by David Lodge
Henry thought it prudent to withdraw from Florence for a time, partly to discourage such gossip, and partly because of a little contretemps with Fenimore. His article for the Atlantic, simply entitled ‘Miss Woolson’, was about to come out and he had left a galley proof with her as they parted one evening. When they met the next day by arrangement for a walk in the Boboli Gardens, she seemed subdued, even morose. He thought it was perhaps the rather sombre trees and shrubs of the garden, and their excessively geometrical arrangement, that was having this effect, which he had observed before in visitors, until they seated themselves on a bench looking down the alley of cypresses, and she returned the galleys to him with frigid thanks.
‘I fear you are displeased with the article, Fenimore,’ he said.
‘No, no,’ she said, unconvincingly. ‘I’m sure you are right.’
‘Right about what?’
‘The modest extent of my achievement.’
‘But I praise your work very highly!’ Henry protested.
‘Do you? Let me see it again.’ Fenimore took the article back from him and scanned it rapidly. ‘You say that Anne – which is the novel for which I’m best known – is my worst.’
‘Not “worst”.’ Henry demurred. ‘I think my words were, “least happily composed”.’
‘And that East Angels is my best,’ she continued. This was her most recent book, published the previous year.
‘I believe it is,’ he said. ‘By far the best.’
‘And then you say, “and if her talent is capable, in another novel, of making an advance equal to that represented by this work in relation to its predecessors, she will have made a substantial contribution to our new literature of fiction.” It seems to me, when I do the calculation in that sentence, that I still have a long way to go before my work will amount to anything.’
Henry was disconcerted and discomfited, taken quite by surprise, and as usual in such circumstances his speech became somewhat disjointed. ‘My dear Fenimore – you misunderstand – the last thing in the world I wished to – I was of course invoking – I was measuring you against the very highest – the very greatest writers – the giants – Balzac – well, perhaps not – but George Sand – George Eliot – the Brontë sisters . . .’
Fenimore listened impassively to his protestations, and then suddenly laughed in his face. ‘Henry, you are priceless,’ she said. Her good humour returned at once, but Henry found this incomprehensible remark the most disconcerting part of the whole conversation. The next day he accepted a standing invitation to pay an extended visit to his friend Mrs Bronson in Venice.
This wealthy New England socialite occupied the Casa Alvisi on the Grand Canal just opposite the Salute, and her hospitality in these imposing quarters, especially to celebrities in literature and the arts, was legendary. Henry’s visit was, however, a disappointment to him. Venice, which he had enjoyed so intensely in the winter and early spring of 1881, was cooler this year, and wetter. One day it even snowed, a spectacular transformation of the city – the dome of the Salute helmeted with a white crust, the black prows of the gondolas scything through flurries of snowflakes – but shortlived. A grey mistiness returned. His apartment was in an annexe at the back of the Casa, rather dark and dank, overlooking a gloomy minor canal. Knowing that Robert Browning had occupied it in the recent past rendered it no more inviting. Henry felt himself becoming depressed, and wrote to Du Maurier, coaxing him to bring Emma to Venice for a holiday. Kiki’s company and amusing conversation would cheer him up, he felt, and he would enjoy acting as their corriere, showing off his familiarity with the treasures of Venice. To this end he somewhat exaggerated the charms of its present aspect in his letter. ‘The weather glows – the lagoon twinkles, and the old marble-fronted palaces look hungry for you,’ he wrote. Du Maurier sent back a long, chatty, ruefully envious reply. ‘Florence – Venice – to me these words are just magical – But I do not see much chance of my seeing what they represent. Yours seems a delightful existence enough – to winter in such places with a delightful occupation that depends on no skill of hand or eye, precarious organ!’ Nevertheless, he sounded in good spirits. He had let New Grove House again for a few months, and taken a house in Bayswater Terrace, setting up his drawing board by the window of the front parlour, where the shifting urban scene afforded constant diversion and inspiration. He had seen a good deal of ‘poor old Millais’ and they took long walks together ‘bras dessus bras dessous’ – and there was a minute sketch of the two men arm in arm squeezed between the lines of script. He asked if Henry had heard the story about the bishop who called on Mrs Gladstone. ‘Mrs G: Oh, Bishop, the country’s going to the dogs. Bishop: Ah – trust me – there’s One above who orders all things for the best. Mrs G: Yes, he’ll be down directly.’ Reading this, Henry laughed out loud for the first time in days, and wished more keenly than ever that his friend could join him in Venice. But clearly Kiki felt too burdened with financial anxieties and family responsibilities to move out of working range of the Punch offices. He reported that they had spent Christmas and the New Year at Brighton, where he read a lot of French novels, notably Une Vie.
