Middle-class humourist
Peter Ackroyd
Three Men in a Boat annotated and in- troduced by Christopher Matthew and Ben- n; Green (Pavilion £12.50) In 1882 Oscar Wilde, while on a lecture tour of the United States, was taken to see the Niagara Falls: 'Every American bride is taken there,' he said afterwards, 'and the sight of that stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American mar- ried life.' 26 years later, Jerome K Jerome, himself on a lecture tour of the same coun- try, also visited the Falls. 'Niagara,' he wrote, disappointed me. I had some trouble in finding it. The tram conductor promised to let me know when we came to the proper turning, but he forgot'. And there, in miniature, we have the two faces of Victo- rian culture — one which died with Wilde, and one introduced by Jerome. Wilde is sharp, superior, a little patronising; Jerome is modest, somewhat flat, very much the 'ordinary chap'. There have been no Wildes of the twentieth century, but we have been living with Jeromes ever since.
Jerome Klapka Jerome was a most un- likely figure to have invented the easy- going, middle-class humour which even now still bears his mark. The standard photographs show a mild-looking gen- tleman, reclining beneath a tree or sitting with a dog on his lap, and yet he had no reason whatever for such benignity. His early years were of unrelieved wretchedness and desperation — the standard childhood of a Victorian writer, perhaps, but one who like Dickens should have reaped a whirl- wind from his childish sighs and groans. He was born in 1859: his father was a Con- gregationalist minister who determined to make his fortune from various business enterprises. All of them failed, and Jerome was brought up in the miserable back
streets of London: .... about the East End of London,' he wrote later, 'there is a menace, a haunting terror that is to be found nowhere else.' As a child he was nicknamed 'Luther' and for recreation read Foxe's Book of Martyrs; he was a dreamy, melancholy child much given to wandering around London and sitting on the tops of trams and buses. On one such excursion he claims to have encountered Charles Dickens in Victoria Park, Hackney; it is nice to think of Dickens recognising in this wretch- ed solitary boy an image of himself. He was not to know, of course, that the boy himself would gain an equivalent reputation as a humourist. One does not think of such things in Hackney.
Jerome's father died when the boy was 12. At the age of 14 he became a railway clerk, and then his mother died also: '1 lay beside her, my head upon her breast, as I used to when a little boy. And when the morning came I was alone.' It is a perfect life so far, is it not? And when we discover that Jerome spent his teenage years alone, afraid and miserable, we might imagine the beginnings of a wonderful and powerful novelist. But he was unable or unwilling to explore his passions — he turned them into humour instead; introspection became, for him, the material of wry jocosity only.
The rest of the story can be quickly told: failed actor; vagabondage; a penny-a-line journalist; schoolmaster; sends contribu- tions to magazines which unfailingly send them straight back. And then at last, at the age of 26, that piece of good fortune which changes the life of a writer. A percipient editor liked his pieces and printed them; an equally perspicacious publisher offered him a contract. If the book in question had been Three Men in a Boat, we would have had the makings of a literary fairy-tale; but in fact Jerome's first book was the now little- known On The Stage — and Off, a collec- tion of humorous dramatic essays. It was followed by Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, his first popular success. It went in- to 12 editions, no doubt in part because of the unfamiliarity of the style. The tone was, for the Eighties, quite shocking — 'What readers ask now-a-days in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow'. Already the Jeromian manner is developing nicely: that tone at once amused and self-deprecatory, an ease of manner which suggests that here is someone who is on exactly the same level 'The way kids wear their hair nowadays shows a contempt for decent society' as the reader (this is very important, as we shall see). 15,000 copies of the book were sold. Although Jerome earned from it onlY £150. But if he had not earned his fortune, he had certainly made a reputation. He became known as the originator of 'the new humour', and was violently at- tacked for it in Punch (who nicknamed him 'Arry K. 'Arry) and elsewhere. For 'new humour meant only that Jerome had had the nerve to find his comic themes in middle-class life, and had been able t0 create sympathetic characters out of people who said things like 'Ain't you going to Put the boots in?' The reviews were more spiteful still when, in 1889, Arrowsmall published Three Men in a Boat. As the whole world knows by now, this little book was based upon a trip down the Thames which Jerome had taken with two friends, Wingrave and Hentschel. There is a picture of them on the back of this biography — Jerome is wearing a striped cap and is reclining nonchalantly on the grass while his friends, looking much less relaxed, are propped against a tree. Jerome had in fact good reason to feel at ease: he has the affable, bright look of an artist who had at last found his proper subject. It seems that he had at first envisaged writing a history of the Thames, with only passages of comedy: 'I decided to write the humourous relief first, get it off my chest, so to speak. After which, in sober frame 0' mind, I could tackle the scenery and the history. I never got there'. There is more than a touch of the faux naif about this statement, and I'm inclined to believe that Jerome knew exactly what he was doing. Even if he did not arrange it consciously, he proceeded by instinct to the heart of the matter — his genius guided him to the material where it could find its proper home Everyone knows why Three Men in 0 Boat is funny, but its success does not rest upon its comedy alone. It has a deeper resonance, not unconnected with the fact, that Jerome had already read and admired Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. This Is English pastoral, of course, at once more self-conscious and ironic than the American version but it is pastoral nonetheless — pro- viding a roseate world of freedom and 01 nonsense where the ordinary claims of Vic- torian civilisation can be so gently guYe° that that civilisation itself takes on a beiligri and wondrous glow. If Jerome could not change the world which had 'once treated him so cruelly, he could disarm it. And 5°, those who first read the book were offered an image of Victorian England shorn of its nastiness and confusion, both unreal in its lightness of touch but convincingly real In its use of ordinary speech and detail. After Three Men in a Boat Jeroille became a 'personality'. He edited a sue; cessful magazine until a libel action forced A him into debt; he travelled widely, an°, wrote stern pieces about Russia an America. He also managed to comPlet.e another 30 books and plays. With the poss!' ble exception of his autobiographical novel, Paul Kelver, and a play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, that later work has not survived in public memory. I have never read any of it myself and, despite Mr Con- °IlY's brave partisanship, I am not persuad: ed that I should. Jerome himself, in his usual self-deprecating manner, seems to have suspected as much. 'Having won suc- cess as a humourist, I immediately became serious. I have a kink in my brain, I sup- Pose. I can't help it.'
Joseph Connolly has written a competent and entertaining biography; if he has failed fully to define the complex psychological adjustment of the wretched child into the benign author, it has to be said that there is very little material with which he could have Worked. Jerome fashioned himself, in his writings, into the image of the 'ordinary man' and, since he lived through the rise and fall of the aesthetic 'Yellow Nineties', he was wise to harbour his genius in what Was then so un-ordinary a fashion. But he Was endearing nonetheless, and Mr Connol- lY has written a most endearing study. Its Only fault is that it lacks illustrations and Photographs, but that loss has been amply remedied by a new edition of Three Men in Boat, annotated and introduced by Benny Green and Christopher Matthew. It must be the most thorough, and is certainly the Most lavish, version of the novel. If your old Arrowsmith is dog-eared, buy this text. Here you will find a striking photograph of Jerome himself, clutching his dog. He looks Prosperous and happy (to say nothing of the dog). He could easily be a pork butcher. Here is a writer we can all envy.
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