A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  – So it was a kind of open marriage, but open only on your side.

  – Jane didn’t want to have lovers.

  – Are you sure? She wrote some short stories about women trapped in unsatisfying marriages, longing for romantic adventure. You collected them in The Book of Catherine Wells. Could we have a look at that?

  He goes to the bookcase and takes down The Book of Catherine Wells. With an introduction by her husband, H.G. Wells, published in 1928 a year after her death from cancer. Chatto & Windus made a nice job of it. The three photographic portraits of Catherine at different stages of her life are not printed on the page, but mounted like photos in a private album. How beautiful she was!

  – But how sad she always looked in photographs, even snapshots. Do you have a single one of her smiling?

  – I don’t know.

  – You would if you had one.

  – I remember her smiling and laughing in life. That’s enough for me.

  – This late story of hers called ‘In a Walled Garden’ – an interesting echo there of your own story, ‘The Door in the Wall’, only in her case the garden is a prison, not a paradise. The heroine is married to a dull, egotistical poet and man of letters called Bray, who changes her first name to suit his taste, just as you changed Catherine to Jane, and who doesn’t satisfy her sexually—

  – But that’s because he made love to her ‘delicately and reverently’ – hardly my style.

  – Well, isn’t that typical of the way writers conceal their autobiographical sources? Simply reverse the facts: instead of a too rough lover, a too timid one. Jane learned that trick from you. And anyway it doesn’t affect the fundamental donnée of the story, that the heroine is sexually unfulfilled, so that when a handsome young photographer comes to take a portrait of her husband, who is absent, she falls instantly in love with him. ‘Mate of mine! Found! Found!’ she thinks. She resolves to take the initiative next time he calls, but he doesn’t return, and she never sees him again. So she decides to seek fulfilment in motherhood instead. The last line is: ‘But it was not Bray’s child she desired.’

  – Yes, well, I admit when I read that story I felt a twinge of discomfort. It was published in a magazine with a very small circulation, but I could imagine it being passed around among my friends – and enemies – and being chuckled over. ‘Jane getting her own back, I see!’ ‘H.G. getting a taste of his own medicine.’ That sort of thing. Of course I didn’t say anything to Jane about that aspect of the story. She showed the first draft to me in manuscript, as she always did, and I confined myself to purely literary comments. I remember questioning ‘Mate of mine! Found! Found!’ A bit out of character, I felt, a bit too D.H. Lawrence, but she stuck to it.

  – You could hardly have complained about the content, considering how often you portrayed unsatisfactory marriages in your novels, some of the wives bearing a resemblance to Jane in various ways.

  – Absolutely. She never complained to me about that either. It was part of our understanding that I was free to make use of our lives in fiction. If you’re writing about contemporary life there’s really no alternative but to draw on your own. But that story, and a few of the others, did make me think, rather sadly, especially after her death, that there was an unfulfilled hankering for romance in Jane – or rather Catherine. That was why I called the book, The Book of Catherine Wells.

  – Catherine was the woman with unfulfilled romantic longings. The part of herself she suppressed when she accepted your renaming of her as ‘Jane’.

  – That’s a somewhat prejudicial way of putting it. I don’t think she had a libido to suppress. As I say here, in my introduction to the stories: ‘Desire is there, but it is not active aggressive desire. It is a desire for beauty and sweet companionship. There is a lover, never seen, never verified, elusively at the heart of this desire. Frustration haunts this desire.’

  – But suppose it had been more active and aggressive. Suppose it hadn’t been frustrated indefinitely. Suppose she had taken a lover?

  – Then I would have gone mad with jealousy.

  – You admit it.

  – Othello would have paled in comparison.

  – In spite of your belief in Free Love.

  – I believe in it as an ideal to aspire to. Unfortunately it’s always liable to be undone by jealousy. I preached against jealousy in many of my books, but I could never entirely free myself from it. On occasion it has totally possessed me – when Isabel remarried, for instance, and when Moura went back to see Gorky in Russia in ’34 and lied to me about it – but Jane never gave me any provocation of that kind.

  – Very fortunate for you.

  – It was.

  Strangely, the only moment when he feared to discover some infidelity on Jane’s part occurred a few weeks after she died, in October 1927, and after her final illness had brought them together more closely than for many years. He was in the south of France, where he spent a good part of the year in those days, when he received a telegram from Frank telling him that Jane had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. She had been unwell for some time, but made light of it and, typically, had booked herself in for an exploratory operation without telling him, so as not to be a bother. He came home to Easton Glebe immediately, and spent the next five months with her as she slowly declined, admiring her fortitude, her patience, her lack of self-pity, and doing his best to care for her. She wished only to survive to see Frank married, but sadly she died on the day before the one appointed for the wedding, to be held at Easton as the bride was a local girl. The couple were married privately, the wedding celebration was cancelled, and there was a funeral a week later to which he invited a large number of friends, and at which he made an exhibition of himself, blubbing noisily as a friend, the classical scholar T.E. Page, read a eulogy which he had composed but did not trust himself to deliver. ‘We have come together in this chapel today,’ it began, ‘to greet for the last time our very dear friend, Catherine Wells. We meet in great sadness, for her death came in the middle season of her life when we could all have hoped for many more years of her brave and sweet presence among us. She died a victim of cancer, that still unconquered enemy of human happiness. For months her strength faded, but not her courage nor her kindness. To the end she faced her destiny with serenity and with a gentle unfailing smile for those who ministered to her.’

