Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  The other’s was an unworthy and brutal nature, utterly corrupted at bottom.

  Fred was as flighty as Arthur was grave. He remained quite Mary’s favourite. For Fred, Lambeth Palace became a springboard for an entry into the very heart of fashionable London society. He was ideally equipped to become its darling – an insouciant wit, brilliant conversation and an easy style. More than any of his siblings, he strove to ignore the fact that he was the child of an archbishop; he was eager to take part in the daring social metamorphosis of the 1890s, as elements of society began to push against the chrysalis of late-Victorian stolidity. He even aspired to join the colourful group that fluttered around Oscar Wilde at the Café Royal. For Fred, this was the moment when ‘the long-retarded spring burst into fullest summer. . . I confess that I was then tipsy with the joy of life and the horns of Elfland were continually blowing.’ Arthur thought him facile and shallow.

  Like Arthur, Fred had taken a First at Cambridge (in his case after very little effort), but had then stayed on for a second Tripos, in archaeology. The Greeks, thought Fred, were ‘the supreme race of all who have inhabited this earth’. After the family holiday in Algiers and Tunis, Fred left for Athens, to take a course at the British School of Archaeology and work on a dig at Megalopolis. He missed the first night of Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde’s first notable success, but went with Mary as soon as he was back in town. Both loved the play, but then, as Mary remarked in a letter to Maggie, she could sit through anything with Fred anyway. ‘He is the dearest person and so delicious to have in the house.’ Yet she sensed that Fred was frustrated in London, found living at Lambeth stifling. He stalked the corridors, seemed unfulfilled, restless, demoralized, ‘for he can’t settle and doesn’t take enough exercise. Bless the darling!’ That was soon to change.

  The spark for Fred’s sudden trajectory beyond the confines of Lambeth Palace was the publication of his first novel, Dodo. He had reworked the manuscript that (to his acute embarrassment) Mary had sent to Henry James. Methuen accepted the book for publication and it came out in May 1893, while he was on a second visit to Athens. ‘Dodo is out!’ Mary wrote to him, adding – with even greater surprise, given the novel’s Wildean frothiness: ‘Your father had the first copy and has positively read some of it!’

  Dodo was an enormous success. It drew a wicked picture of a rich, aristocratic, brilliant and witty London set known as ‘The Souls’, delivering just the degree of delicate birching as to be found bracing even by those it satirized. The first printing sold out within a month. By October, it was into its ninth edition. Fred returned from Athens to find that he had become a sensation, his book a fad. The brittle, extravagant conversation of The Souls that Fred had so perfectly captured, was in turn affected at fashionable London parties, in repartee ‘à la Dodo’. Fred himself came to be nicknamed ‘Dodo’ after the book’s heroine, and the Archbishop had to suffer the ignominy of being referred to as ‘Dodo’s Papa’.

  Though Fred denied it, it was clear to most that he had based his rather appalling ‘beautiful, unscrupulous, dramatic, warm-hearted, cold-blooded’ leading character on the vivacious, acerbically witty Margot Tennant, whom Arthur had introduced to the family. The Prince of Wales once even addressed her as ‘Miss Dodo’ at a ball. Arthur travelled all the way from Eton to offer her a personal apology for his brother’s book, and she wrote him a most gracious reply, though could not resist a slight sally of her own: ‘If the book had had more intellectual merit I should get less tired of being talked to about it.’ To Fred, who had somewhat disingenuously sent a note apologizing for the unexpected publicity the book had caused her (or so the gossip went), she wrote: ‘Dear Mr Benson, have you written a novel? How clever of you.’

  There were those (Margot’s soon-to-be husband, the future Prime Minister Herbert Asquith among them) who agreed with Lady Emily Lutyens that young Fred Benson deserved ‘a good kicking’, and thought he had ‘let the side down’, but the book ran into twelve editions before the year was out. On rereading her son’s first major literary effort, Mary judged: ‘I think it cleverer than I even thought, I also am afraid the blots are more crude than I thought too.’ Later, she confided privately that she felt the characters did not develop and did not always ring true. The Archbishop was bemused by such fuss over so frivolous a trifle, but considered the character of Edith Staines to be so clearly based on Ethel Smyth that he was moved to break with all previous personal precedent and be effusively pleasant to her one dinner-time, sure that she must be offended by his son’s effrontery. Ethel was nonplussed by such civil behaviour on the Archbishop’s part – and, in any case, considered Edith Staines to be the one decent character in the book.

