SOURCE: Ashley, Mike. “Blood Brothers: The Supernatural Fiction of A. C. Benson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction. Vol. 1, pp. 100-10. San Bernardino: The Borgo Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Ashley examines the supernatural in the fiction of Benson and his brothers.]

It is not unusual for several members of a family to be writers, the Waughs being a typical example, but it is perhaps a little unusual when three brothers should find solace and even a morbid fascination in occult and supernatural fiction. It's even more unusual when those three should be the sons of an archbishop of Canterbury. But such was the case with the Bensons: Arthur Christopher (1862-1925), Edward Frederic (1867-1940, known usually as Fred) and Robert Hugh (1871-1914, known always as Hugh). All three became prolific writers, and though none achieved his fame predominantly in the supernatural field, it is their horror fiction that has tended to survive beyond their more mundane efforts.

The most prolific of the three was Fred and he has also earned the most enduring reputation, chiefly through his humorous series of books about Lucia and Miss Mapp, two mischief-making females whose parishional exploits have recently gained renewed popularity in Britain. But the first to turn to writing and who in turn inspired the others, was Arthur.

Arthur was a natural scholar and academic and spent his whole life ensconced within the walls of academe (first Eton and later Cambridge). During the day he taught classics, but in the evenings he would be working on books, essays and countless letters, as well as a voluminous diary, perhaps the longest maintained by an individual. He had produced his first book soon after becoming a Master at Eton, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel called Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton (1886). Thereafter the bulk of his output was nonfiction, including studies of noted episcopalian and literary figures. There were also books of verse, starting with Poems (1893). Queen Victoria held him in high regard, treating him as an unofficial poet laureate in preference to the generally disliked Alfred Austin. Benson had achieved immortality, unrecognised by many, in the lyrics for “Land of Hope and Glory” which he wrote to accompany Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March #1 when it was adapted for Edward VII's Coronation Ode in 1902. The song is now regarded as England's (as distinct from Great Britain's) national anthem.

The brothers' fascination with the supernatural may well have been imparted by their father, Edward White Benson (1828-1896). In his early days at Cambridge he had founded a Ghost Society which, through the work of his wife's brother, Henry Sidgwick, developed into the Society for Psychical Research. The elder Benson became something of an authority on hauntings and psychic phenomena. One case that came to his attention he reported to his close friend Henry James, who made use of it in his now classic story “The Turn of the Screw.” There can be little doubt that Edward Benson would tell his children ghost stories, probably with a strong Christian moral, especially during the long winter evenings, and this was a tradition that Arthur continued. In the absence of his own children (none of the brothers married), Arthur's pupils at Eton were a more than adequate substitute. Every Sunday evening in winter, for about forty minutes before supper, Arthur would gather the boys of his House about him in his study and recount what became known as the Eton Nights' Entertainments. One of the pupils remembered these occasions with much fondness, adding that “No one who ever heard him could deny that he was a glorious story-teller.”

Aware of the popularity of his stories, Arthur was finally persuaded to commit them to print. They appeared as two volumes, The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1904), both later reissued as the omnibus Paul the Minstrel (1911). They are mostly moral tales—”archaic little romances” Arthur himself called them—set in some unspecified medieval time and dealing with the deeds and dooms of various knights and priests. There is much of the mood of William Morris about them. Morris was, at the time of the tales' telling, working on his own fantasies—The Wood Beyond the World (1895) and others. While A. C. Benson had no great affection for Morris the socialist, he did admire Morris the writer and shared his love “for the kindly earth, and the simple country business.”

Not all of the stories involve the supernatural—some are merely simple allegories—but all possess a glamor of the unworldly. There is no lack of vision or imagery in the stories, and Benson made full use of the many weird dreams that plagued him throughout his life and which he recorded in his diary. These dreams were always vivid and frequently unpleasant. One example, from February 1896, concerns a tramp whom he saw washing something over a well. He first thought it was a rabbit,

but I presently saw that it was a small deformed hairy child, with a curious lower jaw, very shallow: over the face it had a kind of horny carapace … made of some material resembling pottery. I was disgusted at this but went on, and it grew dark: I heard behind me an odd sound and turning round saw this horrible creature, only a foot or two high, walking complacently after me, with its limbs involved in ugly and shapeless clothes made, it seemed to me, of oakum, or some more distressing material. The horror of it exceeded all belief.

