Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  [He] found himself with a great number of close friends, and without a single intimate one. He had never bared his heart to another, he had never seen another heart bare before his eyes. He had never let himself go.

  Fred, meanwhile, was glittering in London, turning out books at a rate. In 1900 he had used Arthur’s standing with Henry James to elicit an invitation to visit James at home, at Lamb House, in Rye. Afterwards, James wrote to Arthur: ‘Your brother Fred is personal, and I found him a very interesting, charming, acute and observant youth – modern highly, as you say; with only (it’s my own criticism) a tendency to place Golf too high in his intellectual interests.’ Fred had, the venerable author noted drily, a great ‘affinity with town’, but he was glad to see that the young man had ‘work to his hand there’ – and indeed Fred did. In the first years of the new century he produced book after commercially successful book, including such novels as The Challoners – about an imperious, overmastering clergyman who checks the ‘innocent and sunny impulses of joy’ in his child-bride and terrorizes his children. He wrote it in three weeks, and it sold over 10,000 copies within a year.

  Ben adored Fred’s wit, shrugged off his flippancy, enjoyed his stories from town. He remained her favourite, now that his flat on Oxford Street (and later a little house in Chelsea) had eased the tensions of living at Tremans – in addition to siphoning off some of the excess furniture. Maggie was happy, Arthur well-placed and Fred a tremendous success. It was Hugh’s turn to cause his mother concern.

  Hugh had long been drifting towards Rome, and his approach accelerated considerably once his father was dead. While Ben was still in Winchester, Hugh had left his curacy in Kent to join the monastic Community of the Resurrection, founded by the theologically controversial Canon Gore, at Mirfield, in Yorkshire. The fraternity was celibate, lived under common rule and with a common purse. Hugh clashed furiously with his father’s successor, Archbishop Temple, over the decision. Even Beth was perturbed that the ‘greedy things’ would run off with Master Hugh’s socks and vests in their fervour for communal property. Ben knew that any attempt to restrain her impulsive, headstrong youngest son would simply lead to further foot-stomping, and remarked, ‘he has acted so hastily that to do anything [to prevent him] is almost impossible now. . . I feel that we mustn’t give him the idea of a wilful boy thwarted.’ Soon after the move to Tremans, Hugh left Mirfield, spending long periods with them in Sussex and in 1903 publishing his own first book, The Light Invisible, a series of short stories centred on an old Roman Catholic priest. By July of that year, after three months at Tremans and many a long conversation with Ben, Hugh went to a Dominican convent in Gloucestershire to put himself under instruction for the Roman Catholic Church. In September he travelled to the College of San Silvestro in Rome. After nine months there – during which he managed to pick up not one word of Italian – Hugh was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.

  The voluntary submission of the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury to (in the phrase of one early Anglican litany) ‘the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities’ caused something of a scandal among readers of the Church Times, but Ben, who had known religious crises of her own, and whose overriding impulse was love for those around her, in preference to any broader theoretical, theological or social concern, stood behind Hugh, despite her own feelings of ‘special sadness’. Besides, experience had taught her that opposition to the unbending Hugh served only to exaggerate his wayward behaviour. She had long talks with him while he made his decision, but once he was ordained wrote: ‘We know you are ours still, and nothing will ever shake that fundamental blessed reality of love. . . you know now where your heart feels you can be truly loyal, where it finds its home, where you deeply feel God has led you. . . only let us in, always, whenever you rightly can – my heart cries out for that.’ Arthur was not as tolerant, snorting that Hugh had acted on a whim, in a light-hearted and self-absorbed way, ‘like a child flying a kite’, and that the one thing he wanted was ‘authority and the luxury of not having to make up a confused and not very profound mind’. He noted that Hugh still loved dressing up and wore his biretta all day long. Ethel Smyth, who had never liked the boy and had been irritated by the way he swept around Lambeth in a long coat as his father’s chaplain, observed that ‘it was a relief to think of him safe in a cassock’, while Arthur’s friend H. E. Luxmoore (he of the knickerbockers and brown velvet dinner-jacket) was unimpressed – even by Hugh’s official purple trim when he was eventually made a Monsignor – declaring that he was just the same ‘sharp insignificant little scug as he had been at Eton’.

