by David Lodge
What was happening of course, as Henry grasped after only ten minutes, was that a trap had been set for him. Daly had designed the reading to be as bad as possible because he had already decided, for his own sordid financial reasons, which were themselves the consequence of his managerial incompetence, to cancel the production of Mrs Jasper’s Way as being too risky a venture, and he hoped to get Henry to agree by demonstrating that the play was sure to fail. It would not have been necessary for him explicitly to instruct his actors to perform the piece badly. It would have been enough to deny them any advice or direction on how to perform it well, to suggest by sneers and sighs at the earlier readings the hopelessness of the case, and above all to keep the author at a distance.
Henry sat through the proceedings with a stony, impassive countenance, though inwardly he fumed with rage. He mentally rehearsed what he would say to Daly at the end, so that he would not lose his composure. The end came mercifully soon, because they did the whole play at breakneck speed, without intervals. Ada Rehan came to the front of the stage and stumbled through the little epilogue he had written specially for her, shot him one agonised glance, as from a soul in torment, and fled into the wings, rapidly followed by the rest of the cast. Daly sauntered to the side of the stage, and came heavily down the steps into the auditorium. Henry rose from his seat at the front of the stalls, buttoned up his overcoat, and waited for him.
‘Well, Mr James?’ said Daly. ‘What d’you think?’
Henry paused for a moment before giving his answer. ‘I shall take some hours to become perfectly clear to myself as to the reflections which this occasion – taken in conjunction with your note of Saturday – causes me to make. And then I will write to you. Good day.’ Without waiting to see the effect of this speech on Daly’s countenance, he turned on his heel and walked out of the theatre.
That evening he wrote a letter to Daly, to be posted on the morrow, saying that he would have been glad to have been informed at an earlier moment of the year during which his play had been in the manager’s hands that it was fundamentally unsuited to his purpose – ‘Your few words of Saturday so definitely express, in spite of their brevity, or perhaps by reason of the same, the sudden collapse of your own interest in it, that I withdraw it from your theatre without delay and beg you to send me back the MS. For myself – I cannot for a moment profess that the scene I witnessed on your stage yesterday threw any light on the character of the play.’
Daly promptly returned the manuscript with a letter in which he defended his conduct, adducing his expenditure on set designs and costumes in the summer (which must have cost him all of twelve guineas) as evidence of commitment to the play. He concluded: ‘it was you who offered me the play in the first place, and it is you who now request its return. I am satisfied to accept your word as compliment to my judgement now as then.’ This haughty response provoked Henry into another much longer letter, detailing the entire history of their dealings over the play to show that nothing in them had prepared him for the fundamental objection to it that Daly had made at the last possible moment. But this letter was written more for his own satisfaction and relief rather than in any hope of making Daly contrite or even embarrassed. The man, as he told Elizabeth Robins, was a cad.
His friendship with this young lady had developed steadily over the past year or two. He had helped her with advice on plays by Ibsen and Dumas fils and other foreign writers that she and her partner were thinking of producing, while she in turn gladly submitted to having his work-in-progress read to her, and gave him the benefit of her professional opinion. Of all his friends, she was the one best qualified by experience to sympathise with his ill-treatment by Daly. She was the first person he informed of the reading débâcle, in a brief note written the very same day, and he called on her not long afterwards in her flat in Manchester Square at the top of seventy concrete stairs, and kept her up until one in the morning, pouring out his bitter sense of betrayal. ‘Daly must be laughing up his sleeve,’ he said. ‘Because he has won – he has got me to withdraw my play, so he can pretend it was my own choice. I could have forced him to make the first move. I could have made him cancel the production.’
‘No, you made the right decision,’ said Miss Robins. ‘Once a producer has lost faith in a play it’s doomed. You’ve had a lucky escape.’
‘A lucky escape?’ Henry couldn’t see any luck at all in his situation.
‘I mean, suppose you had somehow forced him, or persuaded him, to go through with it, and done all the revisions he demanded – rewriting it after every rehearsal, right up to the first night – it still wouldn’t have worked, not if he and the actors didn’t believe in it. I know – I’ve been through that kind of horror myself.’ She shuddered expressively.
