Three Men in a Boat (3 page)

Understandably enough, those who lived along the river did all they could to benefit from the boom. Firms like Salter Brothers in Oxford sold or hired out boats; riverside pubs and hotels did brisk business; office workers who couldn’t afford a hotel or felt that a breath of fresh air would do them good, and chose instead to camp out, on land or in their boats, could buy or hire tents, hampers, bedding and the like. An Edwardian enthusiast described how shops like that visited by George, Harris J. and Montmorency (p.
114
) were ‘stocked with the first object of supplying boat-parties and campers with the necessaries of life’. Among these, tinned food played an important part, so much so that ‘the shop-windows are almost completely furnished with supplies of tinned everything, festering in the sun’. Observant as ever, John Carey has noted how tinned food came to be symptomatic of the debasement of the masses ‘because it offends against what the intellectual designates as nature: it is mechanical and soulless’. T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene and John Betjeman all wrote about tinned food with a furious disdain; Jerome, on the other hand, found it ‘genial and amusing’, and one of the most famous set pieces in the book revolves about an unopened and unopenable tin of pineapple chunks.

Unrepentant consumers of tinned foods, George, Harris and J. set out in search of mild adventure, very much in the spirit of Mr Pickwick and his young friends much earlier in the century. Like
The Pickwick Papers, Three Men in a Boat
is an innocent, inconsequential idyll, crammed with digressions and irrelevancies and authorial asides and all the other garrulous pleasantries of the picaresque novel, honed down for a more impatient generation of readers. V. S. Pritchett
¹⁷
– one of the very few critics to have written about
Three Men in a Boat
– sees Jerome as belonging, with the Grossmith brothers and his close friend W. W. Jacobs,
¹⁸
to a ‘small, secure Arcadia where the comic disasters of life are the neater for being low’, and his humour as ‘a response of the emerging lower middle class to the inconvenience of their situation’. Well meant as this is –
Pritchett himself came from a not dissimilar background to Jerome, and writes as an admirer – it doesn’t quite ring true. Jerome’s Thames is, for the most part, a good deal more Arcadian than ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, the Pooters’ terraced house in Holloway, replete as it is with half-witted maids, irreverent errand boys, gossiping neighbours and all those other hazards that affect those who are anxious to impress but seldom succeed, and the Three Men seem far less embattled and altogether more sure of their place in the world than poor, pompous Mr Pooter, brow-beaten at work and fussily incompetent on the domestic front. Both books, Pritchett suggests, exploit ‘that understatement which runs like a rheumatism through English humour’, which may be true enough; but whereas
The Diary of a Nobody
is classic English social comedy, making much of class differences and the sad absurdities of social pretensions,
Three Men in a Boat
is brisker and far less agonized, and reads at times like so many ‘Idle Thoughts’ held together with dabs of narrative glue.

Though J. is, appropriately, a journalist, the Three Men are – like Mr Pooter’s disrespectful son, Lupin – direct descendants of the perkier kind of Dickensian clerk. They live in digs with kindly but overbearing landladies; ground down at work, they prove boisterous and defiant when unleashed on the wider world. Their longing to be ‘free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life’ has a familiar ring to it. ‘At Cookham,’ Pritchett sardonically observes, ‘these suburbans will imagine themselves in the “wild heart of nature” ’, and, like many city-dwellers, they tend to romanticize and idealize country living and country folk, at least until the weather breaks. And, like most oppressed office workers, they console themselves with home-spun homilies about the vanity and transience of earthly fame and riches. ‘Throw the lumber over, man!’ the narrator urges his readers. ‘Let your boat of life be light, packed only with what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink…’ They dislike the
snobs who live in Maidenhead – many of them weekenders, travelling down from Paddington on the Great Western Railway – and snooty, exclusive ‘riparian proprietors’ who try to keep out the ‘hoi-polloi’ with white-painted posts and chains and ‘No Trespassing’ signs: the proprietors, for their part, no doubt detested these urban intruders who wandered on to their land and chopped up their trees for firewood, but their point of view remains unaired. ‘Bally’ counts as strong language, and when things go wrong, as they always do, those responsible are denounced as ‘You cuckoo!’ or ‘You dunder-headed idiots!’ George plays the banjo, badly (‘They are all the rage this season,’ he explains); much pleasure is had from joshing, facetious word-play of the kind that riled the thinking classes, so that when Harris treads on George’s corns, George – mellowed by supper and a pipe and a noggin of whisky – merely murmurs ‘Steady, old man, ’ware wheat!’ A good deal is made of familiar problems like packing and oversleeping and unreliable weather-forecasters; as is to be expected of men on their own, they make heavy weather of sleeping arrangements, tread or sit down on astonishingly resilient pats of butter, and brew up repellent Irish stews into which every known ingredient is hurled.

