Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Arthur, now in his mid-thirties, remained a master at Eton, where he was popular among boys in his house for the stories he made up for them. The father of one of his pupils told Ben that ‘Arthur goes round every night and tickles all the boys, and shows them too how strong he is’. ‘Doesn’t it sound funny?’ Ben observed. Arthur entertained literary ambitions, and was nurturing his friendship with Henry James. Hugh was curate in a village in Kent, but had some surprises in store for his mother as far as his religious inclinations went. Fred had published four more books after Dodo, with varying degrees of success, and his income from these together with his inheritance meant that he did not have to look for other employment. He came to St Thomas Street to live with Ben, Lucy and Maggie – and Nurse Beth, now nearly eighty and still devotedly part of the household; as well, at times, as Nettie Gourlay, whose passionate friendship with Maggie had continued since the first Egyptian trip. Although not initially sold on the idea of living in Winchester, Fred soon came to enjoy it, spending most of his time playing golf at the Country Club, or scooting up to London to revel with the smart set he knew there. Arthur, who was at first benignly admiring of his younger brother’s ability to fit in with other people’s plans and make the best of everything, began to mutter that Fred was too frivolous, and ought to ‘go away and rough it for a year’ in some job that would put a bit of fibre into him, such as being a newspaper correspondent.

  A LETTER FROM HENRY JAMES TO ARTHUR BENSON, PRIOR TO A VISIT TO ETON

  34 De Vere Gardens, W.

  Thursday (Jan. 16, 1896)

  My dear Arthur,

  I am divided between 2 sensations – panting for tomorrow p.m. and blushing for all the hours of all the past days. I ought to have acknowledged your beautiful letter (after your last being here,) about – about everything. But I have been so taken up with living in the future and in the idea of answering you with impassioned lips. . . [You] are not to worry in the faintest degree about the question of my conveyance to-morrow, meeting me, causing me to be met, or getting me over at all. I can with utter ease procure myself to be transported. I shall come – ‘that is all you know – and all you need to know.’ Voilà. I shall in the meantime weave spells over your house and its inmates.

  Yours almost uncontrollably

  Henry James

  A few of Ben’s old circle – most notably the imperious Duchess of Bedford, and her sister Lady Henry Somerset – did visit, but life in Winchester went on in a low key. The Christmas of 1897 was largely a family occasion, although the vicar of Addington was of the party (praying constantly that Arthur be ordained), as was a certain Miss Bramston. Ben had lost none of her abilities at forming rapid and devoted acquaintances, and the besotted Miss Bramston irritated everyone, Arthur in particular, sitting ‘four square at tea like a penguin: she slops her tea about, grabs food, gazes at M.B. and takes no notice of anyone else. She walked with us to Cath. on Xmas Day, in ugly black clothes rudely cut with a large grey woollen shawl around her neck. She is shapeless and walks like a swan.’

  At first, Ben found the sleepiness of Winchester calming. ‘I seemed to find myself,’ she noted in her diary, but occasional visits to London made her long for her old world, that ‘beating keen pulsating life, the splendid web’ which had once surrounded her. The sight of a woman riding in a carriage, splendid by comparison with her shoddy hired brougham; the talk from Court and Westminster now filtered to her through newspapers rather than directly conveyed; all helped to emphasize that she had fallen on the far side of the barrier that excludes the general public from the heart of things – but at least they were echoes of the past. When she returned to Winchester, Ben was doubly cast down by the staleness and mundanity of her life there, at the wittering chat of Close and County and College, or the supposedly thrilling occasion of a carriage ride across the Downs, of pinch-and-scrape dinners for four rather than banquets for dozens of the great and good. ‘I sicken at all this everyday life, at the setting of it,’ she exploded in her diary. ‘Oh, the awful backwater this is!’

