by Colm Toibin
William spoke naturally and easily, his good humour adding to the almost conversational tone of his delivery, a tone Henry had never heard before.
‘You sound as though you have written the lectures,’ Gosse said.
‘I have formulated them,’ William said. ‘Writing does not come naturally to me. I prefer talking but since in this case they want to publish them too, then I will have to write them out word for word.’
‘Perhaps The Times will publish them when they are delivered,’ Gosse said.
‘The Times will receive no further communication from me. It had its opportunity.’ William laughed and lifted his glass and drank.
‘Henry,’ Gosse said, ‘it is your turn.You must tell us now what you will write so that we can look forward to it.’
‘I am a poor story-teller,’ Henry said, ‘a romancer, interested in dramatic niceties.While my brother makes sense of the world, I can only briefly attempt to make it come alive, or become stranger. Once I wrote about youth and America and now I am left with exile and middle age and stories of disappointment which are unlikely to win me many readers on either side of the Atlantic.’
‘Harry, you have many devoted readers,’ Alice said.
‘I have in mind a man who all his life believes that something dreadful will happen to him,’ Henry said. ‘He tells a woman of this unknown catastrophe and she becomes his greatest friend, but what he does not see is that his failure to believe in her, his own coldness, is the catastrophe, it has come already, it has lived within him all along.’
‘Is that the end?’ William asked.
‘Yes, but there is also a man in a different story who goes to Paris from New England. He is an American of middle age, with much intelligence and a sensuous nature which has remained hidden throughout his life. He sees Paris and understands, like the man in the earlier story, that it is our duty to live all we can, but it is too late, or perhaps it is not.’
‘And were a clergyman here,’ William asked, smiling warmly, ‘and were he to ask you what is the moral of these stories, what should he conclude from them?’
‘The moral?’ Henry thought for a moment. ‘The moral is the most pragmatic we can imagine, that life is a mystery and that only sentences are beautiful, and that we must be ready for change, especially when we go to Paris, and that no one,’ he said raising his glass, ‘who has known the sweetness of Paris can properly return to the sweetness of the United States.’
‘And which of these stories will you write first?’ Gosse asked.
‘I may already have embarked on both,’ Henry said.
‘And you, sir, what shall you write?’ William asked Gosse.
‘When I find the tone and the courage,’ Gosse said, ‘I shall write a book about my father.’
‘But you have already written one and I very much admire it,’ William said. ‘The tension between the religious spirit and the quest for scientific truth is something which has mattered very much to me.’
‘I shall write now,’ Gosse replied, ‘about the tension between my father and his son, and I shall spare neither of us. I must find a new style for it, however, and I must find time, but I do not think that this book will gain my father any new admirers.’
‘That might be a great pity,’ William said.
‘And, no doubt, a great book,’ Henry added.
WHEN WILLIAM returned from his walk, Gosse having left them an hour before darkness fell, he found the Lamb House Club in full swing. Alice and Peggy sat one on each side of the sofa, a lamp on the table, quietly reading. Burgess Noakes with his bad shoes came and went with logs and coal until a huge fire was blazing. The curtains were drawn. Henry sat with his biography of Napoleon in the armchair beside the fire.
‘It was a winter’s day,’ William said, ‘and now it is a winter’s night.’
‘In the morning,’ Alice said, ‘we must write another letter to the boys. I think they long for us to come home.’
‘I don’t want to write any more letters,’ Peggy said.
‘It is a new rule of our club that you are excused,’ Henry replied.
William went out of the room and returned with a book.
‘This was my mother’s dream for us,’ Henry said.
‘That we would end up in England?’ William asked.
‘No,’ Henry said, smiling. ‘She always dreamed that we would, each of us, sit enjoying our books while she and Aunt Kate did their work, that there would not be a sound for hours but the turning of pages.’
‘Was it never like that, Harry?’Alice asked.
‘Never,’ Henry said. ‘My father would start an argument or your husband would kick something over or the younger ones would begin a quarrel.’
‘And you, Uncle Harry,’ Peggy looked up from her book. ‘What would you do?’
‘I would dream of an old English house and the fire blazing and nothing being kicked over.’
‘I will refrain, if that is any comfort to you,’ William said. ‘My kicking days have passed in any case.’
As the night wore on, the wind blew up and the windows rattled. Peggy, concentrating fiercely on every word she read, had curled up against her mother who had left her book down and was staring into the fire. They had supper served on trays in the drawing room. When Burgess Noakes took the supper things away, Henry poured drinks for William and Alice and chocolate was found for Peggy. William returned to his book, taking notes. They could hear the scratching of his pen against the paper, and as time passed each of them became engrossed in their books again or in their thoughts so that no one noticed that William was sleeping until he began to snore.
‘We will put more logs on the fire,’ Henry whispered, ‘but we will do it without waking him.’
Alice sighed.
‘It is late,’ she said.
