by David Lodge
Readers bring such expectations to non-fictional as well as fictional narratives, but the method of the writer in each kind is quite different. The historian or biographer describes a circle which contains the facts he considers necessary for a proper understanding of his subject, and excludes an infinity of other connected facts. Skilful writers in these genres are able to give their narratives a satisfying form, with elements of suspense, enigma and irony such as are found in novels, but their liberty to shape their narratives in this way is limited by a duty to historical truth-telling and the availability of evidence. The solution to the enigmas may be irrecoverable; the great climactic moments in the subjects’ lives may never have been recorded. The writer of fiction is quite differently situated. He must draw a circle and then fill it with invented facts which connect interestingly, plausibly and meaningfully with each other to make a narrative which had no previous existence. Because his story is not in the ordinary sense ‘true’, it requires a much greater degree of patterning to satisfy the reader. In historical writing every discrete, documented fact about the subject has a certain value, but in fiction ‘facts’ are redundant if they do not have a literary function (metonymic, symbolic, thematic, didactic, etc.). In historical writing some facts must be included, whereas in fiction this is completely a matter for the writer to decide. It is hard to imagine a biography which did not, for instance, include an account of the subject’s parentage. But many novels make no mention of their principal characters’ parents (or, to put it another way, the novelist did not bother to invent these characters) simply because such information would have been irrelevant to the work’s narrative content and design. (Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, for example, characters who figure prominently in three of my own novels, are parentless.)
The biographical novel, being a hybrid form, brings both kinds of selection and exclusion into play. As the writer of such a book you are constrained by the known facts of your historical characters, but free to invent and imagine in the interstices between these facts. How free is a matter of individual choice. When I first conceived my book I assumed I would invent some minor characters, but the more research I did the more convinced I became that the historical persons in whose lives James’s life was embedded were so interesting that there was no need to invent any more, and that it would immensely enhance the effect of authenticity I aimed at if all my named characters were real people.fn4 Writing, and preparing to write, Author, Author was an entirely new compositional experience for me: instead of creating a fictional world which wasn’t there until I imagined it, I was trying to find in the multitudinous facts of Henry James’s life a novel-shaped story.
The connection between HJ and Du Maurier which had first prompted the idea of the book was its key structural component, because it gave me a criterion of relevance for the inclusion and exclusion of material uncovered in reading and research. I decided that my story should begin around 1880, when the two men first became friends, which meant that all James’s previous life could either be excluded or alluded to briefly and retrospectively. The climax of the story was always to be the failure of Guy Domville and the contemporaneous triumph of Du Maurier’s Trilby. The closing sequence would interweave Du Maurier’s rapid physical decline and death following the success of Trilby with HJ’s gradual recovery from his humiliation, his rededication to the art of fiction and his acquisition of Lamb House. I foresaw a potential difficulty in keeping the two strands of the narrative intertwined until the very end, because Du Maurier died in 1896 while HJ did not sign the lease for Lamb House until a year later, and did not actually move in until another year had passed. However, the posthumous publication of George Du Maurier’s disappointing third novel, The Martian, in 1897, and James’s long postponement of writing a memorial essay about his friend, happily (to adopt his own word) allowed me to keep Du Maurier in the foreground of James’s thoughts and within the circle of the main narrative. But around this circle I planned to draw a second one – or, to change the metaphor, to enclose it in the story of Henry James’s last illness and death, divided into two parts which act as bookends to the main story.
There were several reasons for wanting to include this material in my novel. First and foremost, it was an irresistible and well-documented human story, involving several interesting people with different and sometimes conflicting attitudes to the dying and periodically demented novelist: members of the James family, his last secretary-assistant Theodora Bosanquet (who kept a diary of the events of this period on which Leon Edel drew extensively), and the servants who cared for him. Among the latter I was particularly interested in the character of Burgess Noakes, whom James, shortly after moving into Lamb House, had hired as a house boy when he was only twelve or thirteen, and subsequently trained to become his valet. With James’s approval Noakes had volunteered for service in the British army at the beginning of the war in 1914, served in France as one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’, was wounded and partially deafened by a mortar shell in the spring of 1915, hospitalised in England, and given indefinite medical leave to care for his dying master, which he did with great tenderness and devotion.
Another reason for having this frame story was that it would enable me to put James’s literary career into a deeper and truer perspective than would be possible if my book ended in the late 1890s, with James happily ensconced in Lamb House, and looking forward confidently to writing the masterpieces of his later career. One of the things I discovered (or rediscovered, with a keener apprehension of the pain involved) from my reading in the biographies and letters of James was that for the novelist himself his ‘Major Phase’, as critics would later term it, was a bitter disappointment as regards public recognition, culminating in the critical and commercial failure of the great New York Edition of his novels and tales, which triggered a nervous breakdown in 1910 even more severe than the depression he suffered and successfully overcame after the collapse of his theatrical ambitions. This second crippling experience of failure could be referred to in the frame story, and I also hoped somehow to work into this part of the book a reference to his posthumous success.
