the convenience of any artless theory - The Golden Bowl's discriminations against the obvious

I’m working backwards.  Volume One of The Golden Bowl is “The Prince,” ending with a thirty-page book club discussion.  Then comes “The Princess,” full of Maggie Verver’s intense, interior perceptions, ethical doubts, intuitive leaps, all of that late James stuff.  It is focused and exhausting, but at least I think I know what I am reading.  The first section, even setting the book club aside, moves around.  The point of view can be anywhere; years pass between sections; characters marry; children are born – well, one vague child.

James is teaching me, in the first volume, how to read the second.  But I am still not sure how to read the first.

Full of discriminations against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the best of misleading signs.  (1.2)

That is an early description of the Jamesian Mrs. Assingham, and looks like some kind of instruction, but whether I am supposed to do it or its opposite I am not sure.  I’ll pull another of these:

This error would be his not availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte’s, that might prevail there.  (3.6)

Do I really know what this means, even in context?  No.  But I am pretty sure that the Prince is giving up too quickly.  “That artless theories could and did prevail was a fact he had ended by accepting, under copious evidence, as definite and ultimate…” – this sounds like, in Jamesian aesthetics, an error on top of an error.

Maybe these quotes are just gibberish.  Sometimes I wonder.  “Miss Verver had told him he spoke English too well – it was his only fault, and he hadn’t been able to speak worse even to oblige her” (1.1)

But then there are the first couple of pages of the novel, in which the Prince goes for a walk in London, which he loves, a piece of flaneurish writing that I wish had gone on for thirty pages.  He is girl-watching:

…  when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias.  (1.1)

The Prince is all jittery because he has just become engaged and is having doubts.  His restlessness launches the novel.

Like Maggie, he thinks, and speaks, in metaphors:

‘I’m like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a crème de volaille, with half the parts left out.  (1.1)

Delicious.  He imagines that his wife is made of diamonds:

‘One would have been scratched by diamonds – doubtless the neatest way if one was to be scratched at all – but one would have been more or less reduced to a hash.’ (2.1)

He reads Poe(!), specifically

the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole – or was it the South? – than any one had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain if light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow.  There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery.  (1.1)

Someday I will read The Golden Bowl novel again.  I prepare for that day by assembling a cabinet of the book’s curiosities.

Characters in The Golden Bowl discuss The Golden Bowl - very helpful

The heroine of The Golden Bowl enacts the style of the novel in her story, which is a good trick, but Henry James has a second one nearly as good.  He adds, to the quartet at the center of the book, an outside observer couple, Fanny and Bob Assingham.  Fanny is both tangled in the story and an outsider; Bob merely watches.  The couples are given long scenes in which they discuss the novel.

I mean, they discuss the characters, who are their friends.  But they have enough distance, Bob especially, that they sound little different than if they were discussing the novel.  It is as if they are reading The Golden Bowl together, perhaps aloud to each other before bed, and then talking over the events of the last chapter.  Fanny is, honestly, a better, more attentive reader of James, but Bob is a different kind of reader, so they do well together.

Chapters 3.10 and 3.11 are the clearest place to see this effect – this is the pre-bedtime scene.  The chapters end the longish first “half” of the novel, dead center in the book, before Maggie’s detailed interiority takes over.  The Assinghams sum up the first 270 pages with some efficiency, work through the relevant issues, and speculate on what will happen in the next 270.

The main reason The Golden Bowl did not seem especially difficult to me was that James frequently follows substantial passages of meticulous ambiguity and obscurity with much more clear explanations, often in dialogue, of the novel’s events.  He catches me right up with what I missed, and confirms what I caught.

Fanny, in the reality of the novel, is the confidante of a number of characters, so she is a privileged position, always knowing things that other characters do not.  In other words, she is in the position that I, the reader, am in.  But Bob is even more like me.  These people are less real to him than they are to his wife.

The Colonel took it in. “Then she’s a little heroine.”

That sort of thing.

Martha Nussbaum has two essays on The Golden Bowl in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990).  One is on the moral seriousness of Maggie Verver’s struggle – on the moral seriousness of the novel as such – while the second is in large part about the Assinghams.  Nussbaum makes one error when she describes them as “perform[ing] the function, more or less, of a Greek tragic chorus” – less, definitely less.  They are novel readers.

Bob is the non-Jamesian, “a man devoted to rules and to general conceptions” and has trouble with “nuance and idiosyncrasy” (157-8).  His wife chose this novel for their bedtime reading.  Bob, when it is his turn, will pick the Galsworthy novel I am currently reading.  “Fanny, on the other hand, takes fine-tuned perception to a dangerously rootless extreme.”  She is too Jamesian.  “She delights in the complexity of these particulars for its own sake, without sufficiently feeling the pull of a moral obligation to any” (158).  After they discuss the book, they both understand it better.  Discuss their friends, understand them.  They complement each other.  Their scenes are arguments for the value of talking about books.

"They thought of everything but that I might think." - The Golden Bowl on how to read The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl is a quartet novel, with two couples and an adulterous affair.  The second turn of the screw is that the wife and husband of the adulterers are father and daughter, and are unusually close.  The daughter, Maggie Verver, marries an Italian prince, Amerigo, and it is not that the marriage is a failure but that even after her marriage she never separates herself from her father.  To help her have her own life, her father, Adam, marries a young beauty, Charlotte.  But Charlotte, unknown to the Ververs, used to be Amerigo’s girlfriend!  This could lead to trouble.  A little melodrama, even.  Well, some parody of melodrama.

I suppose the novel is largely about Maggie’s moral growth.  She is not just innocent, but possibly even too good, too unwilling to cause pain to anyone.  She learns to cause pain.

Maggie is given much of the second half of the novel.  Her story gets moving when she discovers the affair, or thinks she does.

‘It’s your nature to think too much,’ Fanny Assingham a trifle coarsely risked.

This but quickened however in the Princess the act she reprobated.  ‘That may be.  But if I hadn’t thought -!’

‘You wouldn’t, you mean, have been where you are?’

‘Yes, because they on their side thought of everything but that.  They thought of everything but that I might think.’  (6.1)

Maggie’s thought is that of not just a Henry James character but a Henry James reader.  Hey, look, I have gotten to my point.  Maggie discovers her husband’s and stepmother’s affair, or at least its possibility, not through eavesdropping or a stray letter or some other melodramatic contrivance, but through close observation and analysis of the people around her.  “It fell for retrospect into a succession of moments that were watchable still,” “the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active” (stitching together two distant lines of 4.1).  The long section describing Maggie’s process of observing and thinking, the beginning of her half of the novel, is packed with lines that I would like to use here:

The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable.  At present however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near.  (again, 4.1)

That is practically an instruction for the baffled reader of The Golden Bowl.  Maggie is modeling the process of reading a late Henry James novel.  Every little nuance in the faces and tones of the people around her is a source of discovery.  The true stories can be understood by observing the absence of evidence – silences are more important than speech, the avoided glance more important than the meeting of the eyes.

