by David Lodge
It had been a treacherous act, but he couldn’t prove it, and in any case he would not demean himself by accusing Alexander directly. Relations between them continued cool and businesslike. He did not attend any further performances, but towards the end of January he called at the theatre one morning at Alexander’s request, to be told by the manager that he was taking the play off at the end of its fourth week, on February 2nd. ‘I’m sorry, Henry,’ he said. ‘I’m just as disappointed as you, but we’re simply losing too much money, and there’s no sign of an upturn in box office takings – isn’t that right, Bob?’ Alexander turned to his business manager, Robert Shone, whom he had invited to the meeting for support. Shone had graduated to his present position from that of stage manager, and had taken some pains to dress and equip himself for the part. He wore a dark three-piece suit bristling with pens and pencils, and had a big ledger open on the table in front of him.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Shone, nodding gravely. ‘We’re averaging less than forty per cent paying customers.’
‘And how much might I expect to receive by way of royalties in the end?’ he asked.
Shone peered at his ledger through a pince-nez and sucked his teeth. ‘I would estimate about two hundred pounds. Perhaps a little more.’
It seemed a paltry reward for so much work and worry and suffering. His face was evidently eloquent of this reflection, for Alexander said: ‘I shall lose fifteen hundred myself.’
‘More,’ said Shone dolefully.
‘Every play is a gamble,’ said Alexander. ‘You never know whether you will win or lose. I’ve been lucky in this theatre so far, but . . .’ he shrugged and left the sentence unfinished.
‘I’m sorry to have been responsible for your luck running out,’ he said coldly.
‘We’re counting on Oscar to restore it,’ said Shone, perhaps indiscreetly, for Alexander glanced frowningly at him.
‘Wilde?’ he said, surprised. ‘Has he written another play already?’
‘It’s one that Wyndham has had under option for some time,’ said Alexander, ‘but he’s not in a position to put it on, so he let me have it. It’s called The Importance of Being Earnest. A good title, don’t you think?’
There was to be no end, it seemed, to the exquisitely ironic twists in the story of his failure as a dramatist. He had walked from a performance of one successful play of Wilde’s to experience the humiliation of being booed, and now another, sure to be equally to the public taste, was being hurried on to the stage of the St James’s to replace his own rejected piece.
On Saturday the 2nd of February, when Guy Domville was due to have its thirty-first and last performance, he wrote to William of having lived through ‘the four horridest weeks of my life’. It was a long, confessional letter, and reading it over he realised how far he still was from purging himself of all the negative emotions that had plagued him ever since the first night. ‘Produce a play and you will know, better than I can tell you, how such an ordeal – odious in its essence! – is only made tolerable by great success, and in how many ways accordingly non-success may be tormenting and tragic, a bitterness of every hour, ramifying into every throb of one’s consciousness.’ He did not feel he was exaggerating his pain.
He had decided to attend the last performance that evening, to make his adieux to the cast and, he hoped, finally to lower the curtain on this unhappy chapter of his life. But when he got to the theatre Shone was waiting in the foyer to tell him they were extending the run by another week, since Wilde’s play would not be ready for another two. He obviously felt himself to be the bearer of good news, but to Henry it was only an unwelcome anticlimax, another obstacle to freeing his soul from the poisonous tentacles of the theatre. He derived little pleasure from the evening. Only Marion Terry had preserved the original delicacy of her performance. The rest of the acting had already become coarse and mechanical, including Alexander’s over-explicit interpretation of the hero. ‘Oh the mutilated brutally simplified, massacred little play!’ he ejaculated in a postscript to William the next day.
