by David Lodge
‘But do people actually talk like that?’
‘Did people talk in blank verse in Shakespeare’s day?’ Shaw retorted. ‘I’m not saying it’s a great play, mind you. It’s flawed, it has its longueurs, it deals with a very narrow strip of human life. But it’s written by an artist! Which is more than you can say for nine-tenths of the plays on the West End stage.’
‘Why did they boo it, then?’
‘’Twas the people in the gallery who booed, and the pit and the cheap upper boxes. They didn’t understand or appreciate the play – how could they, when they’ve been fed for decades on a diet of crass melodrama and coarse farce? They had no patience with the fine moral scruples of Guy Domville, and when he denied them a happy ending by going into the priesthood after all, ’twas the last straw! The stalls were more respectful, but I doubt if they enjoyed it or understood it any better. A lot of them were Henry James’s friends – too many for his own good, perhaps. Maybe the gallery decided there was an upper-class claque in the stalls, so they decided to set up a rival commotion. Alexander should have known better than to bring James on at the end.’
‘It seemed to me an act of revenge,’ said Herbert.
Shaw chuckled. ‘You may be right.’
‘Does it happen very often – booing like that?’
‘Not very often. I was booed at the first night of Widowers’ Houses – though whether they were booing the play or the speech I insisted on making was not altogether clear to me.’
It was news to Herbert that Shaw was a playwright as well as a journalist, but he thought it prudent to disguise his ignorance. ‘How many plays have you written?’ he asked cunningly, as they turned up Charing Cross Road.
‘Several, but only two have been staged. They’re generally considered too controversial, and likely to incur the wrath of the censor. I’ve just written a new one, called Candida. Wyndham wept over the last act when he read it, but he told me it would be twenty-five years before the London stage was ready for such a subject. Then I offered it to Alexander—’
‘You mean George Alexander?’
‘The very same. He said he would do it if I would make the hero blind.’
‘Why?’ Herbert laughed incredulously.
‘He thought it would make the character more sympathetic. He was thinking of playing the part himself, you see. Of course I refused.’
‘Aren’t you in a rather delicate position,’ Herbert ventured, ‘reviewing plays put on by the managements you hope to interest in your own work?’
‘I considered that question carefully when Frank Harris offered me the job,’ Shaw said. ‘But I am incorruptible. And, besides, I need the money. What about you, Mr Wells? Do you support yourself by writing?’
‘I’m trying to. I used to be a tutor in a correspondence college, but I chucked it in.’
‘Are you married?’
‘I’m in the process of getting divorced, while living with the woman I love,’ Herbert said, hoping this would impress the freethinking Shaw.
‘That sounds expensive,’ the Irishman commented dryly.
‘I’m confident of earning a living as long as my health keeps up,’ said Herbert. ‘I’ve just sold a serial story to The New Review for a hundred pounds.’
Now Shaw was impressed. ‘Congratulations! I’ll look out for it. What is it called?’
‘The Time Machine,’ said Herbert.
‘An intriguing title,’ said Shaw.]
So it was over. He had come to the dead end of the road, the dry bottom of the well, the rock wall at the end of the tunnel. Failure. He had made a bargain with Fate – ‘one more year’ – and Fate had kept him waiting for the full term, kept him clinging hopefully to the rope ladder that led to success, before severing its strands with a single malicious stroke, sending him tumbling into the abyss. His play was a failure – there was no evading that fact. Alexander’s talk of a cabal, and the mysterious malevolent telegram, had given him hope for a moment that he had become innocently involved in some vendetta against the actor-manager, but as soon as he heard the booing die down and the applause swell when Alexander went back on to the stage to make his bootlicking speech he knew that it was not ‘Alick’ that the canaille in the gallery had wanted to savage, but himself. Guy Domville had been his last throw of the dice – ‘le sort en est jeté’ – and he had lost. He didn’t intend to risk another humiliation like that. The premonition of failure he had experienced as he crossed St James’s Square had not prepared him for being pilloried by a jeering mob in the presence of almost everybody he knew in London. The memory of that awful moment, the ululating crescendo of noise that greeted him as he turned to confront the sea of faces, ‘Boo! Boo! Boo!’ made him flush even now, as he walked through the cold dark streets that skirted Green Park. The prostitutes did not bother him any longer: something about the stony set of his features, the unswerving deliberateness of his pace, must have conveyed the pointlessness of accosting him.
