Arthur Symons' "The Life and Adventures of Lucy Newcome": Preface and Text

332 ARTHUR SYMONS' "THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF LUCY NEWCOME": PREFACE AND TEXT By Alan Johnson (Arizona State University) The story which follows, "The Life and Adventures of Lucy Newcome" by Arthur Symons, has never appeared in print before. The story's central character, Lucy, however, is familiar to readers of Symons from two published stories. "The Childhood of Lucy Newcome" appeared in The Savoy, 8^ (December 1896), 51-61, and then in Symons' Spiritual Adventures (1905). In this story Lucy is orphaned at about the age of twelve and goes to live with an aunt. In "Pages from the Life of Lucy Newcome" in The Savoy, 2 (April 1896), 14760 , Lucy has been seduced and abandoned by her cousin and struggles to support her baby by working as a laundress in London. When the child dies, Lucy becomes a gentleman's mistress. In "The Life and Adventures . . ." she is, as the story's closing sentence says, a "cultivated woman, with her . . . books and her aspirations and her pictures," but also "a prostitute." As I have explained elsewhere,1 Symons intended the three stories to be a "novel à la Goncourt"—a fiction, that is, in the style of such novels as Germinie Lacerteux (1864) and Chérie (1884) by Jules and Edmond de Goncourt. As Symons said in a notice, "The Goncourts," in The Saturday Review for December 29, 1894, their aim was to render "the inédit of life"—everyday yet novel details—and especially "an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses." This aim led them to set aside conventional plot and to "represent life by a series of moments" in "chapters, which are generally quite disconnected, and sometimes less than a page in length" (702). The Goncourts began with the life of their maid in Germinie Lacerteux. Symons began his "novel à la Goncourt" with Muriel Broadbent, a prostitute whom he met in the stalls of the Alhambra Theatre in the early 1890s. She became the mistress of the architect and writer, Herbert Home, and is the "Mu" who made tea for Verlaine, Home, and Symons in Symons' rooms at Fountain Court, in the Temple, during the French poet's visit to London in November 1893.2 She told her life's story to Symons in and around 1896, and he completed "The Life and Adventures . . ."by 1898. In this story, according to Symons himself, "Sebastian is Home. I am Cecil."3 The "inédit" of the story creates a vivid picture of London in the 1890s, of the prostitutes, artistic men, and men of wealth who met in its music halls, and especially of the complex, fictional woman, Lucy. 333 The geographical axis of Symons' story extends from Farringdon Street Station in east-central London, near St. Paul's Cathedral, westward along Fleet Street, where the Mitre Tavern of the story was probably located,4 onwards along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, and then over to "the more bachelor part of Belgravia" to the west, beyond Buckingham Palace, and onwards even farther west to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert), where Lucy goes to look at art. At Trafalgar Square Lucy visits the National Gallery, but Gatti's Music Hall was also there—on Villiers Street beside Charing Cross Station (where a music hall may be found today as well). The Gatti's restaurant to which Cecil suggests he and Lucy go in Section VIII is either next door to the music hall or (more probably) another restaurant in Gatti's chain of eating places at No. 436 Strand. The oyster bar which she prefers, in Coventry Street, is a few blocks northwest of Trafalgar Square between Leicester Square and (to the west) Piccadilly Circus. The triangle formed by the two squares and Piccadilly Circus is the geographical—and the commercial, aesthetic, and, one might say, spiritual—heart of the story, for here are the great music halls: the London Pavilion at Piccadilly Circus, and the Empire and the Alhambra facing one another in Leicester Square. With the rebuilding or refurbishing of the theatres as music halls in the 1880s, these ornate palaces with their bawdy song and...