A Man of Parts (61 page)

Much to the annoyance of Fisher Unwin, who claimed it would adversely affect sales, he had insisted that his name should appear only as the writer of the introduction, and that ‘Reginald Bliss’ must be on the spine of the book. He did not intend that this would deceive anybody as to its authorship: it was a way of indicating that
Boon
was not to be considered on a par with his other literary works, but as a carnivalesque diversion. He turned to a page at random and found Henry James expressing reservations about a proposed conference on ‘The Mind of the Race’:

‘
Owing it as we do,’ he said, ‘very, very largely to our friend Gosse, to that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times almost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot altogether – altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so extreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently
, stand out;
yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of distress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone, at all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro in a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially going to and fro rather than in any completed senses of the word
getting there,
that does so largely constitute the aggregations and activities we are invited to traverse
.’

He chortled, and read on, unable to stop from sheer pride and joy in the accuracy of his parody until he reached the end of the chapter. Then he scribbled a note, ‘Dear HJ, I hope you will get some entertainment out of this
jeu d’esprit
, H.G.’, slipped it into the book, and put the latter in an envelope addressed to ‘Mr Henry James, c/o the Reform Club’, where he dropped it off the following day. He was aware that Henry James had vacated Lamb House for the duration of the war, and was living in London.

There was a longer interval than he expected before James acknowledged the book, during which he felt some qualms of uneasiness about whether the old man’s sense of humour was sufficiently robust to enjoy a joke at his own expense. When, a week into July, a letter eventually arrived addressed in the slanting hand he recognised as James’s, he took the envelope (gauging with his forefinger and thumb that it contained several pages) into his study, shut the door and sat down at his desk to read the contents in an uncomfortable state of suspense. The customary form of address – ‘
My Dear Wells
’ was reassuring, as was the calmly courteous tone of the opening lines, explaining a delay in his receiving the book. ‘
I have just been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of its pages – though not all; for to be perfectly frank, I have been in that respect beaten for the first time by a book of yours: I haven’t found the current of it draw me on and on this time – as unfailingly and irresistibly before (which I have repeatedly let you know
.)’ There was a note of reproach in that parenthesis which gradually became more and more explicit as the letter continued. ‘
I shall try again – I hate to lose any scrap of you that may make for light or pleasure; and meanwhile I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H.J., which I have found very curious and interesting, after a fashion – though it has naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course for a writer to put himself fully in the place of another writer who finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish that to the world –
’

He had to put the letter down at that point, and take a turn about his study. No, the old man had not seen the joke, he had not been entertained or amused, he had been mortally offended. He returned reluctantly to the letter: ‘
and I think the case isn’t easier when he happens to have enjoyed the other writer enormously, from far back; because there has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which made communication possible
.’ There was a nobility as well as pathos about that simile that was humbling, and smote him with remorse. Not that he would withdraw any of his criticisms of James’s work in
Boon
– satire was satire, parody was parody, and he had only slightly overstated the reservations that even devoted readers of James had to admit to. But he regretted the hurt to James’s feelings and the threatened termination of their friendship. He hastened through the rest of the letter, in which James defended his right to follow the promptings of his own muse however different they might be from his own, eager to draft a reply that would be apologetic and conciliatory without being a hypocritical surrender.

‘
There is of course a real and very fundamental difference in our innate and developed attitudes towards life and literature
,’ he wrote. ‘
To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view was, I felt, altogether too dominant in the world of criticism, and I assailed it in tones of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this war. Boon is just a waste-basket … But since it was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express our profound and incurable difference and contrast with a better grace
.’ A hundred times was something of an exaggeration, but he signed off sincerely as, ‘
believe me, my dear James, your very keenly appreciative reader, your warm if rebellious and resentful admirer, and for countless causes yours most gratefully and affectionately, H.G. Wells
.’

But James was not to be mollified. He sent back a typed letter ( with ‘
dictated
’ in square brackets at the top) which began, ‘
I am bound to tell you that I don’t think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners of Boon
,’ and continued in the same vein. ‘
Your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn’t commit to publicity
.’ It was notable how much more lucid and direct James’s epistolary style had become under the provocation of what he held to be an assault on his most deeply held principles. The letter concluded declaratively: ‘
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn’t be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully, Henry James
.’

He wrote another letter about the possible meanings of ‘art’ in this context, intended to raise the correspondence above the merely personal, but received no reply. In October he heard that James was in poor health and in December that he had had a stroke. He sent a message of sympathy which was curtly acknowledged by his secretary, Miss Bosanquet. He never heard from James again, nor met him, until his death at the end of February 1916 put an end to any possibility of reconciliation. James had not forgiven him.

– Hardly surprising, was it? Your caricature of James’s fiction was incredibly cruel
.
‘
It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string
.’
And then the hippo picking up a pea …

– Well, his comments on me in that
TLS
article were equally offensive. He seemed to forget that he insulted me first.

– But that was just a paragraph. You went on at him for pages
.

– He went on for much more than a paragraph.

– But it was mostly fair comment
.

