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Stella Bowen

Stravinsky’s Lunch, by Drusilla Modjeska (1999)

The Sisters, by Hugh Ramsay (1904)
The Sisters, by Hugh Ramsay (1904)
“Let us begin with two sisters dressed for a ball,” Drusilla Modjeska writes in her introduction to Stravinsky’s Lunch. “Whenever I look at this painting — which, as it is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is quite often — I think they are waiting for the century to begin…. You can see from their faces that they are not the girls who went to balls in nineteenth-century novels; and you can see from their clothes that there is nothing of the modern woman about them.”

Cover of first US edition of "Stravinsky's Lunch"In Stravinsky’s Lunch, Modjeska looks at how two near-contemporaries of the two women in the painting (the painter’s sisters), Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith — both Australians, both painters — took on the century they encountered and carved out lives and careers very different from the conventions of the Victorian world in which they were raised. Modjeska refers to the book as “a koan in my own practice as a woman and writer.” The choice of the term is apt, as Stravinsky’s Lunch is a book that raises many questions and finds few definitive answers to them.

Questions such as those raised by the story of Stravinsky’s lunch, which Modjeska first heard over a restaurant meal with other writers and artists. It’s not really a story, so much as the fact that when the composer Igor Stravinsky was working on a composition, he insisted that his family eat lunch in silence. “All artists are selfish,” wrote Robert Craft in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (1972), “they must be, to get their work done. And they sacrifice the people around them.” for Modjeska, Stravinsky’s selfishness raises larger questions: “What are we prepared to ask of ourselves and of those who love us, what value we put on love and what value we put on art; what compromises we will make; which gods we will appease?”

Stella Bowen offers an example of a woman who, at first, sacrificed herself willingly on the altars of love and art. She happily entered into a relationship with the writer Ford Madox Ford, taking on the many domestic burdens of their rustic, near-penniless existence, in return for the sake of his love and his company: “… to have the run of a mind of that calibre … was a privilege for which I am still trying to say ‘thank you,'” she wrote in her memoir, Drawn from Life. But she also sacrificed her own development as an artist, as tending to Ford’s needs left her with little time and energy for her own work:

Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs. That was true, but he did not realise that if I had had the will to do it at all costs, my life would have been oriented quite differently. I should not have been available to nurse him through the daily strain of his own work; to walk and talk with him whenever he wanted, and to stand between him and circumstances. Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time — it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.

When, after one too many affairs with other women on Ford’s part, Bowen broke off their relationship, he failed to understand what all the fuss was about. As Modjeska puts it, he didn’t realize “that the qualities that had drawn him to her in the first place — her courage, her intelligence, her engagement with life — were precisely those that would take her away from him.” And that courage and intelligence were also what allowed her to produce her best work when she herself was free to focus. Yet, as is clear from Drawn from Life, Bowen never looked upon her time with Ford with regret, certainly not when she thought of their daughter. “Was Love the one, in the end, that she chose?” Or did she even chose one or the other? “Is choosing what she did?”

When I first read the story of Grace Cossington Smith that makes up the second half of Stravinsky’s Lunch, I was quite disappointed. There was none of the drama of Stella Bowen’s life. “No husbands. No babies. No affairs. No scandals. No cafes in Paris…. In the prejudices of her time, she was, simply, a spinster.” Smith spent most of her life in the same house with her parents and two of her three sisters. Most days, she painted scenes and people she saw around her in Sydney and the nearby country and seaside, working in a small studio her father had built at the back of their yard. She was over sixty before she was accepted as a serious artist of her own generation, over seventy when she was finally recognized as one of the greatest Australian painters of her century.

"Trees," by Grace Cossington Smith (1926)

Much of Smith’s story is a matter of producing painting after painting, moving first towards a striking mix of realism and abstraction, as illustrated by her 1926 painting, Trees. Smith said she was trying to paint all sides of a tree at once. When it appeared in her first solo show, one newspaper critic condemned it as a “freak.” Modjeska sees the work as revealing Smith’s keen eye for the dual nature of her Australian world: “For this was a young woman who understood both the settled pleasures of a garden with its bloom of peach, and the hectic tangle of branch and leaf, the mysterious possibilities that lay beyond, in bush and gully.”

