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’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 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.