‘The rules say that I can stay up,’ Peggy said.
‘And allow William to snore,’ Henry said gently, ‘as much as he pleases.’
BY THE TIME they were ready to leave, having arranged to spend the rest of the winter in the gentler climate of the south of France, Peggy had finished several more novels by Dickens and was, Henry noticed on the morning of their departure, deeply engrossed in David Copperfield. She did not have to skip pages, Henry assured her, she could take the volume with her and any other books she cared to pack for her journey and her stay in France, except his two-volume biography of Napoleon, from which nothing would part him, he said, until he had read the final page.
After breakfast when William saw Peggy’s book, he laughed.
‘That’s the one that got Henry caught,’ he said.
Peggy looked up at Henry.
‘He was sent to bed in our house on Fourteenth Street,’ William said, ‘because a cousin of ours had come from Albany with the first instalment of David Copperfield, which she was going to read aloud, and my mother did not think that it would be suitable for a small boy. Instead of doing what he was told, however, he hid.’
‘What did you do, Papa?’ Peggy asked.
‘I was not such a small boy,’ William said.
‘He was a year older,’ Henry said.
‘And did she read it?’
‘Yes, and there was much drama as she imitated all the voices. But suddenly sobs of sympathy rang from a corner of the room where Harry had been listening to the story and snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and had to be effectively banished. He was a great crybaby.’
‘Did you not cry too, Papa?’
‘I have a heart of stone,’ William said and touched his chest and smiled.
Henry thought of the room in New York in which the chapter of David Copperfield had been read, all heavy furniture and screens and tasselled tablecloths, and his mother’s voice rather than his cousin’s, his mother cross at him when he was first discovered and then his mother taking him into her arms when she realized that he was crying. All this became vivid to him as though no barrier had been placed between that evening and now. He knew how far
away it must seem to Peggy and he felt that for William, too, it belonged in the past. William had told the story as it had been told in the family for years, he had picked it up with the same good-humoured, businesslike air as he picked up his suitcases. Henry came out of the dining room and glanced at William as he prepared for departure. Henry shook his head and sighed.
Alice had left five pounds for Burgess Noakes who had appealed to Henry with a look as if to say that it was too much.
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘My sister-in-law comes from the wealthy branch of the family.’
Burgess went ahead with the wheelbarrow, followed by Henry and William, Alice and Peggy, the three visitors having been long enough at Rye to be offered fond farewells by several of the locals. William, it struck Henry now, could not wait to get away, and it came to him that William had always been thus, impatient, ready for novelty, longing for new adventures, even if it were just leaving one room to go into another, or standing when he had just been sitting. When they were small, he would turn the page of the picture book before Henry had had time to absorb fully each illustration, and then refuse to turn back; eventually he would tire of even the picture book and want to go outdoors, leaving Henry free to start the book again alone and study it in peace before going to the window to see what William was doing now.
They were going to Dover and then to France. As the train came, Henry could sense that they did not know whether to smile or be sad. Peggy, he was aware, was desperate to return to her book. He accompanied her onto the train and found her a window seat, and then he stood back as their luggage was being loaded, while Alice urged William not to lift the cases. He embraced both William and Alice before descending to the platform once more. He watched with Burgess as the heavy door was closed.
Lamb House was his again. He moved around it relishing the silence and the emptiness. He welcomed the Scot who was waiting for him to begin a day’s work, but he needed more time alone first. He walked up and down the stairs, going into the rooms as though they too, in how they yielded to him, belonged to an unrecoverable past, and would join the room with the tasselled tablecloths and the screens and the shadowed corners, and all the other rooms from whose windows he had observed the world, so that they could be remembered and captured and held.
Acknowledgements
I have found a number of books about Henry James and his family extremely useful while working on this novel. They include: Leon Edel’s five-volume biography and Edel’s editions of the letters and notebooks; Henry James: The Imagination of Genius by Fred Kaplan; Henry James: The Young Master by Sheldon M. Novick; The Jameses: A Family Narrative by R.W. B. Lewis; Alice James: A Biography by Jean Strouse; Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James by Jane Maher; The Father: A Life of Henry James Senior by Alfred Habegger; A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art by Lyndall Gordon; The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand; Alice James: Her Life in Letters, edited by Linda Andersen; Amato Ragazzo: Lettere a Hendrik C. Andersen, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi; William and Henry James: Selected Letters, edited by Ignas K. Skripskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley; Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, edited by Susan E. Gunter; The Legend of the Master, compiled by Simon Nowell-Smith.
I wish to acknowledge that I have peppered the text with phrases and sentences from the writings of Henry James and his family.
I am grateful to Peter Straus, Nan Graham, Andrew Kidd, Ellen Seligman, Catriona Crowe, Brendan Barrington and Angela Rohan for support and advice. Some of this book was written at the Santa Maddalena Foundation near Florence in Italy and I am grateful to Beatrice Monti for her kindness and hospitality.