Portrait of A Novel (34 page)

One of them was an anecdote about a genteel but impoverished couple that he turned into “The Real Thing,” his finest account of the nature of artistic illusion. And in his stories of the 1880s and 1890s, James became a great chronicler of London’s smoky metropolitan life, a life that in his fiction includes the servants and the shopgirls along with the drawing rooms and gentlemen’s clubs. Tales like “The Altar of the Dead” or “The Real Thing” itself offer a picture of the city’s hidden pulse as vivid as anything in a volume of Sherlock Holmes. James may have feared for the future, but he never doubted his own ability, and the stories of these years have an assurance that the novels of the same period do not. Individual editors might be capricious, but nothing kept him from his work, and in 1887, when his takings fell to their lowest point, he still mailed off what he described to William as eight or nine stories “
of about the length
of ‘Daisy Miller.’” He got paid for them the next year—and banked over $8,000. The dollars mattered. They mattered greatly. Yet James also knew that that year was a bubble, and as he moved through his forties, he was nagged by the thought that he had topped out too soon. His second act had not pushed his plot along.

T
he strongly built and heavily mustachioed Edward Compton was what the Victorians called an actor-manager. He chose the scripts and hired the cast and ordered the sets for a company that bore his own name, doing what are now the jobs of director and producer alike, and he usually kept the play’s starring role for himself. Most of the great English actors had run their own theaters, going back to David Garrick the century before; in James’s day the most famous of them was Henry Irving. The Compton Comedy Company was minor by comparison. It had made its reputation with a ten-years’ tour of the provinces, but Compton now wanted to set himself up in London, and thought that a play—a first play—by an important novelist would provide an attention-grabbing start. Early in 1889 he made an offer. Would James consider adapting his 1877 novel
The American
for the stage?

James had always loved the theater, the French theater in particular; loved its tight, vivid, overdrawn gestures, its sense of the word embodied in performance. He wrote that the “dramatic form seems to me the most beautiful thing possible,” and yet he was attracted to it by something other than beauty alone. The professional in him also loved its financial opportunities; on a successful play the author’s share of the house far outran anything he could have gotten for a novel. In 1889 the foundered hulks of
The Bostonians
and
The Princess Casamassima
still whispered to him of failure, and his negotiations over
The Tragic Muse
had been so difficult that he now spoke of giving up on novels as such and of writing nothing but tales instead. Compton’s invitation came at the right moment, the precisely wrong moment. James had already made one bid for the footlights, an unproduced 1882 version of “Daisy Miller,” and had been so willing to compromise with the demands of the box office as to give it a happy ending. Now that dream revived, and though he hadn’t yet met Compton in person, he imagined that the theater itself had called to him. The stage had sought him out, it would let him escape the difficulties of his recent past, and he saw himself writing “
half a dozen
—a dozen, five dozen plays for the sake of my pocket, my material future.”

A London run, as he wrote to his sister, might earn him as much as £350 a month, and any play so popular in the capital would immediately spawn touring companies as well. James’s decision to commit himself to the theater mystified many of his contemporaries and in many respects it puzzles us still, this belief that he could find the popular success in a new medium that he hadn’t found in an old one. It suggests a mixture of ambition and desperation; it suggests too a peculiar naïveté about the nature, and the limits, of his own talent. The English theater of his day was a popular art for a mass audience, and it relied on popular genres, on love stories and melodrama and often broadly adapted versions of Shakespeare. Actors played to the crowd, and the scenery was as heavily illusionistic as possible. Star vehicles were as common then as they are in the movies today, and successful novels were often translated onto the stage; Dickens was still an inevitable hit. No great play had been written in England for a century, however, and the only theatrical works of the 1880s that still receive a regular production are those of Gilbert and Sullivan.

