“I’m so sorry,” said Fanny. “I’m sure everyone is doing everything they can.”
“I am sure they are, thank you.” James smiled genially, looking down into his glass before he turned to Stevenson. “Have you had any more news on the Deacon?”
The two writers might well have met months earlier than they managed, when James attended the London opening of the drama that Stevenson’s blustery friend Henley had finally coerced him into co-writing: Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life. Fanny, as Stevenson had anticipated, had been exceedingly reluctant to approve of the project, but when Henley assured her that the stage was the quickest way to literary fortune, she ultimately conceded. Sam was naturally delighted to see his favorite tale take dramatic life. As for Stevenson himself, despite the financial attractions, he worried even before the play had debuted that it might well checker his reputation. When he had taken ill the day before the first curtain, he in fact wondered whether his body weren’t rebelling against his mind’s questionable calculations. In any event, he and James had been obliged to wait for Alice James’s indisposition to bring them face-to-face.
Stevenson laughed. “I don’t know. Henley is a bulldog. I expect before long he’ll have Irving himself involved. And a lavish new production on at the Lyceum.”
James smiled, fixing Stevenson in that gaze that always seemed capable of penetrating several feet of stout English oak. “You do know, do you not,” he asked as he swirled the liquid in his glass, “how much I admire you as a writer of narrative prose?” The stress on the penultimate word was unmistakable.
“Point taken,” chuckled Stevenson. “Not that I would be opposed to obscene degrees of personal wealth.”
“Few would.”
“No. Especially given the way our butcher seems to have taken to lurking about the premises—account book in one hand, bloody cleaver in the other.”
Fanny grimaced at her husband, but then turned towards James with buoyant cheer. “Did Louis tell you he had one of Brodie’s hand-crafted chests in his room growing up?”
“I don’t believe he did. How remarkable! And you were aware of what it was?”
“Of course I was,” replied Stevenson. “Every Scotsman knows, from birth, everything there is to know about duality.” Again he raised his glass. “You’ve read Hogg, I trust.”
James nodded. “I have. Although you can hardly claim duality as a Scottish distinction. Over on our side we have Poe, for example. William Wilson. You know it?”
“I do.”
“And the French have Gautier. Le Chevalier Double.”
“That I don’t. Should I?”
James shrugged and took another sip.
“Well,” offered Fanny, pulling her chair closer to the two men, “do you really think you need to invoke books—anyone’s books—to make a point about the double self? I can’t imagine how any soul with an iota of self-knowledge could think we aren’t, all of us, impossibly jumbled bundles of dreams and desires. Men and women equally.”
Stevenson looked at his wife in amusement. “Fanny likes so much to feel included. As to her authority in the matter at hand, I do sometimes call her my ‘violent friend.’ My ‘weird woman.’”
James turned to gauge Fanny’s response. She smiled at her husband with clear affection. “I would venture to say,” he remarked, “that, on this particular score, there is indeed little to distinguish between the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. For years, you know, poor Alice has spoken about the fight between her body and her will.” He sniffed and looked again into his glass.
“The fight,” repeated Stevenson.
James nodded. “You might say it is a constant of her sad odyssey.” He tugged at the sharp crease in his trousers. “But enough of that. Your son is well? Sam, is it?”
“Yes. He is,” replied Fanny. “Thank you.”
“Adjusted to school? The British variety can of course be challenging.”
“His letters paint quite a rosy picture. We couldn’t be more encouraged.”
For a good quarter of an hour, the trio spoke about the ways Americans and the British schooled their various sexes and social classes, with Fanny touting what she took to be the virtues of the general American practice of educating boys and girls in each other’s company. She confessed to an initial reluctance to send Sam to an English public school, having heard that bringing boys of disparate ages together without the largely civilizing presence of girls might lead to all kinds of questionable relationships and practices. Once she had conducted a lengthy probationary interview with Sam’s prospective headmaster, she nonetheless declared, she had been convinced that her son might find the man’s institution at least survivable, and perhaps even beneficial.
“So, Louis,” said James, repositioning himself in his chair after Fanny’s final pronouncement. “To return, with dear Mrs. Stevenson’s permission of course, to our wonted line…I have been meaning to ask you how you felt about Archer’s recent assault.”
“Calling me a ‘jaunty writer with no moral sense?’” chuckled Stevenson, with a coy glance towards his wife.
“Louis claims William Archer is a friend,” Fanny sneered. “Friends like that we don’t need.”
Stevenson turned to James. “This one is remarkably solicitous of my literary reputation, you see.’”
James smiled at Fanny before he turned back to Stevenson. “What do you say to Archer, though? Honestly. In an age of insistent literary proprieties such as our own, the matter truly interests me.”
Stevenson leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankles. “I suppose being called ‘jaunty’ seems more appropriate for a drum major than a writer. That, or a polo player.”
James smiled. “Although the term might suit some of your Child’s Garden poems, don’t you think?” Grateful for Stevenson’s agreeing to collaborate on Deacon Brodie, Henley had taken it upon himself to arrange for the publication of the series of little poems Stevenson had tossed off over the years. It was a touching gesture, to be sure, but not one that either Stevenson or his wife considered important to his literary ascendancy.
