Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  The whole family was at Tremans that summer. Fred (with hindsight) wrote of Rolfe as ‘picturesque and depraved and devil-ridden’. Arthur took against the man instantly. He thought him sinister, felt he brooded over the house ‘like the spirit over chaos’. Rolfe was badly dressed, as well as wearing enormous rings, and managed to make Arthur feel constantly ill-tempered, despite (or perhaps because of) all they might have found they had in common. This bespectacled, long-nosed, priest-like visitor was, Arthur harrumphed to his diary, ‘very silent and deaf at dinner; but not in the least shy or humble or conciliatory. I discovered, by his talk in the chain-room, while we smoked, that he was a great egotist and fancied himself a great writer.’ He was relieved when Rolfe left.

  Hugh had departed in a fit of pique at what he saw as his family’s rejection of his new friend. Once again, it was up to Ben to restore the peace, with her customary tactful turn of phrase. ‘You haven’t got it at all right abt Mr Rolfe,’ she wrote to Hugh. ‘I should like to see more of him very much – it wasn’t a fair seeing of him with the unsympathetic element of Arthur’s mind. Not that Arthur wasn’t quite nice, but a mind which works in such a very different manner introduces an element not favourable to unfettered talk.’

  For a while it looked as if another visit was in the offing. Hugh and Rolfe decided to collaborate on ‘a really startling novel’ about St Thomas à Becket. The project went horribly awry when Hugh’s agent and publisher advised against an association with Rolfe’s name on the title page. Relations between the two men spiralled downwards, finally to shatter into fragments of Rolfeian abuse that continued (often publicly) for years.

  FREDERICK ROLFE PAINTS A PICTURE OF HIS FORMER FRIEND AND COLLABORATOR, FATHER HUGH BENSON, IN HIS NOVEL THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE WHOLE

  The Reverend Bobugo Bonsen was a stuttering little Chrysostom of a priest, with the Cambridge manners of a Vaughan’s dove, the face of the Mad Hatter out of Alice in Wonderland, and the figure of an Etonian who painfully neglects to take any pains at all with his temple of the Holy Ghost but wears paper collars and a black straw alpine hat. . . By sensational novel-writing [his formula was Begin-so-that-you-must-go-on-till-there-is-nothing-left-for-you-to-do-but-to-end-with-a-Bang-(for choice)-of-the-slammed-door-of-a-Carthusian-convent-behind-your-hero], and by perfervid preaching, he made enough money to buy a country-place. . . He did not exactly aspire to actual creation: but he certainly nourished the notion that several serious mistakes had resulted from his absence during the events described in the first chapter of Genesis.

  Apart from the momentary shudder caused by Rolfe’s visit, the summer of 1905 was a happy one. These were halcyon days at Tremans, with all the family often there. Arthur seemed to speak for them all when he wrote that the old house offered a ‘perpetual feast of little, simple, ancient homely beauties: always waiting at every turn; never flaunted. The quiet, the twitter of the birds, the rustle of trees, the green hills and woods in all directions: make it the very sweetest home imaginable.’ The world shrank around Tremans; the life of its inhabitants was painted in watercolours, with small strokes. At the end of December 1905, Maggie wrote to a friend of a busy – even chaotic – morning:

  8.30. Mother came in, before going to London with Lucy for the day.

  9. Beth, conversation about shortcomings of the cook, especially what was done with some sausages.

  10.15. While I had my hair done, my mother’s maid came in much gloom about the Stool-ball [an old Sussex game] Club’s entertainment.

  10.30. Coachman. Acute crisis about new horse. Then to cook with tactful and leading questions and suggestions.

  11. To Arthur and my aunt, when there came a stream of telegrams so that the boy who brought one carried away four, and another arrived directly after.