He shared with his brother the irony that Guy Domville continued to provoke far more letters of praise from people who had seen it than any previous work of his, in any form. He did not tell William, however – he did not tell anybody – that one of these letters was from Ellen Terry, who had attended the first night to support her younger sister. She commiserated with him about the bestial behaviour of the gallery, complimented him on Guy Domville, and asked if he would consider writing a one-act play for her. She was going to do a tour in America with Henry Irving later in the year and was seeking a suitable curtain-raiser. This was a hard test of his resolution to renounce theatrical ambitions. Although he was not himself an uncritical admirer of Ellen Terry, she was the most celebrated actress of her generation on the English stage. She must have new plays pressed upon her daily by petitioning playwrights, and whatever she approved was sure to be performed. He could not bring himself to reject her flattering proposal out of hand, so replied in noncommittal terms, and agreed to meet her.
Ellen Terry received him in a small reception room at the Lyceum where refreshments were served to visiting royalty and other dignitaries during entr’actes, and indeed the interview was rather like an audience with a Queen of the stage. Although she must be, he calculated, nearly fifty years of age, she was still handsome, and the famous voice, at once crystal-clear and faintly husky, was just as spellbinding in quiet intimacy as it was in the theatre. It was impossible when face to face with her not to think of her scandalous and sensational personal life – the disastrous marriage to Watts when she was still virtually a child, and the separations, divorces, liaisons, marriages and children that had followed, not always in the conventional order. All this, including her current relationship with Irving, was well known among those who belonged to her world, but Ellen Terry never made the mistake, as Wilde had, of encouraging scandal. On the contrary she conducted herself with admirable discretion and impeccable outward propriety, and Henry, who more and more believed that only an elegant and resourceful system of benign social lying kept civilisation from being destroyed by human passions, respected her for it. She had forgotten or forgiven or perhaps had never been aware of his dissenting reviews of her much-lauded performances as Goldsmith’s Olivia and Shakespeare’s Portia in the distant past. She was charming, persuasive, and prepared to wait patiently till the summer for her play. Weakly he agreed to think further about the matter, and almost as soon as he got home had an idea for a comedy with a part so perfect for Ellen Terry that it took all his moral strength to stop himself from sitting down and incontinently beginning to write it. Instead he made a brief, rather shamefaced note of the idea, and directed his thoughts sternly back to prose fiction.
Browsing through the pages of his notebook, that precious mine of unworked, richly-veined deposits of raw story-stuff, he was particularly taken with two ideas for novels – one about a widowed father and his daughter, greatly attached to each other, who both married at the same time, then discovered that their respective spouses were in fact lovers, but managed to redeem the ugly situation by nobility of soul and social cunning; the other – over which the spirit of Minny Temple hovered – about a beautiful rich young woman who contracted a fatal illness which threatened to deprive her of the experience of love, and was exploited by friends poorer and less scrupulous than herself. But the possible narrative development of these ideas remained vague and amorphous, and he shrank from embarking upon any major project without a more detailed map by which to navigate. If you made up a story as you went along, there was always a danger that it would go in too many different directions, inhabit the consciousnesses of too many characters, touch on too many themes, to achieve unity and concentration of effect. That, he had to admit, had happened in the composition of his last two full-length novels, The Princess Casamassima and The Tragic Muse. And that perhaps was why he had been tempted to try his hand at dramatic representation, with its inherent f
ormal constraints.
But this reflection prompted another. Suppose one were to apply to prose narrative the method he had used in developing his ideas for plays, namely, the scenario – the detailed scene-by-scene summary of an imagined action? Then one would have a model, as it were, of the novel or tale in a virtual form; one could take the measure of its structure as a whole, assess its unity and symmetry, and make any necessary adjustments, before commencing the process of composition proper. And then, he thought with gathering excitement, might not the dramatic principle itself, of presenting experience scenically – ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ the story, through the confrontation and interaction of the characters – might this not give prose fiction the kind of structural strength and elegance it so often lacked, while the narrative artist remained free to add the priceless resource, denied to the dramatist, of being able to reveal the secret workings of consciousness in all its dense and delicate detail? He was so pleased with this aperçu that he immediately committed it to his notebook, and commented: ‘Has a part of all this wasted passion and squandered time (of the last 5 years) been simply the precious lesson, taught me in that roundabout and devious, that cruelly expensive, way of the singular value for a narrative plan too of the (I don’t know what adequately to call it) divine principle of the Scenario? If that has been one side of the moral of the whole unspeakable, the whole tragic experience, I almost bless the pangs and the pains and the miseries of it.’
