Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  She had first become interested in the Drury Lane Boys’ Club in 1889. Watching a pantomime, she was conscious of real ogres in the gas-lit streets outside the theatre. Inside there were children in Eton jackets and gauzy white frocks enjoying the ogres of fairyland. Outside were “the ogres of Hard Life, of Poverty, of Misfortune, of Lack of Opportunity, Ignorance, Hopelessness, Hunger and Disease”. The ragged children darted among the carts and horses’ heads, begging for pennies as the “powdered footmen descend to open the carriage doors for pretty women”. These were children like Anne, the beggar child in Sara Crewe, and the Rat’s friends Frances was later to write about in The Lost Prince. She was curious about them and sad for them. “Even the best seeds wither if planted in unfavourable earth.”

  The Boys’ Club was started by a boy called Andrew Buckingham in his own cellar; his mother sold her mangle to make room for them, somewhere where they would not be forever told to “move on”. It outgrew the cellar and moved into the Parish Room in Russell Court; they served forty dinners three times a week. Before her accident, Frances had occasionally gone along to help the Rector’s daughter, Stephen Townesend’s sister; she had cut up food for the youngest boys. By 1891, they needed to expand. Frances interceded successfully with the owner of a building in Kemble Street. She decided to give the Club a comfortable reading room in part of the building, in Lionel’s name. The nucleus of the library was to be the books Lionel had been fond of, but she also got book lists from two boys she knew. And Harold Warne helped, providing many of his own publications. Frances chose the linoleum and the fittings, including the “glacier window decoration” which would still give light but cut out the dreary view. She was not over-optimistic about the reading room. She knew many of the boys would “prefer the gymnasiums and the cricket and the fife and drum band”, but she wanted them to have the chance to enjoy Jules Verne and Harrison Ainsworth, and there were many who would.

  Frances opened the reading room on 27th February 1892 in the presence of the M.P. for the district. He was the son of W. H. Smith, “the speaker of the House of Commons and the King of the book trade of the railway station bookstalls throughout the land”. Frances shook hands with all the seventy-five boys. She gave each of them a copy of a letter she had written: “Whether a man’s world is at the West End or at the East, in Drury Lane or Grosvenor Square, Nature gives him a capital of his own”—heart, brain, two hands—“I think I put the heart first.” She asked the boys to make the very best of themselves and do all they could to make the best of others. Then there was an entertainment: the fifes and drums played and the boys sang, “Wot cher . . . Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road”. At the end, Frances went down to her brougham in the dark street, clutching her bouquet of violets and lilies of the valley, thinking of the crowds of lively poor boys and of the one rich one, dead.

  These were the things she did for Lionel. For Stephen, during the mourning months of 1891, she concentrated on a play, The Showman’s Daughter. It had been begun in moments snatched from Lionel’s bedside, in Göbersdorf, Marienbad and Paris. In the May of 1891, Stephen took part in a nurses’ entertainment at Bart’s. He recited “My Brother Henry” and took part in The Curio, “an unfinished tragedy in one act”. At the Annual General Meeting of the Amateur Dramatic Club in October that year, it was proposed, “in view of the great services rendered”, that Mr Stephen Townesend should be “elected Vice-president with a perpetual vote on the Committee”. The proposal was carried unanimously. But it was success on the professional stage Stephen longed for, and Frances was determined to give him that.

  She decided to produce the new play herself, as the only chance of giving Stephen a good part. “Until you produce a play,” she wrote to Kitty Hall in November, “you can never know what it means.” Stephen was not being easy. She wrote to Vivian in Washington: “Of course Uncle Stephen takes care of my business and is very particular about things of that sort, but as for the rest, I feel as if I was the one who had to take care of him. He is so delicate and nervous and irritable, poor boy. But I have to remember when he seems to be unreasonable, that he was never anything but perfect to Lionel, and that he was his comfort and strength and beloved to the last minute.” Vivian wanted Frances to come home. He wrote low-spirited letters which depressed Frances terribly. “I cannot bear it if he gets ill.” She had not seen him for over a year. But she could not abandon The Showman’s Daughter.

  Stephen had originally declined the part of the showman, Joe Hurst. He longed for his chance, but when it came to the point he had no confidence in himself. It was too important a part for his first—but he agreed to understudy the role. Perhaps he would play it in America, However, the first actor engaged to play Hurst was a complete failure and Frances managed to persuade Stephen that he could do it. She wrote to Kitty Hall:

  . . . He is a genius, I do believe. He really quite thrills me sometimes in the pathetic parts. I decided that he must do it in London, and finally convinced him that if I was willing to risk a thousand pounds on his success, he ought to believe in himself. “We are having another week out of town so that he and the others can work into their parts.

  But you may guess what I am going through with that poor, overstrung boy. He is excited and worried by everything. We are going to keep the thing as quiet as possible—I mean the fact that Hurst is not to be played by a London star—because there is much jealousy and spite among professionals, and, of course, the actors will all hate him before he does the part, and be ready to poison him when he has succeeded. But you can imagine how many chance speeches from outsiders crush him, or rankle.