There were rumors of a new theater in Scandinavia, of Strindberg and Ibsen and the tragedy of modern life; and a few years later the British stage itself would be revived by the Irish spark of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. But James did not believe that a real art was possible on the English boards of his day. The solitary worker hated the idea that the script was a notion and not a finished form, he detested the freedom with which managers made cuts or demanded revision, and he never got over his disgust at the sweaty compromised world of life behind the curtain. In some ways he knew exactly what the stage required, and wrote in his notebook that this new version of
The American
must be “
pure situation
and pure point combined with pure brevity.” His next sentence betrays a contempt for the medium itself: “Oh how it must not be too good and how very bad it must be.” Fifty years later a new generation of American novelists would take the same attitude to Hollywood.

Compton’s production of
The American
had its premiere in Liverpool in January 1891, and his company mounted the piece once or twice a week as it toured the country that spring. In September the play opened in London, and though the reviews were mixed and the box office slow, it held the stage through the fall; success enough to make James go on with the experiment. “The Middle Years” lay still in the future, but he thought he had seized his second chance at last and had three more plays planned out within a month. Yet none of them found a platform, and by May 1893, James was longing once more to “
dip my pen
into the
other
ink—the sacred fluid of fiction.” Its ghost still hovered, and waited for him; a refuge, a promise entirely under his own control. His fantasy of success began to flicker, and his hopes eventually came to rest on the fate of one script, the story of a would-be Catholic priest. Its production was to be the single most dramatic incident of his entire career.

A costume drama set in the eighteenth century,
Guy Domville
’s protagonist stands ready to leave Britain for a seminary on the Continent when the news comes that his only male relative has died. He is now the final representative of a fabled name, and his friends persuade him that he has a duty to perpetuate it. He renounces his vocation—and then, at the end of the third act, he revokes that renunciation, spurning the woman who loves him and sailing off at last for the cloister. James offered the play to Compton, but the actor refused it, believing that English audiences wanted happy endings, and that a happy ending meant marriage. Another company proved more hospitable. George Alexander had just made a hit out of Arthur Wing Pinero’s
Second Mrs. Tanqueray
, a drama about a woman with a scandalous past that ends in suicide. Audiences loved it, and Alexander thought that the crowd at his St. James’s Theatre might accept another such unconventional evening. Or at least they would accept it from him. For Alexander was popular, he had fans, and boasted that he could fill a room for a month with anything in which he chose to appear. But if this actor-manager chose
Guy Domville
, it wasn’t for either its ending or its author. He liked it, in Leon Edel’s words, for “
the quantity of tailoring that would be necessary.” Everybody would wear wigs and he himself could show off his legs in tight-fitting breeches. Rehearsals began in December 1894, with the opening scheduled for January 5.

The story of that night has been told many times, but the richest version is in
The Treacherous Years
, the fourth volume of Edel’s life of the novelist; an account whose 30 pages stand as the finest piece of narrative in that entire work. The stalls were peppered with James’s friends, Sargent and Gosse among them, an urbane crowd that arrived expecting to applaud. The upper galleries, where a spot went for as little as a shilling, looked to be filled with Alexander’s own following, an audience that simply hoped for an evening’s entertainment. All the established theater critics were there, working for all the best London papers. So were three younger reviewers, writers who though still largely unknown would soon be ranked among the country’s most important: the novelists H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, and the future Nobel laureate Shaw, whose play about prostitution,
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
, had just been banned as indecent.

James himself was too nervous to watch the performance. He had spent the day answering letters from well-wishers and now took himself off to sit in the audience at the nearby Haymarket Theatre, where a performance of Wilde’s
Ideal Husband
did not make him laugh. He had first met Wilde in 1882, when they were both briefly in Washington, and did not like him. The younger man had managed to snub him with an epigram, and James had described him then as “
repulsive and fatuous
.” They both believed in the sanctity of art; but Wilde was irreverent about his own idols in a way that James could never be. Nor could he ever have allowed himself Wilde’s knowing flamboyance of dress and manner, the flamboyance that announced everything that James determinedly kept hidden. That night at the Haymarket made him uneasy. He had no taste for the drawling hauteur with which Wilde made the outrageous appear obvious; no stomach for the balanced paradoxes of his dialogue.
An Ideal Husband
seemed “
clumsy, feeble
and vulgar,” and yet the audience had swallowed it all down. So as he walked back to his own theater, Wilde’s triumph made him stop dead with fright, as though paralyzed. For how, he wondered, how could his own work “do anything with a public with whom
that
is a success?”

