by David Lodge
Henry had brought with him to Paris an idea for a new play which he began to work on in the intervals between meeting his friends, visiting galleries, going to the theatre, and other diversions. It was based on an anecdote he had heard in Venice the previous summer, about a member of an old Venetian family who had become, or was about to become, a monk, but was snatched out of his convent and virtually forced to marry because he was the last surviving male in the family and it would otherwise become extinct. He decided to set the action of his play in late eighteenth-century England, in one of the pockets of Old Catholic gentry who quietly practised their faith in those pre-emancipation days, and he had Edward Compton very much in mind as producer and leading actor. A period piece, with a big part that called for wearing a full wig, should appeal to him much more than the ideas for modern comedies Henry had vainly offered him over the past year or so. He alerted Compton to the fact that a new play was in gestation before he left London. The manager was impatient to learn more, but Henry wanted to get a first act written before he exposed his subject for consideration, having an intuition that in bald summary it might not immediately recommend itself. Personally he was delighted with it, and sent the Comptons what he hoped were enticing little notes of his progress while he kept them waiting. During the laborious revision of The American he had acquired the services of a copyist in competent possession of a Remington typewriter (by his reckoning one of the few unambiguously beneficial contributions of America to civilisation) and he was now wedded to this method of copying and circulating dramatic manuscripts; but sending his handwritten drafts from Paris to Miss Gregory in Hampstead, getting them back again for correction – and inevitable, irresistible, emendation – and returning them once more for further retyping, all took up time. He had several times to postpone sending the promised first act to the Comptons.
It began with the hero, Guy Domville, tutor to the son of an attractive young widow, Mrs Peverel (a role that would be just the ticket for Mrs Compton), preparing to depart the very next day for the Benedictine monastery at Douai, to fulfil a longstanding vocation to the priesthood. Mrs Peverel was in love with Guy but had concealed her feelings out of piety to their shared religion, while he had an utterly chaste regard for her which, it was subtly conveyed, might in different circumstances have ripened into something else. Guy’s friend Frank Humber, quite unaware of Mrs Peverel’s feelings, was pressing his suit on her himself. Though recognising that he would make a good husband and stepfather for her son, she was emotionally incapable of giving her consent until Guy had irrevocably gone, and asked Frank to wait till the evening for her answer. Frank asked Guy to plead his cause, and Guy agreed – why should he not? Then a relative of Guy’s, Lord Devenish, in whose name the suggestion of ‘devilish’ appropriately lurked, arrived with the news that Guy’s dissolute cousin had died suddenly without legitimate issue, and that he had inherited the family estate. Devenish brought a message from Mrs Domville (not Guy’s mother, who was dead, but a widowed senior member of the family, and Devenish’s mistress) that it was Guy’s duty to marry and ensure the continuation of the line. After much agonising Guy was persuaded by Mrs Peverel, who saw an opportunity providentially opening up for herself, that this obligation should indeed have priority over his religious vocation, and he prepared to leave immediately with Devenish to take up his inheritance. When Frank asked Mrs Peverel for her answer she rejected him, and he bitterly inferred that she must be in love with Guy. Guy, however, knowing of his friend’s attachment to Mrs Peverel, could not allow his own feelings for her to develop in his new-found liberty. The first act ended with Devenish informing the dismayed Mrs Peverel that Mary, the daughter of Mrs Domville by her first marriage, would be the perfect match for Guy – ‘a bride in a thousand – a Catholic, a beauty, and a fortune’.
Henry had in mind a second act, set some months later at Mrs Domville’s home on the eve of Guy’s wedding to Mary, in the course of which Guy would discover that she was in fact Devenish’s daughter, and had been manipulated by him into the match for his own gain, and had another, honourable lover, a naval lieutenant, with whom Guy would help her to elope. Then there would be a third act in which, by means Henry had not yet determined, Guy would recognise his true feelings for Mrs Peverel, and hers for him, but, unable to contemplate hurting his friend Frank, and generally disillusioned with the materialism and corruption he had encountered in secular society, would renounce the possibility of marriage, commend Frank to Mrs Peverel, and depart to take up his religious vocation after all. It was Henry’s intention however to submit the first act to Compton with only the outline of what was to follow.
