Author, Author

by David Lodge

  The bier was carried in solemn procession to the New Churchyard on the other side of Church Row, the original one having long been filled up with generations of the dead going back centuries. Ainger read the last prayers of the funeral service over the open grave, ‘I am the resurrection and the life . . .’ The urn was lowered, and the grave filled in. Du Maurier’s daughters wept quietly, clinging to each other, but Emma was stronger, standing straight-backed with a grandson on each side, clasping their little hands in hers, her face inscrutable under its veil.

  Ainger had invited the family and friends to his house afterwards for some refreshment. ‘You will come, won’t you, Mr James?’ Emma said to him in the churchyard as he took her hand in both of his own, and held it and squeezed it. She preserved her customary formality of address even at this emotional moment, while he himself was almost lost for words.

  ‘My dear Emma – if I may presume – do please call me Henry – this is – this is—’ He shook his head helplessly. ‘So sad,’ he concluded lamely. ‘How do you bear it so bravely?’

  ‘I’ve known in my heart for some time that Kiki was not going to get better,’ she said. ‘It was not such a shock to me as for others.’

  ‘He was a dear, dear friend, but to you—’

  ‘He was a wonderful husband. We had a very happy life together. I thank God for that.’

  ‘You see how much he was loved,’ he said, gesturing at the crowd of mourners milling around outside the church.

  ‘Yes, he had many friends. But you were very special to him . . . Henry.’ She hesitated over the first name and blushed a little as she pronounced it. ‘He always considered himself privileged to call such a distinguished writer his friend.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he murmured.

  ‘It’s true.’

  Among the first people he spoke to at Ainger’s house was Gerald, who had come up that day from Bristol where Trilby was playing. He was in the conservatory, smoking a cigarette, sucking the smoke into his lungs as if his life depended on it. ‘I saw the Governor just two days before he died,’ he said. ‘He was very frail. The last thing he said to me, looking up from the pillow, almost in a whisper, was: “Si c’est la mort, ce n’est pas gai.”’ Perhaps because Gerald was an actor, repeating these words seemed to have a powerful emotional effect on him, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears. He hastily wiped them away and blew his nose on his handkerchief. ‘At least I was able to tell him how well the Trilby tour was going.’ He grinned as he added: ‘But I didn’t tell him that Tree is thinking of dropping the fourth act. I thought it might upset him.’

  ‘You mean – Trilby won’t die?’

  ‘No, she’ll marry Little Billee. A happy ending.’

  ‘Oh, I know all about happy endings!’ he said. ‘Your poor father has at least been spared that – seeing his book travestied.’

  ‘But Tree has a point,’ Gerald said, ‘I mean, once Svengali’s spell has been broken, and he’s dead, why shouldn’t they marry?’

  ‘It would take too long to explain, my dear boy,’ he said. ‘But the fact that you ask the question tells me a lot about the younger generation.’

  Gerald smiled. ‘I must be going, Mr James,’ he said. ‘Must get back to Bristol for the evening performance.’

  As they shook hands and Gerald departed, Du Maurier’s publisher Clarence McIlvaine came up to Henry, a schooner of sherry in each hand, and gave him one of them. ‘I don’t really like sherry, but it’s all there is – apart from coffee and tea,’ he said. ‘At a time like this one needs whisky.’ They exchanged some platitudes about the funeral service, and then McIlvaine moved quickly on to business. He was a Princeton graduate who had done very well in publishing in a comparatively short time. He had been chosen to set up Harper’s British imprint with James Osgood in 1890 to exploit the new Copyright Act, and had recently become the sole head of the firm after Osgood’s untimely death. ‘I’m glad to say that Du Maurier delivered his new novel before he died,’ he said. ‘It’s called The Martian.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Henry.

  ‘You’ve read it?’ McIlvaine asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  ‘No, I know nothing about it except the title.’