The other way that Maggie becomes like James, and like a good Jamesian reader, is that she thinks metaphorically.  The “situation” was “the very centre of the garden of her life,” or like “some strange tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda,” or “a Mahometan mosque.”  She is always coming up with new ones, while developing the old ones.  Maggie “tried to deal with herself for a space only as a silken-coated spaniel.” The spaniel has a “generalizing bark,” which is amusing.  Her stepmother is in a cage, or perhaps in a French prison during the Terror – James has returned to the metaphor that so puzzled me in The Wings of the Dove.

Since all of this is, for a long chunk of the novel, internal, all thought, there is the possibility that Maggie – or the reader – is completely wrong about what is going on, or who knows what is going on, or who knows what other people know about what is going on – the second half of the novel is recursive.  This is not exactly the story James tells, but it is implicit, ready for Ford Madox Ford to write it in The Good Soldier.

Maggie’s “discovery” section is just about the ideal fit between James’s late style and the matter it represents.

Henry James brings it out roundly - The Golden Bowl, the nerve-wearing stuff first

Sometimes I start a round of posts on a big book with my complaints.  Let’s do that again.  It works.  The book is The Golden Bowl (1904).  These are hardly even complaints.  It is just an attempt to see straight.

I am near the end of the book.  Two of the characters are having an all too typical conversation about two of the other characters.  There are only six characters total, and no one ever talks about one of them, so the number of combinations is limited.  What exactly are they talking about?  For my purpose here it does not matter:

‘Well then -?’

‘Well then you think he must have told her?  Why exactly what I mean,’ said Maggie, ‘is that he will have done nothing of the sort; will, as I say, have maintained the contrary.’

Fanny Assingham weighed it.  ‘Under her direct appeal for the truth?’

‘Under her direct appeal for the truth.’

‘Her appeal to his honour?’

“Her appeal to his honour.  That’s my point.’

Fanny Assingham braved it.  ‘For the truth as from him to her?’

‘From him to any one.’

Mrs Assingham’s face lighted.  ‘He’ll simply, he’ll insistently have lied?’

Maggie brought it out roundly.  ‘He’ll simply, insistently have lied.’  (5.1)

Then the two women hug.  This passage has two and a half of the four aspects of late James that most get on my nerves.  First, the conversations built out of repetitions; second, the baffling directions to the actors – I even tried, aloud, to bring out the last line roundly, but I have not the slightest idea if I succeeded; and third, and it is just hinted at here, what I call, in honor of Daffy Duck, the incessant “pronoun trouble,” the constant confusion, by the speakers, within their own conversations, of exactly which “he” or “her” is under discussion, again in a novel where it is only a few people exist.  The fourth nerve-wearer, not in this example (although there is one a few paragraphs earlier) is the use of adjectives like “splendid,” “magnificent,” and “immense” to describe people as if the words have some well-defined meaning.

Yes, these are all tics of dialogue.  That’s where I had to brace myself for James’s mannerisms, and those of his characters.  To James, these are assuredly not mannerisms but central, well-worked aspects of his style, essentially his, part of who he is.  True Jamesians presumably love them all.  And I have perhaps even understood some of them, sometimes, like the ingenious way James developed the seemingly empty word “wonderful” in The Ambassadors.  Or for that matter, look at the jokey use of “immense” in this description of the guests at a dinner party: “a large, bright, dull, murmurous, mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland, though very exalted, immensely announceable and hierarchically placeable couples” (3.6)  “[I]mmensely announceable” is immensely deflating.

This is a long way of saying that Henry James, by this late point, writes like himself and no one else and that his characters live in Henry James novels and behave accordingly.  So I am not so much complaining as acknowledging fixed facts.  All right, so sometimes James’s dialogue drives me crazy.  Now, on to the rest of the book.

It was beyond explanation - late late James bends time

A bit more late late James before my long long vacation, if that is what it is.  I’ll be back in June.  Let me know what you want me to bring you back from Lyon.

I have been enjoying the way the fiction writers of the first decades of the 20th century have freed themselves from the constraints of time.  Henry James is out there with the experimenters, responding not, as far as I can tell, to anything but his own concept of what his stories are trying to do.

“The Bench of Desolation” (1909) appears to be, and for about ten pages is, about a man being sued for breach of promise.  He has moved on to another girlfriend; he has nothing but his used bookshop but would rather just pay something and get it over with.  Social change and so on, that could be a story.

But the third chapter, just a few pages in, frantically accelerates into a chronicle of high-speed misery.  Herbert loses his business.  He marries, in the face of his poverty, the woman he loves, resulting in “the most dismal years, the three of the loss of their two children, the long stretch of sordid embarrassment ending in her death.”  In six pages “a dozen dismal years having worn themselves away, he sat single and scraped bare again, as if his long wave of misfortune had washed him far beyond everything and then conspicuously retreated.”  This metaphor is not as mysterious as the one’s I wondered about yesterday.  At least Herbert, when sitting on that bench, “stared at the grey-green sea.”

Then, in a jolt, comes the scene I mentioned yesterday, where it takes Herbert three pages to walk fifty yards and start up another story, a sequel to the story of the first two chapters.  The elasticity of time in the story is – well, it is common stuff now, but I was fascinated to see it come out of the egg.  The break James throws into the middle of this piece is bold.

His last story is more of a schematic thing, but it has a break right in the middle, too, in the fourth chapter of seven.  Mark Monteith has returned to New York City from Europe because his financial advisor has stolen some of his money.  The first three chapters each have a separate visit (I have to abuse the term a bit to make chapter I fit – Mark’s doctor visits him) which point him to the single, consequential, even melodramatic single visit of the last three chapters.  But the middle is just two pages of Mark walking around New York, thinking.

I would wonder if James were moving towards abstraction, to some kind of fiction of pure thought, but “A Round of Visits” also features a pistol, policemen, and some pretty wild plotty business by the end.  Check out this crazy Jamesian sentence:

It was beyond explanation, but the very act of blinking thus in an attempt at showy steadiness became one and the same thing with an optical excursion lasting the millionth of a minute and making him aware that the edge of a rug, at the point where an armchair, pushed a little out of position, over-straddled it, happened just not wholly to have covered in something small and queer, neat and bright, crooked and compact, in spite of the strong toe-tip surreptitiously applied to giving it the right lift.

The “small and queer” thing is the pistol, which Mark has glimpsed and his friend is trying to conceal.  Raymond Chandler would have described this moment a little differently.

