by David Lodge
‘Your time will come, Henry,’ Du Maurier said.
‘I feel it’s running out. I find it more and more difficult to think up plots.’
‘Do you? My head’s full of plots! I just wish I had your skill with words to tell ’em.’
‘Well, if you have any to spare . . .’ Henry said jokingly.
‘Why don’t you use that story I told you a year or so ago?’ said Du Maurier. ‘About the young girl and the mesmerist?’
‘The young girl and the mesmerist? I’m ashamed to say, Kiki, I’ve forgotten the details,’ said Henry. ‘Remind me.’
‘Well, there’s this girl, a young servant girl, who has an unusually beautiful voice, but no ear at all for music – she’s tone deaf . . .’ A faint memory of the story came back to Henry as Du Maurier summarised it. The girl became a famous chanteuse on the Continent under the tutelage of a little foreign Jew, a musician. She was sought out by a young impoverished artist who had known her as the good-looking but stupid daughter of his landlady, and was intrigued and baffled by her success. He heard the girl perform and was overwhelmed by the beauty of her singing. ‘In fact he begins to fall in love with her,’ said Du Maurier. ‘But then he discovers that the Jew is a mesmerist and the girl can only perform when she’s under his influence. When the Jew suddenly dies, in the middle of a performance, she becomes totally ordinary again – sings like a crow. I’m not sure how the story should end.’
‘It’s a very interesting idea,’ said Henry. ‘Where did you get it from?’
‘Oh, I made it up one day when I was daydreaming. Years ago – when I was saving up to be married. I sent it in to a magazine, but they didn’t publish it and somehow the manuscript was lost. You’re welcome to try and make something of it, Henry.’
‘You’re very generous, my dear Kiki, but . . . I don’t know if it’s quite my line.’ Henry thought for a few minutes in silence as they paced the level pavement. From an open window came the sound of a man singing in German to a piano accompaniment.
‘Ah!’ said Du Maurier, stopping and lifting his hand. ‘Schubert’s “Serenade”.’
They stood under the window and listened until the song came to an end. Du Maurier applauded enthusiastically, and after a moment two startled faces, a young man’s and a young woman’s, appeared at the window embrasure. ‘Bravo!’ cried Du Maurier. The couple smiled, waved and withdrew, pleased, amused and embarrassed all at once.
‘I could never identify a tune like that,’ said Henry as they resumed their walk.
‘Oh, it’s one of my favourite pieces,’ Du Maurier said.
‘No matter. You could recognise a hundred others, I know. And that’s the difficulty, you see – I mean as regards your generous offer. I haven’t the musical knowledge that would be essential to write that story.’
‘Nonsense! I could help you with the musical details.’
‘Why don’t you write it yourself?’ Henry said.
‘Are you serious?’
‘You told me you started a novel once.’
‘Yes, and never finished it.’
‘A novel is a big undertaking – a daunting task – as I know all too well. But a short story . . . The captions to your drawings show you have an ear for dialogue.’
‘You’re very kind, Henry. I must admit that I’ve sometimes thought of taking up the pen again – I mean an author’s pen. But I’m afraid of failure. I don’t know whether I have the gift in me.’
‘Well, you’ll never find out unless you try,’ said Henry.
Their conversation turned to other topics and family news for the remainder of their walk, and over dinner. Sylvia had been courted for some time by a promising young barrister called Arthur Llewelyn Davies, and the announcement of their engagement was imminent. Du Maurier liked the young man, who was handsome, athletic and industrious, having put himself through ’varsity at no expense to his father by winning scholarships and prizes, though Emma suspected him of having an awkward temper. They had just received a letter from Guy, now an army officer serving with the Royal Fusiliers in India, describing a Christmas entertainment he had produced, to great acclaim, for the troops in barracks. As a boy Guy had always been a prime mover behind the burlesque playlets that were a feature of family life at New Grove House. ‘And now, you see, it’s turning out to be an advantage in his military career,’ said Du Maurier proudly. ‘His young brother, however, seems to have no talent for anything except theatricals.’ Gerald would be leaving Harrow in a year or two and Du Maurier was at a loss what to do with him.
