How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  7

  LUCY HONEYCHURCH

  IT’S EMBARRASSING TO admit how wildly I misread A Room with a View when I was 20. Though I’m beginning to think all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time. And what I needed from Lucy Honeychurch then was an idea about becoming an artist and living an artist’s life. It was because of her that I started writing plays.

  First, she took me to Florence. In E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, Italy opens Lucy’s heart, shakes up her assumptions and changes her life. So, channelling Helena Bonham-Carter in the luscious Merchant Ivory film, I cultivated bird’s-nest hair and set off for a month in Florence, just before my final year. I was there to learn Italian, but the classes at the fusty stuccoed British Institute were just in the mornings. The sun-drenched afternoons and the cool, lazy evenings were for awestruck wandering, gazing at frescoes and eating gelato. I tried to give myself up to beauty, as Forster advises. He sends Lucy to Santa Croce without her Baedeker guide, and at first she’s frustrated by not knowing which tomb is the most beautiful, which most praised by Ruskin. The church feels enormous, and cold. (It is.) Then suddenly ‘the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy’.

  Lucy’s big moment comes when she strays, unchaperoned, into the Piazza della Signoria. There’s a fountain, there’s the Loggia, it’s twilight, but she wants more. Just as she’s complaining, ‘Nothing ever happens to me’, something does. Two Italian men quarrel and one stabs the other. As the blood spurts, she swoons. Straight into the arms of George Emerson. Confused, questing George Emerson, who is staying at the same pensione as Lucy and her spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett. After much tomfoolery and turmoil, Lucy and George finish the novel back in Florence – on their honeymoon.

  My Florentine landlady thought I’d found my own George. She thought he was sneaking nightly into my tiny room. In fact she knew he was. The crystals had told her. She was a clairvoyant. Every afternoon, she’d drape shawls over the lamps, sheets over the mirrors (which spooked me – it’s what Jews do in a house of mourning) and sweep the crumbs off the kitchen table to accommodate a Ouija board and a jagged stack of crystals. I’d come in to find her weeping with her clients as she called up their dead, her mascara running in inky streaks – another reason to prefer churches full of frescoes to her flat. And the crystals were wrong: I didn’t have a man in my room. I had a script: the first play I’d written by myself. It was a Generation X melodrama, heavily influenced by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which was then my favourite play (obviously I wanted to be Martha, wanton, manic, wistful, and for Elizabeth Taylor to play me in the film). My play involved self-harm, bad puns, Barbie dolls, and in the second act we made Angel Delight live on stage. It was called The Candy Jar.

  Theatre was new to me. At school, I’d played a duck in Noye’s Fludde, but I couldn’t keep my beak down. I’d done some ballet, feeling like a pink lump, sitting in a circle of girls, in blush-pink leotards, wrinkly tights and irritatingly see-through georgette skirts, while our teacher (sleek and lissom in black, no transparent pink for her) yelled ‘Good toes! Bad toes!’ as we pointed and flexed. And that was more or less it. I hadn’t even seen that many plays. So when two random boy freshers asked me to write a play with them, I nearly said no. I didn’t know about theatre, and I didn’t want to. But then they said they needed ‘a girl to write the girls’. How could I resist?

  I hadn’t tried to write a heroine since the summer I’d messed around with Oliver Twist. And my first two stage heroines were not my finest. They were a drunk French girl and a buttoned-up forty-something. When we got the play on, a casting mishap meant I had to play the forty-something. It taught me a lot about how not to write a heroine; there’s nothing like having to perform your own lines for calling your bluff. And even if the writing had been better, I would still have hated being on stage. There was the panic that I might forget what I was supposed to be doing, the self-consciousness of pretending to be someone else and – my worst nightmare – being looked at. I had salt in all my pockets and an extra sachet in my bra too, but I still felt unsafe. I vowed never to perform again. Nevertheless, I was hooked on theatre. Poetry suddenly seemed sterile next to the liveness of theatre, where you all came together – writers, actors, director, designer, even the audience, especially the audience – to believe in something. My poems had come out of my own neuroses, but now I could write different voices, live different lives, write my own heroines (and maybe, one day, heroes too).

