‘If you will excuse me, I am a little late for my work.’
‘Si, one of the other, he often late. And so’ – she draws a finger across her throat – ‘arrivederci.’
‘The others?’
‘The Signor Irving have four secretary before you. All young man. They no last.’
‘I don’t think that is correct.’
‘Stai attento, Signore.’ She touches her fingertips in the bowl of holy water she keeps on the hall stand, blesses herself quickly, traces the sign of the cross on his forehead. ‘Dio ti benedicta.’
The street is cold, the air smells of rain. As he hurries past the windows of the shops in Covent Garden, he catches occasional glimpses in reflection of a self he would like to inhabit. Purposeful, solid, bowler-hatted, sober, under exigent demands, no time for peasant foolishness. The Man Who Doesn’t Believe Rumours.
What’s troubling is that sometimes there are other reflections, too. Dolls with human hair. Their delft feet clicking. But when he stops to look again, they’re not there.
—VI—
In which a newspaper cutting arrives in the morning mail and a character with an important name is encountered
From the NEW YORK TRIBUNE
November 30th, 1878
Portrait of an Actor
by G. GRANTLEY DIXON
On the wall of his large but surprisingly shabby office at the Lyceum Theatre in London hangs a framed sampler of needlework, of the sort which readers will have seen in numerous homes. Often completed by girls on the verge of womanhood, as an exercise in the matronly gifts, customarily these primers offer biblical quotations, couplets of improving poetry or commonsense phrases.
The motto on his wall strikes a chillier note: ‘Sweet, a good friend’s failure.’
The face is grave, stern, possessed of saturnine depth, somewhat reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David. The black hair is worn long, like a poet’s. He is jowly, has prominent lips, a massy head and long nose; his brows are heavy, the complexion oddly Mediterranean for an Englishman. A large, granitic, good-looking man, like a mariner or farmer, an out-of-doors person, he is by times curiously graceful in his movements, at other moments clumsy, speaking with exhausting rapidity but sitting stock still for lengthy periods while doing so.
When asked his most treasured possession, he showed this reporter a silver-framed photograph of Sarah Bernhardt asleep in her coffin.
I asked if he did not think it a queer picture for Miss Bernhardt’s publicity managers to have circulated, given that she is alive and, presumably, well. ‘She may be well,’ he responded, ‘but no actor is truly alive. To me, that is the meaning of the photograph.’
His large grey eyes can seem bistre-coloured in lamplight. He suffers considerable short-sightedness and is given to odd, sudden squints, as though seeing some apparition no one else has noticed. He reads German and Dutch and collects ‘in a small way’ works of art and medieval books ‘on necromancy and alchemy’.
‘But I am not a wealthy man. Nor should I wish to be. One can imagine no heavier curse.’
‘Than wealth?’
‘Than wealth of that sort where its possessor need not work. After trinkets I should think it would buy only one thing, an evil thing I should never like to have, which is too much time to think. That is not good for a man. He begins to imagine slights.’
On his desk, when we met, was a collection of the folkloric tales of Italy. ‘I began my life as a puppet,’ he assured this reporter inscrutably. ‘Then I became a real boy.’
He smokes without cease, or forgetfully abandons a cigarette to burn out in the ashtray while he expands on some point or amusingly defames some important personage, in a purry, felty voice that slightly over-pronounces its esses. The tip of his left thumb is missing. ‘The result of an accident. I stuck it in Shaw’s eye.’
Mr George Bernard Shaw is disliked (and nicknamed ‘Dreary O’Leary’) by Mr Irving because of that writer’s insistence on stories of ordinary persons and their lives. ‘Like going along to Royal Ascot in the expectation of seeing thoroughbreds,’ Irving says, ‘only to find two flea-bitten mules butting heads in a ditch.’
This reporter has heard it whispered that Irving is in favour of giving the vote to women?
‘I am certainly in favour of taking it away from men.’
