On Reading Henry James
by Hugh Mahoney
Henry James, for all of his faults and eccentricities, remains the preeminent American novelist. Despite his disdain for the reader-self proclaimed-his books last as few of his contemporaries' have and are more widely read today than they were a hundred years ago.
His later novels fall into two categories: the not so easy and the rather hard. On the other hand, readers approaching James for the first time can easily access the earlier works. If we stop midway through James's prodigious output-some twenty novels and over a hundred shorter works of fiction-we avoid the challenge of impossibly long sentences, of hopelessly tangled syntax, of paragraphs that run on for pages, of passages of explication and dialogue that remain as unintelligible on third and fourth reading as they did at first glance. Washington Square and Portrait of a Lady, to name two of the better novels from James's early and middle period, are straightforward narratives presenting no insurmountable obstacles to the reader drawn to novels of idea. Drinking deep from The Golden Bowl, however-that is quite another matter.
Henry James was born in New York City in 1843, the second son of a wealthy Christian Socialist theologian and writer. His older brother, William James, was the noted philosopher and psychologist. He spent much of his boyhood in Europe, receiving a year of schooling in Geneva and little more at any other location. Nearly all of his education came from tutors. He published his first story, in The Atlantic Monthly, at the age of twenty-two. Four years later, in 1869, he moved permanently to Europe, first to Paris and then to England, where he spent the rest of his life unattached-he never married, never took on a companion-producing an immense amount of work in nearly every literary field: novels, novellas, short stories, plays, biography and autobiography, criticism and essays. Most of his characters would be drawn from his own expatriate American experience. He remained an American citizen until World War I when finally, in angry retaliation for his native country's delay in entering the war, he took out British citizenship. He died in London a few months later, in February of 1916.
If we skip the final page of Henry James's dazzling novel of an independent American woman, Portrait of a Lady can be said to be one of the very best novels of the English language.Portrait, written during his middle period, holds the same position today that it did in the writer's lifetime, the novel many critics and most readers still think James's best. What a joy to read! The tale of Isabel Archer is a page-turner, and well past one's bed time, after laying the book aside, we sit there pondering, How did he do it? How did James maintain such a high level of suspense in a novel where so much of the story remains inside the heads of his characters? Isabel Archer inherits a fortune from her American-in-England uncle and determines to spend it in pursuit of freedom and self-discovery. The first half of the novel reads like an early and subtly envisioned feminist tale, ground James would cultivate more explicitly, if less enjoyably, in The Bostonians. But the story darkens. After rejecting two fine young suitors, Isabel marries a "sterile dilettante," "a monster," in the words of those concerned with her welfare, a man bent on destroying her soul. On one level, Portrait is a love story that has less to do with love than with its rejection. It is said that feminine fiction is all about conversation and relationships. This being so, how did James-James has at least one foot in that genre-keep the reader of this intellectualized novel about relationships glued to the page, impatient to learn how the heroine will manage the mess she finds herself in? An important technique James uses to maintain suspense is to posit a question and make the reader wait for an answer. If this is to work, in novels where the action is largely interior, residing in the consciousness of the characters, the questions, and the thoughts that give rise to them, must be of sufficient interest to hold ours. In The Bostonians, the questions are not of particular interest and the answers are far too long in coming. In consequence, the novel reads as if padded and repetitive. This is not the case in the best of James. In Portrait, Wings of a Dove and The Golden Bowl, we continue turning pages because the questions intrigue us and we anticipate the answers: Is it better to marry for friendship or out of passion? Will the close-knit group in the Bowl break their code of discretion to reveal the worm at the core? More often than not the answers to the questions are disclosed in artfully honed dialogue that says just as much and no more than James wishes to say:
"Yes, you're changed; you've got new ideas over here," her friend continued.
"I hope so," said Isabel; "one should get as many new ideas as possible."
"Yes; but they shouldn't interfere with the old ones when the old ones have been the right ones."
