Fictionalizing the Everyday in EF Benson's Mapp and Lucia Novels

The Rules and Politics of Storyworlds: Fictionalizing the Everyday in E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia Novels

James Phillips

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 44, Number 1, April 2020, pp. 52-65 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2020.0003

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754508

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] James Phillips

THE RULES AND POLITICS OF STORYWORLDS: FICTIONALIZING THE EVERYDAY IN E. F. BENSON’S MAPP AND LUCIA NOVELS

Abstract. E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels are often read as nothing more than comedies of manners. Yet this interpretation risks miss- ing their collective commitment to make-believe and the prioritizing of performance over being: Benson’s characters move in the realm of appearances by which Hannah Arendt defines the political. Contending that the novels dwell on how and where politics merges with storytelling, this article examines the freedom with which these willfully frivolous characters reinvent the everyday and turn the facts of their existence into props in a communal game. Benson’s characters, like his readers, play without concern for correction from outside.

story is an instruction manual of sorts, containing rules for the Amanufacture of fictional objects. Consider the opening sentence from E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia: “Though it was nearly a year since her husband’s death, Emmeline Lucas (universally known to her friends as Lucia) still wore the deepest and most uncompromising mourning.”1 As the sentence does not describe someone who exists, it does not press a truth claim that could be substantiated by observing the person in question. Instead, it is an invitation to construction: the reader is presented with guidelines for what he or she is to imagine. These guidelines do not fully determine what is imagined, since the exact shape and constitution of what a reader thinks, feels, and perceives in response to the words on the page necessarily draw on a living history that overwhelms and frames the moment of the act of reading.

The rules of the story do not implement themselves: they require the agency or medium of the reader to put them into effect. This is not the privilege of the ambiguous formulation or the emotional con- fession (the Benson quotation is characteristically neither), for every sentence lies dormant until it is brought to life by sharing in the life of the reader. The locus classicus of the denial of the reader’s passivity is arguably to be found in Proust and, indeed, over the last fifty years the denial has even become a recurring trope of the middle-brow novel.2 Yet affirming the agency of the reader should not and cannot entail disputing that reading is a rule-informed, if not rule-determined, activ- ity. What is distinctive about reading fiction is the adventure on which it embarks with rules. The reader attends to a story, receptive to its cues for how its situa- tions are to be conceived: in following a story, we run with what it pro- vides us to fabricate the fiction we take it to be prescribing. There is a resemblance here to how speech more broadly operates among people when it coordinates perceptions and organizes actions, when it comes up with a model that in its difference from the given state of affairs directs our assessments and reactions. With language there is from the outset among the action-oriented the possibility of storytelling inasmuch as the spell of the given, the currently actual, is disrupted: to speak to one another about what is to be done is already, in its divergence from what is presently the case, to engage in the fantasy of imagining other worlds. The resemblance between rule following in the reading of fiction and rule following in other interpersonal interactions does not extend as far, however, as identity. The evolutionary test to which language as a collective enterprise has been subject in norm formation does not apply to the former. When human beings fashion rules, whether along the lines of drafting a constitution, settling on the division of labor, or devising guidelines for the preferred execution of a given task, feedback is received from the larger world in which the community of language users finds itself. As components in a solution to an identified problem, such rules— along with their performance—admit evaluation (not intrinsically comprehensive) against the criterion of their fitness to the relevant environment. The rule that underwrites a judgment of the given and the actual is judged in its turn when the positive thus discovers its own normative dimension. The ongoing contestational dialogue between the positive and the normative amounts, from a certain perspective, to a story repeatedly initiated only to be once again aborted, since 54 Philosophy and Literature the constructivism of language is never allowed fully to take wing (the moralist and the inventor are halfhearted storytellers). Fiction, in giving itself over to the constructionist powers of language, hits upon a new relation to rules in the act of reading, even as it turns away from the friction between the normative and the positive that otherwise characterizes rules. If it is defensible to speak of rules within the unfettered constructivism of fiction, it is because whatever construction is credited to a story depends on the reader’s implementation of its rules. Every work of fiction is composed, as it were, in the imperative mood. Every utterance is a call to the reader to bring its object imaginatively into being: even when an individual statement within a fiction is factually accurate, a reader is to hear an injunction to claim the fact for the storyworld. In reading we do not so much acquire the license to dream (we already have this and do not have to wait to receive it from a storyteller’s hands) as the opportunity to play unsupervised with an instruction manual. While a dream can indulge our fantasies of invulnerability, it does so by withdrawing us from the feedback of the world at large: irrespec- tive of the contents of a dream, there is an essential solitariness to the dreamer. With the reader, by contrast, sociability enters, but the interpersonal element of the linguistic acknowledgment of norms is set adrift from its pragmatic moorings. The reader of fiction occupies the space of human coordination and nonetheless behaves like a recluse, injecting diffidence into the human interconnectedness that normative language establishes and facilitates. The reader implements rules in solitude, without risk of correction from outside the storyworld (where correction nonetheless occurs, such as when a reader is caught out in an alleged misconstruction of the storyworld and admonished to pay closer attention to the rules, the reader has always had to stop reading in order to speak or write to other readers). Storytelling is not then what binds a community together, but nor does it disperse a community. Its condition of possibility as a form of collective existence is the cohesiveness that comes from language and that language also presupposes. While a community with a wealth of stories is generally held to be a community richer in its conception of its own identity, this stands in need of qualification. The more detailed the imaginative terrain that a given community inhabits does not of itself indicate a community that is more closely knit together, at least not in the sense that the community in question will more readily rally for a common task or shrink back from outsiders. James Phillips 55