As she grew older, Smith turned from subjects such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge to her immediate surroundings, painting the rooms in her family home — always with at least one window or door opening out into the world, but always from the perspective of someone on the inside. She experimented with color, settling on yellow as her primary tone, offset with blue (which is why it’s surprising that Modjeska doesn’t quote the opening phrase from Drawn from Life: “The land where I was born is a blue and yellow country”).

Grace Cossington Smith with her father and sister Madge (1919)
Grace Cossington Smith with her father and sister Madge (1919)

But there is another story that Modjeska reveals. Of Smith’s three sisters, one married early and another took on a lifetime profession as a nurse. But her sister Madge stayed at home and cared for their parents and Grace, and after their parents died, for Grace alone. It was Madge who cooked the meals and saw that the rooms were cleaned and laundry washed and ironed. Modjeska reprints a photo of Grace, Madge, and their father from 1919. It’s one of those family photos that, though accidentally and perhaps misleadingly, seems to betray a secret. “There is Grace with her strong, intelligent face lifted to the sun. Madge’s lowered head is shrouded in misery so intense it seems to burn the paper their images are printed on…. You can tell at a glance that there’d be no question of Grace taking over the kitchen.”

So, despite forging a career in art that was very much of her own shaping, deliberately enforcing her isolation so that she could focus on her work — focus to the point that her paintings from her last decades all depict scenes less than a few yards from her own home — Smith did, in her own way, insist on a form of Stravinsky’s lunch. No wonder that when Madge accompanied Grace on a trip to England in 1949, she found a widower in need of a wife and married him, leaving Grace to return to Australia alone.

Yet Modjeska admits that her attitude toward the story of Stravinsky’s lunch changed in the course of writing the book, and, in particular because of Smith’s example. The nature of the book as a koan is revealed in her realization that the story “not only buys into a way of thinking that would separate art from life, with art striding above and beyond, transcending the ordinary and humble, but it sets life against art, or art against life.” Smith never involved herself in artistic movements and stayed rooted to the home and family she knew. And as her energies diminished with age, she focused on the things she saw immediately around her: her bed, her table, her windows, her mirror.

Some reviewers objected to Modjeska’s interjection of herself, of her own reflections, into her accounts of the lives and careers of Bowen and Smith. But Stravinsky’s Lunch is not really a work of biography as much as an exercise in understanding — and as much Modjeska’s self-understanding as her understanding of the two women she portrays. In 1999, perhaps it was just slightly too early for critics to be comfortable with a work that did not fit neatly into the boundaries of one particular genre, but I think we are seeing now a proliferation of books that sweep across genre boundaries with never a second thought. I hope today’s readers will be ready to seek out a copy of Stravinsky’s Lunch and enjoy it as thoroughly as I did.

Stravinsky’s Lunch, by Drusilla Modjeska
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999

Drawn from Life, by Stella Bowen (1941)

Cover of first edition of "Drawn from Life"I came to Stella Bowen’s memoir, Drawn from Life (1941), through Drusilla Modjeska’s wonderful book, Stravinsky’s Lunch (which I’ll discuss in a separate post). Born in Adelaide, Australia, Bowen met the writer Ford Madox Ford while studying art in London and they lived together from 1919 to 1927. Modjeska devotes the first half of her book to an account of how Bowen struggled to establish herself as an artist while simultaneously dealing with domestic demands — first of Ford and later as a single mother raising their daughter, Julie — and quotes liberally from Drawn from Life. It only took a few excerpts to convince me that I had to read more.