“Amusing trifles!” spat Stevenson.
“On one level, yes,” allowed James. “But to sell them short would, I think, show a serious misappraisal. I don’t know that I have ever encountered anyone who has managed to capture, as you most undeniably do, the pure joy of children at play. I don’t know that anyone has. You may have invented an entirely new genre.”
“You embarrass me, James,” responded Stevenson after a moment’s pause. “I confess, however, that it is rather dispiriting to think that I may ultimately be remembered for penning cheery fancies for the nursery and schoolroom. Provided, that is, that I’m remembered at all.”
“Let me hasten to reassure you as to your prospects,” replied James earnestly. “Your promise is as unlimited as your accomplishments are undeniable.” He looked over to see Fanny nodding her approval. “And jaunty may indeed be the wrong word. One might do better to say that your virtue as a writer has a great deal to do with a kind of imaginative abandon.”
“Imaginative abandon!” snorted Stevenson. “Now I sound like an acrobat who goes about flinging himself off of tall buildings.”
“Precisely!” replied James, through a widening grin. “Precisely. Without a care for whatever might lie below. And by that I mean without a care for whatever anyone may have told you in advance about the dire consequences of writing a fiction that is as free in its invention as a child at play.”
“There are those, of course, who look for me to put away childish things.” Stevenson peered at his wife.
James inhaled deeply and shook his head. “I am simply talking about the power of imagination. Its focus needn’t be, you know, on fabulous polar voyages or quests for pirate treasure or balloon flights to the moon. Those subjects may do for the childish reader. Yet what the mature reader is so charmed to find in you, Louis—what I find—is the freedom to pursue the question, ‘What if?’ without a
ll the deadening ballast of that other question, ‘But would it?’ In a setting, all the while, of some realism and sophistication.”
“You are entirely too kind. I think.”
“No, truly. Your untrammeled inventiveness is a rare tonic to those of us who bemoan the trajectory of modern literary endeavor.” He flicked at a speck on his trouser leg. “It occurs to me that the idea of making believe appeals to you more than the idea of making love.”
Stevenson convulsed in laughter. “Good God!” he half-choked. “Where did you get that? You must be in secret correspondence with my wife!”
James blushed deeply. “That is not what I meant.”
“Mark this, Fanny. The most perceptive, the most studious, the most exact Henry James caught out in something that he did not mean to say.”
“It may just be that you have me there,” James allowed. “What I meant to say, of course, was that rather than depending on the ladies, if you will, to achieve your romantic effects—in your fiction, I hasten to add—you rather impertinently manage to achieve your frissons with pure, untrammeled invention. Make believe.”
“And I should feel flattered?”
“You should.” James smiled.
“I am much relieved.”
“As, then, am I,” said James.
“And as for Archer’s charge that I want moral gravity?”
Steps echoed in the hall, and Valentine appeared in the doorway, carrying a tray of tea and cakes. “I may?”
“Of course,” replied Fanny. “Right over here.” She motioned to the table to her left. The maid crossed the room and set the tray down, turning back to the three of them with a tiny curtsy.
“Thank you,” said Fanny. “By the way, James, I hope Valentine didn’t send you around to the back again today.” She laughed with a careless exuberance, looking for Stevenson to join in. On the American’s first visit, their cook had in fact mistaken the eminent writer for a tradesman and had directed him to the kitchen door. It was only Stevenson’s coming to see who had rung that had set the situation straight. Fanny, the proud mistress of Skerryvore who at long last felt respectably established in the world, had been utterly humiliated by the gaffe.
The American waved his hand and grinned uncomfortably. “Not at all.”
Stevenson peered at his wife with annoyance. Since their household had moved to Bournemouth, he had felt rather like a weevil in a biscuit, locked in a provincial English town chock-full of invalids and all of the numbingly respectable professionals who catered to them—too far from London but even farther from the ever-dependable invigoration of the Continent. Fanny, on the other hand, seemed delighted to be the doyenne of her own villa, and she marshaled the services of their three domestics and part-time gardener like a Bonaparte in skirts. Stevenson was finding her quasi-imperiousness increasingly bothersome, although he had thus far been hesitant to address the topic with her.
“Tea?” asked Fanny, with exaggerated cheer. “Or will it be more whisky for the menfolk?”
With the turn in conversation, Valentine stepped quietly from the room, her face impassive, looking neither left nor right. If she had taken any offense, it was impossible to say.
“I will have a little tea, if you would,” said James, setting down his tumbler. He caught Stevenson’s eye and raised his brow, following that with a gentle smile. “Archer, was it?”
“That…?”
“That we were talking about.”
“Ah, yes,” replied Stevenson, collecting himself. “I was about to ask if my lack of moral gravity went hand in hand with my esteemed childish abandon.”
James shook his head dismissively. “You know perfectly well my own feelings on the so-called ‘moral obligations of art.’ All that silliness Besant goes on about.”
“And what is it Besant goes on about?” Fanny asked.
Stevenson paused and pulled at his collar to release some of the heat that he could feel building up in his neck. “He contends that writers should have a conscious moral purpose. Above all else.”
