Author, Author

by David Lodge

  It had made little difference to the astonishing success of Trilby in both forms of publication. Apparently Harper’s had never published a serial which generated such a huge demand for the magazine – only Fenimore’s Anne had come anywhere near it in this respect, they told Du Maurier – and a hundred thousand copies of the book had been sold in America since it was published last fall. A hundred thousand! Sales in England had been slower at first, but the novel was already in its seventh impression. Poor Du Maurier had reason to regret having sold the copyright for a mere two thousand pounds, but Harper had lately done the decent thing and promised to pay him a royalty from the beginning of this year, so he wouldn’t be ‘poor’ Du Maurier for much longer. Osgood McIlvaine had announced a forthcoming six-shilling illustrated edition for which the demand would be immense; and there was a stage adaptation in preparation in America which would no doubt pour more gold into Du Maurier’s cupped hands.

  He stirred the water moodily with his foot, sending ripples across the surface that plashed against the slopes of his belly. He was reminded of an epigram of Wilde’s, in that essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ in the Fortnightly, something like: ‘Anyone can sympathise with a friend’s failure, but it takes a truly exceptional nature to rejoice in a friend’s success.’ As so often, Wilde’s cynical wit had enabled him to put his finger on an uncomfortable truth. Of course he was glad that Kiki’s money worries were well and truly over, and the fame and adulation lavished by Fortune on the author of Trilby could not have happened to a more decent and deserving man. Nevertheless he couldn’t deny – though he hoped he disguised it from others – that there were ironies in the situation which tasted bitter in contemplation. It was more than likely that Du Maurier, at only his second attempt at writing a novel, had already sold more copies of it than he himself had sold of his entire literary output to date. And this with a story once offered to himself, gratis – that was the most ironic twist in the whole affair, though of course nothing he himself might have done with the donnée would have tickled the public’s palate in the same way. Why Du Maurier’s treatment had tickled it to such an unprecedented degree remained, however, a mystery. Du Maurier, to do him credit, seemed mystified himself – mystified, and somewhat intimidated by the celebrity he had acquired in consequence.

  He would be at the theatre tonight, he and Emma, applauding with all his might at the end, and no doubt calling out ‘Author! Author!’ along with many other friends and supporters, but perhaps with more sincere good will than any other. Du Maurier probably did have the ‘exceptional nature’. If Guy Domville was a triumph, he would genuinely rejoice at his friend’s success. That was a chastening thought, one that should make him ashamed of the hollowness of his own congratulations on the success of Trilby. The hollowness, he trusted, was known only to himself. Basta! Enough of this sour self-examination. He sat up in the bath with a sudden movement that sent a tidal wave slopping over the rim onto the linoleum floor, seized the loofah and began to scrub his back with the zeal of a medieval flagellant.

  There was a letter from Du Maurier in the first delivery of mail, which Smith brought to the breakfast table, wishing him the best of fortune for the first night – ‘I believe actors have a superstitious aversion to wishing each other good luck on these occasions,’ he wrote, ‘but the prohibition surely doesn’t apply to authors.’ There were letters from many other friends and well-wishers: Gosse (who acknowledged the change of plan for the evening), Elizabeth Robins, Mrs Hugh Bell, Mary Ward, Henry Harland, Jonathan Sturges and Morton Fullerton. There was, touchingly, a letter from Minnie Bourget in Paris, who had heard about the play from an American friend, a Mrs Edith Wharton, who claimed to be an admirer and sent, vicariously, her own good wishes. The correspondents who were not abroad would be in the theatre that evening, along with other friends and acquaintances, nearly all names to conjure with. There would be a whole academy of well-known artists, besides Du Maurier: Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Frederick Leighton, George Frederick Watts, John Singer Sargent . . . When Alexander had seen the list drawn up by the box office manager, of seats specially requested or gratefully accepted by these well-known personages, he had allowed himself a low whistle of awe and admiration. ‘Upon my word, Henry,’ he said (they were on ‘Henry’ and ‘Alec’ terms by this time), ‘upon my word, this is going to be the most distinguished first-night audience the West End has seen in years.’ He didn’t know whether to feel elated at the likelihood of their sympathetic attention or alarmed at the prospect of being collectively judged by them.

