Author, Author

by David Lodge

  Oh God! Must he go over it all again in his mind, tread once more this via dolorosa of memories? Beginning with his slightly shaming manoeuvres to ensure that he would be one of the little party who broke the seal on the door of Fenimore’s apartment – travelling to Genoa to meet the Benedicts off their boat from New York, seeing them on to the train to Rome to pay their respects to Fenimore’s grave, and proceeding to Venice to secure accommodation for them there. He himself took Fenimore’s old rooms at the Casa Biondetti where she had stayed temporarily before moving into the nearby Casa Semitecolo, in the vain hope that inhabiting the space she had occupied would somehow help him retrospectively to inhabit her mind. He haunted the precincts of the Semitecolo for days, squinting from jetties at its worn faded façade, wondering if the fact that it faced north across the Grand Canal, and was seldom warmed by the rays of the sun, had contributed to Fenimore’s final, lethal depression, and staring up from the Ramo Barbaro, the dark, narrow, smelly alley to the rear of the house, at the window from which Fenimore had pitched herself on to the hard paving stones below. It was one of the penalties of possessing a novelist’s imagination that he had all too vivid and visceral a sense of the poor woman’s last moments – the rush through the air, the blinding pain of impact, the semi-consciousness of the distraught soul struggling to free itself from the broken body. The newspaper reports said that the two men who came across her crumpled form in the dark alleyway, shortly after one a.m., thought at first it was a bundle of whitish clothing or bed linen that lay before them, and it was only when one of them poked it with his walking stick, and they heard a faint moan, that they realised it was a human being and raised the alarm. Poked her with a stick! Reliving the moment in situ he had run from the Ramo Barbaro to the nearest side canal, and vomited into the water. She had been carried into the house and laid on her bed, but lapsed into a coma and was dead before dawn broke.

  The violence of her death, however, lent credibility to his theory that it happened in a moment of temporary madness. Surely nobody in their right mind would coolly choose such a terrifying and painful end? Or one so shocking and distressing to family and friends? When Alice had her second serious breakdown, in the late ’seventies, and asked their father if she was wrong to feel tempted by suicide, the old man had serenely replied that he could see no objection to her taking her own life providing she did it ‘in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends’ (friends of course in the old, now almost obsolete, sense of close relations). He had thought this wickedly callous of his father when he first heard of it from William, though it had the desired effect of making Alice furiously determined to live. But if Fenimore had taken a considered decision to end her life she would have agreed with Henry James Sr.’s pragmatic counsel, and chosen some means less distressing to herself and those who loved her than defenestration. What means? Well, drowning for instance – that would have been easy enough to accomplish, and to disguise as an accident, in watery Venice.

  But that train of thought summoned up what was possibly the most unwelcome memory of all those attached to Fenimore’s demise – the expedition to dispose of her clothes in the lagoon. He tried to suppress it, but it bobbed up again immediately, like the air-filled dresses themselves. It had seemed such a good idea at the time – the Benedicts had certainly welcomed it as an imaginative solution to a delicate problem. Having already filled twenty-seven trunks and boxes with Fenimore’s effects – ‘packing’ seemed to be a family obsession – they did not really want to ship her clothes as well back to America, but to burn them would risk setting the old chimneys of the Semitecolo alight, to dispose of them as rubbish would be degrading, and to give them away would invite the risk of encountering one day a double or ghost of Fenimore on some canal path or bridge. Why not, then, sink them in the waters of the lagoon that she loved so much, and had written about so eloquently in the last pages of her notebook? It was agreed; and one evening (dull and misty, not the glorious golden Turneresque sunset he had hoped for) he took a gondola piled with dresses well out into the lagoon and, under the puzzled and somewhat scandalised gaze of Tito, Fenimore’s faithful gondolier, began to pitch them overboard. Of course, in retrospect, he should have attached weights to the clothes, but he hadn’t thought it would be necessary; he had pleased himself with a vision of the waterlogged dresses gracefully subsiding beneath the waters of the lagoon. Instead of which, buoyed up by the air trapped inside their voluminous folds, they floated on the surface, surrounding the gondola like swollen corpses, like so many drowned Fenimores. It was a spectacle at once macabre and farcical, and he felt acutely the humiliation and folly of his own part in it. Fearing that some passing vessel might be drawn to investigate, he ordered Tito to use his oar to thrust the items of clothing down into the depths of the sea, a task of some difficulty, for the velvets and silks clung to the blade as if mutely appealing for rescue, and he was obliged to seize a boathook himself to assist the man. What he had conceived as a tender and poetic farewell to his friend had turned into a grotesque masque suggestive of a guilty conscience striving to hide the traces of a crime.