“The land where I was born is a blue and yellow country,” opens Drawn from Life, with a rhapsody about the landscape of Australia — which, ironically, she left at the age of 18 and never returned to. Though her father died when she was just three, her childhood, as she recounts it, was entirely conventional: “We were, in fact, a suburb of England.” Her mother was a staunch Victorian, pure and true in her principles, and Bowen acknowledges it “a privilege to be associated with anyone whose life is a simple and perfect demonstration of all that they believe.” Her mother did, however, bend a little, allowing Stella to take classes at an art school run by a pioneering woman painter, Rose McPherson.

When her mother died in early 1914 and Stella and her brother were left with an annuity of two hundred pounds a year, Stella seized an opportunity to accompany a friend’s family on a journey to England. In London, she studied painting under Walter Sickert, who drove the importance of seeing the unique visual features of any subject. “He taught one to trust one’s faithful eyes, and to open them wide. I had never before been required to look at things so minutely, and having looked, to record them with so little fuss.”

She also met a number of influential figures, starting with the poet Ezra Pound, and in early 1918, at one of Pound’s parties, she was introduced to Ford Madox Ford. They experienced an instant rapport. Bowen found him “quite simply the most enthralling person I had ever met.” He quickly began confiding in her about all his troubles, including his inability to divorce his wife and to disentangle himself from his lover, the writer Violet Hunt. Soon he was telling her that “he wished to place his person, his fortune, his future in my hands.” He was tired of the world and just wanted “to dig potatoes and raise pigs and never write another book.”

Within a year, after Ford’s discharge from the Army, they were moving into a tumble-down cottage in Sussex. It had a hole in the roof, continuously damp, and surrounded by mud whenever it rained, but they loved their hideaway. They bought some chickens and pigs and planted a garden. Not long after, Bowen became pregnant.

Although Ford had vowed to give up writing, it didn’t take long for them to realize they couldn’t survive without the income. He set to work on articles and a novel, eventually published in 1923 as The Marsden Case. Soon the rhythm of the house became set by Ford’s work:

He would retire upstairs to write, and leave me to wrestle with the dinner. At eight I would say, “are you ready to eat?” and he would reply, “in a minute.” At eight-thirty I would say, “It is eight-thirty, darling,” and he would reply, “Oh, give me another twenty minutes,” and I would return to the kitchen and concoct something extra — another vegetable, or a savoury. At nine I’d say, “what about it?” and he’d tell me to put the meal on the table. At nine-thirty I would suggest putting it back on the fire, to re-heat. “What!” he’d cry, “dinner on the table all this time? Why ever didn’t you tell me?” Well, we’d eat perhaps at ten, with enormous appetite, and discuss the progress of his book and of my cooking.

“We enjoyed ourselves,” Bowen writes, but the preservation of Ford’s “working conditions” meant that she had to take over most of the domestic chores and all of the responsibility for managing their affairs. “I must manage to keep all worries from him, which was difficult. It meant that I must not let him know how overdrawn we were at the bank, nor how big the bill from the corn mills had become, nor how badly we needed a paraffin tank.” It was not enough for Bowen to keep the pig from wandering off to the next farm or take care of all the cooking and cleaning and feeding while in the last months of her pregnancy. “If ever a man needed a fairy godmother, he did,” she eventually concluded. And meanwhile, her painting “had, of course, been hopelessly interfered with by the whole shape of my life….”

Stella Bowen: Self Portrait, 1928
Stella Bowen: Self Portrait, 1928
A major theme in Drawn from Life is the near-impossibility of a woman working as an artist when all her time, attention, and energy is devoted to caring for a man pursuing his own career. “I was learning the technique of a quite different role: that of consort to another and more important artist.” Bowen’s blunt eloquence makes this a pioneering work of feminism, on the order of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” And still quite relevant, as the following quote from Jenny Offill’s recent novel, Dept. of Speculation: “I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”

Eventually, both Ford and Bowen came to resent the drudgery of rural life, and in 1922, they sold the cottage and, with daughter Julie in hand, headed for France. Their friend, the poet Harold Monro, had offered them the use of his tiny villa perched on a hilltop outside the town of Villefranche. Although the house was barely better furnished than their cottage, they relished the warmth of the Mediterranean weather, and Ford began working on Some Do Not …, the first volume of Parade’s End. The next spring, Ezra Pound’s wife Dorothy invited Bowen to join her on a tour of Tuscany, and the precise and flattened perspectives of Giotto’s murals strongly influenced her subsequent work.

