Sitting on the toilet in a public lavatory on the back of the door my eyes caught the legend - My mother made me a homosexual. Underneath it, in another hand - If I gave her the wool would she knit me one too.
The donation of a large skein of yarn to the Benson family would cover the jumper question. All of them in one way or another were ever so slightly queer. Simon Goldhill in the best leftist tradition blames Victorian society and repressive religion for this outcome. Not entirely of course family dynamics plays its part too but here’s the odd thing; even when he lays out what psychologists have discovered to be the classic aetiology of male homosexuality he virtually forbids his mind to go there. Again and again we are told of the mother’s warm, affectionate, loving nature that kept her sons close to her as perhaps an emotional bulwark against the cold, coercive, stern and rejective Papa. The classic breaking away from the mother that occurs in the male infant at the age of two/three to go over to the father’s side meets with a lack of warmth and welcome. There are of course many more factors at work but in the Victorian era boarding schools with sexual abuse and bullying added to the problem. The Uranian cult amongst exquisite aesthetes at university took the injunction of the rugger hearties to ‘man up’ literally. Many of those were Eton boys who went to King’s College Cambridge set up for their tertiery education. Arthur Christopher Benson thus remained in that milieu for his life really, going from Eton to King’s, back to Eton, and then back to Cambridge again to eventually become the Master of Magdalene College.
Arthur’s diary which is the major source of Goldhill’s book shows him to be a sexual surd beset by same sex tendencies but never acting them out. Of course he is an abyss of reticence so there are no revelations. Goldhill is cross about this and puts it down to religious inhibition which he portrays in a negative light, of course. Anyway he never married though many of the society matrons that he mingled with at country house shooting parties tried to fix him up. None of their efforts took, he never married.
Goldhill claims to have read the diary, said to be the largest in the world, through over a whole summer. Percy Lubbock’s edition shows Benson to be extremely readable, as were his essays and books. It’s a pity that ‘A Very Queer Family’ did not catch some of this smoothness stumbling as it does over the crags of ‘narratives’. I cannot recommend it as commits the cardinal sin of anachronistic critique from a perspective which misses the point.
I've written a few posts on the Bensons. Follow the links. Main: meet the bensons
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