fascinating.

The bureaucrats who sometimes behave like cult members called another meeting. We decided to go, as there were some more points to be made and we wanted to ensure that the right people heard them.

The enemy turned up in large numbers; they sat in rows and in such as way as to split us up. This was probably an attempt to intimidate my neighbours and me.

Their schemes didn’t work; we were not intimidated and the bringing in of extra people backfired on them.

Today is Anthony Hope’s birthday

The novelist and playwright who wrote under the name Anthony Hope was born on this day, February 9th, in 1863.

Anthony Hope is the main founder of the Ruritanian romance genre; his best-known book is The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).

Taking a short break from Stella Benson and Living Alone to refresh my memory and produce something to mark the occasion has been a great relief. Unlike the Stella Benson material, The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau have no disturbing associations; they don’t stir up painful and depressing memories or give rise to horrible ideas.

On the other hand, the Zenda stories don’t contain the sort of material that generates investigations and commentary; they have no witches or magic in them, although they are fantasy of a kind.

The basic biographical information available, most of which can be found in Anthony Hope’s Wiki entry, is not very relevant either.

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins was an English gentleman. He and his swashbuckling adventure stories have some similarities with John Buchan and his works. Both men had brief legal careers before they started writing for example.

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part IV

The time has come to deal with the end of the relationship, such as it was, between Angela the Witch and Sarah Brown.

After coming under Angela’s influence, Sarah Brown is led by her to what will look like disaster to most people.

If anyone else had said and done to Sarah Brown what Angela did, I would expect them to be cruel, malevolent, a cult leader who makes people burn all their bridges behind them or even a front for something evil.

Angela is definitely not evil or even malicious: she is just lacking in understanding and empathy and she has no feelings of responsibility for the effect that she and her magic have on people and their lives. It means nothing to her; it is their problem not hers. She is bored or baffled by it all.

After all, she is not completely human; she is a magic person.

First, some details of the context in which the disaster happens.

Angela lays the trail

Angela makes her first appearance when she bursts in on the charity committee. She gives them a small demonstration of her powers.

Angela has a strange effect on some of the people at the committee meeting, Sarah Brown in particular. Perhaps because they have fallen slightly under her spell, some of the members feel an inclination to see her again. She leaves her broomstick - whose name is Harold - behind. Was this deliberate, or was it an accident? 

Her address is on Harold’s collar, which makes it easy for them to find her.

Four visitors for Angela

The four people who seek Angela out at the magic shop want more from her than just the taste of her magic that she gave them. They sense her powers and think that she can help them.  

Stella Benson’s imagination

Stella Benson had a powerful and vivid imagination, and from an early age she used it to enhance her life.

There are many factors in her life that help to explain why she should have turned to fantasy friends and an inner world for consolation and compensation, including a difficult family background, a critical and unsympathetic mother, feeling different from other girls, increasing deafness and, above all, very poor health that often kept her bedridden and hospitalised and entailed some horrible and excruciatingly painful medical treatments.

Such factors can be found in the lives of many other fiction writers. Mary Webb, who has been featured on here, also suffered from poor health and had a critical mother for example.

Great potential on the inside may be activated and employed when there is a hostile environment on the outside.

Am I the only one?

Stella Benson wrote this when she was 15 years old:

“I don’t know whether other people are the same as me in having an imaginary world filled with imaginary people to whom at every spare moment of the day one’s thoughts return. I daresay it is childish, but it has grown absolutely indispensable to me.”

The majority of people are not the same as her. For most people, the real world is all there is; they have little contact with an inner world or other dimensions.

Stella Benson’s imaginary friends

Stella Benson’s biography and her novella Living Alone are raising many points and issues, creating new connections and inspiring ideas for more articles.

It is all so overwhelming and difficult to organise that it seems best to deal with just one topic of interest at a time, beginning with the imaginary friends who were a very important part of Stella Benson’s life.

She called her imaginary friends ‘dream people’, ‘thought people’ and ‘Secret Friends’. She spoke about them both as herself in her diaries and via various characters in her novels.

They may have been entirely her creation, or they could have had, or taken on, an independent life of their own.

Stella Benson’s Secret Friends

Stella Benson had many friends and acquaintances during her life. She never lacked for company. Some people liked her and she sometimes experienced popularity. She went on many visits and to many events and enjoyed some of the associated socialising. She met large numbers of people on her travels, and someone was always there to wave her off on her departures and welcome her on her arrivals.

Yet her best relationships were with her ‘thought people’, partly because she sometimes felt alone in a crowd and partly because they were often much more satisfactory than what was available in the real world. They were something to fall back on; they filled gaps in her life.

In Stella Benson’s own words, many written when she was only 15 years old:

“I have never met a real person who could give me half as much comfort.”

“My thought people are everything I long to be and am not. They are beautiful and strong, above all strong.”

“...every crack in the day is filled with ecstatic Secret Friends.”

“I always somehow imagine I have someone with me. Of course, I know that there is nobody but I sometimes find myself acting as if there was...”

She later thought of them as muses who inspired her writing. She also had ambivalent feelings about them:

“...beset to the edge of lunacy with ecstatic Secret Friends...Both God and man may forsake me but I...am never alone.”

“...they really are an involuntary drug, and before I die I shall be overwhelmed by them...”