by Ann Thwaite
It might be the opening of a new career but Frances suddenly realized that Clorinda was not at all a new departure. She wrote to Israel Zangwill that Joan Lowrie had been “a Clorinda in disguise . . . so were Rachel Ffrench and Christian Murdoch in Haworth’s. So was Bertha Amory, who laughed and wore tinkling ornaments and symphonies in red when she was passing through the gates of hell—so was little Sara Crewe when she starved in her garret and was a princess disdaining speech. Oh, she is not a new departure. She represents what I have cared for most all my life—from the time I was eight years old.” It was something to do with the invincibility of the human spirit, the refusal of women to be mild and submissive, the acceptance of all experience, courage born of adversity. There was certainly no sign that she wanted to write Woman in a small typeface.
Edward Burlingame, in London on business seeing Barrie and Meredith and Henry James, was also being told that Frances was sure she had written her greatest work, that she had run the proprieties and conventions very close and challenged Scribner’s to make a suitable offer. Burlingame, while taking her protestations with a pinch of salt, wrote to Scribner: “I can see decided possibilities that she may have done a strong thing and still greater ones that she may have done a popular one.” He agreed to read immediately the eighty thousand words already written. On 9th May 1895 he wrote to Scribner: “The arrangement was that I was to read it and talk with her about it on Friday night when she had invited us to dinner . . . I gave weight in my reading to every circumstance in the book’s favor . . . but I could only come to one conclusion—that she had undertaken something quite out of the line of all her best powers and had done a tawdry and artificial thing, in which the attempt at an archaic style had effectually wiped out the kind of thing generally liked in her writing, and the desire for sensation and aggressive dealing with big elemental violences had wiped out the sentiment. And I can’t see that she has put anything of equal attraction in their place . . . I know what experience there is on the side of these widely-read people’s instinctively knowing an audience better than we do”—but he thought the book “downright dull”.
“Naturally I had a hard time of it at the dinner. I knew and felt the importance of our getting the book anyhow. Zangwill, who was at the dinner [he was undoubtedly “the brilliant London critic”, Frances had quoted to Scribner] and very likely other people, had been telling her ‘George Eliot couldn’t touch it’ etc. etc. I spare you my difficulties. I can be quite still at times and I don’t think I said anything to pain her; but of course I don’t flatter myself that I succeeded in concealing from a shrewd woman that my personal enthusiasm was not at that pitch. I confined myself, in a long talk with her later, to discussion of details in the story and to showing her the importance of our having the book and arranging for it at once . . .” The final arrangement was a $5,000 advance on a 20% royalty, but it was not concluded until November. There were attempts to persuade Frances to bowdlerize Clorinda’s speech. “I have drawn my pen through the most violently improper but not through the others,” Frances wrote to Scribner when she was correcting the proofs. “The child swore and she swore as disreputable grooms and stable boys had taught her to. In her first encounter with Sir Geoffrey I might have made her exclaim ‘Now you really quite annoy me’ but it did not occur to me as being characteristic.” The actual words the six-year-old girl uses are: “Damn thee! I’ll tear thy eyes out! I’ll cut thy liver from thee! Damn thy soul to hell!”
It was certainly a great change from Fauntleroy. “A stronger contrast could not be imagined than that which exists between the exasperating little prig . . . and the superb creature of violent passions.” But in spite of the superb creature, the Dial reviewer was “forced to pronounce the performance crude and the method coarse. The author’s conception of her heroine is certainly bold and the work has a vitality so abounding as to atone in part for its lack of subtlety.” It was as if Frances had been deliberately setting out to refute Henry James’ charge that most of the stuff that was reaching him from America seemed to have been written “by eunuchs and sempstresses”. And, in spite of Burlingame’s reactions, which are easy to share, it was eventually to sell extremely well-both in England and America.
But much more than the writing and negotiation over A Lady of Quality was going on in 1895. It is the most highly documented of all the years of Frances’ life. If not at the peak of her writing powers, as she herself imagined, she was certainly at a high point as far as the life of the world went, and the letters and papers which survive reflect her crammed engagement diary, her rich contacts with a widening circle of London society.
