E F Benson’s classic ghost story collection Visible and Invisible
was published about one hundred years ago in October 1923. The twelve stories
include several that have become anthology favourites, especially ‘Mrs Amworth’
and ‘Negotium Perambulans’. Others are perhaps more routine magazine fare, competent
professional exercises in thrills, but all have a certain brisk economy in the
telling, and a sardonic glee in the macabre.
Benson was 56 when the collection appeared. In complete contrast, he had
issued Miss Mapp, one of his popular society comedies set in Rye, Sussex,
the year before, and he was already known as a prolific, reliable author. He
was the most urbane and worldly of the three Benson brothers, and well
attuned to the commercial demands of the literary market. His tone is often
detached and sometimes ironic.
However, his back-list also included a significant number of uncanny
works, suggesting another side to his imagination, such as The Luck of the
Vails (1901) and The Image in the Sand (1905): and there had been an
earlier short story collection in a similar vein in The Room in the Tower
(1912).
Hutchinson’s catalogue (printed in the back of their books) says: ‘In
this volume Mr. Benson, departing from his usual choice of subject, deals with
the occult and supernatural, and these stories of engrossing interest are
proofs of his versatility and considerable powers of imagination. Between our
own and the other world lies a borderland of shadows, which eyes that can
pierce the material plane may sometimes see and whose happenings are somewhat
disquieting. The writer has subtly caught this vague uneasiness and made it the
pervading influence upon his characters in these original and powerful stories.'
As noticed in a previous post, May Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories
came out the month before, also from Hutchinson, and the notice for this
uses similar phrasing, also evoking both the other world and the borderland
(evidently they were the vogue terms for this sort of fiction), though it also
notes that her tales have ‘a strong psychological interest.’
Mary Butts came across a copy of Visible and Invisible in the
Tauchnitz edition when she was in St Malo, France, in October 1929. She
regarded this as a ‘magic town’, which reminded her of Algernon Blackwood’s
story ‘Ancient Sorceries’. She felt that here she would fall upon a ghost book,
and there it was. ‘There’s magic about’, she added. She noted in particular
Benson’s phrase: ‘Eternity isn’t a quantity. It’s a quality.’
In her journal on 21 October 1929 (The Journals of Mary Butts ed
Nathalie Blondel, pg 328), she made notes about each of the stories:
‘Fun at the mediums, sense not scepticism, “Mr Tilly’s Séance”
Vampires – here he is least convincing, “The Outreach”, “Mrs Amworth”
A ‘left-over’ of early man, “The Horror Horn”, cf. Buchan
The murderer-haunt, “At the Farmhouse”, “The Gardener”, “In the Tube”
The man of science who goes too far—scientific over-weight, “’And the
Dead Spake’”
The blessed dead, “Roderick’s story” & in part “Machaon.” The first
a very lovely story, cf. May Sinclair.
The evil elemental, “Negotium Perambulans.”
In all, a good run over the course—Benson’s course. Egypt omitted as an
‘occult’ distributing centre—he generally puts it in.’
She rediscovered it later, when, as before, ‘at need’ for it: evidently
there was something talismanic about the book for her. In a journal entry for
23 March 1936, she noted: “Grace & comfort it was & is—but a sense that
. . .—it was an advance-guard—a hint of what was to come & to keep . . .
–my ‘awareness’ in order,” adding, ‘I wish I knew E.F. Benson.’
When she wrote this, she had moved to Sennen Cove, in the far West of
Cornwall, and one story from the collection that may have had a particular
resonance for her is ‘Negotium Perambulans’, perhaps one of the most successful
in the book. This is set in the same area, on ‘the bare high plateau between
Penzance and Land’s End.’ Indeed, the story refers to the notable carved,
painted panels at St Creed, which is Sancreed, a place of particular mystical significance
to Mary Butts (and to others): she thought the Grail might descend here. It
seems likely that Sancreed was partly the inspiration for Benson’s story,
because his fictional Polearn has similar carvings and, like Sancreed, an
uncanny atmosphere, with a sense of ‘forces, fruitful and mysterious’ that
‘were dwellers in the innermost, grafted into the eternal life of the world.’
This theme would have appealed to Mary Butts. She was convinced, like Machen,
Blackwood, de la Mare and others in the field, that there are places where
other worlds overlap with ours: this recurs in her stories. She noted that Aleister
Crowley had told her that ‘in certain places . . . there is a leak from the
astral.’ Further, in another journal entry, she noted that glimpses of the
abyss seep through, and gave as an example, some of Aubrey Beardsley’s
pictures. Machen also explored this idea of a link between art and occult
visions in his story ‘Out of the Picture’. ‘Negotium Perambulans’ suggests this
too, in the troubled work of the artist John Evans, whose pictures are
‘inexplicably hellish’, full of ‘flickering shadows’, imbued with malignancy. The
story is the most speculative in the book: it is suitably gruesome and
outlandish, but it also implies vaster deeps.
I have a copy of Visible and Invisible in a later edition in a
rose-red binding which has an inscription in faded ink on the fixed front
endpaper: ‘G.M.H./(a bed book)/24-5-25'. It is to be hoped G.M.H. slept well.
(Mark Valentine)
