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.
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.
While the owners of exceptionally strong and
vivid imaginations take them for granted and see using them as normal and
natural as breathing, as much a part of life as sleeping and eating, most people will have little experience or understanding
of what it is like to live in a self-created inner world or have an imagination
that is like an extra faculty.
However, some other people, both real and
fictional, are the same as her. The Brontës for example created and populated
entire worlds in their imaginations.
What Stella Benson said about returning to her
inner world whenever she got the chance reminds me of something that Charlotte
Brontë wrote to her brother Branwell in 1843:
"It is a curious metaphysical fact that
always in the evening when I am in the great dormitory alone... I always recur
as fanatically as ever to the old ideas, the old faces, and the old scenes in
the world below.“
This refers to the infernal kingdom of Angria
and its inhabitants that Charlotte and Branwell collaborated on. She found it
more rewarding to spend time with the glamorous, but imaginary, Duke of Zamorna
and the rest of them than with the real, but unsatisfactory and uninspiring,
schoolgirls and teachers around her.
Stella Benson raised the point again when she
was 25. Speaking as the narrator in her novel This Is The End, she wrote this:
“I do not know how universal an experience a
Secret Story and a Secret Friend may be. Perhaps this wonder is a commonplace
to you, only you are more reticent about it ... But to me, even after twenty
years' intimacy with what I can only describe as a supplementary life that I
cannot describe, it still seems so very wonderful that I cannot believe I share
it with every man and woman in the street.“
She may not have shared having an inner life
with every man and woman in the street, but she certainly shared it with some
other people, both real and fictional. Perhaps she hadn’t read many biographies,
and Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, which might have enlightened her, would not
be published for another 40 years.
More real than reality
For very imaginative people, the inner world
is more real than the real world and some of them spend as much time in it as
possible.
For such people, real life is food and fuel
for the imagination; it is sometimes seen as just a rough draft, something from
which to get basic ideas for polishing and enhancement. An incident in the real
world might provide the first building block for a castle of fantasy; some person
in the real world might provide the first brush-stroke for a dazzling portrait
of an imaginary character.
I wrote this in an article about Rudyard Kipling:
“Writers certainly use their imagination to
create good stories. For many, what happens in their imagination seems real to
them, more real even than what really happened. Some use what happened in real
life as just the starting point for building a whole edifice of fiction.”
Stella Benson provides
independent confirmation of this when speaking about Sarah Brown in Living Alone and indirectly
about herself:
“All
the best things that she remembered had only happened in her dreams, her
imagination no sooner sipped the first sip of an experience than it conjured up
for her great absurd satisfying draughts of nectar, for which the waking Sarah
Brown might thirst in vain.“
I assume that by ‘dreams’ she means daydreams, and was saying that when the real world gives someone what seems to them just a
tiny taste of something, they have to go into their imagination to turn it into
a feast.
She also said something that innumerable
people with strongly-developed imaginations have said:
“When things happen in my thoughts I feel them
almost as much as if they were really happening.”
She may not have known it, but Stella Benson
was a classic, textbook case when it came to using her imagination.
Imagination: blessing or curse?
As Stella Benson and many others have found, imagination
is a two-edged sword; it can be both a saviour and a destroyer.
Stella Benson had an ambivalent attitude
towards her thought people and her imagination. This quotation is from her first
novel I Pose, which was published in 1915:
“Imagination seems to be a glory and a
misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her
sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed - or cursed - with it, there would have
been much keener competition for the apple.”
A lot more could be said on this topic.
