Author, Author

by David Lodge

  ‘Tell me about the beastly false ear-drums,’ he said. ‘They sound like instruments of torture.’

  That, apparently, was exactly what they felt like. She said it was like having two sharp instruments permanently embedded in one’s ears. She kept them in for two weeks until she could bear the pain no more, but when she took them out the headaches and ear-aches continued for a month.

  ‘Did they improve your hearing, while you had them in?’ he asked.

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Then why did you persevere, my dear Fenimore?’

  ‘I hoped they might work if I got used to them,’ she said. ‘I would do almost anything, suffer almost anything, to hear again as I used to.’

  The day was fine and they went out for a walk. Beaumont Street, just off St Giles, was conveniently situated for exploring the streets and alleys and quadrangles of the time-worn, studious city. They spent a pleasant half-hour browsing in Blackwell’s excellent bookshop, surreptitiously checking its stocks of their own books, as authors do. Henry was pleased to see several copies of The Lesson of the Master, the title of his latest collection of short stories, on the ‘Recently Published’ table.

  ‘That’s a horrid story, Henry,’ Fenimore said later, when he mentioned this observation at dinner. They were dining at the Randolph Hotel, where he was staying the night. ‘Clever, but horrid. It’s a libel against women.’

  ‘Nonsense, Fenimore, it’s no such thing,’ Henry protested. ‘I admit Mrs St George is something of a tyrant. But you might just as well call the story a libel against men. Consider the treachery with which St George steals the girl from his young protégé after his wife dies.’

  ‘But he has been corrupted by his wife’s materialism. And the girl is just as bad in the end. It’s no use protesting, Henry, the moral of the story is clear: women are only interested in feathering their own nests and are consequently the enemies of art.’

  ‘You exaggerate, my dear Fenimore,’ Henry said with a smile which he hoped was disarming. ‘But I think you will admit that there may be a conflict of interests between – not women and art – but marriage and art.’

  Fenimore flushed slightly, and chewed her cutlet in silence for a few moments. ‘Do you advocate free love, then, as a modus vivendi for the artist?’ she enquired ironically.

  ‘Of course not, Fenimore, you know how I hate all such, such – bohemian sordidness,’ said Henry, growing a little excited in spite of himself. ‘And of course I don’t deny that there are successful artists who have been happily – many more who have been unhappily no doubt – but even so – yes, some have been happily married. My friend Du Maurier, for instance – but who knows what more he might have achieved without the constant worry of looking after his growing family? Now it’s driving him to write novels, which is not his métier at all.’

  ‘Marriage does not necessarily entail having children,’ Fenimore said, laying down her knife and fork. Her ear trumpet lay beside her plate like another, specialised piece of cutlery, but she had not needed to use it in the hushed, high-ceilinged dining room.

  ‘No, but that is its usual consequence – and principal purpose, if we are to believe the Prayer Book,’ said Henry forcing another smile. Fenimore, he worked out by a rapid calculation, must be over fifty now, well past normal childbearing age. Was she nurturing some dream of a marriage of true minds rather than bodies, the two of them working away in separate studies, and meeting for companionable meals and strolls, as they had done at Bellosguardo? It had worked well there, but the very attraction of that arrangement had been its provisionality, its open-endedness and amenability to sudden closure. Marriage would be inevitably a surrender of one’s freedom. And then again, even in mature years there should be, if not desire, then some physical tenderness in a marriage. Fenimore was a comely woman for her age. He admired her neat figure and the quiet good taste with which she clothed it, he liked to look upon her smooth round cheeks, still surprisingly unblemished by wrinkles, her wide, calm grey-blue eyes, the slightly amused set of her lips in repose, as if she were biting the lower one, the well-fleshed throat with its invariable velvet choker. He enjoyed her company. But he had not the slightest inclination to reach out and touch her, let alone to put his arms round her and kiss her on the lips, let alone . . . He pursued this train of thought no further. A slightly embarrassed silence fell on the table, which Fenimore broke.