  The delivery of The Times was annoyingly late, as it often was on a Saturday, but Smith brought it to the table as he was concluding his breakfast with a second slice of toast and marmalade and a third cup of coffee. He opened it at once and searched eagerly in the advertisement columns for the announcement of Guy Domville. There it was: ‘St James’s Theatre: Production of Too Happy By Half, one act comedy by Julian Field; and Guy Domville by Henry James, 7.40.’ Was that all? His play tersely mentioned as if it were a mere appendage to Field’s paltry curtain-raiser? He felt himself flushing with indignation at the insult and already wondering how to visit retribution on the offender, whoever it was, when his eye caught another, much longer advertisement in the next column: ‘St James’s Theatre. Mr George Alexander Sole Lessee and Manager. Tonight and Every Evening at 8.20. Guy Domville, a play in three Acts, by Henry James.’ And there followed the complete cast list, and the scene-settings of the three acts, concluding with a brief mention of Field’s farce. His anger subsided. He read carefully through the advertisement for a second time without finding any errors, and then ran his eye idly further down the column. The 372nd performance of The New Boy was announced. ‘What a capital farce’ – Daily Telegraph. ‘Roars of laughter’ – The Times. What might he read here next week about Guy Domville? ‘A play of exquisite sensibility and profound human insight.’ ‘A drama of rare intelligence and poetic eloquence.’ ‘A masterpiece of dramatic construction.’ He almost blushed at his own childish vanity, but what author in the world had never indulged in such fantasies? His eye travelled further down the column: ‘Haymarket Theatre. A new and original play of modern life called An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde.’ He would walk to the Haymarket later and purchase a ticket – it would help to pass the time, and he could lunch afterwards at the Reform.

  ‘Shall I clear the table, sir?’

  He gave a start, not having been aware that Smith had re-entered the room. ‘Yes, yes, please do. Thank you, Smith.’ He rose, gathered up his letters and took them, with The Times, into his study. He hoped for some sensation in his bowels that might presage an evacuation, but was not rewarded.

  He sat in an armchair and browsed through the newspaper without finding anything that held his attention for more than a few moments. There seemed to be rumbles of imminent trouble in Eastern Europe – when were there not? There was a situation in Armenia and a crisis in Newfoundland. The Japanese had seized Port Arthur from the Chinese, who had captured a few Japanese soldiers, chopped them up and carried the pieces about on sticks, and the enraged Japanese had retaliated by massacring five thousand Chinese. How very horrible – but so remote, it was hard to feel any emotion. The ‘Police’ column contained stories infinitely more trivial but of greater human interest. At Marylebone magistrate’s court a well-dressed woman was charged with stealing umbrellas from two ladies while they were occupied in confessionals in Roman Catholic churches in the West End. At Clerkenwell, Ernest Henry Peckham, 33, clerk, was charged with indecent behaviour in St Paul’s Rd, on Thursday evening. Evidence given by two young girls. Peckham a prominent member of his church (Congregational). Sentenced to three months’ hard labour. Alas poor Peckham! His life was ruined. There was correspondence on the Drink Question, and on proposed changes in the rules of Billiards. There were advertisements for new books. A Dark Interlude. By Richard Dowling. The Worst Woman in London by F. C. Phillips. Mrs Jervis: a romance of the Indian Hills by B. M.
Croker. He had never heard of any of these authors before – but then a familiar name leapt from the page and smote his heart with a pang of grief: ‘My First Book by Robert Louis Stevenson and 21 famous authors. With Prefatory story by Jerome K. Jerome.’ Poor Louis! Dead at forty-six in Samoa, and it was apparently not the bronchial disease that had dogged him all his life, and driven him to the South Seas in search of a benign climate, that had killed him, but a brain haemorrhage, which might have happened to anyone, anywhere. The news had reached England in the first week of rehearsals for Guy Domville, so he had not had the leisure to mourn him properly, and chance reminders like this advertisement cut sharply. What was Louis’ first book? he wondered. Travels with a Donkey? And who were the other twenty-one famous authors? He could have contributed a pretty piece himself, about A Passionate Pilgrim and other tales, but he had not been invited, presumably because insufficiently famous.

