'A Very Queer Family Indeed'' by Simon Goldhill (2016)

 

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 

Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson (pub. 1907)

 

‘Lord of the World’ has arrived just in time to be contemporary.  Quite punctual. I make out from internal evidence that its time is of the present moment.  Written in 1907 the classic trope of ‘100 years hence’ or thereabouts is operative and we can currently see its dystopian nightmare from which we are trying to awake.  Genocide is being live streamed with soldiers trying on the lingerie of commandeered houses.  The plain of Megiddo would be a nice place to try a nuclear bomb solution when all seems lost.

So much for the reality what about the book?  The ‘Lord of the World’ is of course the Antichrist, a word which is never used.  You must decide.  Is Julian Felsenburgh an agent empowered by Old Nick or the sulphurous one himself? But he is bringing peace and global unity, can that be bad?   When the book opens we are brought up to speed on the developments that have led to the ripeness of this vile fruit.  It’s complicated but when you break it down it’s really very simple.

“And America?” asked Percy.

“Ah! all that is very complicated. But she knew her strength and annexed Canada the same year. That was when we were at our weakest.”

The prediction of tom foolery of the 21st. century seems right:

“It is all much simpler, certainly,” he murmured, glancing first at the old complicated colouring of the beginning of the twentieth century, and then at the three great washes of the twenty-first.

He moved his finger along Asia. The words EASTERN EMPIRE ran across the pale yellow, from the Ural Mountains on the left to the Behring Straits on the right, curling round in giant letters through India, Australia, and New Zealand. He glanced at the red; it was considerably smaller, but still important enough, considering that it covered not only Europe proper, but all Russia up to the Ural Mountains, and Africa to the south. The blue-labelled AMERICAN REPUBLIC swept over the whole of that continent, and disappeared right round to the left of the Western Hemisphere in a shower of blue sparks on the white sea.

All of these elements are at war or about to go to war.  Things are in a bad way but then Felsenburgh arrives, an obscure American senator preaching to all nations in their own languages moving from one place to another in an uncanny way.  Where will he pop up next?  Is he the Prince of Peace?  It certainly seems so.  The ecstatic audiences want to make him their leader, falling down before him.  Eventually he does become the President of Europe but that is merely a placeholding position.  He is in fact the Lord of the World.  We don’t mention his other title.  We never speak of the devil.

What of the state of religion, the force that should be resisting the neat solutions of the Tempter?

“Briefly,” he said, “there are three forces—Catholicism, Humanitarianism, and the Eastern religions. About the third I cannot prophesy, though I think the Sufis will be victorious. Anything may happen; Esotericism is making enormous strides—and that means Pantheism; and the blending of the Chinese and Japanese dynasties throws out all our calculations. But in Europe and America, there is no doubt that the struggle lies between the other two. We can neglect everything else. And, I think, if you wish me to say what I think, that, humanly speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now. It is perfectly true that Protestantism is dead. Men do recognise at last that a supernatural Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.

So there we are.  We see that there is a good deal of coincidence with out present condition.  But there, in the world of the book, how is the demonic power applied to its characters?  The Brand family, Oliver a government minister, his wife Mabel, and Brand’s mother ailing and in her latter days turning back to the Catholicism of her childhood. The priest that is sent for to administer Extreme Unction is Percy Franklin.  Such is the central character nexus of the book.

Father Percy is even moved by the power of Felsenburgh.

Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head. The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation—stretching, too, as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast city.

You will gather that the theological element is dominant for after all the wastes of history it comes to the final battle of good versus evil.  Man as the measure of all things is inadequate as a rule.  Those ‘inches’ are paltry, trifling, puny, tabid faced with the dimension of eternal malignity of infinite shape.

Along with many nice gadget touches, apps even, rubber roads, asbestos furniture, volors flitting like silver fish there is continuity with our past and a reach forward in a morally credible way.  The minister of euthanasia are on hand when a volor crashes.  The right to die is a protected one with an eight day waiting period  in a genteel rest home if that is what you want.  All very rational.

