A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  ‘Well, I asked her to, actually,’ Amber said.

  He stared. ‘Why on earth did you do that?’

  ‘I used to like the Webbs. They were important influences on me when I was a young girl, and I admired Beatrice particularly. I was rather touched when she wrote to me the other day, giving me her advice. I wanted to try and explain how we saw things. It wasn’t any use, though.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t.’

  ‘But she sincerely wanted to help. When I said there was no possibility of my going back to live with my family she offered to try and arrange a reconciliation, and she really meant it.’

  ‘Beatrice can’t help us – she’s stuck in a rigid moral framework built on foundations in which she herself doesn’t really believe.’

  ‘She kept saying – “But you have to choose, my dear girl – between Blanco White and Wells – you can’t have them both, society won’t let you. If you want your husband, you must go back and live with him. If you want Wells – though I can’t imagine why you should – you’ll have to divorce your husband, and Wells his wife,” and I said, “Well, I’ve got them both at present, Rivers and H.G., and we get along very nicely together.” And she said, “You don’t mean to say that your husband will tolerate that state of affairs indefinitely?” And I said, “Well, we have hopes of him,” and she threw up her hands in dismay – or surrender.’

  He laughed. ‘Good for you, Dusa!’

  In fact Blanco White’s view of the situation was obscure. It was understood between them that his own relationship with Amber was now chaste, and this was also the basis of his self-justifying missives to friends and enemies. He and Amber had not cheated on this contract, in spite of some temptation early in her residence at the cottage, and as her belly swelled it ceased to be an issue. Pregnancy in a curious way gave her back a kind of virginity, or at least chastity. She presided over the cottage like a Virgin Queen, with himself and Blanco White as courtiers dancing attendance on her, and she obviously rather enjoyed the role. She beguiled the time when she was alone by writing a novel, and even began to learn a few housewifely skills from Esther, the very competent cook and ‘general help’ they had hired locally. Blanco White was polite and friendly to him in a reserved sort of way on the rare occasions when their visits to the cottage coincided, but they avoided discussion of personal matters, talking instead about politics, mainly the long-running struggle between the government and the Lords over Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’, which threatened a constitutional crisis and had the whole country enthralled. Considering the amount of gossip and attention the young man must be attracting as he went about his professional work, he was conducting himself with admirable dignity and restraint – but what would he want after the baby was born? It was hard to imagine him approving an arrangement he and Amber speculatively discussed, of her continuing to live at Blythe as Mrs Blanco White, perhaps with a female companion for respectability’s sake, visited discreetly by himself and her husband at different times. He thought that Blanco White must have in mind a future less like the conclusion of In the Days of the Comet, but was not inclined to press him on the matter and risk disturbing the delicate balance they had achieved at Blythe.

  He had brought with him to the cottage an advance copy of Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story, which Fisher Unwin were about to publish as their leading title of the season, and he presented it to Amber with a twinge of misgiving. He had not shown it to her before in any form, feeling that it was Jane’s prerogative to read his work first, and Jane when she read the proofs had said, ‘You know this will be taken as the story of you and Amber, don’t you?’ He had rejected the prediction, pointing out all the differences between the fiction and reality which he had taken care to establish. ‘Ann Veronica comes from a much more suburban background than Amber, and is much more naïve. She goes to London University not Cambridge, and studies biology not philosophy—’ ‘Mere details,’ Jane said, ‘that anyone can see through.’ ‘And there are two characters much more like me, or people’s notion of me, than Capes is,’ he continued, ‘and Capes is divorced by his wife in the end but we’re not going to get divorced – ever.’ And he gave her a kiss to underline the point, which pleased her. Still the conversation unsettled him, and he knew in his heart that he had kept the novel from Amber’s eyes out of a fear that if she saw it she would demand changes and deletions that he could not bear to make. Lately she had been expressing curiosity about the book, and he could postpone showing it to her no longer. She took the volume, elegantly bound in reddish brown cloth with gilt lettering and decoration, exclaiming ‘At last!’, and opened it by chance at the dedication page. ‘“To A.J.” Who is that?’ ‘A composite of Amber and Jane, of course,’ he said. She smiled, and said she would take it up to bed and begin it before she went to sleep.