What can be said of Jane Austen can be said of James to a lesser degree: it's all about dialogue. Although with James there is less conversation and more psychological probing than with Austen, James has passages of dialogue that match hers, that match, in fact, any in the language. In James, it's interior travel that defines character-no American writer takes longer or deeper looks into character than does James-but it's dialogue that tells the story, and more often than not, he, like Austen, tells a good one.
Six hundred pages of engaged reading make the ending of Portrait of a Lady that much more disappointing. It does, in fact, cause the reader to question the integrity of the author. The reader has been toyed with, tricked it turns out, by a writer's brilliant creation that he did not know how to end, so ended it poorly. Many commentators have called the ending of Portrait"paradoxical." It's not. It's perverse. To send Isabel Archer, whose life in a long novel has been devoted to a meditation on freedom, to send this intelligent, remarkably independent, even defiant character back to her emasculating husband, defies literary logic. And a rereading of the famous Chapter 42, where Isabel contemplates her life and the fix she's in, brilliant as the writing in this passage is, does little to mitigate the damage done. Isabel's reasons for marrying the despicable Osmond are not well developed, and her return to a man determined to eviscerate her soul is even less well supported. To justify the ending by claiming divorce was not an option in Isabel's time, as apologists of James have done, begs the question. Isabel needn't have taken such a forbidden step. What is the role in the novel of Mrs. Trochett, Isabel's aunt and mentor and an important character, if not to demonstrate another way? If you can't get along with the man, buy a castle in Florence and go live there (money, or its lack, is always a major player with James, and in this instance, the protagonist has it).
Or perhaps James did see that granting Isabel Archer her freedom was the only proper ending to his novel and instead chose the misogynist alternative-send her back to the husband whose primary interest was to strip her of her personality. A valid deduction, because he would do the same in T
he Bostonians:
create a sympathetic feminist character only to have her capitulate in the novel's brief final passage to an aggressively chauvinist male. There's an offensive streak in James that he was either unaware of, or of which he was aware but knowing his own virility was in question, elected the bully male position to beef up his own shaky masculine image.
As a rule, I put writers who play tricks on their readers on my no-read list. I do not recommend their books. But no such option exists here. Portrait of a Lady is far too significant a work, and far too enjoyable a read (omitting that last page) to be ignored. So do as I advise: just skip the ending and write your own. You will not be doing violence to the work. I may not be the first, or the last commentator to suggest this was the author's expectation all along.
Recently a well-read young friend revealed to me, hesitantly, for he was embarrassed by his confession, that try as he might, he had not been able to move beyond the earlier novels of Henry James. He had failed utterly to decode The Golden Bowl, a failure he found particularly difficult to accept because this was, after all, Henry James, the consummate American novelist. Not to be able to read what uncompromising critics consider the master's finest work-well, this the young man thought, called into question his own level of literacy. I reminded him that even Henry's brilliant brother William, the acknowledged American master of philosophy and psychology, found Henry's novels something of a challenge, but this did not stop him (or discerning readers a century later) from reading his brother. I urged my friend not to give up, that James brought everything in his stylistic bag of tricks, for good and for ill, to bear on this his ultimate work. I then gave my friend the following advice:
Read the last works of Henry James as you would view a painting by one of the great Impressionist painters, Seurat perhaps. To appreciate the painting you must stand back, allow your eye to roam the canvas collecting dabs of color into a visually coherent whole. Do not fasten on a patch of pixeled paint that taken alone does not communicate an image. And by analogy, applying the same technique to James, don't let yourself get bogged down in a dense thicket of Latinate words-modified by imperspicaciously contrived adverbs not to be found in a standard dictionary-beginning (no referent supplied) with a capital letter and stuttering through any number of restrictive, or should we say precautiously inquisitive clauses, each a marvelously executed miniature, often no more than an inconspicuously applied dab of verbal color, distinguished, each from the other, like diminutive portraits outlined in black by every mark of punctuation known to the language, this while not failing to indiscriminately festoon them with a sprinkling of words set in italics, maliciously, one suspects, to inhibit the reader yet further, to end finally with a period, a small black dot, long after the reader has lost the referent of all this meticulously wrought, and we should say brilliant, detail, leaving him finally humiliatingly ignorant of what the author intended to say-be patient, James whispers. I will bring you into port; skim, I advised my friend, allowing your eye to glide through paragraphs, running on in indiscriminate intimidation for multiple pages, gathering an impression here and another there to ultimately come to rest on a passage written in reasonably coherent syntax, for James, more often than not a passage of radiant dialogue-although even here intelligibility can not be assured with absolute certainty-which serves as explication for the indecipherable pages preceding your final enlightenment. Did you get that? I hope so because if you can find the key to the Jamesian style-that is, learn to unravel the syntax-you will find no more superbly envisioned literary work in the American cannon than James's final masterpiece, The Golden Bowl.