James is nearing the end of a fifty year career, and he is still pushing, changing, figuring out how to turn his sensibilities into prose.  It is a heck of a thing to see.

I believe they have internet in France, so please comment, or not, as usual, and I will eventually respond.  “Great comment!” etc.

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.

The supersubtleties and arch-refinements of The Wings of the Dove - parts doubtless magnified and parts certainly vague

In his 1909 Preface to Wings of the Dove, Henry James writes:

But my use of windows and balconies is doubtless at best an extravagance by itself, and as to what there may be to note, of this and that supersubtleties, other arch-refinements, of tact and taste, of design and instinct, in “The Wings of the Dove,” I become conscious of overstepping my space without having brought the full quantity to light.

So, first, there is apparently a “windows and balconies” theme that I completely missed, and that even now, looking for balconies in an electronic text, I do not understand at all, and second, “supersubtleties” and “arch-refinements”!  Is Henry James, in the end, just an elaborate parody of Henry James?  Is that not the fate we all will suffer?

I would not have minded if James had worked his way through the balcony thing for me, at least.

There is a point where Milly Theale is new to London high society and does not really understand it, even though she is told she has conquered it: “the girl read into it [her being told etc.] more of an approach to a meaning” (5.4).  How I identified with Milly at that moment.

Just as an example, in 5.3 Milly is at the doctor’s office, she and James both carefully avoiding any discussion of anything related to the practice of medicine.  Diagnosed with an unspecified mortal illness, she instead fears the pity of the doctor (of everyone):

… and when pity held up its tell-tale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference but that the patient was bad?  He might say what he would now – she would always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment she only wanted him to say what he would.

Again, the immediate subject is Milly’s imminent death, but the graphic intrusion of a victim of the guillotine is a shock.  Where did that come from?  The antecedent of the image appears again at the end of the novel, as Martin Densher worries about the dying Milly:

Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold, in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object clutched for resistance.  (10.1)

What Milly thinks has been a complete mystery for almost a hundred pages at this point.  The correspondence of imagery is due to coincidence, or telepathy, or some discussion Martin and Milly had that James does not report, plus, obviously, the conscious art of Henry James.  Otherwise, Densher’s specificity about the French Revolution is entirely arbitrary.  I still don’t understand the supersubtlety of this one, what line is created by the two points, but there it is.

Rather easier to grasp is the language surrounding Aunt Maud’s furniture.  She had already been described by Kate Croy, Densher’s girlfriend, as “prodigious,” looming – “in the thick foglike air of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and parts certainly vague” (1.2).  This is exactly what Densher finds when he meets Aunt Maud, who is the great obstacle to his marriage with Kate and something of a villain in the novel.  He (Densher, and also James) spends a page describing her furniture:

It was the language of the house itself that spoke to him, writing out for him [Densher thinks in terms of texts], with surpassing breadth and freedom, the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities of the mistress.  Never, he flattered himself, had he seen anything so gregariously ugly – operatively, ominously so cruel.  (2.2)

He calls the pieces of furniture “heavy horrors” and lists their materials without naming a single piece:

They constituted an order and they abounded in rare material – precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and corded, drawn everywhere so tight, and curled everywhere so thick.  He had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush, so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was, above all, the solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance.  These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his own world of thought…

This passage is one of the comic high points of the novel.  It is both packed with detail and yet describes nothing specific.  It ends in another of the novel’s abysses.

There is just no way to sort through all this on one reading.  I’ll repeat this exercise in incomprehension later this summer, with The Golden Bowl.

Imagery in The Wings of the Dove, ethical and aesthetic - vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music

When Mrs. Stringham sees Milly Theale on the edge of an abyss, she imagines that Milly is contemplating suicide, but she also imagines that Milly “was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them” (3.1).  There are other possibilities, I know, but given the location Mrs. Stringham is thinking Matthew 4:8, which makes Milly, a wealthy twenty-two-year-old American woman into a Christ figure.  Whatever kind of Satan is tempting her is not visible to her friend.

Milly is surrounded by figurative language of the abyss, but also with Biblical language.  She is the dove of the title.  She has “lien among the pots” yet shall be “as the wings of a dove covered with silver,” assuming that Psalm 68:13 is the correct reference.  So then she should be the wings, but characters repeatedly refer to Milly as the dove, not the wings, as one would.

Milly’s actions towards the end of the novel, one or more of which might be considered a sacrifice, either redeem one or both of the couple that was trying to grift her, or destroys them, as a couple, or perhaps individually.  Or maybe one thief is saved and the other damned.  I do not know how to reconcile the contradictions of the two sets of endings, or the multiple possibilities of the ending.  Nor did James, I suppose, which is why he wrote the novel.

Another set of images attached to Milly aestheticize her.  She is frequently like someone in a painting, sometimes religious, but in a key scene, not.  “She was the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on every ground.”  And she is, in fact Milly looks exactly like the woman in this portrait, because it is on the cover of the edition of the novel I read, and I am told the resemblance is uncanny, and there we are.

The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angel-esque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded [?] jewels, her brocaded and wasted [?] reds, was a very great personage – only unaccompanied by a joy.  And she was dead, dead, dead.  Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her.  “I shall never be better than this.”  (5.2)

The way that the mortally ill Milly’s recognition is not of herself but of death – or that she only recognizes herself through death – is a great moment, one of the surprising yet exactly right psychological insights that suit fiction so well.  But I picked the quotation because it begins the strange process by which everyone else aestheticizes Milly, one more for example of the novel’s distances, while she transforms aesthetics into ethics.  She uses here wealth to become the Renaissance noblewoman in the painting, moving to a Venetian palace and so on.  But she does it as a way to live.

As with many ideas in James, where this falls between utterly bizarre and ingeniously insightful is unknown to me.

Maybe the answer is in the great scene at the National Gallery (5.7), where Milly wonders if she could “’lose myself’” among the paintings, where “[i]t was immense, outside, the personal question.”  She wants more aesthetic distance.

I could pursue a related set of images that are associated with Martin Densher, a journalist, engaged to Kate Croy but in pursuit of Milly, who compares people to texts.  His girlfriend, for example:

“You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.”  He almost moaned, he ached from the depth of his content.  “Upon my word I’ve a subscription!”  (6.6)

Hilarious.  Or how about 8.1, where Densher thinks that he does not want to “read[] the romance of his existence in a cheap edition.”  Getting dangerously meta-fictional there, Henry.

Milly is not text to him, though, but music: “her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music” (8.1).