  The next morning she came down late to breakfast looking pale and haggard, with the book in her hand, having sat up all night reading it. ‘Ann Veronica is me,’ she said accusingly. ‘This is our story.’ ‘No, it’s not, Amber,’ he said testily, and went through the same arguments he had used on Jane, with the same lack of success. It always annoyed him that people didn’t understand that fiction could only be made out of life, and there wasn’t a decent novel written by anybody which didn’t have a good deal of the writer’s experience in it, but that didn’t license them to treat the whole thing as biography. ‘They will, though, given half a chance, and you’ve given them much more,’ Amber said. ‘Even the name “Ann Veronica” sounds like an anagram of mine.’ ‘But it isn’t,’ he pointed out pedantically. ‘It’s near enough,’ Amber retorted. ‘And she takes a course in jiu-jutsu! All my Cambridge friends will recognise that. Why did you put it in?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said feebly. ‘And this is the worst possible time to publish it!’ she said. ‘It’s bound to draw attention to our relationship.’ She was of course absolutely right, but until now he had managed to exclude from his consciousness this obvious truth. ‘Can’t you stop it?’ she asked. ‘I’m afraid not, Dusa,’ he said. ‘It’s too late. The books are already in the booksellers’ stockrooms, the review copies have already been sent out. We must just batten down the hatches and sit out the storm.’

  *

  And a storm there was, though it built up slowly. The early reviews of Ann Veronica in the TLS and the Athenaeum were favourable, but there was a warning of what was to come in the Daily News, from R.A. Scott-James. ‘As a novel it is a brilliant and interesting one,’ he wrote. ‘But as everyone knows, Mr Wells uses the novel as a medium for expressing his views. I maintain that Mr Wells’s psychology is wrong in its foundation. He is right in his protest against the modern world, against its lack of opportunities for development, but it is not frustrated sex impulses which are responsible for the evil; they are merely a symptom; you will not put things right by promoting some mighty sex-passions.’ This was a fair point, responsibly argued. But a review by the pseudonymous ‘John O’London’ in T.P.’s Weekly took a more populist and polemical line. ‘Decidedly, then, Ann Veronica will be read and talked about this winter by the British daughter. All I can say is that I hope the British daughter will keep her head. That Mr Wells’s story may do considerable mischief is too clear.’ John O’London feared that the British daughter, faced with temptation, might quote and act on Ann Veronica’s words to her married lover: ‘To have you is all-important, nothing else weighs against it. Morals only begin when that is settled. I don’t care a rap if one can never marry, I’m not a bit afraid of anything – scandal, difficulty and struggle … I rather want them. I do want them.’

  In retrospect this speech seemed something of a hostage to fortune. He and Amber now had plenty of scandal, difficulty and struggle to bear, and neither of them found it pleasant. The novel was banned by the circulating libraries, denounced by the National Social Purity Crusade, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Mothers’ Union, and the Girls’ Friendly Society. It was anathematised from the pulpit, one canon
declaring that ‘I would as soon send a daughter of mine to a house infected with diphtheria or typhoid fever as put that book into her hands.’ The same kind of public condemnation that had been visited on In the Days of the Comet now descended on Ann Veronica, but with increased intensity, fuelled by gossip that the central love affair in the story corresponded closely to one in which the author was currently involved. The revised ending he had added to the novel in which Ann Veronica was legally married to a divorced Capes and reconciled with her father and aunt made no difference to the outrage of the moralists, and was frequently picked on by literary critics as contrived, so that he regretted now that he hadn’t been more honest and left his principals living in sin.