  There was a tap on the door and Mrs Smith came in, as she usually did at this hour, to receive her instructions and discuss housekeeping matters. He did not detain her long.

  ‘I shall lunch at my club, Mrs Smith. And as you know, I’ll be out this evening, and having a late supper. Perhaps you would be good enough to provide a light meal at about six, to get me through the evening.’

  ‘Something like a welsh rarebit?’ Mrs Smith suggested. ‘With a rasher of bacon?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And shall I leave a sandwich in the kitchen, for when you come in tonight?’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary. I shall be eating very late.’ Not feeling equal to the task of hosting a party at home, as on the first night of The American, he had arranged to give the Alexanders and the rest of the cast supper at a restaurant in Duke Street after the performance.

  ‘Very well, sir. And the lunch party tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh yes, thank you for reminding me. Four gentlemen will be coming.’ He ran through the guest list: Julian Sturgis, an old Boston friend who was visiting England, Philip Burne-Jones (Sir Edward’s son), the novelist William Norris, and Gosse. As well as wishing to repay some debts of hospitality, he thought it might be interesting to hold an inquest on the production with some sympathetic friends after the dust of the first night had settled. He had thought about inviting Du Maurier, but decided it would not be fair to put him to the trouble of a second journey from Hampstead in two days.

  ‘I thought perhaps roast lamb?’ Mrs Smith prompted. ‘With plaice fillets for the fish course. And apple charlotte for pudding.’

  ‘Admirable.’

  He signed some orders for groceries from the Stores, and handed them back to her.

  ‘Thank you, Mr James.’ Mrs Smith put her notepad and pencil away in her apron pocket, but hesitated as she turned to leave. ‘And may I – may we both wish you the very best of luck tonight?’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Smith,’ he said, blushing for some reason. ‘You are most kind. Most kind. I haven’t forgotten about the tickets.’ He had promised to get them seats for the play on their next night off.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  After Mrs Smith had left the room, he went to the window and stared out in a preoccupied, unfocused way. Something in his recent thoughts was pricking his conscience. The real reason why he hadn’t invited Du Maurier to lunch tomorrow was not the fear of inconveniencing him, but because if he were one of the company they would be sure to talk more about Trilby than Guy Domville. An ignoble motive, but he might as well admit it to himself. He went to the round table on which books recently read, or half-read, or waiting to be read, were piled, and took the three blue-bound volumes of Trilby, inscribed to himself by the author, to his desk by the window. He had developed a habit of picking them up and leafing through them from time to time to see if he could in this way surprise the work into yielding up the mystery of its astonishing popularity. Tucked inside the cover of the first volume were some loose papers which he took out and unfolded: a couple of pages cut from Harper’s Weekly, 14th April 1894, containing his article on Trilby, then being serialised in Harper’s monthly magazine, and a letter from Du Maurier thanking him for it. The publishers had asked him if he would review the first four instalments of the serial, and he had agreed, partly as a favour to an old friend, partly because he was intensely curious to read the novel. They had sent him a copy of the complete text, but asked him not to ‘give away’ the future development of the story. In fact, the early chapters, set in the Latin Quarter of mid-century Paris, among impoverished artists, art-students and models, were by far the best part of the whole, and he had been able to praise them with a clear conscience, though choosing his words carefully. Du Maurier had written ‘to thank you for all the beautiful things about me you so beautifully expressed in Harper’s Weekly – I feel almost vain enough to wish that you were not my friend and had written it all the same just as it is.’

  Happily Du Maurier had failed to detect any note of reservation in his concluding tribute to the novel’s narrative style, ‘a style so talked and smoked, so drawn, so danced, so played, so whistled and sung, that it never occurs to us even to ask ourselves whether it is written’. If you did ask yourself you would have to say it wasn’t written very well. But as a stream of nostalgic reminiscence and anecdote, full of local colour, diversified with snatches of song and lines of poetry and dialogue in several different registers of French and English – polite, colloquial, dialect, literary, parodic, and ‘broken’ – it was irresistible to any reader sympathetically disposed towards the subject matter, brushing aside critical quibbles and scruples with its carnivalesque energy and élan. He had to admire Du Maurier’s boldness in leaving much of the French dialogue untranslated. He would wager that very few of the masses who had read the story, especially in America, would have been sufficiently competent in the language to construe these passages, yet none as far as he was aware had complained. Perhaps they felt flattered by being assumed to understand the French. Perhaps they were amused by the effort to guess what it meant. Or perhaps its impenetrability strengthened the illusion of being transported to an exotic and unfamiliar time and place. There was, after all, little risk of losing a thread of the story on this account, because the story was so very simple.