‘Somehow I can’t draw much consolation from that thought,’ said Henry. ‘The experience of last Wednesday was so painful it blots out all hypothetical horrors.’
‘Perhaps some other management might be interested,’ Miss Robins suggested.
‘No, no, I’ve finished with this play. Daly has spoiled it for me for ever,’ Henry said gloomily. ‘The idea of trying to find another producer for it fills me with nausea. I must go,’ he added, seeing her stifle a yawn.
‘Well, it is getting late,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘But you’re not going to give up the theatre in disgust, I hope?’
‘No,’ he said. And then, after a meditative pause, he added: ‘I’ll give it one more year.’
The thought calmed him, and became his mantra in the days and weeks that followed. One more year. The fact that a calendar year was coming to an end and a new one would soon begin, lent a satisfying logic to his resolution. He was in no mood for Christmas festivities, and declined the several invitations he received, spending the holiday contentedly alone at De Vere Gardens, reading, catching up on correspondence, and simply musing, with Tosca lying voluptuously on his lap, stroking her gleaming coat. He dressed for Christmas dinner, even though he was alone, and was served by Smith with proper ceremony, but ate the meal with a book propped up in front of him. A blessed quiet reigned in the street below his window. On Boxing Day he took Tosca for a walk in the Park and watched the horse-riders on Rotten Row and the swimmers taking their traditional dip in the Serpentine, without meeting or seeing anyone he knew. Sitting by the fire that evening he sketched out an idea for a play, a dark melodrama that he provisionally called The Promise. It would involve, for the first time in his work, a murder – the murder of a child. He quite shocked himself with the evil deed his imagination had conjured up, but as always the mere confirmation that one was capable of generating a new idea was enormously cheering.
On the 29th he wrote to William and Alice, saying: ‘I have passed no more selfishly complacent Christmas, in the cheerful void left by the almost universal social flight to the country.’ Towards the end of his long letter he gave an account of the collapse of the production of Mrs Jasper’s Way, presenting himself as relieved to have severed all connection with the cad, Daly. ‘It was none the less for a while a lively disgust and disappointment,’ he admitted, ‘– a waste of patient and ingenious labour and a sacrifice of coin much counted on. But à la guerre comme à la guerre. I mean to wage this war ferociously for one year more – 1894 – and then (unless the victory and the spoils have by that time become more proportionate than hitherto to the humiliations and vulgarities and disgusts, all the dishonour and chronic insult incurred) to “chuck” the whole intolerable experiment and return to more elevated and more independent courses.’
One more year.
PART THREE
1
‘ONE more year.’ He had not forgotten making that bargain with fate at the end of 1893, but in the event he had been obliged to wait slightly longer – till the fifth day of 1895 – to discover whether or not he would succeed as a playwright. He had underestimated (though he should have known better, given what he had already experienced) the chronic delays, the endemic frustrations, the mu
ltiplicity of unforeseen obstacles, that seemingly attended every theatrical venture. The whole of 1894 had passed with Guy Domville still waiting impatiently in the wings of the St James’s to ‘come on’, as Mrs Tanqueray ended its long run only to be succeeded by the almost equally extended run of Jones’s The Masqueraders. The success of that play had been all the more frustrating for being unforeseen – though he suspected Alexander of having misled him about its prospects in order to secure his option on Guy Domville. Theatre people, managers anyway, were blithely and chronically mendacious about such matters – they simply told you whatever they thought you wanted to hear, and whatever it suited their interest to have you believe, at any given moment. If Alexander had been perfectly frank in the summer of 1893 when they had their first meetings, and had told him that in all probability he would not be able to put on Guy Domville for another eighteen months, he might very well have decided to take it elsewhere. Not that that would necessarily have been to his advantage, for he would merely have encountered another set of delays, frustrations, and obstacles from a different source. At least Alexander was an efficient and hard-working producer. It was not his fault that he had gone down with German measles just after The Masqueraders closed, so that rehearsals for Guy Domville had to be postponed for three weeks. If it hadn’t been for that unlucky circumstance the play in which all his hopes of dramatic glory were now invested would have been put to the test just inside the stipulated calendar year. But now, at last, the waiting was a matter of hours.
