A Literary Pilgrimage

By Helen Matthews

The idea of a pilgrimage for religious reasons is centuries old. People wanted to see places mentioned in the scriptures for themselves, or to see or touch what they believed to be holy relics. In the 4^th century AD a lady named Egeria wrote an account of a pilgrimage from her home (possibly in Spain) to Mount Sinai. Pilgrimages to shrines at home and abroad flourished through the Middle Ages, and such a journey to the shrine of St Thomas Becket was used as a setting for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Religious pilgrimages still take place, of course, but nowadays other journeys, such as those of crowds of Elvis fans to Graceland, seem to answer a similar need to tread in the footsteps of the revered, but without a religious dimension. The literary pilgrimage is another manifestation of this trend.  More obvious examples would include the coach loads of tourists that descend on Stratford upon Avon in ‘Shakespeare’s county’, or upon the Yorkshire moors to see if the heights are indeed Wuthering.

Rye

Last Easter, I paid a visit of my own to a perhaps rather less famous shrine, but one whose literary connections are in fact numerous.  The town of Rye, in Sussex, is probably best known as one of the Cinque Ports (of which I now discover there are seven, but that’s another story).  It is also the thinly-disguised setting of the Mapp and Lucia series of books by E F Benson. I had long wished to visit Rye so that I could visualise Mapp, Lucia, Georgie, Major Benjy, Diva, Mr and Mrs Wyse and Quaint Irene in their authentic habitat.

Benson lived in Lamb House, Rye, from 1919 until his death in 1940. For a few years he was joined by his brother, A C Benson, a Cambridge don who wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory.  He had first visited the house some years earlier, as the guest of the novelist Henry James, who lived there from 1897 until his death in 1916.  The house is now owned by the National Trust, which clearly operates according to a hierarchy of perceived literary merit.  No mention of Benson is made in the description of Lamb House in their general guide to properties, and he only merits a mention on one page of the guidebook, to James’ six (plus several full page photographs) despite the fact that he occupied it for longer, and actually used it, renamed Mallards, as a setting for four of his books[1].

The townspeople of Rye take a rather different approach.  The numerous bookshops prominently display copies of the Mapp and Lucia books and second hand bookshops also stock an impressive range of his other novels, now out of print.  Posters advertise guided tours of the Tilling locations. Henry James and other literary personalities associated with the local area, including Conrad Aiken, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, Radclyffe Hall, Rumer Godden and Russell Thorndike, are also celebrated, but Benson is the clear winner. It was not initially clear to me whether this was because of the Rye setting of Benson’s books or because more visitors were interested in him than in James. However, the tourist information centre website settles the matter:

 

Rye's most famous and best-loved author is probably E. F. Benson whose fictional town of Tilling is based on Rye - many locals say they can still recognise some of the characters! There is a walk around E. F. Benson's Rye during the summer on Wednesdays and some Saturdays. Enter the world where Capt Puffin and Major Benjy took the tram to play golf and Mapp spied on everyone's goings-on![2]

 Henry James is described in the website as ‘Rye’s other literary celebrity’. So the National Trust would appear to be in a minority.

Lamb House

James used to write in the Garden Room, a separate room built at right angles to the main house, during the summer months, moving inside to the Green Room upstairs during the winter.  Benson, too, worked in the Garden Room, which he immortalized as the base from which Miss Mapp observed her neighbours.  My first disappointment on seeing the house was the discovery that the Garden Room had been totally destroyed by a bomb in 1940.  All that remained was a brick wall with a plaque. A small model of the Garden Room as it originally appeared was on display inside the house, along with a number of photographs, including one of the bomb damage in 1940, so it was at least possible to imagine how it would have looked.

The house itself is occupied by a tenant and only three rooms and the garden are shown.  A small room off the hall, recognisably the ‘telephone room’ at Mallards, contains a small exhibition about James and Benson. One of the exhibits is an original letter from James to Benson, inviting him to spend the weekend at Lamb House. 

On arrival in Rye, the first thing I discovered was the reason for Benson’s choice of Tilling as a name for his fictional version.  This became fairly evident as we crossed the river Tillingham to reach the town from the visitor car park.  We walked up Mermaid Street – could this be the original of Tilling’s Porpoise Street, where Mr Wyse (and the dentist) lived? From Lamb House we walked past the crooked chimney to the church, with the Norman Tower and thence to the Land Gate.  Canny Tilling artists always painted the chimney as slightly more crooked than it was in reality just so that there should be no doubt that the crookedness was deliberate. Later, walking along the High Street, I saw a middle aged woman shopping with a wicker basket. This was truly the Tilling of the books.

In some ways, Benson’s life in Rye seems very similar to that of his heroines. Like them, he supported the Rye (or Tilling) hospital.  But instead of making bandages or lending use of his car, he contributed to A Cargo of Recipes, a collection of Rye residents’ favourites sold in aid of hospital funds. His contribution was not however Lucia’s infamous speciality, Lobster à la Riseholme, which was the indirect cause of two ladies going to sea on an upturned kitchen table, but something rather more sinister:

 “Pancakes à la Borgia

 Small pieces of glass (any broken window will serve)

3 berries of deadly nightshade

¼ oz foxglove

Dessert spoon of arsenic…”

He went on to add that it was important that the host declined the delicacy himself for reasons of dieting. Benson also served as Mayor of Rye for three years, a post which Lucia eventually managed to gain in Tilling.  Apparently this was coincidental, and Benson initially tried to refuse the offer of the mayoralty as he was just about to publish Lucia’s Progress, the book in which Lucia becomes mayor, and was worried that this might bring the office into disrepute.[3] Lucia paid for the refurbishment of the Tilling church organ; Benson paid for two beautiful stained glass windows in Rye church, one in memory of his father, the Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the other in memory of his brother A C Benson.

As I have already mentioned, James and Benson were not the only writers to live in Rye.  Radclyffe Hall was another famous resident and who sometimes dined with Benson at Lamb House, shocking the servants by appearing in men’s clothing. Her house in Watchbell Street was apparently the original of  ‘Taormina’, the home of Benson’s ‘quaint Irene’, the artist of advanced ideas and dubious sexuality. Rumer Godden was a later resident of Lamb house.  Russell Thorndike’s  ‘Dr Syn’ novels were set on Romney Marsh around Rye.

As a result of my trip to Rye I learned a lot more about the setting of the Mapp and Lucia books, and about their author. The availability of tourist information and the bookshop displays demonstrated that I was by no means unusual in visiting Rye for its Benson connections, despite the intellectual snobbery of the National Trust.  But was my visit really undertaken for the intellectual reason of discovering more about the author and his works or was it in fact a manifestation of the age old desire for pilgrimage?

---

[1] Miss Mapp, Mapp and Lucia, Trouble for Lucia and Lucia’s Progress.

[2] http://www.visitrye.co.uk/EN/rye_history.php

[3] G Palmer and N Lloyd, E F Benson As He Was, (Lennard Publishing, 1988) pp. 155-6