No more was said between them that evening about the story of the singer and the mesmerist, but as he walked home across the Park after dinner, Henry turned it over in his mind and found it more and more intriguing. The next morning he wrote down a summary, with some embellishments of his own, in his notebook. What interested him was the relationship between the girl and her disreputable mentor, as an illustration of the genuine artist’s unique power. ‘She had had the glorious voice, but no talent – he had had the sacred fire, the rare musical organization, and had played into her and through her,’ Henry wrote. He rather regretted, now, that he had encouraged Du Maurier to try writing the story. In spite of his want of musical knowledge, he thought he might like one day to see what he could make of it himself.
They next met a week or two later, at one of the Gosses’ Sunday afternoons, at their house overlooking the Regent’s Park Canal. Kiki came up to him as soon as he entered the crowded drawing room, holding a cup of tea in one hand and waving a cigarette in the other, beaming all over his face. ‘Henry! Congratulate me. I’ve written forty pages already – or rather Emma has written them. I dictated them.’
‘You’ve started writing your story, then?’ said Henry. He felt a little pang of disappointment at this news, which he managed to disguise with a smile.
‘Yes,’ said Du Maurier. ‘But not the one I told you.’
‘Not about the young girl singer and the Jewish mesmerist?’
‘No, another subject entirely . . . Something I’ve been turning over in my mind for a long time, but never had the confidence to begin. What you said the other day gave me the impetus. After you left, I sat up half the night making notes. It’s going to be quite long – a novel, not a story.’
‘Well, I’m very pleased,’ said Henry, sincerely.
‘I can’t wait to show you some of it. But it’s too early yet.’
‘I should be delighted. Whenever you choose.’
‘You must be quite honest,’ said Du Maurier. ‘I want you to tell me if I’m making a complete ass of myself.’
In Henry’s experience, when apprentice writers showed him their work and asked him to be quite honest, honesty was usually the last thing they wanted, and if they were friends the situation could be delicate. He had learned to temper criticism with words of praise and encouragement, but he was incapable of utterly perjuring himself on matters of literary value. He therefore awaited his first sight of Du Maurier’s work in progress with a certain anxiety. In fact it wasn’t a sight but a hearing that he obtained first: Du Maurier read the opening chapter to him and Jusserand, one Sunday evening in May at New Grove House, after the family had given up their Bayswater tenancy and returned to Hampstead. Henry was relieved and pleasantly surprised by this sample of the novel, which was entitled Peter Ibbetson. It took the form of a memoir by the eponymous hero, who appeared to have composed it in prison for reasons not immediately divulged. Like his creator, Peter Ibbetson had a French father and English mother, and had been brought up on the outskirts of Paris; the opening section was indeed little more than an affectionately nostalgic evocation of Du Maurier’s own happy childhood in Passy. Henry did not as a rule approve of the pseudo-autobiography as a fictional form. An ‘I’ narrator might serve very well for a short story or tale, but in the long haul of the novel it was apt to encourage diffuseness and irrelevance. For a beginner, however, it had its advantages as a narrative method, solving many potential p
roblems by simple elimination, and it lent itself to Du Maurier’s lyrical celebration of a child’s loves, hopes and fears, the adult man’s effort to recover a lost world of impressions. A phrase occurred, ‘to ache with the pangs of happy remembrance’, which epitomised the mood of the whole thing. It was done with considerable charm and delicacy, and no dissembling was required on Henry’s part, when the reading was concluded, to congratulate the author and urge him to continue with the good work. Jusserand added his commendations and vouched for the authenticity of the French local colour.
