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  ‘No, I understand – but of course in performance—’

  ‘Yes, in performance I’m sure it would all become clear. I can’t answer for Augustin, of course, but let’s send him the play and see what he thinks of it.’

  Henry would have liked a more detailed discussion of his work, but she was already picking up her belongings preparatory for her departure. It seemed that she was late for another appointment. She undertook, however, to pass the play to Daly personally with her own commendation, and Henry walked home with a spring in his step.

  A week or so later, he received a brief letter from the producer saying that the play had pleased him but not satisfied him, and offering to elaborate further in a meeting. Henry took this to be a rejection, but an encouraging one, and thought it was worth accepting the invitation. A few days later he called on Daly by arrangement at his office in Shaftesbury Avenue. The producer, a well-built man of about fifty, with a long, handsome, slightly melancholy Irish face, and dark centre-parted hair strikingly combined with a pale grey moustache, received him with American informality in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, and offered him whisky to drink at three o’clock in the afternoon, which Henry politely declined. Daly had the plans of his new theatre spread out on his desk, and took pleasure in showing them to Henry and boasting about all the latest scene-shifting and lighting facilities it would have, and the splendour of its public spaces. When they got down to discussing Mrs Jasper, it seemed to be not the inquest on a dramatic corpse that he had expected, but a consultation about remedial surgery. Daly had a number of criticisms and suggestions to make, most of which Henry accepted, especially the importance of building up the Ada Rehan part and contriving that she should have the last line at the end of each act. He agreed to write another draft of the play incorporating these notes and to resubmit it.

  He hastened home and commenced the task the same day, while the ideas were all clear in his head. Within a few weeks the work was completed, and Henry sent off the revised play to Daly, who had gone back to New York to supervise his season there. Very soon he received a brief letter from the manager to say that he accepted the play and offered a flat rate of $25 per performance. Henry was overjoyed. The only snag was that the production would have to wait for the completion of the new theatre in London, since Daly wanted it to be an ornament of his first season there. However, he held out the prospect of producing it first in New York in the meantime.

  Then an all too familiar inertia seemed to overtake the project. Henry heard nothing from Daly for weeks. He tried to contain his impatience, and distracted himself meanwhile by once again grooming that old warhorse, The American. Compton had signalled from the provinces that the fourth act continued to have a lowering effect on audiences, and made a suggestion for rewriting it that would allow Claire Cintré’s brother Valentin to survive the duel. Henry didn’t care for the clumsy emendation Compton proposed, but his busy brain couldn’t leave the matter alone, and he soon saw a more satisfactory way to achieve the same effect.

  He dashed off an enthusiastic letter to Compton promising a speedy delivery of the new act, but the task proved more complicated and time-consuming than he had anticipated, necessitating numerous small alterations of the three previous acts to make them consistent with the rewritten fourth, and much consultation by letter and telegram between himself and the Comptons as the drafts passed to and fro between London and whatever provincial outpost they had pitched their tent in. It was necessary to borrow and return the prompt-book at intervals because this was the only reliable text of the whole play, and to have the new scenes copied again and again, as they went through various drafts, and whenever he sent one of these to the Comptons he felt driven to accompany it with a detailed explanation of the dramatic reason for every change, and equally detailed notes on how the new lines should be delivered. Henry thought his boots must be wearing a perceptible trail in the pavement between De Vere Mansions and the West Kensington Post Office.

  He knew that by any rational criteria this expenditure of effort was absurd. However much he improved The American there was no prospect that it would ever have another chance on the London stage; and if Compton decided to drop it from his provincial repertoire he himself would lose little income or glory in consequence. Yet he could not bear to let it sink into the oblivion of failed plays as long as there was a possibility of keeping it afloat. It was, after all, to date, still the only one of his dramatic works that had been professionally staged, and he had hopes of one day persuading Compton to take on another. So he slaved away on The American, stitching and unstitching and restitching its speeches, until he had done as much, he told Compton, ‘as flesh and blood could bear’. In mid-November he went down to Bath, where the C.C.C. was occupying the charming Theatre Royal, to deliver the fully revised play in person. The Comptons pronounced themselves delighted with the new fourth act, but a try-out in Bristol revealed some further problems which necessitated more adjustments, more cuts and more new speeches, which he worked on in the last week of November, in a London choked with a sooty ‘pea soup’ fog that hung in the streets like a sinister miasma and, even on the fourth floor of De Vere Mansions, required lamps to be lit all day.

