by David Lodge
Living independently, he was able to dodge some of the more strenuous expeditions of the Du Mauriers, and also to decoy Kiki himself away from them. It seemed to Henry that his friend was in danger of overstraining himself in the effort to keep up the Whitby family traditions. Nevertheless he agreed to join Kiki on one of his favourite walks, along the clifftop path to the little fishing port of Staithes. Although it was a good ten miles, it was mostly level going once you had climbed out of Whitby, and they arranged to have a pony and trap meet them in Staithes to drive them home.
It was a beautiful, sunny morning. ‘One might almost say it’s warm,’ Henry remarked, as they strode along the cliffs towards Sandsend, passing the farmhouse said to be the model for the heroine’s abode in Sylvia’s Lovers.
Du Maurier, well aware of Henry’s reservations about the North Yorkshire climate, smiled. ‘The weather has been very kind to us this September,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember a better one.’
He was in good spirits, not only because of the weather, but also at having finally finished the illustrations for Trilby. ‘It’s been a terrible sweat,’ he said. ‘There are a hundred and twenty-one of them.’
‘A hundred and twenty-one!’ Henry was astonished. ‘I hope Harper’s people appreciate your effort.’
‘Oh yes, they’re very appreciative. They’re a bit nervous about the text, but they’re very happy with the pictures.’
‘Why are they nervous about the text?’
‘Well, as I think you know, my heroine is not as pure as the proverbial.’
‘Proverbial?’
‘The driven snow. I mean, she is really – she’s pure of heart – essentially innocent, essentially good. But not virgo intacta.’
‘Ah,’ said Henry. ‘The readers of Harper’s won’t like that – especially the American ones.’
‘That’s what they’re afraid of. But how could she be? The girl’s an orphan, struggling to make a living as a model in the Quartier Latin, in the eighteen-fifties. She has no family or friends to look after her. She sits for the figure – pour l’ensemble. Girls like that simply weren’t respectable. I know – I was there!’
‘I believe you,’ said Henry. ‘But truth to life has never been an adequate excuse in the eyes of Mrs Grundy. I’m amazed that Harper’s is prepared to risk her disapproval. What happens to your heroine? I mean apart from acquiring and losing her marvellous singing voice?’
‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ said Du Maurier, with a grin. ‘The serial starts in January.’
‘And will there be a picture of Trilby sitting for the figure, pour l’ensemble?’ Henry asked.
Du Maurier threw back his head and laughed. ‘Not likely!’ he said. ‘The most you will see of her in that line are her bare feet.’
They reached Staithes in the early afternoon. For such a small, remote place, squeezed into a narrow ravine that dropped abruptly from the moor to the sea, and overshadowed on one side by Boulby Cliff, the highest point on the whole of the East Coast according to Du Maurier, it seemed remarkably busy and thriving. As they descended the steep, twisting, cobbled main street they had constantly to step aside and press themselves against the walls of the cottages to allow the passage of horse-drawn carts taking the day’s catch to the rail-head above, or clattering down the hill unladen on their way back. With appetites sharpened by the fresh air and exercise they repaired immediately to the Cod and Lobster inn for what Henry called an ‘eponymous dinner’ (provoking blank looks from the landlady, who took their order in plain English from Du Maurier) washed down with good Yorkshire ale.
Perhaps the ale was unusually strong, for Du Maurier was particularly loquacious over the meal. He reverted to the subject of his dealings with Harper. It seemed that Trilby contained a passage of authorial polemic in favour of nudity, which the publishers wanted to cut out.
‘I have a theory, you see, Henry, that if only our climate allowed it, we should be much happier going around without clothes. There is nothing inherently shameful or indecent about the human body.’
‘The weather in North Yorkshire certainly precludes the experiment,’ said Henry, as he cracked open a lobster claw. ‘But even in Samoa – where I understand from Louis Stevenson the natives make do with very little raiment – even there I don’t think I would care to meet my friends in a state of nature. Most of us are simply not beautiful enough.’