  Oh, how I pray the poor fellow may have a triumph. I shall feel I have not lived for nothing if I can help that one poor life into the sun. If I had done no other one thing in my life but help Lionel to die as he did, I should feel as if I ought to be grateful to God for letting me live to do it—but if I can help Stephen to live, that will be another beautiful thing to have done.

  The play was to open at the Winter Gardens, Southport, in December 1891, the same theatre where Henry James’ first play The American had had its first performance eleven months before. Frances had proposed to see James’ play in Manchester before it opened its London run that September, but she had been gently but firmly discouraged by James in the earliest of his surviving letters to her.

  “Your plan of going to Manchester,” he wrote, “is so wonderfully gracious that I shrink from administering the least little douche of cold water, and yet, I rather quake, too, at the responsibility of encouraging your friendly presence; the whole being, as yet, on so provincial a basis.”

  It was even possible that the Manchester performances would have to be postponed—two of the actors had influenza. Moreover he told her, unaware he spoke of her birthplace, “Manchester is far and hideous . . . the journey is long and fatiguing; the play is only provisionally cast”. If she did come, he would feel “honoured and exalted and truly tested”. But there was too much cold water in the letter. She did not go, and concentrated on her own production.

  James was finding the theatre a strait-jacket: “What can you do with a character, with an idea, with a feeling between dinner and the suburban trains?” He was “overcome by the vulgarity, the brutality, the baseness of the condition of the English-speaking theatre today”. But there were the possibilities of fame and fortune, and the game itself had some entertainment and allure. The dramatist’s work did not end once the play was written. Speeches had to be re-written; James found himself showing the actors how certain bits were to be played. It was part of the life of the world, not the study.

  While The American, after mixed notices, played to poorish houses at the renovated Opera Comique Theatre in the Strand, Frances was rehearsing The Showman’s Daughter at the Royalty. “Everything seems to be going well but of course a play is an anxious thing.” She had a proscenium box arranged with a chair and writing-table, writing materials and candles; she could make notes during rehearsals and speak alone
afterwards to any member of the company. The provincial run began at Worcester. It opened at Southport on 14th December. “The actors were quite excited and delighted. But I am not as courageous and full of belief as I used to be and I shall only feel confidence if the box office receipts in London are large enough,” Frances wrote to Vivian. “I do hope it will be a success in London. It has been such work and anxiety to me. I had a special reason for taking all the trouble.” The special reason was of course Stephen. It was Stephen whose life was to be transformed by his success in the play. But he was an unrewarding protege, moody and irritable. Frances wrote, “I have more work and responsibility than I ever had before and I have no one to brace me up. Uncle Stephen simply drags me down and takes all the life out of me.”

  Vivian too, on the other side of the Atlantic, was a worry to her. She mourned and longed for not only Lionel but the child Vivian—“the two little fellows with picture faces and golden love locks whose going has left me forever a sadder woman”. Adolescence was worrying, not charming. She once joked that boys should be buried at fifteen and dug up again at twenty. Was Vivian, so far away, going to turn into an acceptable young man, a gentleman in fact? If only he liked riding. “I wish you cared for riding but I know you don’t . . . It seems as if a gentleman ought to ride well, as well as dance well and speak well. I want you to ride, to dance, to fence and to shoot.” Shooting was obviously part of the gentlemanly way of life—but when it came to the point at Fryston Hall in 1895, she was to write to Vivian, “I don’t think I care to see the pheasants shot.” French was another essential. “Dear, I hope you are not allowing your French to slip away . . . Est-ce que tu connais quelque un a Washington qui tu pouvais parler Français meme un petit peu?” It was obviously important his French should be better than hers.

  Frances was comforted to think that soon Vivian might be old enough to understand all her business affairs. If only she could be sure he would turn out the way she wanted . . . In Southport, her chief consolation was a boy called Cecil Crossland, the son of Lady Somebody (her writing is often difficult). Frances hired a bicycle for him and he was “wild with joy”. He reminded her of Lionel. As for the play, she was sick and tired of it. “There are such anxieties connected with actors and actresses”, particularly when one of them is the author-producer’s protégé.

  Was Stephen anything more at this time than protégé and business, manager? It seems likely, though there is little evidence to prove it. After their first meeting in 1886, five years before, Frances had joked to Owen Lankester that she had loved Stephen in secret all summer. It was the sort of joke she would probably not have made if it had been really true. Years later, at the stormiest, most bitter period of their long relationship, Stephen claimed that Frances had begun to “make love” to him at their first meeting, but at that time the phrase meant no more than flirt. From the earliest days in Tennessee, Frances had always been a flirt. She loved to attract men; she loved the titillation and the provocation. Stephen claimed he had kissed her only two weeks after their first meeting. This was said in insult and in anger, and, if it had been true, Frances would surely have remembered his name when writing to Owen Lankester from Florence: she did not. It is highly unlikely that there was any physical relationship between them until the idyllic weeks in the miniature Dorincourt, just before Frances’ accident. Through the period of Frances’ own illness and that of Lionel, Stephen’s medical training made it perfectly proper for him to enjoy a close relationship which would otherwise have been a subject of scandal.

