Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Maggie’s flip remark about being sought after by the Royal Family was not too far from the truth. The Queen relied heavily on the Archbishop, at times disclosing confidences to him that she kept from her ministers – ‘my excuse is my great loneliness,’ she told him, ‘my many heavy trials and troubles and the great need I have during my declining years.’ Edward was associated with the happiness of the time before she became a widow, when her beloved Albert had so admired the young headmaster of Wellington College. He was a support to her during her Golden Jubilee celebrations in 1887, an ordeal the Queen dreaded, but which marked the beginning of her re-emergence from decades of a seclusion that had become increasingly unpopular with the public. On the day itself, that support very nearly fell away most inopportunely, when Edward became close to being excluded from Westminster Abbey. He had forgotten to give his coachman the carriage pass for transit through the surrounding cordon of troops and police officers, and had to lean out and assure an obdurate inspector that ‘They can’t begin till I get there.’

  As Archbishop, Edward also officiated at royal marriages and christenings. In doing so he became, at moments of import, part of the family life of a most family-oriented woman, growing over time to be, as the Queen remarked to her grandson the Duke of York, ‘such a friend of ours’. Quite extraordinarily, the monarch sometimes wrote to Edward using ‘I’ (rather than referring to herself as ‘the Queen’ or in the first-person plural, as was her usual practice), ending letters ‘yours affectionately’. Her affection extended to the Archbishop’s family, who were all invited to Balmoral one summer towards the end of the eighties. Fred, who had not been born when the Queen visited Wellington College – when Beth had called her ‘My Majesty’ and little Martin had told her she had a very funny bonnet, and received a kiss in reply – was bewitched (as Mary had been at Wellington) by her beautiful voice and prominent blue eyes. Fred and Arthur both later moved in royal circles, and Arthur would be invited to edit Queen Victoria’s letters.

  FROM QUEEN VICTORIA TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY

  Osborne, Dec. 21, 1891

  My Dear Archbishop,

  I must thank you very much for your kind letter, and congratulations on the engagement of my dear grandson Albert Victor to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, which promises to be a happy union. ‘May’ is a charming girl, with much sense and amiability and very unfrivolous, so that I have every hope the young people will set an example of a steady, quiet life, which, alas, is not the fashion in these days. The wedding is to be at St George’s Chapel, on the 27th February. I hope you will perform the ceremony.

  In conclusion, let me ask you to accept the accompanying card with best wishes for Christmas and New Year for yourself and family.

  I am,

  Ever yours affly,

  Victoria R. & I. [Regina et Imperatrix]

  The reticent and notoriously brusque Lord Tennyson – Poet Laureate since 1850, and to Fred ‘antique and imperishable’ – having been prevailed upon through a number of invitations, eventually relented and came to dine at Lambeth Palace. It was a sombre occasion, with the poet plunged into deeper silence than usual as a consequence of being disallowed his tobacco. Edward, whose loathing of smoking had by no means diminished over the years, did not permit the foul habit after dinner at either Lambeth or at the country seat, Addington, even though the practice of cigarettes after the ladies had withdrawn had taken hold in most houses by the 1880s. Only one exception was ever made, for the Duke of York. A Poet Laureate did not warrant such a bending of the rules. The mood of Tennyson’s visit was by no means enlivened when, after a single round of port and brief joining of the ladies in the drawing room, the entire company trooped off for evensong in the chapel, which at Lambeth was sometimes held late in the evening, following dinner. ‘After this long devotional interlude,’ said Fred, ‘it was frankly impossible to resume a festive sociability.’ Later, Tennyson walked with the Archbishop, and at a loss for conversation offered to tell him a bawdy story (the great poet was inordinately fond of limericks). Edward related that he declined, but according to the man of letters Sir Edmund Gosse (a close friend of Arthur’s), His Grace later admitted that the story ‘wasn’t so very bad after all’.