Du Maurier was delighted with this reception. Henry could tell that he was hugely excited by the project and eager to go on with it. It was a second lease of artistic life, and all the more welcome because his sight was giving him great concern. He wore tinted spectacles most of the time now, with lenses of such a dark blue that they were all but opaque and gave him the disconcerting appearance of someone who was really blind, especially when he had a walking stick in his hand. The vision of his good eye was deteriorating, and this was affecting the quality of his draughtsmanship, for he was obliged to use a broader, coarser etching technique than in the past. He was seriously concerned about how long he could continue to work as an artist under this handicap, and the possibility of adopting another medium, not so dependent on the fine co-ordination of hand and eye, was enormously cheering. It was to save his sight that he had decided to dictate his story to Emma instead of writing it out himself. Henry was intrigued by their account of this process: apparently she scribbled down his words as he fluently uttered them, sitting at ease in his armchair in the studio, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and she made a fair copy later for him to read and revise. Henry rather envied Kiki this comparatively effortless method of composition, and said so.
‘Well then, Henry,’ said Du Maurier with a smile, ‘you must get yourself a devoted little wife, like Emma, with a nice neat hand.’
‘Ah, it’s too late for that, I’m afraid,’ he replied. ‘Besides, I would drive the poor woman to distraction with my protracted gropings for le mot juste.’
‘Well, of course I don’t hope to achieve such a fine polish on my style as yours,’ Du Maurier said humbly.
‘No, no, my dear fellow, I meant no such imputation,’ said Henry. ‘You have a natural unforced eloquence which I envy. Continue, mon bon!’
In the following months Du Maurier read to him further chapters of the novel which made a less favourable impression. The story took a somewhat melodramatic turn. The young hero was orphaned and adopted by a relative, Colonel Ibbetson, who brought him up to be an English gentleman but turned out to be himself a cad. (Henry guessed it would be revealed in due course that it was for killing or injuring this man that Peter was imprisoned.) Peter became an architect, and fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful young duchess who proved to be his childhood sweetheart. Whereas the early chapters had had a naïve but genuine truthfulness to life about them, the rest of the novel seemed to be drifting more and more towards the fatal shore of romance. There was also a little too much philosophising by the hero, who shared his creator’s prejudices against orthodox religion. But Henry did not feel it was his duty to cast cold water on the author’s hopes. There came a point when he said to his friend: ‘Don’t show me any more. You must find your own way now. Let me read it when it is published – for it surely will be.’ This was said partly to excuse himself from giving further time and attention to Du Maurier’s novel, for he was preoccupied with an exciting new project of his own – to become a playwright.
4
HE had always been fascinated by the theatre. As young children in New York he and William were frequently taken to pantomimes, circuses and similar entertainments by their parents, who were themselves regular playgoers. One of his earliest and most vivid memories was of his mother and father going off one winter’s evening from the house on Fourteenth Street to see a celebrated actress of the time, Charlotte Cushman, in Henry VIII, leaving himself and his brother, aged about seven and eight respectively, to do their preparation for the next day’s lessons, and his father bursting into the room about an hour later, snatching up William, and rushing off with him (insofar as a man with a wooden leg, the legacy of an accident in youth, could rush) back to the theatre. The first Act had been such a sublime experience that Henry Sr. was determined his eldest son should see the rest of the performance, and had dashed home in a cab in the first interval to abduct him for that purpose. Henry, deemed too young to appreciate Shakespeare, was left alone in the lamplight with his books, bitterly resenting the deprivation. His father tried to make up for it subsequently with excursions to classic and modern plays on Broadway, but there was a sense in which no performance, in boyhood or adulthood, in New York or Paris or London, ever quite rose to the dramatic heights Henry imputed to that fabulous unseen production of Henry VIII. It haunted his imagination for ever after as a kind of Platonic ideal of theatrical ecstasy, which every visit to actual theatres was a vain effort to realise. During his years in Paris he frequented the Comédie Française and familiarised himself with the repertoire of Scribe, Sardou and Dennery. He was a regular theatregoer in London, though its usual fare of broadly acted melodramas and farces was much inferior, in his opinion, to the productions of the Parisian stage. Indeed, it seemed to him that the English nation’s besetting sin of Philistinism was nowhere more apparent than in its drama. He went night after night to sit in the stalls in the faint hope of being gripped or enchanted, and invariably returned home disappointed, sometimes before the play was over.
