by David Lodge
‘That’s good to know,’ says Harry. ‘I’ve reason to believe that my uncle has generously left Lamb House to me, and it would be an immense weight off my mind if you would look after the property until I decide what to do with it. I can’t actually live there – as long as the war continues my work will be in Europe, and afterwards I’ll be going back to America – so I can’t give you any long-term guarantee of employment. But I had a timely letter yesterday from my younger brother, Billy, which I want to share with you. You may recall that Billy and his wife spent part of their honeymoon at Lamb House a few years ago, when my uncle kindly lent it to them—’
‘Oh yes, I remember Mr Billy!’ says Minnie. ‘And Mrs Billy.’
‘They certainly remember you – all of you – very warmly. I mentioned in a recent letter my concern about what would happen to you all after my uncle passed away, and – well – in a word, they’ve offered to take the three of you, to work for them as butler, cook and maid, in their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They have another house on Cape Cod. My sister-in-law is a wealthy woman. I’m sure the terms of employment will be generous. But you don’t have to make any decision immediately,’ he says, as they gape disbelievingly at him. ‘Think it over. Take your time.’
‘Well, I don’t need any time to make up my mind,’ says Burgess, when they get back to the kitchen. ‘Just think of it, eh? America!’ The gleam in his eye shows plainly enough that the idea of putting so many thousands of miles between himself and the Western Front is irresistible. ‘What about you, Joan?’
‘I’m game,’ says Joan.
‘What about you, Minnie?’ he says.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It’s a long way.’
‘You’d love it,’ he says. ‘They know how to live out there, I can tell you. There’s space. There’s food. Steaks, enormous – you’ve no idea. Ice-cream, as much as you can eat. Piped heat in the winter – no fires to lay every mornin’.’
‘I don’t know,’ she says again.
‘Go on!’ he says. ‘Don’t break up the team, Minnie. You, me, and Joan – we could do well for ourselves in America.’
‘Yes, go on, Minnie,’ says Joan. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
Minnie hesitates. ‘You seem to want me to come very bad, Burgess,’ she says.
‘Course I do,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t be the same without you, Minnie. We’re mates.’
She looks at him silently for a moment. ‘Well, all right, then,’ she says. ‘I’ll give it a try.’
‘Good for you, gal!’ says Burgess, clapping his hands. ‘I’ll tell Mr Harry we’re all of a mind to go. But not till the funeral’s over. First things first. Which reminds me,’ he says, adjusting his features to a more serious, even solemn, expression, ‘I’ve got to shave Mr James this morning.’
‘I don’t know how you can do it, Burgess,’ says Joan Anderson, with a little shudder. ‘Shaving a corpse.’
‘I don’t mind that,’ Burgess says. ‘I wouldn’t let anybody else do it. He taught me how to shave him, you see. He said I had a very gentle touch. I never cut him once. It’s a way of sayin’ goodbye.’ Suddenly tears are pouring down Burgess’s cheeks. ‘Sorry – I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ he says huskily, taking out a handkerchief, wiping his eyes and blowing his nose. Minnie goes over, puts her arm round his shoulder, and gives him a squeeze. Now that she has given up her romantic dreams it suddenly seems easier to do that.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for, Burgess,’ she says. ‘I’ll get you a jug of hot water and a clean towel.’
Later that day Theodora calls at the flat to offer her condolences. She had come round to Carlyle Mansions the previous evening to enquire about HJ but met in the lobby a neighbour who had already heard of the author’s death. Theodora, not wishing to intrude on the grieving family, left a note for Mrs James and went to the Post Office to cable the sad but not unexpected news to Edith Wharton. She does not mention this to Mrs James and Peggy, who are noticeably warmer in their manner towards her, and thank her for all she has done for Henry. ‘Would you like to see him?’ Mrs James asks. ‘One has a great tenderness for the body of a person one knew well in life, I think.’ Theodora says she would, and is shown into the drawing room by Minnie Kidd.
