Author, Author

by David Lodge

  ‘The artillery barrage didn’t work, you see. Don’t know why – whether the gunners’ aim was out, or there was something wrong with our shells, failin’ to explode, as was said afterwards – but as soon as the Second Battalion went over the top and charged they were cut down by machine guns and rifle fire. It was murder. Nobody got within a hundred yards of the German trenches – they were spread out across No Man’s Land, dead, or dyin’, or takin’ what cover they could find in craters and behind trees. And then the German artillery started poundin’ our positions. The First Aid post took a direct hit. The noise was terrible. I was shakin’ with fear, I don’t mind telling you, and I wasn’t the only one. The man beside me filled his pants – beggin’ your pardon, sir, but I could smell it. We moved up from the second line of trenches to the first, and mustered there, with fixed bayonets. I was in the fourth platoon of “C” Company. The first three platoons went over the top, and we got ready to follow. Lieutenant Haigh raised his whistle to his lips, and I thought to myself: “Well, Burgess, this is it.” And then Captain Courthope came up and I heard him say to Lieutenant Haigh: “Don’t take your platoon over. There’s no point. It’s a bloody shambles.” It was his own decision to hold us back, and it saved my life – I’m sure of that. A little while afterwards the order came from battalion HQ to retire but it would have been too late if we’d already gone over the top. The other three officers in “C” Company was killed, and scores of the lads, many of them pals of mine. And it was still only seven o’clock in the morning . . . I remember looking at my watch and thinking to myself, if I was at home now, I’d just be getting up and havin’ a wash and a shave, and then goin’ down to the kitchen to have a bit of breakfast with Minnie and Joan, with plenty of time before I have to wake Mr James . . . And didn’t I wish I was at home!

  ‘After a while we was relieved, and regrouped in the rear trenches. They told us we were goin’ to support another attack in the late afternoon. Waiting for that wasn’t funny, I can tell you. But the first wave failed again – a few brave lads got to the German trenches, but none of them came back, so they called off the attack. At about six o’clock in the evening the order came to return to our billets at a place called Gonnehem – “Gone ’ome”, we called it. The battalion marched off in good order, singin’ “Sussex by the Sea” – the regimental song, you know. The C.O. complimented us afterwards on our spirit. But we had something to sing about. We’d survived. Not like the poor sods dead in No Man’s Land. The battalion lost two hundred men that day, killed, missing or wounded. And what did we gain? Sweet Fanny Adams. Not a yard of ground, at the end of the day. Like Captain Courthope said, it were a bloody shambles.’

  There is a discreet tap on the door.

  ‘That’ll be the day nurse,’ says Burgess. ‘Thank you for listening, sir. I hope I didn’t upset you, but I needed to get it off my chest.’

  ‘Thank you, Burgess, that will be all,’ the author murmurs, without opening his eyes.

  ‘So what are you going to do now, Burgess?’ says Joan Anderson, a few days later.

  ‘Do?’ says Burgess, looking blank.

  ‘When the old man . . . pops off.’

  ‘Oh. Soon enough to think about that when it happens,’ he says.

  ‘It can’t be long,’ says Joan. ‘He had a bad night last night.’

  ‘Don’t you be so sure,’ says Burgess. ‘Don’t write him off yet.’

  ‘Oh well, if you don’t want to talk about it . . . I’m going out shopping, to see what I can scrape together for dinner,’ says Joan, a little huffily. She goes out of the kitchen, leaving Burgess and Minnie together. They are polishing the cutlery. Burgess applies the polish and rubs it vigorously into each item, removing the tarnish marks, and then hands it to Minnie to buff with a clean duster.

  ‘I might look for a job as a gentleman’s valet,’ says Burgess, after a minute or two of silence, broken only by the soft clash of the knives, forks and spoons as Minnie sorts them into matching groups on the table. ‘But I’ll be lucky to find another master like Mr James.’