  ‘Ah. Well, we’re serialising it in Harper’s, starting in the next issue – we’ve brought it forward as a kind of tribute. There will of course be tremendous public interest in his last book. I recall you wrote us a very helpful piece for the weekly magazine, about Trilby, when we were running it in the monthly, and I was wondering if we could persuade you to do something similar again.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, pursing his lips and frowning. ‘Perhaps this is hardly the moment . . .’

  ‘What I had in mind was a kind of obituary article – a personal piece, you know, drawing on your close association, surveying his remarkable late career as a novelist, up to and including The Martian. Nobody could do it as well as you, James.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, warming to the idea somewhat. He hesitated because it would take time and energy away from his own creative projects. On the other hand he felt an urge and an obligation to pay tribute to his dead friend, and this would be an appropriate opportunity. ‘How long a piece?’ he asked.

  ‘As long as you like,’ said McIlvaine. ‘It would be for the monthly Harper’s.’

  This was an incentive. He had learned by now that it cost him more effort to trim his work to fit a preordained limit than to let it find its own natural length. ‘I’ve already contracted to write a “London Letter” once a month for Harper’s Weekly,’ he thought it prudent to point out.

  ‘No matter. We’d pay a hundred dollars per thousand words up to a ceiling of, say, five hundred.’

  This was generous. ‘Very well,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent! I’ll let you have proofs of The Martian as soon as they’re available.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Interesting.’ McIlvaine’s enigmatic expression made him think he should have asked this question earlier. ‘More like Peter Ibbetson than Trilby.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right,’ he said, relieved. ‘I always preferred Peter Ibbetson.’

  ‘But Trilby was the best seller.’

  ‘I detest that barbarous Americanism!’ he said emphatically.

  ‘“Best seller”? What’s the matter with it?’

  ‘It confuses quality with quantity in a single word,’ he said, ‘and it’s a solecism – I mean, the way it’s used. I understand that the American newspapers now publish something called “best-seller lists”, numbered from one to ten.’

  ‘That’s right – The Bookman started it, and it caught on. It’s a darned good idea.’

  ‘But how can there be more than one best seller? “Best” means “better than all the others”.’

  McIlvaine thought about this for a moment. ‘You’re quite right, of course, James – in principle. But as regards Trilby . . . it really is our best seller. I mean, we’ve never sold so many copies of a single book before in the company’s history. And since Harper is one of the biggest general publishers in the world, and if you forget about pirate publishing in the old days, for which nobody knows the figures anyway . . . it’s quite possible that Trilby is the best-selling novel ever.’

  ‘Good God!’ Henry said.

  ‘A solemn thought, isn’t it? Can I get you another sherry?’

  ‘No thank you,’ he said. ‘I need some air.’

  In fact it was at least another half an hour before he managed to escape from the reception. As he pushed his way through the crowded drawing room and hallway he was accosted by numerous friends and had to exchange greetings and words of condolence with them. He had to say goodbye to the three Du Maurier sisters, Trixy, Sylvia and May, and renew acquaintance with his godson Guy Millar, now aged seven, to whom he covertly slipped a half-sovereign, enjoining secrecy with a finger raised to his lips. The last person he spoke to was Emma, to whom he confided that he was to write an appreciation of Ki
ki for Harper’s. ‘That’s wonderful, Henry,’ she said. ‘I shall look forward so much to reading it.’

