so long as we do not interfere with the traffic - Kipling rides "With the Night Mail"

The real masterpiece of Actions and Reactions, I thought, was “With the Night Mail,” a science fiction story about a mail run from London to Quebec in a lighter-than-air craft powered by a magic ray.  The narrator is a journalist along for the ride; the text is his article, written, apparently, for some kind of aircraft trade journal.  Commenter Katy yesterday called the story “steampunk as written by John McPhee,” which is just right.  We learn everything we wanted to know about oranges or Wyoming geology or futuristic aircraft – more than we want, honestly – as told by the men who grow oranges or geologize in Wyoming or operate those dirigibles.  Unlike the diligent McPhee, Kipling just makes it all up.

The eye detects no joint in her skin plating save the sweeping hair-crack of the bow-rudder – Magniac's rudder that assured us the dominion of the unstable air and left its inventor penniless and half-blind.  It is calculated to Castelli's "gull-wing" curve.  Raise a few feet of that all but invisible plate three-eighths of an inch and she will yaw five miles to port or starboard ere she is under control again.

Etc., etc., sure, why not.  Kipling approaches the unreadable.  This is his feat of technical heroism akin to the great pilots and engineers about whom he writes.  Just as they approach disaster during storms and so on, Kipling approaches pure gibberish.  The art is two-fold, at least; first, continuous touches like that bit about the fate of the inventor – imagery, character moments, little ingenuities.  Little handholds to delight the baffled reader. Then second, his total commitment to his concept, to the fantasy world he has created, a commitment rare, in my experience, among science fiction writers, who are seldom quite so unfriendly to their poor readers.

This commitment is clearest once the future story has ended but the actual story continues with a series of announcements, advertisements, a book review, and an advice column.  Although the spirit is comic, none of the extra material is exactly meant to be a joke.  It is all part of the commitment, part of Kipling’s unwillingness to leave the world he has invented.  He is like Tolkien working up Elvish.

Is this meant to be a joke?  (I am back in the “article,” the main text):

She is responsible only to the Aërial Board of Control – the A. B. C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly.  But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes, controls this planet.  “Transportation is Civilization,” our motto runs.  Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies.  Practically, the A. B. C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of private administration on its shoulders.

“With the Night Mail” is not just science fiction but Utopian fiction, with a rather specialized Utopia appealing to writers who think the engineers should run things.  What looks like a conceptual, idea- driven piece is in fact pure self-expression.  Kipling creates a world in which he would like to live and then lives in it for a bit.  He is – or would become? – sufficiently aware of the dangers of his Utopia that a few years later he would write a sequel upending the whole thing.

One odd feature of the story is the use of mail delivery as the epitome of technocratic heroism, but I have just read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little first novel, Night Flight (1931), which is specifically about the heroism of nighttime mail runs by early aviators, and boy does Saint-Exupéry mean it, so Kipling was not being idiosyncratic but prescient.

empty, but still magnificent - Kipling's Actions and Reactions

Rudyard Kipling’s Actions and Reactions (1909) is the weakest of his short story collections that I have read, and I think that I just have three more to go.  It is nevertheless fascinating, often most so when it is most wrong-headed.  Complete mastery, ingenious and artful, applied to exasperating material.  This book is the most wrong-headed Kipling I have read; maybe that is what I mean.

The perfect example is “The Mother Hive.”  The second paragraph:

A young bee crawled up the greasy trampled alighting-board.  “Excuse me,” she began, “but it’s my first honey-flight.  Could you kindly tell me if this is my –”

Yes, this story is about and from the point of view of a bee hive.  It is being invaded by parasitic wasps.  The characters are various bees and wasps.  It is an allegory.  A political allegory.  The parasites, who introduce Reforms, are Liberals, the weak-minded bees Tories, or something like that.  The story ends in apocalypse, as a bee-keeper smokes everyone out and destroys the hive.  The natural history, the bee-keeping stuff, is fantastic:

…  two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work, awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose, weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish and capped with dirt.