For literature to be serviceable for nationalism, the act of reading has to be policed to the point where what is being read can scarcely count as literature. Compounded of personal associations, anticipations, and borrowings, of lexical and affective resonances, the object of fiction that the reader brings into (imaginary) being through implementing a story’s rules is a phenomenon of such idiosyncratic density that it attests more to a reader’s singularity than to his or her affinity with fellow readers.3 This idiosyncratic density is indispensable for the traction and viabil- ity of the storyworld, whereas individual citizens can differ from one another in the connotations, poetic allusions, and reminiscences that a given article or section of the Constitution, for instance, suggests to them, without these differences having a bearing on the predictability that constitutions are designed to lend to interpersonal interactions. Literature gets by without the agreement on meaning crucial to other rules. The community that pretends to itself that it can discern its own unity reflected in the object of fiction must first pare the literary text down to a meaning whose decidability costs it the very capacity to evoke the openness of a storyworld. What bond there is that can be attributed to storytelling is at one and the same time the diaspora immanent to language in the incommunicability of the object of fiction in its phenomenological thickness. The perversity of readers is that they congregate around a text in order to experience how they cannot fully meet one another. The complementary perversity of the storyteller is to address readers without expecting a reply, to issue orders concerning the imaginative construction of the fictional object without ever getting around to inspect the result in readers’ minds. The storyteller invades the personal space, so to speak, of the reader, intent on mobilizing the latter’s memories, habits, attitudes, passions, and the like with an eye to the expressiveness and solidity of the fictional object. Even if a storyteller refrains from commanding readers to sacrifice their lives, such restraint does not prove that the storyteller knows nothing of a tyrant’s obtrusiveness and presumption: in his or her own way, the storyteller demands the reader’s entire life by attempting to call on its various aspects in the service of bringing the storyworld imaginatively into being. The storyteller makes demands, but the story can be put aside, other things being equal, if the reader does not deem those demands worthy of fulfillment. The extent of the invasiveness is accordingly in proportion to the degree of the reader’s collaboration. The reader who surrenders to the story knows with what impunity he or she can set about implementing its 56 Philosophy and Literature rules. Intimacy can be carried here to extremes because it coincides with evasiveness. The storyteller is invited in, even has the run of the house, but never manages to confront its occupant and can never leave to report back to other readers. A given reader and a given storyteller might step out of their respective roles and attempt from their different quarters to shed light on the process in which they have been involved, but the semiotic complexity of everything they bring—and must bring— to the construction of fiction invariably overtaxes them, provided they remember what it means to be a reader and a storyteller. The cosmogenesis with which the act of storytelling is charged in the mind of the willing reader might seem a topic for which a better vehicle can be found to explore than the miniaturist novels that Benson set in the fictional towns of Riseholme and Tilling. But worlds come in many sizes. Benson contracts and suppresses in order to arrive at the rules specific to the world of Mapp and Lucia. These rules are not to be confused with the supposedly isolable storytelling algorithms that might be claimed to unite and legitimate the various sequels by other authors published over the last three decades or so: Benson’s rules are coextensive with the entirety of his texts.4 If Benson scales down, it is not for the sake of a decidable meaning and at the price of evoking the openness of a storyworld. He narrows his horizons and those of his characters in order to draw out the delights and charms of the small. Georgie considers it Lucia’s “real métier, to render the trivialities of life intense for others.”5 But she is not alone in that regard. Olga Bracely, the opera singer, undergoes a conversion: “‘Oh, it’s all so delicious!’ she said. ‘I never knew before how terribly interesting little things were. It’s all wildly exciting, and there are fifty things going on just as exciting. Is it all of you who take such a tremendous interest in them that makes them so absorbing, or is it that they are absorbing in themselves, and ordinary dull people, not Riseholmites, don’t see how exciting they are?’”6 Confident that their own world is enough to reward their curiosity, the characters greet each other with “Any news?” when conducting their morning shopping in the high street. This inquisitiveness, while it does not tail off when faced with the outside world, has a socially acceptable form: “The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there. In particular, any manifestation of interest in kings or other distinguished people was held to be a very miserable failing.”7 There is a conspiracy among the inhabitants of Riseholme and Tilling not to let themselves be distracted from the novelties emerging in their midst. James Phillips 57

