by Ann Thwaite
Henry James
P.S. I hope to finish about the 25th.
When Frances finally suggested two dates for his coming, after The Awkward Age was finished, it was not work but hospitality that prevented his accepting: “Alas, dearest lady, I too continue overwhelmed with people . . . This Sunday and the following one are—it breaks my heart to say—impossible by reason of the very phenomenon, here too, that rages at Maytham—viz: some friends from London who arrive on the 2 Saturdays and whom I can’t abandon.”
Four pages of profuse apology (ending “Yours, dear Mrs Burnett, through it all, ever Henry James”) rather softened the blow of not having the pleasure of his company. One visit to Lamb House that is recorded by Ella Hepworth Dixon does not seem to have been a complete success. “Having invited Mrs Hodgson Burnett and the whole of her house-party to luncheon at Lamb House, he began the affair handsomely enough, talking to all his guests, playing the perfect host. Suddenly, in the middle, he got up from his place, walked out without any apology, and could be seen, by his amazed guests, pacing the green garden in a brown study.” Such behaviour was allowable in a writer, and it certainly did not diminish Frances’ desire for his company. That she felt James was more than just an illustrious neighbour, a lion to grace a dinner table, is proved by a reference in one of Frances’ letters in 1900 which we shall come to soon.
One of the most appreciative of the guests who did come to Maytham in the summer of 1899 was David Murray, who had brought the Blyth roses to the Rose Garden. In a thankyou letter on 13th June, he called his weekend “one of the most completely happy visits I ever had to a country house”. He took back to town with him a “merry-leaf”. Frances had a fancy (nauseatingly whimsical or attractive according to one’s temperament) that one of the trees in the Park at Maytham—a five-trunked tree—had magical properties. Frances decided its leaves would be as effective as those that the Christmas cuckoo brought from the tree at the World’s End. “A merry leaf in one’s pocket will make everyone happy and everything go well,” she wrote in her introduction to an edition of Granny’s Wonderful Chair. “If you carry one you cannot help being adorable and you cannot help doing your work well”—the two things that really mattered to Frances. David Murray endeared himself by declaring that the leaf worked for him. “I fancy I benefit by its charm for I am happy enough for any lord and did a good day’s work.” He had also been a useful escort for Stephen’s dog Hett, taking her up to London in the train with him. “At Charing X he was duly claimed by Mr Townesend (looking more sunburnt even than I), some considerable demonstration took place between them and we all separated.”
For some reason, Stephen had not been at Maytham that weekend, though he was there constantly, coming and going between Maytham and his rooms at Crown Office Row with complete respectability in his rôle as Frances’ “business manager”. There was plenty of business to take care of. The London production of A Lady of Quality was not well received when it opened at the Comedy Theatre in February with Eleanor Calhoun as Clorinda, though personal friends, such as Grete Moscheles, were able to be enthusiastic. Both she and her husband, Felix, had liked it “even better than the book. It held us spell-bound,” Grete wrote, “and I pity everybody who has not seen it.” The play was also revived in Boston but again got a fairly rough handling from the reviewers, one of whom complained that such “a dire conglomeration of theatrical horrors and crudities” should be inflicted “upon a defenceless public”. There was a cheap American edition of A Lady of Quality (one hundred thousand copies). When Stephen saw Harold Warne, he was told English sales were already forty thousand of A Lady of Quality and twenty-nine thousand of Osmonde. There were lengthy negotiations with Scribner’s over In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim, which was finally finished this autumn, nineteen years after it had been begun. Scribner’s eventually agreed to a 25% royalty, the rate Frances was already getting from Warne’s. They were understandably reluctant about it. Charles Scribner wrote to Stephen that “25% does not leave the publisher a suitable margin to manufacture, advertise and sell the book but I am most unwilling to lose an author so identified with our house. I do not wish Mrs Burnett to run any risk of sacrifice in bringing the book to us. We will therefore pay the 25% royalty.”
The book was sent off to the printers before it was finally finished and was published only seven weeks after the last word was written.
Frances was by then in New York, irritated to find that the reporters who descended on her on the wharf were more interested in her life than in her writing. What were her plans? “One seems to need them both—America for mental stimulus and England for picturesqueness and rest,” Frances had written before leaving England. But what she most looked forward to was visiting Vivian in Denver, Colorado, where he was busy proving himself no lace-collared mother’s boy but a tough go-anywhere reporter.