He did not, however, immediately put this new compositional method, so luminously promising in theory, to the test of practical application; and the very next day the positive, hopeful mood it had engendered was disturbed by reading an ecstatic review in The Times of The Importance of Being Earnest, which had just opened at the St James’s, with Alexander in the leading male role. This favourable reaction was shared by all the critics he read subsequently, with the solitary exception of George Bernard Shaw, and by all his acquaintance who had been to see the play. It seemed to be Wilde’s biggest ‘hit’ to date – some were calling it his masterpiece. Wilde had embarked on his playwriting career at about the same time as himself, and, he suspected, with the same mixed motives – to make much-needed money and at the same time bring some literary distinction to the debased English stage – and he had therefore always regarded him as more of a personal rival than any other contemporary playwright. It was time to admit defeat: at every point, and by every scale of measurement, Wilde had outreached him. Morton Fullerton had once quoted to him a chilling epigram of Wilde’s which was painfully apropos: ‘It is not enough that one succeeds – others must fail.’ It was evidently his own destiny to add this extra savour to Oscar’s triumph.
But then, suddenly, towards the end of February, when ‘House Full’ notices were being placed nightly outside the St James’s, Wilde’s success was clouded by scandal, and before long his fortunes were in steep and irreversible decline. The Marquess of Queensberry, whose outrage at Wilde’s alleged seduction of his son had been the gossip of London clubs for weeks, publicly denounced Wilde as a sodomite, and Wilde sued him for libel. Queensberry was committed for trial, which began on April 3rd at the Old Bailey amid intense public interest and journalistic frenzy. Wilde lost the case, and was shortly afterwards arrested and charged with sodomy and indecency. The public mood turned decisively and viciously against him. Philistine England was eager to get its revenge for decades of enduring Wilde’s barbed witticisms and aesthetic anathemas, and few dared to defend him now, or to be seen patronising his work. Wyndham closed An Ideal Husband in mid-April, while Alexander removed Wilde’s name from the advertisements and playbills of The Importance of Being Earnest in a desperate effort to keep it running. The trial of Wilde began on the 26th April. After several days of damaging and unspeakably sordid evidence, the jury failed to agree and a retrial was ordered; but whatever the result of the second trial might be, Wilde was now irretrievably disgraced. Alexander took off The Importance of Being Earnest on the 10th of May. Wilde was tried for a second time at the end of the month, found guilty, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. It seemed unlikely that his ‘masterpiece’ would ever be performed again.
Henry did not derive any Schadenfreude from this sudden reversal of his rival’s fortunes. He found most of the published comment on the case, and the general satisfaction at the result, unpleasantly vindictive and often nauseatingly hypocritical. But he thought Wilde was ultimately responsible for his own downfall by the recklessness of his conduct, right up to and including his refusal (so it was said) to flee to the Continent when he had the opportunity. That was not the heroism of a man determined to accept his punishment, but the arrogance of someone who thought he could evade it indefinitely. Wilde had consistently flouted the constraints which society wisely imposed on deviant sexual behaviour, and his overweening vanity had convinced him that he could do so with impunity. Henry felt pity for the man, but not empathy – affected by the spectacle of his downfall, but detached from it. Like an ancient tragedy, its effect was cathartic, purging pity and fear, as Aristotle said – in his own case, self-pity and fear of the future. At last he felt able to accept the humiliating failure of Guy Domville and move on.
