Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part VII

This is the final article in the series inspired by Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone. There is still more to say about Sarah Brown and the House of Living Alone and some related issues, and there is a very strange statement about the nature of reality that deserves to be highlighted.

Science fictional solipsism

The woman who holds the weekly gatherings where the occult is discussed is called Miss Meta Mostyn Ford. Miss Ford is the one who helps herself to a packet of magic powder in Angela’s absence and lets the magic loose, causing all sorts of damage.

She says something very strange while under the influence:

“No place and no person matters when I am not there. There are no places and no people existing where I am not. I have suspected it before, and now I am sure that everything is all a pretence, except me. Look how easy it was to dismiss that gross grocer from sight. He was just a bit of background. I have painted him out."

The ‘gross grocer’ is the Mayor, who was made invisible by her actions.

So while Sarah Brown believes that she is not real but most other people are, Miss Ford believes the opposite.

Such ideas remind me very much of themes such as constructed reality and pantheistic solipsism that are often found in science fiction.

Only the narrator or main character is real, everyone else is an actor or construct. The environment is all specially constructed too, like a stage set. The Truman Story is a good example of this. 

Robert A. Heinlein wrote a short story called They about a man who suffers from the delusion that he is one of the few ‘real’ entities in the universe, and that the other ‘real’ entities have created the rest of the universe in a conspiracy to deceive him.

I would not have expected to see similar ideas put forward as early as 1919. Where did Stella Benson’s inspiration come from?

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part VI

This article in the series inspired by Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone has more to say about Richard the Wizard and his mother. 

Richard is the son of Lady Arabel Higgins. He is an illiterate young soldier; he is also a powerful wizard.

His mother’s attitude towards him is strange: she both knows and doesn’t want to know that he is a magic person.

Lady Arabel’s denial and dissociation

Lady Arabel is very unhappy about Richard’s difference from other boys. Although she knows that he isn’t normal, she is in denial of what he really is. She refuses to accept that he has occult powers. She complains about her friend’s always bringing Richard’s name up whenever anything tiresome or out of the way happens:

“One would think you considered the poor boy a wizard.”

Lady Arabel pretends to notice nothing when Richard performs his magic:

“The wizard's mother obviously had great difficulty in not noticing the phenomena connected with her son, and she wore a striving smile and a look of glassy and well-bred unconsciousness whenever anything magic happened."

She talks a little nervously on very insipid subjects throughout the supper party at which Richard manifests his powers. When Richard does something so spectacular that she can’t possibly ignore it, she turns scarlet and murmurs that he is so merry and ingenious.

It is not only Richard’s magic that Lady Arabel refuses to see. When Sarah Brown tells her that Richard has gone to visit his ‘True Love’, Lady Arabel says, “You are quite mistaken, and I must beg of you to be careful how you repeat idle gossip about my son.”

It is the truth not idle gossip, but she just won’t accept it.

Stella Benson and the sponging Russian count

Stella Benson’s life and works are inspiring many articles, and still the end is nowhere near in sight.

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.

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part V

This article in the series inspired by Stella Benson’s Living Alone has more to say about the effect that Angela the Witch’s magic has on people.  

Sarah Brown is not the only person to be inadvertently given the wrong impression and led to disaster by Angela.

When Angela gives a demonstration of her magic to the charity committee, it has such a strong effect on some of them that they seek her out at her place of work. Each one, the Mayor in particular, thinks that she was speaking to them personally.

Angela and the Mayor

The Mayor, a grocer who is Chairman of the committee, makes the fourth person to visit the magic shop to see Angela again.

“And then the Mayor arrived. The witch saw at once that there was some secret understanding between him and her that she did not understand. Her magic escapades often left her in this position.”

He thinks that she is interested in him personally, but this is a mistake. It is wishful thinking, but he is not altogether to blame; she has inadvertently caught him in her net.

Charlotte Brontë and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone (1919) ends with the arrival in New York of her autobiographical character Sarah Brown, who is ill, alone and penniless.

This scene in the book is my idea of a nightmare scenario.