This is escapist literature of an unusual kind, for it does not transport the reader from the inconsequentialities of everyday life but rather invests them with the glamour and stimulation of fantasy. Even as their composi- tion spanned the interwar period, the six Mapp and Lucia novels decline to reflect or comment on the First World War, the Great Depression, or the rise of fascism.8 Benson spares his characters the decision whether or not to blank these events for the sake of their peace of mind: the world in which he places them effectively assumes the task of resisting the encroachment of these external matters. The fervor with which Lucia, Georgie Pillson, Daisy Quantock, Elizabeth Mapp, Major Benjy, Diva, Algernon and Susan Wyse, Quaint Irene, and the Padre and his wife, Evie, all throw themselves into each new social complication and fad could be suspected of the desperation of a disavowal of grimmer realities if the novels ever paused to acknowledge them. This passion for whatever is both parochial and new can also not be plausibly attributed to any deflection of sexual desires, since most of the characters exist in a condition of doll-like agenitality. Quaint Irene, who frankly proclaims her lesbian attachments, is the exception to the prevailing sexlessness, but even so she fully participates in the local enthusiasms.9 Citing Acts 17:21, Lucia remarks on “the truly Athenian character of Daisy’s mind, for she was always inquiring into ‘some new thing,’ which was the secret of life when first discovered, and got speed- ily relegated to the dust-heap” (QL, p. 28). While her intention when she begins this survey of her friend’s personality is to criticize Daisy for giddiness, Lucia soon concedes that in the past Daisy has been too often in the right for caution concerning her latest craze to be warranted.10 A craze, however, requires commitment or, at the least, the performance of it:

Lucia gave a little indulgent sigh. “Dear Daisy has ideas sometimes,” she said, “and I don’t deny that. She had the idea of ouija, she had the idea of the Museum, and though she said that came from Abfou, she had the idea of Abfou. Also she had the idea of golf. But she doesn’t carry her ideas out in a vivid manner that excites interest and keeps people on the boil. On the boil! That’s what we all ought to be, with a thousand things to do that seem immensely important and which are important because they seem so. You want a certain touch to give importance, which dear Daisy hasn’t got. Whatever poor Daisy does seems trivial.”11 58 Philosophy and Literature

