by David Lodge
This was the starting point for Author, Author – the moment of conception, if you like. The basic facts were in Edel’s biography, but I had not read that enormous work from cover to cover at that stage. I had only dipped into the parts that concerned my critical and editorial work on James, just as I had only dipped into The Notebooks of Henry James edited by Matthiessen and Murdock, which contains James’s own, slightly different account of his seminal conversation with Du Maurier, and reveals that he himself was genuinely intrigued by the possibilities of the Trilby story. It was reading Trilby and Pick’s introduction that prompted that first entry in my own notebook, which concludes:
I am much taken with the idea of a play (or even musical?) of the story of (behind) Trilby, in which H. James and Du M. would be the main characters, framing extracts from the more dramatic scenes of Trilby. It would turn on the irony of the great master of modern fiction turning down an idea that made his friend a bestseller, something J. hankered after and never achieved.
In retrospect it seems clear to me that I thought first of a dramatic rather than a novelistic treatment of the subject partly because, as mentioned above, it had never previously occurred to me to write a novel about a real, historical person. Also, in the late 1980s and the 1990s I had begun to combine novel-writing with writing scripts for film, television and the stage. I had written one play (The Writing Game) first produced in 1990, and had been working intermittently on another one (which became Home Truths, produced in 1998). As I noted earlier, there were lots of contemporary models for theatre pieces about writers and artists. I think I had particularly in mind Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. As I turned the idea over in my mind, however, I soon began to think of it as a novel. Only the discourse of prose fiction would allow me to render the effect of the success of Trilby on James’s supersensitive consciousness, and even a cursory reading around the subject revealed a richness of detail and ramification of effects that would require the expansiveness of the novel form to encompass them. I observed that Du Maurier’s success with Trilby, first as a novel, and then as a play (adapted by other hands), in the years 1894–5, coincided with the catastrophic climax of Henry James’s long campaign to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright, when he was booed onstage at the first night of his play Guy Domville on 5 January 1895. I had been fascinated by the story of that first night, and the people, some famous, others to become famous, who were present at it, ever since I encountered it in Edel’s biography some ten years earlier. I was then editing the Penguin Classics edition of The Spoils of Poynton, the first work of fiction James started after the debacle of Guy Domville, and had acquired from researching the background to that novel a vivid sense of the pain of James’s humiliation and the effort it required to lift himself out of the consequent depression and resume his career as a novelist. The thought of exploring and exploiting this rich material in a novel was exciting, all the more so because I was aware of the element of risk involved: first, in writing a novel completely different in form and content from anything I had attempted before; and secondly in taking on a formidably difficult subject, a writer about whom a great deal was known, and on whose life and work there were many expert and proprietorial authorities.
I obtained and read Leonée Ormond’s excellent biography of George Du Maurier which confirmed my hunch that he was an interesting figure in his own right whose relationship with HJ would be worth exploring in some detail. But I did not begin serious work on the project for several years. If I had done so at once, I might have been the first instead of the third novelist to publish a novel about Henry James. When I made that initial note in November 1995, however, I was well into the preparatory research for another novel, which had priority. This was Thinks . . . , a novel about two contrasting and conflicting views of consciousness: the scientific and the literary (the latter being informed by both humanistic and religious ideas). These views are represented respectively by the hero, Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist specialising in Artificial Intelligence, and the heroine, Helen Reed, a novelist seeking distraction from the recent death of her husband by teaching creative writing for a semester at Ralph’s university. It was a long time before I felt I had acquired a sufficient grasp of the key issues and the vocabulary of consciousness studies to begin writing the novel, and then it progressed very slowly. I was always glad to have an excuse to put it aside for a while, to work on something else – film scripts of my novels Paradise News and Therapy, which were ‘in development’ during this period (and never emerged from it), and Home Truths, which finally reached the stage in January 1998, and which I turned into a novella early in 1999. But to begin work on another entirely new novel would have been effectively to abandon Thinks . . . .
