Dictation (6 page)

"Fully. Completely. I am confident of this. It's only Mrs. Conrad—"

"Very well," Theodora broke in. "This is what you will do, Lilian. I am to give you a passage—some sentences, let us say, or a paragraph or two—this remains to be decided upon. It will be selected from a singular work Mr. James is currently engaged in, a kind of ghost story, about a double, a man appalled by the encroachment of a second self—"

But Lilian gasped, "Why should you give such a thing to me?"

"You must listen attentively, or you will fail to follow. What I propose is not overly intricate, but it demands an orderly patience. We cannot allow missteps, we must be scrupulous. As I say, you will take from me a passage from Mr. James—an exquisite passage, I assure you—and in return I will receive from you some small striking extract from whatever work it is that occupies Mr. Conrad at present."

"Theodora, what nonsense is this, why are you making sport—"

"Mr. James's story is called 'The Jolly Corner.' What name does Mr. Conrad give his?"

"He has settled finally on 'The Secret Sharer,' and though it looks to grow long, it is not to be a novel. A tale rather, an astonishing tale, also about a double, how can this be!—but what has one to do with the other?"

"When we are done, everything. And if you are fastidious, it will yield everything you desire. Please hear me out. After we have made the exchange, you will carefully embed Mr. James's fragment in some hospitable part of Mr. Conrad's final copy, and I will insert Mr. Conrad's into a suitable cleft in Mr. James's manuscript. Now do you see?"

"Do I see? What
should
I see? A confusion, a scramble! What is to be gained by such mischief? Mr. Conrad reads over very thoroughly whatever I show him, and the fair copy when it is ready for print most thoroughly of all. Any foreign matter, whatever its intent, he will instantly detect, he will certainly excise it—"

"He will detect nothing. He will excise nothing. He will not perceive it as foreign matter. Nor will Mr. James."

"Mr. Conrad not to recognize what is and is not his own voice? How can you say this? What is to prevent him from discerning so bizarre an intrusion?"

"A lack of suspicion, a lack of any expectation of the extraneous. Simply that—and something still more persuasive. The egoism of the artist. The greater the art, the greater the egoism—and the greater the assumptions of egoism. Mr. Conrad will read—he will admire—he will wonder at what he believes he has wrought—he will congratulate himself! Privately, in the way of the artist in contemplation of his art. And there it will rest, what you call foreign matter, foreign no more, absorbed, ingested, seamless—a kidnapped diamond to shine through the ages, and you and I, Lilian, will have set it there!"

Theodora blazed; she was all theater; it seemed to Lilian that her fevered look, her shamelessly unbuttoned blouse, her untamed zeal, were more terrible than when Mrs. Patrick Campbell had pretended to be Lady Macbeth—but Theodora was not pretending.

In her mother's flat wail Lilian asked, "And will you also take Mr. James for a dupe?"

"Certainly not. Self-belief is no deception. It is how the artist's mind assimilates and transforms, and who has witnessed these raptures more than we?"

"But what you want from me is a deception all the same. Why do you suppose I care to have any part in it?"

"Because you do care. It means your triumph. Can't you
see,
Lilian? Mrs. Conrad exalts herself—how many times have I heard you complain of this?"

"I complain only of her presumption."

"Precisely. Her presumption in thinking that she has rightful possession of her husband's fecundity, that she is equal to its every motion, that she—she, a wife!—is the habitation of every word, and why? Because she sleeps in his bed. In his bed in the oblivion of night!—when it is you who in the light of day drink in the minutest vibrations of his spirit. What will Mrs. Conrad ever know of the kidnapped diamond? As long as you live, you will own this secret. If she demeans you, what will it matter? You have the hidden proof of her exclusion. Her exclusion! What deeper power than the power of covert knowledge? A victory, Lilian—see it, take it!"

Lilian was silent. Then "Ah," she murmured. And again, as if born for the first time into airy breath, "Ah."

Oh, easily, easily done! Lilian was satisfied, she was assuaged, she was enticed, she was caught; she was
in.
It was plain to Theodora that Miss Stephen ...
Ginny
... could not have been won over so readily. Miss Stephen was not so pliant. Miss Stephen was prone to mockery—she was no one's confederate, she went her own way. Sometimes, she said, she could hear the birds sing in Greek.

***

And so Theodora's determined map, with its side roads and turnings, proceeded.