Lucia is not confessing that her interest is faked, for the appearance of importance with which she and her circle invest each new obsession is quickly indistinguishable from importance pure and simple. The characters of the novels take an interest in taking an interest, assured of its transformative effects on the trivialities of life in Riseholme and Tilling. They levitate, as it were, above the dull facts of interwar, provincial England, aiding and abetting one another in defying the law of gravity. What engrosses Benson is less the magical transformation of trifles wrought by his characters than the reactions and responses with which his characters persuade themselves that a transformation has taken place. If his prose does not exhibit the lyrical mission that Coleridge ascribes to Wordsworth with regard to the everyday, it also does not stand back from the characters’ various hobbies and manias to pass judgment on them.12 The difference between what seems and is important does not disappear in the novels, since a recognition of this difference is needed to gauge the scope of the characters’ suspension of it: what the novels render observable is the erasure of this difference as the characters’ collective goal and achievement. In a sense, the characters inhabit a storyworld of their own making within the storyworld of the novels. They talk themselves into finding the latter storyworld interesting, repurposing fragments of it as props within their own. They are readers who approach the world around them as though it were a story. Whatever has become a prop within the characters’ own storyworld no longer merely seems important. Each prop is important because it is henceforth evaluated against the criteria of the fiction the characters have together composed from their lives. A further fiction is thus at stake within the storyworld of Benson’s narrative descriptions. Even though the identities of the participants and nature of the incidents are preserved intact, an additional element of make-believe has been introduced in the shape of a renovating enthusi- asm. The characters transcribe their lives for the stage they have made of Riseholme and Tilling. They are themselves the most discriminating spectators they could wish or fear for their own amateur theatricals, and their acute consciousness of display and attention to visibility throw a sheen of camp irreality over the otherwise mundane proceedings. By their collusion they succeed in pushing back against the authority of the given and the actual. They do not perceive any need to compete with the latter by means of alternative content drawn from fantasy, since the storyworld in which they take up residence is the uncanny double of the South of England of the early twentieth century—it is enough for this world to be made to feel different. James Phillips 59

