by David Lodge
‘Those actions have to be performed. It all takes time. Add the entr’actes, and if we begin this play at seven, it will be nearly midnight before the final curtain comes down. Quite impossible.’
‘But what is to be done?’ Henry cried.
‘We must cut it,’ said Compton.
Henry came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the pavement under the shock of this suggestion. He had laboured for weeks, weighing and polishing every line like a jeweller with his gems, to create a seamless glittering necklace of words. The idea of this beautiful artefact being hacked into an abbreviated form was like the plunge of a sharp instrument into his own flesh. ‘Cut it? How?’
‘With a blue pencil.’ Compton grinned, somewhat heartlessly Henry thought. ‘There was never a play written that didn’t benefit from cutting. My wife is very good at it.’
There commenced a very painful period of two months during which Henry was gradually compelled by the polite but implacable Comptons to surrender about a quarter of his precious lines. The process was carried on mainly by letter and telegram. Henry’s expenditure on telegrams rose alarmingly, and threatened to consume a significant proportion of the advance of £250 that Balestier had negotiated for him. This medium of communication, though undoubtedly convenient, always confronted Henry with an agonising conflict between considerations of economy on the one hand and literary elegance on the other. Straining to reconcile these two desiderata he produced telegraphic communications that had at times something of the quality of a Japanese haiku, like: ‘WILL ALIGHT PRECIPITATELY AT 5.38 FROM THE DELIBERATE 1.50. HENRY JAMES.’ When professional matters were involved the thought of economising on the length of the message, sacrificing nuances of meaning to save a coin or two, did not even arise; and it often cost him a hundred telegraphed words to defend the retention of a single phrase in his play, which in the end he was obliged, more often than not, to discard. It was a miserable and frustrating business, but he persevered, reminding himself all the while that this was how he was going to liberate himself from the chains of financial anxiety. An added spur was continuing evidence that he would never achieve such a happy state through his prose fiction. The Tragic Muse had been published as a book that spring. Though he had called Macmillan’s bluff and secured an advance of £250 by threatening to take it elsewhere, the sales were disappointing, and by November it was clear that the publisher was likely to make another loss. In the same month, for the first time in his life, Henry had a short story rejected, and by the Atlantic of all periodicals, which had been his reliable patron for so long. He soon placed ‘The Pupil’ elsewhere, but the experience was like a chill breath on the back of his neck. He resumed work on cutting The American with renewed determination. And there was after all a kind of grim satisfaction to be obtained from wrestling successfully with the arbitrary constraints of theatrical convention and the stubborn prejudices of actor-managers. To pare down one’s dramatic material sufficiently to squeeze it into the rigid frame of performance-time insisted on by Compton, without actually killing it in the process, was a not negligible feat.
He went down to Portsmouth in November, where the company had set up shop for the week, for a run-through of the revised play, and was rather pleasantly surprised by how well it flowed, and how little the scars of the last two months’ brutal cutting showed. The quality of the acting, especially in the minor roles, gave him some concern, and he spent at least an hour giving notes to the cast and getting them to repeat certain lines and scenes with more expression; but it was a bitterly cold day and the actors were obliged to wear their outdoor clothes in the unheated theatre, which inhibited their style. As Mrs Compton disarmingly remarked, it was hard to play a love scene with a dewdrop perpetually forming at the end of one’s nose. Henry’s opinion of this lady had steadily risen, and not only because she had intelligent and appreciative things to say about The Tragic Muse, a copy of which he had presented to her husband (though for his part he gave no sign of having opened it). Henry recognised the patience and good humour she had shown in their debates about the ‘cuts’, and her portrayal of Claire Cintré was taking shape very pleasingly. Compton himself was so far something of a disappointment, but it was impossible to draw attention to his lapses in front of the rest of the cast. Henry therefore went back with the Comptons to their lodgings and spent another two hours with the actor in private, going over every line of his role for expression, intonation, and accent (his hold on the American ‘a’ was particularly shaky).
