by David Lodge
Friends! Friends! Henry was always making new ones. They looped round each other like needlework stitches and he felt himself to be at the centre of an ever-expanding tapestry of relationships the maintenance of which, either by social contact or correspondence, absorbed a frightening amount of his time. But he depended on friends for human interest and input, for the stimulus of other minds, for the occasional anecdote that might be the ‘germ’ of a new piece of fiction, and, in his bachelor state, as an antidote to loneliness. About this time he made another: Jules Jusserand, chargé d’affaires at the French Embassy, a dapper, diminutive man, even smaller than Du Maurier and Ainger, but a highly cultivated scholar and critic, equally well versed in French and English literature. Henry introduced him to Du Maurier, who promptly issued him with an open invitation for Sundays. Henceforward Henry often enjoyed Jusserand’s company on the long walk from Kensington to Hampstead and back, and the level of conversation at New Grove House rose several notches on the scale of educated reference – indeed rather too high for the younger members of the Du Maurier family. The Sunday afternoon walks became more sedate and adult excursions, usually composed of Henry, Du Maurier, Jusserand and, towering over the other three, Charles Millar. They would walk and converse in pairs, Henry with Du Maurier and Charles with Jusserand on the outward leg, to the flagpole or the Spaniards Road, and then Du Maurier and his son-in-law would change places for the return journey. Henry usually did most of the talking on the way back, to the polite and deferential Charles, but on the way out he mainly listened, as Du Maurier entertained him with a stream of jokes, anecdotes and stories, some of them autobiographical, some fantastic. It was on one such walk that Du Maurier first mentioned to Henry his idea for a story later known to the world as Trilby – he could never be sure when exactly it was, for he took little notice at the time. But the second occasion on which Du Maurier spoke of it made an impression, and Henry wrote a lengthy note about it in his journal on the following day, March 25th, 1889.
3
BY the end of the 1880s Henry had become increasingly anxious about the progress of his career as a novelist – or rather, about its lack of progress. At the beginning of the decade he had set himself an ambitious programme, to write three major novels which would build on the achievement of The Portrait of a Lady and establish him as the rightful successor to the great English novelists of the previous generation – Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot (to cast one’s eyes no lower down the slopes of Parnassus) – whose work, for all its merits, was beginning to look increasingly old-fashioned in form and content. The first stage of this endeavour, The Bostonians, had excited very little interest, apart from complaints emanating from Boston that he had irreverently portrayed a well-known local bluestocking, Miss Peabody, in the character of Miss Birdseye (and so he had, though he denied it in correspondence with William). Henry was in fact not entirely satisfied with this novel himself. The subject – a young girl torn between the attractions of a reactionary but virile Southern male admirer and a dominating New England feminist soul-mate – was a good one, but he was ready to admit that the treatment was too expository in manner and dawdling in pace. He had more invested – more time and effort, and greater hopes – in his next major work, The Princess Casamassima, a panoramic social novel on a Dickensian or Balzacian scale, crowded with characters from all classes and walks of life from aristocracy to anarchists. He researched the background to this story with the dedication of a French naturalist – even visiting the dismal Millbank Prison to ensure the authenticity of a scene in which the youthful hero was taken to see his incarcerated mother. The novel was nearly 200,000 words long and ran for over a year in the Atlantic. He was well paid for it by the magazine, but there was an almost audible sigh of relief from the other side of the ocean when they received the final instalment. More disturbingly, the sales of the published book were deeply disappointing and it failed to earn out its advance. Taking stock of his life in the New Year of 1888, Henry wrote to his American friend and fellow author William Dean Howells: ‘I have entered upon evil days – but this is for your most private ear. I am staggering a good deal under the mysterious and (to me) inexplicable injury wrought – apparently – upon my situation by my last two novels, from which I expected so much and derived so little.’
By ‘situation’ he meant his finances as well as his literary status, for he depended on his authorial earnings to support the gentlemanly way of life to which he had become accustomed. To the leasing and running costs of the spacious modern apartment in Kensington, with its establishment of servants, he had to add the cost of frequent travelling in England and occasional sorties abroad, tailors’ and bootmakers’ bills, subscriptions to clubs and societies, book purchases, and many other expenses. But his financial anxiety was more than a matter of practical accounting; it also touched his personal pride. He had always secretly hoped that he might become wealthy as well as famous by his writing. It was not because he lusted for gold as such, or for the luxuries that it might buy – yachts and carriages and diamond cravat pins had no attractions for him. It was because to make significant amounts of money and to advance the art of fiction – to transfix this double target with a single arrow – was the only way for a novelist to impress the materialistic nineteenth century. Dickens and George Eliot had managed it. Why not HJ?