This indifference on the part of Benson’s characters toward the harsh demands of reality can be put down to the financial independence they enjoy. As Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd note in their biography, “When Fred’s characters lose their money they usually manage to exist on an income of several thousand pounds a year.”13 Able to rely on others to carry out the tasks involved in keeping a household up and running, they can dedicate themselves to the interpersonal domain of “society.” They have the leisure that in ancient Athens was the enabling condition of political action, although the matters that they debate and over which they pore and plot are of the order of bicycling, tableaux vivants, and yoga.14 They cannot pass for political in the familiar or conventional sense, but they exhibit nevertheless the interpersonal notion of freedom that Hannah Arendt contradistinguishes from the necessities and soli- tudes of biological existence. On crossing the threshold of their respec- tives homes, Benson’s characters step outdoors into the public arena of their collective undertaking in make-believe. What counts is that which, with a little pushing from the participants, comes to seem important. That which, by contrast, is important and as such can do without anyone’s indulgence or wishful thinking for it to be taken seriously is too stolidly self-subsistent to be bothered with. Inasmuch as the characters are not bewitched by what is, and they collaborate to ward off a reassertion of its self-evidence, they taste public freedom and the flowering of the possible. More tendentiously put, they play at the politics that is out of reach to them as minorities (women and homosexuals) under patriarchy. Yet in merely playing at politics, in one significant aspect, they do not fall short of the political, for they enter all the more thoroughly into the spirit of play by which the freedom of political action sets itself off from the necessity at work in biological drives. Viewed in this light, Benson’s novels suggest a reductio ad absurdum of the purism of Arendt’s later account of the life of the revolutionary actor, parodying her distinction between the freedom of the political and the necessity of what she labels the social: the politics that best suc- ceeds in ignoring the social question (and thereby avoids the fate of the French Revolution, as Arendt reconstructs it) is the content-indifferent politicking that goes on in the agon of a village high street between members of the leisure classes.15 Lucia, Georgie, and their circle, as they pursue their fantastic feuds and affect-inflated pastimes, savor undi- luted—but briefly and partially—the independence from bodily cares that the founders of republics experience: Benson’s characters are, as it were, emblematic of the aestheticization of politics for which Arendt 60 Philosophy and Literature has been frequently censured.16 They bear witness to the convertibility of a self-referential politics into fiction. But reading the novels alongside Arendt’s texts on politics does not need to arrive at the sole conclusion that the characters crystallize the culpable frivolousness at the heart of her theory. The purism of Arendt’s understanding of the political, which these characters can be argued to instantiate, is directed toward establishing a concept in its distinctness rather than a practice in its inhumanity. Arendt endeavors to distill the strictly political concept of freedom from a history in which it has repeatedly merged with counterfeits and contraries of itself. Political freedom is prone to forget itself. Action, which is grounded in freedom, then mistakes its ends for its condition of possibility, drawing from the social realm the terms not just of its ratio finalis but also of its ratio essendi. The formalism of Arendt’s definition of the political, while it is on guard against any content or telos of action that seeks to remake the ground of political action in its own image, does not call for a wholesale repudiation of extrapolitical objectives. For Arendt’s purposes, however, the latter are unfruitfully ambiguous sites for discerning the concept of the political. Freedom, as Benson’s characters demonstrate, does not disdain from stooping to claim the everyday as the content for which it furnishes the form. What might be construed and deplored as frivolousness is freedom’s ironic detachment from what is, although without this detachment the political actor cannot become a conduit for utopian possibilities. In pushing back with such vehemence against the social question in On Revolution, Arendt should therefore be interpreted as rejecting not so much pity for the starving masses as the category mistake of believing the social question admitted a political answer: even as popular sovereignty elevated the people politically after the abolition of the monarchy, it left them as hungry as before.17 Identifying in their compassion with the biological forces to which the poor are subject rather than with the poor themselves as concrete individuals, the French revolutionaries exchanged the freedom of the political for the necessity of the social, and buried their own agency in a discourse of historical destiny. Nothing in this admittedly ludicrous juxtaposition of Benson’s characters with the French revolutionaries is intended to imply that we should regret that Lucia, Georgie, and company were never transported from the world of fiction to seize control of the organs of the central government. That is not the business they are cut out for. Yet from a particular vantage point, and with the requisite qualifications, they can James Phillips 61 be regarded as exemplary practitioners of something crucial to political action in Arendt’s narrow sense, namely, the lightness of touch that allows appearance to peel off from being and to set itself up in its own right with its own claim to substantiality. Denouncing the antipolitical quality of the condemnation of hypocrisy during the French Revolution, Arendt writes: “In politics, more than anywhere else, we have no possibility of distinguishing between being and appearance. In the realm of human affairs, being and appearance are indeed one and the same” (OR, p. 88). Appearances are what we have to work with inasmuch as our innermost selves are not objects of possible display. Benson’s characters are performance artists of their own lives. Here the distinctness of the political, in its difference from the biological necessities of animal existence, does not show up in the normativity of a constitution (and the drafting of a constitution is, for Arendt, the definitive political act) but rather consists in performance itself and its translation back and forth between being and appearance. The characters, through their performance, change nothing and everything in the world around them: their freedom is thus all the more easily overlooked.18 They do not introduce a normative order in competition with the positive; instead, they coax the positive into taking on some of the buoyancy of semblance. This is more than a simple case of keeping up appearances, for here the appearances are not a façade behind which a grubbier truth lies tucked out of sight (the elaborate lengths to which Lucia and Georgie go to conceal their ignorance of Italian are not representative of the role the novels assign to appearance). V. S. Pritchett comments on the culture in the novels of appreciating appearances for their own sake: “Always a positive thinker, Lucia draws the correct moral: it is no good, it is abhorrent, to take a real lover. Even in marriage her bedroom door is locked and her husband is content. The important thing is to have the reputation of having a lover: it gives a woman cachet.”19 In one of the rare reflective passages in the series, Georgie comes to the similar realization that the appearance of being the lover of the married Olga Bracely is more to his liking than the actuality:

Georgie by this time had quite got over the desolation of the moment when standing in the road opposite Mrs. Quantock’s mulberry tree he had given vent to that bitter cry of “More misery! more unhappiness!” His nerves, on that occasion, had been worn to fiddlestrings with all the fuss and fiasco of planning the tableaux, and this fancying himself in love 62 Philosophy and Literature

had been the last straw. . . . He admired Olga immensely, he found her stimulating and amusing, and since it was out of the question really to be her lover, he would have enjoyed next best to that being her brother, and such little pangs of jealousy as he might experience from time to time were rather in the nature of small electric shocks voluntarily received. . . . Without being conscious of any unreality about his sentiments, he really wanted to dress up as a lover rather than to be one, for he could form no notion at present of what it felt like to be absorbed in anyone else. Life was so full as it was: there really was no room for anything else, especially if that something else must be of the quality which rendered everything else colourless. This state of mind, this quality of emotion was wholly pleasurable and quite exciting, and instead of crying out “More misery! more unhappiness!” he could now, as he passed the mulberry, say to himself “More pleasures! More happiness!” (QL, pp. 200–201)

