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6

“The Story in It”

1908

I hasten to add, the mere stir of the air round the question reflected in the brief but earnest interchange I have just reported was to cause a “subject,” to my sense, immediately to bloom there. So it suddenly, on its small scale, seemed to stand erect—or at least quite intelligently to lift its head; just a subject, clearly, though I could n’t immediately tell which or what. To find out I had to get a little closer to it.

—Henry James

Preface to “The Story in It” The New York Edition, volume 18

“Everything counts, nothing is superfluous in such a survey; the explorer’s note-book strikes me here as endlessly receptive.” I had read that sentence one evening in 1908, when I was looking back at the first page of the first preface, which had been typewritten by someone else. I was trying to catch up to where Mr. James and I were by reading over the earlier, already completed work. How that sentence stopped me!

“Nothing is superfluous.” I was afraid of the sound of those words. I leafed through the preface pages, nineteen of them, which he had needed to explain his first novel, “Roderick Hudson,” one of his shortest.

Originally, Mr. James had planned to write sixteen prefaces, but by the time I came to him, he had finished only six. Part of me was glad for the work, while part of me was groaning at its endlessness. Yet there, on the first page, Mr. James expressed an understanding of the danger that he might go on and on in his “art of representation,” which “causes the practice of it, with experience, to spread round us in a widening, not in a narrowing circle.” Even so, he was fearless, and I liked his bravado from the first, his claims that such a retrospective would be a good story, “a wondrous adventure.”

Unlike my excited obliviousness on the first mornings, after several weeks, I now felt doubts, wondering how he saw my part in his adventure. It alarmed me to imagine that we had embarked together, already far out to sea, the two of us alone on this little boat, floating on the sound of his voice, swept along by the flow of his memories, which were moved also by some unknown current, some deep upwelling of inspiration. Who was the steersman? Where were we going? What made us move?

Even in those early prefaces, I had my questions when I saw Mr. James name his mysterious wellspring—“that veiled face of his Muse which he is condemned for ever and all anxiously to study.”

Did I believe him or think he was like all the other old, grey-bearded authors who claimed their own private and mystical source of inspiration, somehow vaguely female, the silent, veiled figure that was their angel? They glorified her to be watching over their writing, while they often had a real, unrecognised figure facing them, like Mr. Browning’s dying wife, like Mr. Coleridge’s ignored and brilliant daughter, or even like Milton’s amanuensis-ing daughters, who took down his words when he lost his eyesight.

When my famous author referred to his muse, he might have meant it literally. After all, we were set up to work, I and my sister typists, sitting there before him, our faces bent over our machines, waiting in silence for his every word.

But of course when I first began, I had no such idea. I was much too nervous. To me, when he mentioned his “Muse,” she became another character in his story, his adventure. And my job was not to inspire him. No, I was there to keep him on the narrow, nautical course and bring him back safe.

As we continued with the prefaces during November and December, I found more to worry about. Our adventure seemed threatened by his constant fear of becoming lost, but then an old note-book would help him find his way, like an ancient navigator’s rudder or an explorer’s sketch map. From the first, I longed for the chance to look inside one of his note-books whenever Mr. James pulled one out from the pile of battered old composition books as he prepared for our next new work. I soon learnt how important to his process those old note-books were. In their pages he had written out moments, scenes, and ideas to remember for future projects: anecdotes someone had told around the tea table, whispered bits of ancient gossip, some scene observed while walking along a gravelled path in St. James Park, names that might work in some future story. It had all gone into his note-books, awaiting the right moment. From those bits he could look back to reconstruct the moment of creation and describe it for the prefaces. As I was to learn later, from those bits he might also launch a new story, dictating first a long composition of notes to outline it while pacing and holding the note-book.

It occurred to me then that I might make use of my diaries in that same way, as a repository of any delicious bits I came across. Perhaps my diary would inspire me if I thought of it as my muse while I was writing every night.

My diary—How much it already meant to me! I had begun to keep it on the day my mother died, when I was twenty. That year, when I met my friend, Ethel Allen, it was my writing she loved. She expected so much of me, even suggesting I use the diary to record my progress through the list of books she had made out for me to read. When she was forbidden to see me—her family objected to our special friendship—she told me to use my diaries as my place to write down everything I thought about, everything I saw around me.

I wondered: Is it only men who have their own muses? Is a muse always female? I remembered noticing those graceful female sculptures that shimmered on the dark staircase and in the dusty corners of the Slade Wing of the University of London, where I went to study after my mother died. Early in this century, all the female students, even those in the sciences and medicine, had to go up to the Slade School of Art to share the one small Commons Room. I used to watch the lively young artists in their soft clothes and bright colours, so different from the garments worn by my drab, overworked female colleagues studying medicine or geology. But those plaster casts of famous Greek and Roman sculptures—why were sculptures so often of flowingly graceful women?—the mythic Muses on the stairwell, each one apparently enlightening her own academic or artistic sphere, whether history, dance, music, painting, or poetry.

And why were they veiled? Would a face have made them too individual, too self-possessing, so that whatever they gave was somehow still their own, not belonging to the man who received it? I wondered if Mr. James had been afraid to look too hard at his muse, to speak so easily of her, lest she withhold her gifts or disappear. Perhaps I could learn from him how to look for my muse, how to listen for her voice.

However, it was only his voice I heard inside my head in those first long weeks of working together. After finishing two or three prefaces, in December we changed our schedule to make use of more than the morning, as I had first agreed. Mr. James was pleased with my work, and I was typewriting much faster, with almost no mistakes. And so, he had me return in the afternoons to work on another, quite different project, to make corrections on and copies of a play for the London theatre. We took his recently published tale, “Covering End,” and prepared it for the stage, reworking it into a three-act play called “The High Bid,” all because Mr. Johnston Forbes Robertson, the West End actor and producer, had asked Mr. James for it.

