The Fifth Heart (56 page)

But while he had loved working in isolation, his work was no longer earning him what it should, either in dollars and pounds or in fame.

Oh, not that he’d ever striven after riches or fame! No! The Art had always come first. Always. But he
had
long imagined that before age 50 his work would have allowed him financial freedom enough to . . . To what? Perhaps to buy himself an English country house by the sea. Just a cottage, of course, a tidy little seasonal home in addition to his flat at De Vere Gardens. A cozy country place at which he would host literary friends and his brother William and his family when they came to England. A place where he could host his younger male friends—Paul Bourget, say, or Edmund Gosse. With privacy.

In the end, after all his work, the theatrical group had totally rewritten James’s “gloomy”—their word—third act to turn
The American
into a not-very-successful comedy.

Although the Prince of Wales had come to see
The American
in London and that had prompted the producer to attempt a “second opening” of the shortened and rewritten play at its fiftieth performance, James once again helping to fill the expensive seats and boxes with the author’s literary and high-society friends, audiences remained lackluster until James finally had to agree with the critics. The play into which he and his sister Alice had poured so much of their optimism had been a failure on many levels. He’d frantically abandoned his literary roots, he knew, to achieve a “well-made play” and that eager pandering had turned his serious novel into an absurdly paced melodrama on stage. The highly literate drama critic A. B. Walkley had written of the non-stop busyness of his script—“What, Mr. James? All this ‘between dinner and the suburban trains?’ ” James was sure it had also been Walkley in an anonymous review who’d said that James had offered the public little other than “a stage American, with the local color laid on with a trowel, a strong accent, a fearful and wonderful coat, and a recurrent catch-word.”

Edward Compton, the producer and lead actor, indeed had mastered the American dialect to a fault—in his later viewings of his play, James clearly heard the caricature of American English he’d penned—and the catchword phrase James had given him (after Compton told him that such catchwords were important for characters on stage) had been “
That’s
what I want t’see”—which, by James’s last viewing of the crippled, hobbled, emasculated play, seemed to be every third line for Compton’s American character.

As for the giant chocolate-colored coat, Compton had coveted the garment during rehearsals and provincial openings. “Gives the audience a sense of this American’s real nature,” the actor-producer had said after the first out-of-London auditions. But, James could see now, it had been an absurd wardrobe choice. One critic wondered in print if all Americans skinned buffalos to wear their entire hairy hide as a coat. Another compared Compton’s giant brown buttons to chocolate-covered cupcakes.

The best thing written by critics about his American leading lady, Miss Elizabeth Robins, was that her acting was “a tad less somnambulistic” in some of the later stagings. In the earlier performances, critics had called her acting—essentially of an inert woman, a listener, an observer—“bordering on the hysterical if not the outright deranged.” The poor actress, James had seen, had been totally miscast in his role for a basically passive and passionless woman, had tried the full spectrum, from deranged, to hysterical, then as somnambulistic as if she’d been drugged with laudanum, and now back to the “tad less somnambulistic”. After her recent successes in playing Hedda and Nora in Ibsen’s strangely popular plays, this critical pillorying of her “Claire” character in
The American
made her weep after every performance.

James had felt like weeping with her.

An anonymous critic for the
Era
had summed up Henry James’s first theatrical contribution thusly: “We are as anxious as the critics of the newest school to hail the advent on our stage of literary men, but it is on condition that they bring their literature with them.”

This—the truth of this statement—had hurt James more than he would ever admit. He remembered writing to Henrietta Reubell in 1890, in the early days of his long struggle with
The American
—“I have written a big (and awfully good) four-act play by which I hope to make my fortune.”

Well, it had been
big
. But in the end James had to admit that it had not been “awfully good”. In many ways it had been merely awful.

He remembered writing to his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, now on a distant island in the South Pacific—“My zeal in the affair is only matched by my indifference” but in the same letter enthusing “I find the form opens out before me as if it were a kingdom to conquer”. Yet by the end of the same contradictory letter he was telling Stevenson—“A kingdom, yes, but my standards—by
our
standards, my absent but never-distant friend—a paltry kingdom of ignorant brutes for managers and dense
cabotins
of actors.”

And more recently, when he was down with gout before deciding to go to Paris, he’d written to Stevenson:

On this Friday evening in April of 1893, only a week and day from his 50th birthday, James realized that he never had come to grips with what writing for the theater really entailed. Yet in his portmanteau here at the Hays’ home, he had carried with him to America three completed stage comedies, a drama written specifically for one actress who had aged beyond the role he’d created solely for her, extensive notes on five other possible plays, and the first three sketched-in acts of a serious drama he thought he might call
Guy Domville
.

In one of his earlier notes was a list of possible names for the eponymous character in this play about the lone scion of a wealthy family being called back from a monastery to choose between Holy Orders and continuing his family’s name through marriage and children. James also had the original notes he’d made years earlier in Venice after hearing an anecdote about the apprentice monk who had been forced to renounce either his family’s continuance or his holy vows. At the time he’d thought it might develop into a short story and had given it the tentative title “The Hero”:

James had long ago abandoned
The Hero
as the title of the play version of this tale, had added several extra dramatic—perhaps melodramatic—layers to the basic decision the hero had to make, and decided that amongst all these possible names for his hero, names filling two full pages in one of the thin notebooks he’d brought with him, he had liked “Domville” the best. It had taken him longer to come up with the eponymous leading character’s first name—at one time he’d toyed with “Boy” just because he liked the sound of it—but for the last few months it had solidified into “Guy”.
Guy Domville
. Obviously this was no longer a play set in Venice.

