by David Lodge
Having dictated the final revise of this piece, he found that he had no inclination to go on with his novel-in-progress, The Ivory Tower. This caused him some uneasiness, since Scribner’s had paid a surprisingly handsome advance for it, but the War made any fictional subject seem trivial. He read through the manuscript of another unfinished novel, provisionally entitled The Sense of the Past, which he had sent Theodora Bosanquet to fetch from Lamb House earlier that year, hoping that perhaps this blend of ghost-story and period piece would be more take-uppable, but he lacked the will, and the strength, to resume work on it. In late November he suffered a succession of restless, wakeful nights which deprived him of energy for anything more demanding than correspondence during the day. On the first day of December he finished a letter to his niece, Peggy, in America, with the phrase, ‘the pen drops from my hand’ – a purely rhetorical flourish, since the letter was dictated – but, as it turned out, a prophetic one.
The next morning Burgess Noakes called his master at eight o’clock as usual. Half an hour later, as Minnie Kidd was laying the dining-room table for breakfast, she heard a cry from Mr James’s bedroom, and found him sprawled on the floor in his nightshirt, entangled in the cord of the electric lamp, which he had pulled down from the bedside table in groping for the servants’ bell.
‘Oh, Mr James, sir!’ she exclaimed, kneeling beside him. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘It’s the beast in the jungle,’ he murmured, ‘and it’s sprung.’
‘There’s no beast in here, sir,’ she said, looking round the room, wondering if the caretaker’s cat had somehow got into the flat. ‘You’ve had a fall, that’s all.’
Minnie called Burgess and together they got him back into bed. He leaned heavily on them and dragged his left leg, which seemed to be paralysed. Des Voeux was summoned and Minnie ran round the corner to the flat Theodora Bosanquet shared with her companion, Miss Bradley, to tell her that Mr James seemed to have had ‘a sort of stroke’.
‘Can he speak?’ was Theodora’s first question.
‘Oh, yes, Miss. But his mind’s wandering. He said something about a beast. A beast in the jungle.’
‘It’s the title of one of Mr James’s stories,’ Theodora said. ‘One of his finest.’
‘Oh, I see, Miss,’ said Minnie, though she didn’t really.
‘I’ll come round as soon as I’m dressed,’ said Theodora. She was wearing a housecoat, having not yet completed her toilet.
It was a blessing, she reflected later, that the stroke had not affected HJ’s speech, so that he was able to drape his misfortune in folds of characteristic rhetoric. ‘I have had a paralytic stroke in the most approved fashion,’ he informed Theodora almost proudly, after Des Voeux had examined him. And to his friend Fanny Prothero, who called that day, and was admitted to his bedroom, he confided that as he fell to the ground he had heard a voice, not his own, say distinctly: ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!’
The distinguished thing was certainly approaching, but was still some way off. Henry was sufficiently himself to dictate a cable to his nephew Harry in America, carefully phrased so as not to alarm: ‘Had slight stroke this morning. No serious symptoms. Perfect care. Wrote Peg yesterday.’ But that night he had a second stroke. Des Voeux called in Sir James Mackenzie, who looked grave and recommended that professional nurses be hired. Mrs William James, the widow of Henry’s elder brother, the mother of Peg and Harry, cabled to say she was coming by the first available ship. ‘She shouldn’t, she shouldn’t,’ Henry said, shaking his head, thinking with a shudder of prowling U-boats in the Atlantic – the horror of the Lusitania was still a fresh memory – but he did not try to prevent her. Meanwhile his secretary took command of the household, hiring nurses, giving the servants their instructions, answering enquiries from concerned friends, issuing bulletins, forbidding visits, discouraging even telephone calls because the ringing of the bell disturbed the patient’s rest.
Theodora Bosanquet, Cheltenham Ladies’ College and University College London, was fully adequate to the crisis – in a way, her whole life since 1907 had been a preparation for it. One day in August of that year, a young woman of twenty-seven, working in the London office of Miss Petheridge’s Secretarial Bureau on some dull indexing task, she was astonished to hear a passage from Henry James’s The Ambassadors, one of her favourite novels, being dictated to a typist at a nearby desk. ‘The court was large and open comma . . . full of revelations comma . . . for our friend comma . . . of the habit of privacy comma . . . the peace of intervals comma . . . the dignity of distances and approaches semicolon . . . the house comma . . . to his restless sense comma . . . was in the high homely style of an elder day comma . . . and the ancient Paris that he was always looking for dash . . . sometimes intensely felt comma . . . sometimes more acutely missed dash . . . was in the immemorial polish of the wide comma—’
‘Lord above, how many more commas?’ the typist complained. ‘His bally sentences seem to go on for ever.’
‘This one is only another three lines,’ said her helper.
‘Only!’ exclaimed the typist. ‘I lose track.’
Theodora, unable to contain her curiosity, went over to the young woman and questioned her. It transpired that she was a candidate for employment as Henry James’s typist, the previous occupant of this post having just left him to get married. Apparently – astonishingly, given the unusual complexity of his syntax – he dictated his novels instead of writing them out in longhand, and the young typist was practising with passages chosen at random from The Ambassadors.