  Mary was delighted to have Fred back from Athens and living at home, even if he was pursuing a hectic social life. She fretted that such popularity and financial success were not good for him, that he needed some sort of steady employment to tether him, even though he continued to produce the occasional learned archaeological paper. Fred was now welcomed at the more flamboyant tables at the Café Royal. He fell in with the pretty young poet Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’ as he was known, and in 1894 Bosie introduced him to Oscar Wilde.

  YOUNG FRED BENSON HAS HIS WILDEAN MOMENTS

  Extracts from Dodo

  He is devoted to her, and she is clever and stimulating. Personally I shouldn’t like a stimulating wife. I don’t like stimulating people, I don’t think they wear well.

  Dodo had a deep-rooted dislike for ugly things, unless they amused her very much. She could not bear babies. Babies had no profiles, which seemed to her a very lamentable deficiency. . .

  Mrs Vane was a large, high-coloured woman of about middle age, whose dress seemed to indicate that she would rather not, but that, of course, may only have been the fault of the dressmaker.

  ‘They sleep like hogs,’ she said, ‘and they are very cheerful in the morning. . . It is very plebeian to be cheerful in the morning.’

  With one son a reclusive schoolmaster, and another a frivolous scribbler and social gadabout, Edward pinned his hopes on Hugh to follow him into holy orders. Wilful, argumentative and petulant, young Hugh did not show much promise in that direction either, though he had always enjoyed dressing up and shared his father’s fondness for ritual. While still at Eton, Hugh decided he wanted to go into the Indian Civil Service – a popular recourse among young men wishing to flee the constrictions of home life. It took the combined forces of the entire family to dissuade him. ‘He certainly takes a manly tone and listens to none of us in the way of defection,’ wrote Edward in his diary. While Edward was pleased (in answer to many prayers, and in gratification of his firm Arnoldian principles of Muscular Christianity) that a ‘new power of manliness’ seemed at last to have come over Hugh, he was concerned that the boy had yet to see himself as God’s servant, and to ‘live as to the Lord and not as to men’. Mary was not of the same mind, as Edward noted, resignedly: ‘ “Our little sheltered boy!” his mother says – and breaks my heart. I always reckoned on this one to be my great friend as I grew old.’

  In the end, Hugh was rejected for the Civil Service. Some desultory years at Cambridge followed, which fizzled into a Third. He was ordained in 1895, and went on to work with boys’ clubs in Hackney Wick, and serve occasionally as his father’s chaplain. In this capacity he doubly irritated Ethel Smyth (who had never liked him much), as he would ‘flit up and down the corridors of Lambeth in coats the skirts of which almost swept the floor – a common foible of short men’. Lucy Tait, also, did not take to Hugh, and thought him ‘odd’, and his position on ecclesiastical matters ‘dangerous’. Hugh quarrelled fiercely with Lucy (but then he did with almost everyone).

  Lucy’s presence at Lambeth presented Mary with the greatest demand yet on her powers of ‘tac’, and for once they seemed not quite up to the mark. ‘Lucy came bustling in to give me a kiss,’ she wrote to Maggie, ‘and finding me dolorous. . . said “I’ll be Maggie to you”.’ Far from welcom
ing Lucy as a new elder sibling, Maggie resented her presence. She grew peevish, and began to demand more of her mother’s attention. Maggie could be proud, fierce and cross, as she herself admitted, ‘not about anything particular, but in the sort of condition where one feels it would be very undesirable to be contradicted’. She was scathing about Lucy’s intellectual capacities, and demolished her in argument. A note of acidity crept into letters when Maggie referred to herself as Lucy’s ‘little sister’, and she tried to create rifts between her mother and the interloper, subtle and razor-thin: ‘I have just got a lovely new French hat,’ she wrote to Mary, while on a visit to Aixen-Provence, ‘which you will like and Lucy may think vulgar.’ In another letter she expostulated: ‘Please thank Lucy very much for her letter – but say I shall just wear whichever hat I like – and if her thoughts of her little sister in a strange land centre upon hats – no climax strong enough occurs to me.’

