The Little World by Stella Benson – #1925Club

My final review for the 1925 Club is Stella Benson’s The Little World. I found it in Hay-on-Wye seven years ago, exploring the pocket editions section where, it turns out, it’s not all uniform editions of Kipling, Trollope, Galsworthy etc. I was excited to add to my Benson collection, but hadn’t realised until I picked it off the shelf for the 1925 Club that it wasn’t a novel. It wasn’t even (as I wondered next) short stories. It is, in fact, travel essays.

Having said that, it starts with a couple of sections – ‘Trippers’ and ‘Oldest Inhabitants’ – which are more short stories than essays, since Benson is not involved and the first one involves the premeditated murders of tourists. There may be some living in places like Cornwall that would have empathy, but it’s hardly travel writing proper.

After that, most of the book is about the places Benson goes, often five or six sections in a row in the same place. The ‘essays’ vary from a couple of pages to over 50, and the places she goes are the US, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, India, and Vietnam – perhaps surprising for woman in the 1920s, particularly one who seems to travel mostly alone or with a female companion.

If you’ve read Benson’s fiction, you’ll know what marks her out as a novelist. Her writing style is eccentric, dry, and totally unpredictable. I love it, and her ways of framing a sentence are extraordinary. Once I knew what The Little World was, I wondered how similar the tone would be.

On occasion, you could see the novelist in evidence. The opening of an essay on the US is ‘Being alive at all is an incessant shock and, I think, all the best lives are melodramas.’ That could be lifted from any of novels, whether the narrative or a line from one of her joyfully unhinged, determined heroines. Similarly, this paragraph from a section on teaching in Hong Kong could have one of her heroines’ self-deprecating humour (of the variety that isn’t really humble, because she doesn’t expect you to think any the worse of her):

I lacked not only degrees, diplomas and all necessary knowledge, but also the voice and address of the teacher. I had a very noisy and robust-spirited class, but to its credit let me say that no boy ever actually defied me. If any boy had defied me on a hot day I should have cried; I don’t mind confessing that now. The boys, in spite of a penchant for pea-shooters and cribs, were in the main extremely kind to me, and I think that was because my teaching did not tax their brains, and my discipline was so erratic that it demanded an almost paternal tolerance on their part.

But, for the most part, it didn’t have the same sparkle as her novels. It felt like a subdued version of Benson. For whatever reason – respect, perhaps, a genuine intention of informing her audience – she is much more restrained. The greatest exhuberance seems to come out in the sections on the United States, but otherwise she could be dry, not to say worthy.

In her novels, particularly I Pose, Benson has a powerful feminist voice. And that is threaded in occasionally – curiously, not really about the role of women in the countries she visits, but as asides that help contextualise a country. I noted down this section, which I don’t think would offend a Hindu, but apologies if it does:

Cows in India occupy the same position in society as women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle-race owing to the anxiety of man to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told, that she must occupy a Place Apart—and indeed, so far Apart did her Place prove to be, that it was practically out of earshot. The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. 

Of course, I should admit that travel literature is not really my cup of tea. I love learning about other countries, but I want to do that through the eyes of somebody from that country – not from a British person who happened to pass through. That is true of writing today, and it’s true of writing from 1925. And, of course, the countries that Benson sees will have transformed enormously. I was most engaged by the section on India, because it is the country covered that I am most interested in, but in 1925 it was under British rule. Benson has more sympathy than many of her compatriots for the Indian men and women who are living as colonised people, but I would still rather read about it from an Indian point of view. And there is something distasteful about the ease with which she visits and travels around, compared to the everyday lives of people being oppressed within their own country.

All in all, I think The Little World is for Stella Benson completists only. Or perhaps travel literature aficiandos. I did like the final words of the book, though, so that is where I’ll leave the review:

Having at last boarded the dirty little ship, we sleep and sleep and sleep. And so we lose the end of a journey, we lose the transition from one life to another, from the known to the unknown, from a life of seven-headed snakes and ghosts and gods under a red sinking moon to a life in which the cook wants seventy cents to buy a chicken for supper.