The Year of Henry James
Page 5
I looked at the man who had looked away earlier: he had glasses and straight hair, he was in his late forties. Suddenly I realised who he was.
‘What did Chad’s family make their fortune from in Henry James’s “The Ambassadors”?’ I asked him.
‘No one knows,’ he replied. He did not seem surprised by the question.
‘But there’s a solution in your first novel,’ I said.
‘In my second novel,’ he corrected me.
‘You’re David Lodge,’ I said, and he agreed that he was. He was the presenter of the BBC film.11
Note that the very first utterance Colm Tóibín addressed to me was an abstruse question about Henry James. To use a currently fashionable formula: how weird is that? (The ‘solution’ is in The British Museum is Falling Down, actually my third novel, published in 1965, in which a postgraduate friend of the hero called Camel, who is writing a doctoral thesis on ‘Sanitation in Victorian Fiction’, argues half-seriously that the unnamed, ‘small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest use’, on the manufacture of which the Newsome family fortune in The Ambassadors is based, is a chamber pot.) Note too that Colm Tóibín, discovering that I was making a film about the pilgrimage to Santiago, revealed that he was writing a book on the same subject (not quite true – it was only one chapter of his book) and immediately wondered aloud if everyone else in the canteen were similarly engaged, anticipating the moment ten years later when he found himself at Lamb House in the company of two men also writing books on Henry James.
The passage continues:
We had lunch then. The crew was full of jokes and nicknames for each other, completely bonded as a group. They even called David Lodge ‘Lodgie’. He seemed disturbed that I had not got an official book of the route which should be stamped regularly. I knew he was trying to be helpful but brief exchanges between Irish people and English people can be difficult, and I thought for a moment that he felt he was hectoring me, and he soon stopped and smiled and I smiled back.
He and his crew had a minibus. I really wanted to go with them and abandon my own solitary manoeuvrings. I sat for ages over my coffee talking to them, but I knew it could not last and I stood up to go.
It is always disconcerting to encounter a description of yourself unexpectedly in someone else’s book – like catching sight of yourself on a CCTV monitor. Tóibín captured very well the bantering camaraderie of the production team and the slightly awkward tone of our own conversation, between two writers meeting each other in untypical circumstances and slightly fraudulent roles. For, as his book revealed, Colm was hardly more of an authentic pilgrim than Lodgie. At times we had both walked for a while in the wrong direction – I because the cameraman said the light was better that way, and he because he was lost. I drove most of the route, while he hopped on to trains and buses. I wasn’t of course really disturbed by his lack of a pilgrimage ‘passport’ – one of the devices that the Catholic Church and the Spanish Tourist Board have dreamed up to promote the Camino – but merely trying to help him in his reportorial task. Also I was more disconcerted than I showed by the knight’s move by which he identified me, and a little embarrassed by the fact that I knew little about his own work while he seemed to know mine rather well. The Sign of the Cross was in fact the first book by him that I read. I enjoyed it, and reviewed it favourably. In 1999 he and Carmen Callil did me the honour of including Changing Places in a book they co-authored called The Modern Library: 200 Best Novels Published Since 1950. We had no correspondence about these publications.
Up until the time I published Author, Author I thought that the encounter in Cebrero was our only meeting, and said so to several enquirers, including some journalists. But in mid-September 2004 I met Colm Tóibín again, in Rye, where we were both speaking about our respective novels at the festival, and he reminded me that we had met on another occasion, only two years before, which to my great embarrassment I had to admit I had completely forgotten. I had forgotten the meeting because I had scarcely been aware of it, for reasons which are worth recalling for their comic and ironic aspects. It happened at the Harbourfront literary festival in Toronto at the end of October 2002. This is one of the major international festivals, on a par with Edinburgh, Hay-on-Wye and Adelaide, and is very much the brain-child of Greg Gatenby, a peppy, extrovert, bearded bibliophile who has run it very successfully for many years. He had invited me on a couple of previous occasions when I had been unable or disinclined to go, but in 2002 I agreed to take part in the festival, partly because writers I knew spoke well of it (Malcolm Bradbury was particularly enthusiastic and had been more than once), and partly because Greg had invited me to talk about my book of essays, Consciousness and the Novel, which had just been published in America and was about to appear in England. Books of literary criticism are not usually showcased at literary festivals. I would also be able to read from the recently issued paperback edition of Thinks . . . . Writers are invited to Harbourfront for several days, fed at a different restaurant every evening, and do one onstage interview and one reading during their stay. There was an optional excursion to the Niagara Falls, which I had visited only once, many years before, on the American side of the border and in mist so thick that I could only hear them. And I have relatives in Toronto. So there were several reasons to say yes, and in the spring of 2002 I did so. By the time I packed my bag for Toronto I was about three months and some 20,000 words into the writing of Author, Author, but I was not averse to putting it aside for a week – an enforced break of that kind allows you to reread your over-familiar text with a fresh eye when you return home. I saw from the festival programme that the British writers who would be in Toronto at the same time as myself included Michael Holroyd, Rachel Billington and Simon Gray, all of whom I knew. I noticed that Colm Tóibín would be appearing after I had departed (the festival lasts for two weeks).