  He took the shortest route to the Heath, and then made his way to the old Bench of Confidences. There he sat down to calm his thoughts, which had been stirred up, first by the emotions of the funeral and then by McIlvaine’s rather crass but undeniably interesting intervention. The best-selling novel ever! The Trilby phenomenon became more and more inexplicable – at least, no literary analysis could account for it. At some critical point in the novel’s reception the momentum of sales had taken on a life of its own – the more people who read it, the more people there were who ‘had to’ read it; and just when interest might have been expected to flag, it was revived by the success of the stage adaptation. No wonder Du Maurier felt that he had lost control over his own work, that it no longer belonged to him. It was as if he had released a kind of genie from the bottle of his imagination, which swelled to alarming proportions and beat its chest and roared and danced and pranced and went whirling round the globe, returning to bury him under a suffocating heap of correspondence, newspaper gossip, and coin. No story could illustrate more vividly the vanity of human wishes, or the perils of answered prayers, as far as authors were concerned. Apart from the first few months when it was being serialised, before Whistler started complaining, poor Kiki had seldom shown any sign of enjoying the success of Trilby, and the wealth it brought had come too late to give him any real satisfaction. Charles Millar had a revealing anecdote of lunching at Oxford Square, when a servant brought in a registered letter which Kiki opened at the table. He had glanced at the contents and passed the envelope to Emma without a smile or flicker of interest, saying wearily: ‘Another cheque from Harper’s, my dear.’ It was, Millar discovered later, a cheque for seven thousand pounds. Of course Kiki had the satisfaction of knowing that his family would benefit from his windfall in the future – but he would much rather have lived to share more of that future.

  There were several lessons to be drawn from these reflections, some of them almost embarrassingly obvious insofar as they applied to his own literary ambitions, but the one he took most earnestly to heart was the most banal: the primacy of the gift of life itself. Kiki was dead. There was a Kiki-shaped hollow space in his world which would never be filled up. But it would, over time, be less and less noticeable. It was shocking – shocking, but there was no point in denying it – how sooner or later we accustomed ourselves to the deaths of others, even dearly loved friends, even parents and siblings. Spouses and children might be a different matter – he couldn’t be sure, never having had or lost one himself – but about other forms of bereavement he could speak honestly and with conviction. However deeply and sincerely one grieved for the dead, they gradually and inevitably occupied less and less of one’s conscious thoughts as time passed. He had written a story a couple of years previously, ‘The Altar of the Dead’, about a man who tried to arrest that process by taking over the altar of a Catholic chapel and dedicating candles to his deceased friends – he had begun it in the year of Fenimore’s death, while actually staying in her old Oxford lodgings, and it had been in part a way of coming to terms with her tragic end – but when he had occasion to reread it recently there seemed something unnatural and unhealthy about his chief character’s behaviour of which he had not been fully aware when he wrote it. One should remember the dead, yes, but also let them, slowly, gently, go. He would distil and preserve his memories, his friendship, and his love for George Du Maurier in a memorial essay, which should be as fine and eloquent as he could make it, and then he would move on to complete and perfect his own oeuvre in the years that were left to him, in that ‘certain splendid “last manner”’ of which poor Dencombe, the hero of another story, had only dreamed.

  As usual, this resolution was more easily formulated than carried out. First there was a purely physical impediment to the furtherance of his literary plans. Since the spring he had become increasingly troubled by a pain in his wrist, obviously caused by spending seven or eight hours a day at his desk with a pen in his hand, and by October it had become unbearable. It was not ‘writer’s cramp’ of the familiar kind, which usually eased after a short respite, nor the more exclusive variant known as ‘Trollope’s thumb’, named after the prolific Postmaster. It was more like rheumatism, an excruciating inflammation of the joints and tendons of the wrist which controlled every movement of the hand. His doctor told him that only extended rest, for weeks or months, would cure the condition – an unthinkable course of action. He tried writing with his left hand, and the results looked like the efforts of an idiot child under the influence of alcohol. The only solution was to hire a secretary.