Stella Benson put something of her own experience into the New York episode. She travelled by ship to America in July 1917. She had more in the way of resources than Sarah Brown did, but it was still an ordeal. Approaching New York Harbour, she was:

“...sick with excitement and fright at such an unknown day before me.”

She wrote in her diary on the evening of her first day in New York:

“I never wish for a more wretched thirty hours than this last.”

She was so overcome by loneliness, confusion and the great heat that she started to cry. She awoke the next morning from dreams of death and despair.

The Living Alone scenario and others from Stella Benson’s life sound familiar; they remind me of other writers’ accounts of permutations of isolation, desperation, dangerous situations, going into the unknown, lack of resources and dreadful inner states.

The many common elements make me wonder whether these scenarios are engineered, perhaps subconsciously or perhaps by sinister unseen influences.

Some of Charlotte Brontë’s writings are of particular interest here; they say to me that she knew the terrible feelings well and had experienced a few nightmare scenarios of her own.

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part IV

The time has come to deal with the end of the relationship, such as it was, between Angela the Witch and Sarah Brown.

After coming under Angela’s influence, Sarah Brown is led by her to what will look like disaster to most people.

If anyone else had said and done to Sarah Brown what Angela did, I would expect them to be cruel, malevolent, a cult leader who makes people burn all their bridges behind them or even a front for something evil.

Angela is definitely not evil or even malicious: she is just lacking in understanding and empathy and she has no feelings of responsibility for the effect that she and her magic have on people and their lives. It means nothing to her; it is their problem not hers. She is bored or baffled by it all.

After all, she is not completely human; she is a magic person.

First, some details of the context in which the disaster happens.

Angela lays the trail

Angela makes her first appearance when she bursts in on the charity committee. She gives them a small demonstration of her powers.

Angela has a strange effect on some of the people at the committee meeting, Sarah Brown in particular. Perhaps because they have fallen slightly under her spell, some of the members feel an inclination to see her again. She leaves her broomstick - whose name is Harold - behind. Was this deliberate, or was it an accident? 

Her address is on Harold’s collar, which makes it easy for them to find her.

Four visitors for Angela

The four people who seek Angela out at the magic shop want more from her than just the taste of her magic that she gave them. They sense her powers and think that she can help them.  

Stella Benson’s imagination

Stella Benson had a powerful and vivid imagination, and from an early age she used it to enhance her life.

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.

Stella Benson’s imaginary friends

Stella Benson’s biography and her novella Living Alone are raising many points and issues, creating new connections and inspiring ideas for more articles.

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 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...”

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part III

We now come to Sarah Brown and the House of Living Alone.

Sarah Brown’s initials are the same as Stella Benson’s; she is an autobiographical character: much of what is said in Living Alone by and about Sarah and her life applies to Stella Benson herself, as can be confirmed by reading her biography.

The same applies to the House of Living Alone where Sarah Brown goes to live; Stella Benson knew it well.

Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown is the third main character of interest in Living Alone. 

She is a young woman who lives in London and is a member of the charity committee.

Her health is not good and her life is not satisfactory. Just like the witch Angela, she often goes short of food for lack of money and has to settle for scratch meals.

Sarah Brown is not very good at dealing with the real world; she says this about herself:

“You don't happen to know of a suitable job. I can't cook, and if I sew a button on it comes off quicker than if I hadn't.“

She has written a little poetry and means to write a book some day...some people have a creative temperament without having much creative ability. This does not apply to Stella Benson!

Sarah Brown accepts that magic exists. She can see it in action but cannot practise it herself. She has always wished to be friends with a witch. People who can’t operate very well in the real world or deal very well with real people often look for magical - or other - alternatives:

 “She was not really used to being alive at all, and that is what made her take to magic so kindly.”

This turning to the world of magic can be dangerous. People who seek salvation may be lured to destruction.

Angela the Witch supplies Sarah with sandwiches that, judging by the effects, were enchanted:

 “Sarah Brown would have been very susceptible to such a drug; her mind was always on the brink of innocent intoxication… Therefore, I think, she was a predestined victim of magic, and it seems unlikely that the witch should have missed such an opportunity to dispense spells.”