  Talk at Tremans when Hugh was present was apt to flare into vehement rows. The family, Fred noted, ‘required little provocation to be argumentative’, but even so it was impossible to be silent in response to Hugh’s dogmatic, often ill-thought-out pronouncements, or the arrogantly dismissive ‘But I belong to a Church that happens to know’. Even the preternaturally silent Nettie was sometimes moved to say ‘Rubbish!’ under her breath. Lucy brought her own line of smug superiority to the fray, which exacerbated the situation. Ben listened quietly and threw water on white-hot fury with a ‘Dear me, how pleasant it is to hear young people talk!’ (slightly misquoting Mrs Vincy in Middlemarch) – at which point her progeny would reconcile temporarily to fall upon her for flippancy.

  Hugh appropriated another attic room at Tremans for a Roman Catholic chapel, painting the windows with images of saints (visible to tradesmen, and known in the village as ‘Mrs Benson’s Dolls’). Here he said Mass every morning, and conducted other offices during the day. He sought out a little server, a village boy, and went on long walks with him once religious duties had been seen to. Hugh tore about Tremans, a tornado in cassock and tippet, rushed into breakfast, ripped open his mail, rattled through stories (often profane) with his staccato stammer, shrieked with laughter at his own jokes, and once offered an alarmed Anglican cleric some newly arrived communion wafers to taste, smacking his lips and saying they were delicious. (The wafers were not as yet consecrated, but the visitor was horrified nonetheless.) In his quieter moments he set about writing polemical Catholic novels, with such titles as Come Rack! Come Rope!, The Winnowing, and Confessions of a Convert. In 1905, Hugh moved to Cambridge, to work for the university’s Roman Catholic chaplaincy – with such startling success that complaints about his proselytizing were soon being made to Arthur at Magdalene. Later, he took to public preaching, achieving popularity across Britain and in tours through the USA. When he preached, Hugh’s histrionic daily energy was channelled into high melodrama and his stammer entirely disappeared. He became the Mrs Patrick Campbell of the pulpit.

  FATHER HUGH BENSON IS ENCOUNTERED PREACHING AT THE CHURCH OF SAN SILVESTRO IN ROME

  By Robert Hichens, who once as a young man in Egypt was so

  enamoured of Fred Benson’s tan and wit

  In the pulpit. . . he was, I thought, startlingly sensational. His changes of voice were so abrupt as to be alarming. But even more surprising were his movements of body. Sometimes he would suddenly lower his voice and simultaneously shrink down in the pulpit until only his head and face were visible to the congregation. Then he would raise his voice almost to a shriek and, like a figure in a Punch and Judy show, dart up diagonally and lean over the pulpit edge until one almost feared that he would tumble out of it and land sprawling among his fascinated, yet apprehensive hearers below.

  I have in my time heard a good many preachers, both English and foreign. . . But Father Benson surpassed them all in exaggerated emotionalism of manner and voice. . . he almost stupefied me on that occasion. . . I have heard him called dramatic. I thought him melodramatic.

  Hugh wrote his books, Fred said, ‘in furious haste’ with a ‘terrifying fecundity’, surely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Arthur, too, was able to spin phrases with astonishing celerity – an Ode for the Eton Chronicle in ten minutes, two hymns for the confirmation of Prince Leopold of Battenberg while on the train f
rom London to Horsted Keynes, entire books at a rate of tens of thousands of words a month, as well as some three thousand letters a year and a diary that eventually ran to over four million words.

