Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  Henry James on a Visit

  IT CAN BE said of Henry James that he was made both miserable and happy by the same thing, namely, that he was a mere spectator who barely participated in life, or, at least, not in its most striking and exciting aspects. On the other hand, he led, for many years, the most intense and demanding of social lives, so much so that in one season alone, 1878–79, he received (and accepted) precisely one hundred and forty dinner invitations. This was the era when no first night or party was blighted by his absence.

  He spent the greater part of the last eighteen years of his life, however, at Lamb House, his country residence in Rye, not that he exactly lacked for company there either: to his four servants, gardener and secretary were added numerous visitors throughout the seasons, albeit in orderly and unpromiscuous fashion, for he never had more than two guests at a time. Nearby lived a few fellow writers, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, whose surname at the time was still Hueffer. James had little to do with the first of these, because, although he admired his work, he remained dissatisfied with the man, mainly because “at bottom” he was a Pole, a Roman Catholic, a Romantic, and a Slav pessimist. However, when they did meet, they spoke with great ceremony and admiration and always in French; every thirty seconds James would exclaim “Mon cher confrère! ” to which Conrad would respond with equal frequency “Mon cher maître!” As for Ford or Hueffer, who was much younger than James, they saw each other almost constantly according to the former, but this may have been rather more often than James wanted: there is objective evidence that, on one occasion, when out with his secretary, James jumped over a ditch in order to avoid an encounter on the road to Rye, where Hueffer used to wait for him to pass.

  Henry James was a large man, verging on the obese, completely bald and with terrifying eyes, so penetrating and intelligent that the servants of some of the houses he visited would tremble when they opened the door to him, convinced that they were being pierced through to the very backbone. His bald head made him look like a theologian and his eyes like a wizard. And yet he was always highly circumspect and slightly humorous in his dealings with other people, as if he were deliberately imitating Pickwick. If something bothered him, though, he could be unbelievably cruel and momentarily vindictive, albeit only verbally. Those close to him remember that only rarely did his English become brutal and direct, but they never forgot those few occasions. On the whole, he spoke as he wrote, which sometimes led him to exasperating extremes, exacerbated by his habit, during his final years, of dictating his novels. The simplest question addressed to a servant would take a minimum of three minutes to formulate, such was his linguistic punctiliousness and his horror of inexactitude and error. In his zeal for clarity, his speech became utterly oblique and obscure, and, on one occasion, when referring to a dog, and wishing to avoid the actual word, he ended up defining it as “something black, something canine”. He found himself equally unable to declare that an actress was frankly ugly, and had to make do with saying that “one of the poor wantons had a certain cadaverous grace”.

  He spoke with so many interpolations and parentheses that this occasionally got him into difficulties: one afternoon, he went out for a walk along the Rye road, as was his custom, with Hueffer and another writer and with his dog Maximilian, who liked to chase sheep and who was, for this reason, kept on a leash, but one long enough to allow him considerable freedom of movement. At one point, in order to conclude one particularly immense sentence with due emphasis, James stopped and planted his walking stick firmly in the ground, and in that position held forth for a long time while his companions listened in reverential silence, and the dog Maximilian, running about, back and forth, as the fancy took him, wound his leash around the walking stick and the gentlemen’s legs, leaving them trapped. The Master finished his speech and wanted to continue on his way, but found himself immobilised. When he did, with some difficulty, extricate himself, he turned, eyes blazing, to Hueffer, reproachfully brandished his walking stick and cried: “Hueffer! You are painfully young, but at no more than the age to which you have attained, the playing of such tricks is an imbecility! An im … be … cility!”

  Apart from these rare fits of rage, James was renowned for his impeccable manners and for never putting a foot wrong. He spoke with the same urbanity and—always—in the same circumlocutory fashion to diplomats and chimney sweeps, and felt infinite curiosity about whatever happened to pass before his eyes. Perhaps that is why he invited confidence, and, while in Rye, he certainly never scorned village gossip. He listened ceaselessly and talked ceaselessly too: he even heard the confession of a murderer and once gave a lecture on hats to Conrad’s five-year-old son, who had, in all innocence, asked him about the unusual shape of the hat James himself was wearing.