– So was
my
stuff fair comment. It was just expressed in a lively satirical way. And after all I dished out the same treatment to practically every well-known contemporary writer that you could think of in that book. I even satirised myself in the character of Hallery, who gives a lecture on the Mind of the Race so earnestly boring that the audience walks out.

– The fact remains that Henry James was the prime target – or that’s how it must have seemed to him, and how it would look to any objective reader. Nobody else mentioned in the book has anything like the same amount of space devoted to him
.

– I suppose I got carried away by the fun of the exercise. I persuaded myself that he would enjoy it as a kind of backhanded compliment to his importance and his literary status. After all, he enjoyed Max Beerbohm’s parody of him in
A Christmas Garland
– ‘The Mote in the Middle Distance’.

– But that was so tender towards the original it was more like an
homage
.
Your parodies were brutal in comparison. It was a mean thing to do to an older writer, much less successful than you in terms of sales and celebrity, and in failing health—

– James was always complaining about his health as long as I’d known him. When I heard in December that he’d had a stroke, I sent a message of sympathy. When Gosse organised a petition to give him the OM I signed it gladly, and when he got it in the New Year’s honours list, practically on his deathbed, I sent him a telegram of congratulation. No response. Two months later I heard he had died. I was sorry we had quarrelled, but it was bound to happen. We were two utterly different writers, with utterly different aims, and had conspired to conceal our differences for too long. The incompatibility of our ideas about the novel was bound to lead to a confrontation sooner or later. It could have been managed more tactfully on my part, as I admitted at the time to him. God knows I was punished for my bad manners.

Boon
was a failure. The literary world, or large sections of it, treated him as a pariah, and even his friends were embarrassed by the book. In due course Rebecca suffered too, for when her study of James came out the following year Percy Lubbock and the rest of the Jamesian coterie made sure it was ignored by the
TLS
. It was a miracle of stylish concision and discriminating appreciation, but not a panegyric, and her association with himself was sufficiently well known to damn it in their eyes. The unlucky timing of their respective books had ensured a generally negative reception for both. In the very month that
Boon
was published Henry James had applied for British citizenship to demonstrate his identification with the Allied cause in the war and, having been largely neglected by the reading public for years, he suddenly became a national treasure who should be treated with uncritical respect, a sentiment his demise powerfully reinforced. It was not a good moment to criticise Henry James.

James’s death was announced when he was working on the conclusion to
Mr Britling Sees It Through
. It was a book in which he had invested a great deal of time and effort, and it exemplified exactly that instrumental view of the function of the novel with which he challenged the Jamesian, aesthetic view. His novel aimed to be useful, it had a purpose, which roughly speaking was to wring some kind of positive lesson from the war, but without avoiding or underplaying the horror and the pain. He put Mr Britling through a sequence of attitudes to the war which was very like his own: belated recognition that it was really going to happen, energetic commitment to achieving victory, and then increasing disillusionment, not only with the Allied conduct of the war, but with the patriotic justification of it. Britling came to see the corrupting power of hatred generated by the conflict, and to deplore the demonisation of Germans and Germany which held them wholly responsible for the carnage. The creative freedom of fiction, however, allowed the novelist to put his surrogate under much more pressure than he had ever suffered himself, and thus vicariously earn the right to preach at the end of the book a kind of lay sermon, of daring presumption.

Mr Britling’s son Hugh, following the example of Britling’s secretary, Teddy, volunteered for military service as soon as he was able, and sent home vivid accounts of the fighting on the Western Front. (There were already plenty of printed sources to draw on for this part of the book.) Then Hugh was killed. The sequence in which Britling received the news and then went out into the dark garden, where ‘
suddenly the boy was all about him, playing, climbing the cedars, twisting miraculously about the lawn on a bicycle, discoursing gravely upon his future, lying on the grass
…’ was an imaginative effort to project himself into a situation that was being enacted in real life in hundreds of homes throughout the country every day, and he felt he had done it justice. Mr Britling’s recovery from despair was more of a challenge. He presented it in two stages. Teddy was also reported killed, and Britling had to comfort his distraught widow, Letty, who was filled with nihilistic rage against Germans and God. ‘
The world is cruel
,’ she says. ‘
It is just cruel. As for God – either there is no God or he is an idiot. He is an idiot who pulls off the wings of flies … How can
you
believe in God after Hugh? A God who kills my Teddy and your Hugh – and millions
.’ Britling says he does believe – but not in the God of the theologians. ‘
They have silly absolute ideas – that he is all powerful. But the common sense of men knows better … After all, the real God of the Christians is Christ, not God Almighty; a poor mocked and wounded God nailed on a cross of matter … Some day he will triumph … But it is not fair to say he causes all things now. God is not absolute; God is finite … A finite God who struggles in his great and comprehensive way as we struggle in our weak and silly way. – Why! if I thought there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and deaths and all the waste and horror of this war – able to prevent these things – I would spit in his empty face. God is within Nature and Necessity. Necessity is the uttermost thing, but God is the innermost thing.’ ‘I never thought of him like that,’ says Letty. ‘Nor did I
,’ says Britling, ‘
But I do now
.’ And Britling spoke here for his creator. He had surprised himself with a vein of mystical eloquence he hadn’t known he possessed, opened up by putting his characters in a situation of almost unbearable distress.