Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  MAGGIE WITH NETTIE GOURLAY

  Mary need not have concerned herself overmuch about Miss Reed. Maggie’s heart was else-where. Helping her on the dig was a demure, introverted young woman named Nettie Gourlay, who was somewhat in awe of Maggie’s ferocious energy and incisive mind. Nettie and Maggie shared many sentiments, and enjoyed discussing metaphysics. ‘I like her extremely,’ Maggie wrote to Mary, at the same time assuring her that there was ‘not the slightest touch of Schwärmerei but thorough interested liking’. As the weeks went on, Maggie wrote: ‘I like her more and more – I haven’t liked anyone so well in years. She is so much more free than almost any woman I know from anything small or cheap or common or coarse.’ And then:

  Nettie – how can I keep you up in this, for it changes every day – oh, I hope you’ll like her – you can’t help it if you know her, but she is so horribly shy. . . Oh, Mother, it’s so odd to me to make a friendship like this – generally there has been something in the way – mostly I’ve not been sure of the other person, and generally I’ve had a radical element of distrust. . . I don’t think her perfect – preserve me from it! but there’s nothing small nor hard about her. There – I wanted you to know. Do you remember my saying you didn’t like my friends? and there was a truth in that – but I think I’m ceasing to be attracted by the brute. You know what I mean.

  On her way back to England in May, bringing Nettie with her to meet the family, Maggie told her mother: ‘You can’t think how new this sort of thing is to me. Except you and Tan, I don’t know any one in the world I admire so much.’ Even without the reminder of her own past passions, Mary had already recognized that this was a friendship that needed to be accommodated within what was already a family of unconventional shape.

  Lucy Tait’s arrival at Lambeth Palace had led Mary once again on to the tricky terrain where she had so frequently tripped in the past. ‘I feel nearer her now than I have done these 6 years,’ Mary wrote in her diary in the summer of 1896. ‘O God draw us together more and more – if I might – if I might! but this is as it shall please thee.’ Once again Mary struggled with ‘carnal affection’ and its place in a loving friendship so intense that the union seemed to her a gift of God. She writes of her shame, of how ‘last night I fell again’, and sometimes more esoterically: ‘I must put away forever the red failing.’ Mary owned a leather-bound copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, which Edward had given her for her fiftieth birthday in 1891, soon after Lucy’s arrival. Underlined in pencil are passages that portray religious life as a constant struggle against a powerful enemy, lines which uphold temptation as an offering from God that encourages us to fight sin and emerge triumphant, together with such texts as:

  And, save you act with violence,

  You will not crush your sin.

  MARY BENSON RECORDS A PRIVATE PRAYER IN HER DIARY, IN AUGUST 1896

  O merciful God, grant that the Old Adam in me may be so buried that a new man may be raised up in me.

  Grant that all carnal affections may die in me and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow in me.

  Grant that I may have power and strength to have victory and to triumph against the devil, the world and the Flesh.

  Lucy seemed reluctant to bend to Mary’s arguments. ‘Look here Ben – I’ve been having rather a time of it in Chapel,’ she wrote, while on a short trip from home. She felt spurned, sent back in upon herself, ‘rather like a sea anemone when its feelers are touched’, and she explained why: ‘it’s no earthly good you and me having anything together except just the very thing we have always wanted from the beginning, and no other relationship is the slightest good, not even only as a temporary arrangement for a few days.’ She dismissed some compromise solution Mary had offered (possibly of abstinence and reward) as ‘a Sunday-school prize-giving arrangement’, and would have none of it. ‘I claim,’ Lucy went on, ‘to have you yourself and every bit of you.’ Later, she edged a little closer to Mary’s point of view: ‘Nasty to me Ben? No I should think not my own darling. If there’s any nastiness it’s not with you. The difficulty is to know how to “totally abstain” but what you said particularly about keeping one’s desire true is the thing to begin with and I’m at that.’ In her diary, in the early autumn of 1896, Mary wrote a prayer for them both:

  Once more with shame O Lord grant that all carnal affections might die in me, and that all things belonging to the spirit may live and grow in me – Lord look down on Lucy and me, and bring to pass the union we have both so [illegible] and so blindly, each in our own region of mistake, continuously desired. The Devil has been fading lately, though despair is back, in our own way – and despair is very near me still as I write and pray. I ask from thee O Lord, strong and unconquerable love of the spirit, a flame of fusing, an eternal fire that the desire which came from thee may be accomplished by thee in us, forever.

