A villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo - detail in James

The smart thing to do would be to expand – or, honestly, rewrite – yesterday’s business about how Henry James sometimes allows ambiguities that other writers telling similar stories would close off, whether to satisfy convention or to show off their cleverness.  I have a strong taste for writers in the latter group, so this is a reason I do not always read James so well.  I am looking for the wrong kind of clues and solving the wrong mystery.  Failing to solve, of course.  But I will save this for “The Figure in the Carpet.”

Now I will mention a characteristic of James that I think is related, his maddening physical vagueness, which unfortunately intersects another strong taste for the opposite.  Neither of these are merely tastes, but well-defined, justifiable aesthetic positions, but that is irrelevant for this whine about the difficulties of reading James.

The fixed observer of “The Pupil” is a tutor who becomes entangled with a slippery, almost devious family, the Moreens, rich enough to lounge around Europe as long as they occasionally skip town ahead of their creditors.  The tutor is not the narrator but is what D. G. Myers calls a “third-person onlooker,” an outsider who observes only pieces of the family’s eventful story and does not comprehend everything he does see.  The real story, the important one, is the deep friendship between the tutor and his sickly, sensitive pupil and the alliance they form against the boy’s horrible family, so of course the tutor’s point of view is perfect for all of that, even if it is a story taking place “backstage” in some sense.

A description of the chaotic family, part of it, early in “The Pupil”:

They lived on macaroni and coffee—they had these articles prepared in perfection—but they knew recipes for a hundred other dishes.  They overflowed with music and song, were always humming and catching each other up, and had a sort of professional acquaintance with Continental cities.  They talked of “good places” as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players.  They had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo, and they went to official parties.  (718)

Now, there is a lot to like here, obviously.  Strolling players!  A banjo!  One of the marriageable daughters even strums it a bit later.  Henry James is not typically described as efficient, is he?  But this is pretty crisp.  The tutor “once found [the father] shaving in the drawing room.”  They all mix their French and Italian with “cold, tough slices of American.”  It takes just one long paragraph to pump the Moreens full of life.

But the description remains at this level.  Scenes are almost entirely conversation, sometimes but not always with a few words to establish the setting.  James is specific when generalizing, and general when specific.

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) begins with a long party scene in which Mann describes what every character is wearing, where they are sitting in relation to each other, the furniture they sit on, plus all of the other furniture, and also the paintings and wallpaper.

He wore a cinnamon jacket with broad lapels and leg-of-mutton sleeves that closed tight just below the wrist.  His fitted trousers were of a white, washable fabric and trimmed with a black stripe down each side.  The silk cravat wound around his stiff high-wing collar was fluffed to fill the broad, open neck of his multicolored vest.  (5, tr. John E. Woods)

Maybe this all becomes pointlessly fussy as the novel goes on, I don’t know.  Mann demands that I see that pair of pants; James rarely wants me to see anything.  He fills his fiction with imaginative blank spaces.  And he does it on purpose, he says so openly.  But that is “The Figure in the Carpet,” so it will have to wait until tomorrow.