Reading about various people who fell for a
false image and let wishful thinking and other factors distort their
perceptions has reminded me of the man who at first made a very positive
impression on Stella Benson, only for her to be devastated when she learned that
he was not only greatly inferior to but in some ways the exact opposite of what
she thought he was.
It is the points, issues and patterns rather
than the people that are of interest here; the underlying scenarios, unseen influences
and connections are more important than the details.
The information comes from Joy Grant’s
biography, which is based on Stella Benson’s letters and diaries.
The first meeting
Stella and her future husband reacted much
the same way when they first saw each other. They had premonitions, and not
good ones. She didn’t want to go anywhere he was going, and the feeling was
mutual: he couldn’t get away fast enough!
They came to revise their opinions of each
other, but it might have been better for both of them if they had not ignored
their initial misgivings.
Stella Benson’s marriage
Stella Benson, like Stella Gibbons, married a
man who was younger than she was. The age gap was five years in Stella Gibbon’s
case, but Stella Benson’s husband was only 18 months her junior.
In both cases, the husband’s family was not
impressed; the Stellas failed to pass muster in their eyes.
Stella Gibbons knew about and accepted her
husband’s deficiencies before she married him. She managed to build quite a good
relationship with him. She outlived him by 30 years.
Stella Benson learned about her husband’s
deficiencies the hard way. She tried intermittently to patch things up with
him, but became very unhappy. Her husband was greatly short-changed too. He
outlived her by 13 years.
More about the marriage
Stella Benson found her marriage
disappointing. She thought that she must have been mad to marry someone so lacking
in humour and imagination and said, “We oughtn’t to have married.”
She followed her husband to China, not the
best place for her to live. This extract from her diary makes her life there
seem like hell:
“...It seems to me that by some horrible
accident... I have given up everything - my friends, my health, my amusement,
my adventuring and the pleasures attendant on my writing - for nothing - to
spend the rest of my life in a filthy climate with an unimaginative gloomy
fussy and absolutely unsympathetic companion...”
She probably wrote this when she was at a
very low ebb. Her health had always been bad, and there was still some travelling
and sightseeing for her to do. Even so, losing everything and everyone and
being led into a desert by someone who is one of the last people to meet one’s
requirements is a nightmare scenario.
The second man
Stella Benson became infatuated with a man
she met in London’s literary circles. No one else had ever made her heart
palpitate at just the thought of an impending meeting the way he did!
She thought that he was everything a man was
supposed to be. She thought that she could see him as he was, but she missed
many
warning signs.
The elaborate fantasy that she built up of
him as a key person in her future life was based on very little, but it took strong
hold.
Maybe he read her mind and sensed her
intentions; maybe he felt her unspoken hopes, demands and expectations as a threat and an unwanted, offensive burden. He deliberately acted to
disillusion and deter her, getting drunk and displaying vulgarity. She got the
exact opposite of the behaviour she had hoped for from him. Her plans all
backfired.
Stella felt irritation and mortification; she
was sick with humiliation.
Then came the second devastating blow: Stella’s
brother told her that the man was a theatrical poseur. He was just acting the
part of a tough man, and his apparent nobility was assumed. Stella had been
worshipping a false god.
A new Secret Friend
Stella Benson dealt with this devastating
disaster by giving up any hope she might have had for a real-world
relationship; she made the man into a Secret Friend in her imagination instead.
What the real man said and did in the real
world couldn’t hurt her now; in the inner world he would be the wonderful
person she had thought he was and speak and behave exactly as she wanted him to.
So she both let him go and held onto him; she
both freed herself from his spell and committed herself to him.
Below the surface
Perhaps something deep inside Stella Benson recognised
some elements that she had in common with these men.
It is interesting that neither Stella nor her
husband had a good relationship with their mothers, who did not much care for
them.
It is likely that Stella concealed her
severe health problems until after she got married, and her husband had health
problems that she didn’t learn about until much later.
The second man was pretending to be something
he was not; Stella said many times that she was only pretending to be a real
woman.
Stella Benson's travels sound very glamorous, exciting and enviable; this man’s adventures, expeditions and achievements do too, but,
as previously mentioned, the underlying motives and the spirit in which these
things are done are important factors. They could both have been just going
through the motions for much of the time; they could have been trying to prove
something, escape from something or to fill a void.
Was Stella drawn so strongly to this man only
because they were much the same in essence on the inside? Was this man a mirror
or a messenger?
Context and the total picture
There is more to all this than the personal
and psychological aspects. Something that seems like a bad individual
experience may look very different when put into the context of other writers’ lives; many of them had very similar experiences. What forces are at work here?
There is more to come on this subject.
