Stella Benson's fantasy classic Living Alone
commentary by rbadac
I think I'll let you be the judge of whether the following plot synopsis of Stella Benson's Living Alone (Ln: Macmillan, 1919) constitutes a "spoiler" or not. For my part, I doubt it does, any more than a plot synopsis of a narrative poem would. It is definitely less spoilish than Bleiler's own summary, as mine draws up short before the end, when certain ongoing enigmas get cleared up, whereas Bleiler blurts them out & spilling popcorn down your neck on the way to the exit. This tale is in the telling, though, as you will find once you read it, & you may well agree with me then that even actually reading the book doesn't spoil a thing.
In London, a War Savings committee of six women is disrupted by the entrance of a seventh who rushes in, begging the others to hide her. She has stolen a bun from a baker -- "an uninterned German baker" she is quick to add. The women are self-righteously outraged; Miss Ford asks her why an able-bodied girl like her could not afford to buy the bun. The Stranger claims to have been "one of the leisured classes like yourselves," & up until ten that morning had a hundred pounds. When the others ask her what she did with it, she reveals that she put it in the War Loan, every penny, & even shows them a receipt. With a fake name.
Confusion follows upon confusion for the ladies of the Committee; Miss Ford, Lady Arabel, & a Sarah Brown (who usually got all the "organising work" to do) soon discover that the Stranger, whom they know only as a "Miss Watkins," is in fact a witch. Miss Watkins even casts a spell for them, a bit of Spring song that disorients them so that they do not notice her departure. However, she has left her broomstick behind, on which is the address of an island in the Thames, and Sarah Brown is assigned the task of returning it.
"(Sarah Brown), although she was a member of committees, was neither a real expert in, nor a real lover of, Doing Good. In Doing Good, I think, we have got into bad habits. We try in groups to do good to the individual, whereas, if good is to be done, it would seem more likely, & more consonant with precedent, that the individual might do it to the group. Without the smile of a Treasurer we cannot unloose our purse-strings; without the sanction of a Chairman we have no courage; without Minutes we have no memory. There is hardly one of us who would dare to give a flannelette nightgown to a Factory Girl who has Stepped Aside, without a committee to lay the blame on, should the Factory Girl, fortified by the flannelette nightgown, take Further Steps Aside..."
Sarah goes to the address on Mitten Island & has a chat with the lady they know only as Miss Watkins, nor is this her real name, as apparently she has several, & the text refers to her only as "the witch":
"...Now witches & wizards, as you perhaps know, are people who are born for the first time. I suppose we have all passed through this fair experience, we must all have had our chance of making magic. But to most of us it came in the boring beginning of time, & we wasted our best spells on plesiosauri, & protoplasms, & angels with flaming swords, all of whom knew magic too, & were not impressed. Witches & wizards are now rare, though not so rare as you think. Remembering nothing, they know nothing, & are not bored. They have to learn everything from the very beginning, except magic, which is the only real original sin. To the magic eye, magic alone is commonplace, everything else is unknown, unguessed, & undespised. Magic people are always obvious -- so obvious that we veteran souls can rarely understand them -- they are never subtle, & though they are new, they are never Modern. You may tell them in your cynical way that to-day is the only real day, & that there is nothing more unmentionable than yesterday except the day before. They will admire your cleverness very much, but the next moment you will find the witch sobbing over Tennyson, or the wizard smiling at the quaint fancies of Sir Edwin Landseer. You cannot really stir up magic people with ordinary human people. You & I have climbed over our thousand lives to a too dreadfully subtle eminence. In our day -- in our many days -- we have adored everything conceivable, & now we have to fall back on the inconceivable. We stand our idols on their heads, it is newer to do so, & we think we prefer them upside down. Talking constantly, we reel blindfold through eternity, & perhaps if we are lucky, once or twice in a score of lives, the blindfolding handkerchief slips, & we wriggle one eye free, & see gods like trees walking. By Jove, that gives us enough to talk about for two or three lives ! Witches & wizards are not blinded by having a Point of View. They just look, & are very much surprised and interested..."