First, Mr. James dictated the changes. Then, after I had typed those, he had me mark the pages with a ruler and red ink, underlining the stage directions in red and leaving the dialogue plain. In my more judgemental moments while listening to this new work, I did not think Mr. James’ play-writing was up to his novels and stories. Yet he seemed enchanted by this new project, and I was charmed by his enthusiasm.

He was much more animated with that dictation, pacing the whole room, speaking in different voices for the different characters, using gestures and pauses saturated with emotion. Sometimes I had to add the stage directions as he performed them, because he would forget to spell them out for the written page. We were that comfortable in our work.

At the time, I knew a little about stage productions but not because I had seen very many. No, it was because, while I was with my father up in Uplyme, my friend Ethel and I would dress up and put on little plays for her sister, when Ethel and I were still allowed to be together.

I remember the day when I thought to bring some old clothes of my father’s and grandfather’s to use for costumes. I carried them out of my house, hidden in a big basket, then rode with them on my bicycle down the hill. How Ethel and her sister and I howled when each of us dressed up in trousers, vests, hats, moustaches, and beards. I was the best at it, not only because of my height but also because I could move like a man, and my low voice was a distinct advantage. Usually, I could barely speak aloud, especially with strangers, but it was so different when I was acting. How I loved to play the swashbuckling pirate king or the evil, caped stranger. I always drew the villain’s part.

Sometimes, we would write out our version of “Cinderella” or something we had made up; once it was “The Creatures of Impulse.” (Of course that was my idea for the title!) We would put on several shows for the local children and invite the neighbourhood.

How I loved remembering this as I typed, and then I could bring all that experience to Mr. James and his play. I liked it when Mr. James seemed to be counting on me, but I did not really know how the play would seem to a sophisticated London audience. I thought some of his language seemed stilted, melodramatic even, but perhaps it was that I was only able to hear it. I missed having the charming actress, the handsome actor to embody the story.

It was especially apparent when he was dictating the plays that Mr. James had a beautiful, unusual voice, with its rich baritone colouring the clear and warm phrasing. I enjoyed our play-writing sessions very much. Listening, almost forgetting to work the typewriter, I wondered if the producer would ever find an actor who could play his hero with such a sweet and thrilling sound.

I wondered, too, about Mr. James’ apparent nervousness when he began to dictate each new act. He was slow, hesitant, almost stammering. For the first time, I thought that Mr. James might be shy, even as I was, and so his struggle was intensely interesting to me.

It was an enormous effort to wrench that play into shape for the producer, Mr. Forbes Robertson. Each change, each cut had been a wound for Mr. James and took hours of pacing, dictating, hearing me read it back, then trying again.

Once or twice in that pressured time, I believe, I proved of some help in those revisions, even more than in adding red-ink underlining to indicate the stage directions. I especially loved the American heroine and her spunky ways. I had noticed that at one crucial moment, Mr. James had not given her a reason for one of her speeches. Something had been lost in the to-ings and fro-ings of the various copies and versions of the script.

But how to comment on his mistake, that a character was suddenly acting and speaking in a way that was too brash? I waited for a moment when all was going well and Mr. James seemed in a bright mood. I gathered my courage and ventured, “I wonder if the heroine might be a little too outspoken here. Are we to think of her as a little too charmingly forward? Perhaps—”

He bristled a bit. “Ah, Miss Bosanquet, these rich American women set loose with their father’s or dead husband’s piles of money. Is there anything they don’t think they can say or do?”

I hesitated, then plunged on. “Still, I do think she needs—we need—more of a reason for her brashness here. What was she feeling about that beautiful house, about its handsome and puzzling new owner? Do we know?”

“Ah, I see. I’ve left out a step. This is not old Shakespeare, I mustn’t have her confide her secret passion to the audience in front of the curtain. No, you’re right, I have lost something here. Let me think—”

I waited expectantly, my fingers arched over the keys. And then:

“No, I mustn’t. In fact, I believe I’ll need more time, and I don’t want to waste your time, our time.” Gathering his notes, he went on, “So then, we are done for today. We will take up here tomorrow. Or perhaps it might be next week. I will send for you.”

That’s how it often was. I was glad to help, but there I was with my next day’s pay lost and no way to make it up.

But soon Mr. James was able again to dictate easily, no more stammering, and, perhaps, it seemed to me, in the early scenes his women came even more easily, especially his heroine, Mrs. Gracedew. I believe he had based his imagination of his character’s speaking voice on the American actress we all admired, Gertrude Elliott, since he hoped (as Mr. James explained in a low aside) that he and Mr. Forbes Robertson (who happened to be her husband!) could tempt her into the part.

Once, during a short break for changing the paper, I got up my courage to tell Mr. James how thrilled I was to think I might to be the first to hear the words Miss Elliott was soon to speak on the stage. He laughed with me, for I was blushing.

“You, too, adore her, I think,” he said to me as he went on dictating her lines. The Master’s voice—that beautiful instrument—changed again, becoming warmer, sweeter, more like Miss Elliott’s famous low and musical tone with all it promised of inner strength and beauty and passion. I imagined that he became her, and I imagined the scene with her in it.

That afternoon, there before my machine, I felt the easy flow that now and then happened between us, as his story unfolded and my fingers tapped smoothly, confidently. I wanted nothing to interrupt the flow of that voice, the gradual unveiling, the revelation of that heart and mind to me, as his characters came alive there on the stage in my mind’s eye, while I typed on and on.