Giving himself over to appearances, Georgie gives himself over to fiction. He steps toward the reader, beckoning each of us to make of him what we can. Appearances have their rules, and reading, with its own impunity in the face of feedback from the world of being, is the art equal to implementing them. Reading is the most political of acts, which is to say that the claim being made here about the essence of politics refers to that which functions as its vanishing point.20

University of New South Wales

1. E. F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia (London: Black Swan, 1984), p. 7. 2. See, for instance, Proust’s analysis of the transcriptions that a reader must carry out in order to make sense of a text (fidelity to one register depends on infidelity to another): “A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces. This mildly deviant behaviour is the only means by which the invert can proceed to give full general significance to what he is reading” (Marcel Proust,Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson [London: Penguin, 2002], p. 219). 3. Even the reader who absentmindedly or impatiently skips over particular cues will construct an object reliably different from that of other readers, since the resulting points of semantic thinness in his or her storyworld will help individuate it. 4. These rules differ again from the rules with which characters within a fiction codify the probabilities of their environment. For a discussion of the learning process that fictional characters’ handling of the latter rules both exemplifies and advances, see Karin Kukkonen, “Quixotic Reasoning: Counterfactuals, Causation and Literary Storyworlds,” James Phillips 63

Paragraph 37 (2014): 47–61 (56): “Reading fiction, which serves as an exploration of environments other than the real world, further extends our process of constructing possible causal models, as we configure and reconfigure our probabilities in the form of Bayesian inferences while exploring storyworlds.” Storytelling here is recovered for evaluation in terms of feedback from the nonfictional world, but whatever evolutionary advantage human beings can be said to derive from storytelling through the workshop- ping of different models and training in discernment in the application of rules inevitably involves a storyworld that is surplus to requirements: for the lesson to be learned and for the model to rate as a model, a sifting operation has to be brought to bear on what is allegedly extraneous and superfluous in the fiction. 5. E. F. Benson, Trouble for Lucia (London: Black Swan, 1984), p. 124; hereafter abbreviated TL. 6. E. F. Benson, Queen Lucia (London: Black Swan, 1984), pp. 258–59; hereafter abbreviated QL. 7. E. F. Benson, Miss Mapp (London: Black Swan, 1984), p. 46; hereafter abbreviated MM. 8. In order of publication, the novels making up the series are Queen Lucia (1920), Miss Mapp (1922), Lucia in London (1927), Mapp and Lucia (1931), Lucia’s Progress (1935), and Trouble for Lucia (1939). The Great Depression is allowed to intrude only as the backdrop into which the long-standing character flaw of Miss Mapp’s and Major Benjy’s meanness cannot hope to disappear. See Georgie’s comments to Lucia on wedding gifts: “Tell your Mr. Meriton that because of the widespread poverty and unemployment you begged your friends not to spend their money on presents. They’d have been very meagre little things in any case: two packs of patience cards from Elizabeth and a pen-wiper from Benjy. Much better to have none” (E. F. Benson, Lucia’s Progress [London: Black Swan, 1984], pp. 255–56; hereafter abbreviated LP). 9. Indeed, one of the challenges that Lucia and Georgie confront on the path to marriage is how to reassure one another that sex is not on the cards without mentioning sex: “No ardent tokens were to mar their union. Marriage, in fact, with Lucia might be regarded as a vow of celibacy” (TL, p. 155). For how Irene handles the skittish Georgie, see Lucia’s Progress: “Georgie, I adore your beard. Do you put it inside your bedclothes or outside? Let me come and see some night when you’ve gone to bed. Don’t be alarmed, dear lamb, your sex protects you from any frowardness on my part” (LP, p. 113). The cartoonish coyness of the Mapp and Lucia novels comes across as less artificial than Benson’s attempt to give passion its due in An Autumn Sowing (1917), where the lightness of touch in which he resembles his near-contemporary Robert Walser deserts him. The surface is Benson’s stamping ground: when he ventures beyond it, as in the glimpse of homoerotic longing in David Blaize (1916), he hurriedly returns with a thud to the banality of a ball-by-ball account of a cricket match, cashing in the promise of a continuation of John Addington Symonds’s diary for more Biggles. Benson’s many ghost stories, for their part, do not leave the surface behind so much as experience it as horror: what takes place has no larger world to support it and make sense of it—and as such, when contemplated from a position of safety, it is ripe for being treated as entertainment. As Benson put it: “No doubt it is an excellent thing to know oneself, but self-consciousness is a heavy price to pay for that knowledge. Indeed, perhaps the main reward of knowing onself is the power to forget about oneself” (E. F. Benson, Final Edition [London: The Hogarth Press, 1988], p. 186). 64 Philosophy and Literature