Henry stayed on in Venice for a couple of months without much enjoying himself. He suspected that he had developed jaundice and, distrusting the local doctors, sought the advice of the American physician William Baldwin who served the expatriate community in Florence, sending him urine samples, carefully wrapped, through the post, marked ‘a.m.’ and ‘p.m.’. He wrote a rather self-pitying report of himself to Fenimore, and she generously suggested that he return to Florence, mentioning that there were rooms available in the Casa Brichieri. He took her advice and began to feel better as soon as he arrived. The view from the Casa’s windows, of the clustered roofs, domes and towers of the city, bisected by the tawny Arno, was a tonic in itself; so was the Tuscan sunshine. Neither he nor Fenimore made any further reference to ‘Miss Woolson’. They resumed their pleasant writerly companionship, now under the same roof.
He began work on a story based on an anecdote he had heard in January, about an American bookman who had discovered that Clare Claremont, Byron’s mistress and Shelley’s sister-in-law, now an old lady, was living with her niece in Florence, in possession of priceless Byron–Shelley letters. The man had plotted to lay his hands on them by infiltrating the household as a lodger, with interesting consequences. Henry transposed the setting from Florence to Venice, and made the author of the coveted letters a fictitious American poet called Jeffrey Aspern. The work went well, for the subject gripped his imagination. He was able to evoke the obsessive biographical curiosity of his American protagonist because on occasion he had felt it himself, about Byron and George Sand and other writers. But the more he worked on his story the more conscious he became of the essential depravity of this urge to uncover the secrets of dead authors, to possess their private thoughts and deeds, and to publish them to the world. It was hateful to think of his own papers being rifled by strangers after his death.
In early May he found it necessary to return to Venice to make more notes on the setting of his story, and then it would be time to go back to London. He and Fenimore took a last walk in the Cascine beside the Arno, now in the growing heat a viscous yellowy-green, flowing slowly between its banks like olive oil. ‘You will write, of course, when you have time, and tell me how your work goes,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘And I trust you will do the same. You know how I value our correspondence. But – may I make a suggestion?’
‘What is it?’
‘That in future we burn each other’s letters after reading them.’
She stopped on the footpath and stared at him. ‘Whatever for? Are they so very compromising? Are you afraid they may be read out in court at some future date?’
He grinned uneasily. ‘Don’t be absurd, Fenimore, of course not. They’re not in the least compromising. But they are . . . private. I hate the idea of people reading them after we are dead.’
‘And not only reading them, but publishing them, and making money out of them. It’s the way things are going in this dreadful Americanised age of ours. There is no privacy, no decency any more. Journalists, interviewers, biographers – they’re parasites, locusts, they strip every leaf. The art we lavish – the pains we take – to create imaginary worlds – is wasted on them. They care only for trivial fact. I feel it is our duty to deny them, to defeat them. When we are dead, when we can no longer defend our privacy, they will move in with their antennae twitching, their mandibles gnashing. Let them find nothing – only scorched earth. Ashes.’
Fenimore moved on, in meditative silence. ‘I can see you feel deeply about this, Henry,’ she said at length.
‘I do.’
‘And you have prepared this speech to persuade me.’
‘I admit it.’
‘May I ask if you’ve made a similar compact with any of your other correspondents?’
‘No. There’s no one else to whom I’ve unburdened my hopes, ambitions, doubts as I have to you.’ Fenimore blushed, perceptibly gratified by this confession. ‘Of course,’ he added, pressing his advantage, ‘if you don’t agree, I won’t stop writing to you. But my letters will not be as spontaneous, as unfettered, as they have been in the past.’
‘Very well, I agree,’ she said with a sigh.