  When he was immersed in one of his novels, he could be very forgetful and it would entirely slip his mind that he had guests for lunch until they were there waiting for him, sitting round the table, but he was extremely careful and exacting when it came to the rules of hospitality, which is why, with him, the real danger lay not in being his guest, but his host, for he would draw definitive conclusions, which his imagination would subsequently embellish, based entirely on the attentions he had received or on the atmosphere of a house. Thus, for example, while he admired Turgenev both as a writer and a man (he viewed him as little less than a prince), he always hated Flaubert for having once received himself and Turgenev in his dressing gown. It was, it seems, more like some sort of work garment, known in French at the time as a chandail, and this was probably Flaubert’s way of honouring them and admitting them into the privacy of his home. For James, however, it was indubitably a dressing gown and he never forgave him: indeed, Flaubert became for him a man who did everything in a dressing gown, and his books were consequently deemed to be failures, apart from Madame Bovary, which James conceded might have been written while Flaubert was wearing a waistcoat. Exactly the same mistake was made by the poet and painter Rossetti, who received him in his painting garb, which, for James, was tantamount to receiving him in a dressing gown. And to receive someone thus was a dishonour that revealed the soul of the perpetrator: this fact led James to infer that Rossetti had disgusting habits, never took baths and was insupportably lecherous. He probably breakfasted on greasy ham and undercooked eggs. Equally lacking in cordiality was an encounter with Oscar Wilde, whom he met in America where the aesthetic apostle was staying. When James happened to mention that he was missing London, Wilde looked at him scornfully and called him provincial, saying: “Really! You care for places!” And he added tritely: “The world is my home!” From then on, James referred to him variously as “an unclean beast”, “a fatuous fool”, or “a tenth-rate cad”. On the other hand, his enthusiasm for Maupassant knew no bounds, again thanks to a single visit: the French short-story writer had received him for lunch in the society of a lady who was not only naked, but wearing a mask. This struck James as the height of refinement, especially when Maupassant informed him that she was no mere courtesan, prostitute, servant, or actress, but a femme du monde, which James was perfectly happy to believe.

  As everyone knows, his relationships with women, for whatever reason, and several have been suggested, were well-nigh non-existent. Sex, however, does not appear to have been a matter of complete indifference to him, even though there is almost no explicit reference to it in his books, for when alone with certain people, he thought nothing of enquiring shamelessly and without recourse to euphemism about the most tortuous of sexual aberrations. For many years, he made it clear that he would never marry: on the one hand, and despite having lived in England for forty year
s, he thought the idea of taking a British wife ridiculous; on the other hand, as he said to a friend when discussing marriage: “I am both happy and miserable enough, as it is, and don’t wish to add to either side of the account.” According to him, marriage was not a necessity, but the ultimate and most expensive of luxuries. Women had, it appears, given him a few griefs and heartaches. On one occasion, he described to a friend, in serious and enigmatic fashion, how, in his youth, in a foreign city, he had stood for hours in the rain keeping watch on a window, waiting for a figure to appear, or perhaps a face left unlit by the lamp that gleamed for a second and was then extinguished for ever. “That was the end …,” said James, and broke off. And when Hueffer announced that he was going to America and would be visiting Newport, Rhode Island, James asked him to take a stroll to a particular cliff and there render homage, on his behalf, to the place where he had seen for the last time and bade farewell to his now dead cousin who, when he was a very young man, he should have married.

  Those who knew him remember him as a bright, alert man, restless, nervous, gesticulating and, at the same time, slow and deliberate. He was prudent in whatever he said or did, but not cautious; that is, he found it hard to resolve to do something, but once he did—for example when he was writing—he was unstoppable. While he was dictating his books, he would pace up and down, and when he ate alone, he would often leave the table and pace the dining room as he chewed his food. He very much liked being driven in a car and erroneously believed that he knew the area well and was blessed with an excellent sense of direction, which led him and the indulgent owners of various cars to arrive late and exhausted at their destinations, having taken endless and unnecessary detours under the guidance of Henry James. He almost never spoke about his own works, but lavished great care on his library, which he himself dusted with a silk handkerchief. He did not understand why his books did not sell better than they did, although Daisy Miller was very nearly a best-seller. His friend Edith Wharton once asked their joint publisher to pay her far larger royalties into James’s account. James never found out.

  Henry James died on the evening of February 28, 1916, at the age of seventy-two, after a long illness during which he suffered attacks of delirium: one day he dictated two letters as if he were Napoleon, one of them addressed to his brother Joseph Bonaparte, urging him to accept the throne of Spain. Months before, on recovering from the first such attack, he had been able to describe how, when he fell to the floor convinced that he was dying, he had heard in the room a voice not his own saying: “So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing!”

  Arthur Conan Doyle and Women

  IT SEEMS IMPLAUSIBLE that a man as irreproachable and well-loved as Arthur Conan Doyle could, at the end of his days, have lost much of his reputation and even the respect of many of his friends. Yet this is precisely what happened when, eleven years before his death, he gave up his life to spiritualism, abandoned any writing that had nothing to do with that faith and devoted himself to travelling the world proselytising. Being a conscientious man, he estimated in 1924 that in the first five years of his ministry he had travelled more than fifty thousand miles and had addressed some three hundred thousand people, some of them far-flung enough to have been of Australian or South African nationality. He deemed this to be his duty, but, to an outsider, this could be seen as not the first time that religion had played him a nasty trick: when, in 1900, he ran for election in the city of his birth, Edinburgh, he looked almost certain to win right up until polling day, then a rash of satirical placards appeared, reminding people that Conan Doyle had been born a Catholic and had been educated by Jesuits. Both facts were undeniable, even though he had abandoned the religion of his Irish progenitors decades before. The placards had been the work of a Protestant fanatic called Prenimer with someone else’s financial backing, and they were enough for Conan Doyle to lose an election which he would certainly have won otherwise. Prenimer was just one of the scoundrels whom he had to tackle during his lifetime, among them Professor Moriarty and even Sherlock Holmes himself.