He turned into Piccadilly. A hansom slowed as it overtook him and the driver glanced hopefully in his direction. Should he take it? No, he wanted to walk. He would walk the whole way home, along Piccadilly, Knightsbridge, the Kensington Road and Kensington Gore. He was tired, but he wished to be even more tired, totally exhausted so that he would fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. And before that he wanted time to reflect, time to taste the bitter dregs of defeat to the end, to abandon himself to private, solitary misery. For the past hour or more he had felt as if he were coming round from chloroform, numbed but aware that a horrible pain was lurking somewhere just beyond the threshold of consciousness, waiting for him to become fully sensate. Now he confronted it, gripped it, abandoned himself to it.
Alexander, when he came off the stage for the last time, had hinted that no one would be surprised or offended if he cancelled the supper for the actors, but he had insisted on going through with it. It had been a gruesome occasion. Mrs Saker had sent her apologies – Alexander had muttered some incomprehensible explantion concerning her hat. Several others had made excuses to leave early. He had gone through the motions of being a host, he had made conversation, though he had no memory of what he said, and he had even attempted an occasional joke. Marion Terry had very sweetly tried to cheer him up, assuring him that Mrs Peverel was the best role she had ever had, and Elliott drank too much wine and told an off-colour story that was received in silence. Nobody mentioned the booing. Alexander deliberately took a seat at the opposite end of the table from himself, and spoke to him only when the party broke up, about cutting the drinking scene in Act Two. He had listened and nodded without taking in a word the man was saying, but he had promised to deliver a revised scene on Monday morning, for the cast to rehearse and perform in the evening. He wondered now if he would be able even to glance at the text of the play, let alone revise it, without being overcome with nausea. ‘Boo! Boo!’
He supposed he would grit his teeth and do it. For the sake of the actors, and for the sake of professional honour, he would make one more, one last ‘cut’ in his play, already scarred and bleeding from countless wounds of the same kind. He had no illusions that this surgical tinkering would rescue the piece from commercial failure; and even if by some miracle it did, that would not affect his determination never to expose himself again to such a rude rejection as he had experienced that night. It was bitter to reflect how much time and energy he had wasted on the effort to become a playwright. Five whole years! Five years, for which he had nothing to show but one half-success and one complete failure on stage, and drawers full of unperformed plays in multiple drafts. The endless rewritings, the countless letters and telegrams and meetings, the hopes raised and dashed and then raised again, that had occupied five years, and come to virtually nothing in the end. What vanity! What a waste! The line he had heard Marion Terry utter as he came into the wings seemed to sum up his whole career as a dramatist: ‘It was a dream, but the dream is past!’
A thin cold rain began to fall
from the dark sky. The gaslamps stretched out before him along an almost deserted Piccadilly, casting pools of light on the pavement, with patches of darkness between them. He walked on grimly towards Kensington.
3
THERE commenced a slow convalescence of the spirit.
He woke well before first light on Sunday morning with a horrible feeling of depression and was instantly reminded of the cause. There was no hope of going back to sleep, so he lay there, like the survivor of a shipwreck cast up on the cold shingle of a deserted beach, too exhausted and demoralised to crawl above the tide line, scarcely caring whether he lived or died, letting wavelets of dismal thoughts break over him. What most distressed him was that his humiliating failure was known, or would very soon be known, to everyone in his large circle of acquaintance. There was not a person whom he would meet, or with whom he would correspond, in the next few weeks, who would not be aware that he, Henry James, had been loudly booed on the stage of the St James’s Theatre. The event would be reported in every newspaper; it would be discussed in clubs and drawing rooms and servants’ quarters; gossip about it would cross frontiers and seas. His every social encounter, and every exchange of letters, would be constrained by mutual embarrassment about whether to mention the subject or ignore it, and if the former, how to treat it.