  Now nearly thirty, Maggie was girlish-looking for her age, with a pale, fresh complexion. Tall, straight-backed and slender, her hair pulled tightly back from a marble dome of a forehead and with earnest blue-grey eyes, she could seem stern and aloof. Like her father, she had little small talk. Nellie had once said rather impatiently of her that ‘if Maggie would only have an intimate relationship even with a cat, it would be a relief’, and Arthur noted that ‘her friendships were seldom leisurely or refreshing things’. Clearly brilliant, Maggie was quick and devastatingly incisive in argument, cutting through sophistry with what her Oxford tutor marvelled was ‘absolute remorselessness’. ‘I never met anyone else so quick to notice a flaw in an argument as she was,’ noted one clever but somewhat intimidated young male acquaintance.

  It was clear to Mary that Maggie needed some sort of distraction from life at Lambeth Palace, something to occupy her busy mind, and to divert her attention away from Lucy. Maggie’s health was also a cause for concern. She developed pains in the temples, suffered from passionate outbursts of temper, and was later diagnosed in succession with rheumatism, heart problems, and that hold-all of the time for almost any woman’s woe, a gynaecological upset – in Maggie’s case described vaguely as ‘congestion, dilation, displacement’. Foreign travel seemed an attractive solution. On his next archaeological expedition to Greece, at the end of 1893, Fred took his elder sister along.

  MAGGIE, AGED TWENTY-EIGHT, IN 1893

  From Athens, Maggie wrote to Mary that she felt ‘for the first time almost’ that she had ‘a little taste of the world’. Edward was strict to the point of being old-fashioned and excessively restraining with his children. Alone among her contemporaries at Oxford, Maggie had had to be accompanied by a chaperone at reading parties, and was completely forbidden from joining a group where Browning’s ever so slightly racy drama A Blot in the ’Scutcheon was read. Even Arthur, in his undergraduate days, when he let slip that he had been invited to dinner to meet the actor Henry Irving, received a letter from his father stating: ‘he would not think of forbidding me to go, but he spoke of it as if it were a parting of the ways, and that if I went to such an entertainment, I might easily be drawn into an attractive current of the world, with much superficial charm and interest masking a vague sort of morality and dubious standards.’ Arthur declined the invitation. In Athens, Maggie, though excited by this first taste of the world, hastened to reassure her mother that home was so much nicer, and that she would rather that too much of the world not intrude on it. Yet she and Fred were soon at the centre of Athenian social life, ‘quite hand in glove’ with the Greek Royal Family (Maggie boasted in a letter home), with Fred having to restrain himself during audiences with King George of Greece from imitating the monarch’s habit – ‘as infectious as yawning’ – of standing with feet close together, rising on to tiptoe and dropping back again. Momentary loss of concentration would mean that king and visitor became locked in a gentle seesaw as they conversed. Maggie, for her part, had to accustom herself to Queen Olga’s habit of grabbing women she was speaking to by the shoulders and shoving them back into their seats, causing a descent both sudden and drained of any decorum.

  Together, brother and sister wrote, staged and starred in a farce they titled The Duchess of Bayswater. The piece was originally intended to entertain local English governesses, but Dodo’s fame had spread. Soon word of the farce was out, and ‘the entire host of royalties’ announced their intention to attend. The Duchess of Bayswater premiered before ‘a row of Kings and Queens and ten rows of English governesses, and a swarm of English sailors’.

  Maggie’s emotional outbursts were contained, though she did have periods of ‘fussed depression’, and one rather dramatic ‘attack’ after someone told her she was a disagreeable sort of person. It was up to Fred to take Mary’s role of easing his sister back into some sort of self-control. From Lambeth, Mary sent upbeat letters in the perky, school-girlish style she often employed with Maggie. ‘Oh do be normal,’ she wrote, and ‘PUL-EASE do what is best’, reassuring Maggie that such snubs were nothing to distress her ‘blessed little mind’ over – Mama wasn’t fussed: ‘I larf, I dew.’