She had had a terrible shock in the summer of 1894 when her sister Edith’s second visit to England had been cut short by news that Vivian was very ill. “Five years ago I went home at a day’s notice from Rome . . . there is a resemblance in the two voyages that makes me shudder,” she wrote to Zangwill hurriedly before leaving. Vivian had typhoid and was at the point of death as Frances crossed the Atlantic. But he made a marvellous recovery. By the November he was well enough to start his freshman year at Harvard, and Frances returned to Portland Place, taking Archer Fahnestock, Edith’s elder son, with her. 1895 was to be a good year. In February Swan left her house in Massachusetts Avenue and moved into one of his own in Farragut Square. Something had been resolved. Edith and her husband Frank Jordan took over Massachusetts Avenue. Frances felt she could go there whenever she wished and have things the way she wanted. But for the moment she was happier in London. Stephen was at his most helpful and charming, she was pleased with what she was writing, and the only worries were money ones, a constant concern that she could earn enough to support the comfortable and elaborate way of life she had chosen.
Archie Fahnestock was twenty-two and good company. He could look very nice in a dress suit and was “sufficiently quiet in manner not to be out of place” on even the grandest occasions. Henry James “continued to take the liveliest interest” in him, as he wrote in a postscript to a letter in May. Frances saw a lot of James that year. He, like Israel Zangwill, seemed happy to spend a fair amount of time in her company and even to listen to her reading aloud: “I want to hear the rest of the female highwayman,” he wrote. His letters are full of what he himself called the “mere twaddle of graciousness”, and certainly many of them consist of elaborate reasons why he had to refuse an invitation: “I haven’t a pin-hole until after the 1st of June”, “I have French celebrities on my hands”, “I only want you to know that if, on the 25th, I don’t encumber your staircase, it will be because I’m a hermit in a hermitage”. But when he did come to Portland Place, and he came many times, he liked it to be at a time when he would find Frances without other visitors. On Wednesdays she was at home. If he came on a Wednesday it would not be until 6 “because at that hour you may be less hedged about and encompassed than at 4 or 5”. But he preferred to come on Friday. “The kind of entertainment I like best is weak and lovely lukewarm tea administered toward 6 o’clock or so by the hand of genius—administered, of course, in Portland Place.” “I will come to nothing that anybody else does. It must be all for me.” He said he saw too little of her. He wrote from Playden in Sussex, in an “ovine, bovine, asinine retreat to which weeks ago—discouraged of knocking again and again at your inexorable door where caretakers were monosyllabic, I betook myself—in my misanthropy”. On another occasion, he wrote to her with equal hyperbole: “See with what success I arrange just to catch you . . . I feel so the prince of manoeuverers—and the prince of spellers to be able to say so,” signing himself Machiavelli H. James.
Frances had been saddened at the reception of James’ play Guy Domville. “I cannot understand why the audience should have behaved so badly at its first night,” she wrote to Vivian at Harvard, just after she had seen it. On the first night there had been pandemonium—fifteen minutes of boos and hisses. She had heard that “the insulting uproar was something awful. Henry James stood before the curtain looking like a man who
had steeled himself to anything—everything. The play certainly ends most unconvincingly and feebly—but it was charming in the first act . . . [It] is of the period of my Lady of Quality . . . I never saw anything on the stage so pretty and so real as that apple-tree against the window. I cannot tell you how it breaks my heart to think of Henry James as the victim of what happened at this first night. It is too tragic to contemplate. Oh! Why had it to be so! I rebel against it. He is a man who is so a gentleman and fine and kind in every instinct. And he cares so much about the drama . . . I cannot see why—having such good in it—this play was not better . . . I am afraid he will be too shocked and outraged and hurt to try again.” Frances’ fears were justified. James said the failure had been “the most horrible experience of my life”. He never risked it again. The “poor little play” was taken off after thirty-one performances, to be replaced, to James’ particular indignation, by The Importance of Being Earnest. “The title is rather clever,” Frances wrote in her weekly letter to Vivian, “as it appears that ‘Earnest’ is not an adjective but a young man. If Oscar Wilde were not such a blaguer, he would fill me with delight.” She had “boldly” driven to the St James’ box office to get tickets for the first night but they were all sold out. “I am particularly fond of first nights in London. They are rather like theatrical parties and one learns to know all the people. I wanted to see this one but Oscar Wilde is a party-giving man and knows so many people that he would be sure to have to send seats to half the world besides providing for the critics.