  And of course it was no use denying that he had felt a degree of guilt, or at least responsibility, for Fenimore’s death, which still lingered to disturb his thoughts at vulnerable times like this, but was especially acute in those weeks in Venice when he called daily at the Casa Semitecolo and spent hours at a time helping the Benedicts go through Fenimore’s books and the ‘sealed box’ containing her papers, deciding what should be preserved and what should be burned. He lived in dread of finding a suicide note saying in effect, ‘I am going to kill myself because Henry James doesn’t love me.’ He found no such document of course; nor did he find the letter that Alice had written to Fenimore just before she died, though he searched diligently for it. He had an intuition that Alice, on her deathbed, had made some generous impulsive womanly gesture towards her old unseen rival – writing at last to commit him to her care, saying that Fenimore was the only woman she could imagine Henry marrying, the only woman he should marry, the only woman who had earned the right to be his wife, and that her own spirit would rest easy in eternity if they were united. If his ‘hunch’, as they called it in America, were correct, that would have raised Fenimore’s hopes to a pitch which might have made his subsequent failure to realise them too much to bear. But he found no trace of the letter, nor any intimate letters from himself. She had evidently been punctilious in carrying out their agreement to destroy their correspondence, for only a few brief recent letters, mostly banal communications about his planned visit to Venice, had survived. Those he destroyed: a suspicion that his repeated postponement of this visit might have contributed to her depression continued to trouble him.

  The discovery that most disturbed him, however, was a passage in her notebook, apparently an idea for a story: ‘imagine a man born without a heart. He is good, at least not cruel; not debauched, well-conducted; but he has no heart.’ Was it himself she was thinking of? It wasn’t true of course that he had no heart, but was that the impression he gave? Her words had chimed with something Flaubert had said to him, back in the ’seventies, at one of those Sunday gatherings of writers in his fifth-floor eyrie in the Faubourg St Honoré, calmly reporting a devastating accusation of his mother’s, without attempting to deny its truth. ‘Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart,’ Mme Flaubert had written to her son. Even then, and even though the words were directed at another man, he had felt a little internal qualm of apprehension that they might one day be levelled at himself, for he shared Flaubert’s mania for sentences, sentences that were perfectly balanced, intricately constructed, subtly cadenced, and as densely packed with meaning as a nut with meat. Did such an obsession dry up one’s heart? Was that the inevitable price one had to pay for artistic achievement? He sometimes feared that it was. ‘Not cruel; not debauched, well-conducted.’ Flaubert, of course, had been debauched, and capable of cruelty to women. But at least he had known passio
n. While he himself had always been . . . well-conducted. It was as if Fenimore had left a message for him to find after her death, saying in effect: you have not fully lived. Recalling the moment when he read the note in her neat copperplate hand, he felt a dark abyss of depression and despair opening up beneath him.

  The clock began to chime the hour. Grateful for the distraction, he strained his ears to count the strokes. One . . . two . . . three . . . four. Silence returned. Four o’clock. Four more hours to pass till Smith knocked at his door. Sixteen till the curtain rose on Guy Domville, Act One. ‘The Garden at Porches’. To try to stem the tide of gloomy thoughts he silently recited the stage directions, which he knew by heart: ‘The garden of an old house in the West of England; the portion directly behind the house, away from the public approach. Towards the centre a flat old-fashioned stone slab, on a pedestal, formed like a table and constituting a sun-dial. Close to it is a garden seat. On the right a low wooden gate, leading to another part of the grounds. On the left a high garden wall with a green door. A portion of the house is visible at the back, with a doorway, a porch and a short flight of steps.’ It was a pretty set. He had nothing to complain of in the physical presentation of his play. The scenery and the costumes were of a high standard and had looked impressive at the dress rehearsals under the St James’s electric lighting. With the possible exception of W. G. Elliott in the part of Lord Devenish, the acting was unexceptionable, and at times much better than that. Marion Terry, if not quite the equal of her sister Ellen, was subtle and touching in the difficult part of Mrs Peverel, which required her to express emotion while for the most part struggling to disguise it. The little bit of business she had developed lately, just before the curtain drop at the end of Act One, going across to the pillar of the porch and laying her face against it, lost in thought, was quite exquisite. And Alexander was capable of communicating the real anguish of the hero’s divided loyalties when he forgot to be concerned about presenting his handsome head and tightly breeched legs in the most becoming attitudes. As a director of other actors he was excellent. The rehearsals had proceeded in a calm and orderly fashion, without the tantrums and sulks that had occasionally disturbed the productions of The American. It was a pity, a great pity, that he himself had been rendered speechless by laryngitis at the first read-through, so that he was unable to address the cast and guide them on the right paths to the interpretation of their characters, but instead had to sit in a silent agony of frustration as Alexander performed this task. He had done his best to make up for the manager’s predictable bluntings and blurrings of the finer points of the text by interventions at subsequent rehearsals. And as for the text itself – how he had laboured to reduce its length, in obedience to Alexander’s immitigable demands, without losing vital elements of dramatic substance. Every word that remained had survived several fine-combings designed to identify and eliminate any conceivable redundancy, however trivial. The thing had been sweated and strained and bled until there was not a surplus syllable in it. In short, everyone concerned in the production had given of their professional best. So why was he so nervous? Because, however careful the preparation, you could never be sure whether a play would ‘go’ until you put it in front of an audience.

