Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

How different all that had been from his decades of disciplined isolation while writing his scores of stories and overflowing shelf of novels. But all that labor to what purpose? He made enough money to rent the lovely, light-filled apartments at 364 De Vere Gardens—his home since 1886. But even there he was restless. He’d deliberately given up most of the evening and weekend London social life he’d enjoyed so much in past years in order to spend more time writing. Dedicate oneself to one’s work was his new mantra, and to do that one had to stop accepting dinner invitations five nights of the week, endless invitations to join the rich bourgeoisie whom he was invited to amuse at their country houses and Irish estates with his ample supply of small talk, wit, and gossip.

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:

Don’t be hard on me—simplifying and chastening necessity has laid its brutal hand on me and I have had to try to make somehow or the other the money I don’t make by literature. My books don’t sell, and it looks as if my plays might. Therefore I am going with a brazen front to write half a dozen .

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”:

Situation of that once-upon-a-time member of an old Venetian family (I forget which), who had become a monk, & who was taken almost forcibly out of his convent & brought back into the world in order to keep the family from becoming extinct . . . —it was absolutely necessary for him to marry.