As they nudge their way upstream from Kingston-on-Thames to Oxford, we’re treated to a series of reminiscences and digressions, triggered off by happenings along the way, and suitably conversational in tone. J.’s pompous Uncle Podger is recalled trying to hang a picture, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake; the unavailability of hotel bedrooms in the Windsor and Datchet area is remembered in harrowing detail; in Wallingford they’re subjected to a cascade of fishermen’s tall stories, each more bogus than the last. Jerome makes much of the malice and vindictiveness of inanimate objects, with tow-lines, metal hoops and the tin of pineapple chunks doing their worst to frustrate his heroes. And he makes effective use of bathos, embarking on long and heartfelt passages of lush, Pre-Raphaelite prose, only to have them cut short by one of Harris’s commonplace observations, or by the oarsmen ramming into a punt on which three elderly gentlemen are peacefully fishing the evening away. Harris’s doomed attempts to sing extracts from
Gilbert and Sullivan before an audience of old ladies provides the book with its comic climacteric, but overall a sublime contentment reigns: ‘We lit our pipes, and sat, looking out on the quiet night, and talked.’

Jerome’s new publisher, Arrowsmith – whose other bestsellers included
The Diary of a Nobody
and Anthony Hope’s
The Prisoner of Zenda
– was very taken with
Three Men in a Boat
: he told its author that it ‘ought to do well in the holiday months’, and suggested cutting up some of the longer passages in case they alarmed potential readers. The book’s success on both sides of the Atlantic made Jerome’s a name to conjure with, and when the proprietor of a new monthly magazine decided to pick a popular name as its editor, he chose Jerome in preference to Kipling. The first issue of
The Idler
appeared in February 1892, and included contributions from Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Although he sometimes put in sixteen hours a day on the magazine, scrupulously sifting through the ‘slush pile’ in search of new authors – W. W. Jacobs among them – Jerome still maintained the pose of idleness, contributing a regular column called ‘The Idlers’ Club’ and holding regular ‘Idler at Homes’ in Arundel Street off the Strand, attended by cronies like H. G. Wells, Barrie and Conan Doyle. A year later he added to his load by taking on the editorship of a weekly magazine,
Today
, serializing Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Ebb Tide’ and publishing work by Hardy, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope and even Aubrey Beardsley. He was a popular and convivial figure at the Fleet Street end of the London literary spectrum; overworked as he was, he still found time for bluff, all-male gatherings of writers, politicians and theatrical folk, preferring informal and often short-lived dining-clubs like the Vagabonds or the Omar Khayyam to grander, more snobbish West End clubs.

Jerome’s career as an editor came to an end in 1897, when he was sued for libel over some footling matter by a Leeds company promoter. The plaintiff was awarded a farthing in damages, but both sides were ordered to pay their own costs.
The Idler
and
Today
closed down, and Jerome – who had recently become a father – was once again a freelance writer. Although he was to return to London
after World War I, he decided to move to the country, and bought a house on the Thames, at Wallingford in Oxfordshire.