  This idea came initially from William, who suggested that he might give his hand some relief by dictating his correspondence – as he himself did at Harvard, with much economy of time and effort. Henry couldn’t imagine himself adopting this method except for the most impersonal business letters, but he remembered that Du Maurier had composed his novels by dictating them to Emma, and he thought to himself: why shouldn’t I do the same, using a stenographer? Accordingly, after making some enquiries, he obtained the services of William MacAlpine, a young Scot for whom the epithet ‘dour’ seemed inappropriate, as suggesting too lively and excitable a temperament, but who was extremely competent in taking dictation and typing. At first MacAlpine took his dictation in shorthand and transcribed it on his own typewriter at home; but before long Henry purchased a Remington machine for De Vere Gardens and dictated straight to the typewriter, with an immediate improvement in efficiency. MacAlpine made fewer mistakes – indeed, hardly any – and was able to leave the day’s work behind for Henry to read over and annotate in the evenings, ready for revision the next day. Sometimes he paced up and down the study as he dictated, and sometimes he lay at ease on his chaise longue. He found the click-click of the keys soothing rather than distracting, and MacAlpine was so silent and impassive that he almost forgot it was a human being with a consciousness of his own who was taking down his words. He was aware that his sentences were becoming longer and more intricately wrought under this new regime, but the stammer that so often afflicted him in social situations when he had something urgent and important to say did not trouble him. There was no hurry or pressure. He could form the sentences, order and rearrange the clauses, select the words, all in his mind, or as it were in the air, holding them there for contemplation before he uttered them; and later, with the transcript in his hand, he could dictate the passage again, adding and inserting new units of sense to thicken the richness of meaning.

  With the aid of this new system of composition he finished What Maisie Knew in December and placed it with a Chicago magazine which began serialising it in January. He corrected the proofs of The Spoils of Poynton, the much-revised book version of The Old Things, which would be published in February – the first ripe fruit, as he saw it, of his new fictional method. Now his desk was cleared and he was free to write his essay on George Du Maurier, for which McIlvaine was pressing him – four instalments of The Martian had appeared already in Harper’s. But he hesitated, he stalled, he procrastinated. He made his commitment to the monthly ‘London Letter’ an excuse for putting off the Du Maurier article. But the real problem was that The Martian was a great disappointment – in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, The Martian was embarrassingly bad. The narrator, supposedly writing at some date in the near future, was a dull conventional Englishman called Robert Maurice who had been a schoolmate of the hero of the tale, the gifted, handsome, aristocratic Barty Josselin. Clearly Kiki had based these two characters on the English and French aspects of his own personality and life history. Thus Maurice studied chemistry at London University, while Barty Josselin studied art in Antwerp, where his hopes were dashed by losing the sight of one eye. (Henry was amused to note that this happened while Barty was painting ‘an old man’, not a young girl in the altogether.) It was at this point that the story lurched into the supernatural
-scientific-prophetic mode that had been the undoing of Peter Ibbetson, but in a clumsier and even less credible fashion. Barty was rescued from suicidal despair by the intervention of a female spirit calling herself ‘Martia’, a native of the planet Mars, whose inhabitants, she explained, were morally and intellectually far superior to human beings and able to inhabit a multitude of physical forms. She had come to Earth in a shower of shooting stars a hundred years ago, and existed in a variety of guises, animal and human, until she adopted Barty. Having revealed her existence to him in letters which he discovered by his bedside on waking, she later took the form of one of his children by his adoring Jewish wife, Leah. (An interesting ethnic detail, this, perhaps intended to compensate for the prejudicial portrait of Jewishness in Svengali.) Martia also dictated to him in his sleep a series of brilliant visionary books, with titles like The Fourth Dimension and Interstellar Harmonics, which made Barty into a world-famous author – not surprisingly, since according to Maurice: ‘He has robbed Death of nearly all its terrors; even for the young it is no longer the grisly phantom it once was for ourselves, but rather of an aspect mellow and benign.’ And, the narrator asked rhetorically: ‘To whom but Barty Josselin do we owe it that our race is on average already from four to six inches taller than it was thirty years ago, men and women alike?’ Reaching this point in his set of galley proofs, Henry gave a great guffaw of irrepressible derision and flung the sheets to the floor, startling Tosca, who was dozing beside the fire at his feet, and causing her to jump up and waddle across the room, barking crossly. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, Tosca,’ he said, as he picked up the scattered sheets and put them in order, ‘what on earth can we say about this nonsense?’