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’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...”
The departure and return of the Secret
Friends
When Stella Benson was 17, her mother
arranged for her to go to the Black Forest area of Germany to study various
subjects. She was one of a party of 12 English girls.
This enterprise was an unexpected success. For
almost the first time in her life, she felt, spoke and behaved much as other
girls of her age did, and in the same spirit. She enjoyed a taste of normality.
She didn’t just imitate the fun-loving girls
around her and go through the motions: she participated willingly and fully in
everything. She went to dances and the opera; she didn’t have to pretend that
she was enjoying herself as she really was having a good time.
It didn’t last. Of course it didn’t; it never
does. I know this from experience. Something closes the avenues. Hopes are
raised only to be dashed down; things are given only to be cruelly taken away.
After a short time she became very ill indeed.
She had learned to expect retribution, saying bitterly:
“I always have to pay for being happy.”
Doctors told Stella Benson that she had a
chronic lung condition and would have to go to live on a mountaintop in
Switzerland, which meant going back to living with her mother. She wrote in her
diary that she wished that she had never been born. She wished that she could
die in the night:
“I can’t bear going back to live alone with
Mother as always and all the thought people will come trooping back..“
It speaks for itself that Stella’s thought
people had not come once while she was having a good time in the normal way and
being a real person in Germany.
This seems a little sinister to me. Did these
entities need to keep Stella Benson away from real life for their own purposes?
Were they really friends or were they enemies, predators attracted by her
distress signals?
