A Man of Parts (19 page)

BY 1902 HE
had achieved a position in the world that he would not have dreamed possible ten or even five years earlier. He owned a fine house, architect-designed to his own specifications, and although the building of it had been attended with many petty frustrations and delays, this trade having seemingly made few improvements in its methods and working practices since the construction of the Pyramids, the final result had been worth waiting for. It was a house designed for comfortable and convenient living, rather than boasting of the owner’s social status. The front elevation was simple, the porch and front door modest in their proportions. The principal object of interest to be seen from the windows on that side was the Sandgate Lift, a funicular system ingeniously worked by hydraulic power which conveyed passengers up to and down from the heights of the Folkestone Leas – fascinating to those of a technical cast of mind, but of no picturesque value. The glory of the house was its rear aspect, which faced south, its white-painted rough-cast surfaces reflecting the light and absorbing the warmth of the sun. There was an inviting terrace and two lawns, one big enough for badminton. Beyond the rim of the garden the land fell away steeply to give a view between trees of the English Channel, and on the western edge of the property there was a small brick building with its back turned to the house and a decoratively tiled roof, intended by Voysey to serve as a gardener’s shed, which he himself had quickly commandeered and converted into a satellite study. In the summer months when the weather was fine he would rise at dawn and go out there to write for some hours before breakfast, glancing up from his foolscap pad from time to time to enjoy the view of Sandgate High Street stirring into life far below, the wooded hill that rose up behind the village taking the light of the rising sun, and the waves breaking soundlessly on the shingle beach that stretched westwards along St Mary’s Bay to Dymchurch. Inhaling the fresh sweet sea air that came through the open door he would sometimes recall the bedroom in Mornington Street where he had a small writing table squeezed in between the bed and a chest of drawers, overlooking a squalid yard hemmed in by the sooty backs of other identical houses, and reflect with satisfaction on how far he and Jane had travelled since then.

In literal terms London was only seventy miles distant, and though the South Eastern Railway Company contrived to stretch that out to a two hour and fifteen minute journey, it was not tedious enough to deter weekend guests, of whom there were many. Gissing came, Bennett came, and as the Fabians began to woo him, Beatrice and Sidney Webb came, and the Shaws, and other luminaries of the Society. He enjoyed entertaining his friends and acquaintances from the metropolis, mixing badminton with book talk and charades, and Jane was an efficient if slightly over-anxious hostess. Not that the locality lacked its own literary celebrities. Henry James was not far away in Rye, and they had been on friendly terms ever since he and Jane first came to the area in ’98, when he was laid up in New Romney with the last spasm of his kidney ailment. The damaged kidney finally dematerialised there, leaving him with one healthy organ which had served its purpose adequately ever since. James and his guest Edmund Gosse cycled over from Lamb House to visit him and kindly enquire whether he was in need of financial assistance from the Royal Literary Fund. They were pleased, and visibly impressed, when he told them he was not, and already planning to settle in the area and build himself a house with the royalties from his novels.

It was fortunate that at the outset of his brief career as drama critic for the
Pall Mall Gazette
a few years earlier he had reviewed James’s disastrous play
Guy Domville
kindly, since this allowed a friendship to develop between them based on mutual admiration and – since their work was so different in character, and their ages so widely separated – a blessed absence of rivalry. It was conducted chiefly through correspondence, since James always found some excuse to decline invitations to Spade House, perhaps fearing that he would not be able to praise it convincingly (the information that every bedroom had its own lavatory seemed to disturb him) but the baroque extravagance of his epistolary style was a compensation. ‘
You, with a magnanimity already so marked as to be dazzling, sent me last summer a beautiful and discouraging volume which I never mustered the right combination of minutes and terms to thank you for as it deserved – and then perfectly aware that this shameful consciousness had practically converted me to a quivering pulp, you let fly the shaft that has finished me in the fashion to which I now so distressfully testify
’ – thus did James magnificently apologise for not having acknowledged receipt of
When the Sleeper Wakes
before receiving
Tales of Space and Time
. They had got into the habit of exchanging copies of their new books and compliments about them. The older writer’s fulsome praise was invariably qualified by some hinted reservation, itself disguised as a compliment. ‘
I re-write you, much, as I read – which is the highest tribute my damned impertinence can pay an author
,’ James wrote after reading, rather late in the day,
The Time Machine
. But it pleased him to have this intimate connection with the most distinguished, if not the most popular, exponent of the novel as a form of art in the English language.

There were two other literary novelists of growing reputation living in the same corner of England, where East Sussex met West Kent, whom he had soon got to know and like: Ford Madox Hueffer and Joseph Conrad, who were themselves friends and on occasion collaborators. Collaboration seemed unlikely when you saw them together – Hueffer tall, blond, moustached, with extrovert bohemian manners, and Conrad short, dark, bearded and prickly. He privately nicknamed them the Walrus and the Carpenter, on account of Hueffer’s prominent front teeth. ‘Fordie’, as he was familiarly known, was always seeking to co-opt other writers in his mission to modernise contemporary English writing, and the Polish Conrad, a retired sea-captain, brought a Continental European seriousness and a treasure chest of adventurous experiences to this project, though the nuances of English comedy of manners eluded him. ‘My dear Wells, what is all this about Jane Austen?
’ he would ask, frowning and gesticulating. ‘What is there
in
her? What is it all
about
?’