They moved to Paris in September 1924, and were soon at the heart of the thriving expatriate scene. Ford’s brother, Oliver Hueffer, convinced him to take on the job of editing a new magazine he was establishing called the transatlantic review. Although the review failed after just one year, what a year that was. Ford has a marvelous gift for spotting good writing and collected pieces from Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and H. D., although with the first excerpts from James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” (Finnegans Wake). He also published the work of a fragile and destitute writer from the West Indies named Jean Rhys — and began an affair with her.

Though circumspect about the affair, the memory of it drives her to her most strident tones. She lumps Rhys in with a larger group of bohemians she refers to as “Wild Ones”: “It was quite all right to be dirty, drunk, a pervert or a thief or a whore, provided that you had a lively and an honest mind, and the courage of your instincts.” The affair was brief, however, and Ford and Bowen agreed to stay together in another rough villa outside Toulon for the winter of 1925-6.

Here, the Spanish painter Juan Gris encouraged Bowen to put her painting ahead of the matters of tending after Ford, and she managed to produce a number of vibrant landscapes. It was becoming clearer, however, that she could not continue to struggle with two competing demands, particularly not after being betrayed. When a French painter remarked that her work still seemed very immature, she thought in exasperation, “It is platitudinous to say so, but being a woman does set you back at great deal.” She refers to homemaking as a “specialization”: “Perhaps you never intended to devote your life to his kind of specialization, but society, and your own affections, and the fear of loneliness that besets us all, may keep you at it…. But beware: unlike other specialists, you will receive no promotion after years of faithful service. Your value in this profession will decline, and no record of long experience, or satisfaction given, will help you if you want to change your job.”

They made one last move back to Paris, and enjoyed something of a productive truce period. They placed their daughter in the care of a French woman outside the city and rented a space in Montparnasse where Bowen was able to set up a studio and the two worked during the week, visiting Julie on the weekends. But even with her own work space, Bowen found Ford constantly sending her out on errands: “I wish you’d go and sound so-and-so about such-and-such. I don’t want to do it myself, but it should be quite easy for you.”

Ford spent much of the next two winters in the United States, and Bowen was able to focus on her own work without distraction for the first time. Upon his return from his second trip to the U.S., however, Ford informed her that he had taken up with another woman painter, Janice Biala. That was enough for Bowen. She began action to take full custody of Julie and told the girl that Ford would no longer live with them. “I imagined that facing Paris without Ford was going to be full of difficulties,” she writes. Instead, “There were none. I felt chilly and forlorn at one moment and like a million dollars the next.”

Unfortunately, that feeling soon faded as Bowen confronted the practical obstacles of an increasingly unfavorable exchange rate and a crashing real estate market. Desperate for ways to bring in some much-needed cash, she took an opportunity raised by her American friend, Ramon Guthrie, and sailed for the U.S. where she could get portrait commissions and make several thousand dollars in the course of a few months. Though it helped her out of her financial straits, the visit to America makes for easily the weakest chapter in the book, one filled mostly with unremarkable observations about American life and culture.

By the time Bowen returned to Paris, it was clear that she could not afford to keep living in France, and she and Julie moved back to England, settling in London. With the onset of the Depression, work was almost impossible to get and the two struggled through some lean years. And Bowen found herself temperamentally out of place: “I dare say I have never known how to communicate with people in the English idiom.” In Paris or New York, she could manage to carry on conversations, tossing the ball back and forth with others. In London, however, the conversational ball “crashes to the ground where it lies looking like a suet pudding under the cold and silent eyes of the company. Agony!”

After a few years, she managed to make some headway. “I developed a technique for doing portrait sketches in two or three days and got a good many orders.” Julie studied set design at the London Theatre School and Bowen found a quiet cottage to her tastes in Green End, a hamlet in the Norfolk countryside east of London. Janice Biala contacted them saying that Ford was dying and Julie traveled to Honfleur, France to see her father one last time. It was June 1939.