  Tormented by this struggle, Mary began to eat, comforting herself with oysters and cutlets, game pies, roast goose, rich steamed puddings and rum-soaked cake. She had always been plump, and enjoyed her food. She loved cheese and jam and peaches especially, and the banquets at Lambeth offered untold temptations. Soon, the short Mrs Benson was edging towards twelve stone. To others she made light of this, recounting with amusement the denting of her dignity when, tagging along behind the royal procession to the opening of Tower Bridge in 1894, and feeling rather pleased with herself in her smart landau with its pair of black horses and bewigged coachman, she had heard a voice from the crowd cry out: ‘’Ullo! ’Ere comes the Queen’s cook!’

  Privately, Mary’s intake of food began to distress her. ‘I am prone to excess,’ she confided to her diary, ‘it isn’t delicate flavour or exquisite cooking, but it is quantity.’ She tried remedies of her own, such as cutting out biscuits (which led to binges of eight at a time), forswearing sweet fruits and eating meat instead, a vow in her diary not to eat more than two dishes at dinner, nor take sugar – followed by an entry, ‘Soup, fish, pheasant and soufflé. What a Pig I am!’ She tried Dr Nathaniel Yorke-Davies’s new Stationary Diet, designed to keep patients at a steady weight, which was ‘Again a hideous failure. I gave way at dinner, late too, just before cheese, and eat cheese and butter and reckless dessert, with my eyes open.’

  Day after day, entry after entry, her 1896 diary records her shame and frustration: ‘Bad, bad, and so I shall weigh this morning. I know I shall find my weight gone up, and I shall see my shame with my eyes.’ She began to see her appetite as conjoined with other ‘carnal affections’, until the whole became a lumpen mass of guilt and self-reproach, compounded by further remorse at being obsessed by something as base and fleshly as mere food – ‘this attraction of the flesh the garment I have to cast away – the carnal affection which must die in me – or must I put this away and let it go – this present state of things is just too grovelling – thinking abt food eternally, and breaking my resolutions’. On occasion, a solution presented itself. ‘Today my sins have found me out and I am altogether livery bad,’ Mary recorded one October morning, ‘glad to be puked up.’ In other diary entries she refers more elliptically to, ‘P. again, both last night and this morning,’ or ‘and P. too later on. This awful weakness makes me so ashamed and fearful.’

  SOME SYMPTOMS OF BULIMIA

  Bingeing that may alternate with fasting.

  Purgative vomiting.

  Constant preoccupation with food and dieting.

  Self-disgust when too much has been eaten.

  Mood-shifts including depression, self-hate and guilt.

  Severe self criticism.

  From twenty-first-century medical sources

  Increasingly, Ben relied on Lucy for support – and felt guilty about that, too. She felt she lacked courage, she was fearful and constantly anxious. Anxiety was her ‘deadliest and most constant foe. . . a sort of demon of fright’, and ‘I lean so much on Lucy – how to counteract this?’ Yet of Lucy she writes: ‘It remains for her to be strong and c
ontinuous in spirit, for me to be yielding and dependent.’ For her part, Lucy could be just as ruling of Ben as Edward was – and just as with Edward in the early years of her marriage, Ben responded with petulance. ‘She was didactic and I was unkind and hufty,’ noted Ben, after one contretemps. Lucy could be searingly critical. The impetus behind Ben’s starting her 1896 diary was to draw up a series of rules and resolutions for self-improvement. It was rather like the confessional journal she had written for Tan, with daily entries on the right-hand page, and corresponding prayers and missives to the Lord on the left. Within the first pages, under the heading ‘Things to think of’ she mournfully lists ‘Lucy’s complaints’. Among these are that Ben has no sympathy with the poor, or with Lucy’s work among them; that she puts inconveniences to the family before the good of others; that she sets faults of temper too high and those of selfishness and extravagance too low; that she is contradictory and wants humility; and – in an eerie echo of those days at Wellington – that she lacks energy, reads too many novels, is self-indulgent and over-loving of comfort. The list goes on.