  At Tremans, Arthur sat every day, for the hours between tea and dinner, in an armchair in his room, writing on a board placed on his knees and dropping completed sheets – neither reread nor corrected – into a basket at his side, ready for the typist. Much of this activity went into producing what Fred described as ‘those reflective volumes by which he was now getting so widely known’, books that brought ‘guidance and uplift’ to their readers, but which were ‘deplored by those friends who saw his humour, his critical incisiveness, his keen intellectual interests unused or unexercised’ in a stream of works which they judged to be ‘wholly unworthy of his gifts’. Literary friends pronounced the writing as vapid, silly and fatuous. Henry James had praised the ‘charm’ and ‘loveability’ of Arthur’s early verse, but wrote to him that he felt ‘a certain desire to screw you up just a peg higher. . . to make you squeeze your subject just a little tighter – press on it with a harder thumb’, criticism that held even more true of these later works. Even Arthur felt that his mind was ‘wanting in grip’, and noted that his books went ‘straight to the heart of a few hundred of the unctuous and sentimental middle-class’. Yet these sweet, anodyne works of comforting commonplaces, with such titles as Through a College Window, The Thread of Gold and Thy Rod and Thy Staff attracted a devoted following – including large numbers of importunate widows and spinsters, to each of whose letters Arthur diligently replied. It was almost, Fred said, as if his brother had two personalities with no single connecting point between them – the incisive, genial, intellectual side, and this tender, tranquillizing personality that wrote books as if by dictation without pause for thought. Arthur himself admitted: ‘In my books I am solemn, sweet, refined; in real life I am rather vehement, sharp, contemptuous and a busy mocker.’ Yet the books brought in a healthy income, and Arthur continued to publish prolifically. In 1906, Punch ran a cartoon in its ‘Signs of the Times’ series, with the caption ‘Self-denial week: Mr A. C. Benson refrains from publishing a book.’

  Punch’s satire could quite easily have been directed at any one of Arthur’s productive siblings. Maggie once joked in a letter to Hugh, ‘I think it’s hard that with 3 brothers there should be nary a new book ready for me this week’, but commented more seriously to Ben, ‘the real difficulty is that none of the Benson Bros. can stop writing. They are like the wild huntsman.’

  Ben once observed that writing was ‘the one solace of a Benson under all difficulties’. Since their childhood days, when fearsome Papa might be subject to the odd sting in the family magazine, Benson tensions, contradictions and perplexities – both awkwardnesses between themselves, and those personal vexations that tugged inwardly – had been deflected into the written word. The Benson mind, Arthur wrote once, ‘naturally thinks that anything which concerns itself is of the nature of a national crisis and a local convulsion. It is all lit up in a kind of golden glory, and the actors have tongues of fire on their heads.’ As the boys grew older, this eloquent and dedicated self-absorption was becoming mightily profitable. The ‘odd outburst of books’, Maggie wrote to Arthur, ‘in an unmarrying family is better than marriage’. Unlike marriage, which loosened bonds between siblings, her brothers’ writing drew them closer, because it gave her an insight into their personalities she would otherwise not have had. ‘One gets to know you in a double way, by a sort of second channel,’ she wrote to Arthur, adding that through Hugh’s and Arthur’s books, she came to understand a part of them that ‘could not and should not be too much expressed in daily life, but which enlightens us all’.

  In the bookcase in her sitting room at Tremans, Ben had an Arthur shelf, a Fred shelf and a Hugh shelf, guarding the contents fiercely, never lending them out. That is not to say, Fred noted, that the books gave her any joy at all. She was a severe and candid critic of her sons’ work. Fred was convinced that she never read any of it twice, nor would have read much of it once had they not written it: ‘She liked ‘bits’ in most volumes of this library, but not one spark of inspiration, not one crumb of the bread of life, did she find in any of them.’ Arthur, too, acknowledged Ben as his ‘most trusted and eager critic’, one who had ‘a remarkable perception for what was otiose, inappropriate or disproportioned’, who might praise certain passages, but who ‘laid her fingers infallibly on weaker episodes’. She told him more than once that she did not feel him to be altogether behind his books. Ben dismissed Arthur’s sentimentality, and berated Fred’s superficiality, claiming that the latter did not apply himself to his writing with his full capabilities. There she had a point. Fred became the most frequently cited author in early editions of H. W. Fowler’s The King’s English, in the ‘Antics’ chapter of the Style section, under such headings as ‘Intrusive smartness’, ‘The determined picturesque’ and ‘Patronizing superiority expressed by describing simple things in long words’. About Fred’s novel The Money Market (which he himself had admitted was ‘twaddle’), Ben was scathing, saying that it was amusing, but light, and though she had been swimming along reading it, suddenly ‘a thumping impossible incident (of the usual worst order) cuts clean across all the weavings of character and is followed by equally impossible mawkish sentimental Christian forgiveness’. It all rang false, she went on, was not true to real human nature, only to the superficial world he had sketched: ‘I am rather tired of smart people and should have liked him to have struck a deeper vein.’ Ben’s critique bore weight with her sons. The prolific Arthur paid her the ultimate compliment and ‘suppressed half a dozen books out of deference to her views’, an impressive tally given the rarity of such restraint on his part.

