by David Lodge
The next note reads:
On reflection I think it would be a mistake to draw attention to myself as the ‘real’ author in this way. I couldn’t then ‘invent’ freely. The authorial narrator must have authority.
What this first attempt revealed to me was that I really wanted to write a novel in which the joins between documented facts and imaginative speculation would be seamless and invisible, and that drawing attention to myself as narrator would entail coming clean about the extent to which I was selecting from and embellishing the historical record – thus forfeiting the great advantage of writing a novel about a real person, namely, the reader’s trusting involvement in the story. I also felt that there was too much rhetorical emphasis on the horror of war in this opening paragraph. There was a value to be obtained from the circumstance that James died at a dark moment in the history of European civilisation, and in the way the big public tragedy impinged on the small private one, but it needed to be handled more subtly. Eventually, after much tinkering, the published novel began thus:
LONDON, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent’s epithet more appropriate) of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the distinguished author is dying – slowly, but surely. In Flanders, less than two hundred miles away, other men are dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully – young men, mostly, with their lives still before them, blank pages that will never be filled. The author is 72. He has had an interesting and varied life, written many books, travelled widely, enjoyed the arts, moved in society (one winter he dined out 107 times), and owns a charming old house in Rye as well as the lease of this spacious London flat with its fine view of the Thames. He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who have died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they hoped to marry and were keeping themselves chaste on principle.
The narration is still authorial, and continues to be throughout the frame story, controlling the frequent shifts from one point of view to another among the people grouped around the dying James, and providing necessary contextual information; but it is an impersonal narrative voice, stripped of autobiographical references and personal reflections. Between the two versions I had decided to use the present tense as the basic tense for the frame story (though there are retrospective passages within it written in the past tense) to heighten the contrast between it and the main story, and this also increases the effect of impersonality, inasmuch as the conventional narrative preterite is a grammatical sign of a narrator’s existence.
When I came to write the main story I adopted a more traditional method: a past-tense, third-person narrative focalised through the consciousness of my main character. I aimed at a style which would be compatible with James’s own without being an exact imitation of it, for two reasons: first that the latter would risk seeming like parody, and secondly that people, even professional writers, do not think in the same consciously rhetorical style that they employ in writing. (I was bolder in trying to imitate James’s style of speech, from what we know of it.) I also kept to a basically chronological sequence of events in the main story. It seemed the best way to get my readers, most of whom would not be familiar with Henry James’s life and work, and perhaps not enthralled by what they did know, to understand and sympathise with his private and professional crises. In particular I felt that they would better apprehend the pain he suffered at the disastrous first night of Guy Domville if I took them through the whole history of his five-year campaign to establish himself as a playwright. This was a part of James’s story with which I found it very easy to identify, having myself in mid-life and mid-career as a novelist tried my hand at writing for performance, and acquired considerable personal experience of the frustrations and disappointments, as well as the occasional moments of euphoria and hope, involved in writing plays and screenplays. One of the challenges of writing a novel about a novelist is that novel-writing is essentially a private, solitary and largely mental activity, whereas writing and producing plays is essentially collaborative and interactive – the stuff of fiction.
Accordingly I treated James’s first play to be professionally produced, an adaptation of his own novel, The American, in considerable detail, and gave briefer accounts of his subsequent, abortive attempts to write and find producers for new plays, before coming to the inception and composition of Guy Domville, interweaving this theatrical history with the other more personal strands of the novel involving Du Maurier, Fenimore and Alice James. As I approached the crucial years of 1894 and 1895, however, I was conscious that to treat their events in the same fashion – at the same deliberate pace, in chronological order – would diminish the pivotal importance of the disastrous first night. A radical change of tempo and narrative method was called for. I decided to divide the main story into two parts, ending the first of them (Part Two of the whole novel, Part One being the first half of the frame story) with James, just after Christmas 1893, having been bitterly disappointed by the last-minute cancellation of his play Mrs Jasper, deciding to give his theatrical ambitions ‘one more year’. The first chapter of Part Three takes place just over one year later, on the day of the premiere of Guy Domville. It begins with Henry James lying restlessly awake in the small hours, anxiously contemplating the coming make-or-break trial of his dramatic ambitions, and thinking back over the traumatic suicide of Fenimore, the astonishing success of Trilby and the agonisingly slow progress of Guy Domville towards production, topics which continue to occupy his thoughts throughout the day as he kills time with humdrum activities.