Like many actors in England, he speaks in the clipped cut-glass accent that one suspects he was not born with, and like all actors, everywhere, his modesty is a form of boasting. One feels he has learned that the most efficacious way of prolonging the ovation is to fall to one’s knees, head bowed.
To observe him pull on a glove or turn slowly downstage during rehearsal is to watch an artist at work who knows he is being watched. His recently employed factotum, an Irishman, is rarely far away and busies himself about his master as any new wife about her husband, occasionally completing the other’s sentences or fetching in glasses of the hot lemon and paprika tea to which this Lord of the Stage is addict. The Dubliner speaks but rarely in company, having the stoical hauteur of a patriot on the gallows. Fitting, for his employer bears a striking resemblance to the once-famed Robert Emmet, various parts of whom were sundered from various others, on England’s most ubiquitous export, the gibbet.
One curious thing is that, when this reporter consulted his notes of an interview that had lasted two pleasant hours, a conversation most engrossing and wide in its purview at the time, they seemed to contain much that was trifling and disjointed and many non sequiturs, almost nothing at all worth saying. It was as though one’s notes had been written in invisible ink. But one passage stood out and is given verbatim:
‘Playing is my trade, the butter on my bread. But artistry is also a spirit, a secret room in the soul. Where it is or the key that unlocks it is difficult to find, so that sometimes the door must be broken down by a sort of force. That is what is meant by having a style. One’s force. Once inside one’s own style, proportion changes. The room becomes an anywhere: a forest, an ocean, a prison cell, a fairyland, a number of spheres revolving inside each other, all at once, each on an axis the others know nothing about. At least, that is how one pictures it oneself. To be an artist is to know there are ghosts.’
He is the talk of theatrical London for his extravagant plans. Many would like to see this ghost fail.
Manager’s office
Lyceum Theatre
Stage door, Exeter Street, London
11th December, 1878
Dear Mother,
Thank you for your letter, much appreciated, and for the article about my employer which you enclosed, although much of it is ridiculously fanciful. I did not know the American newspapers were to be had in Brussels. One of the unheralded surprises of London life is finding the odd copy of the New York Times or Chicago Tribune, which one does surprisingly often, on a park bench, say, or left on a tram, as though a fleet of ghost-postmen from America roamed London. One sees the world quite differently through American eyes. Please excuse this hurried response, I will write more when there is time.
I am glad to know that Brussels continues to be good to you. Yes, my wife and I are settled now here and all is coming well. I was sorry that you and my sisters were not able to attend our wedding but I do understand that funds are short. I feel certain that when you meet Florence you will like her very much and come to regard her as a daughter.
She is a thoughtful, watchful, funny, shrewd girl, of generous and optimistic nature and high intelligence. She is compassionate, too, and feels things deeply. I will say that not every single moment between us has been happy of late, particularly since we came to London, but I expect, at least I hope, that this is not an entirely unusual occurrence among new-married people who do not yet know one another all that well. There is also the unsettlement of the change. I am afraid I have grown rather fixed in my ways down the years and am perhaps too accustomed to my own company. My wife is understanding and tolerant but I will say that there have been moments of dif
ficulty, all caused by me. I should like to be a better husband and hope I can be.
My duties here at the theatre are proving more toilsome than I had anticipated but I am hoping that this will ease with time and acclimatisation. Thank God, our opening night has been postponed a few weeks, otherwise I should have ended in the madhouse. For now, I must often write upward of 50 letters daily and see to all manner of tasks about which I have had to learn hurriedly. I seem to talk all day long and come home fagged to death. My employer moves in strange ways, a phenomenon not unknown among artistic people, who in my experience can have particular eccentricities and grandiosities, but then, who has not. I expect everyone has peculiarities of his own, be he barber, plumber or king. One has heard it often contended that women are the unpredictable sex. That does not seem true, to me.
Our situation here is pleasant, although we haven’t much room as yet. The plan is that we shall move in a bit, once things settle. I do appreciate what you say about the dangers to morality of theatrical life but you are not to worry yourself. My position, essentially, is managerial.
