TLS: E. F. Benson’s tortured sexuality
Author E. F. Benson (Fred to his intimates) has often been characterized as uninterested in, or even repelled by, physical intimacy. His biographer Brian Masters described him as “a prude” who “was wary of sex, distrusted it, feared it, and probably in the end avoided it”. The historian Steven Runciman, who met Benson in the late 1920s, declared: “I don’t think that passion, either physical or emotional, played a part in his life”, on the grounds that he considered himself “a personable youth whom a lecherous homosexual might have desired”, and that Benson “never touched him, except to shake hands”. Recent critics are more sanguine, often quoting Benson’s description of Capri “fellows” with their “attractive pagan gaiety”, and inferring a comfort with “casual same-sex activity” from the suggestion that “Pleasure sanctified all they did”. The implication is that Benson perhaps indulged himself in Capri, where he shared a villa with the homosexual classicist John Ellingham Brooks, but was too canny and respectable to combine sex with romantic love at home in English high society.
If he did, he certainly didn’t want us to know about it. Benson shaped the family archives on the principle that “‘when in doubt burn’ was the safer course”. Despite the vast, fascinating cache of his papers in the Bodleian Library, there is a lot we’ll never find. And as Simon Goldhill notes in A Very Queer Family Indeed (2016), “He tells nothing … There is barely a word in any of his surviving papers on any aspect of his internal erotic life”.
Nevertheless, in folders acquired by the Bodleian from Mrs Alice Russell in 1991, there is poetry that tells us more about Benson’s internal erotic life than anything else yet discovered. There is little clue as to when he wrote them; they are scrappy, much-edited drafts on torn paper, originally found in an envelope marked “Literary fragments”. But with their kisses, shared beds and passionate silences, they evoke an intensely romantic, ardently desiring man with the capacity for profound emotional attachment to people with whom he was sexually involved.
"Last night at the dead hour before the day
When birds announce the dawn and sleep again
And to the sleepless heart and sleepless brain
The lights are low and all sweet things decay
I told the bitter beads of love and pain
Each after each in fruitless rosary
And every bead had bitter words to say
You stirred beside me and your sundered arm
While yet I feigned to sleep slipped round my breast
And over mine your knee was softly bent
Then mute you slipped from my side, but golden balm
You spread about your going, for you pressed
Your lips to mine in silence, as you went."
Masters quoted a couple of these lines in his biography (1991), in rather different form, but the whole almost-sonnet has never been published or explored in any detail. It is addressed to someone with whom the speaker is physically entangled and sharing a bed. That final kiss is both reified and undercut by the lover’s mute exit and the speaker’s inability to articulate either consciousness or passion.
The same is true of another poem in the same folder, which also substitutes silent, joyful sexual contact for verbal declarations:
"I saw your soul stir in its sexless sleep
and wondered what red blossom would be born
with what awakening you would hail the morn
and when you would fare forth love’s tryst to keep
Whether your wide sad eyes [would] wake to weep
in dim & deep perplexity forlorn
or laugh to see the golden sheaves of corn
Stand ready for your harvest rich & deep
Thus opened on the world your soul’s sweet eyes
Bright as with morning dew on the eglantine
But never had I once expected this
That in your face danced rapturous surprise
And sweetly shyly do your lips seek mine
And meet there in the wonder of your kiss."
This has never been studied, and is much more scribbled-over than the other. Romance and physical intimacy again intertwine. The pastoral cast, and the emphasis on what Benson’s brother Arthur, discussing the “homo sexual question” with him, called the “concurrence of souls”, make it clear that the “wonder of your kiss” is both physical and emotional.
Both poems contradict the idea of Benson as repelled by physical contact or uninterested in combining sexual and emotional intimacy. But they also reflect the complexity with which love between men is represented elsewhere in his oeuvre. The “sexless sleep” of the second poem perhaps resonates with the sexlessness of boyhood posited to explain romantic friendships in Our Family Affairs (1920) and Mother (1925). It’s noticeable, though, that his representations of close relationships between men are between peers or coevals – boys at school in David Blaize (1916), young men at university in David of King’s (1924) or The Babe, B. A. (1897), adult men in Up and Down (1918) or some of the ghost stories.
David Blaize is particularly interesting here because it articulates the conflict between romantic love and sexuality that some critics have suggested Benson carried into his adult relationships. A schoolboy romance, written during the first years of his friendship with George Wolfe Plank and combining their names in that of its sexually fallen love interest, its plot hinges on Frank Maddox’s willingness to sacrifice desire so that he and David can share “boy-love, hot as fire and as clean as the trickle of ice-water on a glacier”. The published novel is oblique: Frank looks at a towel-clad David in a way that makes him uncomfortable, David flees, and a remorseful Frank gazes at himself in the mirror and concludes: “You beast. You ought to be shot”. But the first draft is more explicit, featuring a naked clinch in a corridor and pages of Frank’s conflicted interiority about “pleasure and longing”. In Benson’s usually telegraphic and quotidian Marlborough diary, several pages are ripped out due to “a dreadful period of temptation with its bearing on my friendship with Risley”. Benson once told a researcher that David Blaize had “a lot of autobiographical stuff boiled in”; one doesn’t have to go far to find it.
Benson’s last word on the subject comes in his memoir, Final Edition (1940), finished ten days before his death. There, criticizing explicit representations of sex in current fiction, he argues that “sexual desire is as natural a craving as hunger or thirst”, and writes: “the most unsatisfactory feature in these coitions was that the partners in them seemed to care for the act so much more than they cared for each other … I felt really sorry for these bloodless voluptuaries who got so little fun out of their amusements”.
Perhaps it is disingenuous, given his earlier denunciations, to suggest that the problem for Benson had never been sex itself, but sex between people who didn’t care for one another. But he was an establishment figure, and this was 1940, almost thirty years before the (partial) decriminalization of homosexuality and barely forty after the trials of Oscar Wilde. The insistence on care between lovers may have been Fred’s way of recognizing in print what he encoded in those unpublished poems: that not only did he feel love and sexual attraction, but in combination, they had been transcendent.
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