Author, Author

by David Lodge

  6

  THE sun woke him early, shining through a gap in the curtains. It rose over the church, and on a clear morning there was always a brief moment when it directed a bright beam straight down West Street, into the King’s Room and on to his pillow, if he had neglected to draw the curtains fully together on retiring. They were made of Irish linen, self-lined and greeny-blue in colour, contrasting pleasantly with the oak-panelled walls. He had chosen the material himself, but gratefully left the supervision of their manufacture to Margaret Warren. How would he have managed the immensely complex task of moving into Lamb House without the Warrens? But then, without the Warrens, he might never have set eyes on the place, or known of its existence. His friendship with this couple had acquired a special warmth from the shared sense, equally agreeable to all three parties, that fate had determined their intimate involvement in his acquisition of Lamb House. Although he had been thrilled by his first inspection of the property, which more than confirmed the hoped inspired by his earlier covetous glances from the street, he would never have had the nerve to sign the lease – for twenty-one years, no less – without Warren’s approval and enthusiastic support a few days later. Still, he was glad that he had bolted down to Rye to view the house on his own, so that his first impressions of it were unconditioned and entirely personal.

  It was almost exactly a year ago that he had ascended the three stone steps and crossed the threshold for the first time. He vividly recalled moving through the house as if in a dream, because the rooms so perfectly fulfilled his vague desires in their size and disposition: the handsome square hall; the cosy drawing room to the left, opening on to the garden, the quaint little parlour to the right, which he immediately assigned as a writing room for guests; the arched staircase that led up to the light and airy Green Room (so-called because of its painted panelling) which overlooked the garden through one window, and afforded a fine view towards Winchelsea through the other, and the master bedroom, known as the King’s Room because George the First had slept there for four nights, having been driven ashore on nearby Camber Sands by a storm (with what instant relish he had anticipated boasting to William and Alice of this royal association and teasing their republican prejudices); then the garden, with the ancient mulberry tree spreading its shade over a broad flat lawn, bounded by flowerbeds and an old brick wall whose rich hues of red, pink and purple, peeping through the leaves and branches of vines and climbing fruit trees, were like smudges of paint on an artist’s palette; and finally – well, not finally, but it was the climax of his tour – the Garden Room which Warren had sketched, thus planting in him the first seed of yearning for this place. It had been added by James Lamb, the mayor of Rye who built the main house, as a banqueting room, but it offered itself immediately to his excited vision as the perfect study, at least in the summer months (in the winter he could retreat to the Green Room), removed from domestic distractions, elevated above the garden on one side and the quiet street on the other, with room for two large writing tables, one for himself and one for MacAlpine, and ample space for pacing up and down, and for an armchair and a chaise longue beside the fireplace where he could recline and reflect. Paradise!

  That was his overwhelming impression on that first afternoon – that he had somehow found his way back to the Garden of Eden through the big green door with the brass knocker in West Street – and it was a fancy that often recurred, especially when he took a turn around the garden after a good morning’s work, with Tosca snuffling happily at his heels. But he had needed Edward Warren’s assurance that paradise was structurally sound, and his expert advice on how to make it even more perfect. It was Warren who had perceived that the rather lurid wallpaper in the downstairs parlours concealed fine oak panelling which, now restored to view and freshly varnished, enormously enhanced the dignity and historic atmosphere of the house; and it was he who had seen where a bathroom might be introduced, and what other modern improvements might be made to the sanitary arrangements and the kitchen facilities, without damage to its architectural integrity. That work, and the supplementary painting and decorating and carpeting and curtaining, had taken a frustratingly long time to accomplish, and he hadn’t been able to move in until June, some nine months after he signed the lease, but already he felt completely at home, and determined to stay in Lamb House till the end of the year. He had, in the meantime, managed to sub-let De Vere Gardens, staying at the Reform when business necessitated an overnight trip to London.

  The curtains stirred gently in a little puff of sea-scented air that blew into the room through the partly-opened window, carrying with it the plangent cry of a gull. The church clock struck seven. He did not repine at having woken early. He was content to lie there, just enjoying the simple sensation of happiness, in the chamber where a king saved from drowning had lain nearly two centuries ago. The charming story was that the mayor’s wife had yielded her bedroom to the King in spite of being heavily pregnant, and had given birth the same night to a son, to whom the monarch, being detained in Rye by a snowstorm, had acted as godfather two days later, and made a present of a silver-gilt bowl and a hundred guineas (the boy was of course christened George). It was pleasing to trace the motif of christening which had linked him to the Warrens from their first acquaintance back to the early history of this house which he had so miraculously come to possess with their help. Of course he didn’t actually own it, but the lease would not expire till 1918, which should cover most, if not all, of the years remaining to him, and he was already resolved to take any opportunity that might arise before that date to buy the freehold.