  For several years past she had rented a small flat in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum, as a kind of haven, a place that was only for her. Neither he nor any other member of the family had ever been inside it. She did not make use of it very often and seldom spent more than a few hours there at a time. She used it for writing – it was difficult for her, she said, to write her own things when she was at home at Easton or in their London flat, surrounded by the evidence of his own prolific literary career, and engaged in helping him manage it. He understood that, and encouraged her to take the flat, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ as Virginia Woolf would call it a few years later, in the title of a book he liked better than most by the same hand. He had made a little joke to Jane when he paid for the lease about trusting her not to use it as a love nest, provoking a faint smile and a shake of the head in response. He had never entertained the slightest suspicion of her doing any such thing – until the day, not long after her funeral, when, as part of the melancholy business of sorting out her affairs and disposing of her effects, he took the keys from her bureau drawer neatly labelled with the address in Bedford Place and went there to clear the flat of her belongings.

  On his journey he was suddenly afflicted with a dread of discovering in the flat some evidence of a secret romantic life, of a lover whom she had met there unknown to him. He told himself the idea was ridiculous, but he could not shake it off. Perhaps it was his own fictional imagination that fuelled the suspicion – it would be just the kind of reversal that a novelist would think up, the serial adulterer confronted with the evidence that he had been cuckolded by his submissive little wife when he c
ould no longer accuse her … or perhaps it was the operation of his own bad conscience, punishing him with these disturbing thoughts for not loving Jane enough while she was alive. Whatever the reason, he was almost trembling with apprehension when he arrived at the house, and had some difficulty fitting the keys into the locks on the front door and the door to Jane’s flat.

  As soon as he stepped inside, however, his fears evaporated. It was a small sparsely furnished studio apartment, with a narrow divan bed, a bureau desk and chair at the window, an easy chair, a bookcase, and a chest of drawers. There were a few prints on the walls, still lifes and seascapes, and a vase of dried flowers on the hearth next to the gas fire. Everything was neatly in place – the bed concealed under a tightly fitting coverlet, the cushions on top symmetrically distributed, the implements of writing tidily arranged on the surface of the desk. It was a room as eloquent of chastity as a nun’s cell. In the drawers of the desk he found the manuscripts of her stories and poems, most of which she had shown him, and the ones that he had not seen before contained no hints of unsuspected amours. But collectively they did suggest a wistful regret that there was an area of life, the area of passion, from which she knew she had been excluded. It was an intimation that rose from the handwritten pages, as delicate and intangible as the faint trace of her favourite perfume in the trapped air of the room. Sitting there at her desk, he resolved to collect the best of these writings into a book that would be a memorial to her.

  – So when did sexual relations between you and Jane cease?

  – I don’t know. I can’t remember. It wasn’t something we agreed explicitly. The intervals between intercourse got longer and longer, and eventually it just stopped.

  – But you must have some idea of when that was.

  – It was probably about 1907, 1908. Maybe 1909.

  – The time of your affairs with Rosamund Bland and Amber Reeves.

  – But it wasn’t as if Jane was jealous or angry with me over those girls, and said ‘Never come to my room again.’ In fact she was an absolute brick. I couldn’t have survived that time without her support, during the Amber affair especially. That nearly broke me, you know. I was mad with anxiety – everything I’d worked for over the past decade seemed to be spinning out of control: my literary career, my political mission, my private life, all at the same time.

  – Well, you brought it on yourself.

  – Yes, I brought it on myself.

  PART THREE

  BY 1902 HE had achieved a position in the world that he would not have dreamed possible ten or even five years earlier. He owned a fine house, architect-designed to his own specifications, and although the building of it had been attended with many petty frustrations and delays, this trade having seemingly made few improvements in its methods and working practices since the construction of the Pyramids, the final result had been worth waiting for. It was a house designed for comfortable and convenient living, rather than boasting of the owner’s social status. The front elevation was simple, the porch and front door modest in their proportions. The principal object of interest to be seen from the windows on that side was the Sandgate Lift, a funicular system ingeniously worked by hydraulic power which conveyed passengers up to and down from the heights of the Folkestone Leas – fascinating to those of a technical cast of mind, but of no picturesque value. The glory of the house was its rear aspect, which faced south, its white-painted rough-cast surfaces reflecting the light and absorbing the warmth of the sun. There was an inviting terrace and two lawns, one big enough for badminton. Beyond the rim of the garden the land fell away steeply to give a view between trees of the English Channel, and on the western edge of the property there was a small brick building with its back turned to the house and a decoratively tiled roof, intended by Voysey to serve as a gardener’s shed, which he himself had quickly commandeered and converted into a satellite study. In the summer months when the weather was fine he would rise at dawn and go out there to write for some hours before breakfast, glancing up from his foolscap pad from time to time to enjoy the view of Sandgate High Street stirring into life far below, the wooded hill that rose up behind the village taking the light of the rising sun, and the waves breaking soundlessly on the shingle beach that stretched westwards along St Mary’s Bay to Dymchurch. Inhaling the fresh sweet sea air that came through the open door he would sometimes recall the bedroom in Mornington Street where he had a small writing table squeezed in between the bed and a chest of drawers, overlooking a squalid yard hemmed in by the sooty backs of other identical houses, and reflect with satisfaction on how far he and Jane had travelled since then.