"How fortuitous," she told Lilian, "to find ourselves so very far advanced even before we have rightly begun. We could not be better placed. This image of a strange and threatening alter ego—that two such illustrious minds should seize on an identical notion!"

"But Mr. Conrad's is a tale of the sea," Lilian demurred.

"That is why you must remember to keep clear of vistas—we cannot allow Mr. James's indoor characters to go wandering over Mr. Conrad's watery world. And the same with interiors: they must not fall into contradiction, a chimney-piece abutting a mast. As for names and dialogue, these too must be avoided—"

"If we are to omit all that," Lilian argued, "what remains to be extracted?"

The vexation of a dull counterpart. What would be the point of it all if the result were to fail of beauty, of artfulness?

"The heart, the lung, the blood and the brain!" Theodora shot out. "What we mean to search for are those ruthless invokings, those densest passages of psychological terror that can chill the bone. Pick out a charged exactitude, tease out of your man the root of his fertility—"

Theodora halted; she looked hard at Lilian: fearful dry celibate Lilian. How to arouse her to reckless nerve, to position her at the mouth of the beckoning labyrinth? To crank her imagination into life? She had been induced to favor the goal. She must now be induced to brave the dive.

"Lilian," Theodora dared, "I entreat you: squeeze out the very semen of the thing!"

Lilian neither blushed nor paled. "When we were first taken to see Warren's body, Mother and I," she said, "it was I who observed that the bullet, though applied to the head, had done exactly that. I have never forgotten the sight of it."

Theodora was chastened. "Then you are ready for our venture."

And still there were brambles and stiles on the way: the matter of timing, for one, impossible to predict or control. The synchronization vital to success. It was not a race, and even if it had been, it was scarcely likely that a pair of magisterial eminences would reach the finish line together. Now and again either Theodora or Lilian was obliged to temporize, and it happened once that Mr. Pinker received two notes only days apart, each puzzling over an untoward delay:

Dear Pinker,

Am being held up, though you should have the promised clutch of pages before too long. Miss Hallowes regretfully reports that her ribbon is fading toward illegibility. A fresh one awaits at the stationer's. In the meantime I am bursting with various damnations—

Yrs,
J. Conrad

My dear Pinker,

To attend most confidingly to your anxiety: Miss Bosanquet is indeed conscientiously aware of the exigencies of Scribner et al. I rely on her own admirable impatience—she assures me that she hastens, she drives on!

Yours faithfully,
Henry James

Nevertheless it is on an ordinary Thursday afternoon in the late winter of 1910 that the illumined moment strikes. It erupts with the miraculous yet altogether natural simultaneity of petals in a flowerbed unfolding all at once. Or else (so Theodora conceives it) as an ingeniously skilled artisan will slide a wedge of finely sanded wood into its neighboring groove to effect an undetectable coupling. Mortise and tenon!—the fit flawless, perfected, burnished. Or else (as Lilian, hesitant still, yet elated, sees it): like two birds trading nests, noiselessly, delicately, each one instantly at home.

In Henry James's London rooms a small dazzling fragment of "The Secret Sharer" flows, as if ordained, into the unsuspecting veins of "The Jolly Corner," and in Joseph Conrad's study in a cottage in Kent the hot fluids of "The Jolly Corner" run, uninhibited, into a sutured crevice in "The Secret Sharer." There is no visible seam, no hair's-breadth fissure; below the surface—submicroscopically, so to speak—the chemical amalgam causes no disturbance, molecule melds into molecule all serenely. And meanwhile Mrs. Conrad goes on sniffing and frowning in those leisured intervals when her husband and his amanuensis sit smoking together—but Lilian, far from cowering, only glows. And Theodora?—well, it makes up for fickle Miss Stephen's recent defection that Theodora has, after all, won more than an ephemeral kiss.

What has Theodora won? Exactly the thing she so resplendently envisioned: two amanuenses, two negligible footnotes overlooked by the most diligent scholarship, unsung by all the future, leaving behind an immutable mark—an everlasting sign that they lived, they felt, they acted! An immortality equal to the unceasing presence of those prodigious peaks and craters thrown off by some meaningless cataclysm of meteorites: but peaks and craters are careless nature's work, while Theodora and Lilian humanly, mindfully, with exacting intent, dictate the outcome of their desires. Lilian wills her hopeful fragile spite. Theodora commands her fingerprint, all unacknowledged, to be eternally engraven, as material and manifest as peak and crater. And so it is, and so it will be.