  Cambridge turned out to be a brilliant place to find out about theatre. It was rammed with thesps (we used the word only semi-ironically) in black polo necks, and comics in thick-framed glasses. I spent whole lost days talking about Shakespeare and le nouveau cirque and Peter Brook over pots of tea and rounds of cinnamon toast in the English Department buttery. I stayed up one night to read Brook’s The Empty Space as if it was a thriller; he made theatre seem important, human and alive. A dazzling Private Lives was so vivid and hazardous that I felt I was in the room with its heroine Amanda, laughing at her jokes, watching her sabotage her life and holding my breath as I hoped she’d find a way to be happy with her sexy scoundrel of a husband. At an elegiac Uncle Vanya I realised theatre could make me feel things and know things before I really felt or knew them in real life. I co-wrote a play with a Ukrainian mature student who’d worked in an abattoir and smoked like a chimney; it was about two psychopaths who destroy a family, and we called it The Nutter. I directed it too; my first go at getting something from page to stage. With a Sondheim-obsessed mathematician I wrote a musical about vampires and small-town racism called The Suckers. As a publicity stunt we carried a coffin through the market square.

  And now I’d written one on my own. A friend was passing through Florence, and we took the orange bus out to Fiesole, in the hills above the city. It’s in those hills, covered in violets, that George kisses Lucy. We made for the Roman amphitheatre and sat on the stage, and read out my play. He read the boys, I read the girls. We had the whole arc of honey-coloured stones to ourselves, the whole blue sky. Later I’d direct it in Cambridge and on the Edinburgh Fringe, but that afternoon in Fiesole was where it startled into life. At Fiesole, Lucy sees the violets and feels spring, really feels the sun and the flowers blooming and opening, and suddenly feels that she can see the world ‘beautiful and direct’ – and then George kisses her. Because of Lucy, and because of Fiesole, I felt that too; that things were clearing, that I could see.

  From A Room with a View, I got the idea that the best kind of life was an artist’s life. When Mr Beebe, the socially astute clergyman, fails to stop Lucy going out unchaperoned, he puts her rebellion down to ‘too much Beethoven’ and speculates that ‘If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.’ I loved this. Too much Beethoven! Too much Beethoven could catapult you into the arms of George Emerson, too much Beethoven could catapult you into life. Beethoven wasn’t my favourite composer (and anyway in the film, which I’ve seen too many times, Lucy’s liberation is underscored by Puccini), but I did want to live as I played. To be brave on and off the page. I thought this would save me from a lot of things: falseness, lies, repression, propriety, primness, delicacy, denial, abstraction, prudishness, artfulness, self-consciousness, pretentiousness, peevishness, sanctimony, and most of all from Forster’s bugbear: muddle.

  Lucy starts out so conditioned that she thinks the proper response to the stabbing is to pretend it never happened. Never talk about it, never let herself feel anything. But George knows something huge has happened. He wants to examine it, feel it, understand it. He wants to live. Lucy runs, scared, in the opposite direction, into the stiff, awkward arms of repressed and repressive Cecil. Cecil consumes art only so that he can twist it into puns, evasions and put-downs. He doesn’t let it make him feel anything. Cecil would never care about a character in a book the way I care a
bout Lucy. Cecil would hate this book. He’d be cold, supercilious, condescending about it. But then, I hate Cecil, so we’re even.

  Cecil wants Lucy to be reticent and mysterious – basically he wants her in a veil. Forster makes the metaphor explicit when George’s father talks Lucy into clarity again and she feels the darkness being ‘withdrawn, veil after veil’. She elopes with George. Finally she’s doing it; she’s living as she plays. But is Mr Beebe happy? No. He’s disappointed because what he really wanted was for her to be celibate. So much for living by his credo. It’s very flummoxing.

  But now it seems I misread the novel, or took what I wanted from it, because Lucy doesn’t want to live an artist’s life at all. She’s not trying to become a concert pianist. Her piano-playing isn’t what attracts George (though Cecil loves it. Surely a bad sign). The only artist in the novel, the writer Eleanor Lavish, is roundly mocked for being pretentious, wearing ridiculous clothes and calling stinking alleyways the real Italy.