I do not yet understand Henry James’s use of imagery, but at least I have learned to look for it.

more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit - some of the abysses of The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove is built out of distances and gaps.  James approaches the central characters, the central story, from a distance, and then backs away from it just as he appears about to show it clearly.  The first chapter is a confrontation between the beautiful, troubled Kate Croy and her worthless father – he gambles, maybe, or drinks, or smuggles cigarettes, or fixes boxing matches; James never specifies – is given plenty if life but then never appears again.  He is barely mentioned again until the end of the book, and never appears because, apparently, he likes to sleep late.  He is memorable, is what I am trying to say, and gets a lot of artistic attention from Henry James, and is then tossed aside.  That is not the story.  It looks like it might be, but it is not.

Milly Theale, the young, rich, orphaned American with tuberculosis or cancer or circulatory collapse, or whatever she has – James never specifies – appears at the 20% mark, accompanied by Mrs. Stringham, and more to my point viewed by Mrs. Stringham.  The companion is a lady writer from Boston who is absolutely incapable of conveying even the simplest information directly.  The first view she gives me of Milly is of her taking in a Swiss “view of great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous,” seated on “a short promontory or excrescence that merely pointed off to the right at gulfs of air” (3.1).  It is the first of the many “abysses” confronted by Milly, a motif that is built into a structural principle.

Milly takes over the novel for a while, and I found her personal story of high interest.  She confronts death more directly than I remember from much other James fiction.  She is a version of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, wondering how she can really live, insisting that she can, in the face of what is likely a short life.  At the edge of this first abyss, Mrs. Stringham wonders if Milly is contemplating suicide, but thinks instead “[i]t was a question of taking full in the face the whole assault of life.”

Why wonder, why speculate?  Much of the novel is from Milly’s point of view, including much pure thought.  And then she is, essentially, a ghost, a hovering presence over the other characters.  She becomes, in her absence, the subject of the last part of the novel.  James creeps up on her introduction and then slips away from her exit, going so far as to create plotty obstacles – messages thrown into fires and so on – to ensure that Milly’s point of view about the later events of the novel cannot be known.

I mean, they could be known.  Who is in charge here?

Milly's assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her friend [Mrs. Stringham] was that of not being able to gainsay it without bringing it more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit. (7.1)

The reference is to Milly’s illness.  Mrs. Stringham appears to have the moral high ground here.  “Tenderness and vagueness” are moral principles in The Wings of the Dove.

he turned off his vagueness - which sounded indeed vaguer still - the hybrid Wings of the Dove

The piece about The Ambassadors in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (1998) was all about sex.  The chapter on The Wings of the Dove by William Stowe is title “James’s Elusive Wings” is all about how the book is hard to understand – how the sentences are hard to understand.  What I wrote about yesterday, in other words.  Stowe begins with the same William James and Willian Dean Howells quotes!

Stowe has the advantage over William James, and me, of having read the book several times and worked on the secondary literature with all of the skill an expert can give it.  So, again, if this guy is having trouble…

Despite its melodramatic plot, furthermore, the book’s language is notoriously difficult, sometimes even undecidably obscure; sentences wind interminably on, pronouns lack definite antecedents, characters use words like “everything” and “nothing” and phrases like “Well, there you are,” which simultaneously suggest and obscure meanings and conclusions that they may or may not have reached.  (188)

Stowe is interested in the hybridity of the text, the combination of the melodrama with an interiorized, modernistic whatever it is, that functions in “traditional humanistic terms as a moral or spiritual fable” but at the same time is “a radically elusive text that entices the reader into an unendable process of supplementation and (over-)reading” (189).  And we wouldn’t want any of that, for certain specific groups of “we,” and we would and do want it, those of us in this other “we.”

The melodrama is the devious attempt by a pair of English grifters to get into the good graces of a rich, dying American girl, perhaps even to marry her, so that the grifters, once enriched with her estate, can marry each other.  Some variation of this story must be the base of a thousand bad plays and a hundred good farces.  The Wings of the Dove did not feel, to me, remotely like a melodrama, nor is that plot description one that would be recognized by the characters themselves, at least not until the end of the novel, when at least one has a moral epiphany – these are the “traditional humanistic terms” – that he has done something terribly wrong.

“I suppose I’m in trouble – I suppose that’s it.”  He said this with so odd a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it – which he as promptly saw.  So he turned off as he could his vagueness.  “And yet I oughtn’t to be.”  Which sounded indeed vaguer still.  (10.4)

The bit I put in bold is both splendid and magnificent.  It is not that James is not aware of how he sounds.

At times the frankly pleasant, lovely, and in other circumstances entirely sympathetic young couple I am libeling as “grifters” act like they are playing at decadence.  At times it was like I was reading a version of Dangerous Liaisons with characters who were new to the whole thing, not jaded to the point of exhaustion.  At times I wondered if the couple really were, at least as a couple, ethically dubious, an example of some kind of dominant-submissive relationship with occasional rebellions by the submissive side to keep things interesting.  Maybe what appears to be, through the last fifth of the novel, an ethical struggle is in fact just a power struggle between these people.  Maybe Stowe’s article should have been about sex.

How did I not know that The Good Soldier (1916) is an elaborate parody of late James?  But I had not read the right James books, so even if told directly how would I really know?  Now I know.

The expensive vagueness of The Wings of the Dove - It almost destroyed me, thinking it all out

So it’s not just me.  I’m glad to know that.  Here is William James writing to his brother in 1902:

I have read The Wings of the Dove (for which all thanks!) but what shall I say of a book constructed on a method which so belies everything that I acknowledge as law?  You’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages, and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean)…  At any rate it is your own…

My premise is that William James has first, the intelligence of William James, and second, at this point almost forty years of experience reading the complete works of Henry James, so if he had this kind of trouble, I should not be surprised at my own.

I have the advantage of having read a century’s worth of subsequent novels that avoid their stories even more ruthlessly than those of James – am I ever used to that – but the writers I think of as the most Jamesian don’t write sentences like those.  Saul Bellow or Alan Hollinghurst or Hotel du Lac, those are examples I have in mind.  The sentences do not make me swear on the name of Dickens.  Maybe you know some more cryptic examples.

This is William Dean Howells, also smart and used to James, in “Mr. James’s Later Work” (1903), which he partly writes as a dialogue with “a weary woman” – she is speaking:

“’There they are,’ as he keeps making his people say in all his late books, when they are not calling one another dear lady, and dear man, and prodigious and magnificent, and of a vagueness or a richness, or a sympathy, or an opacity.  No, he is of a tremendosity, but he worries me to death; he kills me; he really gives me a headache.  He fascinates me, but I have no patience with him.”