‘I envy you,’ said Theodora. ‘I can’t think of a more wonderful position.’
‘Well you’re welcome to it,’ said the typist. ‘Give me a nice straightforward business letter any day.’
Theodora couldn’t believe her luck. ‘You mean – I could apply instead of you?’
‘I’d be glad to get out of it.’
‘Honestly?’
‘Honestly. You’d have to live in Rye, though. A dead-alive place by all accounts.’
‘I wouldn’t mind that.’
‘Can you type?’
‘No, but I could learn.’
‘Well, learn on a Remington, then. It has to be a Remington.’
Miss Petheridge tried to discourage Theodora from applying for the job. ‘You would do far better to stay here in London,’ she said. ‘There is no security in being employed by an author.’ But Theodora did not place a high value on security. Her favourite passage in The Ambassadors was the one where the middle-aged hero, Lambert Strether, exhorted his young friend, little Bilham, at a Parisian garden party: ‘Don’t forget that you’re young – blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?’ It seemed to Theodora that she could best apply this counsel to herself by working for the man who wrote it.
Accordingly she acquired the use of an office Remington and taught herself to type in time to be interviewed by Henry James. He was too polite to test her competence or even enquire about her speed before offering her the post, but he did assure himself that she was familiar with the Remington machine. He had got used to the distinctive tick-tick of its keys over the years – indeed it seemed to have become an essential aid to composition. When the work was going well, and he was in full flow, a kind of rhythm developed between HJ’s lucent utterance and Theodora’s answering staccato on the keyboard, and she felt like a pianist accompanying some virtuoso singer. ‘My Remington Princess’ became one of his fond sobriquets for her.
Fond, but not flirtatious. In her habitual dark tailored suits and plain blouses there was something about Theodora that did not invite flirtation. She was handsome, with a slender, upright figure and classical, slightly androgynous features. Her hair, cut short at the back, was softly waved and brushed across her brow, shading large dark eyes th
at observed the world attentively without revealing much about her inner self. Her voice was pleasantly low in timbre, and she never raised it. She was without question a lady, who would have graced one of the great country houses Henry James liked to write about, but only marriage would have placed her on such a stage, and she was as celibate by nature as her employer. Her background was genteel but financially pinched. Offered the choice of a small dowry or a university education, she had opted unhesitatingly for the latter, and the responsibility of earning her own bread.
Never perhaps were a writer and his secretary so well matched. She was calm, quiet, collected, while he was volatile, loquacious, nervous. She sat still, in perfect repose, during the long pauses while, pacing up and down the Garden Room, or leaning on the mantelpiece with his head cradled in his hands, he racked his brains for le mot juste, and never, never, did she venture to suggest one herself. She admired his work this side of idolatry, and had her private reservations about the ripe late style, but she didn’t dream of even hinting a criticism. Her loyalty and discretion were complete. Her only regret was that she had entered HJ’s employ after his finest work was completed – it would have been such an honour to collaborate in the production of the great trilogy of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. She had had to make do with the Prefaces to the ill-fated New York Edition of his Collected Novels and Tales, the memoirs of his childhood and youth, and other relatively minor works. Nevertheless, she considered herself privileged to share so intimately the creative life of such a distinguished author, even in his sunset years.
‘I think perhaps, Miss Bosanquet, you should inform Mrs Wharton of my – ah – stricken state,’ Henry murmurs, the day after his second stroke. Theodora doesn’t tell him that she has already done so. There is a subplot to his illness of which he is unaware.
Back in October, shortly after his return from Rye, Edith Wharton telephoned from a hotel in London, having taken a short break from her philanthropic war work in France, which ranged from raising funds for ambulances to providing for Parisian haute couture seamstresses suddenly deprived of employment. Typically she had somehow managed to cross the Channel in wartime with her motor car and chauffeur, and offered to take Henry to see their mutual friend, Howard Sturgis, at Windsor. Henry always enjoyed reading her letters about her exploits in France, and in times of peace excursions in her powerful Panhard had been one of his favourite recreations, but he was not equal in his debilitated state to the full force of her formidable presence, which he had for many years characterised in such mock-heroic terms as ‘the Whirling Princess’, ‘the Incomparable One’, ‘the Firebird’ and ‘the Angel of Devastation’. He thanked her but told her he was too ill to go out or even to receive a visit. When she then asked if she could borrow Theodora’s secretarial services for a few hours, he could hardly refuse to grant the favour. After all, she had generously paid for someone to look after Minnie Kidd’s ailing mother in Hastings in 1913, so that Kidd could continue to look after himself, and she had loaned her own manservant to him when Burgess Noakes went off to fight in the War a year later. Theodora, who had only glimpsed Edith Wharton in the past, usually driving up to or away from the front door of Lamb House in clouds of dust and exhaust smoke, acquiesced readily in the plan, being curious to meet the celebrated novelist and international socialite at closer quarters.