Sarah accepts Angela’s invitation to come and live in the House of Living Alone. This could be the best thing she has ever done, or it could be the worst.

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part II

Stella Benson’s fantasy novel Living Alone contains an assortment of characters.

There isn’t much to say about the purely supernatural element, which includes fairies, a magical white horse and a small dragon.

The ‘real people’ in the book include a policeman, a grocer who is also Mayor and some ladies from a charity committee. They are mainly caricatures or stereotypes, and most of them don’t inspire much in the way of commentary either.

The characters who are of particular interest are a witch, a wizard and someone who is neither magical nor a completely real person.

This article covers the two practitioners of magic, Richard the Wizard and Angela the Witch.

Richard the Wizard

We first learn about Richard from what his mother says about him. She says that he isn’t like other women’s boys. He cannot read or write; he disappears without explanation. The servants are all gone because they can’t stand him and his ways.

Living Alone was first published in 1919; one hundred years later, some of the things that we are told about Richard could be taken as a description of someone with mild autism or something similar.

Richard’s mother tells Angela the Witch:

“Do you know, I have only once seen him with other boys, doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with hundreds of real boys ... in 1914.... It was the happiest day I ever had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy... He deserted twice—pure absence of mind—it was always the same from a child—'I wanted to see further,' he'd say...“

We are told that Richard seems to have none of the small skill in details that comes to most people before they grow up. He does everything as if he were doing it for the first time.

Stella Benson wasn’t human: she had the soul of a snake

The feeling of being very different on the inside from those around them is very common among certain types of people. Some of them even believe that they are not really human: they are aliens who don’t belong in this world.

These ideas come from many independent sources. As I have just learned from reading her novel Living Alone (1919) and her biography by Joy Grant, the writer Stella Benson is one example. 

From an early age she felt very different from other girls; she also had a conviction that she wasn’t a real person; she wasn’t human. A future article about her may go into this in more detail.

In the meantime, there is something that is worth highlighting: she went one step further and confided to her diary that she had a ‘snake-soul’.

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part I

I recently re-read Stella Benson’s fantasy novel Living Alone to see what she has to say about witches. As with many other books featured on here, I first read it many years ago and just for entertainment. 

At the time, I overlooked things that now seem very significant indeed; I now see that there is enough material about witches, wizards and magic to generate more than one article.

There are also some autobiographical elements in the book; they will be included in an article about Stella Benson herself.

Part I starts with an overview of Living Alone and continues with some material from the book about magic and its practitioners.

About Living Alone

Living Alone consists of just ten chapters, so it is sometimes called a novella.

Living Alone has been described as a comedy, but it mentions desolation and has a horrible ending.

It is a very strange and unusual book, yet there are some familiar elements:

There are whimsical descriptions in Living Alone that make me think of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

The witches and their broomsticks in the book remind me of Terry Pratchett's witches.

There are a few scenes that remind me of the use of magic in Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life.

London has a magic of its own. There are many references to locations in London, places that I know well and enjoy reading about. Stella Benson was writing from experience: she too knew London well.

Anyone who wants to read Living Alone will find it on Project Gutenberg.

Two birthdays for two Stellas

Stella Gibbons and her books have been mentioned many times on here. One article compares her and her life with Georgette Heyer and her life; they were both born in 1902.

Stella Gibbons was born on January 5th. A much less well-known writer called Stella Benson was born 10 years earlier on January 6th.

As in previous comparisons, there are some common elements and some large differences in the lives of the two Stellas.

Stella Benson came from a much higher social class than Stella Gibbons. 

Stella Benson suffered from ill-health for much of her life whereas Stella Gibbons was fairly robust. 

Both writers had alcoholic fathers. Stella Gibbons was 24 years old when her father died; Stella Benson was 19 at the time of her father’s death,

Stella Gibbons was sent to school for the first time when she was 13; Stella Benson was 14 when she first attended school.

Stella Gibbons was brought up an atheist. She converted to Christianity after meeting the man who would become her husband. Stella Benson was brought up in a church-going family, but she came to reject Christianity - and other religions.