As part of my agreement with my employer, he will look at pieces I might write or adapt for the stage and so I am ardently hopeful for success on that front, at some point. I have been thinking that there might be a play in the American Civil War, perhaps ‘The Assassination of President Lincoln’ (which barbarous outrage itself took place in a theatre, as you know, and was perpetrated by a disappointed actor), or the struggle of brother against brother and so on, but we shall see. It might be too recent for decency.
Well, then, Mother, that is all my news. I am a little uneasy in myself of late, I don’t know why. Pray for me.
I enclose two pounds.
Forgive my untidy scrawl. It seems worse since we came to London.
In haste but with my respectful love to you and my sisters.
THE VOICE OF ELLEN TERRY
Oddly – you wouldn’t have a cigarette, darling? – thank you – no, oddly, I have very few distinct memories of the building itself … (inaudible) … One has spent so much time in theatres, you know, they rather all come to seem the same. But I know dear old Harry spent a ransom on doing it up. So they said at any rate. Probably he exaggerated, shouldn’t wonder. He enjoyed making you feel he was hiding something a bit shocking.
Do you know, I can never remember exactly when I met Harry, he was just always there, like the sky. We did Romeo and Juliet, I seem to recall, in Cirencester or somewhere, when I was nineteen or twenty. He was kindly, a personable cove. Shatteringly handsome. And he had a sort of softness towards the older actors, which I always found touching, spoke to them with great respect and goodfellowship, even though some were long past their best nights. Which in honesty might not have been all that starlit to begin with. Journeymen actors – may God bless every one of them. But he’d take them out walking the morning after a show, sit with them a while in the park. Make a little fuss of them, listen to their stories of the profession. He’d be careful to address them as Sir or Ma’am. Those small things count, with me.
I always think it important to say, about Harry, that he had once been very poor. A young actor starting out on the road – at that time, you’d know hunger. Harry knew what it was to be exhausted and cold, maybe to walk sixty miles between towns for a job, not to have had a proper bed or a place to wash. There was a winter when he was too poor to afford underwear and was sleeping in fields and doorways. So, the old actors were his heroes. He’d walked their roads.
We’d bump into each other now and again afterwards, in some awful ‘digs’ in the provinces. He was amusing and charming, had the good flirt’s trick of making you feel you were the only person in the room, which, even when you know the trick, is fun to see done well.
His party piece was a satirical impersonation of himself playing Lady Macbeth. ‘Look at me, I don’t take myself tremendously seriously,’ that type of fellow. Which is always a sign that they do.
Another tactic, the poor booby, was that he’d flatter your hair. ‘Oh, your beautiful russet ringlets, Angel, is russet the correct word?’ You see, he knew that every other chap in the room, if he flattered you at all, would burble on about your eyes because that’s what chaps did. So, it was always your hair with Harry.
That way, you were supposed to notice he was different from the rest. Tremendously full of feeling and sensitivity and refinement. I saw him do it five hundred times. Mr Russet. It could be early in the morning, it might be after a First Night party, you could be looking like the portrait in Dorian Gray’s attic, it was still ‘Dolling, your beautiful hair.’ (Laughs.)
Oh of course he was in love with one, just ardently, immensely, and going to shoot himself if he couldn’t have you, and in love with someone else three minutes later. By the time you’d boil an egg, he’d have pledged undying devotion elsewhere and be about to leap off London Bridge if rejected. One admired his energy.
He enjoyed when the Westminster Public Gasworks opened, whatever year that was. Gave him a new way of threatening to do away with himself if refused.
Keep thwacking the golf balls, one of them’s bound to go in. That sort of chap. A bit scattergun in his approach to wooing.
It was simply the way with Harry, like waiting for sunrise. But once you made clear that you wouldn’t be going to bed with him, he’d look oddly relieved and calm down. And the matter once raised would not be revisited, I will say that for him. He didn’t make a nuisance of himself. Funny old skellum. Never dull. There are men whom it is important not to take the slightest notice of when they’re talking, if it’s after ten o’clock at night and they’ve had a glass of beer. Harry was one such mammal.
