E.F. Benson's autobio: Final Edition

IT was a great honour and something of an adventure
to be asked to stay with Henry James in this house at
Rye which he had lately bought. He was an old friend
of my family, and we were on terms of familiar adora-
tion with the entrancing folk of his earlier novels,
Roderick Hudson and Christina Light, Gilbert Os-
borne and Isabel and Daisy Miller and the rest, but we
could not all follow him when he declared to my
mother that his work of this period was "subaqueous,"
and that he had now got his head above water. Some of
us-I refuse to damn myself directly-would have liked
him to have continued amphibious, at any rate, for
ever. Six or seven years before he had consented to
read through in manuscript my earliest effort in au-
thorship, and it still appals me to remember that it was
not even typed when submitted to him. He was cer-
tainly appalled also, for he wrote acknowledging the
safe receipt of a sheaf of i'll-written text, saying that he
had not realised that it was so substantial a work. I
wonder how far he penetrated into it: not far, I hope,
for a comparatively small section, deciphered with dif-
ficulty, must have convinced him that Dodo was not a
work about which it was possible for him to be en-
couraging. He wrote me two or three long and kindly
and brilliantly evasive letters about it. He called it

"lively," he called himself "corrosively critical" though
he made no criticism, except that he did not find it as
"ferociously literary" as his taste demanded. "Hew out
a style," he said; "it is by style we are saved," and I
drew the obvious conclusion.

He disappeared next morning after a preoccupied
breakfast to a room built in the time of George II,
which stood in the garden, close to the house and at
right-angles to it up a flight of eight stone steps. The
bow-window on the north looked straight down the
cobbled West Street. On the left was the front of the
house, and just below this window the street made a
sharp turn to the right, and at the end of it was the dis-
used churchyard above which rose the west front of
the church. When Henry James had withdrawn himself
here for his morning's work, none might disturb him,
and as lunch time approached one sat in the garden by
the steps waiting for him to emerge, and could hear his
voice booming and pausing and booming again, as he
moved up and down the book-lined room dictating the
novel on which he was at work to his typist. The clack-
ing of the keys of her machine formed a sort of cas-
tenet accompaniment. Such now was his mode of com-
position: he made elaborate notes of the course of his
story and "with these in his hand he spoke his pages. To
use his own metaphor his book when thus fully planned
was like a portmanteau which he had packed so tightly
that, when he closed it, he heard it "beautifully creak-
ing": now he had only to open it and, in this dicta-
tion, take out and unfold its contents.

This habit of viva voce composition impressed itself
on his talk, giving it an incomparable richness. On it 

ran, as when he was dictating in the garden-room, in
decorated periods with cursive corrections till he found
the exact word and the perfect phrase. The effect
was that of a tapestry of speech being audibly designed
and executed. He worked a panel of this for me one
morning when he came out of his shrine an hour be-
fore the usual time, and, with splendid parentheses
and side-lights explained to me that the book on which
he was engaged (it must have been The Wings of a
Dove) was finished. But I have already exhibited that
piece somewhere, and I have a more sumptuous ex-
ample which my brother Arthur entered in his diary.
He wrote it down immediately after it was delivered,
and it is certainly the best record of Henry James's
unique utterance. The subject was the work of the
novelist Mrs. Oliphant, then lately deceased:

I had not read a line that the poor woman had written
for years, not for years. When she died, Henley-do you
know the rude, boisterous, windy, headstrong Henley?-
Henley, as I say, said to me: "Have you read Kirsteen?" I
replied that as a matter-of-fact-h'm-I had not read it.
Henley said, "That you should have any pretensions to in-
terest in literature and should dare to say that you have not
read Kirsteen!" I took my bludgeoning patiently and hum-
bly, my dear Arthur, went back and read it, and was at once
confirmed, after twenty pages, in my belief-I laboured
t~rough the book-that the poor soul had a simply [emi-
rune conception of literature, such slipshod, imperfect, halt-
ing, faltering, peeping, down-at-heel work-buffeting along
like a ragged creature in a high wind, and just struggling
to the goal and falling in a quivering mass of faintness and
fatuity.

