Author, Author

by David Lodge

  ‘Venice will give you ideas,’ said Henry encouragingly.

  ‘I doubt it. What is there left to say? All the best writers have browsed over the place and nibbled it clean – yourself included.’ At the most she might manage to produce a story or two. ‘I see my output dwindling into silence,’ she said, and then with a smile: ‘Unless of course we were to write that play together.’

  ‘Alas!’ he sighed. ‘I’m no further forward in my theatrical endeavours than when I last spoke to you.’ And he told her the whole saga of his latest dealings with Compton.

  ‘Still, you have written another play, Henry—’

  ‘Partly written—’

  ‘I’m sure that sooner or later you will succeed,’ she said earnestly.

  The last service he was able to perform for her was to see her off from the Gare de Lyon on the next stage of her journey, a day before he himself was due to depart. The great caravan of trunks and packing cases had gone on ahead to Venice, but she still had a formidable number of bags and boxes and valises, the transportation of which from hotel to cab to train he supervised. Having seen them safely stowed in the guard’s van, he returned to Fenimore, who was standing on the platform next to the open door of the wagon lit.

  ‘Rest assured, your luggage will be well looked after,’ he said to her. ‘I tipped the guard and asked him to give it his particular attention.’

  ‘Thank you, Henry.’ She looked at him fondly. ‘You’re a good man.’

  Henry was slightly flustered by the compliment. ‘Really, Fenimore, such a – such an ordinary courtesy does not deserve so – so—’

  ‘I don’t mean just the luggage,’ she said. ‘You’ve been most kind, most attentive all through these last few days. I’m very grateful.’

  ‘It was a pleasure, my dear Fenimore.’

  ‘I hate goodbyes,’ she said.

  The station was all steam and smoke and diffused light, like one of the extreme Impressionist paintings that they had seen the day before. He commented on this for want of something else to say, but the platform was clamorous with sounds – exhalations of steam, bells, whistles, shouts, curses, and even, somewhere in the distance, a band – and Fenimore did not appear to hear him. She did not have her ear trumpet to hand.

  ‘When shall I see you again?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know – perhaps in the autumn. I like to see something of Italy every year if I can manage it,’ he said. ‘And Venice is always an attraction.’

  ‘What?’ She cupped her ear.

  He raised his voice. ‘I said, Venice is always an attraction. In fact I’ve often thought of getting a little place there myself—’

  ‘Have you really?’ Fenimore’s face lit up.

  ‘Just a couple of rooms, you know, something very cheap!’

  ‘I’ll look out for something suitable.’

  ‘Well, it’s just an idea – a dream—’ Henry was already regretting that he had mentioned it.

  ‘Then we could write our play together.’

  ‘Yes, indeed – but first, you know – I must have a success first, on my own account.’

  A railway official standing nearby blew a piercing blast on his whistle. Doors began to slam all along the train. ‘Montez, madame, s’il vous plaît!’ the man said to Fenimore.

  ‘Goodbye, Henry,’ she said, extending her hand. ‘Till we meet again in Venice.’

  ‘Yes indeed.’ He took her hand and, being in Paris, raised it gallantly to his lips, but to his surprise and some alarm, she drew him into a kind of flurried embrace and kissed him briefly on the cheek, burying her face in his beard, before climbing into the train. The official slammed the door shut behind her and he saw her appear at the window of the corridor, walking towards him, waving and timidly smiling, but receding as the train slowly drew out of the station. He stood with his hat in his hand, waving with the other, until the last carriage was out of sight. Then he put on his hat, and, taking out a pocket handkerchief, wiped his bearded cheek. He turned and walked towards the Sortie sign, with a certain sense of relief, and the agreeable consciousness of having a day left in Paris to do as he pleased. He might call at the Times Bureau and see if Morton Fullerton was free to dine with him.