And close it was. Mrs Wharton received Theodora in her suite at Buckland’s Hotel in Brook Street dressed in an elaborately embroidered pink negligee that exposed her bare, well-fleshed arms to advantage, and an écru lace cap trimmed with fur – an outfit, Theodora calculated, that would have exhausted her own clothing budget for the year. She wore a heavy perfume that Theodora found oppressive in the overheated room, its windows firmly shut, and sat half-reclined on a chaise longue, smoking a Turkish cigarette in a holder. To Theodora, sitting upright in the least threadbare of her tailored suits, with her hands clasped in her lap, Edith Wharton appeared half grande dame and half grande courtisane, and the rumoured irregularities in her private life seemed all too plausible. Mrs Wharton quickly admitted that she had no need of Theodora’s secretarial services – that had been just a ruse to obtain a reliable report of Henry James’s state of health. Theodora, though resistant to her efforts to charm, recognised that her concern for the author’s welfare was genuine, and would be backed up with practical assistance if needed. So she gave a frank account of HJ’s condition, and agreed to keep Mrs Wharton abreast of any developments. She reported occasionally on his state of health by letter, and on the fourth of December sent a cable to Paris with the information that Mr James had suffered two strokes but was recovering.
The next day Edith Wharton cables back, ‘Can come if advisable,’ but Theodora deems this unnecessary. Already HJ is perky enough to question the appropriateness of the epithet ‘paralytic’ to his stroke, and to demand a thesaurus to look for alternatives. A few days later he expresses a wish to dictate some notes on his condition. Des Voeux decides this activity can do no harm, and might be beneficial, so the Remington is wheeled into the master bedroom like a piece of medical apparatus, and Theodora takes her accustomed place at its keyboard.
‘I find the business of coming round about as important and glorious as any circumstance I have had occasion to record,’ he dictates, ‘by which I mean that I find them as damnable and as boring.’ The epithet ‘damnable’ gives Theodora a tiny shock – it is strong for HJ in dictation mode – and she notes the slight lapse of grammatical number in ‘them’, but on the whole his grasp of syntax seems unimpaired, and his reflections, though paradoxical, are coherent. ‘Such is my sketchy state of mind,’ he concludes, ‘but I feel sure I shall discover plenty of fresh worlds to conquer, even if I am to be cheated of the amusement of them.’
A few days later, however, he shows signs of mental confusion. He asks Theodora where he is, and when she gives him the address of 21 Carlyle Mansions, he says: ‘How very curious, that’s Lady Hyde’s address too.’ He has got it into his head that Burgess is to take him to visit Lady Hyde. He is running a temperature, and the doctors declare that he is now suffering embolic pneumonia caused by a clot on his lung. Looking at him as he lies asleep on his back in the dimly lit, curtained bedroom, breathing stertorously, with his mouth turned down at the corners and hollow cheeks sunk deeply into his dentureless jaws, it seems to Theodora that the aura of the Great Writer, the ‘cher maître’, as he permits his younger admirers to address him, has finally evaporated, and he is just a simple sick old man such as one might find in any hospital ward.
But to her surprise she is summoned the very next evening to take more dictation – copious dictation, not entirely coherent, but full of striking phrases and vivid images. ‘On this occasion moreover that having been difficult to keep step, we hear of the march of history, what is remaining to that essence of tragedy the limp? We scarce avoid rolling with all these famished and frustrate women in the wayside dust . . . They pluck in their terror handfuls of plumes from the imperial eagle, and with no greater credit in consequence than that they face, keeping their equipoise, the awful bloody beak that he turns around upon them . . .’
‘He’s ravin’,’ Burgess Noakes reports to Joan and Minnie in the kitchen, having heard some of this declamatory utterance as he crept in and out of the sickroom to replace the jug of Mr James’s favourite sweetened lemon and barley water. He shakes his head sadly. ‘He thinks he’s on a march somewhere.’
Joan Anderson tuts and wipes her eye. This is not a sign of real emotion – she suffers from a chronically weeping eye – but it seems an appropriate gesture. Minnie Kidd finds a reason to leave the room and pauses for a few moments in the corridor outside James’s bedroom to listen. ‘He’s writing a letter to his brother and sister, now,’ she says on her return. ‘They’re all dead, ain’t they?’
‘You shouldn’t eavesdrop, Minnie,’ Joan murmurs.
‘I weren’t!’ she says defensively. ‘No more ’n Burgess.’<
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Burgess however seems not to have heard Joan’s reproach. ‘Yes, all dead,’ he says. ‘The three brothers, William, Bob, and Wilky, and the sister, Alice.’
‘Something about a palace, it was,’ says Minnie.
Sitting round the kitchen table, the three servants silently contemplate the decay of the great mind that has funded their existence for so many years. But not for much longer. When Mr James dies they will all be unemployed, and what will become of them then? It doesn’t seem decent to raise the question at this moment, so Minnie asks another.
‘Did you ever read one of Mr James’s books, Burgess?’
‘No,’ he says emphatically, then adds: ‘Why, did you?’
‘No, but . . .’ Minnie’s voice tails away.