There was great poignancy as well as drama in the story of James getting the Order of Merit in the New Year’s Honours list of 1916, just two months before his death. When Edmund Gosse brought him the news in his bedroom he seemed barely conscious, but after his old friend had left James told his maidservant Minnie Kidd to blow out the candle to ‘spare my blushes’. He was, I believe, ironically exaggerating his gratification. The honour, though no doubt welcome, was too little and too late to make up for all the unfulfilled ambitions of his literary career. Edel mentions that among the many messages of congratulation which James received was a telegram from Sir George Alexander, the actor-manager who had mounted the doomed production of Guy Domville, and the man who at the end of the play had, either mischievously or foolishly, invited James on to the stage to take a bow, whereupon he was loudly booed by the gallery. I imagined James, his customary decorum undermined by his dementia, responding to Alexander’s message (which actually referred to the play, and claimed still to take pride in his association with it) with an angry expletive. I decided to invent another telegram (though it is not impossible that there was a real one) from Gerald Du Maurier, George’s younger son and by this time a famous actor, which I thought would provide a convenient opportunity to suspend the frame story and begin the main story. And if I ended the main story with HJ hiring the young Burgess Noakes that would provide a fitting, and hopefully moving, link to the second half of the frame story.
This description of the structure of Author, Author gives a very misleading impression of how I arrived at it, as if in a smooth series of logical steps. In fact it evolved slowly and hesitantly while I was researching the novel, the subject of frequent speculative memos to myself in my notebook. This ‘notebook’ was actually a very capacious lever arch file in which I kept my research notes, correspondence and other documents, as well as ongoing thoughts
about the projected novel. Most of the notes were also filed on the hard disk of my computer. Although it was my customary practice to make notes on reading and other research in handwritten form, I realised fairly early in working on this fact-based novel the advantage of having them instantly accessible by using the computer’s Search facility. Partly for that reason, Author, Author was the first novel I wrote entirely on my computer. (Previously my practice had been to write a rough draft by hand, a few pages at a time, transferring it to the computer for revision and expansion.)
I did more ‘field work’ than usual for this novel, visiting several sites that were important to my story, beginning with De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where Henry James occupied a fourth-floor flat for most of the duration of the main action, and whence he would often walk up to Hampstead Heath on a Sunday in the 1880s, to visit the Du Mauriers. What astonishing distances the Victorians covered on foot! I did not walk up, but I did walk down the long steep incline of Fitzjohn’s Avenue to Swiss Cottage, after I had located and photographed George Du Maurier’s house in Hampstead, visited the parish church in whose churchyard he is buried, and walked over the heath, approximately retracing the steps of the two men on their Sunday strolls. I was unable to find the bench on which they liked to sit and talk, and which long after Du Maurier’s death was photographed on James’s instructions for the frontispiece to the volume dedicated to tales of literary life in the New York Edition, but no doubt it was removed or replaced long ago. I viewed the outside of Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where James acquired a flat in 1913, and took photographs of this stretch of the Thames which he never tired of looking at from his front room windows until he died there at the end of February 1916.
I took opportunities that arose to view places with Jamesian connections further afield. After spending a weekend with friends in Leeds we drove to Whitby, a place with many other literary associations (Caedmon, Mrs Gaskell, Bram Stoker) where he often joined Du Maurier and James Russell Lowell when they were holidaying there, and then to the little fishing port of Staithes a few miles further up the north Yorkshire coast, a favourite walking destination of Du Maurier’s. On another occasion I escaped from a family holiday in the Center Parcs holiday village at Longleat to stay overnight at the Osborne hotel, part of a striking white Regency crescent overlooking the sea just outside Torquay, where James spent a recuperative summer in 1895, the year of Guy Domville. Apart from the open-air swimming pool embedded in the front lawn, its appearance and situation have changed very little since James described it in his letters. I had never visited these places before, and doing so suggested scenes for my novel that I would not otherwise have thought of. Venice I had visited before, but I went back there after attending a literary festival in Mantua and, like James himself, hung around the environs of the Casa Biondetti on the south side of the Grand Canal, peering up at the second-floor window from which poor Constance Fenimore Woolson had fallen to her death in January 1894.
Researching a novel had never been so enjoyable. But there is no limit to the amount of facts you can discover about a relatively recent historical personage like James. At some point you have to decide that you have accumulated enough raw data to work with, and begin writing. In the summer of 2002 I decided I had reached that point. The last piece of fieldwork I did was to revisit Rye, spending three days there at the end of July and beginning of August, staying at the Mermaid, the medieval inn where Henry James used to dine when his cook and butler had a day off. My previous hosts at Lamb House, Hilary & Gordon Brooke, were no longer its tenants, but they gave me generous assistance. Through them I was able to visit the cottage at Point Hill, Playden, just outside and above the town, which Henry James rented in the summer of 1896 from the architect Reginald Blomfield who built it, and to appreciate from its garden the view of Rye and the Romney marshes stretching towards the sea which caused James to fall in love with the place. The Brookes also introduced me to James Davidson, custodian of the Rye Museum which occupies the ancient Ypres Tower on the town ramparts, whose wife was a great-niece of Burgess Noakes. When I asked him if Burgess Noakes ever married, he replied in the negative, and said that some members of the family suspected he was gay. When I subsequently spoke to Mrs Davidson, by phone, however, she told me that he did marry, some time after the death of Henry James (in fact, as I later discovered, in 1930, after returning from America where he worked for many years as butler to James’s nephew Billy and his wife), a woman called Ethel, whom nobody in the family liked and whom they suspected of marrying Burgess for his money. There were no offspring from the marriage, which Burgess was heard to describe as the worst thing he ever did. From this and other evidence I formed the opinion that Burgess Noakes was, like his master, a man without a clearly defined sexual identity or an active sexual life – which would explain the bond between them. Mrs Davidson was very helpful later, sending me further useful information and documents relating to Burgess Noakes. I knew she was in poor health, but I was very sorry to learn from her husband, when I sent her an inscribed copy of my novel, with its acknowledgement of her assistance, that she died not long before its publication.
