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.
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