The witch invites Sarah Brown to live there in the house, which is named Living Alone. It is a guest-house of sorts, for a particular brand of person, those who, according to the official Prospectus of the place,
"dislike hotels, clubs, settlements, hostels, boarding-houses, & lodges only less than their own homes; who detest landladies, waiters, husbands & wives, charwomen, & all forms of lookers after. This house is a monastery & a convent for monks & nuns dedicated to unknown gods. Men & women who are tired of being laboriously kind to their bodies, who like to be a little uncomfortable & quite uncared-for, who love to live from week to week without speaking, except to confide their destinations to 'bus-conductors, who are weary of wooly decorations, aspidistras, & the eternal two generations of roses which riot along blue ribbons on hireling wall-papers, who are ignorant of the science of tipping & thanking, who do not know how to cook yet hate to be cooked for, will here find the thing they have desired, & something else as well..."
Miss Ford & Lady Arabel drop in too, quite independent of each other or Sarah; each has been affected by the witch's charm, but only Sarah actually accepts the invitation to be a resident there. Lady Arabel, however, asks them to supper on Tuesday; she wants the witch to meet her son Richard (or, as she herself calls him, "Rrchud"). She is convinced that the witch & her Rrchud have something in common. Indeed they do; Richard is a warlock.
On her first day at Living Alone Sarah meets the only other lodger, a woman named Peony. Peony tells her in undiluted Cockney of her beloved Sherrie (she calls him that because he calls her that, the French cheri), the man she met through the intercession of a certain Elbert, who is some sort of imp who haunts Peony at various times during her life. Sarah has a last day at her committee job; she quits after eating a sandwich the witch made for her, which contains a magic comparable to the apples of the Tree of Knowledge.
Supper at Lady Arabel's, & the phantasmagorical encounter with Richard, who summons a blizzard of butterflies & levitates the chicken, is interrupted by, of all things, an air raid. The party moves to the nearby churchyard crypt where the neighboring folk usually gather during such an emergency. They are joined as well by certain other neighboring folk of a not-so-mundane nature. Leaving on her broomstick, the witch runs smack into another wave of German planes accompanied by a Teutonic witch, with which she must do battle.
Sarah needs a new job, & Richard offers her one on his farm in the parish of Faery. She & her dog David go there, & Sarah is stricken with a pain while hoeing a row of broad beans, trying too hard to be a good worker (the fairies working with her are slackers all, collect cigarette cards, & virtually ignore the dragon Richard hired to be their foreman). Meanwhile back in London, the witch is alternately fending off the advances of the Mayor of the borough & baffling the attempts of a policeman determined to arrest her for possible crimes against the Defence of the Realm Act.
It goes on, it goes on... it is the most utterly mad book. Did I mention the broomstick is named Harold? that Sarah's suitcase is named Humphrey? "Summary, unfortunately, does not convey the spirit of the book," says Bleiler, & he should know. Such a profusion of what, for lack of a better term, I must call "magical language" must be as uncommon as it is extraordinary. How the text can dip in & out between reality & fantasy without leaving enormous rents is a mystery, a miracle, a magic in & of itself. I cannot count the many times I laughed aloud while reading its astonishing insights, or adequately describe the brume that descends upon the reader, that seems at once to mute & ignite the very incandescence of living.
Afterthought begets allegories to bemuse well after the book is read; certainly anyone acquainted with the concept of Living Alone will have no trouble recognizing its boundaries, or its peculiar gifts to the soul. The magic people, the witches & the fairies, have no need of soul or heart as they are generally understood; they are at one with the rewards of both, & are sufficient to themselves. They toil not, neither do they spin. They avoid romance, yet are romantic. They remain "very much surprised & interested." Sarah Brown has the same initials as the author, of course. The Naughty Poor are as unresponsive to Charity as they ever were. Mitten Island, that "place of fine weather," could not exist in reality, yet Reality could not exist without it. The air raid bombs fall on it, too, but somehow cannot destroy what it is. Here, in a pearl trapped from 1919, is a grain of one of modern humanity's last gasps of wonder, from the threshold of its last innocence.