  ‘Anxiety’ featured prominently among Lucy’s complaints, apparently caused by Mary’s ‘selfish dislike to be anxious and fear of personal discomforts’. Mary began to fret about being anxious. Fred was more sympathetic to his mother than was Lucy. He saw that there were ‘times when the lights were low, times when the whirling wheels slowed down and halted’, when Mary succumbed to the ‘arch-enemy of her soul’, a gripping, almost random dread: ‘that ghostly enemy of hers, whom she was always trying to throttle, and who kept raising spectres for her, the grimness and unreality of which were truly surprising even to herself.’ Sometimes her worries were so exaggerated as to be comic. She expected dreadful accidents, her loved-ones’ corpses delivered to the door; she became convinced that she herself was going to die – on one occasion even setting a date, which resulted in the family initiating a daily countdown at teatime, intoning ‘Nine days now’, ‘Eight days now’ in sepulchral voices, until finally ‘Today!’ burst out amidst general hilarity.

  Yet when really heavy blows fell, as on the deaths of Martin and Nellie, Mary remained clear, composed and strong, as if the succession of minor panics had merely been practice for the true trial. It was the day-to-day fears that crippled her, and through the summer of 1896, Fred noted, they became more chronic, the demon ‘couched in the shadow. . . ever ready to pounce on her with claw and teeth’. Mary worried about Maggie’s health and Arthur’s depressions, about Fred’s fecklessness and that Hugh was so rash, but most of all she was anxious about Edward. The depressions that had plagued him throughout their married life would infect her, too, and she would fret about him long after he had recovered his spring and vigour. She bore the brunt of his severity and dark moods, but for Mary self-denial had become a way of life. As Fred noticed, ‘the primary desire of her heart was to give love’, and that went for her children, for Lucy, and to an all-consuming extent for her husband, too.

  ARTHUR AND FRED BENSON, IN THEIR OWN MIDDLE AGE, REFLECT UPON THEIR PARENTS’ MARRIAGE

  Arthur

  I have been present at talks at Addington when Papa’s hard displeasure about some trifle was intolerable. On the other hand I used to think at the Addington meals, that Mama was dextrous in reverting to subjects which always rubbed Papa up the wrong way. It was a case of real, natural incompatibility. Mama was an instinctive pagan, hence her charm. Papa was an instinctive puritan with a rebellious love of art. Papa on the whole hated and distrusted the people he didn’t wholly approve of. Mama saw their faults and loved them. How very few friends Papa ever had. Some old ones like Bradshaw – sort of tradition, but how he drifted away from Bishop Wordsworth and John Wordsworth and Wilkinson. He disliked feeling people’s superiority. His mind was better and stronger than his heart and his heart didn’t keep his mind in check. It was a fine character, not a beautiful one. He certainly had a tendency to bully people as he believed from good motives. Mama never wanted to direct or interfere with people and I think was the most generous and disinterested character I have ever known. But her diary is very painful to me because it shows how little in common they had and how cruel he was.

  Fred

  Papa was a very difficult person to deal with, because he was terrifying, and remembered things, not very accurately, because he remembered the points which were in his favour and forgot the points which were not. Mama forgot everything, or if she remembered, forgot the sense of resentment. Then he wanted, as you say, obedience and enthusiasm. Mama never claimed either exactly, but got both. Then Papa cared intensely about details, and details never interested Mama; and one must remember, as you say, the other side – and Papa’s affection, when it rose to the surface, was very revealing indeed.