He happened to be in Paris, in December 1888, gratefully renewing his acquaintance with its more sophisticated style of dramatic entertainment, when he received a letter from an English actor-manager, Edward Compton, inviting him to adapt his early novel, The American, for the Compton Comedy Company. His first instinct was to decline. The jaunty name of the company was not promising, and he had accepted a similar proposal some ten years before, to adapt Daisy Miller for the New York stage, which had come to nothing. He had published the unperformed play and resolved not to waste any more time on such ventures. But on reflection he wrote a cautiously encouraging reply to Compton, and after his return to England made some enquiries of and about him, the answers to which were reassuring. Compton had a good reputation as both an actor and a manager. The repertoire of his company consisted mainly of classic English comedies by Shakespeare, Garrick, Goldsmith and the like, which they toured round the country week by week. Compton wished to enhance this programme with a new play by a prestigious writer, and to bring the production into London if it prospered. He believed that a dramatic adaptation of The American would fit the bill and offer rewarding parts for himself and his wife, Virginia Bateman Compton, the leading actress of the company.
The more Henry thought about this proposal – and he thought about it a good deal, sometimes when his mind should have been focused on the final chapters of The Tragic Muse – the more it attracted him. By May 1889 he had agreed in principle to write the play. More than that, he had privately determined to write several plays – half a dozen – a dozen – whatever it took to conquer the English stage. For all its vulgarity and aesthetic crudity, it was for an author the shortest road to fame and fortune – if, of course, one were successful. But why shouldn’t he succeed? He believed he had thoroughly assimilated the craft of skilful playmaking through years of attendance at the fountainhead of the Française, and – heaven knew – he had sat among English audiences long enough to know what would ‘go’ with them. Compton’s proposal, which he had almost dismissed out of hand, now seemed providential, offering a solution to the professional crisis he had confessed to Du Maurier during their walk around the environs of Porchester Square on that mild March evening a year before. Cushioned by moneybags fat with playhouse royalties, he need no longer haggle with publishers over their paltry advances, or bewail the paucity of discriminating readers able to appreciate his novels. With the proceeds of his commercially successf
ul plays he would buy himself the space and time to write real literature without having to worry about its marketability. It was an extra enticement that, even if the playwriting side of this projected double career entailed some compromises with popular taste, it would not be in itself soulless drudgery. It might even be fun. The prospect of getting involved in the practicalities of putting on a play, of meeting actors, attending rehearsals, and consulting about costumes and sets, produced an undeniable tingle of pleasurable anticipation. And then, the excitement of seeing one’s work performed in front of an audience, to hear their laughter and applause . . . At this juncture of his thoughts he was prone to lapse into a kind of daydream, bathed in a golden glow of footlights, in which he himself, immaculate in evening dress, was pulled half-resisting from the wings of a stage amid resounding cries of ‘Author! Author!’ from the auditorium, and took bow after blushing bow.
He already knew that he must compress and divide the action of his novel into three or four acts, with strong curtain lines; that he must exaggerate the brash ‘Americanness’ of his hero for the amusement of the English; and that he must contrive a happy ending to the story. In his novel the rich, self-made American Christopher Newman, an innocent abroad in Paris, was at first permitted to pay court to the beautiful young widow, the Comtesse Claire de Cintré, by her aristocratic relatives, the Bellegardes, and then snobbishly coldshouldered by them. Fate put into his hands the means of disgracing the Bellegardes or, by the threat of exposure, compelling them to allow Claire to marry him, but in a gesture of revulsion against European cynicism and corruption, Newman renounced both love and revenge and returned to his native land, while the Comtesse retired to a convent. Henry did not need Edward Compton to tell him that such a bleak conclusion would not do for a final ‘note’ on which to send English theatregoers home in their cabs and omnibuses and suburban trains – though Compton told him so anyway, tactfully but unequivocally, in the course of their correspondence.