It was the period of elaborate realism on the stage. If Guy Domville’s apple-tree was pretty, Burne-Jones’ scenery for King Arthur was spectacular. Ellen Terry, as Guinevere, and the ladies of her court “had a Mayday festival in the forest—and all the trees and bushes were loaded with white may and the troop of lovely ladies came winding down a sloping shaded path with branches of may in their hands. It was exquisite. One expected to hear the birds burst into singing on every side . . . After all, what Irving does in these days is more or less a kind of poetic, highly cultivated and literary pantomime . . . there are people who scold at Irving a good deal but . . . for my part I should not sigh particularly for the days of The Bells and The Lyons Mail and The Corsican Brothers.”
The very day Frances went to King Arthur she had lunched at Lady Dorothy Nevill’s. Sir Edwin Arnold was there and Bret Harte, George Boughton R.A. and his vivacious wife, and Forbes Robertson, the actor who played Sir Lancelot—“He is a very attractive fellow with a curiously cleancut, ascetic sort of face—an excellent actor but I do not think at all the type for Lancelot.”
Frances saw him again in March in Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith. She took a party to the first night “It gave me a feeling that Pinero had been filled with a vaulting ambition to do something, but has not been in the least clear as to what he aimed at . . . It is . . . no more dramatic than a pair of galoshes . . . It is a thing which seems to casually place before one half a dozen extremely wearisome problems and then say amiably, ‘There, my friends. Just go in and settle it your own way. I’m not prejudiced. Lord, no, I never even attempt to settle such things—but I have no doubt it’s healthy exercise for you’. . . We had to get out of our carriage yards away from the entrance and walk through the rain to get in in time—there were so many carriages in line.” Part of its success was undoubtedly due to Mrs Patrick Campbell. Frances had previously disliked her, but this Pinero play almost persuaded her to join the devotees. “The woman can convey herself so.”
“The supper was very nice afterwards. Everybody was a person with a point of view—Gosse and Zangwill are so delightfully clever and the Hepworth Dixons are stimulating creatures and Mrs Gosse charming.” They had “consommé in cups, lobster mayonnaise, cold fowls, tongue in aspic, foie gras in aspic, cold game pie, amontillado jelly, creme Bavoureuse, Anthony eggs, beautiful strange little cakes—lemon cheese cakes—bonbons, salted almonds, olives farcis, sherry, Burgundy, champagne and brilliant conversation”.
The party broke up at about two but Zangwill remained until half past three. Zangwill was one of the party, too, on a less interesting occasion, the first night of Sardow’s Delia Harding. “It was too imbecile,” nothing but a twopenny melodrama. “My leg is the only sensible part of my body,” Zangwill said halfway through, “it has gone to sleep.”
Israel Zangwill was a remarkable man and if we are tempted to think, on other evidence, that Frances had become worldly, materialistic, enthralled by her own success, it is her developing friendship with Zangwill that makes us think again and realize that she still had that hunger in herself to be more serious which she had always had. There is no doubt whatsoever that Zangwill was extremely fond of Frances and spent many hours talking with her. By 1895 he was much better known than when they had first met in the Chamber of Horrors in 1887. He had published his two novels, Children of the Ghetto and Ghetto Tragedies, and he had a regular column in the Pall Mall Gazette under the title “Without Prejudice”. He had been born in London; his father was a Russian Jew. He combined a passionate concern for the Zionist cause with a marvellous sense of humour, a lightness of touch which rarely failed him, even when his anger was aroused.
He was a realist, upsetting many Zionists by his firm belief that “any land in which Israel should find his soul would be a Holy Land”. He always regarded the Arabs as brother Semites and saw that if the Jewish State was to be established in Palestine, Jews and Arabs would have to have equal national status in “a Semitic Switzerland”. He eventually succeeded Herzl to the leadership of the Zionist movement and was president of the Jewish Territorial Organization at the time of the Balfour Declaration. But this was all in the future. What is extremely relevant to Frances is his attitude to money. At a dinner in 1892 he quoted one of his own verses, “as no one else is likely to”. It aimed to shake his fellow Jews out of a state where
it seems
Ideals, aspirations now are “dreams”,
Fine clothes and furniture are all in all—
The carriage and the operatic stall.