Henry James is laid out in his coffin, covered with a black pall, and there is a white cloth over his face which Minnie folds back to reveal his immaculately shaven face. He looks very fine, like a work of art in ivory wax, perfectly peaceful, but dissociated from everything that was his personality. She understands what Mrs James meant about feeling a tenderness for the body, because the spirit that inhabited it isn’t there to care for it any longer. Theodora, who is an active member of the Society for Psychical Research and sometimes attends séances in this capacity, reflects that it would be an interesting experiment to try one day to contact the spirit of Henry James. Authentic messages from HJ about the afterlife would be well worth having, and inauthentic ones would be easy to identify, since no medium could possibly fake his style.
Some six years earlier, Henry James wrote an essay entitled ‘Is There a Life After Death?’ which he must have dictated to Theodora Bosanquet, so she would have had a good idea of his views on the subject. It was published in Harper’s Bazaar, January–February 1910, along with contributions on the same theme by other writers, including William Dean Howells, which were collected into a book, published by Harper, called In After Days. Since Henry was in the grip of a paralysing depression in February 1910, we must suppose that he wrote the essay in a period of relative calm in 1909, a break in the gathering storm clouds of gloom, for it is an eloquent and optimistic piece of writing.
Leon Edel, who made himself the world’s greatest authority on the life and work of Henry James, summarises the essay, in his monumental biography, as follows:
If one meant physical life, he believed there was none. Death was absolute. What lived beyond life was what the creative consciousness had found and made: and only if enshrined in enduring form.
Actually, that was not quite what Henry James said. It was what you might expect him to say on the subject; it was what you might hope he would say, if you were a convinced materialist and a professor of literature; but it is not what he in fact said. ‘Is There a Life After Death?’ begins: ‘I confess at the outset that I think it is the most interesting question in the world, once it takes on all the intensity of which it is capable’ — hardly the sentiments of someone who thinks that death is absolute. But like all James’s writing, and especially his later work, the essay is very difficult to summarise. His prose is in fact designed to defeat paraphrase. It is like a fine-spun web, flexible and delicate, designed to catch meaning rather than to express it. You have to negotiate the web, spread yourself over it, experience it, to get the meaning. Stand back from the web, and you can hardly trace its structure, its threads are so fine; try to condense it, and you risk destroying it. Still, we will try. He says that contemplating the question can have two possible effects:
the effect of making us desire death . . . absolutely as welcome extinction and termination; or the effect of making us desire it as a renewal of the interest, the appreciation, the passion, the large and consecrated consciousness, in a word, of which we have had so splendid a sample in this world.
He himself was familiar, and would soon be familiar again, with the first effect, but the essay consists largely of an exploration, and eventual affirmation, of the second, in which death is seen as the portal to an extension, not an extinction, of consciousness. He frankly acknowledges, however, the absence of any firm evidence for such a hope. We must resign ourselves, he says,
to the grim fact that ‘science’ takes no account of the soul, the principle we worry about, and that we are abjectly and inveterately shut up in our material organs . . . Observation and evidence reinforce the verdict of the dismal laboratories and the confident analysts as to the interconvertibility of our genius and our brain — the p
oor palpable, ponderable, probeable, laboratory brain.
For him orthodox religion offers no firm foundation from which to challenge this view; neither is he impressed by the claims of spiritualism to access life beyond the veil. The dead are conspicuous by their absence and their silence. So what gives him any confidence in the possibility of personal immortality? Simply ‘the accumulation of the very treasure itself of consciousness’, an accumulation heightened and refined by the circumstance of being an artist:
It is in a word the artistic consciousness and privilege in itself that thus shines as from immersion in the fountain of being. Into that fountain, to depths immeasurable, our spirit dips – to the effect of feeling itself, qua imagination and aspiration, all scented with universal sources. What is that but an adventure of our personality, and how can we after it hold complete disconnection likely?
In other words, he finds the interaction between his developing individual consciousness and the world it inhabits so rich and rewarding that he cannot accept that the sense of self thus produced is just a cruel trick played by Nature which will be rudely exposed at death. He emphasises that this is not ‘a belief’ (a word he has been careful to avoid) but ‘a desire’. There is in fact an implication running through the entire essay, an idea which some speculative theologians have since found attractive, that we will get the afterlife we desire (and no afterlife at all if we don’t desire it). The essay concludes:
And when once such a mental relation to the question as that begins to hover and settle, who shall say over what fields of experience, past and current, and what immensities of perception and yearning, it shall not spread its wings? No, no, no – I reach beyond the laboratory brain.