I was pleased with the way this chapter came out, and it provided a model for the last chapter of Part Three, which again begins with Henry James lying awake in bed, this time in a happier mood, thinking back over the acquisition of Lamb House, which he now occupies, and looking forward confidently to the work he hopes to accomplish there. But it was not a viable template for the second chapter, which had to describe the first night of Guy Domville, for the simple reason that the anxious James was not present for most of the performance at the St James’s Theatre, having gone to see Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, in an ill-judged attempt to distract himself. He turned up in the wings of the St James’s only just in time to be drawn on to the stage by Alexander. He would, of course, subsequently have acquired some knowledge of the circumstances that caused him to be booed, but this would not be enough to support a prolonged retrospective stream of consciousness about what happened. In short, there were many aspects to that evening’s events, of rich human and historical interest, that could not be accommodated while at the same time preserving the integrity of the main story’s chosen point of view – something James himself insisted on as a theorist and practitioner of the novel. The solution I arrived at was to hypothesise that over the many years that followed he did in fact acquire from various sources, oral and written, directly and indirectly, most of the facts that we now know about that notorious first night, and became belatedly aware that while ‘his story, with its drastically limited point of view, was proceeding, other connected stories were in progress, other points of view were in play, at the same time, in parallel, in brackets, as it were’. Those stories are then told, literally inside brackets, in the rest of the chapter, in passages that alternate with passages narrated from James’s point of view. It was a kind of cheating, but it turned out to be most readers’ favourite chapter.
There is another decision that has to be made about every novel, and that is what to call it. Some writers keep an open mind about this until the very last moment before the book goes to press, but for me deciding on the title is an important part of the creative process. It is a way of defining for oneself, and for one’s potential readers, what the novel is essentially about. Usually in the early stages of working on a novel I entertain several possible titles, hesitating between them and thin
king up new ones as the book takes shape. Initially I thought of calling this novel HJ, but that seemed to suggest too narrow a focus. When I started writing, my working title was The Madness of Art, a phrase in a passage from one of James’s stories which I intended to use (and did use) as an epigraph, the words of a dying novelist: ‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’ Out of its original context, however, ‘the madness of art’ would not, I decided, make a particularly appealing or appropriate title.fn5 On 3 October 2002 I made an entry in my notebook:
Last night in the bathroom while getting ready to go to bed I had an idea for my title which is the one I think I shall stay with (though undecided about punctuation):
Author, Author
Author Author
Author! Author!
I was pleased with this title, and never considered any other afterwards. The primary reference is obviously to the climax of the novel, when James is lured on to the stage by cries of ‘Author! Author!’ at the first night of Guy Domville. The whole novel is a kind of tribute to James, as the curtain comes down on his life, reversing that humiliation (and I already had a vague idea of inviting him to take a bow at the end). But the title also indicates that there is more than one author in the story, and that the career of George Du Maurier is symmetrically paired and compared with James’s. In a more abstract sense the novel is about authorship as a profession and vocation, and the repetition of the word (I felt there was a Blakean rhythm to it, ‘Author, author, burning bright . . .’) expresses the obsessive and all-consuming commitment of writers like James to their art. To incorporate all these suggestions I decided to omit the exclamation marks that belonged to the main, literal meaning of the title, but to have no punctuation at all would have struck too modern a note. So Author, Author it was, and remained.fn6
II
I am rather unusual among contemporary British novelists in being published by different publishers in hardback and paperback (Secker & Warburg and Penguin, respectively). When I began writing fiction it was common practice for hardback publishing houses to sell the paperback rights in a novel to a specialist paperback publisher, but from the 1980s onwards, as bigger and bigger conglomerates were formed, and these set up their own paperback imprints, it became customary to publish novels ‘vertically’ in hardback and paperback editions produced by the same group. I was reluctant, however, to change an arrangement which suited me very well, and managed to resist pressure to do so. Eventually it was agreed that Secker (who were acquired by Random House in the late ’80s) and Penguin would make a joint offer for both hardback and paperback rights of any new novel on which they had an option. It has never been my practice to sign a contract and accept an advance for a novel which was unwritten or partially written. I submit my new novels in a finished form with which I am satisfied (though always open to editorial suggestions) and wait for an offer.
I explain all this because it had some bearing on the timing of the publication of Author, Author, and consequently on its reception. In the late spring and early summer of 2003, as I drew near to the end of Part Three of the novel, I began to consider when I was likely to be able to deliver the finished work. The publishing of literary fiction in Britain, as of most trade books (as they are called) sold through bookshops, is divided into two seasons, or six-month periods, spring/summer (actually January to June) and autumn/winter (July to December). Information about forthcoming books is circulated to the book trade, the media, and other interested parties (such as the organisers of literary festivals) in two corresponding catalogues which are compiled long before the books are published. For this reason, among others, most books are published between nine months and a year after they are accepted. I much prefer to bring out a new novel in the January–June period, when the publication of leading fiction titles is well spread out. The Booker Prize, for which submissions must be published before the end of September in any given year, has made that a very crowded month for literary fiction, to such an extent that important novels are now published in July and August, traditionally considered a bad time to bring out new hardback fiction because so many people are away on holiday.