Drawn from Life closes as summer 1940 nears. Though military encampments are being set up around Green End and the possibility of evacuation is being whispered about, for Bown, “Mostly I feel this is my last ditch.” Earlier, she wrote, “Four times in my life I have gone away with two suitcases, leaving all behind me, never to return,” but she was ready to “stay put and take what comes.”

Three group portraits painted for the Australian War Memorial by Stella Bowen
Three group portraits painted for the Australian War Memorial by Stella Bowen

Though written on the promise of popular interest in her relationship with Ford, Drawn from Life earned Bowen little more than her advance, and she struggled to keep things going until late 1943, when she was commissioned to paint for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. She produced several dozen canvas over the next two years, including several group portraits of Australian bomber crews that evoke the murals of Giotto that she’d seen in Italy with Dorothy Pound. Before the war ended, however, she had been diagnosed with colon cancer, and, after a short remission, she died in October 1947 at her home in Green End.

Drawn from Life deserves to be recognized as a minor classic. It’s a fiercely feminist text, one that echoes the messages of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech, “The Solitude of Self,” and anticipates The Feminine Mystique and other works of decades later:

If you are a woman, and you want to have a life of your own, it would probably be better for you to fall in love at seventeen, be seduced, and abandoned, and your baby die. If you survived this, you might go far! Otherwise, emerging from a love-affair into the position of a middle-aged housekeeper, you may suffer the most desperate sensations of constriction and futility which your situation will give you little chance to survive.

At present, there appear to be around thirty copies available for sale, with prices starting at over $20 and ending at over $2,000, according to a search on AddAll.com. First published in the UK in 1941, when a paper shortage ruled out the possibility of any immediate reissue, it’s been republished several times (in 1976 by George Mann, a small regional UK press, in 1984 by Virago, and in 1999 by Picador in Australia), but none of these were large quantity runs and (I’d like to think), it’s a book that, once bought, people tend to hang onto.

Drawn from Life: Reminiscences, by Stella Bowen
London: Collins Publishers, 1941

Pull Devil, Pull Baker, by Stella Benson and Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine

Cover of first UK edition of Pull Devil, Pull Baker by Stella Benson

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


[The Count:] At Cracow I stop at the Hotel de France. There I soon make the acquentance of the jeunesse doré of the locality, and between19 them — (a very costly one) — of Count P______, son of governor general of a province, to hoom I made cleaver story; that on way I was robed of my french passeport, that make me stop at Cracow expecting to find a french consulate in town. On ground of this story, the young count introduce me to the austrian chief of police, who give me, without any difficultys, a certificate of identity, due signed and seeled by him, that had the same value as a regular passeport for all austrian empire. I reussite also to lent [borrow] two thousand florins by the proprietor of the hotel, to wich I payd largely all my bill and my way further — to Vienna. At Vienna I had the opportunity to make another loone of two thousand florins by a old friend of my. With this lendet money I left Vienna for the south — for Buda-Pesh, the beautiful Hungarian capital, where I spendet foolish near all my money with the charming, pretty, Hungarian gerls — that brogth me bec to misery. In this critic position I rich Trieste, where I stop in the best hotel, kept by a friend of my friend in Vienna. That make me all rigth; permit me to ewayt some new chances of making money for my tramping further.

19Among.

[Benson:] The count does not explain exactly why he was all right in the best hotel, or enlarge upon the nature of the “chances” that here favoured him, or mention whether the numerous creditors he left trailing behind him as he flashed upon his brilliant course, ever Came Back into His Life — (as your creditors and mine are so lamentably likely to do). I should very much like to discuss with him his financial methods; it seems to me that he must have much that is useful to teach us all on this point — but as he is now without a penny, enquiry would perhaps seem ill-timed or tactless. But at the period of his life which this story embraces, his skill in “making money” seems to me most enviable. His world seemed always full of strangers anxious to lend him thousands on no security at all. I can only say that mine is not. I once, with great difficulty, borrowed a shilling over a strange bank counter, on the security of my simple face — but this is my nearest approach to the Count’s splendid insouciance.