During that visit to Rye I drove around the delightful surrounding country, visiting the places James used to walk or cycle to – the neighbouring Cinque Port of Winchelsea, the villages of Lydd, New Romney, Newchurch and Brookland, with their ancient churches – and went as far as Folkestone, where James visited the Du Mauriers, who were on holiday there in September 1895, when the success of Trilby was at its height. I planned a conversation between Henry and George as they walked up and down the clifftop promenade known as the Leas. And, as previously mentioned, I went back to Lamb House, to refresh my memory of its interior and garden, just a month or two before Colm Tóibín and Michiel Heyns encountered each other there.
In the article in Prospect from which I quoted earlier, Michiel Heyns reminded his readers of Henry James’s extreme and uncompromising hostility to literary biography, and his almost obsessive desire to preserve his private life from public scrutiny even beyond the grave, recalling that the novelist confided to a correspondent in 1914: ‘My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter . . . I have long thought of launching, by provision in my will, a curse not less explicit than Shakespeare’s own on any such as try to move my bones.’ It is a fair assumption that James would have anathematised novels about himself even more vehemently than biographies. Heyns concludes his article by saying, ‘I am starting to suspect, as yet another letter of rejection arrives, that James’s curse is taking effect – at least on one writer.’ His suspicion was understandable in the circumstances, and if I were of a superstitious nature I might experience some uneasiness myself on this score, since I certainly feel that Author, Author has been an unlucky book. But if the outraged spirit of HJ were responsible, it is not obvious why Heyns should have suffered much worse luck than I, or why Colm Tóibín has enjoyed a seemingly trouble-free and favourable reception for The Master (unless being shortlisted for the Booker Prize but not winning it counts as a misfortune).
No, I do not feel that I have been cursed, but rather that by daring to write imaginatively about Henry James I entered a zone of narrative irony such as he himself loved to create, especially in his wonderful stories (which are among my favourite works of fiction) about writers and the literary profession: ‘The Lesson of the Master’, ‘The Death of the Lion’, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, ‘The Middle Years’, ‘The Next Time’, and several others. I became – we all became, Colm Tóibín, Michiel Heyns and I – characters in a Jamesian plot. Consider, for example, that comical convergence in the sanctum of Lamb House of three writers all secreting works-in-progress about its distinguished former owner. Could anything be more Jamesian? It was, to use a phrase of Lambert Strether’s in The Ambassadors, when he encounters Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet at the riverside inn, ‘as queer as fiction, as farce . . .’. Or consider the delicate situation of Tony Davis when
he was taken into the confidence of two novelists unknowingly competing with each other to write novels about the writer of whose home he was custodian. Or consider the ironies and symmetries that have characterised my own slender acquaintance with Colm Tóibín, which I will now relate.
We first met not, as writers usually do these days, at a book launch or literary festival, but on top of a small mountain in Galicia, in north-west Spain, in the summer of 1992. I was making a television documentary for the BBC about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, and we had reached the little village of Cebrero, about 150 kilometres from Santiago, which has a special place in the history of the pilgrimage because of a miracle said to have taken place there in the Middle Ages. It has a refugio (one of the hostels free to genuine pilgrims that are dotted along the Camino) with a more than usually commodious canteen attached, where I was having lunch with the team (director, production assistant, cameraman, sound technician) during a break in filming, when a dark-haired young man came in and sat down, since there were no other places free, at the end of our refectory table. Colm Tóibín was also following the pilgrimage trail, gathering material for a book entitled The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, which was published two years later, and which I reviewed, not knowing in advance that I would find in it his description of our encounter:
As I looked at the menu I realised that the other people at the table were of the English persuasion and did not look like pilgrims. Nor did they look like a family on holiday; most of them were in their thirties and it was hard to work out the relationship between them. I looked at one of them and was sure I knew him from somewhere; he was careful to look away. I asked them a question about the pilgrimage and found out quickly that they were a television crew making a film about the route to Santiago. I told them I was writing a book about it, and wondered out loud if everyone else in the dining room was engaged in similar activities. They were all jolly and friendly in a very English way, and it was a great relief from the gruff Galicians I had been dealing with.