Vivian had finished at Harvard in 1898 with “Honorable Mention” in four studies out of five. (“Tell me just how grand Honorable Mention is,” Frances wrote to him, “I feel as if it were very important.”) He had got himself a job on the Denver Republican. “I wish I had a million to give you. I believe you would found a great newspaper with it.” However, she consoled herself, Vivian had qualities worth more than a million: courage, kindness and a capacity for hard work. Frances had written to Edith: “Imagine his going fifteen miles at night in an unheated car, the thermometer 20 degrees below zero, then plowing his way on foot through six miles of deep snow . . .” It was rather sad that this effort was merely to report “a race-club supper-party”—but he had been asked to do it and he had done it. “I never was so proud of anything in my life,” Frances said. Vivian was doing a bit of everything—the courts, the hotels and railways, “even a bit of art and music criticism”. On slow Sunday nights, he was allowed to take a turn at the Assistant City Editor’s desk.
It was a great blow when her doctor told Frances she should not go to Denver. “I am told with my weak heart I cannot live in that high altitude.” Her heart had been behaving reasonably well for some time and she took a great deal of dissuading. Fortunately, Vivian was able to come to Washington for Christmas. There were things Frances had to tell him which could not be said in letters. The end of the century found Frances, as she explained mysteriously in a letter to Kitty Hall, “wound up in the web of having tried to help one person and borne the consequences, and in rejoicingly beginning to help another, which, in this case, will of course turn out quite differently. They always are quite different—when one begins, and it would be so impossible not to stretch out a hand. But we are what we are, and the kind of thing it is the law of one’s nature to do one does in the face of the condign punishments which are inevitably inflicted as the reward of what we think are good deeds.”
Frances’ good deed in putting out a helping hand to Stephen (“the poor boy”, “so delicate and nervous and irritable”, who thought he was “always unlucky”) was now to reap this inevitable punishment. In February she left Washington and sailed to Genoa. There she was met by Stephen Townesend and married him.
Chapter Nine
The Amazing Marriage
1900–1907
The American newspaper reactions were predictable. The New York Journal and Advertiser, for instance, had enormous headlines right across the page: LOVE’S AFTERNOON IN THE LIFE OF LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY’S MAMMA. THE AMAZING MARRIAGE OF MRS HODGSON BURNETT, AMERICA’S GREAT WOMAN NOVELIST, TO HER PRIVATE SECRETARY, YOUNG ENOUGH TO BE HER SON.
The exaggerations and inaccuracies were not confined to the difference in their ages. The reporter drew a vivid picture of the child Frances in a ragged, homespun dress—“visitors to Cornwall called her ‘The little Girl of the Mines’ . . .”
Journalists, with little knowledge of the facts, were free to write their own romances. There is something that fascinates the public imagination about women marrying men a great deal younger. Henry James had once written to his mother: “Old women are marrying young men, by
the way, all over the place. If you hear next that Mrs Kemble or Mrs Proctor or Mrs Duncan Stewart is to marry me, you may know we have simply conformed to the fashion.” At this time, James was thirty-seven and the women were all over seventy.
The sub-editor used the word AMAZING lightly. It was not, on the surface, in fact amazing for a rich and ageing writer—Frances had just celebrated her fiftieth birthday—to want to secure the permanent attention of a handsome, vigorous man in the prime of life (Stephen was forty) whose services as secretary, agent and business manager she relied on. To the world, it would seem likely that she loved him or at any rate needed him.
It seemed less likely that he loved her. Frances had never been a beauty, and now she was stout, rouged and unhealthy. It was said that she wore a wig. Certainly her hair colour owed more to henna than to nature. By her very kindness, her encouragement, her giving him chances to shine, she had confirmed his own belief that he could not stand on his own feet as an actor. The newspapers liked the performances he gave under Frances’ aegis but managers did not come running for his services. Everything he did—his anti-vivisection speeches, his writing, his acting—he agonized over. He needed Frances. “All his psychological problems held her as their centre,” as Frances wrote of one of her characters in De Willoughby at this time. “An appreciation by an old friend” which appeared after his death in the Animals’ Guardian referred to “his highly strung nervous system and too sensitive temperament”, his “tortuous questioning”. “Everything that upset or wounded hurt him to the quick.” With unusual frankness in an obituary, the writer said that Stephen had “the delicate hypersensitiveness of a highly strung woman”.