Both Arthur and Fred made good use of dreams as a device in several of their stories, usually as portents. In Arthur's “The Gray Cat,” for instance, Roderick, the young son of a knight, while out on his own one day, is strangely affected by a dark pool in the hills. Thereafter he is plagued by dreams, first of two men emerging from the pool and claiming Roderick as their own, and then of being trapped in the pool with the water rising. Roderick is only released from his suffering after much tribulation. One is left to wonder how much of A. C. Benson there is in the character of Roderick.

Perhaps the most memorable of Arthur's fireside tales is “The Closed Window” which has much of M. R. James about it. James was a close friend of the Bensons, particularly of Arthur, with whom he had been a fellow scholar at King's College. “The Closed Window” is set in the Tower of Nort, home of the good knight Sir Mark and his cousin Roland. It tells of a room in the turret which has been sealed shut since the bizarre death of Mark's grandfather, who had lived at Nort under the blight of some strange shadow. The tower room has four windows, one of which is locked and barred and bears the inscription CLAUDIT ET NEMO APERIT [He Shutteth and None Openeth]. One sunny day curiosity gets the better of Mark, who opens the window to discover a world of darkness with a bleak, rocky landscape and a shape “like a crouching man” that beckons him. At length it is Roland, not Mark, who ventures into this world, resulting in one of Arthur's most effective climactic scenes.

These moral tales mark the A. C. Benson of the 1890s and appear to be all that he intended to publish. That he continued to create stories is certain, for he would occasionally join M. R. James in his own legendary narration of Christmas stories. One such, “The House at Treheale,” was related in 1903, and the manuscript was found along with others by Frederic, after Arthur's death. He published two of them under the title Basil Netherby (1927). These are more formalised ghost stories with one, “The Uttermost Farthing,” being a splendid example of the haunted house genre. Both are studies in revenge and retribution as a result of dabbling in black magic, but these moral undertones are certainly secondary to the tale, unlike the earlier stories.

In selecting these two stories for publication Frederic had cast aside other, presumbably less accomplished, items. Nevertheless, since these two examples show that Arthur was hitting his stride as a writer of ghost stories, one is left wondering what became of these other stories and whether more may survive. Arthur's association with M. R. James is enough to suggest that the two may have been mutually inspirational, and perhaps it is no surprise that Arthur's first two collections should appear at the same time as James's own Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904). Arthur had passed to Cambridge in 1903 as Master of Magdalen College and it seems more than likely that this closer association with M. R. James, who in 1905 became Provost of King's College, Cambridge, would have resulted in more stories. If so, where are they?

It is worth remembering that at this time Arthur was heavily involved in editing Queen Victoria's letters for publication, although this did not stop a stream of other essays flowing from his pen. In 1907, however, came the sudden mental collapse of his sister Maggie, and her removal to an asylum. This affected Arthur deeply, and he too slipped into a depression which lasted for two years. This melancholia did not lift until 1910 and then he returned to full college life and another active period of writing. He clearly retained an interest in the weird and wonderful, what with the reissue of his earlier stories as Paul the Minstrel in 1911 and the appearance of a sentimental religious fantasy about the immortality of the soul, The Child of the Dawn (1911). This work, which is uncharacteristically optimistic, had been prompted to a large degree by his brother Hugh's novels The Lord of the World (1907) and The Dawn of All (1911).

The period 1910/1911 was thus a creatively active one for A. C. Benson, and it has caused Jamesian scholar Rosemary Pardoe to wonder whether Benson might also be the identity behind the pseudonym ‘B’. This graced seven short ghost stories published in the Magdalen College Magazine between 1911 and 1914. They do not read like Benson's other stories, but if written when emerging from a severe depression, may accountably be different. There are, however, certain stylistic similarities, but this and other circumstantial evidence is far from conclusive. Rosemary Pardoe published five of these stories in a booklet entitled When the Door Is Shut (1896) and interested parties may wish to investigate further. One of the stories, “The Strange Fate of Mr. Peach,” is certainly worthy of A. C. Benson and it is hard to believe that, even if he were not ‘B’, he did not contribute in some way to the composition of these tales.

It is regrettable that A. C. Benson wrote no other works of horror or supernatural fiction. In 1917, after his sister's final decline and death, he entered a second and more intense bout of depression which lasted until 1922. He died of pleurisy on June 17, 1925, aged sixty-three.

