Telepathic connections
Antonia White is said to have established a telepathic connection or psychic rapport with a few people during her lifetime.
This is from her daughter Lyndall Hopkinson’s book Nothing to Forgive:
”...a strange telepathy...had again and again compelled me to leave for England just when Antonia most needed someone, although she had never appealed for help.”
Another link was with a young solder called Robert Legg. As Jane Dunn tells us in her biography Antonia White: A Life, they played a game in which they would not communicate verbally. Antonia White describes this phenomenon in her autobiographical novel Beyond the Glass:
“She had become so expert at ‘the game’ that he had only to will her and she went instinctively to the right place at the right time.”
This reminds me of what Joyce Collin-Smith said about the Maharishi Yogi:
“He seemed to have definite hypnotic power. Most of us could be summoned at a distance and would come at the inner command...”
Antonia White too had a telepathic link with an Indian guru, a mystic called Meher Baba. She too believed that he was sending her hypnotic commands.
Feeling different and copying others
Feeling that they are not real people, feeling different on the inside from everyone around them and imitating others for various reasons are common elements in the lives of Antonia White and Stella Benson - and many other creative people.
Antonia White said this in her autobiographical novel The Sugar House:
“I really believe I’m a kind of monster. Not a real person at all.”
Stella Benson said again and again that she felt that she was just pretending to be a real girl, a real woman, a real human being even:
“Of course I am not a real girl.”
Antonia White said this:
“If you only knew how desperately I want to be like other people. Ever since I was at school, I wanted to have exactly the same kind of home and garments as everybody else...I wanted to be able to play games...I’d go on beautifully for months, thinking I had really brought it off this time. And then I’d go and say or do or something that spoilt it all. “
This was in the context of having the same sort of family and possessions as the other girls in her class, but the imitation aspect reminds me of something Stella Benson said:
“I wish I were a real girl...instead of pretending all the time to be young, and feeling so unsure, like a bad pupil at a dancing class with the corner of her eye fixed upon what everyone else is doing.”
There is a difference between copying others because of wanting to fit in and imitating them because of the lack of the normal human instincts, inclinations and know-how, however I suspect that Antonia White, while she did not go as far as Stella Benson, also imitated others when she could not act from her real self.
She often felt that she was putting on a performance.
A character in the unpublished autobiographical story Julian Tye tells ‘Antonia’ that while she gave a very convincing performance of a smart young woman in business, it was obviously only a performance.
Stella Benson thought she was deceiving people and just posing.
Antonia White said that she was an outsider from first to last.