Interesting, somewhat surprising stuff – and it encourages a different and more pleasing fantasy than the one I indulged in earlier: the spirit of Henry James existing out there somewhere in the cosmos, knowing everything I wished he could know before he died, observing with justifiable satisfaction the way his reputation developed after his death, totting up the sales figures, reading the critiques, watching the films and the television serials on some celestial video player or DVD laptop, and listening to the babble of our conversation about him and his work, swelling through the ether like a prolonged ovation.
Henry, wherever you are – take a bow.
Acknowledgements, etc.
This kind of book cannot be written without the help of other books, and other people. My biggest single debt, inevitably, is to Leon Edel – not only for his indispensable biography, Henry James: a life (1984), but also for his editions of Henry James’s Letters (1974–84), the Complete Plays (1949), Guy Domville (1961), and The Diary of Alice James (1964); also for A Bibliography of Henry James (with Dan H. Laurence; 3rd edn. 1982 revised with James Rambeau). Among other biographical studies of James, I profited particularly from Lyndall Gordon’s The Private Life of Henry James (1998), Philip Horne’s Henry James: a Life in Letters (1999), R. W. B. Lewis’s The Jameses; a family narrative (1991), H. Montgomery Hyde’s Henry James at Home (1969), Simon Nowell-Smith’s The Legend of the Master (1947), and Robert L. Gale’s A Henry James Encyclopaedia (1989).
My main sources of information about George Du Maurier were Leonée Ormond’s comprehensive and lavishly illustrated biography, George Du Maurier (1969), his granddaughter Daphne Du Maurier’s The Du Mauriers (1937) and The Young George Du Maurier: A Selection of his Letters 1860–67 (1951), C. Hoyer Millar’s George Du Maurier and Others (1937), and, going further back in time, Felix Moscheles’ In Bohemia with Du Maurier (1896), J. L. & J. B. Gilder’s Trilbyana: the Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel (New York, 1895), and R. H. Sherard’s profile, ‘The Author of Trilby’ in The Westminster Budget (Dec. 1895). It was Daphne Du Maurier who discovered that the alleged aristocratic strand in the family’s history was a fiction concocted by George Du Maurier’s paternal grandfather, Robert Mathurin-Busson, who was an ordinary artisan with no claim to either the name or estate of Du Maurier, and fled from France to England to escape, not the Revolution, but a charge of fraud. George Du Maurier died in blissful ignorance of these facts. He must have known that his English maternal grandmother, Mary-Anne Clarke, had been a famous Regency courtesan and the mistress of Frederick Duke of York, who supported herself and her (legitimate) daughter Ellen in exile in Paris on an annuity obtained by threatening to publish her compromising memoirs and the Duke’s love letters; but he did not, it seems, share this knowledge with his friends. It was his son, Gerald, who allowed the name Du Maurier to be used for a well-known brand of cigarettes.
Other published sources from which I gleaned valuable information and ideas include: Clare Benedict, ed., Constance Fenimore Woolson (1932); Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (rev. edn. 2003); Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work (1924); Joseph Francis Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly (1917); Margaret Drabble, Arnold Bennett (1974); Daphne Du Maurier, Gerald: a portrait (1937); Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987); James Harding, Gerald Du Maurier (1989); Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Vol. I, 1856–1898: The Search for Love (1988); Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times (1963–1971); G. D. Martineau, A History of the Royal Sussex Regiment (1955); A. E. W. Mason, Sir George Alexander and the St James’s Theatre (1935); Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts (1992); Harry T. Moore, Henry James (1974); Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: the Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (2000), and Introduction to Trilby, Penguin Classics edition (1994); Lyall H. Powers, ed., Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900–1915 (1990); Elizabeth Robins, Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters and a Commentary (1932); Miranda Seymour, A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle 1895–1915 (1988); Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude (1996); John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward (1990); Elaine Showalter, Introduction to Trilby, Oxford World’s Classics edn. (1995); Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape 1849–1928 (1985); Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1933); H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography (1934); Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981).