  Ben was not the only family critic. One evening, when all three brothers were at Tremans, working on books, someone suggested they suspend their literary labours and that each attempt a parody of one of the others. ‘This was a congenial job,’ noted Fred, for though these three men took their work very seriously, ‘there was not a vestige of mutual admiration between them, and they thought it would be pleasant to give frank expression to the lack of it.’ So like three Cains, each prepared to murder an Abel. Ben ‘much looked forward to this feast of fraternal candour’.

  Arthur had to read Hugh’s mystical religious novel The Light Invisible before he could begin his task. He composed a piece about a saintly Roman Catholic priest, who took surreptitious sips of port while sitting in his parlour communing with the Unseen; or doddered about the garden recounting such clairvoyant spiritual experiences as his vision of a woman dressed in blue with stars in her hair, standing by a rosemary bush. ‘She smiled and vanished, so it was not difficult to guess who she was.’ Arthur was so overcome by mirth as he read that his eyes streamed and he had to wipe his spectacles, and Ben laughed ‘helplessly and hopelessly, with her face all screwed up’, though Hugh sat puzzled and enquiring, smiling politely.

  Next, Fred tackled Arthur, with a story of ‘a wise patient wistful middle-aged gentleman called Geoffrey’, who ‘sate’ (an irritating anachronism, favoured by both Arthur and his father) by his mullioned window, looked out at meadows and wild flowers, and mused – at length – about his gardener being rude to him. Geoffrey wondered how people could be so discourteous in a world where a Divine Hand had scattered such loveliness, mused again, tranquilly, on his own boyhood, and (inspired by a hymn the gardener was whistling) on how he and the gardener would both one day face the great mystery of death. Then, instead of dismissing the gardener, Geoffrey called him to the window where he sate, and thanked him for the lesson his whistling had imparted, and the two sang the final verse together. Once again, Ben was reduced to helpless giggles – while Arthur sat (or sate) frosty, looking pained.

  Next came Hugh, on Fred, with a composition full of babbling puppets whose inane, inconsequent talk had no individuality at all – one which, Fred thought, missed the mark entirely, while Ben
and the others were convulsed. ‘Oh you clever people!’ said Ben when it was all over. ‘Why don’t you all for the future write each other’s books instead of your own? You do them much better. Give me all those stories. I shall read them when I feel depressed.’

  In 1904, Chatto & Windus published a book entitled Hadrian the Seventh by one Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, in which the protagonist rises from a life of obscurity and literary poverty to become Pope. It was a work of fantasized autobiography, of outrageous wish fulfilment liberally laced with venom, as a man pitted against the world trounces his enemies. Rolfe furiously – and eloquently – poured vitriol on the hierarchy of the Holy Roman Church, who had thwarted his own attempts to become a priest, while maintaining a fervent, if somewhat recondite, Catholicism. (He circumvented the Church’s snub by abbreviating his first name to Fr.) Shatteringly arrogant, Rolfe sustained a supreme self-belief in the face of public indifference to his work, scathing criticism in the press, and the betrayal he eventually perceived in almost anyone who dared befriend him. Generally in a state of abject poverty, he did battle by letter with publishers he thought had cheated him, and in turn implored money of friends, or hailed abuse upon them, with accusations of perfidy and deception. In 1908, he moved to Venice, where he alternated between being lauded in palazzos and sleeping rough. In certain circles he developed some renown for the introductions he could make to sexually obliging adolescent boys there, and for the extraordinarily vivid letters he wrote describing his own encounters.

  Hugh read Hadrian the Seventh in February 1905, and was entranced. He wrote to Rolfe, declaring his admiration, saying it was impossible to express how much pleasure the book had given him, and that he had read it three times. He said it was brilliant, and put it among the three books from which he wished never to be separated. A correspondence ensued which grew more intimate and frequent, with each writing to the other almost daily. In August, Hugh suggested a walking tour – starting out from Cambridge with one or two shirts, a toothbrush and a breviary, eating where they could and staying in out-of-the-way inns in any village where a ‘mass house’ was available. The tour was such a success that it was immediately followed by an invitation to Tremans.