  11.45. Began my book; fire, sofa and bedroom.

  11.50. Nurse for an interview, in the middle of which came Arthur about a book. Back to my room and book.

  12.15. Midday letters. Horse crisis more acute; up to Arthur about the other book,and back to my room.

  12.30. My aunt to say one telegram hadn’t gone, consequent rush downstairs. Back to book and room.

  12.45. Stool-ball entertainment crisis more acute. Back to book. Then a message from the cook.

  1. Beth to say she wouldn’t interrupt me. Back to book till

  1.20 – and then there’s the gong for lunch.

  And since then another telegram; and the blacksmith’s daughter on the Stool-ball Club crisis. I fear I do rather waste time in small ways!

  Maggie had been happy during her first years at Tremans, much occupied with her new outdoor ‘sphere’, even largely at peace with Lucy in their mutual love for the place. But tending poultry, coping with crises about horses and organizing village amusements were pitiful occupations for a mind like hers. Their petty distractions could only temporarily deflect the forces that had begun to create cracks at Winchester. The forces regathered. By 1906 they threatened an implosion.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In 1906 Ben turned sixty-five and Lucy fifty; Maggie and Nettie were in their early forties, while Beth had reached the grand old age of eighty-eight. Anyone staying at Tremans, Fred wrote, even an intimate friend, would see only an ideal seemliness and tranquillity, ‘a widowed mother and her daughter living each with the friend of her heart in a beautiful house in great comfort’. But beneath this placid surface welled a ‘profound disturbance’. The first signs were subtle. Maggie was restless, her jealousy of Lucy rekindled; once again she grew certain her mother had turned against her. She was sullen with Ben; little frays with Lucy became more frequent. Maggie wanted a Penzance hedge, perhaps, in front of the tiled sitting-out place in the garden. Lucy thought that that would cut off the view of the South Downs. Maggie bridled, but at a glance from Ben, Lucy said no more, instead rather agreed about starting some ducks, as the weedy pond near the stable-yard seemed destined for them.

  Slowly the Winchester strains resurfaced. Maggie was still, painstakingly, working on The Venture of Rational Faith, but dayto-day life at Tremans induced a depressed listlessness in her. ‘I have given up chasing turkeys, and am gradually giving up fussing about anything,’ Maggie wrote to her friend Gladys Bevan in August 1906. Some weeks earlier she had said that there was really ‘nothing the matter except tiredness. I am a little tired still. In fact I feel I shall have to relinquish a good deal a certain tattered remnant of pride that I retain.’ To Nettie she had once blamed her moods on fatigue: ‘It’s odd, when one gets tired, the way in which vague fears and depressions and feelings of powerlessness. . . come dimly back, just the way clouds grow and fade on a hot day.’ In the summer of 1906 the clouds of fears, depressions and feelings of powerlessness did not fade but gathered, darkly. Maggie and Ben had deep, difficult conversations.

  Maggie became convinced that Ben and Lucy were trying to exclude her. These feelings had never entirely disappeared after Winchester. To Ben, they seemed to have caused Maggie to inhabit a world of unreality. Even in 1902, Ben had felt the need to write to her: ‘My dear and Precious Person. . . I feel as if you were wandering further and further in some strange region and my voice can’t reach you. But it SHALL. It seems as if you were following a mirage and I love you far too well not to try and tear you back. . . You know in your soul that you have been mistaken in your idea of me.’ Maggie insisted that she did not judge, but she could be every bit as censorious as Edward had been – perhaps even more so. ‘I never knew anyone judge more rapidly, promptly and without appeal,’ Ben wrote to her. Maggie herself acknowledged that she lacked ‘elasticity’, yet sensed that the daily round at Tremans was doing little to help her: ‘I think one gets less elastic when one can’t escape by activities from the circle of oneself.’ She laid her accusations before Ben – that Ben cared nothing for her, that she was subservient to Lucy, that Lucy was trying to oust them all. Like Edward, Maggie demanded Ben’s love, yet was coldly domineering, at times attempting to exercise the power of an
authoritarian patriarch, then making a more subtle bid for control with the demands for attention of an invalid child.