  Ben set herself to read through Edward’s letters and diaries, including the one dating from the year he proposed to her, which revealed ‘that he chose me deliberately, as a child who was very fond of him and whom he might educate – he even wanted to preserve himself from errant fallings-in-love’. ‘Oh God thou knowest how this has pierced,’ wrote Ben in a despairing diary prayer. Not only was she forced to relive that ‘terrible, difficult, amazing Rugby time’, when as a child desperate to please she had been propelled into a situation where she ‘could scarcely be said to have a choice of my own’, but she began to question the forty-three years that followed it. Ben sank into deep, miserable introspection. A moment at William Gladstone’s funeral, on 28 May 1898, drove the point home even more painfully. As Mrs Gladstone entered Westminster Abbey, supported by her sons, the entire congregation rose to its feet. That had not happened for Ben at Edward’s service, and now she realized with a shock that ‘I was not associated with him in people’s minds’. Apart from a very few, most of the old circle seemed indifferent to her after Edward’s death, as if she, too, had died. ‘His friends did not and do not seek me,’ she wrote. ‘I think I had imagined they would take me as a relic of him.’ All she had ever been, it seemed to Ben, was a pleasant hostess, yet though she had toiled to make herself agreeable to everyone around Edward, they had not wanted her ‘2d. agreeableness’; instead they wanted ‘his massiveness, his large ideas, his power. And I was never associated with these.’ She doubted that, after all these decades, she had ‘any life of my own at the back’ at all, was sickened by the thought that she was merely ‘a ghost in a phantom world’.

  Edward, Ben opined, had had aims – so many that there hadn’t seemed any room for hers. Her role had merely been to make life pleasant for him. She thought, too, that she had ‘no honour’ from her children: ‘They have aims, all and have for so long regarded me as a person who kept things pleasantly going.’ Now, they no longer took her seriously. And indeed what was she, after all these years? ‘What can I do now? at 57 not very vigorous – having spent all my life in scrappy interruptions – small means – fat and ugly.’

  Ben turned to Lucy for help, but Lucy often compounded Ben’s feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness with harsh criticism. At times, it was as if with Lucy Ben was recreating another version of her marriage to Edward. Lucy even took Edward’s side, criticizing Ben for want of sympathy, for not having entered into Edward’s life, not caring for the things he loved. ‘She says I have a way of disassociating people from their life and caring for them apart from it. She has often felt this and thinks that he did and that the cause was the same.’ Lucy went on: it was the same with Nellie, too. Ben’s failings as wife, mother, intimate were laid flatly before her. Later, she confided to a friend: ‘I never really knew what depression was till ’96.’ In her diary she wrote: ‘This flat dull leaden depression – what is right about it? It feels like a slow finding of one’s level – and such a level!’

  Adapting to widowhood, for Ben, also meant having to learn to economize – and she had never been much good at that. In at least one moment of economic crisis, she consulted Fred, ‘who has taken it in a good masculine way’ (which probably means he bailed her out). But Fred also contributed to the problem, as his lavish social life brought to St Thomas Street a stream of house guests with high expectations. At one point Ben, Lucy and Maggie (in a rare moment of unity) together demanded a dam to the flow, much to Fred’s annoyance. ‘I am awfully sorry about having made Fred low,’ wrote Ben, ‘I hate not falling in with any plan of his, but it’s economy that sits beside me at bed and board – and so I fear our staff couldn’t do it (and perhaps a secret thought that we can scarcely afford more guests than the ordinary spare room).’ Ben began increasingly to find Fred ‘captious’ and ‘contradictious’, and he spent longer periods away from home, visiting friends or on the golf course. In her diary, she writes of him almost as a lover, regretting how d
etached from each other they are becoming, and asking God for ‘insight and love and attractiveness and patience. How is it that we are so far apart! And yet Fred loves – and I love.’ Ben thought her son was growing a little too uppity for his own good, too full of his success as a writer, but then she acknowledged that, as with her, life in Winchester was the problem.

  It is all on so small a scale. He is awfully nice to me but we run dry in a few minutes, and in the drouth I hear my own silly words ringing in my own sad ear. I think the only thing would be to live with him, alone, for two or three months. I can’t do it, and if I tried I shouldn’t last out. . . Clearly this points to WIFE. Will it be?