  Just before he was finally, finally finished with The American he heard again from Daly, who wanted more cuts and revisions of Mrs Jasper and asked if he could supply an amusing piece of verse in rhyming couplets for Ada Rehan to recite at the end of the play, à la Restoration comedy. Henry, who had not written a line of verse since youth, was dismayed by this suggestion, but, perceiving in these demands that the New York production must be imminent, gamely composed a pretty, genial, graceful speech in rhythmical prose for the purpose, and dealt expeditiously with the other points raised by the manager. He sent off the revised script and waited in suspense for several weeks, only to learn eventually that a New York production was not after all feasible, and the London one was held up by delays in the building of Daly’s Theatre (for that, rather vaingloriously, was what it was to be called) caused by the national strike of bricklayers. It seemed, however, that the revised play was to the manager’s satisfaction, since there was no word to the contrary. About Hare’s plans for Mrs Vibert he no longer bothered to enquire, for he felt demeaned by the endless sequence of excuses, empty promises, and transparent prevarications that such enquiries inevitably elicited. So the year drew towards its close, with his plan to make his fortune as a playwright still more of a dream than a reality.

  Meanwhile Du Maurier was having better luck in his effort to establish himself as a novelist, as Henry learned from a letter received at the beginning of December. He had dined with Harper’s Clarence McIlvaine who told him that they liked Trilby, and wanted to publish it on both sides of the Atlantic subject to certain excisions of controversial matter, ‘anticlerical tirades and so forth’. Du Maurier had been shown some of the readers’ reports and quoted one of them: ‘a decided advance upon Peter Ibbetson – a beautiful piece of work, full of faults, but full also of that illuminated something that soars above criticism – it is so large, so human, so searching that it will appeal to a great multitude.’ Harper were offering the same terms as before, but Du Maurier was hopeful of getting them to cough up more for the ‘illuminated something’. A postscript in French jokingly described the kind of illumination to be expected: ‘Lampions anticléricaux. Spécialité d’éclairage moral. Nudité – chasteté &c. &c. voir “Trilby”.’ Henry felt just the tiniest prick of jealousy – no publisher’s reader had ever greeted his own work so effusively – but immediately dismissed it as ignoble and indeed absurd. He wrote back quickly with his congratulations: ‘Brava Trilby – bravo Harper, & Harper’s Readers & Harper’s McIlvaine & bravi tutti! I rejoice with all my heart in the big verdict.’ He was quite curious to read the novel now, but Du Maurier was apparently in no hurry to publish. He secured a fee of £2,000 for the copyright of the new book, twice as much as for his first, undertook to illustrate it himself, and was given a year to do
the necessary drawings and to revise his text.

  7

  1893 began inauspiciously for Henry with an attack of gout, his first experience of this painful affliction, possibly brought on by drinking in the New Year with tumblers of hot punch at a gathering of friends at Gosse’s house. Gosse was always lavish with liquor on such occasions, compensating no doubt for the austere abstinence of his puritanical upbringing. Immobilised in the flat he wrote to his friend, only half in jest, ‘I feel it is the beginning of the end.’ He would be fifty in April. He had, even by the most wildly optimistic estimates, fewer years left than he had lived, and he was oppressed by the consciousness of unfulfilled ambitions, declining vitality and diminishing reserves of time. He felt he was in danger of losing his identity as a writer, falling into a void between a fading reputation as a novelist and a still elusive one as a dramatist. If he could only attain the latter he felt sure he would have the strength and the confidence to revive the former. Meanwhile he was tormented by the spectacle of other writers – Kipling, Wilde, Thomas Hardy, for instance, not to mention Mrs Humphry Ward – getting the kind of attention and praise that he felt was his due; felt, but could not openly admit even to his closest friends without appearing pathetically weak and envious. Instead he put these complicated misgivings and yearnings into a short story that he called ‘The Middle Years’.

