by David Lodge
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by David Lodge
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Note
Part One
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Four
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Author
David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Therapy and Thinks... He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, The Practice of Writing, and Consciousness and the Novel.
Also by David Lodge
FICTION
The Picturegoers
Ginger, You’re Barmy
The British Museum is Falling Down
Out of the Shelter
Changing Places
How Far Can You Go?
Small World
Nice Work
Paradise News
Therapy
Home Truths
Thinks . . .
Deaf Sentence
A Man of Parts
CRITICISM
Language of Fiction
The Novelist at the Crossroads
The Modes of Modern Writing
Working with Structuralism
After Bakhtin
The Year of Henry James
ESSAYS
Write On
The Art of Fiction
The Practice of Writing
Consciousness and the Novel
DRAMA
The Writing Game
Home Truths
To Danny Moynihan
Author, Author
A Novel
David Lodge
‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’
– Henry James, ‘The Middle Years’
Who was to be lucky and who to be rich,
Who’d get to the top of the tree . . .
– Felix Moscheles, In Bohemia with Du Maurier
Sometimes it seems advisable to preface a novel with a note saying that the story and the characters are entirely fictitious, or words to that effect. On this occasion a different authorial statement seems called for. Nearly everything that happens in this story is based on factual sources. With one insignificant exception, all the named characters were real people. Quotations from their books, plays, articles, letters, journals, etc., are their own words. But I have used a novelist’s licence in representing what they thought, felt, and said to each other; and I have imagined some events and personal details which history omitted to record. So this book is a novel, and structured like a novel. It begins at the end of the story, or near the end, and then goes back to the beginning, and works its way to the middle, and then rejoins the end, which is where it begins . . .
PART ONE
LONDON, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent’s epithet more appropriate) of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the distinguished author is dying – slowly, but surely. In Flanders, less than two hundred miles away, other men are dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully – young men, mostly, with their lives still before them, blank pages that will never be filled. The author is seventy-two. He has had an interesting and varied life, written many books, travelled widely, enjoyed the arts, moved in society (one winter he dined out 107 times), and owns a charming old house in Rye as well as the lease of this spacious London flat with its fine view of the Thames. He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they hoped to marry and were keeping themselves chaste on principle.
The author is dying propped up in bed among starched sheets and plump pillows, attended by three servants and two professional nurses working in rotation, while the young men are dying in the mud of No Man’s Land, or in squalid trenches, or on jolting stretchers, or on camp beds in field hospitals amid the groans of their wounded comrades. But of the little group caring for the author only his manservant Burgess Noakes knows what dying on the Western Front is like, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s happy to be out of it, is Noakes, with a Blighty wound – thirty small wounds to be exact, thirty bits of shrapnel from a German mortar bomb that had to be painfully winkled out of his head, body and legs – and with his hearing permanently damaged by the blast; glad to be on convalescent leave extended by special dispensation so that he can attend his distinguished master (who has friends in high places – as high as the Prime Minister himself, Mr Asquith) and hopeful of a discharge on medical grounds in due course. As for the others – the cook/housekeeper Joan Anderson, the parlourmaid Minnie Kidd, who both live in, and Mr James’s secretary/typist, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, who has a small flat in nearby Lawrence Street – the drama of his dying is inevitably more vivid and involving than the carnage in Flanders, because it is personally present to them. As it happens, none of them has lost a near relative in the war – yet. Of course they are depressed by the long daily lists of casualties in the newspapers, and share sympathetically the grief of bereaved friends, but they cannot really imagine those deaths.
In fact it is Henry James himself who, if he were compos mentis, would be better able to imagine them, up to a point, being a novelist whose job it is to imagine things he has never personally experienced. Stephen Crane, for instance, once briefly his neighbour in East Sussex, wrote the best novel ever published about the American Civil War though he wasn’t even born when it took place. Henry had at least some experience of that war to go on, having been as a young man an anxious and uneasy spectator of it, exempted by an obscure back injury from taking part himself, but with two younger brothers who served gallantly on the Union side. He never forgot visiting seventeen-year-old Wilky at his training camp with the 44th Massachusetts, one of a crowd of sunburnt smiling confident young men in smart new blue uniforms, and then seeing him brought back months later to the family home in Cambridge on a stretcher, half dead, with terrifying stories of battle to tell when he recovered.
Perhaps it was because he had lived through the first major war of the industrial age, the first with casualties on an industrial scale, that Henry foresaw the catastrophic consequences of the European conflict sooner than most Englishmen. Only two days after war was declared he was writing to his friend Edith Wharton, fellow Anglophile and Francophile (not knowing when or where his letter might reach her, for she was motoring somewhere in Spain as the armies mobilised and the ultimatums expired), to say ‘I feel all but unbearably overdarkened by this crash of our civilisation’, and he has been in a state of handwringing mental anguish ever since. Not that he has been a passive, or pacifist, observer of the conflict. On the contrary, he is convinced of the iniquity of German aggression, and has done as much as a portly, valetudinarian, expatriate American of his years could possibly do to help the Allied cause. He has visited wounded soldiers in hospital (his fluency in French was appreciated by the Belgian Walloons, though what they or the Tommies made of his convoluted style of utterance was a subject of amused speculation among his friends) and been active in charitable work assisting Belgian refugees i
n Rye. He became Honorary President of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. He has urged American participation in the war on his compatriots by every means, even to the extent of granting an interview to a journalist from The New York Times to promote the cause, in spite of a lifetime’s aversion to this form of publicity. (He did however insist on seeing the text of the article before publication and completely rewrote it, so that he was, Theodora Bosanquet reflected with quiet amusement, in effect interviewing himself.) And in the summer of 1915 he made the biggest commitment of all, taking British nationality in a gesture of solidarity with his adopted country.