  Arthur was also on his mother’s mind. He had written to Fred urging him to wed, as ‘he is the only one of us four likely to. We are the only Bensons of our line left. . . we have struggled into a certain position and it would be pathetic if we died out just now.’ Of Hugh, Arthur wrote that he did not have ‘the slightest touch of sexual passion’, that he liked his friends and loved children but ‘shrank from women’, a description Arthur might well have applied to himself. A decade or so earlier, Arthur had briefly wondered whether he might be able to fall in love with a certain Miss Erna Thomas. There had been rare, fleeting and largely theoretical thoughts of marriage at other times in his life, but he was happier developing robust friendships with his boys at Eton, or experiencing the ‘indescribable thrill of romance and desire’ of watching naked young men diving and playing in the river, or, while walking, glimpsing a favourite pupil through a window undressing by candlelight for bed. Such matters clearly remained unspoken between the brothers, or at least locked firmly in the rapidly filling cabinet containing aspects of Benson behaviour that were allowed their place in family life simply by being ignored. And Fred’s heart, unfortunately for the Benson line, also lay elsewhere. By the spring of 1898 he was on an extended trip to Capri and Athens, where, Ben remarked, ‘he found a little boy to play with – a nice young officer’.

  Far more of a cause of anxiety to Ben than Fred’s contrariness was Maggie’s behaviour – and Maggie was acting very strangely indeed. If Winchester was frustrating for Ben and Fred, it was crushing to Maggie, offering little to stimulate her formidable mind. With her rheumatism and weak heart confining her much of the time to the house in St Thomas Street and its small walled garden, Maggie set herself to writing an account of her Egyptian excavations, as well as a philosophical work, eventually to become The Venture of Rational Faith. Progress was slow. She also began to prepare for publication a treatise of her father’s on the Book of Revelation, to which he had been putting finishing touches just before his death, and editing some addresses he had delivered at Lambeth. At the same time, she entered into intense correspondence with Arthur, who was writing the Archbishop’s Life. The family noticed that the oddest change was coming over her, as if she were being possessed by Edward’s spirit. As Maggie soaked herself in Edward’s works, Fred observed, ‘they gripped her mind. With the effect that his very personality, dominating and masterful, and his sense of responsibility for the spiritual strenuousness of those round him began to take possession of her.’ It was, he thought, as if ‘some masculine fibre had begun to assert itself in her’. Maggie attempted to exert strict rule over her mother, wanting to run the household herself, and, Fred noticed, ‘into her nature there passed as well something of [Edward’s] severity and of those moods of dark depression which sometimes obsessed him’.

  MARY BENSON WITH MAGGIE IN 1898

  Ben’s liberation from the fetters of the previous forty years was sharply checked. ‘There is in her displeasure,’ Ben wrote in her diary of this force that had taken over her daughter, ‘as there was in her father’s, a power of bringing one into bondage – a dreadful fear – fear that one should be displeasing her. . . that lapses or neglects. . . are being added up against the cloudy and dark days’. Ben could recognize this bondage, but found herself unable to escape: ‘O God what to do. . . how, O Lord, to get a personality – the old cry. Freedom is so gone. . .’ She caught herself once again acting ‘in a sort of dull slave spirit’, and saw life before her with ‘a fettered sense of a long vista of slavery’.

  Maggie’s jealousy and resentment of Lucy now grew ferocious. Time and again in her diary, Ben writes of Maggie’s fury, or gloom, or of her complaining of tiredness for days on end and then lapsing ‘into silent depression only broken by some sharp sparring with Lucy’. Maggie complained of Lucy’s role and influence in household affairs, insisting that Lucy occupied too much of Ben’s time – ‘day and night, first thing in the morning last thing at night’ – and that Lucy held too much sway over her. She picked fights with Lucy, and cornered Ben in ‘horrible’ or ‘terrible’ talks, accusing her of mouthing Lucy’s opinions, of the two of them excluding her, of Ben’s growing distant from her. Maggie became sulky and suspicious that Ben and Lucy were conspiring against her, complaining that her life was dull in comparison with theirs. She said she felt neglected, and that she hated Winchester. Most of all, she said she wanted change – and when Ben suggested she might find it by spending a week with Nettie Gourlay, Maggie interpreted the suggestion as a desire to get rid of her.