I took the liberty of adding italics to the words that are directly borrowed from James.  I think some of the others are jokes.  “Tremendosity” is definitely a joke; “opacity” is not in The Wings of the Dove, at least; as for “vagueness,” this is practically a description of the novel:

an impenetrable ring fence, within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements, all strained to breaking  (9.4)

I had wondered if some of the adjectives that James’s characters fling at each other – “wonderful” – were perhaps examples of current slang, something he heard at dinner parties, but I guess not, or at least they were not at the parties Howells attended.  They are mostly signals that I am in James-world, which is not exactly like this one ever was.  The weary woman again:

“We could not bear to lose a word; every word – and there were a good many! – seemed to tell.  If you took one away you seemed to miss something important.  It almost destroyed me, thinking it all out.  I went round days, with my hand to my forehead; and I don’t believe I understand it perfectly yet.  Do you?”

No.  I have two other differences from Howells’s magnificent invention.  First, when I left all the words in I still thought I was missing something important, and second, it turns out I have endless patience with James, so I will bang on about him until I run out of babble.  I didn’t take a fifth as many notes as I did with The Ambassadors, so I won’t go on as long as that.

He faced it completely now - some late James "tales"

I took a break from The Ambassadors by reading some easier stuff, including some Henry James.  For a long time, twenty-five years or more, the only “late James” I had ever read had been “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), so I revisited that, and also tried the dark, strange, anti-comedy “Fordham Castle” (1904) and the surprising novella “The Papers” (1903), surprising in both subject and tone.

Everyone interested in fiction should at least see late James, even if he cannot stand to read it.  How is this for a first sentence:

What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention – spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance.

There’s starting in the middle of the action, and starting in the middle of a fog bank.  But in this case, the vagueness suits the theme – the plot – since the story is about a man who knows, just somehow knows, that something is going to happen to him – that the beast is going to pounce.  But what any of that might mean is anyone’s guess.  The story is an appendix to The Ambassadors.  Where Strether implores that we “Live all we can,” this fellow says “Yes, exactly, just as soon as – ,” and just as Strether turns out to be living all he can pretty much by definition, this poor sap more or less discovers that the beast is life, and is perpetually pouncing.  Or else the anticipation causes him to miss the pounce.  Or he does not miss it, but misses that he does not miss it.  And so on.  I can see why Borges loved James’s stories (“I think that the whole world of Kafka is to be found in a far more complex way in the stories of Henry James”).

“The Papers” is about two young journalists who write up gossip and party-going for newspapers.  They are in some sense a couple, and if their comic banter is not up there with His Girl Friday, it is getting there.  The characters are surprisingly cynical for James.  No, that is not right.  The surprise is that they are forthrightly cynical, a necessary stance for survival in their shallow, parasitic profession.  The woman is not sure she is capable of maintaining the proper level of cynicism, which could make for a plot, but James picked something more melodramatic – a celebrity disappears, perhaps committing suicide?  Did the journalist drive him to his death?

A jolly little shocker, all too relevant.  The profession of celebrity journalism seems to be fundamentally unchanged to the present day.

“Fordham Castle” is another comedy, although not of the funny kind, with another faked death.  Abel Taker is at a Swiss hotel, calling himself C. P. Addard so that his wife can pretend he is dead and, presumably, marry someone better and richer.  He meets a woman in exactly the same situation, he thinks, except that it is her daughter who wants her “dead” and out of the way.  Some coincidences ensue.  The last lines:

He faced it completely now, and to himself at least could express it without fear of protest.  ‘Why certainly I’m dead.’

It’s about as dark a James story as I can remember.  And not especially “late” or difficult – nor is “The Papers” – although as I become accustomed to the period I have a lost my sense of what any of that means.  Relative, I guess.

He gurgled his joy - the immense hedonist in The Ambassadors

Martha Nussbaum argues that the perceptive, particularizing Lambert Strether represents the Aristotelean ethical position and the absent but omnipresent Mrs. Newsome the Kantian position.  In the long, complex, over my head introductory material, Nussbaum also argues against Utilitarian ethics. 

Her specific argument is, setting aside the merits of a given philosopher, that the novel - not just this novel, but the novel as such, as a form – is especially good at working through the kinds of ethical problems that Aristotle’s system is also good at.  Some high proportion of our daily decisions are probably well covered by a pretty basic Utilitarianism, but they hardly make for good fiction.  Chocolate-covered cake donut or plain?  Or maybe I need Kant to help me resist the temptation.  I face this problem often, daily, but as drama it is a little thin.

Although Nussbaum does not really mention it, the Utilitarian position has a representative in The Ambassadors in the great minor character Jim Pocock.  Around the middle, just as Strether was pretty close to resigning his ambassadorship, I began to wonder how James planned to fill so many more pages with this handful of characters.  At just that point, the arrival of new characters was announced, just what the novel needed, including the daughter of Mrs. Newsome, her representative in the flesh, but even more cold and inflexible, completely incapable of adjusting her sense of correctness to her perception.  “The effect she produced of representing her mother had been produced – and that was just the immense, the uncanny part of it – without her having so much as mentioned that lady” (10.3).

But her husband, Jim, that’s who I want here.  Early in the novel, Strether has picked up, along with “wonderful,” the word “immense” – see just above – which is used less flexibly and appears to be some kind of slang.  But it sticks to Jim:

“You see Jim’s really immense…  Jim’s intensely cynical…  He’s awful.”  (9.1)

That’s Strether, thinking aloud.  Jim is only cynical from Strether’s Aristotelian perspective.  In fact, he is a hedonist, a simple-minded Utilitarian, maximizing his pleasure:

He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn't there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he didn't know quite what Sally had come for, but he had come for a good time. (8.2)

And he assumes that Strether and other Americans in Paris are as decadent and ready to party as he is.  He enacts a parody of Strether’s response to Paris, as he

drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the other.  “Why I want to come right out and live here myself.  And I want to live while I am here too.”

I could almost detect Strether’s anxiety – is Jim suggesting Strether take him to a brothel? – but Jim’s first “disencumbered and irresponsible” suggestion is that he and Strether, in a cab together, “take a further turn round before going to the hotel.”  Oh, yes, that kind of good time.

In a further irony, there is a hint, at the end of his novel, that his wife, the rigid Kantian Sarah, has taken up with another American.

I meant to use this post as a note dump, a scrapbook of favorite bits of The Ambassadors I Had not yet mentioned, but it turned out to be more of a good time to write about immense Jim.

Let’s see, in a few weeks, optimistically, if The Wings of the Dove is half as much fun.

She had taken all his categories by surprise - Kant vs Aristotle in The Ambassadors

Technically, the greatest trick of The Ambassadors is the hovering, deity-like presence of the Woollett matriarch and corncob pipe baroness Mrs. Newsome.  She is the first person that Lambert Strether calls “wonderful.”  He had better; he is engaged – in some mercenary way – to marry her, once he has completed his engagement to drag her no account son back to Massachusetts to take over the chamber pot factory.  (It’s a running joke in the book that no one ever specifies in what embarrassing way the Newsome’s made their fortune).