Once you've got the Bowl's story under your belt, I suggested to my friend, you can always go back and try again. Second time around, James is a much easier read, allowing for a greater appreciation of this master of craft. Advice that holds for many of James's later works.
To get by with what Henry James does in this novel a writer must have really good material-and no one has come up with a more intriguing literary concept than the toxic knot of relationships contained in The Golden Bowl.
From page one in all of his best novels, Dr. James puts his people on the couch, and this gives the reader immense power. James makes us privy to the intimate psychic machinery of his characters as if we were concealed behind the drapery, listening with cupped ear, as the characters reveal, obliquely, their innermost thoughts. Just as the psychiatrist does not listen to every rambling word of his patient under study, so the reader of James is not expected to hang on to every word of this notoriously verbose writer,
but rather like the shrink, to pick up on those expressions relevant to the case and let the rest float by. As we listen, the prose of
The Golden Bowl becomes more transparent until, by the time we reach the final hundred pages, reading the
Bowl is almost as easy as reading
Washington Square.
In James, don't look for action to carry you forward, not action in the sense of physical acts, movement from here to there. There's very little of that anywhere in his mature work and even less in James's final novel. Neither does he make much use of straight narration; typically thoughts of a character recorded by the ubiquitous and cognizant "I" narrator lead us on, deliberations which more often than not are presented obliquely, one character reflecting on the nature and thoughts of another. But that's not to say there isn't plot, revealed through dialogue, and a good deal of suspense rising almost exclusively from the interior ruminations of his characters.
The Golden Bowl's story is one of subtle psychological relationships: between daughter Maggie and her very rich father, Adam Verver; between Maggie and her best friend Charlotte; between Maggie and her husband, the Prince, a man of beauty, brains and breeding but no money who has been purchased by the father as husband for her.
Each in this foursome reflects on the character and motivations of the others, all made incestuously convoluted when Charlotte, with the same qualifications and needs as the Prince-the three Bs and no money-marries Verver, making daughter and best friend stepdaughter and stepmother-and by extension, making Charlotte mother-in-law to her lover, the Prince, her best friend's husband.