In the most Freudian of errors, Frances, in a letter to Edith written on the honeymoon, refers to a muddle on arrival in Genoa as “the wild agitation of losing my new born bride”. The rest of that letter is an amusing description of the horrors of honeymooning in a wet Italian spring. “When I remember that I would not go to Cornwall because I was afraid it might rain—and reflect upon this week spent as it were shut up in Noah’s Ark—the Mediterranean roaring at us just below our balcony and the poor beautiful red and white camellias beaten and shattered to pieces—all their petals scattering the ground—I can scarcely avoid a rueful grin.” This was Pegli. Arenzano was a little better. At least the sun shone. But it was cold. She sat with her fur coat buttoned up to her throat, her feet on a cushion and two hot water bottles. “It is not gay.” This was an understatement. Two months later she decided there was no point in dissembling to Edith. Stephen was an impossible husband. He “scarcely seems sane half the time . . . He is like some spiteful hysterical woman. He will work up scenes. He will not let things alone.” Had marriage changed their long relationship to such an extent that they could no longer live tolerantly together? Or had the relationship always had these extremely black periods? There is plenty of evidence of tensions and unhappiness between them in the past. Frances always admired Stephen’s nice eyes but they had only very briefly distracted her from the knowledge of his feet of clay. She had no illusions about him. Why then did she marry him? My reluctant conclusion is that he had literally blackmailed her into it and that the reason he did so was her money. He needed her financial support and her patronage, but he was sick of being an underdog. As her husband, he would have rights.
There were plenty of people at the time who believed Stephen had married Frances for her money. His family told me that, to deny the allegation completely, Stephen actually insisted on paying his own board and lodging at Maytham. There is no evidence of this. My justification for using the word “blackmail” comes from Frances herself. In May 1900, she wrote to Edith:
He talks about my “duties as a wife” as if I had married him of my own accord—as if I had not been forced and blackguarded and blackmailed into it. It is my duty to end my acquaintance with all such people as be suspects of not admiring him . . . It is my duty to make my property over to him—to live alone at Maytham except when he wishes to bring down a hospital nurse or so—he is to be provided with money enough to keep his chambers and spend as much time there as he likes. It is my duty to work very hard and above all to love him very much and insist on his writing plays with me. If I had married him because I loved him and believed he loved me what hades I should have passed through.
“His chambers” refers to his set of rooms at 5 Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, which he kept for many years. Frances stayed there several times in 1900. “He gives me the little blue and white bedroom and sleeps on the lounge in the sitting room.”
“If I had married him because I loved him . . .” She certainly did not love him now. Had she married him to save her reputation? Were there revelations about their relationship in the early 1890s with which Stephen had threatened to ruin her? He certainly had some sort of hold over her. “But for the fact that he could not injure me quite as much unmarried as married I should never have got the divorce. His most infamous threat, you know, used to be that he would get Dr Burnett to join him in hounding me down.” But how had she been so stupid as to believe marriage would end her problems? She apparently thought “that when this marriage was a fixed fact, he would feel so secure that [she] would at least have peace”. But it was not so. It was “a grotesquely hideous position”. She loathed marriage. How had she found herself “shackled” to two husbands, she who could write of a robin, “Never since I was born have I loved anything as I have loved you—except my two babies”? Birds did not demand money or work up scenes or sulk. When things were desperate indoors, Frances retreated to the Rose Garden. The new roses were superb.
She put a great deal of her own experience into describing the unhappy marriage in The Shuttle, the major novel she began this summer in the Rose Garden, though it was not often fine enough to work outdoors. Henry James wrote of “a brave August of fires and floods and storms and overcoats”, following “a torrid but not wholly a horrid July”. But the weather was, of course, the least of Frances’ problems. The Shuttle is the story of an Anglo–American marriage. It was very much a story of the time. In 1909, it was to be estimated that more than five hundred American women had married titled foreigners and some two hundred and twenty million dollars had gone with them to Europe. The most publicized, the most commercial perhaps, of all these marriages was that of the reluctant Consuelo Vanderbilt in November 1895 to the ninth Duke of Marlborough. It was no coincidence that the American heiress in Frances’ novel was called Rosalie Vanderpoel. Frances was “not in the least anti-international marriage”, as she wrote to her old friend, Richard Gilder, who was interested in serializing the new book in the Century. She was only against “a certain order of particularly gross, bad bargain”.