  He turned over on to his back and joined his hands on his stomach in the attitude of a sculpted figure on top of an old cathedral tomb. There was no statue on Fenimore’s tomb, just a plain cross. He had finally visited it in May, having fled from Venice when the crowds of tourists became unbearable. It had been a soothing experience after all, and he wished he had not postponed the pilgrimage for so long. He had always loved the Protestant Cemetery, shaded by cypresses, its modest graves contrasting with the great pagan pyramid of Caius Cestius close by. Shelley and Trelawney were laid to rest there, and Keats under his poignant despairing epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ There was no epitaph on Fenimore’s tombstone, just the bare name, ‘Constance Fenimore Woolson’, with the date, ‘1894’, a reticence that would have pleased her, as would the ivy and violets growing in profusion over the fine white marble.

  Fenimore again. It seemed that he was not going to be able to stop thinking of her during this long wakeful night, so he might as well spare himself the effort to do so. If it were true that he had no heart, or only one desiccated by the mania for sentences, would he have been so disturbed by her death, or have spent so many hours brooding on it? He had needlessly distressed himself by taking the words in the notebook so personally. But the idea of a man who was born without a heart – a good man, well-conducted, who however lacked some vital faculty of feeling – was an interesting one. Suppose the man sensed there was something missing in himself – suppose he spent his entire life waiting for something to happen to him, something very important though he didn’t know what it would be, and confided this vague but obsessive expectation to a woman friend, only to discover, when she died, that what he lacked was the capacity to recognise and return the love the woman was all the time offering him. He might do something with that idea. Not immediately, not perhaps for years, but he would write Fenimore’s story for her one day. The idea gave him a kind of peace and satisfaction, and he felt himself at last growing drowsy.

  The next thing he was aware of was the rap of Smith’s knuckles on the bedroom door.

  ‘Eight o’clock, Mr James,’ came the muffled summons.

  ‘Thank you, Smith,’ he mumbled in reply.

  A few moments later Smith entered with a steaming jug in his hand, which he placed on the washstand. Then he went to the window and drew the curtains, revealing a view of roofs and chimney-pots and a strip of dull grey sky. ‘A cold morning, sir,’ he remarked, ‘with a nipping wind. But only to be expected in January.’

  ‘As long as it doesn’t snow,’ he replied. A heavy snowfall could keep half the first-night audience away.

  Smith evidently followed his train of thought. ‘It did say in yesterday’s newspaper there might be a few flurries, but nothing to cause anxiety.’ He knelt under the mantelpiece and applied a match to the gas fire, which ignited with a pop. ‘Shall I run your bath, sir?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Smith.’

  ‘And your usual attire for a Saturday in town? The soft black jacket and grey worsteds?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  When the man had left the room and closed the door behind him, Henry got out of bed and emptied his bladder copiously into the chamber pot. As he returned it to the commode he felt, as always, a slight twinge of guilt at giving the housemaid the task of emptying it, but he was too lazy to put on his dressing gown and slippers and shuffle down the corridor to the w.c., and then back again to the bedroom to shave and then out again to the bathroom to bathe. He took off the little black silk cap that he wore in bed, and his pyjama jacket, shivering a little, for the gas fire had not yet warmed the air in the room. He poured water into the handbasin, washed and dried his face, and then, with a little shaving soap, a freshly honed razor and a pair of gentleman’s scissors, shaved his cheeks and trimmed his beard. He took particular care with this operation, bearing in mind the evening to come. His was never a neatly shaped beard, like De Maupassant’s imperial, for instance, or flowing and patriarchal, like William’s, but bushy, flecked with grey, and blunt in outline. Someone had said once that it reminded him of a soldier’s beard, or a sea-captain’s, and he had not been displeased. Sometimes he thought of shaving it off, but now that the top of his head was almost entirely bald he felt he needed more than ever the compensatory mass of hair around his jaw; and besides he liked the slight air of mystery a beard created, the way it screened revealing facial expressions.

  He put on his dressing gown and slippers and proceeded to the steam-filled bathroom. Tutored by long experience Smith had run a bath of precisely the right temperature, allowing time for the water to cool by some degrees while he was shaving. He lay back luxuriously in the hot water, his belly protruding from the surface like a small pink island. He had abando
ned all hope of reducing it – however much walking he did made no difference, and even a course of instruction in fencing had failed to have any effect. It was, like his baldness, like the gout, a sign of the body’s inevitable degeneration. Du Maurier had left that out of account – the sagging dugs and pendulous paunches of the elderly – in his utopian vision of a world returned to prelapsarian nudity which he had expounded in the Staithes pub. The corresponding passage in Trilby had been cut from the magazine serial but restored in the book.