Commonplace Book

'The threatening of a storm grew every moment more imminent, and the two young men, who had intended to ride over the downs, decided to postpone their expedition. They stood together at the window of the smoking-room watching the awful and mysterious mobilization of cloud, the hard, black edges of thunder, ragged, as if bitten off some immense pall, coming up against what wind there was, and rising higher every moment towards the zenith, ready to topple and break. Once a scribble of light, some illegible, gigantic autograph, was traced against the blackness, and the gongs of thunder, as yet remote, testified its authenticity. Before long a few large drops of rain jumped like frogs on the gravel path below the windows, and a hot local eddy of unaccountable wind, like a grappling-iron let down from the moving vapours above, scoured across the lawn, stirring and rattling the dry-leaved laurels in the shrubbery, and expunging, as it passed, the reflections on the lake. It died away; the little breeze there had been dropped like a broken wing; the willows by the water were motionless as in a picture; a candle on the lawn would have burned with as steady a flame as in a glass shade within a sealed room. The fast-fading light was coppery in colour, and the darkness came on apace as the great bank of congested cloud shouldered its way over the sky, but, despite the gloom, there was a great precision of outline in hill and tree.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part IV, Chapter XV)

Commonplace Book

'"Elephantine wit," sighed the lady. "When Harry is so kind as to make a joke, which is, unfortunately, not so rare as one might wish, I always feel as if heavy feet were tramping about directly overhead."

"And when Lady Oxted makes a joke," said the lad, "which is not so often as her enemies would wish, she always reminds me of a sucking spring directly underfoot. I give one waterlogged cry, and am swallowed up. Do pour out tea for us, Lady Oxted. You are such an excellent tea-maker."

"The score is fifteen all," remarked Evie.

"When did Harry score?" demanded Lady Oxted, seating herself at the urn.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part III, Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

'Evie laughed.

"Dear Aunt, have you been very honourable lately?" she asked, "or has Uncle Bob been doubting your first qualities?"

"Cynicism always ends in disappointment," remarked Lady Oxted, leaping a conversational chasm, "but since it is cynical, I suppose it expects it."
[...]
"I will never waste an ounce of resolution again in determining to abide by my word," she announced.

Evie laughed again, with a great ring of happiness in the note.

"Then you will confirm Uncle Bob in his cynicism," she replied, "and disappoint him of all his pleasant little disappointments."'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part III, Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'...It was not only what they said and did that threatened her: in their presence, she saw with their eyes, felt with their disordered feelings, suffered their anger and panic. If she could have seen no more than their skin, she might have sustained her own life in their company. But she experienced the deadly movements of impulses that were not even conscious in them. It was as though some barrier other people possessed for their own protection was lacking in her.'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part One)

Commonplace Book

'...a long box hedge, once cut into tall and fantastic shapes. But it seems long to have lacked the shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night-hag into things inhuman. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part I, Chapter I)

Hope Against Hope and other stories by Stella Benson (1931)

This was published as a limited edition of 670 copies, all signed by the author, by Macmillan. It contains six stories, which all have in common either a holiday feel, an island location, or a setting outside the Anglo usual, enmeshed in the natural world. But, of course, being Benson, they deal with a firm contrast to this background: her characters are "characters" in casual parlance. Odd, whimsical, slightly offkey people. Often with obsessed minds, or ludicrous flaws of character, and pushed to an unexpected breaking point by exposure to testing realities. Looking small in their silliness, and yet representing us all in their peculiarity, foregrounded and looming large. Hope Against Hope pits a needy, dithering nurse against a hard-mouthed, unforgiving patient in a coastal nursing home. Her unwanted false jollying of him belies a passionate nature which is grimly revealed in an inept suicide attempt. Submarine has a wealthy couple diving in the Caribbean, where, in a spasm of underwater panic and dislocation, the wife betrays a long-subdued sense of guilt over the sacking of a thieving servant. Her crazed imagining that their guide and oxygen-supplier is the long-gone servant's son intent on cutting off their supply in revenge for his mother's dismissal, is revealed as nonsense, but reveals her perfectly. Hairy Carey's Son has the son of a presumed Caribbean pirate who barely knew his aged father visiting for the first time the scene of his father's supposed outrages, with an idea in the back of his mind that he has the clue to the discovery of a lost treasure. His utterly inept journey through the island on a wild goose chase very nearly costs him his life. An Out-Islander Comes In sketches the story of Rose from Liver Island in the Caribbean who has done the unimaginable in that inbred spot - she's married an outsider, an American no less. On her first foray off the island with her new husband she gets fuzzily lost in the capital of the island group. Everyone looks the same to her; her mind is so untutored in worldliness that even her husband fades into the crowd. On the Contrary is set on a cruise in the Red Sea. Leonard Lumley is a classic example of the winning out of delivery over content. He has the commanding manner. He has an answer and a homily to promote in every situation. The problem is, his actual understanding and capacity draggle on far behind his advertising. He perfunctorily leads an excursion party of the well-to-do passengers to the baking sands of Arabia, with hilarious unintended consequences. Finally, by far the most impressive piece is The Desert Islander. A young Russian Foreign Legionnaire, dirty and flea-infested, with a badly injured leg, turns up at the remote home of a British official deep in warring southern China. He is a 'desert islander' by nature - an extreme individualist, dogmatic and well in need of flattery for his unusual ideas. Mr White is a typical empire Brit of his era: neat, unemotional, effortlessly superior - almost guaranteed to be Constantine's nemesis. He quickly realises that Constantine must be got to hospital as his leg is dangerously gangrenous. Their manic car ride on bullock tracks through pouring monsoon is truncated at the first town as brigands have taken out all the bridges further on. The only way for Constantine to carry on is by river. By now he and White are wrapped in a terrible unspoken fight for supremacy; the tension, the war, Constantine's fear for his life, and, mostly, their ineffable difference of character, approach, everything, taking its toll. As Constantine is pushed off in his hired sampan amid a hail of gunshot from the forest-covered hills, White seems to fall forward in prayer at seeing him off successfully. But then he falls forward a bit more, and finally his neat, tidy body slumps down awkwardly, his hair draggling in the water - he's been hit. Constantine, having seemed, to his own irritation, the loser in their contest, has now 'won', though in this awful context. It's a moving piece. All of these, perhaps with the exception of An Out-Islander Comes In, which is a little sketchy and not so satisfying, are original, striking work in what can be understood to be the later Benson style. This is where her originality is still in play, but the fantasy and wide-eyedness of earlier works have been significantly tamed and replaced with a more worldly cynicism.