  ‘You don’t want to settle down, then? Get married and raise a family?’ Minnie says boldly.

  ‘No,’ says Burgess, shaking his head. ‘I’m not the marryin’ kind.’ Another long silence follows before he continues. ‘I remember Mr James sayin’ to me once – we were in a train, in America – “the cars” they call ’em out there. Very comfortable they are – seats like armchairs . . . I remember him sayin’ to me – I don’t know why he was in such a confidin’ mood, but on those long journeys he would get talkin’ sometimes . . . I remember him sayin’: “I decided long ago that I would never marry, Noakes” – he still called me Noakes in those days. “A writer shouldn’t have any ties – except to his art.” That’s what he said. And I reckon it applies to being a good servant, too. You have to be dedicated. It’s a vocation.’

  ‘There are servants who are married,’ says Minnie.

  ‘Yes, but it always causes problems. Take the Smiths – they were at Lamb House before your time. He was the butler, she was the cook. It seemed like a good arrangement, but Smith was a terrible drunk – he was always tippling Mr James’s wine.’

  ‘Yes, I heard,’ says Minnie.

  ‘It was a disgrace. But his wife covered up for him. Mr James had to get rid of them in the end, but it went on far too long. Smith could never have got away with it if they hadn’t been married. Now you and me, Minnie, we make a good team because we’re independent. Everything between us is open and above board. We’re professionals.’

  ‘Did they have any children – the Smiths?’ she asks.

  ‘No, thank God. That’s another tie. I saw what it did to my poor Ma, left with six kids to bring up when my old man died. That’s why she took me out of school and got me the job at Lamb House – she was desperate to get me earnin’ a bit. She told the old toff I was fourteen, but I was only twelve. I don’t blame her, mind. I’ve had a good life working for Mr James, a good life and an interestin’ one . . . Two bachelors together. We were well matched.’

  ‘But what about love, Burgess?’ Minnie bursts out.

  ‘Oh, that,’ he says. ‘You mean girls, women?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was always shy with girls, when I was young,’ he says, after a pause for thought. ‘I preferred sports in my spare time. I’d rather be down at the athletic club than chasing girls, any day. And when I saw what happened to some of my mates – getting girls in the family way, having to get married, having a brood of kids they couldn’t support . . . I reckoned I was better off on my own. And later on in the Army it was the same. The lads with wives and sweethearts was twice as miserable as those of us who was single – missin’ ’em, wonderin’ if they would ever see ’em again – or wonderin’ what they might be getting up to at home. I was glad I was a bachelor, like Mr James.’

  ‘But if everybody felt like you and him, the human race would come to an end,’ says Minnie.

  ‘Not much risk of that, I reckon,’ says Burgess with a grin.

  ‘I love you, Burgess,’ says Minnie.

  ‘This deafness of mine is a real curse,’ he says. ‘Apart from that, I consider myself a lucky man. I’d better do that knife again, Minnie, don’t you think?’

  Suddenly the kitchen door swings open, and Mr Henry James Jr bursts in. ‘Burgess – Mr James has taken a turn for the worse, and Dr Des Voeux’s phone seems to be out of order,’ he says. ‘Would you run round to his house and ask him to call?’

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ says Burgess.

  And so, on the 25th of February, the death-watch begins. Henry’s last words to Alice, before he lapses into semi-consciousness, are: ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘Of course, Henry,’ she says, and stays at his side for hours before weariness compels her to retire. The other members of the household take it in turns to sit with him and relieve the nurses throughout that day and the next. Burgess in particular spends long hours at the bedside, watching his breathing
, straining to hear the unintelligible words he occasionally mutters. On the 27th the nurse summons Mrs James because the patient’s breathing has become irregular, but the crisis passes. On the 28th he is unable to take nourishment. At four in the afternoon, as darkness falls outside the windows, he begins breathing in short gasps. Dr Des Voeux, who is in the room with Alice and her children, says quietly: ‘This is the end.’ But it isn’t, not quite. The relatives gathered round his bed are physically and emotionally exhausted. They long for the inevitable end to come. But the author’s fingerhold on life is extraordinarily tenacious. He will not let go until he has to.