Still, the first act went smoothly, enjoyed by both the stalls and the gallery above. Then the trouble started. An actress had problems with a hat; a bit of stage business turned sour. Feet began to shuffle, a few lines produced a skirl of unintended laughter, and when just before the end Guy proclaimed that he both was and would remain “
the
last
. . . of the Domvilles,” a voice from the gods replied that “It’s a bloody good thing y’are.” The curtain calls made it all worse. Any competent actor knows whether or not a performance has gone over, and the audience’s restiveness had put Alexander on edge, tense with what Wells later described as the air of “
audible defeat
.” James’s friends, however, were not so sharply attuned to the mood of the house, and after the cast had taken the usual bows, they began to call for the author. He himself had returned too late to hear that moment of heckling and was willing enough to be led on stage. Then the upper galleries began to boo and jeer, only to find that their catcalls were answered from below by the ladies and gentlemen who redoubled their clapping. Nothing was thrown, but still the two audiences faced off, a confrontation in which questions of taste were also matters of social class. And all the while James stood before his audience, stood there for “
an abominable quarter
of an hour,” humiliated, exposed, indeed naked. He seemed trapped by the footlights, pinned to his place by the hissing crowd, and the press reports of the evening all criticized the producer for having brought him out in the first place. Some members of the audience thought he looked scornful and cool; others remembered his gallantry in the face of assault. But one of the actors thought that the author of
The Portrait of a Lady
had simply turned green.

Guy Domville
was a flop almost before it had begun, even though the St. James kept it up for a month and the later performances were without incident. What made it worse was the fact that the theater followed it with Wilde’s own
Importance of Being Earnest
, a new property at which Alexander grabbed once it was clear that James’s work had failed. Two things should be said about that failure. First, the disaster of the opening night wasn’t entirely James’s fault, and the theatrical press of the day reported that the boos had not at first been directed at the author himself. His appearance was rather their occasion; a claque was rumored to have been organized against Alexander, and some men in the galleries had been paid in drinks to shout the house down. But the second thing is that
Guy Domville
is a very bad play indeed. Its opening moments remain effective. James quickly defines Guy’s situation, and there is some drama in the character’s changes of heart. Only it’s not one that works in the theater. At the very least, his decision demands soliloquy, though what it really requires is a carefully prepared chapter in which he might sit before the fire and review the course of his life. It needs a sense of interiority for which nothing in the Victorian theater allowed. Its failure was bitter and the jeers unjust, but
Guy Domville
did not deserve to succeed. The English stage would find its future instead in the self-conscious wit and entirely modern settings of Wilde and Shaw.

James walked home through the gaslit streets, through Piccadilly and on past Hyde Park Corner, two miles to Kensington in the rain. Five years of work—five years of hope—had vanished. He still believed, would always believe, that it was a good play, but his eyes were now open, and he knew he needed to find a future. He knew it with a certainty that he wouldn’t have felt if
Guy Domville
had had the same kind of straggling success as
The American
. He wasn’t crushed. Instead he was angry, and in the weeks after the opening he sent William a few letters of full-throated outrage. Yet in the privacy of his notebook he seemed simply to draw a line, telling himself that he “
need say
no more” about it. He was newly aware of everything his theatrical temptation had smothered, and was ready once more to take up his old form. He had been working in the dark for too long, but he now had more stories in mind than he could possibly write, and at 34 De Vere Gardens the future looked strangely open and full. James took hold of his pen and wrote two wildly optimistic sentences: “It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”