Editor’s Comments


This site has been idle for the last month while I enjoyed the longest vacation of my adult life — one whole month (long vacations being one of the benefits of working in Europe). I did not, however, stop searching for and reading neglected books, so I have a backlog of posts to work through. I’m starting on it in reverse order, taking a look at the last book I came across (in Missoula’s Bird’s Nest Books), which I read in the course of my flights back home: Stella Benson’s 1933 book, Pull Devil, Pull Baker.

Finding it in the Russian history section, I pulled Pull Devil, Pull Baker down for a look on the strength of Benson’s name, which I recognized from Tobit Transplanted which D. J. Enright mentioned on several lists on this site. Although the spine only lists Benson, the title page credits her and one Count Nicolas De Toulouse Lautrec De Savine, K. M. (Knight of Malta). A quick flip through the book suggested it was a combination of recollections by the count and commentaries by Benson. It also showed that the count’s sections featured a highly unusual prose, full of misspellings and words from a hodge-podge of languages. I still wasn’t quite sure what this was, but it looked novel enough to buy for a very reasonable $5.

Stella BensonThe book opens innocently. Benson vouches for the real existence of the count and offers a synopsis of his noble pedigree (quite unconnected with that of the famous painter) as a member of “one of the most distinguiched aristocratic famelys of Europe.” She describes meeting him while he was a patient in a charity hospital in Hong Kong. According to Marlene Baldwin Davis’ Notes to Benson’s diaries, Benson did, indeed, encounter:

an elderly expatriate Russian who was penniless and ill. This relationship, which began 13 April 1931, involved Stella’s listening to the man’s ‘loving stories,’ transcribing them into readable, but not literary English so as not to spoil the effect, and getting them published under the title, Pull Devil, Pull Baker.

Benson describes with some admiration the Count’s talent for wandering the world with hardly a cent to his name, playing on the sympathy and admiration of unsuspecting Samaritans. But she also saw that his taste for adventures was being outpaced by the wear of old age:

Wait a little while — and yet a little while again. There was, I thought, the sound of a creaking bolt in the words. At seventy-seven, when a man is sick and worn out, a little while is as high a prison wall as a big while.

The Count, we learn, comes from a family with blood ties to French, Spanish, German, and Russian nobility and social links to just about anyone else of “hyg class” in Europe. Born in Russian Alaska in 1856, he survives a turbulent childhood to become a guardsman, gambler, and gallant. He easily falls in love with women, who, by his account, usually fall just as easily in love with him. He runs up enormous debts, almost always with Jews whom he looks upon with splenetic contempt. The Count’s first chapter ends with his discharge from the Russian army after a fight with a Jewish tailor over money.

Benson titles the first chapter, “Pull Devil: Presenting the Baker from the Devil’s Point of View.” According to Brewer’s, “Pull Devil, Pull Baker” is “said in encouragement of a contest, usually over the possession of something.” Benson (the Devil) sets up the book as a series of opposing chapters: one chapter giving Benson’s view of the Count (the Baker) and his stories, followed by another presenting the Count’s story, mostly in his own words with slight commentaries and footnoting by Benson. She admits at the start that,

[t]he dislocation between author and editor is usually more discreetly glossed over than it is in our book. At any rate, in our book, the Count says what he means, and I say what I mean, and, although our meanings are often mutually contradictory, at least I do not interpret him, as some editors have been known to interpret authors who are no longer sufficiently alive to insist on interpreting themselves.

My editing consists largely in trying to outshout my author with ideas of my own — ideas always, I am sure, in his opinion, completely irrelevant and frivolous.