He wrote to William on his return to London: ‘The authorship (in any sense worthy of the name) of a play only begins when it is written, and I see that one’s creation of it doesn’t terminate until one has gone with it every inch of the way to the rise of the curtain on the first night.’ He was to discover that it didn’t even terminate then, but for the moment he could not, as far as The American was concerned, think beyond the premiere, now only a few weeks off, to which he looked forward with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Meanwhile he had already begun writing a second play, provisionally called Mrs Vibert, and had conceived the idea for a third.
On the afternoon of Saturday the 3rd of January 1891, with only hours to go before the first public performance of The American, Henry paced up and down his sitting room in the Prince of Wales Hotel, Southport, belching and breaking wind intermittenly. He had declined Compton’s invitation to share the dinner the manager always took punctually at three o’clock when he was performing in the evening, and ordered a cold collation in his room, but perhaps this had been a mistake. A hot meal would have been more calming to bowels churning with anxiety. He summoned the waiter to remove the soiled dishes, and sat down at the table to write some letters – rather like a soldier, it occurred to him, on the eve of a battle which he might not survive. He wrote to Du Maurier and to Gosse, thanking them for their kind messages wishing him success, and saying that he counted on them ‘to spend this evening in fasting, silence, and supplication’. He wrote to William, congratulating him on the safe arrival of his third son, drawing a parallel with the imminent birth of his own dramatic first-born, and describing himself as ‘in a state of abject lonely fear’. He wrote to a French friend: ‘“Je fais du Théâtre – je suis tombé bien bas – priez pour moi.”’ None of these letters would reach their recipients before his fate was decided, but composing such humorous hyperboles afforded him some relief from the real stress he was suffering.
The dress rehearsal of the previous day had confirmed his opinion that the play would stand or fall by its intrinsic qualities, for the acting was mostly pedestrian and the stage settings minimal (though it was an undoubted enhancement to see Compton with a toupee covering his bald pate at last, and a moustache on his upper lip for good measure). Henry had tried to watch the play as if it were the work of another hand, and it seemed to him that it did hang together and move along at an exemplary pace. But it was hard to judge with only a thin scattering of auditors, mostly employees of the theatre and their relations, in the cavernous theatre. All fifteen hundred seats were sold for tonight, and he would have to sit among the occupants and register their verdict. One of them would be William Archer, the influential critic of The World, who had written to Henry welcoming the prospect of a new play by a distinguished man of letters, and announcing his intention of attending the premiere. Henry was both flattered and alarmed by this message. Archer had something of a mission to raise the literary standards of the English stage, an aim with which Henry had every sympathy, but he was a fervent supporter of Ibsen, about whom Henry had reservations, and he could be a harsh critic of work that displeased him. Henry had replied, stressing the limitations of the provincial production and recommending him to wait for the London one that it was hoped would follow, but Archer declined to be put off.
To kill time Henry put on his overcoat and went out to post his letters himself, instead of giving them to the hotel reception desk, where he paused however to bespeak a late supper for himself, the Comptons, a
nd Balestier, who was on his way from London by train. The meal would be either a celebration or a wake. After calling at the Post Office, he strolled along the marine promenade. There were few people about on this cold winter afternoon. The tide was out, far, far out, and the sun, largely obscured by cloud, was setting over the flat wet sand and an almost invisible sea. An inordinately long skeletal pier stretched from the shore towards the horizon, as if it had set off to bridge the Irish Sea and lost heart. It seemed absurd that he, Henry James, the ‘distinguished man of letters’, the cosmopolitan author equally at home in London, Paris, Rome and New York, should have fetched up here in the middle of winter, in this flat and featureless provincial resort, on the very rim of civilisation as it seemed, anxiously to await the determination of his fate as an aspirant playwright. At the thought he gave a loud, barking guffaw of self-mocking laughter, which caused a gentleman passing by to look at him sharply and disapprovingly, obviously under the impression that he was drunk.
Henry went on to the theatre. The man in the little cubby hole by the stage door recognised him. ‘There’s nobody in from the company, Mr James. They’re all having a rest this afternoon.’