They really and truly don’t mean to be idiots. But it’s like a Roman Catholic person not wanting to feel guilt. Might as well ask water to run uphill. Except that might conceivably be contrived. With a pump.
Once, he asked my sister to run away with him, to Rotterdam I think it was. She said no and he asked my brother. That was the most important thing to understand about Harry. Essentially, what he wanted – darling, who wouldn’t – was someone to run away with him to Rotterdam.
It’s what all of us want, isn’t it? Of course, nobody gets it. Probably not even those misfortunates who are in Rotterdam already. One wonders where they want to run away to. Crouch End?
But he’d grown up and taken on a bit of sensibleness – is that a word? – by the time he opened the Lyceum. What age? Oh, in his middle thirties I should guess, darling, no one counts these things too carefully in our profession. 36-ish, perhaps? He was 36 a long time. (Laughs.) And by the time he was 36, he had acquired all the maturity of an only sometimes irksome schoolboy who needs cuffing about the head just once a term. Early developer, our Harry. For a man.
I should think the best feature of the old Lyceum was where it was located, slap in the middle of London. One’s played a frightful lot of cities up and down and abroad. Cologne. Berlin. Paris. Sydney. Wonderful theatres, my heavens, and then there is New York. But I do sort of feel London is where a playhouse belongs, dashed if I know why. Something to do with the weather.
And Shakespeare. When one knows he might have walked the selfsame street, it rather puts a fizz in one’s blood. You see the Thames, and you feel, golly, the Globe was just yonder. He might have got the idea for Macbeth on Southwark Row or the Embankment. Pepys. Kit Marlowe. Those ghosts are all about. That’s what I found, at any rate, as a young actress coming up. But it was thirty centuries ago, darling. One was so full of – what is the word?
No, I wasn’t there when Bram came, although, queerly, I often think I was. Somehow he was always there, like that rainy light coming in the windows. He was a darling man, rather obsessive, exquisitely serious. He could be absent-minded, too, the sort of fellow who goes out in unmatched shoes. One used often to think he would have made a wonderful monk.
He didn’t at all seem the sort one would employ as a manager. Head in the clouds sort of chap, not a clue about t
he things that really matter in a theatre, like money and tickets and making sure the gutters have been cleared and someone’s sweeping the foyer and the actors aren’t poisoning each other. A little of that is all right, it keeps up morale. Too much of it and the audience starts noticing.
Harry was ruddy useless, felt management to be beneath him, and so Bram wouldn’t have had, what’s the word, say a mentor of any sort. A bit imperious, was Harry. Knew he was Harry.
‘King Henry the Ninth’, I used to call him, as a tease.
But an ingénue can grow into a role, after all. One supposes Bram must have done. God knows how.
In the Upper Circle, he is trying to make an accurate count of the seats, but his hangover is making it difficult. The total keeps slipping, the numbers swap and shimmer. Three times, he has had to recommence from scratch, the floor plan he has found is inaccurate, forty years out of date, and the ruckus from down in the auditorium keeps crashing through the bulwarks of his solitude.
A trumpeter is quarrelling with a Liverpudlian ticket-taker, the noise is like an aria from Hell. Teams of plasterers are caterwauling and joking as they work, moulding putti and gilded angels and escutcheons to the fronts of the curved new boxes. It is as though the seats rearrange themselves the moment he turns his back, like school brats disconcerting a new teacher.
We are uncountable, say the rows of velvet seats. You think the dust falls on us. In fact, we create it. We creak when you raise us, we moan when lowered. We are Manhattans of woodwork and we reek of damp britches. We shall punish you for the long centuries of seatly servitude when the lowest parts of your race were pressed into our velvet flip-down faces. But our day is approaching. We shall sit upon you. If you prick us, do we not bleed?
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