Like Arthur, Hugh was plagued by moral and theological dilemmas. Hugh had been ordained a deacon in the Church of England by his father in 1894. The next few years saw him traveling to the Holy Land and Egypt as well as serving the poor in London before settling, in 1901, into a community life in the House of Resurrection at Mirfield, near Bradford, an Anglican establishment run on Benedictine lines. It was here, between evangelical work and study, that Hugh became fascinated with his brother Arthur's moralistic fantasies, and was inspired to compose the stories later published as The Light Invisible (1903). These are not stories in the formal sense, but rather episodes and incidents related by one priest to another, telling of odd, fleeting visions and matters unworldly. Few of the stories stand well on their own, possessing instead a collective atmosphere, although “The Traveller,” in which the spirit of one of the knights who murdered Thomas à Becket still restlessly seeks absolution, has an individual merit.

Although the last of the Bensons to toy with the supernatural in fiction, Hugh was possibly the best of the three. His stories carry a sense of conviction that is absent from those by Arthur or Fred, and it is likely that Hugh had a greater experience of the occult than his brothers. He had, in his early days, been a Swedenborgian, and was keenly aware of the spirit world around us. In his later years he explored the psychic realms more actively, attending séances and performing exorcisms. For good measure he was also an accomplished hypnotist and there are grounds for believing that he experimented with drugs. In the days since his ordination Hugh had suffered much mental anguish about his calling, but while at Mirfield, he decided once and for all and in July 1903, instead of renewing his vows, he set himself on the path to Catholicism. Fired by a renewed enthusiasm and dedication, his progress was rapid and he received Holy Orders in Rome in 1904. This sudden conversion made Hugh something of a celebrity and his books became bestsellers, especially By What Authority? (1904), which questioned the very basis of the Church of England.

By 1907 Hugh had completed a second collection of stories in the same vein as the first but now reflecting a Catholic outlook. Though they are composed in a more traditional framework, the stories are heavy in propaganda which occasionally spoils moments of brilliance. Nevertheless this second volume, The Mirror of Shalott, has been singled out for praise by many for its singularity and inventiveness. Some of the stories are, again, mere episodes, but others, especially “Father Girdlestone's Tale” and “My Own Tale” have a power and intensity equal to any tales of the supernatural. Hugh may well have been drawing upon many of his own experiences, for there is a conviction about the stories that is chillingly effective.

Hugh's power as a writer is most evident in The Necromancers (1909), possibly his best work. It tells of a young man whose fiancée dies before their marriage. He joins a group of spiritualists in the hope of regaining her, only to find himself possessed by an evil spirit. The novel leaves no doubt as to Hugh's own views on the phenomenon: “Spiritualism is wrong,” says Benson through one of his characters. “Evil spirits are at us all the time, trying to get in at any crack they can find. At séances … you open yourself as widely as possible to their entrance. Very often they can't get in, and then you're only bothered. But sometimes they can, and then you're done. It's particularly hard to get them out again.” Elsewhere Hugh gives this sensible advice: “To go to séances with good intentions is like holding a smoking-concert in a powder-magazine on behalf of an orphan asylum.”

Benson wrote a number of other novels, mostly thinly-veiled tracts of Catholic propaganda, of which the best known is probably Come Rack! Come Rope! (1912), with its convincing scenes of torture and religious persecution in Elizabethan England. Alas, Hugh's writing days were cut short by overwork, a weak heart and pneumonia. He died on October 19, 1914 aged only forty-two. Terrified of being buried alive, Hugh left strict instructions about his burial to ensure that he was unmistakeably dead before his interment.

Unlike Arthur and Hugh, E. F. Benson did not suffer from moral or theological issues. Although, like Arthur, he was plagued with vivid dreams, he was probably the most level-headed of the three. He was a wonderful athlete, with a fondness for winter sports, and had a wicked sense of humor with a delight in practical jokes. It would not be far from the truth to say that Fred never really grew up, and it was this that in all probability saved his sanity and allowed him to live a long and active life.

Fred was also inspired to write by his eldest brother's tale-tellings. He would occasionally sit in on the Eton Nights' Entertainments, and even used one of the stories as the basis for his later melodramatic novel The Luck of the Vails (1901), a murder mystery with only slight supernatural undertones. Fred's first attempt at fiction was, however, far removed from the supernatural. Dodo (1893) was, by Victorian standards, a rather risqué novel, portraying the rise of an ambitious if rather brainless “modern girl”. The book delighted the scandalmongers of the decade and catapulted Frederic into the social limelight, a position in which he reveled. Thereafter he was determined to be nothing other than a writer, and spent the rest of his life trying to repeat his early success. It led to an output of over a hundred books, eighty of them works of fiction and only a dozen of those in the realm of fantasy.