I was fortunate to be assisted in my researches by three couples who were or are custodians of Lamb House, now the property of the National Trust, who facilitated my access to the house, and generously helped me with information, documents and introductions: the late Graham Watson (who was my first literary agent) and his wife Dorothy; Hilary and Gordon Brooke; Sue Harris and Tony Davis. Burgess Noakes’s great-niece, Mrs Diane Davidson, kindly answered some questions and supplied me with some useful documents.
Peter Davison, Michael Holroyd and John Sutherland helped me by answering specific enquiries. Alan Readman of the West Sussex Records Office supplied useful information and photocopied documents concerning Burgess Noakes’s war service. Kathy Chater did some research for me in the East Sussex County Records Office. I am grateful to the staff of the London Library (an invaluable resource), the British Library, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University – especially Jennie Rathbun of the latter institution, for helping me to obtain photocopies of the Henry James–George Du Maurier correspondence, most of which is unpublished, and some letters of Burgess Noakes. Bernard Bergonzi, Maurice Couturier, Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Mike Shaw and Jonathan Pegg, all read the first complete version of the novel and made helpful comments and corrections, as did my wife Mary. My editors at three different publishing houses, Geoff Mulligan, Paul Slovak and Tony Lacey, gave me very useful notes for my final revision of the text.
In my brief authorial prologue I state that, although ‘nearly everything that happens in this story is based on factual sources . . . I have imagined some events and personal details which history omitted to record’. Some readers may wish to know more about the nature and extent of these additions to my sources, so here is a summary of the significant instances.
Since I was unable to find any verbal description or photograph of Minnie Kidd, I was obliged to invent her personal appearance. Her unrequited love for Burgess Noakes is a speculation, partly encouraged
by the fact that she wrote frequently to Noakes when he was serving as a soldier in Flanders, and that Theodora Bosanquet and Edith Wharton concurred, in their correspondence, in hoping he would get a medical discharge ‘for Kidd’s sake’ (though by that they probably meant the assistance he gave to Minnie in looking after HJ). James did allude to ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ when Minnie came to his assistance at the time of his stroke, but her attempt to read the story is my addition. The telegram from Alexander congratulating James on his O.M. is a matter of record, but Gerald Du Maurier’s is not.
Although we know that James was shocked by the morals of Wagner’s entourage in Italy in 1880, and subsequently broke off relations with Zhukovski, Leon Edel says that ‘we can only guess what happened at Posilippo’ – so I have guessed. Du Maurier’s encounter with the Protestant minister in Malines, which he relates to HJ, is my invention, though it is consistent with his circumstances at the time and his subsequent views. The excursion of HJ and Du Maurier to Staithes is not based on any record, though HJ did join his friend in Whitby that summer, and the walk to Staithes was a favourite of Du Maurier’s. HJ’s brush with the prostitutes and the louche young men outside the Haymarket Theatre on his way to see An Ideal Husband is my invention. Du Maurier’s encounter with Tom Guthrie and Edmund Gosse’s conversations with William Norris in the St James’s Theatre on the same evening are imagined, though all were present at the first performance of Guy Domville. The actions and reactions of the other named characters that night are more closely based on recorded fact. The Chicagoan’s offer of $10,000 for a signed drawing of Trilby in the nude is my only embellishment of the true story of the Trilby ‘boom’. Agatha Miller, better known by her married name of Agatha Christie, was living in Torquay, and reached her fifth birthday, when HJ was residing at the Osborne, but the encounter between them is a fancy of my own. Exactly when HJ hired Burgess Noakes as house-boy is uncertain; I have favoured the earliest possible date, the autumn of 1898, for structural reasons. It was my idea to send Peggy James and her mother to see a performance of Peter Pan. I believe Burgess Noakes must have been present at the battle of Auber’s Ridge; drawing on the 5th Battalion’s war diary for facts, I have imagined how he observed and survived it. The offer of Billy James and his wife to employ Burgess Noakes, Minnie Kidd and Joan Anderson may not have been conveyed quite so soon after HJ’s death as I have presented it.