Although the labour of researching and writing this book postponed systematic work on the Henry James–George Du Maurier project, that idea was always simmering quietly on the back burner of my own consciousness, and in consequence there are several allusions to and quotations from Henry James in Thinks . . . . He was probably the first novelist in the English language to have a theoretical as well as an intuitive understanding of the importance of ‘point of view’ in fiction – i.e., the perspective(s) from which a story, involving several characters through any or all of whom it could be focalised, is told; and he was a virtuoso in the art of telling a story through a limited or unreliable ‘centre of consciousness’ (to use his own term). It seemed useful and plausible therefore to make my heroine an admirer of Henry James, very familiar with his work from having once begun (but not completed) a DPhil thesis on it at Oxford. Early on in the novel there is a conversation in which Messenger explains that the problem for cognitive scientists is that consciousness is a first-person phenomenon but science is a third-person discourse. Helen quotes from memory the opening paragraph of The Wings of the Dove to demonstrate how novelistic discourse can overcome the first person/third person dichotomy through the device of ‘free indirect style’, in which the inner voice of the point-of-view character is fused with the voice of a covert narrator:
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
The subjectivity of consciousness – the fact that we can never know for certain what anyone else is thinking – makes it easy for human beings to deceive each other, and this was a theme that Henry James often explored, though with the greatest reticence and decorum, in stories of infidelity. In a crucial episode of Thinks . . . , when Helen unexpectedly encounters Ralph’s wife Carrie engaged in a romantic assignation with one of his colleagues (generally supposed to be a celibate homosexual), she is conscious of re-enacting a celebrated scene in Henry James’s novel, The Ambassadors, where the hero Lambert Strether, on a solitary walk in the French countryside near Paris, sees and is seen by Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet in a rowing boat on the river and realises the true nature of a relationship he had been led to believe was entirely innocent. It is Helen’s interest in James (and at a second remove my own) that brings her to the town of Ledbury where she makes this discovery.
In the summer of 1999, by which time I was well into the writing of Thinks . . . , Philip Horne published Henry James: A Life in Letters, which told the story of the novelist’s life through a generous selection of his letters, many of them not previously published, with linking passages of editorial commentary and comprehensive notes. It was just the book I needed to refresh my knowledge of James’s life as the prospect of actually starting work on the James–Du Maurier novel appeared on the horizon. Among the early letters I was particularly struck by one from James to a friend in America (Charles Eliot Norton) describing a long walk he made in the spring of 1870 from Malvern, in Worcestershire, where he was seeking a cure for his chronic constipation, to Ledbury, where he
saw ‘a noble old church (with detached campanile) and a churchyard so full of ancient sweetness, so happy in situation and characteristic detail, that it seemed to me . . . one of the memorable sights of my European experience’.7 I decided that Helen should come across this letter in a book (though in fact she couldn’t have done, because Horne published it for the first time and the action of Thinks . . . takes place in 1997) and decide to make a literary pilgrimage to Ledbury, where she would encounter Carrie Messenger and her lover. Ledbury is no great distance from Cheltenham, Gloucester and environs, where I had set the action of my novel, inventing the greenfield University of Gloucester for this purpose (having checked on the Internet that no such institution existed, but overlooking the fact that there was a Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education which was seeking university status, and would acquire it within a year of the publication of my novel). In October ’99 I was in Cheltenham myself to take part in the literary festival, and I took the opportunity to drive the following day to Ledbury, where I lunched at the Feathers, a fine old black-and-white inn, the perfect setting for my projected scene, and noted other details of local colour which would be useful.
The festival event that had brought me to Cheltenham was a panel discussion with Andrew Davies and Adrian Mitchell about the adaptation of novels for TV, film and stage. It was a subject in which I had a personal interest, having adapted my own Nice Work and Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit as serial TV dramas for the BBC. But the main example I used in my brief presentation at Cheltenham was the juxtaposition of a passage from James’s The Portrait of a Lady with the corresponding scene in Laura Jones’s published screenplay for Jane Campion’s 1996 feature film of that novel. I had been thinking a lot lately about the adaptation of James’s fiction for the screen.
At the beginning of that same year, 1999, I had received an invitation to give the annual Henry James lecture at the Rye Festival in September. It came from Hilary Brooke, the organiser of the festival. She and her husband Gordon were then the custodians of Lamb House. She mentioned that they would be glad to offer me hospitality at Lamb House if I accepted. I had been in Rye on two or three occasions in the past, and looked at Lamb House from the outside, but these visits never coincided with the limited hours when the interior and the garden were open to the public. The prospect of actually being able to stay there overnight as a guest was irresistible. I agreed to give the lecture, and proposed as my topic the feature film adaptations of James’s novels, of which there had been several in recent years, notably The Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and Washington Square, while a film of The Golden Bowl was about to go into production. There had also been many adaptations of James’s novels and tales for television, especially by the BBC, going back to the 1960s and ’70s, and several successful stage adaptations including The Heiress (Washington Square), The Aspern Papers, and several versions of The Turn of the Screw, as well as Benjamin Britten’s celebrated opera. These did not come within the scope of my lecture, but they reinforced the irony that Henry James, who always bemoaned the limited circulation and appreciation of his fiction and failed disastrously as a playwright, who was heard to exclaim late in life, ‘I should so much have loved to be popular!’,8 achieved a huge global audience posthumously through the adaptation of his work in dramatic form by other hands. This would in due course become a minor theme of Author, Author.