‘Ah, but that’s because we neglect our bodies. And we neglect them because we cover them up with layers of cloth – and in the case of women, distort their natural shapes with whalebone and bustles and lacing and suchlike. Now if we saw each other habitually in a state of nature, as you call it, as a matter of course, we should take pains to exercise and diet to make our bodies strong and healthy and attractive.’
‘What about those who are irredeemably ugly or misshapen?’ Henry objected.
‘They wouldn’t reproduce, because nobody would marry them,’ said Du Maurier triumphantly, evidently seeing this as a knockdown argument. ‘By Darwin’s law of natural selection we would – in the course of a few generations – eliminate ugliness from the human race. We would also get rid of all the sniggering smut and furtive lust that surrounds the mere mention of the human body in polite society, and corrupts relations between men and women.’
‘An interesting theory, if somewhat utopian,’ Henry murmured, privately amused that the skinny, diminutive Du Maurier was so passionately commited to this cause.
‘That’s why the nude in art is so important,’ said Du Maurier. ‘It holds up the beau idéal of the human body, for our contemplation and emulation. But it can’t be done without models, like my Trilby, taking off their clothes. And since exposing one’s body to the opposite sex is simply not done in our society, the poor model is automatically cast beyond the pale. It’s not surprising that most of them are no better than they should be – at least they weren’t in Paris, when I was young.’
‘Do you still paint or draw from life?’ Henry ventured to ask.
Du Maurier smiled. ‘No, Emma wouldn’t approve. Anyway, I have no need to, in the kind of work I do. Though Sambourne wouldn’t agree – you know Sammy, don’t you?’
‘I’ve met him a few times,’ said Henry. Edward Linely Sambourne was one of the staff artists on Punch, specialising in political cartoons, but also contributing drawings of social life, often featuring pretty young women.
‘He had no proper art training, you know, so he uses photographs when he’s drawing figures, and copies them. He photographs the models naked, and then with their clothes on. He claims he needs to know the position of the limbs under the clothing to make the pose convincing.’
‘And what does Mrs Sambourne have to say about that?’ Henry asked, amused. ‘Or is he not married?’
‘Oh, he’s married all right,’ said Du Maurier, ‘but amazingly she doesn’t seem to mind a bit. I can’t think she’s seen many of his pictures, though. He showed me some of them once, and, well, frankly . . .’ Du Maurier glanced around the room and lowered his voice – ‘frankly, a lot of them are the sort of thing you might pick up in a shady print-shop in Paris. Girls larking about stark naked . . . or even worse – with just stockings on, or a hat or a mask, lolling about on sofas, showing their . . . well, showing everything. He has thousands of these pictures.’
‘Thousands!’
‘Yes. He belongs to the Camera Club in Charing Cross Road, where you can rent a studio and hire models by the hour. I can’t help feeling there’s something a bit “off” about it. There’s no doubt some of the models are really beautiful. But some are not, and of course they’ve all got hair.’
‘Hair?’ Henry was puzzled.
‘Pubic hair. It creates a pornographic effect.’
‘But Kiki,’ Henry objected, ‘if we all went around naked as you advocate, we should have to get used to that feature of the human anatomy.’
‘Yes, but since we don’t, it’s distasteful. Artists don’t depict pubic hair – tru
e artists, I mean.’ He was evidently a little bothered by the imputation of inconsistency, for he added musingly: ‘Anyway, women could always learn to shave – like men, but in a different place.’
Henry burst out laughing, and Du Maurier, who had not intended to make a joke, smiled sheepishly.
Afterwards they lounged about on the quayside, watching the men mending their nets and loading them into the long narrow open boats in preparation for the night’s fishing, and wandered up and down the crooked alleys and peered into sheds for gutting and smoking and salting fish, and gave pennies to the shoeless children who stared at them from the doorways of cottages. It was all rather too overwhelmingly smoky and smelly and fishy for Henry’s taste, but Du Maurier loved it, and kept taking out the little tablet of drawing paper he kept in his pocket, and sketching in pencil the outline of something that caught his attention, a boat or a building or a bonnet – for the women of Staithes wore a very distinctive article of that kind. He wanted to stay on until the evening to watch from the end of the long harbour wall the flotilla of boats going out to sea for the night’s fishing, and Henry indulged him. It was indeed a moving sight, so frail the craft seemed, setting sail towards the coming darkness under the ominous bulging brow of the great cliff. Then, after a warming dram at the inn, they made their rendezvous with the bespoken pony and trap, and returned to Whitby in this conveyance, much pleased with their outing. In Henry’s case, however, the agreeable mood was abruptly dissipated by something that was waiting for him when he got back to his lodgings: a message from Daly to say that the opening of Mrs Jasper had been postponed once more, until January.