  Quite apart from looking after his sister and working on archaeological excavations, Fred was having his own fun. Lord Alfred Douglas visited and shared his room at the Grand Hotel for a week, and Fred later became inseparable from Reggie Lister, a diplomat at the British Legation. Two years older than Fred, Reggie had an irresistible charm, an exuberance and infectious enthusiasm for almost anything he did and anyone he met, and was pleasingly lacking in the grit of ‘manliness’ that the Archbishop so valued. His friendship with Fred ‘dispensed with all the preliminaries of acquaintanceship: there was no gradual drawing together about it, it leaped into being, and there it remained, poised and effortless’ – for life.

  In January 1894, Fred and Maggie went on to Egypt to follow Fred’s archaeological pursuits, and again mixed with the grandest of British society, this time at the Luxor Hotel. Lord Alfred Douglas was again there, and Fred took a steamer with him up the Nile, together with the novelist Robert Hichens, a member of the Café Royal set, whose book The Green Carnation, clearly based on the lives of Oscar Wilde and Bosie, played a part in the scandal that descended on Wilde the following year. Hichens rather envied ‘Dodo’ Benson his beauty and success, thought him gloriously tanned, ‘a thorough outdoor man’, and was impressed by how ‘he and Lord Alfred got on marvellously together, the wit of the one seeming to call out and polish the wit of the other’.

  At the large communal dining table at the Luxor, Maggie ‘was as clever in conversation as her brother’, and thoroughly enjoyed having company of her own age. To her mother she confessed that while she would want only the ‘smallest possible driblets’ of this exciting new world to be allowed to colour life back home: ‘The only thing I should like more of – it will amuse you but I feel quite capable of saying it out loud – is the society of young men. I have had much more of that than of girls since I came out [to Egypt] – naturally with Fred.’ Ultimately, though, Maggie would observe that she could never conceive of meeting anyone who was ‘man enough to marry and yet woman enough to love’.

  Brother and sister returned to London. Delighted, as ever, to have Fred home, Mary found him to be ‘in magnificent health’, declared by a doctor to be ‘“like an Apollo”. . . in the perfection of his muscles. Lor!’ Maggie had been bitten, but by an entirely metaphorical bug. ‘This place grows on one extraordinarily,’ she had declared back in Luxor. ‘Bas-reliefs of kings in chariots are only now beginning to look individual instead of being made on a pattern, and the immensity of the whole thing is beginning to dawn – and the colours, oh my goodness! You get to see them more every day.’ She had worked on Arabic and turned her considerable mind to deciphering hieroglyphics, and before returning home had taken up Egyptology and done some excavating of her own. In the winter of 1895–6, Maggie returned to Egypt, this time to work on the excavation of the Temple of Mut at Karnak.

  ‘I am really immensely happy,’ Maggie wro
te to her mother, just days after arriving. ‘Instead of idling as a pursuit, one has pursuits and idles for pleasure.’ Maggie was given the role of overseer, and a local workforce quailed before this tall, imperious Englishwoman. A family friend, Lady Jane Lindsay, was most impressed visiting the dig on the first day to see ‘Maggie the centre of a howling mob with a copy-book in one hand and a courbash [buffalo-hide whip] in the other – some score of individuals beyond the number she desired, being determined to get their names inscribed as labourers’. ‘Hurling small boys’ from her position atop an elevated stone, Maggie appointed her assistants, and soon set to work. Over the following weeks she made a number of rare and significant finds, among them a rose-granite seated statue of Rameses II, which the Government Excavator later permitted her to take home.

  So energetic was Maggie in her archaeological work that Mary began to worry about her health in such a hot climate, and persuaded Fred to join her. He reported that Maggie was well, and so lively in company at dinner ‘that you wouldn’t have known your own daughter’. But a deeper concern troubled Mary. Maggie had written to her of a Miss Reed, who had become passionately attached to her and was growing most importunate. Mary wrote instantly to warn her daughter not to ‘allow any parleyings’, to distance herself from Miss Reed, and to be wary of any growing ‘morbidity’ (a term commonly used at the time when speaking of same-sex attraction). She followed it with another letter a few days later, advising: ‘I don’t want you not to be kind, goodness knows, but do be very firm – and don’t sit with her more than you ought. . . don’t ever yield one tittle to her morbidity – her letter, poor little blue-eyed child, is very bad.’