But would the male—and very masculine—protagonist’s heroic act consist of consenting to a loveless marriage (a marriage into which a villain with the villainous name of Devenish was trying to ensnare Guy Domville) or would his character resist this temptation and renounce life, love, family, and any future for his noble family’s name by returning to Holy Orders and cold celibacy?

Lying there in John Hay’s guest room in the near-darkness, the small pool of light from his bedside lamp illuminating only his pale hands and the small pile of his notebooks, James imagined that the double-renunciation at the end of the play would bring tears to sensitive souls in the audience. He could imagine his elaborately dressed actor saying loudly—“I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!” Everyone in the theater would either weep or be struck into awed silence.

But would they?

James felt like weeping. He wished Sherlock Holmes would return.

* * *

On the next day, Saturday morning, precisely one week before his dreaded birthday, having just finished breakfast—Gregory had whisked the tray away with his usual silent efficiency when James had rung the little bell—and dressed in his finely tailored brown pinstripe suit and waistcoat, Henry James sat in the spring sunlight at the table near the open window of his wonderful guest suite and wrote the following:

James paused and looked at what he had just written. It was hogwash. Sentimental hogwash. He had committed himself to making his fortune writing for the theater and there was no little latch he could lift that would let his cozy—and financially unrewarding—literary efforts come tip-toeing back in.

And what was this self-serving babble about building a “small literary monument” for himself, block by block? Flaubert had answered that conceit rather concisely with his comment—“Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they’re just as useless. And they stay in the desert. Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.”

Henry James would soon turn fifty and while he’d sown his literary wild oats with both abandon and determined discipline, at this dark moment he doubted very much if any of his literary children would outlive him. At least by not much more than a few years at best.

Even his attempts to get his peers—or at least his younger literature-oriented male friends—to call him “Master”—Maître—had failed. If they did so, at his actual urgings, they made it into something like a joke. No, there was no “literary monument” out there for him or of him, no monument built “block by block” by his patient workmanship. And for the temporary “monuments” he’d labored so hard to construct, the critic-jackals were indeed pissing on them, the tiresome bourgeois—especially in America—clambering over his blocks and scratching their initials in his oh-so-carefully-cut stones with nails and knives.

Just last year he’d written a story he’d very much liked titled “The Wheel of Time”. In it his main character, yet another reflection of himself as seen through a glass darkly, thinks much about his distant youth while musing on his forty-ninth birthday. About youth . . .

But with that round, odious number of 50 now bearing down on him like a freight train in the night—just as impervious, just as terrifying, just as unavoidable—he would pay anything to remain forty-nine forever or, if that was not possible, at least for another few un-passing years.

James realized to his horror that he was close to tears. Maybe that young, pink American pig named Teddy Roosevelt had been right; perhaps he
was
effeminate in his thoughts and writings.

* * *

James was aching to write someone a letter. But he couldn’t, shouldn’t . . . this trip to America was to remain a secret from his friends and epistolary interlocutors.

More hogwash. He was a man of letters in more than the literary sense. Henry James wrote a letter to someone, usually multiple letters to multiple someones, every day of his life. In a real sense, writing and receiving letters was the way he kept in touch with life.

At the moment he felt an overwhelming need to write a letter to Constance Fenimore Woolson about what had happened to him over the past few weeks. He knew that Fenimore had turned fifty-three last month in March—he’d written her a clever letter offering his elliptical birthday wishes—so she might understand his feelings about turning fifty. To his recollection, they’d never discussed the topic of aging. Fenimore—an American writer like James, in self-exile in Europe for decades—was the focus of the closest thing to a romantic relationship with a woman that James had ever felt or allowed.

Of course, he really had no romantic notions about Fenimore, certainly no sensual or sexual ones—the thought of an unclad woman’s body appealed to him only in a very few classical paintings and sculptures. It was the nude male form that moved James in some deep, solid, but uncertain way—ever since that day he walked into his brother William’s Newport art group’s life-drawing class and saw their cousin Gus standing there naked as the model. But at one point, for weeks when both of them were staying in Fenimore’s rented chalet of Bellosguardo high above Venice, Fenimore in her rooms upstairs and James comfortably in his apartment on the lowest floor, he’d had
some
sense of what it might be like to live with a woman.

To be married.

Of course Fenimore was so masculine in so many ways—fiercely independent, achingly but muscularly ambitious as a writer and poet in her own right, willing to break off even the most delightful conversation with James while sitting on the wide terrace of the Villa Brichieri near Bellosguardo watching a sunset in order to get back to her writing—but she was also a woman with a woman’s mysteries. It had taken James months after Fenimore had left her leased home in Oxford before he realized that she’d come there—to the winter darkness of England which depressed her so, she needed sunlight or her moods would plummet—to be near him while his sister Alice was dying.