Commonplace Book

'...Everything despairing seemed a fact beyond dispute; everything hopeful, a mere dream...'

from The Desert Islander, a piece in Hope Against Hope and other stories by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'"Do you speak, Mademoiselle, of the solemn union between man and woman? In this sense marriage is a sacrament. Hence it is nearly always sacrilege. As for civil marriage, that is a mere formality. The importance attached to it by present day society is a folly which would have appeared laughable to women of the old regime. We owe this prejudice with many others to that bourgeois movement, to the rise of financiers and lawyers, which is termed the Revolution and which seems admirable to those who profit by it. It is the fruitful mother of all foolishness. Every day for a century she has been bringing forth new absurdities. Civil marriage is nothing but one of many registrations, instituted by the state in order that it may be informed concerning the condition of its citizens: for in a civilised state every one must have his label..."'

from The Red Lily by Anatole France (Chapter XIII)

Juha by Juhani Aho (1911)

The temptation would be to call this a love-triangle, but I don't really think it is. It seems to me to represent a state which can be seen as prior to that of the civilised notion of love. It depicts nineteenth century pioneer Finland in the wilds, with scattered villages and trading posts and a smattering of clergy. The ground on which everything about life is based is elemental, as is the struggle to survive and prosper in an environment both full of possibilities and enormously lonely and limiting in a personal sense. It is particularly limiting for women; they appear in this book as appendages in the main, though the mothers of the two male protagonists are tough frontier matriarchs, having survived through their appendagehood to some form of independence; although they are still very much living through their sons, they are also despotic family rulers in the domestic sphere. Juha is an ageing individual, with his own home apart from the family stead, who, years ago, took on a young wife, an ethnic Karelian who had been orphaned into his family. He looked after her from young girlhood and it seemed 'natural' that she would become his wife in time. Marja is established in his home, which to some extent they have built up together, both working physically hard. She is pretty tired, and pretty tired of him. He seems old and very uninviting, and she's worn out in the way that must have been very common for pioneer women of that time. Into their lives erupts a wandering trader: the young, fit, lanky, ultra-masculine scion of the most famous Karelian trading family. Shemeikka sweeps Marja off her feet, and she's still young and pretty enough to grab his attention. When Juha's hellish mother arrives for a visit, criticizing everything Marja does in minute detail in her well-established manner, driving Marja mad for the millionth time, the attractions which Shemeikka holds out finally become too alluring. After some indecision, she hops into his boat as he's leaving and heads off with him. Juha is devastated. His mother says, in effect, 'I told you so'. Juha battles between thinking that perhaps Marja was forcibly removed by Shemeikka, and the distinct possibility that she went willingly. He slips into terrible depression. Meanwhile Marja, after a few largely happy weeks alone, discovers on their arrival at Shemeikka's family compound that he has a tribe of young women lodged there who have been procured in a similar manner to hers. She is simply this year's model. She also slips into a depression as her dreams of young love are murdered. Having been there for some time, and now with a child of the liaison, she decides that she hates Shemeikka more than Juha, and feels sorry for what she has done to him. She escapes, leaving the child behind, and heads home. Juha accepts her with open arms, having in the meantime conveniently convinced himself that she was taken against her will. She does not relieve him of this delusion, not being able to bear the results of what the knowledge of her willingness would do to him. But fate soon overshadows Marja's mind; she simply can't get past the fact that Juha is incredibly unappealing to her, even though she feels for him on some emotional levels. She needs her child also; they decide to go back to Karelia together to retrieve him. While they are trying to achieve a slipping in and out with minimal attention, Shemeikka walks in. In the ensuing confrontation, Juha fights Shemeikka, flooring him before he is ready to retaliate. But in the confrontation Shemeikka reveals that Marja came willingly, and that she once told him that she wished Juha dead. Having injured Shemeikka, Juha and Marja escape in their boat. Juha, realising at last the true qualities of Marja's lack of feeling for him, confronts her. This time, exhausted, she does not deny how it actually was. With a bewildered dead look in his eyes, he casts himself over a waterfall to his death. This has the classically 'depressing' Scandinavian engulfing fated realism, I guess, but I don't find that unenjoyable when it's written this well. It's not about love, except on Juha's part, it's more about the 'wife-taking' process; though I suppose both Juha and Marja were seeking it, and not finding it in each other. It seems to me well ahead of its time in terms of its tough discussion of the human nitty gritty. Its themes of ownership, violence and elemental retribution in affairs of 'love' have one other striking likeness: I think people living with family and relationship violence would find the situations and reasoning here chillingly familiar.