At last it was ready. Personally he considered that it was easily the best thing he had done so far as a dramatic author: the delicate web of moral scruple and tender feeling that connected the principal characters (the blackguard Devenish excepted) stretching and tightening under the pressure of circumstance, produced a seamless succession of poignant personal dilemmas that would surely hold any audience enthralled, and offer wonderful opportunities for actors. On the 16th April he wrote to Compton to announce the dispatch of the first act under separate cover to Hartlepool, the C.C.C.’s current base, adding that he hoped it would arrive by p.m. the next day rather than the morning of the following one, ‘as I shall like to think of you and Mrs Compton conning it together, after the performance, by the quiet midnight lamp’.
It was a grievous blow, after conjuring up this cosy picture, to receive a letter from Compton a few days later expressing disappointment with the first act, and misgivings about what might follow it. He was unhappy with a play that put so much emphasis on the moral problems and religious beliefs of Roman Catholics, with which ordinary British theatregoers would find it difficult to sympathise, and he feared, from the few hints that Henry had given, that he was bent upon an ending even unhappier than the first version of The American. Henry replied immediately and at length, defending his choice of subject, concluding: ‘Above all I thought it dramatic. I accept of course completely your statement that, for your purposes (which are the only purposes in question), I am in error. It’s sufficient that you don’t like the subject – we will drop it on the spot.’
This pained but dignified communication had the effect, gratifying as far as it went, of making Compton withdraw or moderate his criticisms in a prompt reply. It had certainly not been his intention to reject the play outright at this stage, and he was eager to see the next two acts as soon as Henry was able to show them to him. But he did earnestly advise him to bear in mind the prime importance of giving a happy ending to the story, with the union of Guy and Mrs Peverel. Their correspondence continued for several weeks, during which time Henry moved on from Paris to Lucerne, to join up with William and his family, whose sabbatical year in Europe was drawing to a close. He saw no point in showing Compton any more of the play as long as they differed so fundamentally on the question of the ending. ‘The ending you express a dread of is the only ending I ever dreamed of giving the play,’ he declared. To make Guy abandon his vocation in order to marry Mrs Peverel would be ‘not only no subject at all, but a very ugly and displeasing (as well as flat and undramatic) substitute for one’. Compton however remained stubbornly unconvinced. Henry resolved to continue to work on the play by his own lights in the hope that it would find a sympathetic home one day; meanwhile he kept Compton sweet by offering him another idea, this time for a comedy set in Monte Carlo.
Henry’s vigorous defence of the envisaged ending of the play was not wholly based on the considerations of dramatic form and good taste that he advanced to Compton. He felt an intense personal identification with his hero, seeing in Guy’s final, heroic renunciation of love and marriage in favour of the religious life a parallel to his own celibate dedication to the vocation of authorship. Perhaps into the character of Mrs Peverel he put a little of Fenimore’s: her pathos, her wistfulness, her undeclared but always implied yearning to be loved. Fenimore was very much on his mind at
this time, for she was leaving England once again, and going to make her home in Venice. She had been talking of this plan for ages, complaining that the grey skies and chilly winters of England made her more susceptible to depression, and that of all the places in the world she had visited Venice was the one which most satisfied her senses and soothed her spirit. She had put off the move, and submitted to one more English winter, in order to complete the novel, Horace Chase, on which she had been labouring for several years. Now that it was finished, and running as a serial in Harper’s, there was nothing to detain her. She wrote to Henry to say she had given notice to her landlady and begun ‘packing’. The portentous weight of that word was not lost on him. The assembling and filling of trunks that preceded all Fenimore’s major migrations was a complex and protracted business, which she conducted as seriously and methodically as the quartermaster general of an army. If she was ‘packing’, then her decision was certainly irrevocable.
Not that he wished her to revoke it, or had any right to try and persuade her to do so. He certainly couldn’t quarrel with her choice of location. Venice was to him, too, the most charming city in the world, and he had even toyed with the idea of acquiring a pied-à-terre there to retreat to when the filth and fogs of London, the press of people (and the people of the press!) became too much to bear. But, as always in his relations with Fenimore, he had ambivalent feelings about her move. When she was present, he was oppressed by an obscure sense of responsibility for her happiness which he could not possibly fulfil, but when she was absent he missed her. He certainly felt that it was not right, it was not seemly, that she should be quitting England in his own absence, without a valedictory meeting. He therefore arranged to coincide with her in Paris for a few days in the middle of May, where she could break her journey to Italy, and he his journey back to London from Switzerland.
