by David Lodge
He found the passage he was looking for under the date August 5th, 1889, when Alice was living in Leamington Spa. It referred to the death of William’s friend, the English psychologist Edmund Gurney. ‘They say there is little doubt that Mr Edmund Gurney committed suicide. What a pity to hide it, every educated person who kills himself does something towards lessening the superstition. It’s bad that it is so untidy, there is no denying that, for one bespatters one’s friends morally as well as physically, taking them so much more into one’s secret than they want to be taken. But how heroic to be able to suppress one’s vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard.’ What an extraordinarily sharp mind she had possessed, his little sister! He had underestimated her insight and her wit when she was alive. He seemed to feel she was addressing him from the other side of the grave in this passage – to the same effect that their father had addressed her years before on the same topic – turning him against the idea of suicide in the very act of seeming to commend it. Did he want to reveal to his friends the true depths of his despair? Did he want to admit to the world that the game was too hard? Probably not.
It was a mercy anyway that Alice had not lived to witness the ignominious collapse of all his theatrical ambitions – she would have felt the disappointment almost as keenly as himself. He turned the leaves of the journal, looking for the references to his dramatic ventures. The first mention of The American was on March 25th, 1890. ‘H. seems cheerful about his play and to be unable to grasp my flutterations about it. What a “state” I was in when he told me six months ago as a great secret that he had embarked.’ There was a long entry on January 7th, 1891, summarising his report of the first night at Southport: ‘it was delightful to hear and see him flushed with the triumph of his first ovation . . . am so thankful that the dear being has had such a success. The “first nights” to come, we shall be less quivering about.’ He was reminded of many moments of excited expectation that had turned out to be ill-founded or illusory – for example, ‘H. came in, a few days ago, all heated from a most sympathetic interview with Hare, who not only accepts play number two, Mrs Vibert, which H. wrote before Christmas for Miss Genevieve Ward, but accepts it with enthusiasm and calls it a “masterpiece of dramatic construction”.’ Even Alice had perceived his tendency to become over-confident at the slightest encouragement, and his failure to appreciate the inherent treacherousness of the stage as a medium for his work. This last entry continued: ‘I was surprised to find that H. didn’t seem to see how much more dependent this play will be, for success, upon the actors than The American.’ As he reread these and similar passages they seemed to recapitulate his whole dramatic career in a condensed and ironic form, but he was also struck by Alice’s enthusiastic identification with his campaign to conquer the English stage. She regretted that he had not begun it a few years earlier, when she might have been strong enough to attend a performance. But, she said, in one of the last entries in the journal, in September 1891, ‘I shall, after all, have seen a bit of The American; for Harry brought a sample of Madame de Cintré’s ball dress the other day, he having been to choose it, with Mrs Compton.’ Reading this, he shed tears.
The only comfort of a limited sort he could draw from the journal was that Alice had no word of criticism of him personally – on the contrary she frequently praised him for his patience and kindness, in terms that made him almost blush: ‘I have given him endless care and anxiety but notwithstanding this and the fantastic nature of my troubles I have never seen an impatient look upon his face or heard an unsympathetic or misunderstanding sound cross his lips.’ He didn’t deserve such praise. The reason he had been kind to her was because she gratified his egotism – she was so devoted, so admiring, so eager for his success, and she didn’t compete with him – that was the key. Whereas he had failed Fenimore because she did compete. He had used her in the same way that he used Alice, as a confidante, as a counsellor, as a source of moral support in times of professional difficulty; but he had never given her the same support in return, he had never poured over her anxieties and self-doubts the healing balm of total, unqualified, extravagant praise, such as all artists needed occasionally. He flushed as he recalled her disappointment at his article, ‘Miss Woolson’, her all too justified resentment of its meagre, grudging praise, its prim reservations, its patronising tone. How much of that might be traced to simple jealousy because she had sold forty thousand copies of East Angels, and he only eight thousand of The Portrait of a Lady? And lately he had caught himself treating George Du Maurier in the same ungenerous spirit. As long as their friendship had been a complementary one of author and artist it had been harmonious and enjoyable, but since Du Maurier became an author too the relationship had subtly changed, at least as far as he himself was concerned. It was being eaten away from within by the worm of envy and jealousy.
He found himself engaged in what Roman Catholics called an examination of conscience, which a Monsignor of his acquaintance had once explained to him was part of the preparation for Confession, accusing himself of selfishness, envy, jealousy, resentment, and a corresponding lack of generosity, humility, magnanimity and fortitude. The very day’s newspaper seemed to confirm this harsh self-judgement. There was a report in The Times, almost certainly written by Morton Fullerton, of ‘The Degradation of Captain Dreyfus’, which described how the unfortunate man had been paraded before three thousand troops, and a crowd of civilian spectators pressed against the railings around the barrack square, to hear the sentence declaimed by General Darras in a loud voice: ‘Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms and we degrade you!’ And then an adjutant stripped him of his epaulettes, plume and red stripes, and broke his sword in two under his heel (it had been filed through beforehand). There was a spectacle to put his own petty humiliation on the stage of the St James’s in perspective! ‘Dreyfus held his head high and protested his innocence: “Vive la France! Je jure que je suis innocent.”’ He was inclined to believe the man’s claim. He certainly admired his courage and dignity under extreme duress, beside which his own response to rejection seemed merely sulky.