  In literal terms London was only seventy miles distant, and though the South Eastern Railway Company contrived to stretch that out to a two hour and fifteen minute journey, it was not tedious enough to deter weekend guests, of whom there were many. Gissing came, Bennett came, and as the Fabians began to woo him, Beatrice and Sidney Webb came, and the Shaws, and other luminaries of the Society. He enjoyed entertaining his friends and acquaintances from the metropolis, mixing badminton with book talk and charades, and Jane was an efficient if slightly over-anxious hostess. Not that the locality lacked its own literary celebrities. Henry James was not far away in Rye, and they had been on friendly terms ever since he and Jane first came to the area in ’98, when he was laid up in New Romney with the last spasm of his kidney ailment. The damaged kidney finally dematerialised there, leaving him with one healthy organ which had served its purpose adequately ever since. James and his guest Edmund Gosse cycled over from Lamb House to visit him and kindly enquire whether he was in need of financial assistance from the Royal Literary Fund. They were pleased, and visibly impressed, when he told them he was not, and already planning to settle in the area and build himself a house with the royalties from his novels.

  It was fortunate that at the outset of his brief career as drama critic for the Pall Mall Gazette a few years earlier he had reviewed James’s disastrous play Guy Domville kindly, since this allowed a friendship to develop between them based on mutual admiration and – since their work was so different in character, and their ages so widely separated – a blessed absence of rivalry. It was conducted chiefly through correspondence, since James always found some excuse to decline invitations to Spade House, perhaps fearing that he would not be able to praise it convincingly (the information that every bedroom had its own lavatory seemed to disturb him) but the baroque extravagance of his epistolary style was a compensation. ‘You, with a magnanimity already so marked as to be dazzling, sent me last summer a beautiful and discouraging volume which I never mustered the right combination of minutes and terms to thank you for as it deserved – and then perfectly aware that this shameful consciousness had practically converted me to a quivering pulp, you let fly the shaft that has finished me in the fashion to which I now so distressfully testify’ – thus did James magnificently apologise for not having acknowledged receipt of When the Sleeper Wakes before receiving Tales of Space and Time. They had got into the habit of exchanging copies of their new books and compliments about them. The older writer’s fulsome praise was invariably qualified by some hinted reservation, itself disguised as a compliment. ‘I re-write you, much, as I read – which is the highest tribute my damned impertinence can pay an author,’ James wrote after reading, rather late in the day, The Time Machine. But it pleased him to have this intimate connection with the most distinguished, if not the most popular, exponent of the novel as a form of art in the English language.

  There were two other literary novelists of growing reputation living in the same corner of England, where East Sussex met West Kent, whom he had soon got to know and like: Ford Madox Hueffer and Joseph Conrad, who were themselves friends and on occasion collaborators. Collaboration seemed unlikely when you saw them together – Hueffer tall, blond, moustached, with extrovert bohemian manners, and Conrad short, dark, bearded and prickly. He privately nicknamed them the Walrus and the Carpenter, on account of Hueffer’s prom
inent front teeth. ‘Fordie’, as he was familiarly known, was always seeking to co-opt other writers in his mission to modernise contemporary English writing, and the Polish Conrad, a retired sea-captain, brought a Continental European seriousness and a treasure chest of adventurous experiences to this project, though the nuances of English comedy of manners eluded him. ‘My dear Wells, what is all this about Jane Austen?’ he would ask, frowning and gesticulating. ‘What is there in her? What is it all about?’

  With James, Hueffer, Conrad and himself all living in the same area there seemed to be the makings of a new literary coterie, and for a brief time it was augmented by Stephen Crane, the brilliant young American author of The Red Badge of Courage, and the beautiful Cora who passed as his wife but was in fact married to another man, and rumoured to have run a brothel in the Wild West of America. The Cranes came to England in 1897 and rented a huge ramshackle mansion at Brede, near Rye, where they threw a memorable New Year’s party in 1899/1900 which spread over three days of feasting, wassailing, games and theatricals. Henry James was invited but prudently declined. There were so many guests that the men and women had to sleep in segregated dormitories, and, in stark contrast to Spade House, Brede Place had only one WC, which was reserved for the ladies, so in the early morning gentlemen were to be seen making their way to the nearby woods with a thoughtfully abstracted air, pretending not to notice each other. In spite of these inconveniences most of the guests enjoyed themselves, though poor Crane himself was obviously very ill with the tuberculosis which caused his death six months later in a Swiss sanatorium. He missed Crane sorely, a brave, delightful man, whose tragically premature death, which might so easily have been his own, made him feel all the more blessed by good fortune.