When Henry got back to London he read through all Fenimore’s letters and then destroyed them. To his annoyance he was unable to find the one in which she had said that the best of her work was not worthy to touch the hem of his poorest, for he would have liked to bathe himself in its delicious, self-abasing praise once more. He must have lost it or left it behind in Boston.
He kept the letter from Du Maurier which he had received in Venice, but never responded to its comments on Maupassant’s Une Vie. He always privately associated that novel with Beatrix Millar, though wild horses would not have dragged the admission, or an explanation, from him. Soon after she was married, her husband had carried her off to America and Canada, where his City firm had offices, and they were absent for nearly a year, but Henry saw them both frequently after his return from Italy, for they were regular visitors to New Grove House on Sundays, with their young son Geoffrey. The marriage, as far as one could judge from external appearances, was evidently a much happier one than poor Jeanne’s in Maupassant’s tale. Motherhood had brought Trixy’s beauty to ripe perfection, and young Geoffrey was the image of the curly-haired cherub in the ‘Bubbles’ advertisements for Pears soap. In due course she produced a second son, called Guy after his uncle, and Henry was asked to be a godfather. He accepted the duty with pleasure, though warning the parents that his associations with the Church were of the loosest. ‘My religious upbringing was – what shall I call it – pewless,’ he told them. ‘My father was converted to the teachings of Swedenborg when I was but six months old.’
‘What do Swedenborgians believe, sir?’ Charles Millar asked him earnestly.
‘My dear boy, what do they not believe?’ Henry answered with a sigh. William had just edited and published, as an act of filial piety, the Literary Remains of Henry James Sr., a handsomely bound and printed volume that had been met with a resounding silence by the public at large. Reading it (or, to be accurate, reading in it) had reminded Henry of the fantastical foundationless ideas to the elucidation of which his father had dedicated his considerable intellect for most of his life. There was nothing quite so sad, to Henry’s mind, as a book plainly doomed to count its readers on the fingers of one hand.
Du Maurier in contrast had hardly any beliefs at all. ‘I think I was a born sceptic,’ he told Henry when they were seated one day on the Bench of Confidences. He had been brought up as a Protestant, since his father was of Huguenot ancestry, and his mother’s family Anglican, but their attitude to religion was more pragmatic than dogmatic. ‘My brother Eugene was baptised in a Catholic church to please an aristocratic friend of the family he was named for. I think they would have made him a Hindoo if it would have improved his prospects.’ Du Maurier laughed a little shamefacedly at his own joke. ‘No, that’s not fair – they were Christians of a kind, but not devout. My father had a loathing of priests and pastors – ‘les corbeaux’ he used to call them because of their black cassocks. He and Maman seldom went to church. They taught me to say my prayers – but even as a young boy I couldn’t see the point of praying. If God was so wonderful, why did he need me to tell him so? And what was the point of asking him for favours, since if he existed he knew what I wanted already?’
‘You were a remarkably precocious little atheist,’ Henry remarked.
‘No, I was never an atheist,’ said Du Maurier. ‘I’m what Huxley calls an “agnostic” – a very useful word. I don’t know whether there is a Supreme Being, but if there is I’m sure He – or rather It – doesn’t resemble the irritable old man with a long white beard one was taught to fear in childhood, or his humourless son.’
Henry tittered at this satirical description of the godhead. ‘Does Emma know about these views of yours?’ he enquired.
‘She knows, but we don’t discuss them. It would upset her – she’s a conventional soul, the dear girl. I’d privately renounced the Christian religion before we fell in love.’
‘Was there a particular moment when you ceased to believe or was it a gradual process?’ Henry asked.
‘Both, in a way. But the crisis came when I lost the sight of my eye, and feared to lose the other,’ Du Maurier said. ‘I was in despair. For once I was tempted to turn to prayer. I was living in Malines at the time – I’d gone there to consult a specialist who didn’t seem to be doing me much good. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there? No? Well, it’s a town full of churches – I’ve never been to a place that has so many for its size. Most of them – all the nice old ones anyway – are Roman, but one day when I was feeling particularly blue I passed a Lutheran church, and went in and knelt there and tried to pray, without much success, or relief. After a while a minister came in and noticed me. When I got up to leave he engaged me in conversation, and I explained my plight. He questioned me closely about the circumstances in which I lost the sight of my eye. As you know, I was painting from the life at the time, a young girl. He asked me if the model was nude. ‘I think his term was “unclothed”. I said yes. He said: “Then perhaps God has punished you for that.”’