I went to Rye early in September, with my wife, Mary, who had been included in the Brookes’ invitation, and gave my lecture, illustrated with video clips, in the Methodist Hall. I shall say no more here about the lecture, which was published later in a much expanded form,9 nor expatiate on the charms of Lamb House and its walled garden, which are amply described in the pages of Author, Author, but the occasion still glows in my memory with a kind of halo of happiness. It took place on a very warm evening, of a kind rare in England, when the heat of the day lasts long into the night and it is comfortable to be outdoors in shirt-sleeves or summer frocks as darkness falls. There was a drinks party at Lamb House after the lecture and guests sipped their white wine on the lawn and under the boughs of the mulberry tree which replaced the one blown down in the great storm of 1915. One of the pleasures of the occasion was a reunion with Graham Watson, who had been my literary agent at Curtis Brown until his retirement in 1979. He and his wife Dorothy had themselves been the curator-tenants of Lamb House at that time, though I was then unaware of it, and had subsequently moved to a pretty cottage on Church Square. Later in the evening there was a convivial supper kindly provided by our hosts in the modern extension discreetly attached to the back of the house. And so to bed – in Henry James’s bedroom! Not in his actual bed, which was disposed of along with most of his other furniture long ago, but in the panelled bedroom on the first floor at the front of the house, known as the King’s Room since George I slept there in 1726, having been shipwrecked in a storm on nearby Camber Sands, and where the Master slept during his occupancy of Lamb House. I had no idea that a few years later I would write a scene in which Henry James, waking early in this room, and lying contentedly in bed, as the rising sun peeps between the gap in his curtains, thinks back over his recent acquisition of the house, and looks forward to the work he hopes to accomplish there. My plans to write a novel about him were at that point extremely vague and fluid. I knew that the James–Du Maurier relationship, and the contrasting fortunes of Guy Domville and Trilby, would be at the heart of it, but the structure and scope of the whole novel remained to be decided, or rather discovered, first in the process of reading and research, then in the process of writing. In September 1999 I was still preoccupied with the task of finishing Thinks . . . .
It was in fact not until April of the following year that I delivered the completed manuscript of Thinks . . . to my publishers, and was free to begin serious preparation for the Henry James novel. I started by reading Edel’s Life carefully from cover to cover, and rereading Leonée Ormond’s biography of George Du Maurier, and worked outwards from those basic sources in all directions. I compiled a calendar of noteworthy events in the lives of the two men, and noticed some interesting convergences in the process. I began to get a much clearer idea of the shape of each man’s life. But that did not give me the shape of my novel – ‘life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection’, as Henry James himself observed, in the Preface to The Spoils of Poynton in the New York Edition. No one wrote or spoke more eloquently about the connections and discontinuities between life and art, but of his many remarks on the subject the one that seemed most relevant to my task is in his Preface to Roderick Hudson:
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Relations stop nowhere because the existence of each human being, and every action and every thought of each human being, are determined by pre-existing circumstances which themselves were subject to the same kind of determinations, and to trace the chains of cause and effect which extend outwards in space and time from even the most trivial event, in a complex web of connections, is a task which if, per impossibile, it were pursued exhaustively would eventually encompass the history of the universe. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy discovers this to his cost when he sets out to give a faithful and comprehensive account of his ‘Life and Opinions’, starting with his own conception. He is led into so many explanatory digressions and retrospective sub-narratives that by the fourth volume he has progressed no further than the first day of his life, which has taken him a whole year to narrate, and it dawns on him that the longer he lives, accumulating more experience which demands the same exhaustive treatment, the less likely he is to complete his work:
– was every day of my life to be as busy as this – and why not? – and the transactions and opinions of it to take up as much description – and for what reason should they be cut short
? As at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write – it must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write – and consequently, the more your worships will have to read.
Will this be good for your worships’ eyes?10
The ninth volume was the last, because Sterne himself died shortly after publishing it, but however long he had lived the novel would never have been finished in the usual sense of the word. Tristram Shandy is the ultimate metafiction, which achieved an unprecedented truthfulness to life by continually exposing the irreducible gap between the world and the book. Tristram’s failure is Sterne’s triumph. But if all novels were like Tristram Shandy we should soon become bored with them. The human mind demands pattern, order, cohesion and a certain degree of closure in narrative discourse, and can only occasionally be teased into accepting a radical departure from these conventions.