My trip began dramatically. I arrived at Heathrow’s Terminal Four to find the Departure Hall in turmoil. CANCELLED, CANCELLED, CANCELLED, CANCELLED: the word ran down the right-hand columns of the monitor screens as if announcing some apocalyptic catastrophe. It transpired that all that day’s flights had been cancelled because of high winds. Was it possible that the awesome power of modern aviation could be brought to a halt by mere wind? Apparently so. There was nothing to do but go back to London, spend the day and night in my London pad, and return to Heathrow next day. The awkward consequence of this delay was that, instead of having a day to rest and recover from jet-lag, I had to do my onstage interview within a few hours of arriving in Toronto, at what was two o’clock in the morning by my body-clock. Simon Gray had a similar experience, arriving on the same day on a later plane to perform in the same evening, and wrote very amusingly about it in the next instalment of his delectable journals, The Smoking Diaries (2004).
Fired up by the challenge of the circumstances I believe I acquitted myself pretty well in my onstage interview, which was deftly conducted by the Canadian novelist Wayne Johnston; but perhaps for that reason the rest of my visit, though pleasant enough, seemed slightly anticlimactic. To be honest, I found the venue something of a disappointment. Though I had been to Toronto before, and should have known better, the name ‘Harbourfront’ had summoned up in my mind the image of something like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a busy picturesque quayside crammed with yachts and fishing boats and lined with bars and restaurants. Toronto’s Harbourfront is a somewhat soulless development of big hotels and apartment blocks spread out along the lake shore, where a bitter wind already blew off the water in late October, and the festival itself took place in a modern building lacking in charm. It did, however, have a bar, and there one evening near the end of my stay, after attending some event, I had a drink with a friendly Canadian who was connected with the festival in some way. I cannot remember his name. There was a crowd of people around the bar and a roar of talk.
At this point I must inform the reader that in recent years I have become quite deaf, and am ob
liged to wear a hearing aid in both ears. Though it is a state-of-the-art digital device with a programme to damp down background noise, it cannot always cope with extreme conditions such as obtained in that bar. Names are always especially difficult to hear when nothing in the context gives you any clue as to what they might be. My Canadian friend greeted a man whose name I did not catch and whom I did not recognise, though he smiled warmly as if he knew who I was. He spoke animatedly for some time, but I heard and understood almost nothing of what he said, and responded with phatic murmurs and complaints about the circumambient noise level, until his attention was drawn by some other person. As we moved away from the bar I said to my companion, ‘Who was that man?’ ‘Colm Tóibín,’ he replied. ‘Good God,’ I said, ‘was it really? I didn’t recognise him.’
If this seems improbable, bear in mind that I had only seen Colm Tóibín in the flesh for about an hour, ten years previously, and in the meantime his physical appearance had altered. It is not surprising that he recognised me: I am famous among my acquaintance for not changing much in appearance, and looking younger than my years. (It is just the luck of the genetic draw.) At the time of our first meeting, when Colm Tóibín described me in his book as being in my late forties, I was in fact fifty-seven. The passage of time since then had left its mark more deeply on him than on me. The young man who walked into the canteen at Cebrero had a head of dark curly hair. The man in the Harbourfront bar was bald, and his features triggered no memory. (I am sorry to be so personal, but it is the only way I can explain what happened. I would gladly trade my hair for his ears.) I was embarrassed that I had not recognised him and hoped that it had not been too obvious, but the episode did not bother me for long, and I soon forgot it completely. There is no mention of it in the brief notes I made of my time in Toronto. I wonder now what Colm Tóibín said in the conversation that I was unable to hear or meaningfully contribute to. Did he perhaps drop some hint of working on a novel about Henry James? If so, I didn’t pick it up, and returned to England blissfully ignorant of this threat to the originality of my own project, only to encounter immediately another from a different source.
I arrived in London early on Saturday morning, 2 November, and bought the Guardian to read on the train to Birmingham. Although a copy was waiting for me at home, I was eager to read the lead article in the Review section, which was an edited extract from the title essay of Consciousness and the Novel. I read it through with the quiet complacency that seeing one’s work prominently in print usually generates, and then idly turned the pages of the magazine. My eye was caught by the opening sentence of a review by Toby Litt of a novel by Emma Tennant called Felony:
I don’t know what Henry James ever did to Emma Tennant, but it must have been something pretty awful. Enough to have her take revenge upon him by making him the villain of her latest novel.