  . . . while for me, as I conjure up this deathbed scene, looking at it as through the curved transparency of a crystal ball, perhaps the most poignant fact about Henry James’s life is that, having suffered professional humiliation and rejection in mid-career, culminating in the débâcle of Guy Domvill, and having then triumphantly recovered his creativity and confidence, and gone on to write his late masterpieces, those foundation stones of the modern psychological novel, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, he had to suffer the experience of catastrophic failure all over again, little more than a decade after the first ordeal. The three major novels, written at Lamb House and published in quick succession between 1902 and 1904, in an astonishing, prolonged surge of creative power, were received for the most part with respectful bafflement or blank indifference. Sales of each book were just a few thousands. This was dispiriting enough, but what plunged him into depression, hypochondria, and near suicidal despair – what reduced him eventually to the gibbering, weeping, bedridden wreck his nephew Harry discovered on arriving at Lamb House early in 1910 – was the total failure of the New York Edition of his collected works, on which he had laboured for many years, selecting, revising and proofreading the texts, and prefacing them with richly meditated accounts of their genesis and composition. The majority of the twenty-four volumes were published in 1908, and his royalty payment at the end of the year from this source amounted to just $211. This discovery, he told a correspondent, ‘knocked me flat’. The critical reception of the edition was equally disappointing – only Percy Lubbock’s review in the TLS hailed it as a literary landmark, and for the most part it was simply ignored by the press. There was an additional sting in knowing that many of his literary friends who had disapproved on principle of his extensive revision of the early work, such as Edmund Gosse, would feel vindicated by the outcome. As another year passed with no improvement in the fortunes of the edition he became convinced that the whole project had been a gigantic folly, which would ruin him financially and bury his reputation. By a cruel twist of fate this experience coincided with a revival of his theatrical ambitions and hopes, which at first offered relief from his depression but only exacerbated it when they were once again dashed. In 1908 the distinguished actor-manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson offered to produce an extended version of the one-act play Henry had written long ago for Ellen Terry, now entitled The High Bid, but after trying it out in Edinburgh he decided to put on Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back in London instead. This was a sensational hit and ran for three years, while The High Bid received only five matinee performances. Two other plays commissioned at about the same time didn’t get even that far. The cumulative weight of all these disappointments was too much to bear. It was in the mood of black despair they induced that he made the first great bonfire of his correspondence in the garden at Lamb House, watched by his awed and uncomprehending servants. It was essentially an act of revenge against the uncaring, unsympathetic literary world that had scorned or ignored his work. If they didn’t want his novels, he would do everything in his power to ensure that they didn’t get his life – he would rather vanish entirely from the literary landscape than become one of those ‘interesting’ minor figures who live on in biographies and collections of letters and footnotes to the works of more eminent writers. He derived some temporary relief from this drastic act, but before long he was plunged into acute depression again.

  He recovered in due course, thanks largely to the care of his brother and sister-in-law, and wrote more books, notably the volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, which were warmly received by a literary world now inclined to cherish him as the venerable relic of an earlier era. But he completed no further major fictional project, and more and more of his books went out of print. It was just as well he did not know that the surprisingly generous advance he received for The Ivory Tower had come out of Edith Wharton’s royalties by her secret arrangement with Scribner’s. He must have felt, when ‘the distinguished thing’ presented its visiting card, that, in spite of the admiration of his friends and the young disciples to whom he was cher maître, in spite of the Order of Merit and the congratulations it provoked, in spite of his own belief in the value of his work, and in the difficult aesthetic path he had carved out and strenuously followed – in spite of all this, he must have felt that he had failed to impress his vision on the world’s collective consciousness as he had hoped to do at the outset of his literary career.