  And Forster doesn’t show us Lucy living as she plays. After she admits she loves George, he skips to their honeymoon. We don’t see her battle her family and society to marry him, and we don’t see her make the bold decision to elope. There’s no running-away-in-the-dead-of-night scene, no secret marriage, no journey to Florence pursued by angry relatives. The drama is all off stage. This really annoyed Katherine Mansfield, who cattily said Forster only ever got as far as warming the teapot, but never made the tea.

  For most of his life, Forster didn’t live as he played. He wrote intrepid heroines who put love first (I also have a soft spot for Lilia, the middle-aged English widow in Where Angels Fear to Tread who rushes headlong into marriage with an Italian hunk), while all the time he was living with his finicky, proper mother and putting love very low on his list. He didn’t lose his virginity until he was 37, when he was living away from his mother for a while because the Red Cross had posted him to Alexandria. After that, he wrote just one more novel (1924’s A Passage to India) and then stopped publishing fiction. He lived on for another forty-six years, and there were no more novels, no more stories. He said he’d dried up. But after his death, from his letters and diaries came the heartbreaking revelation that he had stopped writing fiction because he didn’t want to write about heterosexual love. His one gay novel, Maurice, was written in 1913, but published posthumously: at first, he withheld it because it might upset his mother, and later because he was seeing a married man and had to be discreet.

  So Forster wrote A Room with a View when he wished he could write heroes instead of heroines. And when he imagined Lucy finally being able to stop lying, he was writing about the kind of honest love affair he wanted himself. And I never noticed before how sympathetically he writes Charlotte. I used to hate her for squelching George, for encouraging Lucy to lie, for her ‘barbed civilities’, her awkwardness, her obsession with correct behaviour. But in a devastating passage Forster explains why she is how she is. Lucy is lying, claiming she doesn’t love George. And Forster writes ‘The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before.’

  So it seems Charlotte had a chance at happiness, perhaps at love (perhaps even with a woman; there’s definitely a flirty vibe to her friendship with Eleanor Lavish), and she fluffed it. Now Lucy has broken up with Cecil, claims she doesn’t love George and is planning to go away with two fussy, fidgeting spinster sisters she met in Florence. To Charlotte, it looks as if Lucy is on course to become her. And she knows what that’s like, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. So, having been a ninny for most of the novel, she sees her chance to cut through the muddle and bring Lucy and George together. And she jumps at it. She rises to the occasion. She becomes heroic. Lucy can’t believe Charlotte’s done it, but George can. He’s read Eleanor Lavish’s tacky novel and found that the bit where the heroine is kissed on a hill of violets has a curious power, which can only come from Charlotte describing Lucy and George’s kiss to her friend. ‘The sight of us haunted her,’ says George, ‘or she couldn’t have described it as she did . . . There are details – it burnt . . . She is not frozen, Lucy, she is not withered up all through.’ Reading this now, maybe because I’m older and more sympathetic to maiden aunts, eternal chaperones and companions to the younger, friskier, more skittish heroines, I find it unbearably moving. And I hope if I ever get my call to adventure, I’ll say yes. Charlotte showed me it’s never too late to become a heroine.

  Bertolt Brecht, who my theatre friends quoted incessantly, said that we should always see the choices characters don’t make, as well as the ones they do. Forster shows how Lucy nearly becomes Charlotte. She swerves at the very last minute on to another path, but she could easily have been lulled into thinking there was no other path. In Brecht’s plays no actions are inevitable. Instead of allowing us to suspend disbelief, he keeps us awake, keeps showing the characters’ choices and their alternatives. It’s not always the most relaxing theatre to watch but it’s hugely empowering. Then, I was excited by following Lucy’s path. Now I find Charlotte’s late flowering into heroism just as inspiring. And maybe Forster was rehearsing his own choices too, maybe it was writing Charlotte that made him seize his chance at happiness when, at 51, he met the love of his life.