  The hero, Dencombe, was a novelist whose work, produced slowly and with immense pains, was respected but not widely appreciated, and now, in middle age, he had an illness which threatened to cut short his hopes of achieving greatness. ‘This was the pang that had been sharpest during the last few years – the sense of ebbing time, of shrinking opportunity . . . he had done all he should ever do, and yet hadn’t done what he wanted.’ This dismal thought occurred to the listless Dencombe as he sat on a bench facing the sea at Bournemouth, balancing on his knee a package just received from his publisher, which he knew contained a copy of his latest – and almost certainly last – novel. Having summoned up the energy to remove the book from its wrapping, and after dipping into it with a flicker of revived self-esteem, he recognised by its cover another copy of the same book in the hand of a young man escorting two ladies, one old and one young, along the cliffside path. He also recognised the people, for they were staying in the same hotel as himself. The young man, Doctor Hugh, turned out to have obtained an early copy of Dencombe’s novel because he was passionately devoted to his work. ‘Chance had brought the weary man of letters face to face with the greatest admirer in the new generation of whom it was supposable he might boast.’ Dr Hugh henceforth dedicated himself to caring for, and perhaps curing, the sick author, who ‘soaring again a little on the weak wings of convalescence and still haunted by that happy notion of an organised rescue, found another strain of eloquence to plead the cause of a certain splendid “late manner,” the very citadel, as it would prove, of his reputation, the stronghold into which his real treasure would be gathered’. This was a recurring daydream of Henry’s own, to be fulfilled when he had put himself above all concern with vulgar notions of ‘success’ as a novelist by demonstrably achieving it as a dramatist, but one he did not wish to reveal too obviously. Decorum in the ordinary as well as the literary sense of the term required that the fictitious author should be denied this happy consummation. Dencombe must die at the end of the story, in his middle years, his life’s work incomplete. Imagining himself in this plight Henry summoned up a deathbed speech of such poignancy and eloquence that it brought tears to his own eyes as he penned it: ‘“A second chance – that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”’ He was not quite sure himself exactly what the last two sentences meant; like the speeches of Hamlet or Lear they contained more than any prosaic paraphrase could express. If he were to die tomorrow, he would be happy to have them inscribed on his tombstone.

  To intensify what was at stake in the story he decided that Dr Hugh’s devotion to the author would cause him to alienate the old lady, his patroness, and thus lose the chance of marrying the young one, her companion. Reading the story over, it struck Henry that Fenimore would say he was once again opposing women to art, or marriage to art – and she would be right: the evidence was undeniably there on the last page, as the Doctor declared that he sacrificed his attachment to the young woman willingly, and assured the dying novelist of his literary achievement: ‘“You’re a great success!” said Doctor Hugh, putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage bell.’ Henry thought about deleting or replacing the ironic hymeneal trope, but let it stand. Fenimore would feel both angry and vindicated when she read it, but it was just as well that she should be under no illusions as to his real feelings. About some things they communicated more honestly through their fictions than in their conversations.

  There were several analogues to the figure of Dr Hugh in Henry’s life now – clever and charming young men, usually American expatriates as it happened, who applied the balm of private admiration to the wounds inflicted by public neglect. Poor Balestier had been one such. William Morton Fullerton, a handsome and highly intelligent journalist who came from Boston to London in 1890 and quickly secured a position on The Times, had helped to fill the gap in Henry’s life which Balestier left, and so had Henry Harland, a talented writer and a publisher of vision, who moved from America to England at about the same time, joining John Lane at The Bodley Head as an editor. Then there was Jonathan Sturges, a victim of polio bravely borne, fortunately provided with a substantial private income which he supplemented with journalism, belles lettres and translations, including a collection of Maupassant’s stories initiated and completed with Henry’s support. He was conscious that none of these young men conformed to the approved Anglo-Saxon pattern of hearty masculinity, though they diverged from it in different ways and for different reasons: Sturges on account of his physical affliction, poor fellow, Fullerton because he seemed to be attracted equally by male and female beauty, and Harland (who was married) because of his interest in what used to be known as aestheticism and was now beginning to be called, as la fin du siècle drew nearer, the Decadence. All three, in fact, were friends of Oscar Wilde, the presiding spirit of this movement in the arts as far as England was concerned. Although Henry kept his distance from Wilde, and the aura of sexual scandal that he carried with him everywhere, this did not affect his relations with the three young men, which were affectionate but of course entirely proper. The upsetting experience with Zhukovski in Naples, which had in a sense precipitated his intimacy with Fenimore, belonged to his own younger self. Now, having reached the calm waters of middle age, having survived all the perils and problems, the vague longings and physical disturbances, associated with sex in early manhood, Henry felt quite safe in cultivating the friendship of sympathetic young men. Old comrades like Du Maurier and Gosse were of course inestimably precious; but after all one took their support for granted, and their praise of one’s work with a pinch of salt. There was nothing quite so sweet to injured merit as the tribute of an intelligent and gifted young man, the deference of disciple to master. Morton Fullerton even carried his homage to the extreme of imitating Henry’s own style in writing to him, incorporating whole phrases from a published article into one of his own letters, for which Henry thought it prudent to administer a mild slap of reproof. One could, after all, have too much of a good thing.