His first ordeal of this kind came very soon, in the form of the lunch he had arranged for that day (which seemed in hindsight an act of hubristic folly) specifically to garner impressions of Guy Domville. Nothing could have been less welcome, but, like the funereal supper for the actors the night before, it must be endured. William Norris was the first to arrive. He shook Henry’s hand and looked at him with anxious, sorrowful eyes. ‘My dear chap,’ he said. ‘I will say one word about last night, and then no more. You have written a wonderful play – full of poetry, feeling, and moral seriousness. The ruffians who hooted it last night condemned themselves as illiterate. Of course, you will be feeling nothing but pain now, but time will heal it. You are a great writer.’
‘Thank you, William,’ he said, sincerely.
‘And now let us talk of other things.’
But that was easier said than done. Young Philip Burne-Jones arrived, still fizzing with excitement and indignation at the events of the night before. He had stayed on at the theatre and got into an argument on the pavement outside with some men coming out of the gallery, and was eager to tell Henry of this adventure as a token of his support. It didn’t seem to occur to him that his host might prefer to pass over the whole fiasco in silence. He was fond of Philip, who had done a very passable portrait of him the previous year – in profile, sitting at his desk with a quill in his hand, gazing into space as if in search of the right word – but he was a rather wild, undisciplined young man, who had caused his father much grief by his taste for high living and late nights, sometimes in the company of the Prince of Wales’s dubious entourage. He saw the rumpus in the theatre as a skirmish in the war between culture and anarchy – ‘a deliberate attempt by a gang of underbred rowdies to spoil an evening of civilised entertainment,’ as he put it. Not until Gosse said loudly, ‘Perhaps we should change the subject,’ and glared at him, did he let go of it. Gosse deftly led the conversation on to other topics: the latest gossip about Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquess of Queensberry, the obituaries for Christina Rossetti, who had just died, the controversial court-martial trial of Captain Dreyfus, and, inevitably, the extraordinary success of Trilby.
Mrs Smith’s roast leg of lamb with mint sauce was unanimously praised, and he signalled to Smith to be generous with the claret, so the mood of the party became quite jolly. Sturgis amused them by describing how Du Maurier’s novel had been subjected to the vulgarest commercial exploitation in America. Apparently ‘Trilby’ boots and shoes were widely advertised in the press, illustrated with engravings of the heroine’s naked foot ‘after’ Little Billee’s famous drawing on the wall of the Paris studio, and a Broadway caterer had moulded ice-cream in the same shape. ‘There is also, I understand, a “Trilby Hearth-brush” and even a “Trilby Sausage”, but whether they are also shaped like feet I couldn’t say,’ said Sturgis, to general laughter.
He attended only fitfully to the conversation, but threw in the odd remark when it seemed apposite, and evidently managed to give the impression of someone in full possession of his faculties, for Gosse said quietly to him on leaving: ‘I’m very glad to see you so calm, Henry. I know what it’s like to be the object of public insult, and I remember what good counsel you gave me at the time.’ He was referring to Churton Collins’s devastating attack on his published Clark Lectures, From Shakespeare to Pope, years ago in the Quarterly Review, showing them to be full of egregious factual errors. Gosse was a good fellow, and a clever one, but he had a genius for inaccuracy which Collins had pounced on and made the occasion for a violent and controversial attack on the state of English literary criticism. His advice to Gosse on that occasion had been to avoid reading the newspapers until the affair was forgotten, and he intended to follow it himself.
He broke this resolution, however, the very next morning. He had spent Sunday evening removing the drinking scene from Act Two of the play and writing new dialogue to perform more straightforwardly the same dramatic function. It had been arranged that a messenger would call at 9 a.m. to collect the manuscript and take it to the theatre, where it would be copy-typed for the actors so that they could rehearse the emended scene when they came in at eleven o’clock. He couldn’t face attending the rehearsal – he doubted in fact whether he would ever set foot in the St James’s again – and sent his MS to Alexander with a covering note, saying: ‘This is the best I can manage in the time available – use it as you think fit.’ When it had gone, there was nothing to do after breakfast but retire to his study and brood.