BAD NEWS BAD NEWS BAD NEWS . . . The message raced through the synapses of my brain and sent the adrenalin pumping through my arteries and veins. Seated in a crowded railway carriage, I could not express my shock or relieve my feelings by an exclamation or expletive. Another writer had scooped me by publishing a novel about Henry James! I hardly dared to read on to discover how similar it might be to the one I had recently started. I let my eye skim the surface of the newsprint, picking up the gist of the review; then I read it from beginning to end. I was relieved to discover that Felony was only partly about Henry James, and dealt with only a fairly small segment of his life, in a style evidently very different from my novel. I also observed from the header that it was very short. Nevertheless its publication was a blow. It would take some of the bloom of originality off my own novel, and if I had not already made a substantial start on Author, Author, the effect would have been far more demoralising. As soon as I got home I reread what I had already written (the first half of the frame story, and the first chapter-and-a-bit of the main story), and was reassured. It worked, I thought, and I knew how I meant to go on with it. To avoid any more interference in the creative process from Felony, I resolved not to read that novel, and to avert my eyes from any more reviews of it that might come my way. An additional ironical twist, of a kind with which I would become familiar, was that it was published by Cape, a Random House imprint like my own publishers, Secker & Warburg. I had not yet told my publisher, Geoff Mulligan, the subject of my novel-in-progress, except to say that it was a period piece. I now put him in the picture. He was sympathetic and supportive, and said there was no need to speak to anyone else in Random House at present about the clash with Felony. So I went on with my novel in a calmer state of mind, and in the months that followed the existence of Emma Tennant’s bothered me less and less. Subconsciously I must have assumed that, having survived this unwelcome surprise, I would not experience another of the same kind. Little, as the old novelists used to say, did I know.
Writing a novel could be accurately described as a process of continual problem-solving or decision-making. Most of these decisions are made at the level of the scene or paragraph or sentence: this action or thought rather than that, this word or phrase rather than that. But there are macro-decisions which govern the whole narrative, and there are limits to one’s freedom to revise or modify them once the work is well under way. I have already touched on one of these matters, the handling of time. Another, perhaps the most important, is the question of the point of view from which the story is to be presented, which concerns not only the perspective from which events are perceived, but also the style or voice in which they are narrated. The possibilities are numerous: you can have one point of view or several; you can let the point-of-view character or characters narrate their story/stories in their own voice(s), in literary or colloquial styles, or you can narrate it in an authorial voice which may be intrusive or impersonal, and may merge to a variable degree with the inner voices of the characters through the device of free indirect style. You can narrate the novel entirely in the form of documents: letters, emails, depositions – even, as in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in the form of a poem and editorial apparatus. But always, at any given point in the narrative, there is a point of view which focuses and controls our interest as readers in the unfolding story.
While I was researching Author, Author, I gave much thought to this aspect of the projected novel, as my notebook shows, e.g.:
9 Dec 2000. I still have a very open mind as to how the story should be told. Not first person – would be too like the notebooks and the essays. Probably not focalised through HJ throughout. Perhaps multiple viewpoints . . . [Undated] A question to be considered is whether the main story should proceed chronologically within the frame of James’s last illness and death, or in a series of jumbled flashbacks in the mind of the dying James . . . 10 July 02. Still turning over the options re. pov. I am coming to the conclusion that HJ must be the only char whose consciousness is represented mimetically, through free indirect speech etc . . . To ‘do’ GDM in the same dense detail and interiority as HJ would be inconsistent with HJ being the main character of the frame story, and would probably extend the book inordinately.
A persistent theme in many of the notes, widely separated in time, is an anxiety that the novel should not read like a biography, and the hope that I could avoid this effect by foregrounding the machinery of narration itself, through abrupt time-shifts, switches of point of view and ‘postmodernist’ authorial interpolations. In late July 2002, I wrote:
I think of beginning the novel something like this:
December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent’s epithet more appropriate) of Flat xx [check], 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the novelist was dying – slowly, but inexorably. In Flanders, a mere 150 miles away [check] men were dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully, blown to bits by shells, perforated by machine gun bullets, disembowelled by bayonets, drowned in mud-filled craters, poisoned by infection – young men, most of them, with their lives still before them, lives never to be lived. The novelist was 72 [check
] he had lived a full life, travelled widely, moved in society (one winter he dined out 172 times [check]), enjoyed the arts, owned a charming old house in Rye as well as leasing his spacious London flat with its view of the Thames. He had never experienced sexual intercourse, but that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they believed in chastity outside marriage. The novelist was propped up in bed among starched sheets and plump pillows, attended by three servants and two professional nurses working in rotation, while the young men were dying in No Man’s Land, caught on barbed wire, or in trenches amid mud and excrement and rats, or on jolting stretchers, or on camp beds in field hospitals filled with the moans and screams of their wounded comrades. So, why should one expend much retrospective sympathy on the old man when so many young ones were suffering much crueller fates? Because there is no quantifying the significance of a death. The end of every human life has inexhaustible pathos, poignancy, irony, if we know the person well enough. But we cannot know everybody. The half million [check] who died in the Battle of the Somme – I wonder at the immensity of loss as I wonder at the number of years it takes for the light of the nearest star to reach Earth – but I cannot imagine those deaths. Whereas the last illness and death of a novelist, one whose work I am reasonably familiar with, whose life is recorded and recoverable in some detail, is a subject that stirs my sympathies, invites my speculations, no doubt in part because I am a novelist myself, not so far away from the age of Henry James when he died.