  There were the three young British aspirant painters, ‘the Three Musketeers of the brush’, the giant Yorkshireman Taffy, the bearded Scot known as the Laird, and the English hero, Little Billee, whose nickname, like so much else in the book, derived from Thackeray. There was Trilby, the beautiful, natural, generous-hearted and usually barefoot young model whom they all in their different ways loved; and there was Svengali, the Jewish musical genius of mixed German and Polish origin, who recognised the unusual quality of Trilby’s voice and realised he could overcome her tone-deafness by hypnotism and thus make his own fortune. Little Billee was in love with Trilby but was shocked to discover her one day in an atelier full of students sitting for the figure, pour l’ensemble (or as she said herself, ‘sitting for the altogether’), and he ran away, but relented and was reconciled to her, and she agreed to marry him, but when his scandalised mother appealed to her she nobly gave him up and disappeared, later to be rescued from destitution by Svengali. All this was fairly obviously derived from Scènes de la Vie de Bohème and Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias, as Du Maurier himself candidly admitted – except for the character of Svengali. Svengali too had his precursors and progenitors – Shylock, for instance, and Dickens’s Fagin – but he was a highly original creation. He was a villain, physically repulsive with his long greasy locks, heavily lidded eyes, yellow canine teeth, and hoarse rook’s caw of a voice, but he had more vitality and eloquence than the ‘good’ characters, and his virtuosity as a pianist was far more credible than were the alleged gifts of Little Billee as a painter. Du Maurier in fact manifested a similar ambivalence towards the Hebrew race in real life, voicing the conventional English distaste for their collective presence in large numbers, while at the same time befriending individual Jews and admiring t
heir artistic and intellectual gifts. Indeed Little Billee was said to have some Jewish blood in his ancestry, the narrator commenting that ‘most of us have a minimum of that precious fluid in our veins’.

  As he turned the pages he came across the remarkable speech in which Svengali, enraged by Trilby’s indifference to his overtures, tried to frighten her with a vision of herself as a corpse in the Morgue.

  ‘But you are not listening, sapperment! Great big she-fool that you are – sheep’s head! Dummkopf! Donnerwetter! You are looking at the chimney-pots when Svengali talks! Look a little lower down between the houses, on the other side of the river! There is a little, ugly grey building there, and inside are eight slanting slabs of brass, all of a row, like beds in a school dormitory, and one fine day you shall lie asleep on one of those slabs – you, Drilby, who would not listen to Svengali, and therefore lost him! . . . And over the middle of you will be a little leather apron, and over your head a little brass tap, and all day long and all night the cold water shall trickle, trickle all the way down your beautiful white body to your beautiful white feet till they turn green, and your poor, damp, muddy rags will hang above you from the ceiling for your friends to know you by; drip, drip, drip! But you will have no friends . . .’

  The picture he drew of the poor girl’s naked corpse was a remarkable transposition of the nude as beau idéal into a kind of gloating memento mori, and it was significant that the death with which Svengali prophetically threatened Trilby was by drowning, the traditional end of the fallen woman in fiction. By associating this idea with his villain Du Maurier ruled it out as a possible fate for his heroine, and strengthened the audience’s sympathetic identification with her, in spite of references to her liaisons with several artists in the past (something, by the way, that would surely have been much more of a stumbling block to a conventional prig like Little Billee than her sitting ‘for the altogether’). His review in Harper’s had in fact provoked a letter from a righteous American matron chiding him for not condemning the heroine on this account (he had forwarded it to Du Maurier for his amusement) but on the whole it was surprising how little protest there had been from the notoriously puritanical American reading public. The novel had provoked much discussion in the press, and even apparently sermons from pulpits, but it had not been widely denounced. It had helped no doubt to make the story acceptable that the heroine died before there was any possibility of the hero marrying her.