Mrs. Newsome never appears – the ambassadors in the title are her ambassadors.  Yet she saturates the novel.  She is constantly invoked.  Decisions are made based on the presumed approval, or otherwise, of Mrs. Newsome.  “Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure” (10.3).

At this point in the book, Strether has shaken himself free from Mrs. Newsome, which allows him to think such a thing, or later say that “’she’s all, as I’ve called it, fine cold thought’” (11.2), a bold thing for a novelist to openly declare, since it is might cast some doubt about characters more generally.  But it is also Mrs. Newsome who is, to pull back a quotation from two days back, “deep devoted delicate sensitive noble.”

Martha Nussbaum, in her chapter on The Ambassadors in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), argues that she is “no mere caricature, but a brilliantly comic rendering of some of the deepest and most appealing features of Kantian morality” (179).  Strether, by contrast, switches sides from Kant to Aristotle.

Nussbaum’s book is a defense of the ambiguities and complexities of Aristotelian ethics against its strongest competitors, Kant and Utilitarianism.  Both Mrs. Newsome and Strether have strong senses of duty and integrity.  Strether, faced with the complexities he discovers in Europe, finds his American, Kantian rules inadequate.  “[S]he had taken all his categories by surprise,” “she” being the French countess, and thus Paris.  I don’t believe James was really thinking of Kant when he wrote that line, but reading along with Nussbaum it is pretty funny.

“Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy.  If it were, it would.”  (1.1)

Strether, at this point, is only a few pages into the novel, and only barely in Europe, and the old friend he meets in England actively hates “the ordeal of Europe” (1.2), but he is already experiencing subconscious doubts.  All of this is before I learn that he is actually returning to Europe after a long, tragic absence, and before I have witnessed his perceptive powers, which are what really complicate things.

This is about as clear a statement of Nussbaum’s distinction between the improvised, perceptual Aristotelian ethics and the preset, reasoned Kantian system as I could find:

In the new norm of perception, unlike the norm of Woollett, there is a bewildering problem about authority.  For if the ethical norm consists not in obeying certain antecedently established general rules, but in improvising resourcefully in response to the new perceived thing, then it is always going to remain unclear, in the case of any particular choice or vision, whether it is or is not correctly done.  (Nussbaum, 182)

James is on the side of ambiguity and love stories.  They confuse the categories.  Strether is almost a superior being because of his James-like perceptive powers, but the plot is driven by his failures of perception, about himself and those around him.  It is possible that many of those failures are deliberate; it is almost certain, by the end of the novel, that they, the failures, are right.  Strether learns to fail ethically.

He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things - Henry Jame's use of the word "wonderful" in The Ambassadors

She was silent a little.  “How wonderfully you take it! But you're always wonderful.”

He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate spirit, a complete admission.  “It's quite true.  I'm extremely wonderful just now.  I dare say in fact I'm quite fantastic, and I shouldn't be at all surprised if I were mad.”  (7.3)

When Mary Kyle Michael of Tipp City, Ohio, wrote her useful article “Henry James’s Use of the Word Wonderful in The Ambassadors” (Modern Language Notes, Feb. 1960, pp. 114-17), she was doing her research the hard way, so I forgive her some errors:

This device is his use of the word wonderful more than sixty times in The Ambassadors.  It remains inconspicuous because James often uses it humorously as well as in its straightforward sense.  (114)

With the help of the Gutenberg electronic text, I effortlessly see that, including a few cases of “wonderfully,” the word appears over a hundred times!  That is one error; the other is the idea that the word is inconspicuous.  Oh no.  It became, for me, at first an irritation – “what are these people gibbering about”?  But Michael is right.  She calls it – the word “wonderful” – “the aesthetic device by which [James] ties together resolution and art.”

“Wonderful” begins as an evasion, a word to describe the powerful matriarch of Woollett without really describing her.  A minor character at a party, the “historic” Miss Barrace (10.1, no idea what “historic” means), says “wonderful” to describe everybody and everything:

Her answer was prompt.  “She’s charming.  She’s perfect.”

“Then why did you a minute ago say ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ at her name?”

She easily remembered.  Why just because --!  She’s wonderful.”

“Ah she too?” – Strether had almost a groan.  (5.1)

Hey, that’s just what I almost had!  Or did have.  As a result of this ludicrous conversation, Strether, our hero, becomes infected with the word, and begins to use it constantly, first as a joke, a deliberate parody of the memorable Miss Barrace, but soon begins to explore the word.

In the quotation at the top of the post, I can see Strether shifting from the joke stage – he is bantering a bit with his friend Miss Gostrey – to something more serious.  And now I see that Strether had been using the word himself, mentally, to describe, what else – “wonderful Paris” – back in, where else, the great Chapter 2.2.  I had not noticed that.  Calling Paris “wonderful” is not so unusual.  It is when the word shifts to the people he knows and admires – the stern woman back home he planned to marry, the French countess who in some sense seduces him, or the wayward son who he envies – that the meaning of the inherently ambiguous word becomes

“You’ve been ‘wonderful, wonderful’ as we say – we poor people who watch the play from the pit…”  (11.1)

Strether is talking to that son here, the one he was supposed to press gang back to Massachusetts.  He has begun to use the word ironically even before the crisis of the novel occurs two chapters later, when it becomes almost poisoned.  Strether’s begins with an innocent wonder at the marvels he finds in Europe.  Here is, almost literally, the moment when he loses his innocence:

He recognised at last that he had really been trying all along to suppose nothing.  Verily, verily, his labour had been lost.  He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.  (end of 11.4, which has five “wonderfuls”)

The word now includes deceit, sex, and other similar, new marvels.

Flaubert had taught me to be alert for and to follow themes across a complex work – the horse theme in Madame Bovary, the ribbon theme in Sentimental Education – and to work out the patterns they create.  James is using “wonderful” to do something similar, linking scenes and ideas together from throughout the novel, but with an important difference.  The characters are aware of the motif.  They make their own use of it, change it.  They make their own patterns, their own meanings.

Many thanks to Mary Kyle Michael of Tipp City.

absorbed interested and interesting - a discovery and a question (still on The Ambassadors)

While writing yesterday’s post, I got tangled in a Twitter “conversation” with people who were pretending to be crazy; it was about, in a sense, The Ambassadors, and in the course of it I realized that Alexander Payne’s brilliant closing segment (link goes to the clip) of the anthology film Paris je t’aime (2006) is an adaptation of The Ambassadors.  The most direct evidence is at the six-minute mark.  Payne also borrows a bit from the closely related “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903).

Maybe it was something I’d forgotten, or something I’ve been missing all my life.  All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness.  But not too much sadness, because I felt alive.  Yes, alive.