There was a hereditary factor in this ambition. His grandfather, William James, who had emigrated from Bailieborough, County Cavan, almost a hundred years ago, arriving in Albany, New York State, with hardly more than two coins to chink together in his pocket, rapidly accumulated an immense fortune through a series of shrewd business ventures in dry goods, tobacco, transportation and real estate, and was worth three million dollars when he died, one of the two or three richest men in America. Henry’s father had inherited (after a legal struggle, for he had been excluded from the will) a share of the estate worth $10,000 a year, enough to support himself and his family in comfort without further exertion on his part, and to leave his offspring well provided for when he departed this life. Yet by the time that sad event occurred the money had been mostly frittered away in injudicious investments and periodically settling the debts of his two youngest sons, Wilky and Bob. After the Civil War they had embarked on an idealistic venture to run a plantation in Florida with freed slaves as workers, but it proved a hopeless commercial failure. Neither of the brothers subsequently distinguished himself in any other branch of business, and Wilky had died young, a bitter and disappointed man. William, after years of vacillation, seemed at last to be carving out a successful academic career for himself at Harvard, but it was unlikely to make him rich, even if he finally managed to finish the Principles of Psychology on which he had been labouring for a decade. None of the Jameses was poor, but none of them was entirely free from financial anxiety either. The father’s estate, divided between his five children, did not constitute significant wealth, and Henry made over his own share to Alice to ensure her financial security. This generous decision was also an act of faith in his future as a professional author. It was shocking to reflect on how far the family fortunes had declined from the level achieved by Grandfather James. To reverse this decline by the work of his pen, to count his readers and his royalties in tens of thousands, while maintaining the highest artistic standards, was Henry’s dream. But as the years passed the prospects of realising it appeared fainter and fainter.
Not that it was getting more difficult for novelists to become rich – quite the contrary – but they were the wrong ones. There was Rider Haggard, for instance, whose bloody and preposterous She sold 40,000 copies in 1887, the year of its first publication, while Robert Louis Stevenson, whose tales of adventure were infinitely superior, had to be content with much more modest sales (though they were considerably better than Henry’s, without doubt). Henry, who had befriended Louis in Bournemouth the previous summer when he took Alice to the resort for a holiday, and loved the man as much as he admired his work, wrote to him: ‘the f
ortieth thousand on the title page of my She moves me to a holy indignation. It isn’t nice that anything so vulgarly brutal should be the thing that succeeds most with the English of today.’ But it was even more mortifying when one’s literary friends had an undeserved success.
Among his large acquaintance was Mary Ward, a niece of Matthew Arnold and the wife of Humphry Ward, a former Oxford don who was a critic and leader-writer for The Times. Henry was a frequent visitor to their house in Russell Square, and in due course became a friend and literary counsellor to Mary. She was an earnest, intelligent woman of moderately progressive views, with ambitions to write fiction. In 1884 she had published Miss Bretherton, a short, slight novel about the life of an actress which was actually inspired by a visit to the theatre with Henry to see the celebrated American actress, Mary Anderson. The novel was commendable as a first effort, and kindly received, but sold few copies. Mary Ward had some difficulty in finding a publisher for her next attempt, a long novel about the travails of an Anglican clergyman who lost his faith and sought a new vocation in serving the poor. When Robert Elsmere finally appeared, early in 1888, the first reviews were cool and few in number, but the novel’s themes of embattled belief and honest doubt, of social injustice and philanthropic idealism, evidently touched a nerve among educated readers, who began eagerly to recommend it to each other. Mudie’s re-ordered the novel in bulk. Mr Gladstone himself was moved to write an immensely long article about it in the May issue of The Nineteenth Century, entitled ‘Robert Elsmere and the Battle for Belief’, describing it as ‘brilliant but pernicious’, which gave a huge further boost to sales. It was the book everyone who dined out in London that season had to read and it went through impression after impression. Henry read his inscribed copy amid this hysteria with total bewilderment. How could people fail to see that, well-intentioned and edifying as it was, and interesting as the social and theological questions it touched on were, in terms of fictional form Robert Elsmere was creakingly antiquated? The point of view from which the story was told shifted abruptly as narrative expediency dictated, with no concern for consistency or intensity of effect; the characters debated the issues in long set speeches that bore very little resemblance to natural utterance; the descriptive passages were heavy with cliché; and the plot flagrantly served the purposes of ideological debate. Of course the book was not entirely without merit – fortunately so, because he was obliged to write a congratulatory letter to its author, and he was aware that a few vague complimentary lines would not suffice. Mrs Humphry Ward (thus she styled herself in print) would expect a detailed critique from her mentor. He put off this duty so long that he had to apologise profusely for the delay, and make up for it by the unctuousness of his praise, leaving only the tiniest loopholes through which his artistic conscience might wriggle. ‘The hold you keep of your hero is I think very remarkable and especially in relation to the kind of hold you constantly attempt to make it,’ he wrote, ‘and much as you tell about him you never kill him with it: though perhaps one fears a little sometimes that he may suffer a sunstroke from the high, oblique light of your admiration for him.’ He was confident that the triumphant authoress would not detect any implied criticism in the word ‘attempt’ or any irony in ‘sunstroke’. She wrote back to thank him for his generous words, mentioning casually that her publishers were about to bring out a six-shilling one-volume edition of her novel and were predicting a total sale of thirty thousand copies by the end of the year. Henry had recently published The Aspern Papers in a volume with two other tales. Macmillan had printed just 850 copies and had no plans to reprint.