  8

  NEAR the top of the heap of mail that awaited him at De Vere Gardens on his return from Paris was an invitation to the premiere of a new play by Arthur Pinero, entitled The Second Mrs Tanqueray, at the St James’s Theatre. Henry went to it with an interest quickened by already knowing something about the production through the involvement of his friend Elizabeth Robins. It was apparently a daring, ‘Ibsenish’ piece, about a woman with a past which finally caught up with her, destroying her happiness and her marriage. Pinero and George Alexander had wanted to cast a little-known but highly promising young actress called Mrs Patrick Campbell as the heroine, but she was contracted to another management, so Elizabeth Robins had been offered and accepted the part. At the last possible moment, however, Mrs Campbell became available, and Miss Robins, being appealed to, very generously yielded to her. Henry felt she had been badly treated, though Elizabeth Robins denied it. But the price of her generosity rapidly became evident at the first night. The mercurial, desperate and doomed Paula Tanqueray was a great role, and allowed Mrs Patrick Campbell, ably supported by Alexander as her devoted husband, to demonstrate that she was a great actress. The audience was spellbound; their applause at the end rapturous. Henry had never been in a theatre before when the sense of a ‘success’ was so palpable – almost physical, like a powerful aroma carried from some banquet of delicious food. He inhaled it hungrily; it renewed his appetite to sate himself on such a feast. How he envied Pinero taking his bow at the end of the play, bow after bow! How he pitied poor Elizabeth Robins to whom he spoke in the entr’acte, valiantly praising her rival’s performance, and whom he glimpsed hurrying away from the theatre at the end, anxious, no doubt, to avoid any more such tests of her self-control.

  It was no surprise that The Second Mrs Tanqueray was widely acclaimed by the critics and that ‘House Full’ notices soon appeared outside the St James’s Theatre. What particularly impressed Henry was that Pinero and Alexander between them had achieved popular success with a play that challenged its audience with an uncompromisingly ‘unhappy’ ending – indeed, a tragic one. Tanqueray knew his wife had a disreputable past when he married her, but believed she could be redeemed by his love, only to discover that the prejudices of society and the conflicts in the woman’s own character undid his good intentions and drove her to suicide in the end. Coming so soon after the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan, Mrs Tanqueray further enhanced Alexander’s reputation as an actor-manager. He seemed to have a golden touch – what might it not do for Henry’s plays, especially the one he had been working on most recently?

  Accordingly he wrote to Alexander requesting a meeting, to which the manager responded promptly and positively, saying that he was always looking for new plays by good writers. They met in his office at the St James’s, in King Street. It was the only theatre in this exclusive part of London, and somewhat removed from the main entertainment district, but it was an area that Henry knew well and felt at home in. The London Library was just round the corner in St James’s Square, and his club, the Reform, was only a few minutes’ walk away in Pall Mall. The theatre had an elegant Georgian façade with a pillared portico and a balcony above it where patrons could take the air on warm evenings between the acts. Pausing on the pavement to look up at the building before he went inside, Henry was struck by how much more suitable and congenial a home it would make for his dramatic work than the underground Opera Comique at the seedier end of the Strand, and the very name – his patron saint – was auspicious. He sprang up the steps and pushed through the polished swing doors more eager than ever to secure Alexander’s interest.

  In the event the meeting went exceedingly well. Henry did not exactly warm to the young actor-manager, but he was favourably impressed by him. He had the air
of someone who knew exactly what he wanted, and what needed to be done to attain it. The whole theatre had the atmosphere of an extremely well-run ship whose captain was respected and a little feared by the crew. His office was in immaculate order; only the large mirror on one wall seemed a little incongruous and hinted at an element of personal vanity in the occupant. But he was undoubtedly a very handsome man, with a strong assertive chin and a fine head of naturally wavy hair, who might be forgiven for an occassional complacent glance at his own reflection. He received Henry dressed in a perfectly tailored pale grey suit with trousers pressed to a knife-edge in the latest fashion, shook his hand, and pulled up a chair for him with grave courtesy. ‘I’m at your disposal for three-quarters of an hour, Mr James,’ he said.