Like Hugh, Frederic had his share of psychic experiences, and like Arthur, he had his share of dreams and nightmares. These, combined with his very active life, provided much fuel for his fiction, and it may possibly be why his horror stories, next to his humorous episodes of Mapp and Lucia, have survived when his many other books are forgotten.

Most of Fred's supernatural stories can be found in his major collections: The Room in the Tower (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928) and More Spook Stories (1934). The rest are tucked away in books and popular magazines of the day. Frederic did not set out to establish any special place for himself in the horror genre. If anything he is an imitator, lacking the conviction of Hugh and the intensity of Arthur, but with sufficient imagination and experience to lend his stories an individuality. He wrote ghost stories because he enjoyed that frisson of fear himself. He shared with Algernon Blackwood the belief that “the narrator must succeed in frightening himself before he can hope to frighten his readers.” Perhaps for that reason he composed many of his stories in the first person.

When he came up with an idea that he liked, he was not averse to using it again and again. As a result a steady diet of E. F. Benson, unless selected carefully, can pall. In some stories Fred let the bare boards show through, with too little attempt to make them convincing (try for example, “And the Dead Spake—”, an utterly absurd story in which a man likens the human brain to a gramophone record and tries to replay deep-seated memories). But these are minor infractions which one must expect from an author as prolific as Benson. They are far outweighed by his more polished and inventive tales. In all he wrote about seventy ghost and horror stories, some fifty of which are of high quality.

One fine example is “The Room in the Tower,” the title story of his first collection. It grows out of a recurrent dream which plagues the narrator's adolescence and early manhood, but which never reaches a conclusion. The narrator only knows that he enters a room in a tower and is confronted by something terrible. At length the events in the dream begin to enact themselves in reality, and the narrator finds himself in the room. Awakened in the pitch darkness of night during a storm, he sees fleetingly in a flash of lightning “a figure that leaned over the end of the bed watching me,” wearing a “close-clinging white garment, spotted and stained with mold.” In the stygian blackness and deathly stillness that follow, he hears “the rustle of movement coming nearer.”

Here Frederic is genuinely frightening himself and hoping to chill others. As in Arthur's stories, dreams are used to good effect. In “The Face” events are replayed almost scene for scene as a young girl's recurrent dreams lead inevitably to her doom, whilst in “Caterpillars” and “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery” they serve as preludes to climactic events. Frederic was also much taken by the theme of fate, of one's unswervable destiny, both in life and beyond. It recurs most pointedly in “The Outcast,” which makes full use of an idea almost tossed away at the end of “The Room in the Tower,” that of a coffin that refuses to be buried. In “The Outcast” we follow the life and death of Mrs. Acres, whose body houses a spirit cursed in a former life never to rest or find shelter. As a consequence all things reject Mrs. Acres, and even after her death on board ship, when she is buried in the English Channel, the sea will not allow her rest, and she is cast up on the shore. When again laid to rest in the local churchyard, even the earth rejects her.

Unlike some of Benson's contemporaries, who left much unsaid, Frederic liked to dwell on grotesque and gruesome details, as in “The Horror Horn,” where an Alpine form of Yeti has particularly nasty eating habits. Benson's greatest predilection was for things glutinous and slimy, especially worms and slugs. They appear as the manifestation of evil in several stories. “Negotium Perambulans,” which H. P. Lovecraft thought possessed “singular power,” is really a rather weak attempt at imitating M. R. James. It presents a remote Cornish village with a house cursed by an ancient evil in the form of a gigantic slug which sucks the body of all its blood. In “And No Bird Sings” we find a wood devoid of all animal and bird life due to the presence of an elemental. Two men set out to rid the wood of this unseen evil and find themselves assailed by something “cold and slimy and hairy,” like a giant worm. The same sluglike elemental reappears in “The Thing in the Hall” while the victim in “The Sanctuary' is afflicted by a grey worm. Psychologists may well interpret the constant reference to worms as a reflection of Benson's own suppressed sexuality (interestingly, worms also turn up in Arthur's story “The Slype House”) but they nevertheless serve as a profound store for horror tales. The frequent reworking of the device does tend to diminish any authentic terror, but there is one story in which Frederic employed the theme to stunning effect, “Caterpillars,” which many regard as his best horror story.