As for James and Conrad, in personal and literary character they are too unlike to sustain the early ardor of their long friendship. Though it has cooled, they are, if unwittingly, bonded forever: a fact in plain print, and in successive editions, that no biographer has yet been able to trace.

What is most extraordinary of all, however, is that Miss Bosanquet and Miss Hallowes, after the changelings were crucially implanted, never spoke another word to each other, nor did they ever meet again. It is probable that posterity, gullible as always, will suppose that they never met at all. But—truth to tell—posterity will have nothing in particular to remark of either one, there being no significant record extant.

NOTE:
Among the historical actualities imagination dares to flout are club rules and death. Was Leslie Stephen in his grave nearly a decade before he makes his appearance here, and was no woman permitted to set foot in London's all-male Reform Club? Never mind, says Fiction; what fun, laughs Transgression; so what? mocks Dream.

Matt Sorley, born Mose Sadacca, was an actor. He was a character actor and (when they let him) a comedian. He had broad, swarthy, pliant cheeks, a reddish widow's peak that was both curly and balding, and very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys. His stage name had a vaguely Irish sound, but his origins were Sephardic. One grandfather was from Constantinople, the other from Alexandria. His parents could still manage a few words of the old Spanish spoken by the Jews who had fled the Inquisition, but Matt himself, brought up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was purely a New Yorker. The Brooklyn that swarmed in his speech was useful. It got him parts.

Sometimes he was recognized in the street a day or so following his appearance on a television lawyer series he was occasionally on call for. These were serious, mostly one-shot parts requiring mature looks. The pressure was high. Clowning was out, even in rehearsals. Matt usually played the judge (three minutes on camera) or else the father of the murder victim (seven minutes). The good central roles went to much younger men with rich black hair and smooth flat bellies. When they stood up to speak in court, they carefully buttoned up their jackets. Matt could no longer easily button his. He was close to sixty and secretly melancholy. He lived on the Upper West Side in a rent-controlled apartment with a chronic leak under the bathroom sink. He had a reputation for arguing with directors; one director was in the habit of addressing him, rather nastily, as Mr. Surly.

His apartment was littered with dictionaries, phrase books, compendiums of scientific terms, collections of slang, encyclopedias of botany, mythology, history. Frances was the one with the steady income. She worked for a weekly crossword puzzle magazine, and by every Friday had to have composed three new puzzles in ascending order of complexity. The job kept her confined and furious. She was unfit for deadlines and tension; she was myopic and suffered from eyestrain. Her neck was long, thin, and imperious, with a jumpy pulse at the side. Matt had met her, right out of Tulsa, almost twenty years ago on the tiny stage of one of those downstairs cellar theaters in the Village—the stage was only a clearing in a circle of chairs. It was a cabaret piece, with ballads and comic songs, and neither Matt nor Frances had much of a voice. This common deficiency passed for romance. They analyzed their mutual flaws endlessly over coffee in the grimy little café next door to the theater. Because of sparse audiences, the run petered out after only two weeks, and the morning after the last show Matt and Frances walked downtown to City Hall and were married.

Frances never sang onstage again. Matt sometimes did, to get laughs. As long as Frances could stick to those Village cellars she was calm enough, but in any theater north of Astor Place she faltered and felt a needlelike chill in her breasts and forgot her lines. And yet her brain was all storage. She knew words like "fenugreek," "kermis," "sponson," "gibberellin." She was angry at being imprisoned by such words. She lived, she said, behind bars; she was the captive of a grid. All day long she sat fitting letters into squares, scrambling the alphabet, inventing definitions made to resemble conundrums, shading in the unused squares. "Grid and bear it," she said bitterly, while Matt went out to take care of ordinary household things—buying milk, picking up his shirts from the laundry, taking his shoes to be resoled. Frances had given up acting for good. She didn't like being exposed like that, feeling nervous like that, shaking like that, the needles in her nipples, the numbness in her throat, the cramp in her bowel. Besides, she was embarrassed about being nearsighted and hated having to put in contact lenses to get through a performance. In the end she threw them in the trash. Offstage, away from audiences, she could wear her big round glasses in peace.