Add this book to your Orwell and your Huxley.  You are worth it.  Time is short.

Priestcraft: Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's Come Rack!Come Rope!

I've read some of Benson's work before and posted on him and his family. In hand at present is Come Rack! Come Rope! a story based around the persecution of Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth. St. Edmund Campion Martyr comes into the tale which is quite absorbing and well told. He refers to his Queen as our Eliza and she is described thus:

She was dressed in some splendid stuff; jewels sparkled beneath her throat. Once a hand in an embroidered glove rose to wave an answer to the roar of salute; and, as the carriage came beneath, she raised her face.

It was a thin face, sharply pear-shaped, ending in a pointed chin; a tight mouth smiled at the corners; above her narrow eyes and high brows rose a high forehead, , surmounted by strands of auburn hair drawn back tightly beneath the little head-dress. It was a strangely peaked face, very clear-skinned, and resembled in some manner a mask. But the look of it was as sharp as steel; like a slender rapier, fragile and thin, yet keen enough to run a man through. The power of it, in a word, was out of all measure with the slightness of the face…. Then the face dropped; and Marjorie watched the back of the head bending this way and that, till the nodding heads that followed hid it from sight.

Fr. Edmund Campion in the disguise of a gentleman then says a strange thing:

He lifted his cap once more with grave seriousness. "God save her
Grace!" he said.

For all his loyalty he was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn after several interviews, or mechanically 'enhanced interrogations' with Richard Topcliffe priest-hunter in chief.

Addendum 11/3/14:

A character in the book mentions that he thinks the Papal bull of 1570 Regnans in Excelsis denouncing Elizabeth was a political error. It ushered in a period of persecution and repression that might have been avoided. One wonders whether the memory of this might not have played a part in the treatment of the Nazis by Pope Pius XII.

Blunders come in both directions. Obama and his Prayer Breakfast Waffle on Religious Freedom. He started a totally unnecessary fight with his contraception mandate. Why? It will be interesting to see how that proceeds.

A Mirror of Shalott by Robert Hugh Benson

This is the season of the pooka, a good time for stories of the supernatural. In a paperback anthology I found a slight tale by Robert Hugh Benson benson excerpted from a book called A Mirror of Shalott. This is available on Internet Archive. IA The suite of stories are told by a group of Catholic clerics meeting in a house in Rome I'm not sure that everyone would consider them real chillers, there are no fat boys like the one in Pickwick that will make your blood run cold, with a recitation of the blood drinkers burial in character but in an understated way that sharpens your sense of both the supernatural and the infranatural, they have a power.

Benson was a priest himself so the material plane was merely a diaphane that could be backlit on occasion. My sense is that these tales are more or less the true stories that he had heard from his colleagues in the ministry. It is the near irruptions into the everyday of other worlds where you can't be quite sure whether it was imagination or not that are the most effective. One story of a dream told by Father Stein :

He was slow of speech and thought and movement, and had that distressing grasp of the obvious that is characteristic of the German mind.

However the story that he tells of an archetypal dream is worthy of the best of Carl Jung.

Another story involves the concept of mystical substitution which a man proposes to the priest who is recounting it, a practical man not well up on the idea.

Well, I didn't understand him at first, but we talked a little, and at last I found that the idea of mystical substitution had seized on his mind. He was persuaded that he must make an offering of himself to God and as to be allowed to bear the temptation instead of his brother. Of course, we know that that is one of the claims of the Contemplative but to tell the truth, I had never come across it before in my own experience.

Not a good idea as it turned out. This man had previously gone for the priesthood and we are told:

The man's health simply could not stand it. But he led a most mortified and interior life with his wife in his London house, with a servant of two to look after them and was present daily at mass at the church that I served then.

Diverting and edifying. Quite!