It's a complex study of relational intrigue that defies synopsis, but is much easier to keep track of in the book. There's no blurring of characters here: Maggie, the loving daughter; her husband the Prince, bought and paid for; Charlotte, born to be rich but isn't; and the famously rich Verver; each of these expatriates in England stands distinct and unique, yet interdependent, in an abstract world where no one works or pursues an avocation even, like writing or painting (some play a little music), where no one does anything, to be sure, other than reflect upon the nuance of character and motivation of family members. The foursome moves in a near void with none of the "human fringes," to use Edith Wharton's term in criticizing her friend's penchant for creating characters lacking the pedestrian detail that hangs about our lives. The characters often set down to table, but we are never told what they eat. Book in hand, we are not told what they read. We never learn the source of the father's great wealth. Money is a major player in the novel-it's what brought these expatriates together and holds them in bondage-but we are never given a clear notion of where and how he made it: American City, the supposed font of the Verver millions, remains a symbol, not a site. Other than reflecting at great length on what motivates the other members of the household, we learn almost nothing of how these people spend their day. But unlike earlier James works-Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians where too often insufficient evidence causes us to question the characters' motivations-in the Golden Bowl we learn a great deal of what compels these people to behave as they do, and their reasons read like a catalog of the seven deadly sins-sloth, greed, lust, envy-all artfully concealed beneath a veneer of mannered high society. James is often said to be one of the early practitioners of realism, but there is very little of the real world to be found in The Golden Bowl. It's a surrealistic world, the aloof, detached and dreamlike world of the super rich, the beautiful people-James actually uses the term in the novel-with nothing to do but plumb the infinitely refined inducements behind trivial acts that, as they cumulate, constitute character, where the sexless nature of the characters-like the public persona of James himself-stand in odd relationship to a story necessarily laden with sex. It does, however, this world of the Golden Bowl, lend itself to sensual misbehavior-James builds his story on it-albeit in forms as obscurely closeted as was the writer's own sexual life. Nothing overt, no hand on the breast, no torrid bed scene; we are, in fact, in The Golden Bowl, unsure at the end if Charlotte did in fact bed the Prince, her best friend's husband. I tend to think she did, and so, apparently, does Maggie, because she takes revenge in ways that only a friend betrayed, a friend who holds the purse strings, can mete out. Using her father as instrument, she exiles the fabulously beautiful, the eminently fashionable and high-society-loving Charlotte to the quintessentially unfashionable sticks of the American Midwest. And now the Jamesian touch, the turn of the screw: No one, not Maggie, not the Prince, not Verver, each for private reasons, will reveal to Charlotte that her adultery has been found out, and the hapless woman is sent into exile tormented by not knowing the reason why.
The Golden Bowl as well as several other James novels have been made into films. The movie makers took their first crack at a James novel in 1949 with Washington Square, a straightforward tale, for James, and easily told. The movie was released as The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, to great commercial and critical success.Washington Square won a basket of Academy awards, including best actress and best picture. The Wings of the Dove, released in 1997, also did reasonably well both at the box office and with the critics-Helena Bonham Carter garnered an Academy Award nomination for best actress in the role of Kate Croy. But neither Portrait of a Lady or The Golden Bowl, also filmed in the Nineties, opened to much critical or commercial success. Both died an early death. Understandably. Too often movie makers who tackle James cannot get much beyond costume drama. The attempt by Hollywood and television to bring the characters of these middle to late James novels to the surface sacrificed the very quality that won for his novels their unique position in American letters-psychological depth. Hollywood is not equipped to present characters deep in interior deliberations. In consequence, there is no shortcut to Henry James. He must be read; his genius is lost in translation.
It should be mentioned, if only to offer a kinder explanation for a less than courageous summing of a fine novel, that James published
Portrait in installments in
The Atlantic Monthly. It's not clear if he had finished the novel at the time of first publication. Perhaps a deadline caught James without a well thought out ending to a story he thought already occupied too many pages, running in fourteen installments for over a year. With the presses humming, perhaps he just wanted to wind the thing up and sent in his perfunctory ending-disappointing at best, dishonorable at worst. Which, by the way, he let stand in his 1908 revisions of the novel. Not surprising: James was fond of ending his novels on a desultory note.
By the time James began
The Golden Bowl, he was dictating his novels for later transcription, and as he was famously loquacious in conversation, so he was in print.
In Henry James's day, aristocratic prostitution-marriage to the highest bidder-was a respectable trade, or was at least less detrimental to the reputation of a woman than a man. To make his "beautiful" hustler male may offer a peek into James's own carefully cloistered sexual psychology.
© 2008 by Hugh Mahoney.
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