  All this controversy was of course good for sales, and Fisher Unwin were rubbing their collective hands as the orders poured in, more than compensating for the circulating library ban. But the sales figures did not compensate for his own discomfort. He was conscious that he had become an object of pity and a cause of embarrassment to some of his friends, and that they were avoiding him. He received fewer invitations to social events, and when he put in an appearance at his clubs, members he recognised at a distance seemed mysteriously to disappear from sight if he took his eyes off them. If he was not mistaken, Henry James performed this vanishing trick at the Reform one day, and sent a letter subsequently, acknowledging the gift of Ann Veronica, in which his attempt to praise and damn the novel in the same long exhalation of breath was more than usually strained: ‘The quantity of things done, in your whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration – so much so that I was able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength of the feeling communicated, and the impetus accepted, almost as much as if your “method” and fifty other things – by which I mean sharp questions coming up – left me only passive and convinced, unchallenging and unenquiring (which they don’t – no they don’t!)’

  His old adversary John St Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator, had a much more decided opinion of Ann Veronica, though he waited till late November to deliver it. The piece was unsigned, but his style of magisterial condemnation was unmistakeable from its title, ‘A Poisonous Book’, onwards.

  The loathing and indignation which the book inspires in us is due to the effect it is likely to have in undermining that sense of continence in the individual which is essential to a sound and healthy State. It teaches in effect that there is no such thing as a woman’s honour, or if there is, it is only to be a bulwark against a weak temptation … If an animal yearning or lust is only sufficiently absorbing, it is to be obeyed. Self-sacrifice is a dream and self-restraint a delusion. Such things have no place in the muddy world of Mr Wells’ imaginings. His is a community of scuffling stoats and ferrets, unenlightened by a ray of duty or abnegation.

  Strachey concluded by brushing aside possible defences of Ann Veronica’s conduct by quoting Samuel Johnson. ‘Boswell tells us of a conversation in which he defended with sophistical excuses a woman who had betrayed her husband. Dr Johnson cut him short with his immortal – “My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue and vice. The woman’s a ———, and there’s an end on’t.”’

  He had hopes of keeping this review from Amber’s eyes, but he discovered when he next visited her that some anonymous person had sent it to ‘The Occupier’ of the cottage in Blythe, and she had it ready to show him. ‘I’ve seen it already,’ he said. ‘It’s vile.’ ‘What word is represented by the dash at the end, I wonder?’ she remarked, affecting a detached curiosity. ‘I believe it’s “whore”,’ he said. ‘But Strachey is too mealy-mouthed to print it.’ ‘I see,’ she said, and flushed perceptibly. A few minutes later she said she was feeling tired, and went to her room, obviously upset. He cursed the malicious person who had sent the review. At first he suspected Beatrice Webb, but on closer examination the hand on the envelope looked more like that of Hubert Bland, who could have got the address from Beatrice, and would certainly be gloating over the hostile reception the novel was getting, and want to make sure Amber saw this particularly wounding specimen. By a strange coincidence Rosamund Bland had at last got married that month to Clifford Sharp, just as the publication of Ann Veronica brought the scandal of his affair with Amber to the boil – or perhaps it wasn’t coincidence, perhaps the spectacle of them heading for a public smash had frightened Rosamund into matrimony with the man her parents favoured. But it was a queer repetition: his two young mistresses married off to faithful younger swains in the same year.

  He received a letter from Violet Paget, a friend to him and his work for many years, who wrote under the name of ‘Vernon Lee’. Rumours of the scandal in which he was enmeshed had reached her ears, and she wrote expressing concern. He replied summarising the situation candidly, and concluded: ‘There you are! You won’t for a moment tolerate it I know – nobody seems going to tolerate it – I won’t leave my wife whose life is built up on mine or my sons who have a need of me. I won’t give up my thinking and my meeting with my lover. I mean somehow to see my friend & my child & I mean to protect her to the best of my power from the urgent people who want to force her to make her marriage a “real one”.’