Frustrating as this news was, it did give Henry an excuse for cutting short his holiday and returning to London – namely, to investigate the cause of delay – for he felt he had enjoyed enough of the delights of Whitby and environs for the time being. Du Maurier commiserated when he explained the situation the next day. ‘It’s a shocking way to treat a writer of your distinction,’ he said. ‘But, as I keep telling Gerald, theatre people are totally unreliable. You simply can’t trust them. Not that it makes any difference. He’s dead set on becoming an actor. I was hoping you would have a word with him, Henry, when he comes up here next weekend.’
The plan to make Gerald into a solicitor had been abandoned long ago. Instead he had gone into ‘business’, working for a shipping company, but he spent all his spare time in amateur theatricals and concert parties, sometimes with his sister May, and was beginning to make a name for himself and get written up in the newspapers.
‘I’m afraid you must resign yourself, Kiki,’ said Henry. ‘It’s a strange, compulsive business, the urge to make plays. To act in them, or write ’em, or produce ’em. It’s no use appealing to reason. If Gerald really – I mean really wants to be an actor – nothing on earth is going to stop him.’
He was of course speaking for himself as much as for Gerald.
On his return to London he sought an early interview with Daly. The manager told him frankly that his theatre had still not yet found its feet, or its audience. Tennyson’s The Foresters was in rehearsal, due to open at the beginning of October, and Daly was plainly worried that it might fail. ‘There’s no real interest, no advance take to speak of,’ he said. ‘Tennyson’s a dead lion as far as the public’s concerned.’ He didn’t think it would be a good idea to follow it with a new play by a comparatively untried playwright. Accordingly he had decided to hold back Mrs Jasper until after Christmas and to push a reliable classic, The School for Scandal, which had served him well for many years, into the gap. Henry accepted this decision without argument. He had no wish to see his play exposed to a public scrutiny rendered sceptical in advance by the company’s sorry record. Failure in the theatre was contagious. So he possessed his soul in patience, though, as he wrote to William, he longed ‘for the reality, the ingenuity, and the combined amusement and disgust of rehearsals’.
Daly’s apprehensions about The Foresters proved well-founded. It was enjoyed by the first-night audience and kindly reviewed by the critics, but was a commercial failure – the house was reputedly ‘papered’ for every performance. Henry reflected with some complacency that, at this rate, Daly would soon be counting on Mrs Jasper to rescue his season and his reputation, so would put maximum effort into making it succeed. This motivation was certainly apparent, but manifested itself in an unwelcome form in the manager’s next communication, at the end of October. He had reread Mrs Jasper, and considered that it was still too long. He asked for further cuts and revisions. Henry wearily agreed to go over it one more time, but after six days reported ‘utter failure’. It was not possible, he believed, to remove anything substantial without ‘detriment to elementary clearness – to the rigid logic of the action and the successive definite steps of the story’. He offered to consider any specific cuts Daly himself might propose, but the manager did not take up this invitation. He did however ask for a ‘snappier title’. Henry made one or two suggestions, which the manager rejected. In a mood of barely controlled exasperation Henry sent him a list of sixty-four alternatives titles: The Rescue, The Reprieve, The Remedy, The Release, The Response, Comfort, Compassion, Contrivance, Compunction . . . the list covered a whole sheet of paper in three columns. Daly, who seemed impervious to irony, rejected them all because they did not draw attention to Ada Rehan’s role – as, of course, the original title had. Eventually they agreed on Mrs Jasper’s Way.