‘The old toff could hardly do more,’ Burgess Noakes remarked to George Gammon, the gardener at Lamb House, in October, when Henry James went down to Rye for what proved to be the last time, accompanied by Joan Anderson, Minnie Kidd, and Burgess himself. ‘The old toff’ was how he and George usually referred to their employer in private. It implied no disrespect, but rather admiration for the style with which James played the part of a gentleman – his impeccable manners, his elaborate verbal courtesies, his dashing waistcoats, the carefully discriminated collection of hats and sticks for all occasions in the hall at Lamb House. ‘Put a lot of Yankee noses out of joint it did, when he got himself nationalised,’ Burgess said. ‘The family weren’t none too pleased neither.’ He had overheard Mr James dictating letters to Miss Bosanquet about the critical reaction in America to his change of citizenship. ‘And he sent me socks,’ he added reminiscently.
‘Socks?’
‘When I was at the Front. Socks and ointment for me feet.’
‘What was it like, Burgess – at the Front?’ George Gammon asked.
Burgess smiled and nodded and stared into the burning coals behind the grate of the kitchen range – its door left open to shed a cheerful glow on the flagged floor. It was evening, getting dark, and they were sitting in the parlour kitchen of George Gammon’s cottage, tucked away behind the garden wall of Lamb House. George waited patiently. Since Burgess came back from the war it was difficult to know whether he hadn’t heard your question, or didn’t want to answer it. ‘Did I ever tell you how it was between me and him when I joined up?’ he said at last.
‘Aye,’ said George, nodding. But Burgess told him again anyway. He was itching to join up as soon as war was declared, but hung back because he knew how dependent on him the old toff was, especially now his health was so poor, and he didn’t want to seem ungrateful to the man who had taken him on as a houseboy and trained him up to be a gentleman’s gentleman, travelling all over England, staying in the grandest houses in the country, Scotland and Ireland and America too, and always in the same railway carriage, no first-class and third-class tickets like with many masters and servants. So for two weeks, while more and more Rye lads took the train into Hastings to enlist in the 5th Battalion of the Royal Sussex, Burgess suffered miserably in silence as he went about his duties at Lamb House, until he could bear it no longer and told Mr James he wanted to join up. ‘And what d’you think the old toff said?’
George shook his head in pretended puzzlement.
‘Well, he couldn’t have been more pleased. Not that he wanted to lose me, like – said he didn’t know how he’d manage without me. But it turned out he’d been hopin’ I’d volunteer ever since war was declared. So we’d both been of the same mind for two weeks without—’
An urgent knocking on the cottage door made Burgess break off his narrative just short of its conclusion. It was Minnie Kidd, a shawl thrown over her head and shoulders, who had run the few yards along West Street from Lamb House to the cottage. ‘You’d better come, Burgess,’ she said. ‘Mr James ’as been took bad.’
Burgess wasn’t surprised. Ever since they arrived at Lamb House his master had seemed restless and unhappy, wheezing and sighing to himself, raising his hands as if about to utter some lament and then letting them drop to his sides in mute despair. He was dismayed to see in the garden the stump of the ancient mulberry tree that had been blown down in the great gale of the previous winter. It had been reported to him at the time of course, and he had authorised Gammon to cut off the boughs and branches for kindling and to saw the hollow trunk into sections that could be chopped up into logs. But actually to behold the dismembered corpse of the beloved tree under whose dense rustling shade he had so often sat in summers past was a different matter. ‘It’s a symbol, Burgess,’ he said mournfully. ‘A symbol and a portent. First the poor old mulberry tree, next poor old HJ.’ Burgess received this pronouncement, as he received all of his master’s utterances other than instructions and questions, in respectful silence. Long experience had taught him it was the best policy. ‘You don’t want to bandy words with the old toff,’ was always his advice to new servants, ‘or you’ll get more than you bargained for.’
The house had been let or lent to a number of transient tenants over the past year, looked after by temporary servants, and it had a shabby neglected air which caused Joan Anderson to frown as soon as she entered the front hall, and to emit audible signs of distress when she reached the kitchen. While Joan and Minnie worked away with brooms and dusters and scourers and dishcloths to restore the house to something like its normal order, their master ransacked his drawers and cupboards for private papers, letters, photographs and manuscripts, and made a bonfire of them in the kitchen garden. He stood grimly over the curling, blackening sheets as they turned to ash, poking them occasionally with a stick, like the staff officer of a retreating army destroying documents lest they fall into the hands of the enemy. It reminded his servants of a much bigger bonfire back in 1909, when Mr James destroyed the accumulated correspondence of a lifetime in what was obviously a mood of black depression, though what had triggered it they didn’t know.