  From correspondence between the two brothers in 1925

  Edward wrote of the ‘fearful blackness and whiteness and hardness and coldness’ that curbed and checked him. He suffered from insomnia, sometimes sleeping only four hours or so each night. He worked ferociously hard at Lambeth, hankering after retreats to Addington – but his depressions once there, without work to occupy him, lasted longer and were more severe. At times, doctors confined him to bed, and he would lie, Arthur wrote, ‘revolving many things and reviewing his own inadequacy, and the consequent downfall of the Church and the wreck of religion, till he was in complete despair’. Arthur felt that his father was unsuited to the role of Archbishop, that in accepting it he had yielded ‘to what had always been a temptation of his, the love of ruling’. A successful archbishop should not only tolerate compromise, but embrace it enthusiastically. ‘The note of the Primacy is sympathetic caution, and that was not by any means my father’s ideal.’ Edward’s dissonance with the demands of his calling, Arthur thought, lay behind the bouts of neurasthenia that so paralysed him.

  In America, neurasthenia was accepted as a condition that affected both men and women, but most British doctors considered it largely an affliction of the weaker sex. Whatever opinion his own physicians might have held, for Edward such debilitating nervous exhaustion took on moral overtones, going against every element of his belief in Muscular Christianity and manliness of spirit. Overwork and grief were more acceptable causes of nervous collapse, and both certainly held in Edward’s case. In 1890, as Nellie lay dying, he was working on the most difficult single decision of his entire career: writing his judgement for the Lincoln Trial, the result of a bitter doctrinal conflict within the Church, centred on rituals practised by the Bishop of Lincoln which inclined to Catholicism. And just weeks after the judgement and Nellie’s funeral, Edward’s younger brother Christopher died in Wiesbaden.

  Whereas Mary took her fears inward, or relied on her faith for strength, Edward’s ‘moods of depression and dark discouragement’ fell like night on all about him, and ‘required a buoyant vitality in his immediate circle’. His wife, especially, was expected to deliver unbounded adoration, cheer and support. Yet implore though Mary might, Edward would simply not listen, would not slow down or rest. At the end of July 1896, she persuaded him to see a doctor, in preparation for a visit to the Anglican Church of Ireland. The doctor diagnosed that the Archbishop’s heart was ‘weak and wanting in power’, and advised rest before and after meals. ‘He is furious and won’t,’ wrote Mary in her diary. He also refused to cut down on work or abandon the Irish tour.

  Lucy did not come to Ireland. For some reason Mary did not want her to, and for once stood her ground against her friend. Alone with Edward, on an uncomfortable journey and with far too many daily appointments (Mary thought the Archbishop of Dublin a ‘slave-driver’) her day-to-day anxieties multiplied. Simply hearing him blow his nose would cause ‘the cold hands to clutch’; the slightest hint of rain and she raised her own umbrella to protect him. Yet, at the age of sixty-seven, Edward seemed – despite a passing cold – not to have lost any of his drive. He relished the time in Ireland, met every part of his packed schedule, and remained full of vigour.

&nb
sp; FROM MRS BENSON’S DIARY, IRELAND, SEPTEMBER 1896

  . . . this has been a dreadful time – my own shrinking from the nights has been terrible to me. There was no giving way on the other side, and with the help of God I must think it out – Soundly and in proportion. . . I have taken my resolve for this time – not, unless illness of any kind comes, to make any moan or any difficulty – but for the future what? God show me. . .

  The Archbishop and Mrs Benson returned to England on 10 October, and travelled directly to Hawarden Castle, near Chester, to visit the Gladstones – something Edward had eagerly been looking forward to. As he sat working in the railway carriage on the way to Chester, Edward was so engrossed that he did not answer Mary when she asked if he wanted lunch. She did not ask a second time and remained hungry. They continued to Hawarden through gales and torrents of rain. Edward got his comeuppance when they arrived. They sat down immediately to tea, and Mr Gladstone, by now well into his eighties, held forth on the subject of a recent Papal Bull, which had denied the validity of Anglican holy orders, for a solid three-quarters of an hour, while the Archbishop (as was so often the case when in the presence of men of equal or superior intellectual stature) remained silent. He sat, teacup in hand, poised ready to take the first sip.