  Robert Browning, one of Mary’s favourite poets, was, by contrast, an ebullient guest, ‘immensely genial’; he ‘ate and drank and talked with a juvenile pleasure’. He provoked much speculation in the family when, on hearing that Edward most liked his lyrics, he remarked: ‘Lyrics? I’ve got deskfuls of them.’ (Browning was to publish no further volumes of poetry apart from the slim Asolando which came out on the day of his death, a few years later, and no great hoard of unknown lyrics came posthumously to light.)

  Henry James, who had immediately taken to the tall and dreamily handsome twenty-two-year-old Arthur at a Cambridge luncheon party in 1884, was invited to Addington for the first of what became a number of visits both there and to Lambeth Palace. His Roderick Hudson and more recent Portrait of a Lady had won him multitudes of admirers, and he had not yet embarked on his more confounding later works, which (Fred thought) raised ‘armies of new readers, who took the place of the old brigades who fell stark and staring beneath the stroke of the Wings of the Dove’. Mary delighted in James as ‘full of talk, though lengthy’, and she, too, was surprised that ‘he thinks his writing now much better than Roderick Hudson. Fancy that! And wouldn’t hear our praise and said his former work was subaqueous, and this time his head was above water!’

  One winter’s night at Addington, James seems to have drawn out the Archbishop more than most guests managed to, and roused memories of the Ghost Club at Trinity. The two men sat by the fire in the drawing room, ‘talking a little, in the spirit of recreation’ of things ‘ghostly and ghastly’, when (James later wrote to Arthur):

  [The Archbishop] repeated to me the few meagre elements of a small and gruesome spectral story that had been told him years before and that he could only give the dimmest account of – partly because he had forgotten details and partly – and much more – because there had been no details and no coherency in the tale as he received it, from a person who also but half knew it. The vaguest essence only was there – some dead servants and some children. The essence struck me and I made a note of it (of a most scrappy kind) on going home.

  AN ENTRY (OF A MOST SCRAPPY KIND) IN HENRY JAMES’S NOTEBOOK

  . . .the story of the young children (indefinite in number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and the apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence etc. – so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, getting in to their power.

  The tale the Archbishop gave to Henry James became the chilling The Turn of the Screw. Some years later, Mary – with the sort of motherly well-meaning that has caused acute embarrassment to offspring down the ages – sent the grand novelist, on Fred’s behalf but without his knowledge, a draft of his lengthy first novel. Entitled Dodo, it was not even typed but scrawled on hundreds of sheets of blue foolscap, ‘written in a furious hurry and covered with erasures, that exploded into illegible interpolations’. After some months, James emitted a polite note to Fred apologizing for his tardiness in response, saying that when consenting to Mary’s request he had ‘rather overestimated the attention I should be able to give to a production in manuscript of such substantial length. We live in such a world of type-copy to-day that I had taken for granted your story would come to me in that form. . . ’ A rather delicately expressed judgement followed:

  I am such a fanatic myself on the subject of form, style, the evidence of intention and meditation, of chiselling and hammering out in literary
things that I am afraid I am rather a cold-blooded judge, rather likely to be offensive to a young story-teller on the question of quality. I am not sure that yours strikes me as quite so ferociously literary as my ideal. . . Only remember that a story is, essentially a form, and that if it fails of that, it fails of its mission. . . For the rest, make yourself a style. It is by style we are saved.

  It was an extremely measured response to a work whose chief literary merit was the first recorded use of the word ‘diddums’ in the English language.

  Mary mixed easily with the literary greats, but also enjoyed a jolly camaraderie with the various young men who came one by one to the palace as domestic chaplains, and were encouraged to join in family discussions and amusements. She ‘delighted in their arguments, called them by familiar names, and was repaid with a loyal and chivalrous affection’. Over the years, the glittering company at Lambeth somewhat eclipsed Chat Basset back in Cornwall. Mary’s fervour for the Truro friendship grew less intense, though the pair kept in touch, and even speculated together a little in shares, losing money.