She had undoubtedly sealed a bad bargain herself. Although she was not a young American heiress and Stephen was no aristocrat with a crumbling stately home, there are, as so often, parallels between real life and this new fiction. In England, she wrote in The Shuttle, “women’s fortunes, as well as themselves, belonged to their husbands, and a man who was master in his own house could make his wife do as he chose”. Stephen, like Sir Nigel Anstruthers, obviously had no intention of playing “the part of an American husband, who was plainly a creature in whom no authority rested itself . . . [Anstruthers] had seen women trained to give in to anything rather than be bullied in public, to accede in the end to any demand rather than endure the shame of a certain kind of scene made before servants, and a certain kind of insolence used to relatives and guests”. Nigel Anstruthers is described as “a liar and a bully and a coward”. In a letter to Edith, Frances wrote of Stephen, “When a man shows himself a blackguard, a liar and a bullying coward, one does not forget.”
The accusations, insults, sulks and sneers were intolerable. The demands and scenes were shocking. Stephen taunted her with her past. She had seduced him from the beginning: “He said I began to make love to him when first we met . . .” Even allowing that in current usage, “make love” meant no more than “
flirt”, it was the sort of accusation that it would have been impossible for Frances to have borne being made in public, as Stephen seems to have threatened in order to make her comply to some fresh financial demand. For months, Frances longed for death and prayed for it every morning: “Oh, God, if I have ever done a good deed in my life, kill me before the day is over.” At times, it seemed it must all be a dream, “one of those nightmare things”, she described in The Shuttle, “in which you suddenly find yourself married to someone you cannot bear and you don’t know how it happened, because you yourself have had nothing to do with the matter”. She wrote to Vivian, “Understand that when I say your father never assumed a single responsibility of manhood, I know another who has assumed even fewer and has done more evil.”
There was talk in the village, of course. Harry Millum, the gardener’s boy, said that they reckoned the master just came down for his money and then was off on his cob, back to the station and London. He thought more of his horse than his wife, they said. “In a place where naught much happens, people get into the way o’ springin’ on a bit o’ news and shakin’ and worryin’ it, like terrier does a rat. It’s nature.”
But Frances tried to keep up appearances. There were a few hours of pleasure, times when the happiness Maytham had seemed to hold returned. It was a joy on 19th May to celebrate the relief of Mafeking—not just because she was glad for Mafeking and brave Colonel Baden-Powell but because she had been feeling “that only the devils win on this black earth”. She wrote to Edith:
We clambered up onto the tower and Stephen showed me how to run up the flag myself. I ran it up and it flew in the breeze, the church bells were ringing as loud as the ringers could make them, the under-gardeners were in the kennel yard and they saw me run up the flag and threw up their hats and cheered and we cheered back in a frenzy of joy. Then I sent Stephen chasing up to the Church to give the ringers a sovereign and tell them to drink Colonel Baden-Powell’s health. Then we ordered out the phaeton and drove up to the village because I thought we might get up a children’s treat in the park, and call out the band—But there was not time to arrange it for that afternoon as the children and the band people were too far scattered to be collected in a short time. But we drove to the little shops and I bought red, white and blue ribbon and made big collars and bows for all the four dogs—and I bought the only flags I could rout out and a whole card full of badges of the British Hon holding a Union Jack and then I stopped the phaeton opposite Miss Jessup’s and got out and pinned the badges on every child in sight. You may imagine how they came running up and I gave out the flags for them to put on their cottages. Then I went to see two poor cottagers I had just heard of and gave them money and ordered in beef for them. One of them was such a poor wretched old woman—she had a fall in the winter—poor old thing she looked almost senseless with suffering and could only cry and gibber at me—as she seems to have lost her voice. But I cheered her up a little, I think, for she clung hold of my hand with her poor old cold bony claw and gibbered out “Ah come again—come again.” I can tell you I am going again. I told her the good news and I was so glowing with it that I seemed to waken her up. I think any intense, warm feeling communicates itself to suffering people chilled with woe.