Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

by E. F. Benson

full of detail, full of fire and gesticulation, as if he himself had invented the science of squeezes, and had done nothing all his life but make them.

After lunch he said he would drive me to St. Deiniol’s, the library, chiefly theological and philosophical, that he was arranging, largely with his own hands, from his vast accumulation of books, for the benefit of the district, and in especial, for that of clerical students whose Church he had vainly attempted to disestablish. Soon after lunch it was announced that the carriage was round, and he went to the door. I had supposed that there would be some brougham or whatnot in charge of a coachman; instead there was a pony carriage for two, with a groom holding tight on to the pony’s head. Mr. Gladstone, already very dim-sighted, peered at the pony, and said to me, “Wait a minute: that pony’s a beast,” and hurried back into the house reappearing again with a formidable whip. Then I became aware that he and I were going alone, and that Mr. Gladstone, armed with this whip in case the pony was “beastly,” was intending to drive, for he took up the reins, and, as soon as I was in, said to the groom, “Let go, Charles,” and whacked the pony over the rump to teach him that there was his master sitting inside. Under this charioteer, blind and aged and completely intrepid, we cantered away to St. Deiniol’s, Mr. Gladstone pointing at objects of interest with his whip, and reminding the pony that he would catch it, if he misbehaved. From there, I think he drove me to the station and returned alone. I duly sent him squeezes prepared in the manner he had prescribed, and received a series of post-cards suggesting the probable readings of erased letters, and when next I went to Hawarden that autumn, there were passages he had turned up in the “Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum” which bore on this tombstone and on that, discharged at me as if from a volcano....

Six weeks’ exploration was enough to exhaust my funds, and I carried my squeezes and my sketches back to Cambridge, there to put the results into shape.... And there I found, and re-read with a suddenly re-kindled interest those pages of blue foolscap on the first of which was the heading “Dodo.” I had written them chiefly for my own amusement, but now, rightly or wrongly, I had the conviction that they might amuse others as well. But I really had no idea, till I took them out again, what they were like; now it occurred to me that the people in them were something like real people, and that the whole in point of agitating fact was something like a real book, that might be printed and bound.... But I instantly wanted another and if possible a story-teller’s opinion about it, and sent it off to my mother, asking her to read it first, and if it seemed to her to provide any species of entertainment, to think whether she could not manage to induce Mrs. Harrison (Lucas Malet) or Henry James, to cast a professional eye over it. She managed this with such success, that a few days afterwards she wrote to me to say that Henry James had consented to read it, and give his frank opinion. The packet she had already, on his consent, despatched to him.

Now this MSS. which thus had reached the kindest man in the world, was written in a furious hurry and covered with erasures, that exploded into illegible interpolations, and was indited in such a hand as we employ on a note that has to be dashed off when it is time already to go to the station. This was genially hinted at when late in November the recipient announced to me his judgment in the matter; for he prefaced his criticism with an apology for having kept it so long, and allowed that, in consenting to read and criticize, he had “rather overestimated the attention I should be able to give to a production in manuscript of such substantial length. We live in such a world of type-copy to-day that I had taken for granted your story would come to me in that form....”

I should like to call the attention of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our national caricaturist and parodist, to this unique situation. Henry James at that time had lately evolved the style and the method which makes a deeper gulf between his earlier books and his later than exists between different periods of the work of any other artist. Nearest perhaps in this extent and depth of gulf comes the case of the painter Turner, but the most sober and quiet example of his early period is not so far sundered from the most riotous of Venetian sunrises, as is, let us say, “Roderick Hudson” from “The Ivory Tower.” Just about now Henry James had realized, as he told my mother, that all his previous work was “subaqueous”: now, it seemed to him that he had got his head above water, whereas to those who adored his earlier work he appeared to have taken a header into some bottomless depth, where no plummet could penetrate. At this precise moment when he had vowed himself to psychological analysis so meticulous and intricate that such action as he henceforth permitted himself in his novels had to be sifted and searched for and inferred from the motives that prompted it, he found himself committed to read a long and crabbed MS., roughly and voluptuously squirted on to the paper. With what sense of outrage as he deciphered it sentence by sentence must he have found himself confronted by the high-spirited but hare-brained harangues of my unfortunate heroine and her wordy friends! Page after page he must have turned, only to discover more elementary adventures, more nugatory and nonsensical dialogues. At the stage at which my story then was, I must tell the reader that the heroine was far more extravagant than she subsequently became: She was much pruned and tamed before she made her printed appearance. The greater part of her censored escapades have faded from my mind, but I still remember some occasion soon after her baby’s death when she was discovered, I think by Jack, doing a step-dance with her footman. It must all have seemed to Henry James the very flower and felicity of hopeless, irredeemable fiction and still he persevered.... Or did he persevere? He wrote me anyhow the most careful and kindly of letters, following it by yet another, delicately and delightfully forbearing to quench the smoking flax.

“I am such a fanatic myself,” he writes in the earlier of these, “on the subject of form, style, the evidence of intention and meditation, of chiselling and hammering out in literary things that I am afraid I am rather a cold-blooded judge, rather likely to be offensive to a young story-teller on the question of quality. I’m not sure that yours strikes me as quite so ferociously literary as my ideal.... Only remember that a story is, essentially a form, and that if it fails of that, it fails of its mission.... For the rest, make yourself a style. It is by style we are saved.”

In case the reader has given a glance to Dodo, can he imagine a more wisely expressed opinion, that opinion, in fact, being no opinion at all? Never by any possibility could that MS. have seemed to him worth the paper it was written on, or two minutes of his own time. With what a sigh of relief he must have bundled it into its wrapper again!

I suppose I was incorrigible on this question of scribbling, for I was not in the least discouraged. But for the time the further adventures of the book were cut short by its author’s Odysseys, for directly after Christmas my father and mother, Maggie, Lucy Tait and I started for Algiers, through which we were to journey together as far as Tunis. After that I was going on to Athens to spend the spring there studying at the British School of Archæology, and it was with a light heart that I clapped Dodo, after this austere outing, back into a drawer again to wait till I could attend to her.