He would hardly have given so much time and affection to Frances if she had been as materialistic as her detractors suggest. If she loved money (and of course she did), one reason was that it enabled her to provide dinner and operatic stalls for such as Zangwill. “Money is made for spending and the good things in life are made to be bought by it,” she wrote in Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress, published this year. She knew what it was like to be without it. But it did not mean that she did not have ideals and aspirations. Zangwill was not a man to waste time in idle gossip. “‘Cultivate those who can teach you,’” he quoted at a dinner for Joseph Jacob. “I hope the awakened interest of our community in literature will help to undermine further the tottering supremacy of money.”
The earliest letter I have seen from Frances to Zangwill describes how she rushed down to Hatchard’s on publication day to buy Zangwill’s new book. “Has it come in yet?” the assistant asked a passing youth. “Just,” was the reply. Frances gave a sigh of relief, “Oh,” she said, “I shall be so glad to have it.” She told Zangwill she “handed out a golden sovereign with the air of being quite ready to pay twice that and more”. It was enough to disarm any author. Zangwill found nothing too much trouble where Frances was concerned. He listened to her reading her work in progress—because it spurred her on. “Can you find an evening soon when you can come in to dinner as you did last week?” She read to him often in Portland Place and sometimes in his study in Oxford Road, Kilburn.
In 1894 Zangwill had applied himself to summer-house-hunting for her, suggesting a cottage at Farnham (“35/—per week—a homely place, of course”) or one at Aldeburgh (“an ugly darling of a seaside townlet unknown to Aunt Sally”). He took her on an expedition to “the wilds of Haslemere”, Tennyson country. “‘It takes so much time to earn one’s living, that one has no time to live,’ he said the day we came to Haslemere.” It is a feeling most of us know now and one Frances had
certainly known, though many of the people she met did not. It was a bond between them.
Reading his books, as well as talking to him, she felt this bond. Referring to one of his stories, she wrote to him: “I am learning . . . that there are thousands of people who cannot understand any of the things that are like the meaning of that story; who cannot understand anything. And one may beat one’s brains out against the dead wall of them and the raving mad, if one will let oneself and hence those vivacious spirits the which you envy me. But you see far and much—and great things, I think—and one should give oneself a half-holiday and let off a few modest crackers when an understanding strays across one’s paths.” He called her “Clorinda” and lent her books. She gave him neckties and he wore them—“one at a time”.
Sometimes when she came home she would find him on the cushions of her big soft Chesterfield settee looking pale and exhausted. She would ply him with coffee and cigarettes and engage him in “undisturbing but interesting phsycological [sic] conversation”. Frances never could spell that word, though it greatly attracted her. “My house is a nice one. It is a sort of tired brain hospital where patients can move from one pile of cushions to another and there is nothing irritating in the atmosphere,” she wrote to Vivian. She found the cigarettes relaxing herself. She had been smoking for years, in spite of some raised eyebrows. It helped her “neuritis”; she was sure of it. So did Zangwill’s admiration.
This was the closest of her friendships at this period. And what of Stephen? Zangwill never mentions him. He was obviously not living at Portland Place. In the autumn of 1893 he had appeared with Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery at the Comedy Theatre in a play called Sowing the Wind and he had spent some time on tour, but fortunately for Frances he was available in April 1895 when she badly needed his services.
“What do you suppose I am involved in now?” she wrote to Vivian. “Another Fauntleroy fight. Two men in Paris . . . have made a play of the story and it has been put on by Bertin of Comédie Parisienne with a success that seems enormous. The Paris papers are full of it and into the fray I have had to plunge once more. . . Stephen has been able to take the matter in hand and see lawyers and authorities for me and will go over to Paris on Monday to have an interview with the pirates.” The maddening thing was that Elizabeth Marbury had had her expenses paid but had tried in vain to place the play on the Continent years before. Now Frances had joined the Society of Authors and their solicitor offered advice. So did Brandon Thomas, who had played Mr Havisham in Frances’ own play; he had had all sorts of experiences with Charley’s Aunt, which was being performed everywhere.