‘I know,’ said Henry. ‘Thank you. I merely wish to reassure myself about some details of the set.’
He mooned around the stage for some time, fiddling with the props for the first scene, ‘A Parisian Parlour’, by the dim illumination of a single gaslight, and adjusting the placing of the chairs by an inch or two. The curtain was down for some reason. On an impulse he parted the two flaps, stepped out in front of the curtain, and looked into the enormous maw of the dark, empty auditorium. He waited a few moments till his eyes accommodated to the gloom and he was quite sure he was alone. Then, gravely and deliberately, he practised a bow.
If it was an act of hubris, it went unpunished. A few hours later he stood in the same spot, dazzled by footlights, bowing with the applause of fifteen hundred spectators roaring in his ears. The ovation was loud and long – long enough to warrant three bows. The beaming Compton, who had already taken several himself, seized Henry’s hand in both of his own and shook it vigorously. His lips formed the word ‘Congratulations!’ Then the curtain came down for the last time, and the applause died away into a buzz of animated conversation as the audience filed out of the theatre.
Compton turned to the actors. ‘Well done, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said.
‘Yes, indeed, you were all wonderful. Wonderful!’ Henry seconded, going round shaking their hands. He had a special word of thanks for Mrs Compton, whose hand he kissed in homage. The actors dispersed to their dressing rooms with pleased smiles. Henry and Compton followed them into the wings. ‘It seemed to go very well,’ Henry said, with affected casualness.
‘Well? It was a triumph.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You were magnificent, my dear Compton,’ Henry said, and he spoke sincerely. The manager’s performance had been a revelation. Nothing he had seen in rehearsal had prepared him for its passion and energy.
‘Having an audience makes all the difference.’
‘Indeed it does,’ said Henry. Being part of it that evening, watching his own play through its ears and eyes, had been an extraordinary experience, as if the big black maw of the auditorium which he had looked into that afternoon had swallowed him and, like Jonah in the whale, he was both part of this great live breathing creature and yet distinct from it. He felt every tremor and vibration of its reaction to the spectacle on the stage, he registered the strength of every collective laugh and chuckle, and measured the intensity of every silence at moments of dramatic tension, while himself remaining strangely detached, unmoved and unamused by the familiar material. It was such a novel sensation that at first he distrusted the evidence of success. In the interval at the end of the first act he hastened backstage and buttonholed Compton in the wings. ‘In heaven’s name,’ he said, ‘tell me. Is it going?’ ‘Going? Rather!’ had been the reassuring reply. ‘You could hear a pin drop.’ And to judge by the reception at the end, the other three acts had ‘gone’ just as well.
Balestier came up, his fresh eager face nodding enthusiastically atop his long, thin, wandlike frame, and wrung Henry’s hand. ‘Congratulations, my dear chap, we have a hit on our hands,’ he said.
‘Do you really think so?’ Henry said.
‘Ask this man,’ Balestier said, nodding at Compton.
‘I’ve already told him,’ said Compton. ‘And it will be even better by the time we get to London.’
Henry left them talking, and hastened back to the hotel to order champagne to be served with the supper. He floated along the street in a kind of bubble of euphoria, which survived a slightly prickly encounter shortly afterwards with William Archer. He was surprised, while supervising the laying of the table in his sitting room at the hotel, to receive the critic’s card, but invited him to come up. He struck Henry as surprisingly young, somewhat resembling a Nonconformist minister in appearance and manners.
‘I see you are preparing for a party,’ he said, looking rather disapprovingly at the champagne bottles cooling in ice buckets. ‘I will not detain you long. I thought I would give you the benefit of my first impressions of your play. I could not find an opportune moment at the theatre.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Henry politely, though he would willingly have postponed the pleasure. ‘Indeed it’s excessively kind of you to have made a pilgrimage all the way up here to see my apprentice effort.’
This modest description of his piece did not elicit the emphatic protest Henry expected. ‘For a first play it has much to commend it,’ Archer said evenly. ‘But there are certain imperfections to which I feel I should draw your attention.’