How many hours he could not precisely calculate. He had heard a distant clock strike the half, but of which hour? It might be three, or four, or five. It could hardly be only half past two, since he had not gone to bed until after midnight (Alexander had called for a second, late dress rehearsal) and he felt as if he had had at least a few hours’ sleep; but he sensed that it could not yet be past six o’clock – the silence in the street outside was too profound. The pitch darkness of his curtained bedroom gave no clue – that would last until well after seven o’clock in the depths of a London winter. He could of course fumble for a match and look at his watch, lying on the bedside table where he always left it on retiring, but in truth he didn’t really want to know the time. If it was only a quarter past three or four he would be depressed by the thought of how many hours he had to get through before Smith rapped on the door and brought him his hot water. He felt wide awake. It was going to be a long vigil – that was already evident. It would last right up till the moment the curtain rose that evening at the St James’s – no, longer than that, because he had no intention of sitting and suffering in the theatre while his fate was decided.
The original plan, concocted with Gosse, had been to spend the evening in the saloon bar of some quiet public house in the vicinity, where his friend, hurrying out in the entr’actes, might give him brief bulletins of how the play was going; but on reflection this seemed a bad idea. He envisaged himself sitting alone in a corner of the pub over a pint of ale, watching the hands slowly move round the face of the clock over the bar, speculating futilely about the progress of the play, but unable to think of anything else. It would be unendurable. Accordingly he had written to Gosse that afternoon, cancelling their arrangement and saying that he had decided to fill the time by watching somebody else’s play. He had it in mind to see Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which had just opened at the Haymarket. The Times had given it a favourable review, but not too favourable. Their critic shared, even if he expressed it more mildly, his own opinion that Wilde’s dramatic art consisted wholly of giving tired theatrical devices a superficial gloss of wit. What was it he had said? ‘Mr Wilde’s passion is to adorn the commonplace with epigrams.’ Something like that. But it sounded as if the piece was diverting enough to serve his purpose, which was simple distraction. When it ended, or before if necessary, he would stroll over to the St James’s in time to watch from the wings the cast take their curtain calls, and if the reception warranted it, to take a bow himself. That would be at about eleven. God in heaven! He still had almost an entire day to get through before his suspense would be relieved, for better or worse.
The distant clock struck the three-quarters.
‘One more year.’ Where had it gone? What, creatively, had he achieved in it? Nothing, certainly, in the dramatic line, except the usual excruciating business of cutting and trimming Guy Domville as it went through rehearsals. He had sent a scenario of The Promise to Compton, thinking that the part of the hero would appeal to him, but Compton had rejected it so promptly and emphatically, recoiling in such horror from the subject, that he was discouraged from trying it on anyone else. Perhaps one day he might turn it into a novella. His earlier proposal to Compton of the Monte Carlo comedy had also come to nothing: after an absurdly long-drawn-out correspondence it became evident that there was nothing about the plot that Compton positively liked and that his suggested changes amounted to a prescription for writing an entirely different play. What a waste of time! He had conceived no fresh ideas for plays since then which had progressed further than the pages of his notebook.
And what had he published in the past year? A couple of stories in The Yellow Book, and Theatricals, which was nothing but a sad testament to frustrated ambition, consisting of two plays, Tenants (originally Mrs Vibert) and Disengaged (originally Mrs Jasper), which in spite of all his efforts had failed to reach the stage. Although he had prefaced this volume with an elaborately humble authorial Note, admitting that it commemorated practical failure, and pleading only for indulgence in the compensatory idea of ‘virtual’ performance in the reader’s mind, he had nourished secret hopes that reviewers might take his part against the producers who had at first encouraged and then turned against his work – lamenting that the theatregoing public had been denied the pleasure of seeing the plays, and even calling for new efforts to stage them. Vain hopes! The reviews had ranged from tepid to icy, and neither Hare nor Daly would have been caused a moment’s discomfort by any of them. It was an extra source of chagrin that Daly’s fortunes had taken a turn for the better immediately after his procured abortion – one could really call it no less – of Mrs Jasper. The production of Twelfth Night he had mounted in its place last January had been a huge hit, and Daly’s Theatre had subsequently gone from strength to strength.