The Aspern Papers was, Henry thought, one of the best things he had ever done, and he had written other short pieces of late which had similarly satisfied him – in particular a wickedly ironic story called ‘The Lesson of the Master’, about a gifted novelist who had sacrificed his artistic integrity to ‘the idols of the market; money and luxury and “the world”; placing one’s children and dressing one’s wife; everything that drives one to the short and easy way’. Having made this confession and given this warning to a worshipping young protégé, the novelist cynically betrayed him in a narrative twist of which Henry was particularly proud. These stories were first-class, Henry had no doubt of that, but collections of short tales didn’t ‘sell’ and they didn’t make an impression. It was the novel, of which Mary Ward’s lumbering three-decker was such a dispiriting example, that counted in the literary marketplace.
In that year he began writing the latest of his own efforts on this scale, The Tragic Muse, a novel about politics and the theatre, similar in form and social scope to The Princess. It was not his original intention that it should be as long as its predecessor, but it grew and grew in his hands like some towering vessel on a potter’s wheel. He worked tremendously hard on the book, conscious of how much depended on it, but he didn’t really enjoy the effort, and some small inner voice told him, though he tried to be deaf to it, that The Tragic Muse wasn’t going to be any more successful than The Princess. Although, dipping at random into his bulky manuscript, he couldn’t find fault with any particular passage or scene, he sensed that it lacked the intangible force that made a reader reluctant to put a book down and eager to pick it up again. This was a dismal admission to make, even silently, to himself, in the watches of the night. Was it possibly true, as Fenimore had said in her article, that he lacked ‘the true story-telling ability’? The loyal Atlantic began serialising The Tragic Muse in January 1889, and Henry, who was writing the final chapters, waited in vain for some encouraging word from the editors about the response of its readers. Meanwhile his English publisher, Macmillan, was offering a much reduced advance against royalties on the new book.
‘In fact – to be candid with you – in the strictest confidence – he offers just seventy pounds,’ said Henry.
‘Seventy pounds! Why Punch has been known to pay that for a single drawing,’ said Du Maurier.
They were strolling through the residential streets off Porchester Square on a surprisingly balmy evening at the end of March. Henry had been invited to dine en famille with the Du Mauriers at the house they were currently renting in Bayswater. He had arrived early, and the meal was a little delayed by some kitchen crisis, so Henry suggested they should take the air, since it was so pleasant. The streets were quiet, with few cabs or carriages about. It was the twilight hour that most flattered London. The gaslamps were coming on, throwing the shadows of the leafless plane trees on to the pavement, and here and there in the gardens an early flowering cherry tree made a pink splash against the brick walls.
‘Seventy pounds for The Tragic Muse is an insult,’ said Du Maurier.
‘I know, but what can I do?’ said Henry. ‘Macmillan lost money on The Bostonians and The Princess. I can’t really blame him. The fact is my books don’t sell.’
‘Your publisher must take some of the blame for that. Does he advertise them?’
‘Not much.’
‘There you are! Take Rider Haggard, for example—’
‘I would rather not,’ said Henry.
Du Maurier laughed. ‘I know what you mean! But why is he so successful? He has a clever publisher – Cassell, isn’t it? You remember when they brought out King Solomon’s Mines?’
‘Happily I was abroad at the time.’
‘It was his first book, of course – he was completely unknown. Cassell’s men plastered the whole of London the night before with posters, saying “KING SOLOMON’S MINES – THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN”. People woke up the next morning and saw these posters everywhere as they went to work. Of course they were curious to find out more. It worked like magic.’
‘I don’t think it would work for me,’ said Henry James. ‘In any case I detest the idea of selling books as if they were brands of soap.’
‘Of course, I wasn’t suggesting anything as vulgar as that . . .’ said Du Maurier.
‘Now if Mr Gladstone were to write a review of The Tragic Muse, that migh
t do the trick,’ said Henry with a rueful smile. ‘It did for my friend Mary Ward. But I don’t think it’s likely.’
‘Robert Elsmere?’ Du Maurier made a face. ‘We got the first volume from Mudie’s. Neither Emma nor I could be bothered to read the other two. She can’t write, Henry, not like you.’
‘It’s very kind of you to say so, my dear Kiki, and I won’t pretend to disagree with you. But the fact is that the demand for my work is diminishing. It’s a frightening prospect – I tell you this in confidence, you understand,’ he repeated, clasping Du Maurier’s arm to impress the earnestness of his sentiments. ‘It’s been weighing on my mind of late, and I have to tell somebody.’