That was the moment I fell in love with Paris.  And I felt Paris fall in love with me.

The internet does not seem to be aware of any of this, so it is a gift from me to some poor schmoe writing a paper on Alexander Payne and adaptation.

Now, a question.  What in the devil are these:

… and if he had never seen her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her so highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar estimate "cold," but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. (7.3)

He was neither excited nor depressed; was easy and acute and deliberate – unhurried unflurried unworried, only at most a little less amused than usual.  (8.1)

The occupant of the balcony was after all quite another person, a person presented, on a second look, by a charming back and a slight shift of her position, as beautiful brilliant unconscious Mamie – Mamie alone at home, Mamie passing her time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short rather shabbily used, but Mamie absorbed interested and interesting.  (9.3)

In case my edition was full of typos, I checked against two other sources.  The punctuation – and rhymes! – are just as I have them.  This is new in James, right?  New in, well, everybody.  I have been pushing on with shorter James, “The Papers” and so on, and I have not noticed these unpunctuated chains of adjectives.

There is a conventional explanation that the late James style is a combination of the way James talked with a switch from writing to dictation.  Lambert Strether, the center of this novel, frequently speaks like James thinks.

“How can he but want, now that it’s within reach, his full impression? – which is much more important, you know, than either yours or mine.  But he’s just soaking,” Strether said as he came back, “he’s going in conscientiously for a saturation.”  (9.1)

It is not just the hesitations – although Strether does wander – “as he came back,” exactly – but the metaphors that not only become part of speech, but are actually developed.  “Soaking” continuing to “saturation.”   Why is Strether so “tormented”?

“Because I’m made so – I think of everything.”  (9.1)

His companion’s response is that “’One must think of as few things as possible,’” but I do not believe that option is available to Strether.  He is in this sense the shadow of his creator.  James, too,  thinks of everything.

Still – “unhurried unflurried unworried” – that’s not the way anyone talks, is it, even Henry James?  What is it?

he held off from that, held off from everything - Henry James goes book shopping

Lambert Strether’s idea of France is tied up in French books.  He came back from his honeymoon with

lemon-coloured volumes in general on the brain as well as with a dozen – selected for his wife too – in his trunk; and nothing had at the moment shown more confidence than this invocation of the finer taste.  They were still somewhere at home, the dozen – stale and soiled and never sent to the binder; but what had become of the sharp initiation they represented?  (I’m still in 2.2!)

The wife, we remember, had died, and then their son died.  That last sentence is a sad one.  Strether’s memories are evoked by the bookshop window displays, “behind which lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.”  The French books are always lemon, never yellow; now we know what that means, right?  Even an American French novel about culture has to drag in German Italian Bildung.

In two cases, books are associated with knives:

the novel half-uncut, the novel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like the dagger in a contadina's hair, had been pushed within the soft circle [of lamplight]…  (11.1)

See, there’s Italy again, a sexy Italian peasant stabbing the French novel.  I know she is sexy because Strether is milling around handsome, virile Chad Newsome’s apartment, where everything is sexy – this is, the narrator uncharacteristically interrupts to tell me, “an hour full of strange suggestions… one of those that he was to recall, at the end of his adventure, as the particular handful that had most counted.”  And all Strether does is look at Chad’s books and prints and the view of the street from his balcony and listen to “the unceasing soft, quick rumble below, of the little lighted carriages that, in the press, always suggested the gamblers he had seen of old at Monte Carlo pushing up to the tables.”

Chad’s the one who won’t abandon Paris for Woollett to supervise the manufacture of toothpicks.  Strether spends time in three different apartments, all described as in some way ideally French, two, including Chad’s furnished by Americans (although he turns out to have had help developing his good taste) who had “rummaged and purchased and picked up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing,” one belonging to the French Countess, and thus too perfect, another world, her things not collected but transmitted, the owner “beautifully passive under the spell of transmission” (6.1).  Her books are, when bound, “pinkish and greenish,” and when new “they hadn't the lemon-coloured covers with which his eye had begun to dally from the hour of his arrival.”  The Countess keeps up with foreign literature.

There is, of course, a paper-knife in this scene, in a French Revue that is later described as salmon-coloured.  This knife is aimed at Chad’s forbidding mother somehow.  I did not entirely understand that bit.  Remember that the Review Strether edits is green.

Strether’s full name, Lewis Lambert, is “’the name of a novel of Balzac’s’” (1.1) – oh for pity’s sake, it would be a stretch to get “Louis Lambert” (1832) to fifty pages.  You people and your Balzac “novels.”  “’But the novel’s an awfully bad one.’”  Well, yes and no.  Where was I.

I mentioned the invocation of a subconsciously smut-free Maupassant yesterday.  A surprising meeting takes place in Notre Dame, so the characters discuss “the question of Victor Hugo” (7.1).  If there is a reference or two to Flaubert, it is (they are) oblique.  Lots of books.  Strether edits a literary review, so the world is filtered through books.  Some of us will identify with Strether here:

His conscience had been amusing itself for the forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a book; he held off from that, held off from everything.  (back to 2.2)

Holding off from books is holding off from everything.

the effect of tone and tint - Lambert Strether perceives - The Ambassadors as Paris novel

The Ambassadors is a terrific Paris novel, even a bit of a tourist novel.  The point of view belongs entirely to Lambert Strether, returning to the city after a thirty-year absence, and James spends some time just flaneuring around with Strether.  A couple of these chapters moved towards a plotless novel of pure perception that I wish James could have written.

The first example is Book II, Chapter II, “his second morning in Paris,” with bank business and the post, and then a long walk (the novel lends itself to mapping).  Long paragraphs, long sentences, no dialogue – oh thank goodness – barely an intrusion by another character except in Strether’s thoughts.  In the Jardin des Tuileries, he looks for the Palace.

The palace was gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play – the play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve.

So I learn that the previous visit had been before the Franco-Prussian War, before the Commune and the burning of the palace.  The first thing Strether finds is an absence.  This is before the passage I quoted yesterday, where I learn that the previous visit had been Strether’s honeymoon.

When he reads his letters, including one from Mrs. Newsome, the woman he plans to marry when he returns from his mission to corral her son, he finds that “this tone of hers… struck him at the same time as the hum of vain things.”  He has escaped this powerful woman, and escaped Woollett.  It only took a day.

It was the difference, the difference of being just where he was and as he was, that formed the escape – this difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be; and what finally he sat there turning over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free.

The premise of the novel, the reason that Strether is the protagonist even though he is on the periphery of the Woollett story, is that he is perceptive.  He is comparable in perceptive powers to, say, Henry James.  Thus James, from time to time, has to show him perceiving things.