‘What’s the matter with him now?’ Burgess asked Minnie, getting to his feet and hastily buttoning up his army tunic. He continued to wear his uniform although he was on indefinite sick leave – it saved having to answer pointed questions, or fend off accusing looks, from people keen to hand out white feathers. He was barely an inch over five feet, but muscular and well proportioned, an amateur boxer who had once been Sussex bantamweight champion. Minnie Kidd admired the silky moustache he had grown on his deep upper lip while he was in the Army, its lustre faintly reflecting the glow of the fire. She was a buxom, pleasant-featured young woman of thirty-three, and stood a head taller than Burgess Noakes, much to her regret.
‘Gastric,’ said Minnie.
‘Eh?’
‘Gastric,’ she repeated, raising her voice.
‘Aye,’ said Burgess, fastening his belt buckle with a click. ‘All that Fletcherising done it.’
Ten years earlier Henry James had been converted to the teaching of the American dietician Dr Horace Fletcher, who recommended that every mouthful of food should be chewed and masticated until it was reduced to liquid before being swallowed. One memorable day Fletcher had visited the author at Lamb House, and their lunch was a solemn ritual in which priest and acolyte vied with each other for merit. The servants could hardly keep straight faces as they watched the two men virtuously chewing each forkful of their roast beef sixty times. The tempo of conversation was necessarily slow, and the meal inordinately long. It was the opinion of many in the author’s circle besides his manservant that he had ruined his digestion by this faddish regime, though he no longer practised it in its full rigour.
Burgess stamped his boots on the flagged floor, the reflex action of a soldier before going on parade. ‘Let’s go then, Minnie,’ he said.
Outside it was dark, and a sea mist had crept up the steep incline of Mermaid Street from the quays. The gaslamp bracketed to the wall of the Garden House at the elbow of West Street, turned down to a mere glimmer because of lighting restrictions, was hardly visible, but a slab of light shone across the cobbles from the front door of Lamb House, left open by Minnie when she dashed out.
‘You’ll get us fined,’ Burgess teased her. ‘Attractin’ the Zeppelins.�
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‘Sorry, Burgess,’ Minnie said meekly. ‘I was that flustered.’
They found their master slumped in an armchair in the Green Room on the first floor, haggard and gasping for breath, a hand pressed to his chest, or his stomach (it was difficult to tell where the one ended and the other began under his waistcoat), papers scattered at his feet where he had dropped them. Burgess got him undressed and into bed, and dosed him with the physic he usually took for gastric attacks. But the breathlessness continued, he spent a sleepless night, and the following morning Doctor Skinner was summoned. Skinner detected an irregular rhythm of the heartbeat through his stethoscope, diagnosed intermittent tachycardia, prescribed digitalis, and recommended that Henry should see the heart specialist Sir James Mackenzie as soon as possible. So the whole party had to prepare to return to London after only three days in Rye.
Minnie Kidd brought him the papers she had picked up from the floor when he was taken ill. They were letters, all in the same hand, with little sketches inserted into the text of some of them.
‘Ah, thank you, Kidd,’ he said. ‘Poor Du Maurier! I was going to burn them, but I fatally began to read them.’
‘Shall I burn them for you, sir?’ said Minnie
Henry smiled faintly. ‘No, no, thank you, Kidd. Let them escape the – ah – holocaust. They escaped the last one, somehow. And, after all, they can do no harm. There was no malice in poor Kiki.’ And he put the letters away in a drawer in the Green Room.
Sir James Mackenzie confirmed Dr Skinner’s diagnosis, which seemed to give the author a melancholy satisfaction. He had consulted the great physician once before, in 1909, convinced that he was suffering from a cardiac complaint, like his brother William, only to be told that there was nothing wrong with his heart – indeed, nothing wrong with him at all that couldn’t be remedied by a sensible diet and regular exercise. The news had been a relief, of course, but also, the patient felt, cast a slight aspersion on his character, the imputation of being a malade imaginaire. Now it appeared that he did have ‘a heart’ after all. He dictated letters to his friends to this effect, and basked in their concerned replies. He played the part of a certified invalid assiduously, rarely going out, and never in the evening. His London doctor, who bore the exotic and suggestive name of Des Voeux, attended him regularly at Carlyle Mansions. He managed a little work in November – finishing off his elegiac introduction to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America, a task over which he shed some tears, for he had been deeply affected by the death of the handsome, gallant young poet, whom he had met once at Cambridge, as an undergraduate of exceptional charm and promise, and whose literary career he had subsequently followed with keen interest. The fact that the manner of Brooke’s death – not from a battle wound, but from blood-poisoning on shipboard, en route to the Dardanelles – had so signally failed to match the proleptic sublimity of ‘If I should die . . .’ only intensified its pathos, only made it more eloquent of the tragic waste of so many young lives in the War at large.