Silence fell again. Towards the end of November he grew restive: if the play was to be mounted in January, rehearsals would have to start soon. Meeting Ada Rehan at a party one Sunday evening, he made this point to her and was disconcerted when she casually replied that she believed there were to be one or two readings of the play at the theatre in the coming week. When he said he had not been given notice of them, she looked embarrassed and said that no doubt it was because the times had not yet been fixed. It was impossible to continue the conversation further in the presence of others, and soon afterwards she left the party without their exchanging further words. Henry waited in vain for a message from Daly until the following Saturday morning.
He was having his breakfast when Smith appeared at the threshold of the dining room with the first delivery of post on a silver salver. ‘Will you read your letters in here, sir, or shall I leave them on your desk in the study?’ he asked.
‘Bring them here, Smith. Thank you.’
Smith laid the mail on the table beside him and withdrew. Recognising Daly’s handwriting on one of the envelopes, Henry plucked it from the sheaf and tore it open. Inside was a curt note saying that there had been two readings of the play at the theatre that week which had revealed major problems, and that Daly proposed to hold another reading with the full cast on the following Wednesday morning so that Henry could see for himself what they were. ‘Basically,’ Daly concluded, ‘it lacks story.’
Henry had consumed only one of his customary three coddled eggs. He pushed aside the dish containing the remainder, and supporting his head in his hands he groaned aloud. After all this time, after the play had been unconditionally accepted and an agreement drawn up, after so many revisions and deletions and fine adjustments to dialogue and stage directions, to be told after all that ‘it lacked story’! How in the name of God was he supposed to put more story into it at this time of day? At first he was devastated; then he grew angry. Clearly Daly, rattled by the string of failures in his famous ‘season’, had lost his nerve, and his faith in Mrs Jasper’s Way, to the extent of forgetting his own once favourable opinion of it. What most angered Henry was the sly going behind his back, trying out the play with the actors before Henry had had a chance to introduce it to them himself and describe the nature of the roles they were to play.
He went to the reading on the following Wednesday morning determined to rectify this injustice – to take the company by the scruff of its neck and make them see how the thing should be done – only to find himself completely outmanoeuvred. The actors w
ere already gathered on stage, in a silent and wary semicircle, with their playbooks in their hands, when James arrived. Even Ada Rehan only flashed him a brief, wan smile as Daly performed perfunctory introductions, naming the actors one by one. She looked pale and drawn. Then, just as Henry was taking out his notes to address the cast, Daly suggested he should take a seat in the stalls.
‘Shouldn’t I say a few words first?’ Henry asked.
‘I don’t think that’s necessary, Mr James,’ said Daly. ‘We’ve been through the play a couple of times already, as I told you.’ He glanced at his pocket watch. ‘I think we’d better get on. Are you ready, ladies and gentlemen?’ With a stiff nod, that he hoped expressed dignified resentment, Henry vacated the stage, and went down the steps at the side into the auditorium.
Daly began reading out the stage directions. ‘“An old-fashioned lawn or small pleasance, in a slightly neglected or deserted condition, on a height or slope, commanding, in the distance, across a valley, a little winding, shining river—”’ He stopped in mid-sentence. ‘I guess I needn’t read out all this scene-setting. You’ve all got the picture. So, Sir Montagu and Mrs Wigmore, please.’ And the actors playing these parts began to read them in a stammering monotone, like children ‘called on’ in the classroom, with heads lowered and eyes bent on their playbooks. Those who followed did no better. They rushed at their lines and gabbled them as if they couldn’t wait to get to the end of the speeches. They stumbled over the syntax, and put emphases in the wrong place, or left them out entirely. Above all they utterly failed to convey any sense that they found the story they were presenting remotely interesting or amusing or believable. It was without doubt the worst presentation of a playwright’s words by professional performers that Henry had ever witnessed. Even Ada Rehan seemed to lose all her vivacity and sense of timing. Her pallor became deathly, her features positively haggard, as the ghastly travesty proceeded. She was a good enough actress to know what was happening and to feel some shame at her own involvement.
