vague with a perverse intensity suggesting design - the late late style of Henry James

I’ve been reading some of the last stories of Henry James – “Julia Bride” (1908), “Crapy Cornelia” (1909), “The Bench of Desolation” (1909) and “A Round of Visits” (1910) – all very much in his late style, his late late style, even.  The single tic of James that drives me the furthest up the wall is his fussy, ludicrous stage-directing of dialogue.  From a couple of pages of “Julia Bride”:

… he almost fluted.

He ever so comically attenuated.

… he humorously wailed…

That kind of thing.  Real Jamesians must develop a taste for it?  Or an immunity?  To the extent that I understand it as comedy, I enjoy it myself, in smallish doses, and my point is that a few passages aside, late late James has lost interest in dialogue.

He will instead spend three pages moving a character fifty yards.  He is approaching a bench (“The Bench of Desolation”), he sees a lady on the bench, he recognizes her, and then not a hint of exterior movement for several pages as the character thinks.

The lady indeed thus thrust upon Herbert’s vision might have struck an observer either as not quite vague or as vague with a perverse intensity suggesting design.  (Ch. 4)

The constant slippage from the character’s thought is part of why a short walk takes so long.  I need to know not just what Herbert sees in some detail, but what other, theoretical, people might see, and also what Herbert does not see.  The second observer, by the way, is correct – there is design, and it is perverse in more ways than one.

The stories are generally on the perverse side.  In “Bench,” the vague lady has sued Herbert for breach of promise and drained money from him, ruining his life and that of his (eventual, short-lived) wife and children.  She is now returning the money with interest, which was her plan all along, because although she truly loved him she knew he would never make anything of the money himself.  Which is certainly true, since at the beginning of the story Herbert operates a used book store.  Still, it is hard to recognize the vague lady as quite human.

“Julia Bride” is desperate to convince an ex-boyfriend, and perhaps also a former stepfather, the fluty fellow up above, to persuade her current boyfriend that her six previous engagements did not really mean anything.  A real social issue, the rise of divorce and other changes in permissiveness, are swamped in this story less by the oddness of the characters than by the remarkable variety of metaphorical language applied to Julia’s every move and thought.  She has just learned that the ex-boyfriend is marrying.  It is like a deluge, and she

was positively to find on the bosom of her flood a plank under aid of which she kept in a manner and for the time afloat.  She took ten minutes to pant, to blow gently, to paddle disguisedly, to accommodate herself, in a word, to the elements she had let loose…

All of that activity is presumably describing conversation, which is what I meant to say James has lost interest in dialogue.  He is at this point much more likely to describe a conversation.  By the end of this long paragraph, Julia is (metaphorically) climbing a pedestal.  At the beginning of the next:

… her consciousness had become, by an extraordinary turn, a music-box in which, its lid well down, the most remarkable tunes were sounding.  It played for her ear alone, and the lid, as she might have figured, was her firm plan of holding out till she got home, of not betraying – to her companion at least – the extent to which she was demoralised.

I thought about writing a post that just listed the metaphors in order.  The story is packed with them, built out of them.  Maybe that would give me a clue about how James moves from the flood to the music box and its lid.  I was baffled, often impressed by the originality of James’s invention but with no understanding of where any of it came from, what the language had to do with this character.

Presumably as and if I re-read, the design will become less vague and perverse.  The first time through any complex text, this sort of thing is so hard to see, yet here I go after it, again and again.