  FRED BENSON IN 1886

  Mary now had a circle of intimates in London, who increasingly addressed her as ‘Ben’. Two particular friends were the imperiously beautiful Marchioness of Tavistock, later Adeline, Duchess of Bedford (whom Fred thought could on occasion be rather over-conscious of her rank, trailing ‘clouds of glory from the abodes of light’), and the Marchioness’s rather unfortunate sister, Lady Henry Somerset. A torrid scandal at the end of the seventies had resulted in Lady Henry being debarred from the best houses in Society. She had not only separated from her husband, but had made public her reasons for doing so – his infatuation with a seventeen-year-old boy. In doing this she had broken an inviolable code of propriety – that all may very well be known, but nothing should be spoken – and had outraged the principle of feminine reticence. ‘Dire was the wrath of the silent ones,’ Fred noted. Society showed ‘when defied, of what savagery it was capable’. Shunned and scorned, Lady Henry had thrown herself into good works, opening a refuge for alcoholic women, and becoming deeply involved in the temperance movement. These activities provided her with an entrée to Lambeth Palace, but even so, Mary’s further friendship showed social courage, or at least a willingness to ignore the ‘wrath of the silent ones’. Yet Lady Henry’s very presence was a cold warning to Mary of the consequences of too much being said. Certain issues could more effectively simply have a lid closed on them, and be left quietly in a place of tacit acknowledgement, so as not to release their dangerous destructive forces.

  Mary’s ability to lend a sympathetic ear, to console, counsel and elicit confidences had by no means diminished. ‘Sometimes she tried to shake herself up into an interest in politics, national affairs, and burning questions of the day,’ wrote Fred, ‘but no question concerning collective interests and the affairs of the masses burned so bright for her as those of individuals.’ In Mary’s sitting room at Lambeth, the by now famous comfortable ottoman saw admirable service, as she sat a new intimate down with a ‘Now tell me exactly why you think that,’ or an ‘I don’t agree at all. Let’s have it out,’ or, ‘Quite so: I see that, yes I feel that. . . but how about this? Let me see if I can put it to you.’ Her energy for participation in others’ feelings seemed boundless. ‘O what an awful year has been yours,’ she once wrote to a friend. ‘Yes, do, do let us have a talk abt bad pain – I shd love it.’

  One recipient of such sympathy and advice, a young composer named Ethel Smyth, referred to Mary as a ‘physician of souls’, and spoke of her ‘magic intuition’ in discerning the emotional needs of others. ‘Her master passion was undoubtedly the cure of souls,’ Ethel observed. ‘A great part of her life was consecrated to her patients, as I used to call them, who when bereft of her physical presence were kept going by words of counsel and comfort written on letter-paper so diminutive that it inevitably suggested a prescription.’

  A strapping, tomboyish creature with a loud laugh, a strong jaw-line and a penchant for older women, Ethel Smyth was twenty-seven when she met Mary in 1885, and already enjoying some success in her field, as a composer of string quartets, sonatas and Lieder at the ready. They were introduced by family friends, as Ethel was in sore need of the ‘physician of souls’. Her emotionally entangled relationship with Lisl von Herzogenberg – an Austrian aristocrat eleven years her senior – had come to an acrimonious and abrupt end. Lisl was the wife of Ethel’s composition teacher, and for seven years Ethel had lived in the couple’s house in Leipzig as a sort of surrogate daughter, passionately in love with Lisl, with a fervour that was fully reciprocated. But in early 1885, Ethel became embroiled in a complicated flirtation with Lisl’s brother-in-law Henry Brewster, and Lisl suddenly and completely severed relations. Heartbroken and convinced she was no longer able to compose, Ethel limped back to England, to the comfort of Mrs Benson’s ottoman. ‘I would give anything to be any good to you,’ Mary told her, ‘but I leave that in God’s hands – only if patient listening and eager desire really to see and understand tenderly and truly is any use I think I dare promise that.’