And in the correspondence columns there was more food for thought: a letter from Sidney Colvin forwarding a long report of the death and burial of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, by his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Samoan chiefs had come from all over the district bearing fine mats, each one of which had taken a woman a whole year to weave, in which a great man had to be wrapped according to Samoan burial practice. ‘They kissed his hand one by one as they came in. I wrote down the speech of one of them that came and threw himself on his knees beside Louis. He was an old, worn-out man, and his crying made it hard for him to speak. “I am only a poor black man and ignorant. Others are rich and can give Tusitala the parting present of rich things. I am poor and can give nothing this last day that Tusitala receives his friends. And yet I am not afraid to come and take the last look at my friend’s face. We were in prison and he cared for us. The day was no longer than his kindness. You here are great folk and full of love. Yet who is there here so great as Tusitala? Who is there more loving-compassionate. What is your love to his love? Oh Tusitala, this is the last time I see your face till we meet in God together.”’
This extraordinary testimony brought tears to his eyes once again. How had Louis managed to inspire such devotion from these people of a totally different race and culture after only a few years of living amongst them? He did not deceive himself that he would ever be mourned in the same heartfelt way, but he resolved to be a better man in future, more humble and less self-centred. He would accept his failure in the theatre philosophically, he would re-dedicate himself to the solitary craft of fiction, he would seek perfection in it without concern for fame or greed for material reward, he would purge himself of envy and jealousy. It was too late to make amends to Fenimore, but he would seek out George Du Maurier and renew their old, easy companionship.
He made this ‘firm purpose of amendment’, as the Romans called it, at
half past three in the afternoon. At four o’clock came a telegram from Alexander, saying: ‘NEW SCENE EXCELLENT WELL DONE MANY THANKS COME AND SEE FOR YOURSELF TONIGHT ALEC.’ Instantly he felt a little thrill of gratification at praise for a professional task skilfully accomplished, and an irresistible urge to see his handiwork performed. Would this be inconsistent with his resolutions? He persuaded himself that it would not.
He went to the St James’s that evening wearing ordinary clothes and sat in the gallery, whose other occupants followed the play attentively and with apparent pleasure. He had to admit that the second act did not suffer by the omission of the drinking scene – indeed it progressed smoothly and naturally. The theatre was nearly full, and at the end the cast were warmly applauded, taking several curtain calls. He mingled with the outgoing crowd on the stairs and in the main foyer, and overheard several approving comments on the play. Afterwards he went behind and spoke to Alexander, who said it had been ‘a good money house’, meaning they had given away very few complimentary tickets, and passed him copies of a couple of reviews, by Archer in the World and Clement Scott in the Telegraph, which were much more sympathetic than the one in The Times. Both praised the first act highly – Scott called it ‘one of the most beautiful human documents that has been committed to the care of the stage for some time’. He began to wonder whether the play might not turn out to be a success after all, until Alexander sounded a cautionary note.
‘I think a lot of people came tonight because they were curious to see what all the fuss was about on Saturday,’ he said. ‘We can’t rely on that kind of interest to fill the theatre for long.’
‘They seemed to enjoy what they saw,’ he said.
‘They did indeed, and if they urge all their friends to come we may be able to keep it going. But advance bookings are weak, and the reviews are, to say the least, mixed.’
‘The Times was beastly, but these are not bad,’ he said, holding up the cuttings from the World and the Telegraph.
‘There were some others I didn’t think you’d want to see,’ said Alexander ominously. ‘We shall depend on word of mouth. I’ll keep you informed of how it goes.’
As he walked back to Kensington he regretted the impulse that had sent him to the theatre. Already he felt himself being drawn back into the sickening, exhausting maelstrom of emotion that seemed to swirl around every theatrical project, generating an endless, soul-destroying alternation of hope and dejection. How soon he had lapsed from his high resolve of the afternoon! He vowed once again to put his failure behind him, to renew his allegiance to the muse of fiction, to strive to be a better person, to possess his soul in peace. But it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy.
The next two days were largely occupied in answering the letters that continued to pour in by every post from friends and well-wishers, a task both painful and gratifying. On the one hand he was thus constantly reminded of the horrible experience of the first night; on the other he was moved by the apparently genuine enthusiasm of so many of these correspondents for Guy Domville. One of the most painful letters he had to write was to William and Alice, in which he was obliged to act as his own defendant, because they had no direct knowledge of the play – though they would certainly have heard indirectly about the débâcle of the first night. Ever since he had compared American social and cultural life unfavourably with that of Britain in his book on Hawthorne, back in 1880, the American newspapers had conducted a vendetta against him and his works, and would have reported the booing episode with glee. In any case his brother and sister-in-law would have observed that he hadn’t, as promised, cabled them on Sunday about the first night, and drawn the obvious conclusion. ‘Even now it’s a sore trial to me to have to write about it,’ he confessed at the outset of his letter, ‘–weary, bruised, sickened, disgusted as one is left by the intense, the cruel ordeal of a first night that – after the immense labour of preparation and the unspeakable tension of suspense – has, in a few brutal moments, not gone well. In three words . . .’ But as usual he required a lot more than three words to describe the event and its effect on him. He began the letter on Tuesday evening and finished it on Wednesday morning.