‘Good heavens!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘What a monstrous thing to say!’
‘Wasn’t it jolly of him? His theory was that God had blinded me in one eye for painting a subject likely to arouse lust – my own and other people’s – through the organ of sight, and that my best hope of preserving my good eye was to renounce such art for ever.’
Henry was reminded of the day long ago when he entered Hunt’s studio in Newport to find Gus Barker posing nude – poor Gus, who three years later was shot dead by a Confederate guerrilla on the Rappahannock River – and his own emotions on that occasion, but he said nothing of this to Du Maurier. ‘Outrageous,’ he murmured. ‘And cruel.’
‘Yes, I sometimes think cruelty is the only real sin,’ said Du Maurier. ‘I told him I couldn’t believe in a God capable of such petty spitefulness, and that I intended to return to the life class at the next opportunity. In fact I’d given up serious drawing and painting to rest my eye, but it made a good exit line as I stalked out of the church. He yelled after me: “Put not the Lord thy God to the test!” And I admit there were moments in the days following when I felt a certain . . . superstitious anxiety. How would I feel, I wondered, if I lost the sight of the other eye? After giving the matter a lot of thought I came to the conclusion that it would just be my bad luck. The causes of my weak sight were purely physical, and nobody’s fault. Things are as they are for perfectly natural reasons that sooner or later science will explain – has already explained to a large extent. That was my final parting with religion. And what about you, Henry?’ he concluded. ‘Where
do you stand?’
‘Ah, that would take a long time to tell,’ said Henry. ‘In brief – like you, I’m a sceptic when it comes to doctrine. But I must admit to a kind of emotional attraction to the Roman Church – emotional and aesthetic. I adore Italian painting from Giotto and Botticelli to – oh, Tintoretto, Titian . . . those old masters humanise the biblical legends in a way I find immensely moving. And I think I take a gloomier view of human nature than you do, Kiki. I believe there is such a thing as evil – original sin if you like – and that perhaps humanity needs religion as a bulwark against it. And I rather envy the Romans their rituals and symbolism – the sung masses, the votive candles, the anointing of the sick . . .’
‘You wouldn’t convert, though, would you?’ Du Maurier enquired, almost anxiously.
‘No, no fear of that,’ Henry said with a smile. ‘Consciousness is my religion, human consciousness. Refining it, intensifying it – and preserving it.’
The infant Guy Millar was baptised in Hampstead parish church by Canon Ainger, a neighbour of Du Maurier’s who was his regular walking companion on the Heath on weekdays. Since Ainger was otherwise occupied on Sundays it was the first occasion on which Henry met this gentleman, though he had heard a lot about him. Like Du Maurier he was small in stature, with strikingly white hair, and a slightly theatrical manner (he had in fact acted in some of Charles Dickens’s celebrated amateur productions). To Henry nothing better illustrated the comfortable tolerance of the Church of England towards diversity of belief than the friendship of these two men. Ainger was a learned churchman of orthodox Low Church views, and a popular preacher at the Temple, where he held the position of Reader. He must have been aware that Du Maurier never went to church apart from family weddings, christenings and funerals, but it seemed to make no difference to their mutual regard, which was based on common secular enthusiasms – for walking, music, amusing conversation and convivial society. Henry had been rather apprehensive that his qualifications for godparenthood would be put to the test by Ainger before the christening, or at the reception afterwards at New Grove House, but Du Maurier had reassured him. ‘Ainger’s far too sensible a chap to bring up religion on an occasion like this,’ he said mischievously. ‘Anyway, there’s another godfather who’s certainly been confirmed, so you needn’t worry.’ This turned out to be Edward Warren, a young architect who had been at school with Charles Millar. He was a pupil of Bodley’s and a disciple of William Morris. Henry liked him and his pretty fiancée exceedingly and immediately struck up a friendship with them which proved enduring.