  He heard footsteps on the landing outside, probably the housemaid going down from her attic bedroom to kindle the kitchen fire. He could summon her and ask for his hot water to be brought as soon as it was ready, but he felt no urge to rise early and disturb the normal timetable of the house. Part of the euphoria he felt at this moment was the consciousness that the day ahead of him was entirely at his own disposal, free from all social obligations and distractions, available for uninterrupted work and quiet private recreation. Gosse had gone back to London the day before and, much as he had enjoyed his company, there was inevitably a slight sense of strain involved in the entertainment of visitors, of whom he had already had several since June. It was always pleasing to receive them, and to register, as much by the expressions on their faces as by their words of congratulation, their admiration of his new residence; but this gratifying response only spurred him on to be a host worthy of the house, and he spent far more time thinking about and attending to the needs of his guests than he had ever done in London. So it was always also a secret relief to see them go, and to relish the prospect of an interval of selfish peace until the next one was due.

  Gosse, to do him justice, had been no trouble, happy to spend his mornings reading and writing in the small parlour while he himself was dictating to MacAlpine in the Garden Room. He had brought his bike with him and they made some quite long excursions into the Romney Marshes, which was perfect cycling country – miles of flat, unfrequented roads winding between fields of grazing sheep and leading to sleepy old towns and villages with extraordinary churches – one the size of a cathedral in little Lydd, and another like something out of a fairy-tale, with shutters on the windows and a free-standing conical steeple made of wood, in Brookland. The most memorable of these trips, however, had been to New Romney to visit H. G. Wells, who was convalescing there at the home of an exceptionally kind and caring doctor, having been taken ill with a severe kidney complaint while making a bicycle tour of the East Sussex coast with his wife.

  Their mission had been a delicate one: the Royal Literary Fund, having heard that Wells might be in need of financial help, had asked Gosse to make a confidential assessment of the young writer’s needs without letting him know that his case was under consideration. Gosse knew Wells slightly and his pretext for calling on him was to introduce Henry, who remembered his intelligent review of Guy Domville with gratitude and was plea
sed to cooperate. Wells had since made a stir with a scientific romance called The Time Machine, which he fully intended to read one day, and some similar tales in the same vein, but one of the things they learned on their visit was that he was currently engaged on a realistic novel of contemporary life called Love and Mr Lewisham. Another was that Wells was in no great financial need – indeed he was sufficiently solvent to talk of building himself a house somewhere on the East Sussex coast as soon as he should have recovered his health. He was very interested in domestic architecture, and raged eloquently against the meanness and inconvenience of the typical modern British house, with its cramped rooms and interminable staircases, its inefficient heating and inadequate sanitation. He aimed to build the first house in England that would have an en suite lavatory for every bedroom, an eccentric ambition which suggested that he would not find Lamb House sympathique. Henry nevertheless invited him to call when he felt fit enough to do so. Although they had no interests in common except books and bicycles, he was impressed by the courage and self-belief of the young man, and his refreshing lack of reverence for the tried and the tested. He was the very embodiment of the new scientific age, glorying in visions of inventions that would transform everyday life. When Henry described how he was dependent on dictation as a method of composition, Wells predicted that before the end of the next century there would be machines that would take dictation and instantly transcribe your words on to a screen for revision and emendation and print them out on a typewriter without any human agency. How he and Gosse had laughed! Wells’s charming little wife Jane – his second apparently, in spite of his youth – who gazed adoringly at her husband as he held forth, had looked quite hurt by their lack of respect.

  He was rather pleased that Wells was thinking of settling in the area, confirming other evidence that it was becoming a popular habitat for authors. Ford Madox Hueffer had rented a farmhouse near Hythe, where he apparently collaborated with the interesting Polish expatriate Joseph Conrad on literary projects, and Stephen Crane, the brilliant young American author of The Red Badge of Courage, whom he had met briefly in London, was coming to live at Brede, on the other side of Rye, when he returned from reporting the war in Cuba. His wife Cora had already taken an enormous ramshackle house there. It was regrettable that the morals of these literary folk (Conrad excepted) were somewhat lax – Wells had lived with Jane for some time while waiting for his divorce, there was gossip about Hueffer’s relationship with his sister-in-law, and it was rumoured that Cora had been a brothel madam in the far West before she met Crane. He was anxious to establish his credentials as a thoroughly respectable citizen in the eyes of deeply conservative Rye; but as long as he was careful not to get personally involved in these scandals it was all grist to a novelist’s mill.

  The remarkable relaxation of moral standards in English society that had taken place in recent times, and the freedom with which such matters were discussed in sophisticated circles, was in fact a central theme of the novel on which he was presently engaged, The Awkward Age, and he was enjoying projecting something of himself into the character of Mr Longdon, the elderly country-dwelling bachelor whose old-fashioned values provided a measure of the decadence and cynicism of the metropolitan set in which he found himself, and provoked his compassionate interest in the plight of two young girls making the difficult transition from the schoolroom to marriage in this milieu. It was an idea he had started developing as a short story and put aside when it showed a stubborn determination to be a novel. Now he was writing it as a full-length serial for Harper’s Weekly, with such facility and confidence that he had agreed to their starting to run it in October even though he was some distance from finishing it.