  No shrinking violet, Lucy could spar quite as fiercely as Maggie, and even initiate her own skirmishes. Ben, ever the conciliator, tried a gentler approach. ‘I thought that this time I would try to meet the attack cheerfully, I mean on my side,’ she wrote after one outburst. ‘I set before me this plan: To give no ground of offence by anything – not to be betrayed into a cross word. . . and to try and steady her conditions with my mind instead of feeling them with my nerves and heart.’ The collapse of this plan left Ben flailing pathetically, during a dismally silent carriage ride with Maggie: ‘O what a drive! She scarcely spoke and was most curt – I tried many subjects. . . I asked her whether she was interested in Church Reform. “No,” she said, “I’m not” so that ended it.’ Ben found herself not mentioning letters she had received if Maggie wasn’t mentioned in them, fearing an outburst, or not going to visit Hugh because Maggie wouldn’t like it. Rarely did she retaliate in kind, although after one of Maggie’s tirades on change, she was ‘goaded into a most unwise word’ and suggested that perhaps what Maggie wanted was change from Nettie Gourlay, but she ‘took it back at once’. Into these toxic waters came Tan, Ben’s old inamorata and mentor from Lincoln, though only for the briefest of visits. Perhaps Ben was seeking spiritual advice. The day was not a success. Maggie sat sullenly silent throughout a drive with Tan and Beth, too, and in the afternoon Lucy quite rudely insisted that Ben sit down with her to do the household accounts, leaving their guest to fend for herself.

  By the beginning of 1898, the situation with Maggie had grown so fraught that Ben had called in the family doctor, Ross Todd (whom she affectionately nicknamed ‘Toddles’). He advised a move to the country, to a house with large grounds so that Maggie need not feel cooped up by the restrictions placed on her by her weak heart – somewhere, given her inability to walk much, where she could stroll in more diverting surroundings than the walled-in garden at St Thomas Street. Ben’s attitude to the countryside, according to Fred, inclined to Dr Johnson’s view that one green field was much like another green field, and that a walk down Fleet Street was infinitely preferable. She regarded the prospect of exclusive country life ‘with sheer blank dismay’. They had lived barely a year in Winchester, and Fred himself deeply disliked the idea of leaving.

  As was so often the case with Benson family affairs, the question was not openly discussed, but ‘began to ooze into the water-supply of domestic life, somehow hardening it and producing reticences and changes of subject’. Yet Ben’s inclination to self-sacrifice was deeply ingrained. ‘In the country she can have her sphere,’ she said of Maggie. ‘Something to look after. A sphere.’ Once Ben had a catchword, ideas became more definite; a label made difficulties seem somehow more soluble. It was at this point that Fred fled to Athens. ‘At the crucial moment EFB flies to
Greece,’ harrumphed Arthur to his diary, adding – unfairly, given his own disengagement from any family difficulties: ‘His motto is anything to save trouble. . . Fred by golf and avoidance of all responsibility prolongs insouciance of youth longer than most people.’ Ben and Lucy began to look for somewhere else to live. Arthur was furious: ‘The entire decision has really been made by a hasty doctor humouring Maggie in a nervous and fanciful mood. And the painful sense remains in everybody’s mind that all their wishes have been sacrificed to this. Either MB could have averted this by decision, or M herself by consideration.’ Arthur even felt a twinge of sympathy for Fred, who although he had not liked the idea of Winchester at first had graciously gone along with it, and now ‘just when he has got rooted, it is all pulled up and he has to start again’.

  Money was once again an issue, especially as an idea had formed to take a little house in London in addition to a place in the country. It was put to Arthur that he might contribute financially and make the new country house his home. ‘I fear I don’t really want it,’ he wrote in his diary, contemplating the idea of forsaking cosy Eton life to live with his family. ‘I don’t think I should do to live at home; we are all too much alike – too critical – too clever – all see what everyone is going to say before they open their mouths – I always get depressed there.’ Fred was far more adapted to such a life, thought Arthur, as he ‘can give way in trifles, is very companionable, easily amused, seldom depressed’ and what was more, ‘he understands women which I don’t do’.