This article is about her involvement with a
sponging expatriate Russian count; it involves a familiar personality type and
associated scripted scenario.
Stella Benson generously helped this poor old
man and made great efforts on his behalf, only to be met with insults, lies,
delusions and ingratitude followed by yet more demands and hard-luck stories.
Stella Benson meets Count Nicolas
Stella Benson first met the frail, pathetic, penniless
old man who called himself Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine in April
1931. He was in a free bed in a charity hospital in Hong Kong at the time.
She felt very sorry for him even though he
immediately started lying to her. He may have been confused and delusional
rather that deliberately deceitful though. He told her that he had no money at
all, then some fell out of his pocket. He showed her a picture of someone he
said was a Princess who had been crazy about him - it was an advertisement!
Stella Benson helps Count Nicolas
Count Nicolas was a mess of a person. Stella
saw him as a free spirit broken by adversity. She decided to transcribe some of
his ‘memoirs’ in the hope of selling them and getting some money for him.
She started to produce a book that consisted
of both his reminiscences - or fantasies - and her commentaries on them. It was
later published as Pull Devil, Pull Baker (1933). She gave him a very generous
advance payment, but after Count Nicolas moved on he started sending her very
frequent begging letters.
Then he appeared on her doorstep, ill and destitute.
She gave the ‘silly old cadger’ some more money.
The games Count Nicolas played
Count Nicolas claimed he had American
citizenship, but there was no documentary evidence. The ‘letter of
recommendation’ from a famous American bishop that he showed her was actually a
demand that he cease sending begging letters as the writer he had done all he
could for him! The Count similarly misrepresented other papers he carried
around.
Stella wore herself out going around various
consulates trying to get him a visa. This may have been a wasted effort, as he
was able to move from country to country without either money or documents by
playing games with and preying on naïve and soft-hearted people. He would get
someone to give him enough money for the cheapest available boat ticket; he
would fall ill on board during the sea voyage, at which point he would be
dropped off on shore and put into a free hospital. Then the game would begin all
over again.
Adding insult to injury
Stella Benson left Count Nicolas very much
richer than she found him. His stories would never have been published without
her help. She conscientiously ensured that he received all the payments due to
him for his contributions to Pull Devil, Pull Baker. Her reward was to get a
demand for help from Macao, where he was penniless and in danger of
imprisonment. She felt obliged to send him money, only to get a letter from Colombo
saying that he was starving there and calling her a low-born swindler for not
answering his previous appeal!
The story of Stella Benson’s dealings with
Count Nicolas, which comes from Joy Grant’s biography, ends here, with no
information about the eventual fate of the Russian sponger.
Everyone has met a sponger
Exploiters, energy vampires and emotional
blackmailers are everywhere. Getting into trouble and forcing the people around
them to come to their rescue is a game that many people play.
Who hasn’t encountered someone like the
Count, and maybe helped them out of feelings of compassion and/or duty only to
be taken for granted, met with ingratitude and applied to again - and again -
as if for the first time.
Many of us will have discovered the hard way
that some people are like black holes or bottomless pits; they divert and waste
resources that could be put to better use. They seem disconnected; they run on
automatic. They are stuck in a tape loop, subject to the repetition compulsion
syndrome, carrying out the same old program over and over again with no
feeling for continuity.
Was Count Nicolas a mirror?
Stella Benson was very familiar with the
concept of the deserving and undeserving poor from the social work that she did
in the East End of London during the First World War. She had encountered many ‘no-hopers’
and Count Nicolas was a classic, textbook case, so why did she let him exploit
her?
Count Nicolas was certainly an expert at
squeezing money out of people and getting them to come to his rescue, but there
may be more to it than that.
Perhaps she sensed a similarity. Perhaps he
represented an aspect of her inner self.
Could she have been drawn to him because they had something in common? Did
she recognise a part of herself in him?
Stella Benson often became very ill while
travelling and visiting; the people around her felt obliged to help and take
care of her. She says this through her
autobiographical character Sarah Brown in Living Alone:
“I have been, I may say, a
burden and a bore all over the world; I have been an ill and fretful stranger
within all men's gates; I have asked much and given nothing...I
have been so wearisome to everyone, so constantly ill.”
Perhaps by helping Count Nicolas she was
trying to fix an element in her own life or atone for all the trouble she had caused. Perhaps also he reminded her of her alcoholic
father, who appeared small, pale and broken in one of her final encounters with
him, and she was indirectly trying to rescue, redeem and rehabilitate him.
More exploitation to come
This story has reminded me that some of the other
novelists who have been featured on here had similar problems - but the
spongers were their brothers. This will be the subject of a future article.
