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7

“The Real Thing”

January 1908

The question, I recall, struck me as exquisite, and out of a momentary fond consideration of it “The Real Thing” sprang at a bound.

—Henry James

Preface to “The Real Thing” The New York Edition, volume 18

In many little ways, Mr. James encouraged my growing friendship with Nellie Bradley, asking after her, speaking kindly to me of her family, and recalling his first visit to Rye many years before, when he had rented the house on Point Hill to finish one small book, “The Spoils of Poynton,” and then to begin another.

I remember now how busy Mr. James and I had become that cold, wet winter. While we were still working on the prefaces and revisions of the novels and tales, we were putting the finishing touches on “The High Bid,” even while the play was already in production with Forbes Robertson and nearly ready to go for its first run in Scotland. Perhaps thinking of the scenic or dramatic method he needed to write a new play was making Mr. James remember that time years before, when he had tried writing for the theatre—and, I understand, had tragically failed.

“The Spoils of Poynton” was the first piece of writing he had successfully completed after his most public, demoralising theatrical disaster. I understood little about that painful incident when he dictated to me the preface to the piece written soon after that blow. Of course, he avoided mentioning his dramatic failure. In fact, in collecting all his most admirable works and in writing his prefaces, he left out his attempts at writing plays and focused, instead, on everything else. Only later would I come to understand the reason.

Yet with this work, with “The Spoils of Poynton” and its preface, he really let himself go, describing for me in his wildest metaphorical style the process from its idea and spark all the way to the last words of the novella.

We had been steadily working our way through the stacks of his novels and tales, and we often began with where he found his plots. And so, it was on that dark winter morning when he first talked of the germ of the story for “The Spoils of Poynton.” This time, the germ was an anecdote taken from gossip at a dinner party. I was struck by his unusual choices of violent language, by how, in general, his sources of inspiration were becoming appallingly clear: He stole his inspiration from real people’s stories, stole from his friends, stole their tiny terrible moments, their lost dreams, hidden lives, broken promises, cruelties, and lies. He took for his own any chance revelation. Mr. James apparently believed it was the right thing to do. He had not taken much, he dictated to me; he had used the tiniest part of someone’s story—“. . . the prick of inoculation; the whole of the virus, . . .”

As I typed steadily to the sound of his voice, I wondered: Was what he did right? Was that the technique I wanted to learn from him? Why was I reluctant to take on the challenge of Mr. James’ methods? Could I steal, take my friends’ stories, and use them that way? Why not? Was it my lack of courage, my lack of having the necessary, cold-hearted hunger for gobbling up my friends’ stories and spitting them out again?

As Mr. James paused to poke the fire, I wondered: In my diary, had I not been using something from Mr. James’ method? Even on our longest days, I had usually been able to keep up my daily-page habit, recording what had transpired that day.

Mr. James was pacing again, dictating his justifications to my fingers:

“Life being all inclusion and confusion, . . .” and a long pause, then, “. . . and art being all discrimination and selection, . . .”

I wanted to remember those phrases, for it was curious to think how, in general, diary entries can become the truth, somehow promising a basic honesty, a tell-all quality. I had been thinking, I’ll write this down before I have a chance to censor myself, my actions, his words—the old fly-on-the-wall, the témoignage quality that professors and gossips rely on to bring to life their dry recitations of facts and dates.

But I had no time to muse, for I had to type on and record his reasoning:

“. . . life has no direct sense whatever for the subject and is capable, luckily for us, of nothing but splendid waste.”

I admired the balance of his phrases. Yes, this was how a great writer told of his method of drawing from life, I thought, as I bent again to my machine, thinking how in the evening I was slaving over my diary pages, their steady pace, the even slant of letters, the nearly identical length of every entry—how it was all calculated, all controlled, no sudden scribble on some evening after too much brandy. No, even then, I knew I was writing those pages—my “private diary”—for public consumption.

As that first winter passed and as I heard and concentrated my mind and fingers on more and more of the prefaces, I was also listening carefully for my own benefit to Mr. James’ well-thought-out theories of composition. It was in my diary notes that I first endeavoured to make use of his rules and suggestions as I understood them while taking them down.

As he described the germ for “The Spoils of Poynton,” I was caught in his spell when he told me of the story’s inspiration on that Christmas Eve, that brown London night. It seemed as if I were also there at that dinner table, eavesdropping. I was caught. It had all begun with his friend, another guest at the table, telling him of someone she knew, a good lady of the north, freshly widowed, who was engaged in a fierce family battle with her son over her dead husband’s will. Naturally, under entailed British law, the son was to receive everything the mother and father had owned together, even his mother’s precious house and her priceless collections. Everything was left, entailed away, exclusively to the son. Mr. James had thought that this one hint from his dinner companion was enough and dropped out of her conversation to let his mind begin to work out the rest of the story for himself.

As he dictated, describing his curiously (to me) ghoulish practise of picking over the bones of a tragedy, building his art on the ruins of other people’s broken lives, I found myself becoming more and more alarmed.

Again, here was foolish Life, who was notably female—

“I saw clumsy Life again at her stupid work.”

He continued, recalling that he had been forced that Christmas Eve to listen to more of the woman’s story. At some point, I must have made some sort of unconscious, protesting creak with my chair. I could not type it out as he dictated. Mr. James then came closer and, in the most deliberate, even diabolical, of tones, went ahead dictating, forcing me to face the bloody work necessary to reach a story.

He had been caught by the guest’s anecdote, but her first few words—“but ten words”—were all he needed to know, as he thought to himself:

“One had been so perfectly qualified to say in advance: It’s the perfect little workable thing, but she’ll strangle it in the cradle, even while she pretends, all so cheeringly, to rock it;”

His own murderous cheerfulness flowed on as he described to me how he stopped his friend from finishing her tale so that he might extract only the tiniest germ, the one viable cell, and throw out the rest. I was dumbfounded to think he’d had no desire even to attempt to tell the whole story, even to try to deal with the “fatal futility of Fact,” as he alliteratively called it. Instead, he went on blithely to describe how he played with his characters, choosing which ones to throw together, which to send their separate ways, with his main concern apparently over the scenic construction of the story, as if it were a play on a stage.