  The letter had come from Paris, where Fullerton had been posted at the beginning of the year to work at the Times bureau. Henry missed the young man’s company and conversation, and it was partly in order to enjoy them again that he went to Paris in the middle of March, for an extended visit. He stayed at his favourite hotel, the Westminster, in the Rue de la Paix, just off the Place Vendôme. The gout was still troubling him, but he managed to hobble around the boulevards to meet Morton at the cafés and restaurants he had ‘discovered’. Henry Har
land also happened to be in Paris at the same time, and they had a convivial dinner at which the young man eagerly explained his plans to publish a new high-quality literary periodical that would be more like a book than a magazine – indeed it was to be called The Yellow Book – designed to challenge and transform the stuffy Philistine world of English letters. It would publish the best work of the younger generation of writers who took their cue from recent developments in French literature, and be illustrated by a dazzling new artistic genius called Aubrey Beardsley; but Harland was anxious to solicit contributions from Henry to give the publication what he called ‘copper-bottomed literary quality’. Henry had seen some of Aubrey Beardsley’s black-and-white illustrations, which were about as remote from Du Maurier’s in style and content as could be conceived, and was not sure his own work would sit comfortably with the young artist’s between the same covers; but he gave a cautious welcome to Harland’s invitation and promised to think about a suitable contribution to The Yellow Book when it was nearer to making its debut. ‘Anything from you would be wonderful,’ Harland said. ‘And it can be as long as you like.’ That was certainly an incentive, for Henry’s stories had a way of quickly expanding beyond the limits previously agreed with magazine editors. He had just emerged from a heroic struggle to keep ‘The Middle Years’ under the six-thousand-word limit insisted upon by the implacable editor of Lippincott’s, where it was to appear in May.

  While he was in Paris he heard from Gosse of the death of John Addington Symonds, a figure of considerable and longstanding interest to Henry, in the contemplation of whose life he was able to define and clarify his own position regarding the delicate question of affectionate relationships between men. Symonds had first impinged on his consciousness in the 1870s as the author of a multi-volumed study of the Italian Renaissance which he greatly admired, as he admired subsequent works of scholarship and criticism from the same cultivated pen. Symonds, who suffered from tuberculosis, lived with his wife and children in Switzerland, making frequent visits to Italy, and Henry had met him only once, in London in the late ’seventies; but some years later he sent him in hommage one of his essays on Venice, and received a graciously complimentary reply. According to Gosse, who was much closer to Symonds, he was unhappily married to a severely puritanical wife who deeply disapproved of the tenor of her husband’s work, which she regarded as pagan, hyper-aesthetic and tolerant of immorality. Henry made a note of this donnée, and later worked it up into a dark little story, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, one of his first tales of literary life, in which a novelist’s wife so loathed her husband’s work-in-progress that she allowed their son to die rather than let him grow up and read it. (More grist to Fenimore’s mill, Henry had to concede, as he recalled this story.) It was set in England and of course contained no recognisable portrait of Symonds, though the Italianate title of the fictitious author’s novel was a clue to a few knowing readers. Henry left the precise nature of the scandalous content of ‘Beltraffio’ obscure and ambiguous – indeed, he didn’t find it necessary even to know himself what it was. In due course, however, it became clear that Symonds was by temperament, and probably in practice, a Uranist, or, to use a term that had just begun to circulate, homo-sexual, and this was the real cause of incompatibility between him and his wife. Only a few months before his death Gosse had sent Henry a copy of a privately printed booklet by Symonds called A Problem in Modern Ethics which was nothing less than a plea for the toleration of physical love between men, citing the precedent of such relationships between mature citizens and youths in Plato’s Athens to argue that they were not incompatible with the highest kind of civilisation. Henry found the Athenian or Platonic model of mentor and ephebe an appealing one for his own relations with his young admirers, but only up to a point that stopped well short of the grossly physical. A hug or embrace between friends, on greeting or parting, was of course perfectly natural, and he deplored the frigid Anglo-Saxon prejudice against such demonstrations of affection – or love, why not call it love? – between men. But something fastidious in him recoiled from any thought of intimate sexual contact involving nakedness, the groping and interlocking of private parts, and the spending of seed. Admittedly (though he would only admit it to himself, in his most secret self-communings) he found it easier to picture himself thus engaged with a beautiful youth than with a beautiful maiden, but that only strengthened his resistance to any possible temptation to act out such disturbing fantasies. If there were men attracted to other men who found it impossible to detach love from sensuality then let them indulge the latter in private, and not seek the permission and approval of society, or challenge society by flaunting their deviance – that was Henry’s considered opinion. Society could only openly endorse the normal sexual instinct that was inextricably linked to procreation, the great life force that carried the race forward into the future. Henry regarded Symonds’s printed apologia as a reckless act which might have damaging consequences for himself and his friends, and he thought Gosse (a dear chap, but his name always irresistibly suggested ‘goose’ and ‘gossip’) imprudent to circulate it. He returned his copy as quickly as he could, with a carefully worded letter that disguised his real feelings behind a mask of urbane, amused detachment. It was perhaps just as well for poor Symonds that he had died, even at the early age of fifty-three, before he pulled down the full weight of society’s disapproval upon his head.