Although he received no royalties from the pirated American edition, earnings from
Three Men in a Boat
and his other books and plays were enough to keep the family afloat. Before long, Jerome decided to send the Three Men on their adventures again. Not surprisingly, George, Harris and J. have become stouter and more settled in the ten years since they took to the river: in Pritchett’s opinion, ‘they have lost the happy, impartial rudeness of unattached young men’. George weighs over twelve stone, has risen (like his original) to the rank of bank manager, and is still a bachelor. Harris and J. are respectable family men, with several children apiece and such trappings of worldly success as paddocks and cucumber frames. J. is making his way as a writer, and is bruised by snobbish and dismissive critics (‘You’ve been reading those criticisms again,’ Mrs J. tells him). Both Harris and J. enjoy playing the parts of henpecked husbands, and both are – by modern standards – unrepentantly old-fashioned in their views on marriage (‘In married life,’ J. explains to George, ‘the man proposes, the wife submits. It is her duty; all religion teaches it’). Defiant behind their wives’ backs, they long to get away with their men friends, but don’t quite know how to broach the matter; when Mrs J. announces that she too would like some time to herself, J. feels quite bruised and affronted. Domestic diplomacy behind them at last, they decide to make a bicycling tour of Germany; and much of the fascination of their ensuing adventures lies in Jerome’s perceptive, and disconcertingly prophetic, view of the Wilhelmine Germans as a people in whom kindliness and a passion for order are combined with passivity, a taste for brutality and authoritarian rule.

Three Men on the Bummel
was published in 1900, and that same year Jerome took his family to live in Dresden. Its charms, he declared, were ‘more solidly German, and more lasting’ than those of Paris – yet another manifestation of the prevailing notion, inflamed by the Romantics and by philosophers like Nietszche and Herder, that German culture was somehow more profound and more rooted than the articulate but superficial Latin varieties.
Jerome’s admiration for his hosts was reciprocated: a club was formed in his honour, and his new book became a set text in German schools.

Back in England, Jerome was at last taken seriously by the critics when
Paul Kelver
was published in 1902. The
Times Literary Supplement
compared it, favourably, with Olive Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm
, and suggested that although
Three Men in a Boat
had been the literary equivalent of a millstone round its author’s neck, his new novel displayed ‘shrewd observations of a certain habit of mind and cast of character’. He visited St Petersburg, skied in Switzerland with Conan Doyle, and, in 1908, made his first lecture tour of America, visiting every state of the union and calling on the President, Theodore Roosevelt, who – or so it was claimed – happened to be reading one of his books at the time.

Jerome enjoyed public speaking, and was not afraid of making his views known, in person and in print. While editing
Today
he had condemned Turkish massacres of the Armenians; he campaigned on behalf of the badly-off, including his fellow-writers; a keen animal-lover, he berated the Belfast City corporation for its treatment of its tram-horses. His most dramatic outburst occurred in 1913, on his second tour of America. After one of his public readings, in Tennessee, he was moved to protest against the lynching of Negroes in the Southern states. ‘The treatment of the Negro calls to Heaven for redress,’ he wrote in
My Life and Times
. ‘I have sat with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of “Buck Niggers” being slowly roast alive; how they screamed and writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inwards as the flames crept upwards till nothing could be seen but two white balls… These burnings, these slow grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pincers can only be done to glut some hideous lust for cruelty.’ This is forceful writing, strongly felt, and provides further evidence of Jerome’s awareness of the harsher sides of human nature. After he’d finished his tirade, he ‘sat down in silence. It was quite a time before anybody moved. Then they all got up at the same moment, and moved towards the door.’

Round-faced and ruddy, with large, straight features, dark eyes and a thatch of thick white hair, Jerome in his fifties and sixties looked more like a benign English farmer than a desk-bound literary man. Conservative in dress, he continued to favour the tubular trousers, high-buttoned jackets and virulent tweeds of a late-Victorian man-about-town. On one occasion he was attacked by suffragettes who had mistaken him for Mr Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, and had to be escorted to safety by two policemen. He had a hatred of litter – hence, in part, his liking for Germany – and carried a sharpened stick with which to pick up rubbish; he once asked an eminent Turk what most impressed him about England, and was distressed to learn that it was the ‘dirty paper’ blowing about the streets. He remained a prolific writer, notching up – by the end of his life – some eighteen novels and collections of stories, twelve plays, three volumes of essays (including a second instalment of ‘Idle Thoughts’), a travel book and an autobiography; his secretary remembered how ‘he would walk up and down the study floor with his hands behind his back and dictate with marvellous ease page after page of pathos and humour. He would occasionally refer to his shorthand notes, and he would often rearrange the ornaments on the mantelpiece while dictating.’