I had hoped therefore to publish Author, Author in the spring of 2004. By the end of May 2003 I had nearly finished Part Three and had only the second ‘bookend’, Part Four, to write. But Mary and I had arranged (now rather to my regret) to take a two-week holiday in France in mid-June, and it wasn’t feasible to think of delivering the finished novel until late July. The Random House catalogue for the next spring/summer season would go to press early in August. Taking into account the number of people at Random House and Penguin who would have to read the novel and consult each other, and their various planned absences on holiday, it was obvious that there simply wouldn’t be time to do a deal and get copy into the Spring/Summer ’04 catalogue. Of course I could have submitted the 90 per cent of the novel I had already written by the end of May, and invited an offer on that basis; but having worked so long and hard on the book, and having what I thought of as the makings of a very strong concluding section in my head, I couldn’t bear to have it judged in an incomplete form, like an arch with the keystone missing. So I resigned myself to publishing the novel in the autumn of 2004. Had I taken the other course of action Author, Author would almost certainly have appeared at the same time as The Master, for it is a fair assumption that the two publishers, having discovered by one means or another the coincidence of subject matter between the two books, would have brought them out as early as possible in 2004, and perhaps agreed on simultaneous publication (as had happened the previous year with two competing biographies of Primo Levi). What the consequences of that would have been is impossible to assess with certainty, though I was later to attempt such an exercise; but it would have made a significant difference, I believe, to the reception of both books.
At the time, still ignorant of the existence of The Master (which Colm Tóibín later told me he had delivered to his publishers in March of 2003) I felt only a mild disappointment, more than balanced by a comfortable feeling that I could finish my novel without any pressure, and would have plenty of time to show it to a few people in whose opinion I was particularly interested and to give it a final polish before I submitted it to the publishers. There was no point in delivering it any earlier than the beginning of September, when all the publishing folk would be back at work after their summer holidays.
I enjoyed writing Part Four. I nearly always do enjoy writing the concluding sequence of a novel. It seems to come with a kind of ease and inevitability, so very different from the effort and hesitancy with which one begins, doubtless because one is no longer held up by a multiplicity of choices and decisions about the development of the story. There are very few pieces of the jigsaw left lying on the table, and it suddenly seems very obvious where they must go, and how they fit together, with a satisfying click-click-click, to complete the picture. I found a way of including the theme of James’s posthumous success in acquiring a large, global audience for his work, by putting another frame around the frame story itself. A brief, italicised ‘Author’s Note’ was already in place before the opening paragraph of the novel. It reads, in part:
Nearly everything that happens in this story is based on factual sources . . . all the named characters were real people. Quotations from their books, plays, articles, letters, journals, etc., are their own words. But I have used a novelist’s licence in representing what they thought, felt, and said to each other; and I have imagined some events and personal details which history omitted to record.
It seemed to me that my readers would appreciate some kind of guidance on the relation of fact to fiction in the novel, and by guaranteeing the authenticity of the written documents quoted I would give them a kind of ‘reality check’ on the events described: they could be certain that anything referred to in such sources was ‘true’. This note would also, I
decided later, provide a formal basis for an italicised authorial intervention in the last pages of the novel, where I fantasise being transported to the dying James’s bedside to try and deliver the consoling news of his future fame. It was a risky conceit, but I liked it. I wrote the last line of the book with a great sense of satisfaction: ‘Henry, wherever you are, take a bow.’
Mary is normally the first person to read my books. To save time, and because she happened to be exceedingly busy herself, I gave her Parts One–Three to read while I finished off Part Four. She was surprised by how different it was in style from my other novels, but favourably impressed. Her main criticism was that there was an excessive amount of factual detail in the first half of the main story. I took this criticism seriously and went over Part Two, trimming it as much as I felt able to, before passing the completed MS to other readers for their comments and corrections. I was particularly eager to know what our friends and neighbours Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell would think of it. Joel had recently retired as head of the Drama Department at Birmingham University, where his wife Sheila had also been a senior Research Fellow. I was aware they had a special interest in Oscar Wilde and nineteenth-century British drama, but not until I was well into writing Author, Author did I discover that they probably knew more about George Alexander and the St James’s Theatre than any other two people in the world, and that they possessed, framed and hanging on the walls of their early Victorian house, posters, publicity photos and programmes for many of Alexander’s productions, including the first one of The Importance of Being Earnest, which he mounted hastily after the failure of Guy Domville, using several of the same actors who had performed in James’s play. It was an extraordinary and (I thought) auspicious coincidence to find this invaluable research resource at the corner of our street. Where else could I have discovered, for instance, that the first name of the actress known professionally as Mrs Edward Saker (a form designed to confer respectability on actresses in those days) was ‘Rose’?