  Before leaving Florence, I went to Fiesole again with some other students. This time, we read Euripides’ The Bacchae and I got the plum role. Agave is the queen that Dionysus lures to the mountain. Seduced into reverie, Agave and her women wear snakes in their hair, suckle wolves and gazelles and make wine, milk and honey spring from the earth. When the men try to force them back to civilisation, the women tear a herd of cows to bits with their bare hands. Agave dismembers a lion – and when the trance fades she looks down at her hands and sees it’s not a lion’s head she’s holding, but her son’s. Sitting in that amphitheatre, reading from my shared and tattered Penguin Classics copy of the play, I looked at my hands and saw the lion’s head transform into the head of my son. I had a seizure, a bad one, and got the bus back with blood pouring from my cut knees. But I had been Agave in that moment, really been her, felt what it might be like to go madly, dangerously wild, and how hard she has to fight to hang on to her reason when she gets it back again. And felt again how theatre was giving me a chance to really be other women, to try out their choices and see how I liked them.

  Back at Cambridge for my final year, I was facing some choices too. At the end of the year, I’d be moving back to London, where all the expectations I had been avoiding were waiting for me. And, strange though it was to be thinking about marriage while my parents were in the throes of their divorce, on my weekends back they even arranged for me to go on a couple of dates with boys from my community, including one who had gone away to university himself but told me that everyone knew the first thing a girl did when she went away to university was take drugs and spread her legs. My mother said he was testing me, and now he knew I was a lady, he’d treat me beautifully. But Esther Greenwood had shown me I was done with the double standard and anyway, thanks to Scarlett O’Hara, I didn’t want to be a lady. At least now I had more of an idea about what I did want: to make a life in the theatre.

  Theatre gave me a new community, one that suited me better than the one I’d grown up in. Yes, Franny was right, in Franny and Zooey, about theatre people: ‘All those egos running round feeling terribly charitable and warm. Kissing everybody and wearing makeup all over the place’. But I also met people who were open about their ambitions, ready to live with thin skins and open hearts, to try to do what Franny’s brother Buddy says and aim to make something ‘beautiful . . . nameless and joy-making’ on stage. Buddy promises that if Franny succeeds, he and the much-mourned Seymour ‘will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come round to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons’.

  Franny wasn’t my only actor-heroine. Looking back it seems obvious I would end up in the theatre; so many of my heroines had preceded me there. Antonia White’s Clara had done time in a travelling theatre
troupe in the 1920s and she, and the theatrical memoirs I was hoovering up, gave me an enduring fantasy about playing the ingénue in a creaky farce, living out of a suitcase in digs cluttered with aspidistras and fleas (to be dispatched with a cake of soap) and bedbugs (beyond the pale), living on sausages, strong tea and grilled herrings, sticking telegrams in my dressing-room mirror on first nights, and knowing how to apply panstick, combat stage fright, drink men under the table and do an impromptu cabaret turn, all high kicks and silk stockings. Most of this would turn out to be wildly out of date, but I do still think of Clara sometimes, when I’m in a dressing room full of the warm rose smell of cold cream, or picking up post at the stage door, and when once I popped out of a last night party to watch my play’s set being sawn up and chucked in a skip and remembered that one thing you have to know about theatre is how ephemeral it is.

  But my first and best guide to the theatre was Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 story of the Fossil girls making their way on the stage. When I first read it, at nine or ten, not knowing I would end up writing plays, I didn’t want to be able to act like Pauline or dance like Posy; instead, when gawky, down-to-earth Petrova asks, at the end of the book, ‘I wonder, if other girls had to be one of us, which of us they’d choose to be?’, my answer was you, Petrova, only you.

  The sisters – all unrelated orphans adopted by an absent-minded palaeontologist – only go on the stage to earn their keep. (They also have to take in boarders and share frocks and make do and mend. I love how practical Streatfeild’s book is, packed with details about dressmaking and household accounts; she even includes a performing child licence in the book!) But once they get started, Pauline (the blonde) and Posy (the redhead) love it. But Petrova (the brunette – another reason I loved her), hates theatre. She can’t think of anything worse than becoming a dancer or an actor. She wants to be a chauffeur or a mechanic or an aviatrix.