The next day he had a welcome break from London and letter-writing, when he fulfilled an engagement to visit a relatively new friend, Arthur Benson, at the home of his father, Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He had met Arthur Benson, who was a master at Eton, at Frederick Myers’s house in Cambridge, and soon added him to the little confraternity of clever, deferential and well-read young men whose company he valued. Arthur’s younger brother Edward, who had literary interests too, was also at home for the Christmas vacation. The archiepiscopal residence at Addington, in Kent, was nobly proportioned and comfortably appointed, and its atmosphere of donnish Anglicanism was soothing to his bruised spirit – the very words ‘archiepiscopal residence’ sounded like a benediction as he pronounced them silently to himself. There was however no possibility of forgetting all about Guy Domville for the duration of his brief visit: his hosts had read the review in The Times, and in various tactful ways offered their sympathy. The Archbishop was less lively company than his sons, but over a cup of tea beside a glowing log fire in the drawing room, as the light faded on the level lawns outside the long windows, he mentioned a story of a haunting, recently told to him, which caught and held Henry’s attention. It concerned a pair of bad servants in a country house, a man and a woman, who had corrupted two young children in their care, and then died, but reappeared as ghosts, beckoning to the children from battlements and across water to join them, so that they would destroy themselves. It was only a sketchy anecdote, clumsily narrated, but he thought it had possibilities as the basis for a short story and made a note of it when he returned to London the next day.
His notebook was bulging with ideas for stories and novels waiting to be written, and he meant to write them. It was, he was sure, the only way forward. Produce! produce! he urged himself. But he hung back, he hesitated to begin. He sat at his desk and wrote in his notebook: ‘I take up my own old pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.’ But he laid the pen down again. He was not ready. His confidence in himself as a writer had been badly damaged, and the worst thing he could do would be to rush into some new work of fiction which might turn out to be another disappointment.
It was difficult, in any case, to turn his back decisively on the drama as long as Guy Domville continued to play at the St James’s and its future remained uncertain. Favourable reviews continued to appear and were passed to him by friends: an intelligent one from George Bernard Shaw in the Saturday Review, which addressed directly and effectively the philistine arguments of The Times, and was marred only by rather fulsome praise of Alexander’s performance; one in the Pall Mall Gazette, by a writer whose name, H. G. Wells, he did not recognise, which described the play as ‘finely conceived and beautifully written’, and another by a female critic in a magazine called Woman who found ‘the behaviour of the pit and gallery inexplicable’, and concluded: ‘The setting of the last act, “the white parlour” at Mrs Peverel’s home, Porches, was one of the most perfect stage interiors I have ever seen.’ This typically feminine gush of enthusiasm for the décor made him smile, but the review was not imperceptive.
From these sources, and from conversations with friends like Gosse and Elizabeth Robins who had been present at the first night, he began to reconstruct the sequence of events which had led up to his own unsuspecting appearance at its deplorable climax: the universally applauded first act which seemed to presage a great success; the hesitant beginning of the second act, the rude mockery of Mrs Saker’s costume by the gallery and pit, the consequent collapse of her confidence and its disastrous effect on the other actors; the growing hubbub of jeering and barracking as the third act drew to its close. Informat
ion about the mysterious telegram received by Alexander had leaked out, and there was speculation in the press that the performance had been maliciously disrupted by a hired claque. Someone who had been present wrote a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette claiming that the upper boxes were filled by men who looked far too rough to be able to afford four shillings for a seat and who returned after the entr’actes behaving as if they had been treated to strong drink. Nothing was ever proved, however, to confirm these suspicions, and the memory of how warmly Alexander was received when he went back on stage to make his grovelling curtain speech convinced him that the hostility of the gallery and pit had been mainly directed at himself and his play. But what became more and more obvious, as the total picture became clearer, was that Alexander had betrayed him by inviting him to take a bow, as surely as Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane. The image of Alexander smilingly beckoning him to come out of the dark wings into the glare of the footlights was as vivid to him as if it had just happened, but the smile now seemed vulpine. He must have been well aware that, despite the friendly applause from the more expensive seats, the play had gone badly in the last two acts, and that the cries of ‘Author!’ from the gallery and the pit were not expressions of enthusiasm, but on the contrary a device to lure him out of hiding in order to hurl abuse. Yet Alexander had led him into the trap, presumably out of some malicious impulse of revenge, a desire to make him share something of the discomfiture that he and the other actors had endured for the past hour or two. Perhaps he hadn’t anticipated the intensity of the storm of booing that ensued, Elizabeth Robins conceded, but he couldn’t for a moment have supposed that Henry would receive a unanimously warm ovation from that audience.