Stella Benson, Douglas Adams and the total picture disaster

The novelist and travel writer Stella Benson, who has inspired many articles, had some good insights about herself and her life.

She may never have realised though how much she had in common with other writers. What effect would it have had on her if she had put her life into the context of the lives of certain other people? 

What further effect would it have had if she had seen exactly where she stood in relation to the entire human race?

Having one’s ideas and viewpoint expanded is not always beneficial; it can be devastating.

Stella Benson herself mentioned the danger of realising that we are nothing special, not individuals but just one of many. 
She said this in her travel book Worlds Within Worlds:

“The world would come to an end if each one of us suddenly began to see himself as one of a crowd—and that a funny crowd...We all intend to be seen as Ones, not as crowds; all our details of personality are evolved to clothe us as Ones, not as crowds.“

It may seem that Stella Benson was exaggerating when she said that the world would come to an end if people realised their personal insignificance, but she is not alone. Douglas Adams, author of the comedy science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so in a sense a fellow travel writer, dealt with this Issue in a way that is both amusing and alarming.

Context and the total picture: Part I

Sometimes a painful experience doesn’t feel quite so bad when we learn that other people, some very well known, have had a similar experience.

One example comes from the life of the artist Pauline Baynes, best known for her illustrations of the Narnia books.

Her family broke up when she was five years old. She returned to the UK from India with her mother. She was sent to a convent school where she was given a hard time by strict, unsympathetic nuns because of her fantastical imagination, her unusual handmade clothes and her ability to speak Hindi.

She later learned that Rudyard Kipling, whose work she greatly admired, had as a boy been sent back from India to a place where he was treated badly. Learning that she was not alone, that she was in very good company, made her feel a little better.

Then there was Napoleon, reduced to living on crumbs of hope in exile. Anyone who knows what subsisting on remote possibilities is like might well feel a little better or even gratified when they learn that they have something in common with the great emperor. 

However, putting painful experiences into the context of other people’s lives in this way can be a two-edged sword. 

What do Alan Garner and L. M. Montgomery have in common?

A previous article describes how neither Noel Streatfeild nor Isaac Asimov ever forgot being refused some information that they had eagerly asked for. They never forgave their teachers for impatiently brushing them off either.

I have since read about two more very different writers who also experienced painful incidents that they never forgot: as children they were unjustly and cruelly punished for speaking in ways that their teachers disapproved of. 

The first incident was mentioned by L. M. Montgomery in a letter she wrote in 1907 about some discoveries she made while reading the Bible:

“When I was a child a school teacher gave me a whipping because I used the expression "by the skin of my teeth." He said it was slang. If I had but known then what I know now!!! It is in Job—those very words.”

From The Green Gables Letters from L. M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber 1905-1909

What’s wrong with a gentle reminder of the importance of speaking good English? That teacher should have known his Bible too.

I wonder if that teacher ever learned about the literary achievements of his former pupil.

The second incident involves Alan Garner.

Something about Alan Garner’s Owl Service

The Owl Service (1967) by Alan Garner OBE FRSL is an award-winning fantasy novel for young adults that affected me very strongly the first time I read it. 

The Owl Service is a story of the supernatural. It involves something that has been called in other articles a scripted scenario.

The story is set in modern Wales.  The plotline is based on a story from Welsh mythology, a story about betrayal and destruction involving a triangle of two men and a woman.

Three teenagers, Alison the English girl, Roger the English boy and Gwyn the Welsh boy, re-enact the story - or rather the story re-enacts itself through them as it has been doing down the years and through the generations. 

The girl is once again the betrayer, and the two boys hit each other where it hurts most. 

Some of the witty remarks that various characters make have a positive effect when read; there are also some very cruel and hurtful comments that are painful to read and have a very negative effect. This article highlights some of the best and worst of these comments.

Parents and step-parents
Alison’s mother is a terrible emotional blackmailer and Gwyn’s bitter mother seems sadistically determined to sabotage his life, not just for personal reasons but because of unfinished business from the past. 

Public libraries present

For much of my life, I took the existence of public libraries for granted: they were just there. I can now look at them more objectively and put my experiences into various contexts.

I now know something about the background and history of public libraries and about other people’s views on and experiences of them.

There was a long discussion about free public libraries on the old Conservative Conserpiracy Forum. Some posters approved of them, others did not. I made several contributions in their favour and challenged some of the points made by the antis.

In addition to my personal memories, those old posts and some information I compiled at the time are the main source of material for the public library articles.

This one will bring my personal experience up to date. 

Leaving the public library behind
After leaving school, I continued to be a great user of local public libraries for some years. Then came a time when I allowed my membership to lapse and even forgot that public libraries existed! Buying books instead of borrowing them became the norm for me.

There were several reasons for my defection:

I had moved to an area where the local library was not at all impressive; it was small and there was a very poor showing on the shelves, with little to make browsing worthwhile.

I became interested in New Age and other types of metaphysical books that my library didn’t stock.

I could afford to buy whatever books I wanted, fiction and non-fiction, new or second-hand as available, and I was spoilt for choice as there were many bookshops of various kinds within easy reach including specialist, second-hand and discount. There were charity shops everywhere and they were a good source of cheap books. Some street market stalls sold books too. Browsing in all these places was enjoyable and very productive.

L. M. Montgomery and Rudyard Kipling’s Cat

The Cat That Walked by Himself is one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s children’s classic Just So Stories (1902). 

This book contains tales about various wild animals:

“...the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”

The Cat walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

L. M. Montgomery knew this story, and it meant a lot to her. Her heroine Emily Starr mentions it after her friend Dean warns her about the pressure to conform at school:

“"...Don't let them make anything of you but yourself, that's all. I don't think they will.’

"No, they won't," said Emily decidedly. "I'm like Kipling's cat--I walk by my wild lone and wave my wild tail where so it pleases me. That's why the Murrays look askance at me. They think I should only run with the pack."”
From Emily Climbs (1925)

Later in the book, Emily gets the chance to go to live in New York. She is very torn, thinking about what she might gain and what she might lose:

“Would the Wind Woman come to her in the crowded city streets? Could she be like Kipling's cat there?”

She decides to remain with her people and the old farm on her beloved Prince Edward Island, even though it means missing many opportunities to broaden her horizons and have a career. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery made some very different decisions, and she came to regret them as terrible mistakes.

Stella Gibbons and some libraries

Terry Pratchett is not the only writer of interest who both feasted on library books and created books for other library users to read.

Stella Gibbons, whose life and books have been featured on here, is another writer who both took out and put in. My first encounter with her work was via books that came from the public library. 

Internal evidence from her books suggests to me that Stella Gibbons considered libraries to be an important part of life and that she was very familiar with the various types, not to mention the differing social classes and educational and intellectual levels of the members.

She found much good reading material on the family bookshelves when young, but probably joined a public library too.

As an adult she was a user of her local public library for many years. She may also have subscribed to a circulating library as they were still going strong in the first half of the 20th century despite the competition from the free public libraries and she features two of them in one of her books.