  ‘Tell me about your plays, Henry.’

  ‘Alas, there is nothing new to report. Theatrical managers are the most dilatory, vacillating, fickle race of men I have ever encountered.’

  ‘You may remember,’ Fenimore said timidly, ‘we spoke once of collaborating on a play together.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ he replied. He had anticipated that this subject would arise during his visit, and had his answer ready. ‘But I wouldn’t dream of embroiling you in the wretched and demoralising business until I am much better established in it myself.’

  ‘That is thoughtful of you,’ she said, but she looked disappointed.

  Henry could not conceive of collaborating with anyone in writing prose fiction – it was too private and personal a process; but there was, inevitably, a collaborative element in the staging of every play which made sharing the compositional process in this form not entirely unthinkable. He had however no intention of getting involved in such an experiment until he had seen his current dramatic projects through to completion and run out of ideas for new ones. Meanwhile, there was no harm in being vaguely encouraging to poor Fenimore. ‘We will speak of it again when I can feel confident of actually getting our work produced,’ he said.

  ‘Very well, Henry,’ she said, brightening perceptibly at the word ‘our’.

  ‘A prospect that seems very distant at present,’ he cautioned. But he was not sure she heard him correctly.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  6

  BY the late spring he felt the need of a long break from London and duty. The exacting business of administering Alice’s estate was concluded, and his theatrical ships were apparently becalmed at sea, far from port. There was nothing to detain him in England, and he yearned unspeakably for Italy. He made arrangements to join the French writer Paul Bourget and his young American wife in Siena, and to stay afterwards with another friend, Mrs ‘Jack’ Gardner, well-known hostess and patron of the arts, in her rented palazzo in Venice. It was a signal advantage of being a bachelor with a large circle of friends that one could make such plans at relatively short notice, and the development of the railroad system in Europe had made it absurdly easy to carry them out. One boarded a train at Victoria or Waterloo station and two or three days later alighted in some warm historic southern city, a journey that at the beginning of the century would have taken weeks by coach and diligence. The drawback of such progress in transportation was of course that too many people took advantage of it, leading to the plague of English and American tourists now infesting all the most interesting and picturesque places in Europe, but he hoped to avoid the worst of the hordes by going to Italy in the months of June and July, traditionally regarded as too hot for the comfort of Anglo-Saxons.

  Just before he departed he attended Du Maurier’s lecture on Punch artists, which finally reached the capital, after its long circuit of provincial venues, in late May. The Prince’s Hall in Piccadilly was not as full as might have been hoped, for the Season was in full swing and Society’s mantelpieces groaned under the weight of invitations, but a number of Du Maurier’s friends besides Henry turned up loyally for the occasion. They were asked to sit on the stage behind the speaker as a ‘platform party’, an exposure to public gaze that Henry did not welcome, but submitted to for his friend’s sake. Alma-Tadema was in the chair, a rather comical circumstance, since the two men looked so alike that they were frequently mistaken for each other. (When congratulated in error for Alma-Tadema’s paintings by enthusiastic ladies Du Maurier would sometimes imitate his colleague’s thick Flemish accent and say, clasping t
heir hands, ‘Tank you zo much, gom to me on my Chewsdays’ – or so he claimed, adding: ‘I often wonder if they go.’)

  Du Maurier had given his lecture so many times by now that he knew it by heart, and seldom needed to do more than glance at the text which he had had printed in an eighteen-point typeface so that he could read it easily. He was plainly bored with it, and delivered it without any ornament of gesture or intonation, yet somehow he managed to avoid the consequence that might have been expected, of boring his audience. There was something so palpably honest and decent and modest about the man that one’s heart went out to him, and if there was nothing intellectually incisive about his discourse – the only crumb of aesthetic nourishment Henry carried away from it was the statement, ‘It must be remembered that there are no such things as lines in nature’ – nevertheless he did succeed in evoking the individual qualities of his great precursors, Leech and Keene, simply by the play of his own personal knowledge over their characters and their work. With Du Maurier everything was personal, and more often than not rosily tinted with a lyrical nostalgia that was never sickly because it was palpably sincere. It was what had made the first part of Peter Ibbetson so charming. It was a real gift – not enough to carry a whole novel, but certainly a whole lecture.