With James, Hueffer, Conrad and himself all living in the same area there seemed to be the makings of a new literary coterie, and for a brief time it was augmented by Stephen Crane, the brilliant young American author of
The Red Badge of Courage
, and the beautiful Cora who passed as his wife but was in fact married to another man, and rumoured to have run a brothel in the Wild West of America. The Cranes came to England in 1897 and rented a huge ramshackle mansion at Brede, near Rye, where they threw a memorable New Year’s party in 1899/1900 which spread over three days of feasting, wassailing, games and theatricals. Henry James was invited but prudently declined. There were so many guests that the men and women had to sleep in segregated dormitories, and, in stark contrast to Spade House, Brede Place had only one WC, which was reserved for the ladies, so in the early morning gentlemen were to be seen making their way to the nearby woods with a thoughtfully abstracted air, pretending not to notice each other. In spite of these inconveniences most of the guests enjoyed themselves, though poor Crane himself was obviously very ill with the tuberculosis which caused his death six months later in a Swiss sanatorium. He missed Crane sorely, a brave, delightful man, whose tragically premature death, which might so easily have been his own, made him feel all the more blessed by good fortune.

So there he was in 1902, the proud owner of Spade House, a paterfamilias with a healthy son, respected in the local community (he had been approached about becoming a Borough magistrate), enjoying a crowded and various social life, on friendly terms with a widening circle of important writers and thinkers, and increasingly celebrated as a writer and thinker himself.
Anticipations
was selling as fast as a novel, and his lecture at the Royal Institution in January, ‘The Discovery of the Future’, was rushed into print for the benefit of the hordes who had been unable to get tickets for the event. But in the same year he wrote another book of a very different kind, which puzzled many of his new admirers when it was published, a short novel entitled
The Sea Lady
. It was a variation on the Undine myth that playfully mixed incompatible elements of fantasy and realism, but had a serious theme. A middle-class family called the Buntings who occupied a house on the beach at Sandgate saw one day a beautiful young woman swimming in the sea, apparently in difficulties. She was rescued and brought ashore wrapped in a blanket, the blanket concealing a tail. She charmed everyone, especially a young man called Charteris destined for a successful career in Parliament on the Liberal benches. He fell in love with the mermaid, to the dismay of his fiancée, Adeline, who was devoted to the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward and committed to improving the Condition of the Poor, an ambition mocked by the Sea Lady: ‘
What is the Condition of the Poor? A dreary tossing on the bed of existence, a perpetual fear of consequences that perpetually distress them, because they do not know what a dream the whole thing is …. And what does she care for the Condition of the Poor after all!
Her dream is that she be prominently Doing Good, asserting herself, controlling their affairs amidst thanks and praise and blessings
.’ The Sea Lady’s enigmatic motto was, ‘
There are better dreams
.’ Charteris vacillated between the claims of Desire and Duty, and finally succumbed to the former, sinking beneath the waves in the arms of the Sea Lady.

The idea for this book sprang from an experience on the beach at Sandgate in the summer of 1900. While Spade House was being built, they were renting a villa called Arnold House, one of a row whose back gardens extended down to the shore, very convenient for mixed bathing, an activity still regarded as somewhat daring by conservative Sandgate. One fine morning he went for a stroll along the beach at low tide and was making his way back to his garden gate when he heard a call of ‘Uncle Bertie!’ from the direction of the sea. He turned and saw, wading through the shallow breakers towards him, a vision of transcendent beauty, Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
come to life.

She was May Nisbet, the daughter of E.F. Nisbet, who had been drama critic of the
Times
when he himself was reviewing plays for the
Pall Mall Gazette
. Nisbet had in fact written a devastating review of
Guy Domville
which Henry James still recalled with pain, but he never confessed to James that he knew the reviewer personally. They met frequently at first nights, and the experienced journalist had taken a liking to him and given him a few tips of the trade. In due course they became sufficiently friendly for Nisbet to confide that he had an illegitimate daughter at school in Goudhurst in Kent, and when he fell suddenly ill he sent a message begging ‘My Dear Wells’ to look after this girl after his death, news of which had swiftly followed. He had accordingly continued to pay the school’s fees, invited the girl to Sandgate for occasional holidays, and bade her call him ‘Uncle Bertie’. She had been a gawky, pimply adolescent when she first became his ward, but this summer, aged seventeen, she had blossomed into a striking beauty. Now, striding towards him in a wet bathing costume and lit by the morning sun, she seemed like a young goddess. Her costume was a simple schoolgirl’s garment, without the frills and furbelows of high fashion, rather too small for her, and all the more revealing for that. It covered her from neck to mid-calf, but clung like a second skin to every contour of her perfect young body – even, he noticed as she came smiling up to him, the nipples of her swelling breasts. She seemed the epitome of clean, healthy, sun-kissed young womanhood, and he was swamped by a wave of impossible desire for her.

‘Good morning, Uncle Bertie,’ she said, tugging off her bathing cap and allowing her long fair hair to tumble about her shoulders. ‘Aren’t you going to bathe?’

‘
No, I want to peel that costume from your limbs and lick the salt water from every inch of your delicious body and then make urgent ecstatic love with you here on the sand like a satyr with a nymph on some Aegean island
,’ he wanted to say, but in fact he said, ‘Maybe later. I prefer to go in when the tide is up.’

Perhaps she became conscious that he was staring at her rather fixedly as he spoke, for she blushed and looked round for the towel and bathing robe which she had left higher up the beach. ‘I’d better go in and change,’ she said.

‘Yes, don’t get chilled,’ he said. He could not resist adding, ‘You’ve become a beautiful young woman, May.’

She blushed again and smiled shyly, and mumbled something that sounded like ‘Thank you.’ He watched her, appreciating the alternate rise and fall of each buttock under the clinging short skirt as she moved up the beach, until she found her towel and robe on the dry shingle and covered herself. Only then did she look back at him and wave, and he waved back.