The Man Who Went Too Far

E. F. Benson

Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940), Fred to his friends, came from a prominent and high achieving family. His father, Edward White Benson, was Archbishop of Canterbury, and his brother Arthur (like Fred a writer) composed the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. For all the celebrity the family enjoyed, the Bensons knew tragedy. Two of Benson’s five siblings died young and a number of family members suffered severely from depression. Benson initially made his name as the author of Dodo (1893), a light-hearted social satire, a strand of his writing he would continue in the 1920s and 30s with the Mapp and Lucia series. The significant volume of supernatural horror he published forms an important contribution to the development of weird fiction. H. P. Lovecraft described him as an author of “singular power”.

‘The Man Who Went Too Far’ was first published in Pall Mall in 1904. The story is set in the New Forest, the old hunting grounds of William the Conqueror. Today the forest is important as one of Britain’s most biodiverse locations, though it is also (more secretly) significant for its supernatural ecology of ghosts, witches and other eldritch visitors. In Benson’s story, the tale’s horror arrives in the form of the Greek god Pan. Half-man, half-goat, Pan is an ancient expression of nature, sex and fertility with a strong association with woodland. Pan featured recurrently in the pagan revival of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras as a sign of an alluring but sometimes dangerous lost world. It is this ambivalence that informs Pan’s persistent role in Edwardian representations of homosexuality as a figure who embodies both desire and anxiety. Benson is often identified as a gay man, though the era’s prejudices required him to be discreet; it is certainly possible to read the Pan of ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’ as operating in dialogue with complex debates around the expression of sexuality.