  Henry described three items in his current portfolio of half-written plays and scenarios, chosen because they all had commanding roles for a leading actor; but he particularly ‘pushed’ the play about Guy Domville, at present provisionally entitled The Hero, and to his delight it was this one that seemed most to take Alexander’s fancy. Henry undertook to send drafts or scenarios of all three plays for his consideration, but privately he decided to give priority to The Hero. For this purpose he withdrew to a hotel in Ramsgate for several weeks in June and July, and gave up the use of his flat to William and Alice, who wanted to spend some time in London on their own before they collected their children from Switzerland and finally returned to America. He chose Ramsgate because it was cheap but also because it was such a notoriously Cockney seaside resort that he was sure he wouldn’t run into anybody he knew, and thus be distracted from his task. He derived some amusement from the contrast between its cheerful crowds sucking their rock candy and eating their cockles and mussels and dropping their aitches with carefree abandon, and the refined historical drama on which he was engaged.

  Early in July he sent Alexander a revised version of his first act, together with detailed scenarios of the second and third. Admitting that ‘my dénouement does not belong to the class of ending conventionally termed happy’, he artfully invoked the precedent of Alexander’s current success: ‘Mrs Tanqueray seems to me to have performed the very valuable service of showing that the poor dear old British public can rise to a dénouement that isn’t a mere dab of rose-colour.’ He sent Alexander at the same time brief scenarios for the two other plays, but to his delight Alexander plumped unhesitatingly for The Hero. It was, he said, in his letter of acceptance, ‘the most beautiful poetical play produced in this country since Olivia’. He evidently didn’t know, or had forgotten, that Henry had himself reviewed Olivia, a feeble adaptation of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield by W. G. Wills, less than favourably on its first presentation in 1878. The comparison took some of the savour from Alexander’s tribute, but this was obviously sincere and very gratifying. When it came to agreeing terms Alexander drove a hard bargain, offering a basic £5 per performance and setting a ceiling of £2,000 on royalties, but Henry was again impressed by the manager’s fair and unambiguous dealing. The only slight shadow over this new and exciting partnership was the prospect – yet again – of delay. Not only had Mrs Tanqueray settled into what was obviously going to be a very long run at the St James’s, but Alexander now admitted that he had in principle agreed to put on a new play by Henry Arthur Jones immediately after it. Alexander hinted that he was doubtful if Jones’s play would be ready in time, and Henry, selfishly hoping he would be proved right, worked hard to finish Guy Domville (as they had now agreed to call it) so that it would be available to go into production the moment it was decided that Mrs Tanqueray must close.

  Meanwhile Daly’s long-becalmed production of Mrs Jasper hove in sight. His new theatre had opened in late June with a revival of the popular Shrew, but the plays that followed had not gone down well with either the critics or the public. The melodrama The Hunchback was perceived as too old, the French comedy Love in Tandem too frivolous and the farce Dollars and Sense too broad to be worthy of Ada Rehan’s talents. When Henry came up from Ramsgate in August to consult about sets and costumes, the manager seemed less confident and expansive than at their first meeting, and complained about the clannishness and conservatism of the London theatregoing public. ‘Every house has its little flock of patrons, who go like sheep to see every darned thing that’s put on in it,’ he said, sucking on a savagely chewed cigar. ‘When we played at the Lyceum, the same people who went to Irving’s shows came to ours. But they won’t come to ’em now we’re in a brand-new theatre. It’s the damnedest thing.’ He planned to open Mrs Jasper in the late autumn, by which time Daly’s Theatre should have attracted a following. He had a model of the stage set to show Henry, and some designs for costumes. It was a long time since Henry had worked on the play, and he was impatient for rehearsals to begin so that he could, as it were, roll up his sleeves and get to grips with it again.

  With two new plays accepted for production in the near future by two leading London managements, Henry felt he was on the brink of really making his mark on the theatrical scene, yet after so many disappointments he was well aware of how fragile this happy state of affairs really was – like a house of cards which one must touch only with extreme caution and bated breath. He restrained himself with difficulty from pressing his managers for dates and decisions in case this should have the effect of turning them, however illogically, against his darling projects. More than ever he hoped for financial rewards from this source, for his income from writing had sunk to an alarmingly low level. He had published only one new piece of work so far that year, ‘The Middle Years’, and the sales of his books – those that were still in print – were depressing in the extreme. ‘Tell it not in Samoa – or at least not in Tahiti; but I don’t sell ten copies,’ he wrote to Louis Stevenson, and he was hardly exaggerating. It was fortunate that the American rents he had donated to Alice on the death of their father had reverted to him under her will, together with the untouched capital that had accumulated while she held them, otherwise he might have been seriously embarrassed.