  ETHEL SMYTH BY JOHN SINGER SARGENT

  EDITH STAINES, A CHARACTER BASED ON MISS ETHEL SMYTH, RETURNS FROM AN ENJOYABLE MORNING OUT SHOOTING, IN FRED BENSON’S NOVEL DODO

  Edith had gone up to her room after insisting on having two of Dodo’s bottles of eau de cologne in her hot bath. ‘There is nothing so refreshing,’ she said, ‘and you come out feeling like a goddess.’ Certainly Edith looked anything but a goddess just now. Her hat was pushed rakishly onto the side of her head, there was a suggestion of missing hairpins about her hair; she wafted with her about the room a fine odour of tobacco and gunpowder; she had burned her dress with a fusee head that had fallen off; her boots were large and unlaced, and curiously dirty, and her hands were black with smoke and oil, and had a sort of trimming in the way of small feathers and little patches of blood. . . But she insisted she had never enjoyed herself so much, she talked, and screamed, and laughed as if nothing serious had occurred since breakfast.

  For the forty-four-year-old Mary, meeting Ethel was one of her ‘My God, what a woman!’ moments (it is Ethel who records Mary’s use of the phrase); for Ethel’s part, the now somewhat matronly Mary soon became ‘the mainstay of my life’, offering succour in the ‘long cold night of the spirit that fell upon me’. Mary provided in abundance the nurturing love Ethel demanded, and the younger woman adored the attention. Soon, Ethel was calling Mary by that ‘so intensely appropriate monosyllable adopted by some of your inner circle’, Ben.

  ‘The reasons for which I love you are unshakeable,’ Ethel wrote to Ben, ‘here are some of them; your truth, your fire, your intensity, your power of sustained effort, your extraordinary grip over other souls, your intellect, and above all, in the words of a prayer I like, your “unconquerable heart”.’ Ethel appreciated another side of the Archbishop’s wife. She enjoyed the ‘particular look of devilment one knew so well on her face’, her delight in a little social wickedness, her acute sensibility to absurdities. On a more fundamental level, Ethel discerned the dexterity of spirit Mary needed to sustain herself as dutiful wife, effervescent hostess and sympathetic friend. When Ethel said that Mary Benson was ‘as good as God, and as clever as the Devil’, the remark struck such resonance among those who knew her well, that it did the rounds of their friends.

  Ethel played up to the more adventurous aspects of Mary’s spirit. She was more outspoken and deliciously frank than any of Mary’s other correspondents. In 1891, Ethel was on holiday with the Empress Eugénie, the former consort of Napoleon III, when a spider ran up the imperial leg. Ethel had developed an infatuation for the Empress, although (Ethel wrote to Ben) she felt that one ‘might as well be in love with the Rock of Gibraltar’, despite the fact that Eugénie had admitted to ‘likings’. With characteristic heartiness, Ethel had pooh-poohed the fuss caused by the spider, and dismissed any notions of danger. That night, the sixty-five-year-old Em
press summoned Ethel to her room, and appearing in her nightdress. . .

  . . .showed me her beautiful leg bared absolutely (but decently) up to the hilt. . . absorbed as she was in proving her point about the venom of spiders. Ben! You never saw such a leg! Not one hair on it – absolutely white and firm and modulated like – a nocturne of Chopin (would that you were musician enough to appreciate that comparison) and a foot and ankle like the Venus of Medici. The same is true of her shoulders – Form – Form!

  ‘I think Ethel would like to call herself a “woman of the flesh”,’ observed Mary one day, after hearing a sermon on how a ‘man of the world’ is really but a ‘man of the flesh’.

  Ethel blew into Lambeth Palace like a wicked wind sprite. She visited bearing golf clubs and musical scores, attacked anything she did with vitality and verve, talked volubly and peppered her conversation with slang. The corridors echoed with: ‘Congratters!’, ‘Oh, hang it!’ and ‘awfully’. She was the living embodiment of a new generation. She took up the daring new pastime of bicycling, and wobbled in style along the gravel sweep in front of the palace, later giving instruction to the Dean of Windsor. Off she hauled Nellie (of the devastating underarm bowling), when a cricket mania possessed young women of their acquaintance in 1889, to the celebrated White Heather Club to join the team of Meriel Talbot, the W. G. Grace of the ladies’ game. Ethel was boisterous, spirited and argumentative, and her relations with the Benson siblings were tempestuous, ‘most of us being more or less aggressive and cocksure’.