  Now they were in a new professional relationship. Stephen was not only Frances’ business manager but her star actor. The jealousy and spite Frances had written of to Kitty were a daily nightmare. But at least Frances’ faith in Stephen was justified. He did well in his part. When The Showman’s Daughter opened at the Royalty Theatre, London on 6th January 1892, “Will Dennis” (the name Stephen had taken) was praised. “The Showman finds a very congenial representative in Mr Dennis,” wrote The Times critic. As for the play, it was a variation of the story Frances had told in Louisiana. The Showman—the proprietor of a travelling waxworks show—has a daughter whom he had educated as a lady. But can the daughter of a waxworks’ showman be a lady? “It must be confessed that the talk as to what constitutes a true gentleman or a true lady is a little tiresome . . . but the authoress has aimed at enlisting the sympathies of the public and this . . . she may succeed in doing.”

  Frances was not given the chance to succeed. A week after the play opened the Duke of Clarence died. He was “darling Eddy”, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, the most popular young man in the Royal Family; it was six weeks before his wedding to the young princess Frances had met at St Monica’s. England was plunged into mourning. Nobody went to the theatre. The Showman’s Daughter closed with a considerable deficit, and Stephen had one more circumstance to justify him in his frequent declaration that he was “always unlucky”. On 15th March, knowing it was time she saw Vivian and glad perhaps to escape temporarily from Stephen’s problems, Frances returned to Washington.

  She was, though she did not know it, obeying Henry James’s advice. On 7th January, the day after the opening of The Showman’s Daughter, he had written of Frances to his friend Mrs Hugh Bell: “She is a fatally deluded little woman, and I’m afraid cunning hands are plucking her of her downy plumage. I wish she would gather up her few remaining feathers while yet there is time and flutter them westward, where she has, after all, a husband and a child.” She would not have either much longer. Vivian was nearly sixteen, hardly a child, and Swan had for many years been her husband in name only and would soon not even be that.

  Henry James’s unease about Stephen Townesend’s “cunning hands” would prove well founded, but Frances’s infatuation survived her absence from England. Townesend’s power over her remained immense.

  Chapter Seven

  The Life of the World

  1892–1895

  Frances was “spending the Spring very quietly in Washington”, according to an interview she gave a New York paper on 16th April. There is nothing to suggest that Lionel’s death had done anything to heal the breach between his parents. Swan Burnett is hardly mentioned in any of the surviving letters of the fourteen months Frances was now to spend in America—though he was still concerning himself with her business affairs. On 26th April E. L. Burlingame, Frances’ editor at Scribner’s, wrote that Mr Doubleday “hands me a letter he has received from Dr Burnett” about The One I Knew the Best of All, Frances’ story of her own childhood. This was originally supposed to be a brief sketch to be added to her collection published in England as Children I have Known, which later appeared, in America under the title Giovanni and the Other. Dr Burnett wrote that he had Frances’ consent to offer it to Scribner’s Magazine and mentions an offer “made for it by a syndicate”, obviously in an attempt to get Scribner’s to improve their terms. Burlingame was surprised, as he had understood it was for children.

  Frances replied that her memories had turned out rather differently than she had expected. “It is only mature and thinking people who will get the real flavor of the humor and pathos of it . . . It is most interesting to me as I write it, because I find I remember the juvenile mental attitudes so clearly . . . It belongs to the grown-ups—especially those who are interested in children as a sort of phsycological [sic] study . . . I wonder if it will be as interesting to people who do not regard children as a serious study. I am not sure it belongs in any magazine.” But it did eventually appear in Scribner’s between January and June, 1893, and then, as a small volume, later in the year. The illustrations were by Reginald Birch, as they were for so many of her books. For this one, he was paid a thousand dollars—forty dollars a drawing, and some of them very small. Scribner’s paid Frances three thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars in advance of royalties. Frances preferred that to the flat five thousand dollars which MacClure had offered.

  I have quoted from The One I Knew the Best
of All a great deal in my first chapter. It was in a letter to Burlingame this year that Frances mentioned she would not include “the only really sentimental episode” of her life, when she was nine years old and in love with a man of thirty. Was the implication that this was the only time she ever really, without qualifications and reservations, loved any man? Frances had used the possibilities of passion and unswerving devotion in such a relationship in her early story, “Kathleen Mavourneen”. It seems likely that Frances felt that no love she had had later came near the excitement and whole heartedness of that early adoration. In another letter, in May, she told Burlingame that she was working on the chapter called “The Party”. She paraphrased for him, as she rarely did in letters, the passage about the child, in the middle of polkas and muslin frocks and sashes and bonbons and lights, saying restlessly, “Is this the Party? Is it the Party? Somehow it doesn’t seem to be the Party—as one says—all through life, all through it.”