  Ever since his youth, and given that he was a trained boxer, he had found himself getting involved in brawls with scoundrels in the defence of various women: he beat up several soldiers in the gallery of a theatre because one of them had jostled a young woman; and as soon as he arrived in Portsmouth, where he was thinking of setting up as a doctor, he thrashed a fellow whom he saw kicking a woman. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, that same man appeared at his surgery the following day and was his first patient, although he did not, it seems, recognise the doctor as his aggressor of the previous night. Conan Doyle continued to be rather free with his hands when it came to defending women: travelling by train through South Africa with his family, one of his grown-up sons commented on the ugliness of a woman who happened to walk down the corridor. He had barely had time to finish this sentence when he received a slap and saw, very close to his, the flushed face of his old father, who said very mildly: “Just remember that no woman is ugly.”

  A man like Conan Doyle was bound to be something of an authoritarian, at least with his family, but during the years when his first wife Touie was ill with tuberculosis, and he was already in love with the woman, Jean Leckie, who would become his second wife, his nerves were particularly on edge, and he inspired more fear than respect among his children. They were not allowed to make the slightest noise while he was writing, for if they did, Conan Doyle, wearing an ancient, demoniacal, rust-coloured dressing gown, would come storming out of his office, and punishment would ensue. Sometimes, he did not even have to shout, he just fixed them with his petrifying gaze. On one occasion, when he was reading The Times, his daughter Mary started asking him innocent questions about the fertility of rabbits. Round the corner of the newspaper appeared one eye, no more, and that was enough for the question to freeze on the child’s lips and for her to postpone her curiosity.

  To be fair, he was much kinder to his second brood of children, those he had by Jean Leckie: he would allow them to run around while he played billiards, not even hitting them with the cue if they caused him to miss a stroke. As you can imagine, he was always very gentlemanly towards his own women: his extremely beautiful second wife became Lady Conan Doyle, and he bestowed on her all the comforts and wealth of his middle years. He clearly did everything he could to make up to her for the ten years of adoration and waiting she had had to endure before they could be married, for, however much he loved Jean, he could not bring himself to wound or leave his first wife, whose illness forced him with her into exile in Egypt and Switzerland in search of more benign climates. One gathers from various witnesses that his love for Jean Leckie was such that, in order to please her, he even learned to play the banjo (badly), but that their love remained strictly platonic as long as Touie remained alive. And precisely because it was platonic, he had no compunction about confessing his feelings for her to his own mother and family and in introducing Jean Leckie to them as if she were his fiancée, or, rather, his wife-in-waiting. The odd thing is that Conan Doyle’s mother, with whom he always maintained both a strong bond and a copious correspondence, immediately gave them her blessing and welcomed her married son’s fiancée as if she were her daughter-in-law. Only his brother-in-law, Hornung, the creator of Raffles the thief, once blurted out: “It seems to me that you attach too much importance to whether these relationships are Platonic or not. I can’t see that it makes much difference. What is the difference?” Conan Doyle’s response was categorical: “It’s all the difference,” he roared, “between innocence and guilt.”

  He had a great deal to do with both these things not only in literat
ure but also in life. For many years, he used to receive letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes; admirers apart, many other people would write to him (i.e., to Holmes) asking him to take up some case or problem that was troubling them. One day, however, a letter asking for help came, addressed to Conan Doyle himself. It was from a young woman whose Danish fiancé had disappeared just before their wedding; she feared for his life, and could only explain his desertion by assuming that some terrible misfortune had befallen him. Ever the gentleman, Conan Doyle took on the case and solved it: he not only found the fugitive Dane, he showed the young woman how unworthy this foreigner was of all her efforts on his behalf. Later, he took on at least two other cases, far more dramatic and complex, driven not by his desire to track down a criminal, but to liberate and exonerate those whom he believed to be innocent men wrongly condemned. After his personal success as an investigator, offers rained down on him, including one from a Polish nobleman under suspicion who enclosed a blank cheque. Conan Doyle rejected all but the few mentioned above.

  Blank cheques seem to have been common currency in Conan Doyle’s life, for when he began earning large sums of money with Sherlock Holmes and became free from financial difficulties, he would often send such cheques to his younger brothers, who were not as yet free from such difficulties. He was also offered cheques of a literary origin, by publishers wanting him to revive Holmes after he had made him disappear over the Reichenbach Falls in 1893. He had been tempted by the idea of killing him off before, and it was Conan Doyle’s own mother—a devoted reader of the Holmes adventures and to whom her son used to send the galley proofs in order to placate her impatience—who saved the detective’s life. When Conan Doyle announced in a letter to her his intention of killing Holmes off, claiming that his existence “takes my mind from better things”, she replied by return: “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!” And Conan Doyle postponed the death for another two years.