… he lingered before the charming open-air array of literature classic and casual.  He found the effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves, delicate and appetizing; the impression – substituting one kind of low-priced consummation for another – might have been that of one of the pleasant cafes that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement; but he edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly behind him.  He wasn’t there to dip, to consume – he was there to reconstruct.

James and I watch him do it, even while book shopping.

Now, the way the story works is that although Strether is the most perceptive character in the novel in some fundamental ways, he has huge blind spots, particularly regarding the sexual behavior of others, and possibly himself, both in real life and in literature.  It is likely that he very much does not want to marry the stern, rich, Woollettish Mrs. Newsome, and manipulates his own behavior through the novel to act on that unconscious desire.  That is not living.  The climax of the novel is a great combination of themes, another chapter full of walks (11.3), when Strether seeks out a French country scene, and finds it – it “remind[s] him… of Maupassant,” but a charming cleaned-up American Maupassant with no sex.  The climax is exactly when Strether discovers that there is sex in Maupassant, and also in the lives of the people he knows, and that where he suppresses it unconsciously, they lie deliberately.

Beginning The Ambassadors - an elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting

A good thing about reading the difficult, aggravating The Awkward Age (1899) so recently is that it makes The Ambassadors (1903), a novel written in a dense, purposefully ambiguous style, look almost like a regular old novel.  Not so difficult.  It is, in fact, full of difficulties, but the illusion created by the contrast was helpful.

After James, I moved to Trollope, and the contrast there is – whee! zoom! look at me go!  Something like that.

Where to start.  Everyone – I looked around – starts with a line jerked out of context, “’Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to’” (5.2) which sounds deep and wise but is also, unless the characters are discussing suicide, which they are not, a tautology.

“It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life.  If you haven’t had that what have you had?”

The speaker is Lambert Strether, the novel’s hero and, in limited third person, sole point of view, aside from a few minor interjections from James.  Strether is asked by his patroness, who he thinks he wants to marry, to investigate and retrieve her adult son.  Why won’t he return home to Woollett, Massachusetts, marry a nice girl, and manage the family urinal cake factory?  Could there be a woman involved – a French woman?

Of course; obviously.  But Strether, as he soon as he sets foot in it, falls in love with Paris.  He doesn’t want to leave.  I would occasionally abandon the book for a day or two just to let Strether enjoy Paris more.  I knew that in the end he was going back to Woollett.  He isn’t rich enough to merely live.  Why rush him.

A good part of the high comedy of The Ambassadors comes from the Americans who are so baffled that anyone would want to live in Paris – and would not want to live in Woollett, with Woollett people and by Woollett standards, that they might prefer Paris theaters and sex with a beautiful French countess, even if she is married.  Life as a Balzac character.

Was it at all possible for instance to like Paris enough without liking it too much?  (2.2)

Now I am breaking into the tautology.  It all depends on what “live” means.  Strether did not know that, back in Woollett, editing a Review (“’And what kind of a Review is it?’…  ‘Well, it’s green,’” 2.1), he was not living all that he could, while in Paris he finds other possibilities.

The piece on The Ambassadors in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (1998), “Lambert Strether’s Excellent Adventure” by Eric Haralson, begins where I began and immediately asks “but what on earth does it mean?” (169)  The entire article is about the extent to which “Live all you can” means “Have all the sex you can” (a wide range of opinions are presented), which tells me more about the state of Henry James studies in the mid-nineties than it does about The Ambassadors, but still does say a lot about the novel.

Strether, it turns out, has been in Paris before.  He did have his life.  He was there thirty years earlier, age twenty-five, with his wife, on their honeymoon.

It had been a bold dash, for which they had taken money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred at the moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so than by this private pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed with the higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it should bear a great harvest.  He had believed, sailing home again, that he had gained something great, and his theory – with an elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back, even, every few years – had then been to preserve, cherish, and extend it.  (2.2)

They even bought a pile of yellow-covered French books.  But Strether’s wife died before they were able to return, and soon after their only son died at boarding school.  Strether retreated from “life,” from sex.  With “under forty-eight hours of Paris,” something of this earlier sense of life returns to him.

The Ambassadors has a sad story underneath the plot.  This lost wife is barely mentioned again.  I only picked her out once more, obliquely.  Maybe it is a happy story, of the expiation of decades of grief.

the adventures of innocence have so often been the material of fiction - more useful Henry James short stories

“The Two Faces” (1900) was helpful in decoding the obscurities of The Awkward Age.  It is written on similar principles, but is simpler and only fifteen pages long.

Mrs. Grantham introduces a young woman into society, purposefully dressing her to look like a fool, which means “many things – too many, and they appeared to be feathers, frills, excrescences of silk and lace.”  Mrs. Grantham commits this small act of minor cruelty as revenge on the woman’s husband, who is Mrs. Grantham’s ex-boyfriend.  The point of view is that of Mrs. Grantham’s current boyfriend, Sutton.  When he witnesses the revenge – when he sees the cruelty in Mrs. Grantham’s face and humiliation in the young woman’s – there we have “The Two Faces” – he decides to dump Mrs. Grantham.

That’s a version of the story, with some translation.  Most of what I wrote has to be inferred.  For example, all Sutton does at the end is leave the party early.  If I want that action to be meaningful, I have to do something with it.  None of the sexual connections with Mrs. Grantham are explicit.  They are barely even implicit.  But to interpret what is visible in the text – to have it make sense at all – I have to start filling the void.

I first read The Awkward Age as if James would eventually provide clues to resolve the novel’s ambiguities.  “The Two Faces,” easier to absorb, showed me more clearly how much was going to remain unstated.  It is not so much a technique to allow multiple possibilities of motive, but to demand the reader work harder, and take some risks, just to piece together the plot.  Without some reasonably big leaps, “The Two Faces” makes no sense.

I want to note one fun description of a secondary character, introduced for expository purposes:

She was stout, red, rich, mature, universal – a massive, much-fingered volume, alphabetical, wonderful, indexed, that opened of itself at the right place.

Look, there is one of those mystifying superlatives, “wonderful,” used in a way I don’t understand.

James was using his short stories of this period to work on a number of techniques.  “The Story in It” (1902) works in the opposite way, removing every shadow from a simple case of unrequited love and then wondering, per the title, whether there is a “’story’ in it.”  This meta-fictional question is asked in a story which mostly consists of an argument about the purpose of fiction, an essay in dialogue disguised as a short story.

“You mean that the adventures of innocence have so often been the material of fiction? Yes,” Voyt replied; “that’s exactly what the bored reader complains of.  He has asked for bread and been given a stone.  What is it but, with absolute directness, a question of interest, or, as people say, of the story.”

The random reader of The Anglo-American Magazine likely found this story incomprehensible, but for anyone following James, who at this point had completed The Ambassadors and was writing The Wings of the Dove, it is revealing.