So, two tales and one book of plays – was that all he had to show for 1894? There was the little article puffing Du Maurier’s Trilby in Harper’s Weekly – but to recall that piece was to recall the state in which he wrote it: still reeling in shock from Fenimore’s death, struggling to finish it and send it off to the magazine before he journeyed to Italy to deal with the aftermath of the ghastly tragedy.
He groaned softly, turned over on to his stomach and buried his face in the pillow. The last thing he wanted to think about was poor Fenimore – now he would never get back to sleep. But the creative dearth on which he had been brooding had surely been caused in part by her death. It had taken him nearly a year to get over it, if indeed he had yet done so. It seemed that he hadn’t, for already a sickening recollection of the emotions with which he had received the dreadful news, in ever more devastating instalments, was rising irrepressibly in his consciousness like waves of nausea from the pit of the stomach. First, shock and disbelief at receiving, late in January, a cable from Fenimore’s sister Clara Benedict in New York, curtly informing him of her death without further explanation, and asking if he could go to Venice immediately. Then bewilderment, as cables from other parties arrived to say that the funeral was to be in Rome – but still without a word about the cause of death. Then, on the very day that he arranged his journey to Rome – immediately after he returned home from Thomas Cook’s, in fact – the horror with which he read the Venetian newspaper cutting, sent by a friend, which stated that Fenimore had fallen, or thrown herself, from her bedroom window on the second floor of the Casa Semitecolo in the early hours of Wednesday, January 24th.
He was instantly stricken with the certain bel
ief that she had taken her own life, and it was so reported in the English newspapers in the following days. But there was an element of ambiguity about the circumstances which Fenimore’s sister and other relatives understandably clutched at. She had been ill, and confined to bed for some days before the fatal event, and the family’s explanation was that she had fallen accidentally from the window in the delirium of fever. He would have liked to believe this, but he was too well acquainted with Fenimore’s character, her chronic sadness, her proneness to crippling depressions, that dark grotto of melancholy hidden deep inside her outwardly composed social self, to doubt that her death was suicidal. Of course it was likely that illness had precipitated the dreadful act – he seized on this circumstance as eagerly as the family – but it hadn’t caused it. His theory, which he broadcast among mutual friends and acquaintances in a flurry of correspondence, was that she had suffered a sudden fit of madness or dementia, brought on by feverish illness, in which her chronically depressive temperament became momentarily self-destructive. It was in short an act committed, ‘while the balance of the mind was disturbed’, to use the forensic formula, but of course no less tragic for that. He was in a state of near-collapse at the horror and pity of it, and cancelled his journey to Rome, unable to face the ordeal of attending the funeral. He offered instead to go later to Venice to help Clara Benedict deal with Fenimore’s effects. And how much later it turned out to be . . .
All through February and most of March he had waited in London for Clara Benedict and her daughter to cross the Atlantic, in a state of growing anxiety and suspense about what might be found in the sealed rooms of the Casa Semitecolo, and especially in the sealed box mentioned by Fenimore’s cousin, Grace Carter. It was Grace Carter, happening to be in Europe at the time, who had been first on the scene of the fatality, and reported that Fenimore had recently given instructions that in the event of her death the apartment was to be sealed by the American consul to await the arrival of her next-of-kin, and had expressed a wish to be buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, because she hated the gloomy island cemetery of Venice. It seemed that Fenimore had greatly exaggerated the seriousness of her indisposition, or so her doctor and secretarial assistant had believed, and fallen into what they regarded as a morbid habit of brooding on the subject of death. There was of course another possible explanation for her behaviour, the contemplation of which made him deeply uneasy – namely that she had all along been coolly and deliberately planning to kill herself, while pretending that her mind was disturbed by sickness. The word ‘sealed’ which recurred in these communications, suggestive of portentous secrets awaiting discovery, made him apprehensive. Although he had no doubt that Fenimore had taken her own life, and was sufficiently devastated by that tragic fact, what he really dreaded was finding some evidence that she had done it on account of him. The correctness of his intuition on the first count had been confirmed as soon as he saw, from inside the apartment, the window from which Fenimore had fallen – there was no way an adult, however feverish, could fall out of it accidentally – but the second possibility had proved much more difficult to determine, and still remained hauntingly ambiguous.