They did not stay in the same hotel. Fenimore pretended that the Westminster was far too grand and expensive for her, but Henry knew that she knew that it would embarrass him to be sleeping under the same roof as herself, taking his key from the same desk in public view, and he was grateful for her tact. She arrived in Paris a day ahead of him and left word at the Westminster of her accommodation in a more modest establishment not far away in the Rue des Capucines. He arrived on the Geneva express in the late evening, and waited upon her the next morning. He thought she looked pale and drawn, her usually plump smooth cheeks faintly wrinkled like apples that have been stored too long. When he asked about her health she said she had found her ‘packing’ more than usually exhausting, and then, staying in London for a week after leaving Oxford, she had had an uncomfortable session with a dentist, and caught a bad cold.
‘Paris will revive you,’ Henry said. ‘Paris at this time of year is a sovereign tonic.’
‘Meeting you here revives me already, Henry,’ she said, smiling.
He offered his arm and they walked out into the street. Almost at once they were in the Place Vendôme, with its elegant façades and huge central column surmounted by the statue of Napoleon. ‘The statue is a replica, you know,’ Henry observed, ‘the Commune tore down the original in 1871.’ They walked round the massive monument, admiring the bronze bas-relief of heroic battle scenes that wound its way from the bottom to the top.
‘It’s like Trajan’s column in Rome,’ she said. ‘Do you remember we saw it together in, what was it, ’eighty-one?’
‘Yes indeed. This was of course built in explicit imitation of Trajan’s column. The metal came from twelve hundred cannon captured at Austerlitz,’ he said.
‘Goodness, Henry, you’re a walking guidebook.’
‘I have a special interest in this place,’ he said. ‘Seeing it is my earliest memory.’
‘How early?’ she said.
‘I was less than two years old.’
‘Impossible, Henry, you must have dreamed it.’
‘No, from a very early age I had a mental image – a recurring vivid mental image – of myself in a moving carriage, sitting on my aunt Kate’s knee – in long clothes – facing Mother and Father, and seeing through the window a tall column decorated with the shapes of human figures. They brought me here – my parents – in 1844, on their first visit to Europe. There was no such column in any other city I was taken to in infancy. I was ten years old when I next visited Paris. It must have been that first occasion that I remembered.’
‘Well, it’s very remarkable,’ said Fenimore.
‘I’ve been fascinated by Napoleon ever since I traced the memory,’ said Henry. ‘Shall we walk on?’
They strolled down the Rue de la Paix and the Rue de Castiglione, paused for coffee and a pastry in the pâtisserie on the corner, crossed the Rue de Rivoli into the Jardin des Tuileries, and made their way along the neat gravelled paths to the Louvre. It was one of several walks they took in the days that followed – happily Henry’s gout had disappeared, and Fenimore was always a stalwart walker. He was right: the capital was at its beguiling best. The weather was mild, the breezes soft. The sun glinted on the gold statues, crosses, and weathercocks surmounting the pale grey buildings, on the foaming wakes of pleasure boats cruising on the Seine, on the plate glass windows of the grands magasins, and on the jingling harness of the carriage horses trotting along the broad boulevards. The chestnut trees in the avenues were in glorious leaf and blossom, the parterres in the parks flamed with colour. There was a controversial exhibition of the Salon des Indépendants and an excellent Misanthrope at the Comédie Française.
For a few days Henry, unusually for him, wrote nothing, not even a letter, but gave himself up to pleasure and entertaining Fenimore. She was grateful and appreciative, commending everything he suggested and arranged, and she began to look better, with more colour in her cheeks and more spring in her step. But he sensed a deep underlying melancholy which lay still and undisturbed by all these distractions, like a pool in some dark underground cavern. She didn’t seem elated by reports that the serialisation of her new novel was being well received in America. She was revising the text for book publication and begged Henry to wait to read it in that form. She claimed that it would be her last novel – that she couldn’t face the effort of writing another, and hadn’t any new ideas anyway.