We pass by this statement as nothing more than editorial self-effacement, but about fifty pages into the book, Benson returns to the matter in a passage that, in my view, ranks among the most remarkable to be found in any piece of fiction from the first half of the twentieth century:

For this reason I am uncertain now whether the Count de Savine is editing me or I him. I am cleverer than he is — I think — but I am not sure whether I see more or understand more. Simply, I say more and I understand that I don’t understand. He writes austerely in terms of appearances. He feels that there are various sets of words applicable to various kinds of people. Cluck, to the goose, spells hen — grunt spells pig — what else can the goose know about hens and pigs. Blu eys, gold hairs and smole fiets spell women to the Count, champagne and guardee ostentation spell hyg class men, durtiness and igrerence spells loo class men; crookyness spells Jew. That Count writes A Crooky Jew and means all that is comprehensible to him about a Jew…. What more is there to say? What other eyes can one look through, if not through one’s own? I write “The Count de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine” and add after the name thousands of words. What do I mean? I mean an invented thing — the Count-plus-me. And yet I write his name again and again and add thousands and thousands of invented words to describe him-plus-me, simply because I have not the austerity to confine myself to what I know. His narrative shows me how little I know — yet here I am, commenting industriously upon in.

It seems to me that I could edit the Jew Taylor quite as easily as I can edit the Count. I could edit an armadillo now, if I had to. I have seen and talked to the Count; I have not seen or talked to the Jew Taylor or the armadillo, but to describe Count, Jew or armadillo I have no recourse but to invent. I know nothing about the Count de Savine, either, except what he looks like and what he says and what he writes.

So I shall make up some words about the Polish Jew — and I maintain that my Jew can be no more unlikely than the real one.

Benson then proceeds to repeat the story of the Count’s fight with the tailor — only this time from the tailor’s viewpoint. The Count knocks the tailor on the head and in the commotion, the lights are snuffed. The tailor thinks, for a moment, that he has died and gone into an afterlife of nothingness. He is frightened, then comforted by the realization that all his worldly cares and burdens are now gone. Coming to, he thinks, “For a minute I was free … now I am the slave of a slave.”

With this passage, Benson leaps from the simple dimensions of a collection of fanciful reminiscences with editorial commentary to the fictional equivalent of differential geometry. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is not just “an arrangement of short stories,” as critic R. Meredith Bedell describes it. I think it shares more in common with such works as Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and other early works of metafiction. Indeed, there are more than a few parallels between the book and Don Quixote itself: both play with the dimensions of the story as experienced and the story as told; both intersperse narration and commentary; and both deal with an elderly man from one era trying to deal with the realities of a very different one.

Perhaps without knowing it, Benson also manages to address a profound issue about the relationship between perception and reality that no less weighty a thinker than Ludwig Wittgenstein was grappling with at roughly the same time that she was writing Pull Devil, Pull Baker. “Cluck, to the goose, spells hen…. What other eyes can one look through, if not through one’s own?,” she writes. Is this not, essentially, what Wittgenstein was arguing with his aphorism, “If a lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him?”

That the Count is more likely descended from Baron Munchausen than Count Alexander IV de Toulouse Lautrec is obvious. Benson’s intrigue with the Count’s stories and viewpoint does not prevent her from exercising editorial discretion when it’s called for:

[The Count:] “Very please to meat you, Count,” tell he, “I was effrayed to molest you. You can not mean2 how inthusiast peopel are concern you, from the Blac See to the Baltic, and from there to the Pacific Costs of the Fahr East….” et., etc., etc..

2Know, imagine.

[Benson:] (Here follow nine pages of hero-worship.)

She does acknowledge that “I have grown to love the Count’s oddities of spelling,” but here again, her remarks play with our understanding of the relationship between Baker and Devil:

To make a loone suggests to me something more insouciant and dashing than the mere borrowing of money. I think the noty gerl must have possessed a piquancy that ordinary naughty girls lack. I like the ai and ay effects — so incongruously refained upon the bearded lip (bearded pen-nib?) of a world-roving adventurer; quait and quait I find much more convincing then a mere completely. And my favourite sentence in the whole of this work is —

[The Count:] The most ones of our officers had sweathearts, but I was to yang and to inconstant to bound me with a gerl; prefair to flay from one to a other, as a butterflay who flay from one flower to a other one.