  It’s tempting therefore to indulge in a fantasy of somehow time-travelling back to that afternoon of late February 1916, creeping into the master bedroom of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, casting a spell on the little group of weary watchers at the bedside, pulling up a chair oneself, and saying a few reassuring words to HJ, before he departs this world, about his literary future. How pleasing to tell him that after a few decades of relative obscurity he would become an established classic, essential reading for anyone interested in modern English and American literature and the aesthetics of the novel, that all his major works and most of his minor ones would be constantly in print, scrupulously edited, annotated, and studied in schools, colleges and universities around the world, the subject of innumerable postgraduate theses and scholarly articles and books (and of course biographies – but it wouldn’t be tactful to mention them, or the fact that he would be adopted by a branch of academic criticism known as Queer Theory, whose exponents claim, for instance, to find metaphors of anal fisting in the Prefaces to the New York Edition). And what fun to tell him that millions of people all over the world would encounter his stories in theatrical and cinematic and television adaptations, that The Turn of the Screw would be made into an opera by one of the greatest of modern British composers, and that although his plays would, alas, remain unperformed, the novels and stories would provide coveted roles for some of the greatest actors and actresses in the world; and that film and TV tie-in editions of these books would sell in large quantities.

  It was his misfortune to consort with, and often befriend, writers far more popular than himself whose success only aggravated his own sense of failure, but time has rectified the balance. Of his peers and contemporaries probably only Thomas Hardy is more widely read today (I don’t count as either a peer or a contemporary little Agatha, who knocked him off his bike in Torquay, where there is now a statue of her by the harbour, and who still sells five million books a year though she’s been dead for a quarter of a century), whereas Mrs Humphry Ward is almost totally forgotten and even George Du Maurier is slipping out of the collective cultural memory. Everybody knows what the name ‘Svengali’ signifies and what a trilby hat is and what ‘the altogether’ means, but not many people, I find, especially young people, know where these terms come from. ‘You only contributed one word to the English language,’ I would tell HJ, ‘but it’s one to be proud of: “Jamesian”.’

  A silly, self-indulgent fantasy, of course. And even if the other impossible conditions were met, I would be too late. He is beyond hearing or understanding now. Every active cell of his body and his brain is dedicated to drawing the next breath . . .

  At six o’clock he exhales three sighing breaths at long intervals, the last one very faint, and peacefully expires. Dr Des Voeux checks his pulse and pronounces him dead. Alice and her daughter embrace and comfort each other. Harry
goes to the kitchen to tell the servants. Minnie bursts into tears and covers her face in her apron; Joan Anderson wipes her good eye as well as the chronically weeping one; Burgess goes very pale, coughs, and says, in a voice husky with emotion: ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but could I ask a favour?’

  ‘Of course, Burgess, what is it?’

  ‘Could I shave Mr James – for the last time, like? I think he would have wanted me to. Better than some stranger doin’ it.’

  Harry looks a little taken aback by the request, but quickly agrees. ‘Certainly – I’m sure your instinct is right, Burgess. But not yet – tomorrow morning perhaps.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,’ says Burgess.

  ‘And . . . I’ve got something else to discuss with the three of you,’ Harry says, looking at them rather strangely, one by one. ‘But that can wait till tomorrow too.’

  The next morning, after the breakfast things have been cleared, Mr James summons the three servants to the dining room, and invites them to sit down at the big polished table with him.

  ‘I expect you’ve been giving some thought to what you will do in the future,’ he says. ‘I want you to know that we – I mean my mother and sister and myself – are very aware of what good and faithful servants you have been to my uncle, over many years, and especially in these last few months. We are very grateful. And we’d be very glad if you would stay on here as long as there is work to be done, while we settle my uncle’s estate, and so on. Of course you are quite free to give notice at once if you wish—’

  ‘Speakin’ for myself, sir, I’ve no such wish,’ says Burgess quickly, and the two women murmur their agreement.