Surely to the trained ear there was never a finer
passage of picturesque prose in the making, prose
glowing in the melting-pot, ready to be poured out into
the mold. He was soaked and saturated in the creation
and criticism of literature: they permeated his being,
an organic part of it. Friends and literature were
his passions, and when he talked to a friend the most
trivial incident must be dipped in style, as in Tyrian
dye: he put what he wanted to say in a chiselled casket
of words. One day he paid a call on a neighbour in
Rye and he wished to tell us that when the door was
opened to his ring a black dog appeared on the thre-
shold. But he could not bring himself to say "black dog,"
for that would have been a scarcely decent dishabille
for his information. "And from the dusky entry," he
said, "there emerged something black, something
canine." And below that formal and entrancing talk
stirred the spell of his geniality and benevolence, of
his absorbed interest in all the qualities, rich and poor,
of humanity. He disliked certain of these with singu-
lar intensity; anything approaching rudeness or in-
quisitiveness was abhorrent to him, rousing in him
just such a sense of sickened pity as he felt for the work
of poor Mrs. Oliphant. On the other hand he treasured
and fondled all that responded to his fastidious instincts
and to his affection. "I am singularly accessible," he
wrote, "to all demonstrations of regard." But an un-
friendly deed or word on the part of one whom he had
treated as a friend was final.

One afternoon I played golf at Camber. Beyond the

links in those days extended the stretch of tussocked
dunes bordered by shining sands, which now is covered 

with a confluent rash of small perky bungalows and
bathing-suits hung up to dry, and is resonant with
motor-cycles and loud speakers. He met us after our
game at the club-house and gave us tea, nebulously
interested in what we had been doing. "Some be-flagged
jampots, I understand, my dear Fred, let into the soil
at long but varying distances. A swoop, a swing, a
flourish of steel, a dormy": and he wrote to Arthur
saying that he thought I put golf too high among in-
tellectual pursuits. On other afternoons we walked very
slowly with frequent pauses for his salutations to his
friends-a child, a station-master or a dog, for each of
whom he had some special word-through the cobbled
streets of the town and out on to the levels of the sheep-
grazed marsh, with the sky above enormous as at sea.
I do not think he took much notice of the aspects of
nature, he was scarcely more conscious of them than
is a man, deep in thought, of the comfort of the arm-
chair in which he sits. Nature, at any rate, only ap-
pealed to him fitfully, as the cool water and the plane-
trees of the Ilyssus momentarily diverted the attention
of Socrates from his philosophy and his Phzedrus, till
at the end of their talk he invoked Pan and the deities
who haunted the place to give him and his companion
inward beauty of soul. Of all men that I have ever met
he was the most Socratic-his mind was always occupied
within on its own surmises and speculations. In the
middle of light superficial talk it withdrew itself into
depths of its own element, like a diving submarine.
Just so did Socrates stand meditating throughout a win-
ter's night at Potidzea, unconscious of all but the philo-
sophical problem that engaged him.

He laughed but little, but he was as full of humour
as the packed portmanteau "beautifully creaking." In
these distant memories I recall his story of how on his
way down to the High Street, he saw advancing towards
him a woman whom he knew that he knew, but whom
his racked memory failed to identify. As they drew
fatally nearer each other, she made a bee-line for him
acros; the roadway, and, still unidentified, opened con-
versation. "I've had the rest of it," she said, "made into
rissoles." Recognition followed at once. "And then in
fact," he said, "the cudgelling of my brain ceased, for
I recognised my own cook and knew that she was speak-
ing of the leg of lamb I had enjoyed roast on Monday
and cold on Tuesday."

Those few days at Rye scattered on the surface of
my mind seeds of desire, barren at present, but, so I
take it, capable of sprouting should occasion give them
a chance of growth. Rye has a spell, and I had been
touched with it. Lamb House and its walled garden,
the cobbled streets with their Georgian houses, and,
outside, the marsh, the golf, the empty sea beaches
beckoned, as by some secret gesture, with a promise
of ideal content. But a young man of thirty, still very
experimental in his tastes, and full of an energy for
the due dispersion of which every day is too short,
does not aim at content nor indeed desire it, and I
did not contemplate living there. I thought of it as one
thinks of some little town through which the express
train passes, slowing down but not stopping, thus giv-
ing to the observer from his window glimpses of red
roofs and fruit trees in flower and a stream wandering
through meadows or broadening into a bathing-pool.