  It was a relief to write this letter, but he was well aware as he read it through how illogical and impracticable his defiant stance would seem to the recipient. He sent the letter anyway, but he was beginning to weary of the struggle, feeling like a stag at bay, bleeding and exhausted, surrounded by yapping hounds. He suspected that Amber and Jane were beginning to weary too, though neither of them admitted it. Jane did not visit Amber at Blythe, but corresponded with her and bought baby’s clothes which he took down there. It was fortunate that they had just moved to London, for in Sandgate Jane would have been the object of local gossip; their Hampstead neighbours were less inquisitive, or concealed their curiosity behind more urbane manners. But he was guiltily aware that some of Jane’s London friends and acquaintances had ‘dropped’ her, or found excuses not to accept her invitations.

  As to Amber, she became more and more passive and contemplative as her pregnancy advanced, moving slowly about the cottage as if drugged, her thoughts focused on the coming child. Sometimes she would take his hand and place it on her belly to feel the baby kick, and then he would gently stroke the convexity through her smock, round and round in circles with the tips of his fingers – it was the closest they came to making love these days. ‘Do you want a boy or a girl?’ he asked her as he was doing this, sitting beside her on a sofa facing the fire, one dark afternoon early in December.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  ‘I hope it’s a girl,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have a daughter, as brave and beautiful as you.’

  She smiled. ‘And what would you call her?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Anna Jane,’ he said eventually. ‘“Anna” because it’s about as close as you can get to Amber without causing confusion—’

  ‘And because of Ann Veronica?’ she interjected.

  ‘Perhaps … And “Jane” because she’s been such a brick in all this.’

  ‘Very well, if it’s a girl “Anna Jane” shall be her name,’ said Amber. ‘Providing Rivers agrees of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. But the reminder of Blanco White’s prerogative depressed him somewhat, and he continued stroking her belly in silence.

  ‘He was here yesterday,’ she said after an interval.

  ‘Was he? He doesn’t usually come in midweek.’

  ‘He wants me to go back to him,’ she said.

  ‘Does he?’ he said, trying not to show how much this statement disturbed him. ‘And do you want to?’ He stopped the massage.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think, for the baby’s sake, I should. I’m very isolated here, when neither you nor Rivers is down.’

  ‘I’ll arrange for you to have a proper nursemaid when you bring the baby here,’ he said – it had already been agreed that she should go into a nursing home at his expense to
have the baby.

  ‘Thank you, H.G., but … it’s not just the baby,’ she said. ‘Rivers is not prepared to go on like this. He said to me yesterday, “This nonsense has got to stop before you have the child.” ’

  ‘Did he? He’s got on a very high horse suddenly. What did you say to that?’

  ‘I said he’d have to talk to you.’

  ‘Rivers can talk to me until he’s blue in the face,’ he said, ‘but he won’t make me give you up.’

  ‘He seems to think he can.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  When he got back to Hampstead the following day there was a letter from Blanco White, requesting a meeting at his chambers; not so much a request, in fact, as an order, giving him a number of possible times in the coming days. He chose the earliest and made his way by Tube to Lincoln’s Inn the next morning with a sense of foreboding. This confidently assertive Blanco White, described by Amber and expressed in his letter, was a quite new persona, and there must be some reason for it.

  When he presented himself at the chambers he was not directed to the crowded little office at the top of the stairs where they had had their previous conference – how long ago it seemed! – but ushered into a kind of boardroom with a big rectangular table of dark polished wood and upright chairs, and left there for some minutes to twiddle his thumbs and stare at the glass-fronted cabinets full of legal books, before Blanco White appeared with several manila folders in his hands. ‘Good morning,’ he said stiffly, and sat down on the opposite side of the table. He placed the folders on the polished surface and squared them up with his hands. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, without a trace of warmth in his voice. ‘I don’t think I will detain you for long. I am speaking, you understand, as a lawyer representing myself as Amber’s husband. The charade at Blythe has gone on long enough. Amber must return to me as my wife, and you must sign an undertaking not to see her or communicate with her for a minimum of three years. I have it here.’ He slid one of the folders across the table.