“As an experiment,” Benson then “tries transposing” (an interesting choice of a mathematical term over the expected “translating”) one of the Count’s stories into grammatically and orthographically correct English: “The lawyer of the baroness appealed, on the ground that she was not in her normal mind at the time of the murder, but the appeal was dismissed by the high court.” Her point, although unstated, is clear: in these words, the story is not, in fact, one of the Count’s stories, but something different, not just if wording but in viewpoint. Yet the experiment also raises a question about the fundamental premise of the book: are these the stories as written by the Count (as claimed in the introduction) or as told by the Count and written by Benson? I have not had the opportunity to check Benson’s diaries, but if what Prof. Davis states is true (“This relationship, which began 13 April 1931, involved Stella’s listening to the man’s ‘loving stories,’ transcribing them into readable, but not literary English so as not to spoil the effect….”, then Benson’s experiment is itself a metafictional sleight of hand, showing the reader how dramatically a story can be changed just by altering the words and grammar in which it is told.

Pull Devil, Pull Baker is, I think, an unrecognized precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War. It belongs in the same canon as the works of Calvino, Borges, and Queneau. Take the following, which now recalls Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle but at the time displayed the same self-referential brio as Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (AKA Ceci n’est pas une pipe):

There is, perhaps, no thing called Truth in any book — or at any rate that can be arrived at by appraisal from a standpoint outside the book itself. Words in books are like citizens in cities; as long as they live in accord with their neighbours, they are beyond outside challenge…. My word truth, the Count’s word truth, the police-magistrate’s word truth, would all be strangers within one another’s gates.

For all the post-modernist and metafictional wizardry she displays in Pull Devil, Pull Baker, however, Benson does presume to be the Count’s superior. Instead, she reflects, with some sadness,

The words “quait unexpected,” which might almost be called the refrain of the Count’s story, no longer seem to us exciting — as they seem to him. We have grown wary of surprises, through living all our lives in such a quait and quait unexpected world. But the Count was born into an established world — a world scored with seemly grooves and bristling with instructive signposts….

The increasing complexity of the world, as compared with the much simpler, black-and-white world on which the Count de Savine first opened his eyes nearly eight decades ago, now imposes upon us a kind of colour-blindness. We forbid our hearts to leap forth on new adventures; spiritually as well as economically, we can’t afford adventures any more. We have learned to stay at home, because we know now that the world is round — that travel only takes us back to the same place in the end — that the path to adventure is a treadmill path round a spinning globe. There is no destination, either of dragon or princess…. And so I submit, as black-and-white refreshment to eyes dazzled with complex colour, these simple stories by a storyteller who never got tired of anything — least of all of himself….

At the time of its publication, Pull Devil, Pull Baker was seen a little more than a collection of quirky and entertaining reminiscences — “rodomontadinous reminiscences,” as Time’s reviewer put it. Scribner’s compared it to Trader Horn, while in the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman called it “quaint without being at all nauseous.” One of the few to recognize that the book was something more than that was Benson’s friend and fellow writer, Winifred Holtby. In a letter to Benson, she wrote that the book “[S]how[s] how a writer works, how the artist’s mind differs from the non-artist’s — and how the purely self-regarding imagination which blinds, differs from the outward looking imagination which illuminates.” Perhaps the misunderstanding of the book worked in Benson’s financial favor, though: it was picked up by the Literary Guild and sold well in the U.S.. Unfortunately, she never had the chance to enjoy this success, as she died of pneumonia in December 1933 while living with her husband in northern Vietnam.

Find Out More

  • Wikipedia entry on Stella Benson
  • Prof. Marlene Baldwin Davis’ Notes to the Diaries of Stella Benson

Locate a Copy

Pull Devil, Pull Baker, by Stella Benson and Count Nicolas De Toulouse Lautrec de Savine, K. M.
London: Macmillan, 1933
New York: Harpers, 1933