  Afterwards Henry had supper with him and Emma – poor Emma, how many times had she listened to that lecture? But she claimed she never tired of it. She was looking a little pale and worn, having only recently recovered from a frightening episode of family illness, of which Henry now received the full story. In April Trixy had succumbed to typhoid fever while on a visit to the Isle of Wight, and Emma had gone to Shanklin to nurse her, only to fall ill with blood-poisoning herself, so that mother and daughter were ill in bed in adjoining rooms, while Du Maurier was unable to fly to their assistance because of his lecturing commitments. Henry, who still harboured a special fondness for Trixy, and had had a particular dread of typhoid ever since Balestier’s death, listened to this saga with sympathetic concern. Then he asked how the new novel was progressing. In contrast to his eagerness to solicit early opinions of Peter Ibbetson, Du Maurier had kept this second effort very much to himself so far.

  ‘Pretty well, I think,’ said Du Maurier modestly.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Emma enthused. ‘I’m always longing to find out what will happen in the next chapter.’

  ‘Ah, well, you’re biased, my dear,’ said Du Maurier fondly. ‘We must wait and see what the people at Harper think.’

  ‘Do you have a title for it yet?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s called Trilby,’ said Du Maurier. ‘That’s the name of the heroine.’

  ‘“Trilby”,’ Henry repeated. ‘Is it her first name or her second name?’

  ‘Her first name. “Trilby O’Ferrall”.’

  ‘She’s Irish?’

  ‘Scottish. The child of two rather disreputable Scottish parents, but born and brought up in Paris. Not that she was brought up in any proper sense. Her father was a drunkard, and her mother not much better.’

  ‘She’s orphaned at fifteen, poor thing, and left to look after her infant brother,’ Emma elaborated. ‘So she works as an artist’s model.’

  ‘“Trilby”,’ Henry said again, musingly, rolling the syllables on his tongue as if to suck the flavours of association from the name. As a title it was certainly more euphonious and memorable than Peter Ibbetson (he was never confident about where to put the e and the o in the surname when he wrote it down). ‘I seem to have heard it before, but not as a girl’s name.’

  ‘I came across it in a French fairy tale, when I was a boy,’ said Du Maurier. ‘Trilby was the name of the fairy, but the story for some reason was set in Scotland. Whether the name is French or Scottish I have no idea, but it caught my fancy, and stuck in my memory. It seemed appropriate for my chanteuse.’

  ‘I remember now!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘It was the name of Eugénie Guérin’s pet dog!’

  ‘Was it, by Jove?’ said Du Maurier, laughing. ‘Fortunately not many of my readers will have your knowledge of French literature, James.’ Superstitiously he touched the wood of the table. ‘If I’m lucky enough to have any readers, that is.’

  Henry enjoyed his Italian holiday. Siena was delightful, not yet ‘discovered’ by as many tourists as Florence or Rome, while crowded, vaporetto-ridden Venice still offered sanctuary and treasures and incomparable views to the discriminating visitor, especially if he had the good fortune to reside in a palazzo on the Grand Canal, with a gondola always at hand to waft him to some unfrequented church or unspoiled island in the lagoon. From Venice he went to Lausanne, where William, who was on sabbatical leave from Harvard, was spending the summer with Alice and their four children, two of them infants whom Henry had not seen before, while young Harry and Peggy had grown considerably since he had dandled them on his knee on his last visit to America. He was disconcerted by William’s departure on a walking tour not long after his arrival – there had been some misunderstanding about plans – and cut short his visit after ten days, which was however quite long enough for doing duty as genial uncle, and for Switzerland too, for that matter. He had never quite been able to see the point of Switzerland. He returned to London, with only a brief pause in Paris, in the middle of August. In his luggage was the complete draft of a play called Mrs Jasper, which he had written in the course of his travels.