  It was partly for reasons of economy that he decided not to go to Italy that autumn, as he had vaguely hinted to Fenimore that he might, and partly because he felt uncomfortable under the pressure of her expectation that he would join her in Venice. In mid-July he received a letter from their mutual friend Mrs Curtis, a long-term Venetian resident who was helping Fenimore look for permanent quarters, and, having heard from her that Henry too was seeking a pied-à-terre in the city, now offered her services in that regard. He wrote back immediately to say that he must have given Miss Woolson a wrong impression of the seriousness of his intention, that it was really only a daydream that he indulged in from time to time, but had no practical prospect of realising. He trusted Mrs Curtis to convey the gist of this message to Fenimore. He also mentioned in his letter that he hoped to visit Italy in the winter but had learned from experience not to make hard-and-fast plans. This too was designed for Fenimore’s ear.

  With Italy indefinitely postponed, Henry felt he needed – and deserved – some more modest holiday after the completion and delivery of Guy Domville, and therefore accepted a suggestion of Du Maurier’s that he should join him and his family in their beloved Whitby in September. He had done this once before, in ’87, when Lowell was also staying there, and had gone up again two years later, when Lowell alone was the attraction, the Du Mauriers having deserted it that summer for Dieppe. He had found it difficult on those occasions fully to share his friends’ enthusiasm for the place, and without the inducement of their company would hardly have lingered for long. He felt this ambivalence again on revisiting Whitby. It was undoubtedly historic and picturesque, but its climate and topography were a constant challenge to visitors. Seen at a distance, on a sunny day, from high up on the moors, the huddled red and brown buildings of the port, the graceful skeletal ruins of the abbey on the grassy clifftop above, and the long arms of the harbour stretching out into the blue, white-capped waves, one grasping a lighthouse like a candle
in its fist, made a delightful picture. But bitterly cold winds blew off the North Sea on to this rugged stretch of Yorkshire coast even in September, and the town was built along a river estuary in a deep and narrow valley, so that any attempt to get out of it entailed stiff climbs up pitiless gradients.

  Admittedly the Du Maurier family, or tribe, as he felt inclined to call them, for they were so many now – sons-in-law and grandchildren as well as children – seemed to thrive on the regimen of a British seaside holiday in this bracing setting. They bathed in the freezing sea off the beach that ran north-westwards from the harbour, and played cricket on the sand at low tide. They rowed up the river Esk, pulling their boat over the shallow dam, and climbed up precipitous paths to picnic beside the waterfall at Cock Mill. These pursuits and excursions were familiar to Henry, and to a large percentage of the British population, from the pictorial adventures of the ‘Brown Family’, a thinly disguised version of the Du Mauriers, which appeared regularly in the pages of Punch. But somehow the drawings didn’t convey the chill of the winds or the steepness of the inclines. Perhaps the former disadvantage might have been less apparent earlier in the season, in July or August, but Du Maurier, with typical thrift, took his holidays in September, when rates were lower. Admittedly he needed to rent a house of some considerable size to accommodate his extended family and their servants – Trixy and Charles were there this year with their three boys, and Sylvia and Arthur with their firstborn, George, named after his grandfather. Henry politely declined the offer of a bed in St Hilda’s Crescent, where one always seemed to be crunching sand and seashells under one’s feet, and people were perpetually running up and down the stairs and slamming the doors and calling out for each other – his godson Guy as lustily as anyone. Instead he took Lowell’s old rooms in a cottage down by the harbour, near the drawbridge that spanned the narrow entrance to the broader estuary. It revived pleasant memories of his friend to watch, as Lowell had loved to watch, the drawbridge being raised to let the big ships glide through with barely a yard to spare on each side.