  Once again, Ben was in bondage, and not only to Maggie. Lucy, too, was controlling, and something of a bully. ‘Last night,’ Ben wrote in her diary, in the midst of Maggie’s illness, ‘something prompted me to ask Lucy whether she considered me a grumbler. She said very promptly, “Yes.” I asked, “Let 20 be the maximum grumbler, what mark do you give me?” and she answered “15”. . . There is all told. She tried to water it down, but it was a facer.’ There follow pages of the same analysis of her own faults and self-blame that Edward once induced. Although Maggie’s claim that Tremans was ‘a republic, but that Lucy was dictator!’ might be seen as part of her jealous imaginings, yet there was truth in it. Lucy could be combative, smugly convinced that she was right, holier-than-thou in all her good works, certainly holier-than-the-Benson-brood. She would frequently interrupt people as they began to talk, riding them down – and Ben would retreat mildly, as had been her habit of more than forty years. After one ‘militant conversation’ with Ben and Lucy, Arthur noted in his diary:

  The fact really is that Lucy, who is very strong and unimaginative and good-humoured, has a subtle effect. She has been everything to Mama, and I am everlastingly grateful to her – but I think she has really rather broken us up as a family. She disapproves of us all, for various reasons, and is quite unable to see another point of view. It is she, I think, who is really the provocative element.

  Later, he was even more forthright:

  She is the evil genius of the family. I think it is she who has done most to disintegrate us. She doesn’t assert herself, she just goes her own way.

  Maggie’s condition worsened during the summer. She began to get into ‘fusses about detail, paroxysms of anxiety’, felt like ‘a piece of old and frayed elastic’, as if a shadow were creeping over her mind. She tried to strangle herself with a piece of string. She set her bedroom curtains alight. One morning, the day after a long talk in which Maggie had revealed to Ben how she longed for her motherly love and kisses as of old, Ben went in to see her (Maggie had taken to breakfasting in bed) and found her almost paralysed by depression, in a state Ben recognized only too well from her years with Edward. She asked Maggie what the matter was. ‘Oh, I am killing it!’ came the perplexing reply. At the end of August it was decided that Maggie and Nettie should go to Cornwall for a month, for Maggie to rest and recuperate.

  AN INTELLIGENT WOMAN, FRUSTRATED BY THE INACTIVITY FORCED UPON HER BY HER GENDER, IS TAKEN TO A COUNTRY HOUSE FOR A REST-CURE FOLLOWING A NERVOUS COLLAPSE,

  but has disturbing experiences there

  If a physician of high standing, and one’s husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?. . . So I take phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.

  Personally I disagree with their ideas.

  Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. [. . .]

  The paint and paper [in the bedroom] look as if a boys’ school had used it. . . I never saw a worse paper in my life.

  One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

  It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

  The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight [. . .]

  But in places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. [. . .]

  I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!

  From ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,

  a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892.

  From Cornwall, Maggie wrote to Arthur about her depression. He responded with typically egocentric musings on his own sorrows. On the way home she stopped off to visit Fred in London, saying as she left, ‘I wanted to see you again first,’ leaving him wondering what that ‘first’ meant. Back at Tremans, through the winter and into the spring of 1907, Maggie’s despair deepened, and her behaviour grew ever odder. Beth was worried by the way she wandered through the corridors, ‘with a fixed and deadly gaze’. Maggie told Arthur that she saw ‘underlying darknesses and vilenesses, old animal inheritances and evil taints of blood’ in the faces of people passing in the street; that the world was phantasmal, as though everything except the actual objects on which her eyes rested were falling into dust and nothingness. To Fred she mentioned the spirits of dreadful beasts and demons lurking behind mask-faces of men and women.

