#sasha garwood

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Benson (left) and Plank (right)

In 1915, Edward Frederic (E. F.) Benson – the bestselling author of comic novel series Mapp and Lucia – was in his late 40s, popular and famously charming. Since adolescence he’d been drawn to men, and his diaries recount passionate romances at Marlborough College and King’s College Cambridge. But, perhaps unsurprisingly for the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, he was discreet. George Wolfe Plank was 15 years younger – a scrappy, self-taught American artist whose fantastical Vogue covers defined the look of the era. George had a studio around the corner from Fred in Chelsea and an eye for his handsome neighbour. For five years they shared houses and holidays – a couple to those who saw clearly, simply “bosom friends” to those who chose not to. The pair inhabited the tensions of queer masculinity in a world where sex between men was illegal and policed. They met in 1915 after George wrote to Fred, calling him “unmarried, worldly and witty” – all coded queer signifiers at the time – and quoting the poet Walt Whitman, whose rhetoric about comrades and love was a touchstone for many men who desired men. Fred invited him to tea and played him Tchaikovsky. Before long they were seeing each other every day, and George told his sister Amy that “I am … so happy I can scarcely realise it is I”. Their contrasting backgrounds brought conflict and fascination, perhaps bridged by physical attraction. In one letter George declares: “Two people never came from such opposite poles and were better friends; He was born an aristocrat, lived at Lambeth Palace, educated … he goes in for all sorts of sport, which of course makes him a fine physical specimen – and yet, we seem to fit perfectly, which is a miracle!” Fred would drop into George’s studio after evening engagements. Were they sleeping together? Surviving scraps are suggestive, but the archive’s silence here is ambiguous. Letters tell us about love but, for safety, much less about sex. Regardless, they were very close. When Fred bought 25 Brompton Square in London later that year, he insisted George move in too, and they decorated it together. “I grow fonder of him every day,” wrote George. For Fred, these were “a delight”, “halcyon days”. They also rented Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex, together, with George saying that he wanted to “stay on here … for always”. In 1916, they published The Freaks of Mayfair together, with George’s elegant Aubrey Beardsley-esque drawings illustrating Fred’s sharp social satires. This book put queerness at the heart of high society, particularly through the character of maiden-auntish character Aunt Georgie and his preference for “slightly effeminate young men”.

These years saw some notably queer works from Fred – David Blaize, Up and Down – and his first volume of autobiography. George produced Vogue covers, fashion illustrations and theatre scenery with dedication and flair. Their surviving letters are loving and haunting. Fred burnt piles of correspondence before he died, fearing “mischief” – but his surviving writing to George is poignant. “This scrawl must go: it carries with it a great many wishes that you were not away, and when the telephone bell rings, I miss your voice,” one letter from Fred reads. “The point is, I wish you were here … I want you.” George is caring, reassuring: “bestest love” and “I thought of you with every step”. Longing drifts from the pages. Nevertheless, there was sometimes trouble. Fred could be depressive and George wrote, wryly, during a bad patch: “Poor Fred is a mass of nerves … I must look after him as much as he will let me … But he is a queer fish at times and it is hard work.” When Fred’s mother died in 1918, George rushed to be with him. But having been swept off his feet by this glamorous, successful older man, he now spent months supporting a grieving companion who seemed suddenly old, both needy and unable to say what he needed. Fred was “huffy” when George’s friends Mildred and Jimmy took him to Paris, upset when George travelled alone, and wanted more of his time than George felt was compatible with his work. Throughout 1920 they were together regularly, indulging in the “perpetual privacy” of Rye. And then, in 1921, Fred disappears from George’s letters almost entirely. So often it’s the unknowns that haunt us. What happened? The archives can’t tell us for certain. They were both generous, gregarious, caring – but it seems that Fred’s demands came to strain George’s kindness, unlike the blissful early days when Fred was happy and George dazzled. (Full article)

[fredbensonenthusiast]

E.F. Benson's lost romance (GLR)

Thank you @alovelywaytospendanevening for alerting me to another interesting article by Sasha Garwood. She is writing a book about Fred and George - here is a sneak preview of some of the sources she will be drawing on, and some of her theories so far.......caricature courtesy of resident GLR cartoonist Charles Hefling 😉

https://glreview.org/article/e-f-bensons-lost-romance/

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

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.

(Full article)