1895 The episode has become legendary: James, shamed as a dramatist, returns to his proper profession as a prose stylist to produce his late, great novels. In 2004 the story dominated two (good) novelised biographies of Henry James. Colm Tóibín’s The Master leads with it, and it forms the climax of David Lodge’s Author, Author.
Daringly for such a complex prose stylist famous for his competing points of view, Henry James had tried his hand at a play, Guy Domville, about a man caught in a love triangle while trying to renounce the active life for the priesthood.
James stayed away from the opening, preferring a neighbouring premiere instead, that of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. He thought it dreadful – clumsy, feeble and vulgar – but the audience adored it. What would such a crowd make of Guy Domville? He set off to find out, just as his play was finishing. Greeting him backstage at the Victorian Theatre, actor-manager George Alexander dragged him onstage to take the author’s plaudits.
At first James took the audience’s tumult for approval. He was rudely disabused. They were jeering, not cheering – louder and more abusively as the author’s face rose from his bow of appreciation. ‘The worst part was now’ – Tóibin has imagined it – ‘when he could not conceal the expression on his own face, the look of panic he could not prevent.’
Yet the biographer and critic Richard Ellmann has added a few nuances to the old tale of unmitigated disaster. The next evening James sat through a full performance, which the audience treated respectfully. Critics like William Archer, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw liked it, and it did run for five weeks. Despite the firm resolution entered in his notebook on this day, he wrote another play afterwards – Summersoft, at the instigation of the actress Ellen Terry, though she never produced it – in which Ellmann detects distinct echoes of Wildean dialogue.1
Meanwhile, Alexander was busy working on a new production for the Victorian. Its name? The Importance of Being Earnest.
1 Richard Ellmann, ‘James Amongst the Aesthetes’, in John R. Bradley (ed.), Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 1999, pp. 25–44, 40–1.