  Ben and Lucy had plans to go to Venice on holiday. Doctors diagnosed Maggie’s problem as a mild liver upset, and assured Ben that she could go ahead with her arrangements. A sense of desertion and betrayal outraged Maggie. To her mind, she was right about Ben and Lucy. Lucy had stolen her mother. They cared nothing for her and were happy to go off to Venice together, leaving her in this state. She would show them. In a frenzy, she flagellated herself with a carriage whip, to see – she said – what pain would do. She tied her own hands together, saying she was frightened she would lose control. The night before Ben and Lucy were due to leave, Maggie could not sleep and in the morning summoned Lucy to her room, placing guilt and responsibility firmly in Lucy’s hands by telling her she was afraid she might kill herself or do harm to somebody. Ben and Lucy put off their trip, and called Dr Todd.

  At dinner Maggie did not utter a word. She rocked, put her head on her hands, rested her forehead on the table, and slipped from her chair on to the floor. The others would not believe how bad she was, she told Dr Todd, she needed to be tied up. Only by agreeing to do so did he manage to persuade her, sobbing loudly, to leave the room. At eleven o’clock that night she cried out loudly in her bedroom. Lucy and Dr Todd went to her. Here accounts differ. Fred records that Maggie was gripped by a ‘homicidal mania’ and implies that (even earlier, perhaps, over dinner) she tried to kill Ben; others that Maggie tried to kill herself. It took Todd, the parish nurse and three servants four hours to restrain her, and indeed, eventually, to tie her up.

  Dr Todd summoned two colleagues, one of whom was an expert in such matters, Dr George Savage (who two years earlier had treated Virginia Stephen, later Woolf, after her breakdown following the death of her father). Arthur was called, and Ben sent a telegram to Fred telling him, ‘We are in very deep waters.’ Arthur arrived, regretful that in his earlier letters to Maggie he had focused so wholly upon himself, but soon doing so once again. He determined to stay at Tremans for at least a week, he said, ‘or at all events for as long as I can stand it. A few bad nights and such pleasant reveries as mine of this morning would soon embark me on the same course. . . what a beautiful, desirable, sad, treacherous, unjust world it is, little things punished so heavily, big things left alone.’

  When Dr Savage saw Maggie, he advised that she be transferred to an institution for the insane. Arthur signed the committal order. On 8 May, in the morning, Ben and Lucy went out for a walk, the servants were told to stay in their rooms, and Arthur occupied Beth in helping him to pack. A carriage drew up to take Maggie to a private asylum, St George’s Convent, run by the Sisters of Mercy, a few miles away at Wivelsfield. Fred noted that Ben bore this ‘without any shrinking of the spirit’, and Arthur thought Lucy’s stalwartness ‘simply beyond words’. All three brothers went to see Maggie within a few days. She was
serene with Hugh, distant towards Fred, and confided in Arthur her fears that the demons would return. On visits over the next few weeks, Ben found her daughter disturbed and erratic, though on her better days she was calm enough to sit knitting. Maggie made no recovery. At the end of August Arthur went to see her, and found her wildly unsettled and convinced that the Sisters were trying to poison her. As he left the convent, he heard another inmate screaming, a tormented cry that moved him to ‘as dark and dreadful a depth of despairing bewilderment’ as he had ever felt. Next morning Arthur awoke in deep depression: ‘Something seemed to crumble in my brain and clutch at my heart. I thought I was going to die.’ He began to dread that he was joining his sister on a downward spiral.

  In October, Dr Todd suggested that Maggie be transferred to The Priory, at Roehampton, in South London, where she could receive closer clinical care. The Priory cost a steep £550 a year, and Maggie’s own money had run out. Ben and Lucy agreed to add what they could, and Arthur and Fred to contribute according to their respective incomes. Hugh refused to help (it was not merely from malice that Rolfe, in his ranting letters, accused Hugh of grotesque meanness). Hugh was in the process of buying himself a country property, Hare Street House, in the village of Buntingford in Hertfordshire. Towards the end of October, Dr Todd made the necessary arrangements. Arthur’s depression deepened. He, too, consulted Dr Todd. On 1 November Todd placed him in the care of a nerve specialist at a residential nursing home in Mayfair. A few days later, Maggie was moved to The Priory.