  Nothing had been more striking, or more gratifying, about his acquisition of Lamb House than its liberating effect on his creative imagination. Almost immediately after signing the lease he had begun dictating The Turn of the Screw, which showed every sign of making more of an impression than anything he had published for years. The impetus had been partly – indeed mainly – mercenary. Slightly panicked at the thought of the expenditure to which he had committed himself, he had leafed through his notebook in search of something that might tickle the reading public’s jaded taste, and decided that a ghost story, inspired by Archbishop Benson’s anecdote about the two haunted children, was most likely to perform the trick. In that regard it had exceeded his expectations. The novella-length tale, serialised in Collier’s in the first few months of this year, had elicited a large postbag of complimentary letters from friends and strangers alike, but it was clear from the tenor of the correspondence that he had touched a deeper level of response in his readers than a mere pleasurable shudder. There was something peculiarly chilling about the idea of an adult couple corrupting the innocence of two young children, and then coming back from beyond the grave to claim their souls, but he had instinctively known that to underline the evil, to make it luridly explicit, would diminish its effect. The tale ‘worked’ because the nature of the corruption was never specified, and the supernatural manifestations were domesticated to its idyllic country house setting – they might even be (as the down-to-earth housekeeper Mrs Grose hinted) the fevered imaginings of the susceptible young governess who was its narrator and sole centre of consciousness. As his more perceptive readers recognised, he had contrived that every uncanny incident in the story was capable of two explanations, one natural and one supernatural, and it was the undecidability of the narrative, sustained to the very end, that more than anything else kept them on the rack of suspense. Several wrote to him pleading to be put out of their misery by an authoritative explanation of the ‘true’ nature of the case, requests which he had found elaborately polite ways to evade. He anticipated receiving more such entreaties when the tale was published in book form next month, paired with another long short story to plump out the volume, ‘Covering End’.

  This was a recycling of his play Summersoft, which Ellen Terry had hung on to for three years without showing any signs of getting it produced. That he had been able to shrug off this disappointment, and put the material to profitable use in another form, surely demonstrated that he had finally weaned himself from the Theatre. But he had learned lessons as well as tasted bitterness at that treacherous bosom, as The Awkward Age demonstrated, consisting very largely of ‘scenes’ which might, without much adjustment, be performed on a stage that could accommodate ten or twelve hours’ traffic instead of the statutory two or three. Editors were apt to complain (or alleged that their readers complained) that his stories contained too much analysis and introspection, that they were slow-moving and insufficiently ‘slick’, and sometimes hinted that these defects might be mended by increasing the proportion of dialogue to narration, as if there were not many significant moments in life from which dialogue was axiomatically excluded (such as, for instance, a man lying alone in bed musing on his good fortune). But if they wanted dialogue, he would give them dialogue – The Awkward Age contained little else – and see how his critics liked it. Probably no better than his internalised narrative mode, he thought wryly.

  He was resigned now to never being a really popular author, or producing a ‘best seller’, like poor Du Maurier. Something had happened in the culture of the English-speaking world in the last few decades, some huge seismic shift caused by a number of different converging forces – the spread and thinning of literacy, the levelling effect of democracy, the rampant energy of capitalism, the distortion of values by journalism and advertising – which made it impossible for a practitioner of the art of fiction to achieve both excellence and popularity, as Scott and Balzac, Dickens and George Eliot, had done in their prime. The best one could hope for was sufficient support from discriminating readers to carry on with the endless quest for aesthetic perfection. ‘Who was to be lucky and who to be rich,/Who’d get to the top of the tree?’ He would never be rich, but when Lamb House fell into his hands he had felt blessed with good luck, and there was more than one tree from
whose highest branches one might look down with a satisfying sense of achievement.

  The future seemed to stretch before him bright with hope and possibility, like a great calm ocean under the morning sun. He sometimes figured Lamb House as a ship of which he was the captain, steaming into the future, with MacAlpine as first officer and his little band of servants as crew; this bedroom was his cabin, the lawn was the main deck, and the Garden Room the bridge. Somewhere ahead a great project awaited him: three major novels, as analytical, introspective and deliberately paced as he cared to make them, but also as deep, as daring and as beautiful as only he could make them. The elements were already stored in his notebook. One about the grizzled American overcome by a vision of lost opportunities in the Paris garden, urging his young companion to ‘Live all you can!’; another about the sick heiress betrayed by love and her friends; a third about the father and daughter who overcame the destructive power of passion by their goodness and cunning. He was not ready to begin them yet, but he felt a serene inner certainty that he would write them in Lamb House.

  After breakfast he interviewed Mrs Smith in the drawing room as usual. Since there were no guests, either in residence or expected, there was little to discuss as regards the day’s menu, and he approved her prudent suggestions for ‘using up’ ingredients left over from entertaining Gosse.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked, as she seemed disposed to linger.