10. A similarly inadvertent, but not disowned, self-portrait is the description of Edmund Gosse: “In many ways he was more like a tremendously intelligent child who, playing on the sea shore, did not concern himself with the sweep of the great tides, but splashed ecstatically in the less menacing ripples with the keenest eye for the adorable jetsam they flung up. He was not at ease nor at his best in the presence of high tensions, they made him feel uncomfortable, as if a thunderstorm was brewing. So, stepping lightly from their neighbourhood, he devoted his taste, his knowledge, his acumen to less cosmic phenomena” (E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show [London: The Hogarth Press, 1985], pp. 199–200). 11. Benson, Lucia in London, pp. 230–31. “Abfou” is the name Daisy settles on for the ancient Egyptian control guiding her séances. See Elizabeth Mapp’s method for enliv- ening her existence: “Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil” (MM, p. 7). 12. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983): “Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awaken- ing the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us” (pp. 6–7). 13. Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, E. F. Benson: As He Was (Luton: Lennard, 1988), p. 165. 14. After Lucia becomes Lord Mayor of Tilling at the very end of the fifth of the six novels, her performance of distributive justice exasperates Georgie, among others. Whereas Lucia’s friends hold that she romanticizes the poor beyond recognition, Elizabeth Mapp is convinced that poverty resolves into the personal failing of idleness for which, it fol- lows, she (and the modes of production) cannot be held responsible. See LP, pp. 83–84. 15. The game of make-believe to which they are all committed does not preclude fero- cious antipathies, yet again and again care is taken lest these quarrels, which at times seem the very relish of the game, result in a definitive breakdown in relations. See Robert F. Kiernan, “The Novel of Histrionic Manners: E. F. Benson” in Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel (New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. 66–94: “Good behavior is valuable because it allows scope to bad behavior” (p. 77). 16. See, for example, Martin Jay’s well-known objection to the autonomous spectacle of the Arendtian political: “As its own end, politics should not be conceived as a means to anything else whether it be domination, wealth, public welfare, or social justice: in short, politique pour la politique” (Martin Jay and Leon Botstein, “Hannah Arendt: Opposing Views,” Partisan Review 45 (1978): 348–80 (353). 17. “All rulership has its original and its most legitimate source in man’s wish to emancipate himself from life’s necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be James Phillips 65 more futile and more dangerous” (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [London: Penguin, 2006], p. 104; hereafter abbreviated OR). 18. In order to believe in it, a different kind of sympathy, a different set of commit- ments is needed not only from those that Arendt ties to the perception of freedom in revolutionary history but also from those Kant requires for recognition of the “as if” (als ob) of the world of freedom, in which rational beings frame and comply with moral norms without disturbing the reign of the laws of nature. It is a sympathy less with the rules of a normative order, whether political or moral, than with the pragmatics that has broken clear of the spell of the positive. 19. V. S. Pritchett, “E. F. Benson: Fairy Tales,” in The Tale Bearers: Essays on English, American and Other Writers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), pp. 18–24 (22). 20. Political action, in the open-mindedness with which it faces off against the obsti- nacy of the present, exhibits the imagination with which storyworlds are constructed. Arendt, who appeals to the liar and the storyteller in her exposition of the freedom of the political actor, distinguishes politics from the factual realm without severing it from the latter altogether. For how Arendtian politics defines itself both in relation to fiction and against the deceptions of ideology and propaganda, see James Phillips, “Between the Tyranny of Opinion and the Despotism of Rational Truth: Arendt on Facts and Acting in Concert,” New German Critique 40 (2013): 97–112.