Set, for once, in an Italian villa, it tells of the terrifying dreams that the narrator suffers. First, entering an unoccupied bedroom, he sees that the four-poster bed is a mass of writhing greyish-yellow caterpillars, all a foot or more in length and with crab-like pincers instead of suckers. The caterpillars become aware of his presence and turn their attention to him, pursuing him back to his own room. The next day just such a caterpillar is found by another of the guests, a painter called Inglis. The following night the narrator suffers another dream, and this time is forced to witness a relentless tide of caterpillars as they mount the stairs and force their way into the painter's bedroom. Later the symbolic significance of “the crab-like pincers” is brought to home when the narrator learns that from that second evening on, Inglis has contracted cancer.

This delight in overt horrors did not mean that Benson was immune to the more sensitive treatment of fear. Two of his best stories benefit from a controlled heightening of tension. “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery” is, at the outset, a humorous story, with the occupants of a haunted house having accepted and actually delighting in the presence of a whole family of ghosts. However, Benson subtly converts the humor into fear with the inclusion of a curse related to the ghosts of twin children. These two ghosts are always avoided until, by misfortune, one of the occupants is forced to face them. “Pirates” is a beautiful evocation of childhood memories and how they return to haunt a man, who is endeavoring to recapture the past, in his final moments. The first was Benson's own favorite of his stories, whilst “Pirates” is arguably the most aesthetically successful.

Being so prolific, E. F. Benson turned to most of the traditional horror themes for his stories. “Mrs. Amsworth,” for instance, is a fairly typical vampire story. “The Man Who Went Too Far” explores nature-mysticism, rather common in late Victorian fantasies, especially in the work of Arthur Machen and later Algernon Blackwood. Benson expanded this story into his novel The Angel of Pain (1905). “In the Tube” and “The Bed by the Window” show that he shared with H. G. Wells and again Algernon Blackwood a fascination for time and other dimensions. “Gavon's Eve” and “The Sanctuary” use witchcraft and other black magic as their central theme, while there are any number of stories involving séances and spiritualism. A later novel, Across the Stream (1919), joined with Hugh's earlier The Necromancers in its anti-Spiritualism message. Again it uses dreams as a vehicle for spirit manifestation, and carries an added sense of verisimilitude in Frederic's references to the protagonist's long-dead elder brother Martin. Frederic had himself had an elder brother Martin, who had died when Martin was only eleven.

Frederic's post-graduate days as an archeologist in Egypt and Greece provided the background for a few stories. “At Abdul Ali's Grave” involves an Egyptian black magician, whilst the novel The Image in the Sand (1905) combines Egyptian mysticism with spiritualism in a tale of a vengeful Egyptian spirit.

Frederic's novels, whilst not as accomplished as his short stories, are unjustly neglected. These include Colin and Colin II (1923/1925), really one long novel published in two parts, which studies the successive generations descending from a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly power. The Inheritor (1930) is similar in that it involves a curse which manifests itself in alternate generations in the shape of cloven-hoofed, misshapen heirs. This novel contains some of Benson's best writing. Yet only Raven's Brood (1934), his last weird novel, has seen any recent revival, and even then it was misrepresented as a typical paperback gothic, complete with lighted turret window and backward-glancing fleeing maiden on the cover.

Although Benson's best-known short stories are those, like “Caterpillars,” relying on more overt horrors, in due time his reputation must rest on his more subtle ghost stories. He rang the changes possibly more than any other author on the haunted house theme, and Benson's special variant, the haunted garden. Apart from “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery” and “Pirates,” the best examples of these two appoaches, Benson also wrote “Reconciliation,” “The Gardener,” “A Tale of an Empty House,” “Expiation,” and “Naboth's Vineyard”—amongst the best of a score or more of haunting tales.

In his final years, old, crotchety and crippled by arthritis, Fred spent less and less time writing. He was now a key part of the life of Rye, a lovely town in Sussex, where he lived in the former house of Henry James, and where he served as mayor from 1934 to 1937. He was also awarded the Order of the British Empire. He had installed in the parish church two beautiful stained glass windows, the first in 1928 in memory of Arthur, the second, in 1937, dedicated to his parents. The last, the west window, includes the figure of E. F. Benson himself in his mayoral robes. What other writer of ghost stories has such a shining memorial?

E. F. Benson died in London in February 29, 1940, whilst undergoing surgery. He was seventy-two, the last of the Benson brothers, each of whom had lived within his own private world. It is perhaps fitting that today we remember them for their dreams and fantasies.