Archer proceeded to make some detailed criticisms of the play’s construction, which Henry hardly had the patience to follow. There would be a time for tinkering and polishing later. Now he wanted to gorge on his success. ‘You will grant, I think, that the play was very well received tonight,’ he said, with a touch of asperity.
‘Indeed. But it is the kind of play that goes better in the provinces than in London,’ said Archer. Shortly after delivering this opinion, he took his leave.
Henry’s spirits were slightly dashed by the encounter, but soon afterwards the Comptons and Balestier arrived in buoyant mood, and after a glass or two of champagne the bubble of euphoria enclosed him again. When he told them about Archer’s pernickety criticisms of the play, and his apparent indifference to its ecstatic reception, mimicking the young man’s somewhat pedantic and humourless manner, they howled with laugher. The trouble with Archer, Balestier remarked, was that having appointed himself keeper of the English theatre’s conscience, he thought everyone should ask his permission and advice before writing a play. They ate their supper with leisurely relish as they reviewed the many high points of the evening, like soldiers lolling in their tent, reliving a victorious battle. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when the happy party broke up. Before he retired to bed, Henry drafted a telegram to be sent to Alice first thing the next morning, as he had promised. For once, a not strictly grammatical stream of words and phrases seemed rhetorically justified. He wrote: ‘UNQUALIFIED TRIUMPHANT MAGNIFICENT SUCCESS UNIVERSAL CONGRATULATIONS GREAT OVATION FOR AUTHOR GREAT FUTURE FOR PLAY COMPTONS RADIANT AND HIS ACTING ADMIRABLE WRITING HENRY.’ It summed up his feelings about the evening perfectly.
The next day the company had to move on to Wolverhampton, where they were due to perform at the Grand for the following six days. Henry shared their journey which, it being a Sunday, was slow and uncomfortable, with long waits for connections at Liverpool and Crewe, where the refreshment rooms were closed by Sabbatarian decree and only bleak, unheated waiting rooms afforded shelter. The trains seemed to stop at every little station, and there were seldom attendants available to remove and replace the footwarmers in the carriages. The high spirits of the author and the manager survived the
se trials, however, and they exchanged warm farewells when the company alighted at Wolverhampton. Henry stayed on the train until its termination at Birmingham, where he stayed the night at the Midland Hotel. He was going on to visit Fenimore in Cheltenham the next day.
Fenimore had returned to England the previous summer after months of restless movement. Her old enemy depression had returned to plague her, and her usual remedy was a change of scene, or several changes in succession. In the autumn of 1889 she was in England, then in France, and in the following winter and spring she made an adventurous tour of Greece and Egypt with her sister, which she wrote up in lively articles in Harper’s. Henry particularly enjoyed her lyrical descriptions of Corfu, and a humorous account of being rescued from a crowd of ferocious brigand-like porters on the quayside at Patras by an imperturbable German hotelier. She did not return to Florence at the conclusion of these travels, claiming that she had grown weary of its inward-looking, gossipy, expatriate community. Instead she settled in Cheltenham. Why Cheltenham? She couldn’t give much of an explanation, except that it was a pleasant spa town with an abundance of convenient lodgings. Going back to Leamington Spa was out of the question, because Alice James was living there with Katharine Loring, having moved out of De Vere Gardens after Henry returned from his long sojourn in Italy. When asked about her choice of Leamington as a location Alice gave the absurdly trivial reason that she had heard of lodgings there from which one could hear the music of a band that played daily on a corner of the Parade. Henry privately thought it had something to do with the fact that Alice knew Fenimore had lived in Leamington for a time, and hoped somehow to learn more about her by retracing her steps. The motives of these two women, who circled his existence like moons, showing him at most only half of their selves, were never entirely clear, but Alice continued to be both fascinated by and jealous of the unseen Fenimore. Once when William had arrived in England without warning they travelled down to Leamington together and Henry went ahead to prepare Alice for William’s visit. ‘I must tell you something,’ he began. ‘You’re not going to be married?’ she shrieked. Henry did not need to ask whom she thought he might be about to marry.