In mid-May, between the two trials of Oscar Wilde, he began work on a new work of fiction, using the method of the preparatory scenario that he had adumbrated in his notebook. Its ‘germ’ was not the story of the two children haunted by former servants which he had most recently entered there, but an anecdote told to him at a dinner table two years ago, about a widow and her son who fell out concerning the ownership of a house full of beautiful ‘things’ which the mother appreciated and the son merely coveted. He planned to tell the story from the point of view of a character who was not in the original source at all – the mother’s companion, a young woman at once finely sensitive and humanly fallible. His working title for this tale was ‘The House Beautiful’, a phrase of Walter Pater’s which Oscar Wilde had appropriated for the title of one of his most popular public lectures.
George Du Maurier had been among the first of his friends to write to him, with characteristic sensitivity and tact, after the opening night of Guy Domville, deploring the behaviour of the gallery and expressing his admiration for the play, and he wrote again, supportively and sympathetically, when its run was prematurely terminated. Henry replied warmly to both letters, and they exchanged words briefly at a noisy crowded private view at the Grosvenor Gallery in February, but it was not until the beginning of March that he carried out his ‘firm purpose of amendment’ to the extent of walking up to Hampstead to have a long and confidential chat with his old friend. He deliberately chose a weekday, rather than a more gregarious and family-dominated Sunday, and luckily it was a fine and unseasonably warm one. It would be best, he decided, not to attempt to disguise his own bafflement at the success of Trilby, but to bring the subject out into the open and frankly address it. Accordingly as he climbed the last steep hill to New Grove House, he prepared a speech which he delivered as soon as Du Maurier came into the hall to greet him.
‘Will you take off your coat and rest for a while,’ Du Maurier asked, ‘or would you like to take a walk on the Heath at once?’
‘Let us take our walk, cher ami,’ he said. ‘Let us find our old familiar seat, and sit down and endeavour to discover – if it is in any way possible to arrive at a solution – endeavour to discover some reason for the success of Trilby. I mean of course,’ he added hastily, for the prepared speech sounded a little ungracious when uttered, ‘not its success with discriminating readers – which could have been foreseen – but with so many thousands to whom the very word “discriminating” would be a novelty and a puzzle.’
‘With all my heart,’ Du Maurier said, laughing. ‘But I must warn you that I have no ready explanation myself.’
Du Maurier continued to be as surprised as anyone by the popularity of his book and appeared to be more bothered than gratified by it. Correspondence was a great headache. ‘I get at l
east five letters a day from American readers – Harper forward them, you know – and it’s a frightful bore having to reply,’ he said, as they walked down the hill to the Heath, their sticks clicking on the pavement almost in unison, and the now aged Don hobbling along just ahead of them.
‘You ought to get a secretary to answer them for you,’ Henry said.
‘Well, Pem does take care of some of them.’ Du Maurier gave a little chuckle. ‘I think she’s rather brusque with my more ardent female admirers. It seems to me very extraordinary that people appear to think that having bought a book entitles them to write a private letter to the author asking all kinds of personal questions and giving all kinds of information about themselves in which one can have no conceivable interest.’
‘You could always just ignore them,’ Henry said.
‘Yes, I could, but I wouldn’t feel happy about it. I was taught that it’s bad manners not to answer a letter, and I can’t shake off the habit of a lifetime.’
‘What kind of things do they say?’
‘Oh, the usual tosh about how wonderful the book is, and how they sat up all night to finish it, and how they cried when Trilby died. Quite a lot of them seem to think the characters are real people, or were. I’ve had at least three letters complaining that they couldn’t find Little Billee’s paintings in the National Gallery.’ (Henry laughed and struck the ground with his stick.) ‘A number of clergymen have offered to explain the error of my freethinking ways and to convert me to their particular brand of Christianity.’ (‘Inevitably!’ Henry exclaimed.) ‘And I had a letter from a gentleman in Virginia asking very earnestly what exactly was the relationship between Trilby and Svengali when he paraded her around the concert halls of Europe as La Svengali.’