Smith had placed The Times on his desk, with a quantity of letters considerably greater than the usual Monday morning post. A number of his friends who had been at the theatre on Saturday had hastened to send him messages of support and sympathy. They all said more or less the same things – ‘enjoyed the play enormously – scandalous behaviour of the gallery – shameful speech by Alexander – hope you will not be discouraged from giving us more fine plays’. It was kind of them, but the cumulative weight of their pity was oppressive, and he skimmed rather than read the letters. He picked up The Times, and leafed through it to check whether it contained a review of Guy Domville – only, he told himself, in order to be prepared to turn over the page quickly when he came to it. There was a review on see here, placed next to an article on ‘Stockfeeding Value of the Farm Crops of the UK’, and he found himself unable to resist running his eye down the long column of print to get the gist. It was unfavourable. The anonymous critic began by referring to the controversial reception of the play on the first night, and sided unequivocally with the gallery. ‘“The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give.” It is vain to insist upon the literary merits of an unsuccessful play or to question the popular verdict that has condemned it.’ The writer commended Alexander for promising in his curtain speech to do better in future, though the failure was not his fault. Guy Domville was not a good play. ‘In every scene, almost in every line, it tells of painful and misdirected effort.’ The dialogue perhaps had literary quality, but ‘apt and vital it is not; and the actors can do nothing with their text but recite it like a well-conned lesson’.
Dismayed, he let the paper drop. If he had retained any spark of faith in his play, any lingering hope that discerning theatregoers, other than his own interested friends, would appreciate its merits, they were crushed out under the vindictive heel of this nameless assailant. If The Times sided with those hooligans in the gallery, then there was no place for him in the English theatre. ‘Painful and misdirected effort’ – the words stung like a slap across the face, but they could be the epitaph on his career as a playwright. It had indeed been painful, and it had manifestly been misdirected. He had wasted five years on th
e futile quest for an illusory Grail – five years in which he had neglected the art of which he did have some acknowledged mastery. And if he returned to that now, who would be interested? He had published no new novel since The Tragic Muse, and the sales of that and its predecessors had been pitiful in the last couple of years – no more than twenty copies of any title. Magazine editors had virtually ceased to solicit him for contributions. He was in serious danger of extinction as a literary figure, not to mention bankruptcy.
He was overwhelmed by a feeling of total hopelessness, and for the first time in his life he felt the real seduction of the idea of suicide. He had always believed that consciousness was the supreme value, but what did it profit a man to be conscious if it was only of failure, humiliation and regret? This gloomy train of thought made him think of Fenimore, who had evidently come to the conclusion that there was no further possibility of joy in her life, and had rationally acted upon it. He shuddered at a mental picture of her lying crumpled in a moaning heap on the cobbles of the Ramo Barbaro – but there were easier paths to oblivion than that. Drugs, opiates. To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . . And that made him think of Alice, who had paradoxically refused the offer of a Lethean draught, though she had every justification for taking it and believed in principle that suicide was no sin but a valid human choice.
He went to the cabinet where he kept her journal in a locked drawer, and took it out. It was not a document that he cared to leave lying around for prying eyes to light on. When he received his copy the previous spring from Kathleen Loring, one of four she had had privately printed for herself and Alice’s surviving brothers, reading it had been as disturbing as reading Fenimore’s notebook – indeed in some ways more so, for its references to himself were much more explicit. He was astonished and not a little embarrassed to find the casual small talk with which he had entertained his invalid sister – some of it mildly malicious at the expense of his acquaintance, and some self-revealing – scrupulously recorded in its pages. He was impressed by his sister’s lively prose style, but had been horrified by Katherine Loring’s proposal to publish the journal as it stood. His counter-proposal was that a carefully edited version, with all compromising personal references removed, should be published, and then the original copies burned. The matter remained unresolved.