  This was a light-hearted comedy of manners, verging on farce, loosely based on one of his own short stories, but set in England instead of the original Italy. The plot turned on the efforts of an unscrupulous mother to compromise a young man into marrying her daughter. The eponymous heroine, a young widow, at first gave her support to this plan, then recoiled against it and tried to help the young man to extricate himself from his engagement, only to fall in love with him herself and he with her. There were a great many other flirtations, jealousies, unrequited loves, and misunderstandings among the characters, which kept them in a constant flurry of exits and entrances, pursuing or hiding from one another, and there was a good deal of business with a photographic camera in the first act, which Henry thought would be a novelty. He saw the piece as a pure entertainment that would beguile the audience by the adroitness with which it juggled the balls of an admittedly exiguous plot. It would of course require actors endowed with comic élan and immaculate timing, and a charismatic actress in the title role.

  The one he had in mind was Ada Rehan, an Irish-American actress who was the star of the productions of Augustin Daly, himself an interesting theatrical phenomenon. Having made his reputation as a producer on Broadway, he had in recent years brought his company to London for several highly successful seasons at the Lyceum. He had been bold enough to include in his varied repertory productions of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It, in versions closer than usual to the original texts, which had been rapturously received, with special appreciation of Ada Rehan’s performances as Katherina and Rosalind. The venerable Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, had been so ravished that he had offered Daly his verse play about Robin Hood, The Foresters, on the understanding that Miss Rehan would play the part of Maid Marion, and a production was reported to be in preparation, with music commissioned from Arthur Sullivan.

  Henry had met Miss Rehan the previous autumn, just before the premiere of The American, and on that occasion she passed him a message from Daly, inviting him to submit a play with a good part for herself. The proposal was all the more enticing inasmuch as Daly had just announced that he intended to build a new theatre in Leicester Square as a permanent London home for his company, while continuing his operations in New York, thus opening up the prospect of having one’s work produced on both sides of the Atlantic by the same management. Henry had invited Daly to the first night of The American, and sent him two outlines for plays which failed to elicit any response. Now, however, he thought he had something that might appeal to both manager and actress. He wrote to Miss Rehan asking if he might read the p
lay to her, and she agreed readily, suggesting that it might take place one afternoon at the home of their mutual friends, Mr and Mrs Barrington, where they had first met.

  This couple were very happy to make their drawing room available for the reading, to play the part of an audience, and to provide tea between the acts. Ada Rehan was a little late, perhaps by design, for she obviously liked to ‘make an entrance’. She was an actress from the toes of her delicately fashioned shoes to the top of her elaborately coiffed hair, and smiled and fluttered her eyelashes and gestured expressively as she apologised for her lateness. She was tall and beautiful, and possessed of what one critic had called ‘a velvet voice’. When she had finished her little performance she subsided into the upright armchair prepared for her and assumed an attitude of studied attentiveness, while Henry sat on a similar chair facing her and read his play, and the Barringtons listened from the comfortable depths of a sofa. Miss Rehan did not laugh quite as much as he might have wished, and certainly not as much as the Barringtons, but he had a sense that she was smiling a good deal, and when he had finished she said: ‘Well, that was lovely. Thank you very much, Mr James.’

  The Barringtons added their plaudits, and then discreetly withdrew to allow author and actress to confer privately.

  ‘So – do you think it would “go”?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said.

  ‘And can you see yourself as Mrs Jasper? I must say that I believe you would be quite perfect.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think I can,’ she said, to his delight. ‘The part has great possibilities. I’m not sure I followed all the intricacies of the plot—’