Penelope Fitzgerald

The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts:

It’s more of a difficulty than a help that so much has been written about the Bensons (Palmer and Lloyd have already done a biography of Fred Benson) and that the family should have written so much about themselves. The Archbishop kept diaries, and his wife Minnie wrote two – one a dutiful sightseer’s journal, kept at her husband’s suggestion on her honeymoon, another one 20 years later which told some, at least, of the story of her heart. (There is also a contemporary diary of Minnie’s for 1862-63.) Arthur Benson wrote four and a half million words of diaries, a book of family reminiscences, a family genealogy, lives of his father, his sister Maggie and his brother Hugh, and a memoir of his sister Nellie. Fred wrote Our Family Affairs, Mother, As we Were and (almost on his deathbed) Final Edition. He also kept a diary. The Bensons, ‘a rather close little corporation’, as Arthur called them, had a boundless talent for self-expression, self-justification and self-explanation. Yet they did not give themselves away.’‘

‘An obituary,’ Virginia Woolf wrote on Saturday, 6 January 1940.

Anthony Sampson begins and ends his book with an account of his grandfather’s funeral, held, as requested in his will, at the top of a Welsh mountain, Foel Goch. Among the mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had been known – not only to the Gypsies – as the Rai, the Master. Indeed the Daily Express (this was in 1931) began its obituary with a quotation from Browning’s ‘Grammarian’s Funeral’: ‘Leave him still loftier than the world suspects.’ Afterwards there was a tremendous blow-out, complete with wines and cigars, at the White Lion in Cerrigydrudion. But Michael Sampson, Anthony’s father, who had scattered the ashes nine times over the mountain, looks cold and ill at ease in the faded press photographs. And the Rai’s widow was not present.’