“Well, shouldn’t they?” she asked, turning to James. “In the main, I mean?”
“So some believe,” replied the American. “Myself excluded.”
Fanny looked vaguely incredulous. “You don’t mean to tell me your work, your characters, pay no heed to morality?”
“Not at all. Just that what I mean by writing—the stories I write—should undertake to trace the implications of things, far more than the imperatives.”
“What exactly do you mean by implications?” asked Fanny, bemused.
“I mean,” explained James, “that the novel should deal with all life.” He indulged himself in an uncharacteristically expansive gesture, one incorporating both of his arms at once. Stevenson looked for tea to slosh from the man’s now-elevated cup, but James executed the maneuver with the practiced grace of a priest raising the chalice. “With all feeling, all observation, all vision.” He looked with intensity back and forth between the two of them and then gathered his hands back into his lap, with nary a drop spilled. “I should say writers should indulge in the freedom to see life whole, not parse it into sterile and rigid categories of right or wrong. That is for the law, surely. Or religion. Not for art.”
“Can you say, truly,” Fanny asked, “that you are not at all interested in the moral impact of art? Of your art?”
“Of course I am interested,” replied James. “How could I fail to be? We live in a world of legal and ethical obligation.” He returned Fanny’s stare, as she eyed him now with overt skepticism. “It is simply that I am far more interested in the possibility and indeterminacy of that impact than I am in saying—presumptuously, I might add—that this is a right or this is a wrong thing for us to represent in our imaginative world. Or that this is the precise effect that a work of art will undoubtedly have, for better or for worse, on the delicate and thirsty young souls who partake of it.”
“I’m afraid I can’t agree with you, at all,” said Fanny, after a substantial pause. “Perhaps it comes of being a mother.”
“Well,” responded James, “motherhood is a window onto life through which I have not yet had the privilege to look.”
Stevenson fingered the end of his moustache as Fanny and James shared a cathartic laugh. After a moment, he remarked very quietly, “I once lost a friend whom I believe I might have helped…had I been more forceful in my ministrations. Both personal and literary.”
“I am very sorry,” said James.
“In fact,” Stevenson continued, “I have since written of him—if rather indirectly. And I have wondered about the value of his story—of his life—for others of his sort.”
“Of course.” James set down his tea and clasped his hands together over his knee, looking on attentively.
“I must also admit,” said Stevenson, leaning forward in his chair, “that I have wondered about how any exemplary quality of his life might or might not correspond to its reality.”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked Fanny.
Stevenson looked at her coolly. “Just that in order to point a moral one is sometimes tempted to exaggerate. To distort. To represent as a thorough penitent, for example, a poor wretch who remained desperate to the end for the very thing that had ruined him.”
Fanny eyed her husband with a chill gravity.
“Perhaps you find, as I do,” offered James, “that what seems most verisimilar in your imaginings—the most faithful, that is, to the experience of life as it is lived in the moment—is infinitely more interesting than what might perhaps be the most instructive?”
Stevenson managed a smile. “Perhaps that comes of all of those dreary and crippling years we spend with sententious schoolmasters. And sanctimonious clerics. I must admit, in any case, that my quirky little midnight muses—my brownies, you know—they have never had the least rudiment of a conscience.”
“And so they are free to create art.”
“Oh, good heavens!” sighed Fanny.
“Indeed they are,” Stevenson continued. “If there’s to be anything by way of the ethical in what I do, I am obliged to add it after the fact. Sometimes with the most pointed encouragement.”
“Heavens!” Fanny repeated after a moment’s pause. “Have we determined, then, that neither of you esteemed men of letters has, in the end, anything to tell us about how we ought to behave ourselves in life?”
Stevenson looked at James, and then back at Fanny. “Why turn for guidance to any men at all, love? If you are ever in need of moral edification, merely take counsel with yourself. You never seem to be at a loss for what it is that you or anyone else should do or say.”
Fanny turned to James, her mouth agape. James extracted his watch and peered at it with a theatrical precision.
“Well, then,” declared the American. He slid his cup and saucer further onto the table and softly tapped on his knees. “This has been delightful. Thank you both, as always.”
“Must you leave?” asked Stevenson.
“Regretfully.”
“Well. Perhaps we can take this up again another time. Once we have all of us achieved the moral omniscience of motherhood.” Stevenson rose and walked over to his friend. “Do come again, James. We’ll promise to behave. Won’t we, love?”
Once they had seen James to the door, Stevenson returned to the drawing room, hotly pursued by his wife. He walked to the window and stood there peering out at the garden, his arms folded, one hand cradling his jaw.
“What in God’s name was all that about?” asked Fanny, bending towards him like a diminutive prizefighter.
“What do you mean?”
“Your cynical and demeaning treatment of me just now. In front of our dear friend James.”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“Like hell you don’t.”
Stevenson swallowed hard. “I’m sorry if you somehow found my remarks demeaning. I was merely caught up in a stimulating conversation.”
“I find that hard to believe.” She straightened up, her hunched shoulders settling. “But I shall endeavor to forgive you.”
Seeking Hyde Page 16