Kipling had recently become interested in bee-keeping.  If anyone has earned the right to animal allegories, it is author of Just-So Stories, but this one makes no sense.  What is the parasitic wax-moth supposed to do?  It is her nature to invade bee hives.  She can do nothing else.  Maybe that is Kipling’s point.

Two stories are not allegories but parables of imperialism, as usual complicating my ideas about Kipling’s ideas without making me any less – I would not normally say appalled, but “Little Foxes” is appalling.  The new English governor of the new English colony of – something near Ethiopia; this is all made up – discovers that his new country has foxes.

The Great River Gihon, well used to the moods of kings, slid between his mile-wide banks toward the sea, while the Governor praised God in a loud and searching cry never before heard by the river.

The poor fox “could not understand the loud cry which the Governor has cried.”  He cannot guess what is about to hit him.  The English proceed to organize the entire country on an English fox-hunting basis.  In many ways it works.  There is an insight here about the value of the rule of law, however arbitrary its basis.  Kipling may well have meant for me to find this story appalling.  I am not sure.  The main plot as such is just one of Kipling’s prank plots, thin stuff.

“A Deal in Cotton” is a narratorial masterpiece, with an Englishman describing a colonial African incident that he does not fully understand, because he was feverish when it happened, and his Indian servant re-telling the story in a way that contains its own elisions, with a let’s call it “true” story emerging out of the combination; it is more or less about competing kinds of imperial rule.  The game here, the skill, is in the omission of information.  No one was better at that game, not even Henry James.

What else.  “Garm – a Hostage” is a perfect dog story, and “The House Surgeon” is a perfect ghost story.  My doubt is if they are anything else, not that they need to be.  I have avoided mentioning the single story that seemed to me like a narrow, frustrating, surprising masterpiece, “With the Night Mail,” a science fantasy that is also perhaps nothing else.  I want to save it for tomorrow.

Technically, Actions and Reactions is almost beyond belief.

Paris Peasant - Louis Aragon wanders around - A laudable error. But a delectable folly.

Paris Peasant, Louis Aragon, 1926, translated by Simon Watson Taylor.  A Surrealist novel, in some sense, although I do not understand what use there might be in calling this a novel.  The book contains a short preface that I did not understand; a hundred-page tour of the shops in a covered passage, destroyed just after Aragon wrote the piece, that is a classic of Paris flaneuring; another bit of wandering in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, this time at night, and accompanied by André Breton; and a final manifesto-like piece that I did not understand.

The root of Surrealism (“offspring of frenzy and darkness,” p. 65 of the 1994 Exact Change edition) is realism, right?  Aragon is at one of the hairdressers in the Passage de l’Opera.  He is rhapsodizing on the subject of blond hair:

What is blonder than the froth of moss?  I have often though I saw champagne on the floor of forests.  And chanterelles!  And agaric!  Darting hares!  The moons of fingernails!  The colour pink!  The blood of plants!  The eyes of bitches!  Memory: memory is truly blond.  (p. 40)

Twaddle, perhaps, but glorious twaddle, imaginatively free twaddle.  Aragon has provided himself with a form that is both rigid – a passage, a straight line – and endlessly free and digressive, with room for poems and a little play (“Man Converses with His Faculties”) and essays on anything.  Plus lots of signage and typography, which I suppose I could scan.  Maybe it’s on the internet somewhere.  The drink menu of the Certa café is reproduced.  There is a Dada Cocktail for four francs.  Aragon did not pick the Passage de l’Opera at random – it is packed with Surreal history, “the last traces of the Dada movement” (92):

What memories, what revulsions linger around these hash houses: the man eating in this one has the impression he is chewing the table rather than a steak, and becomes irritated by his common, noisy table companions, ugly, stupid girls, and a gentleman flaunting his second-rate subconscious and the whole unedifying mess of his lamentable existence; while, in another one, a man wobbles on his chair’s badly squared legs, and concentrates his impatience and his rancours upon the broken clock…  The whole scene – sweaty walls, people, stodgy food – is like a smear of candle grease.  (92-3)

The book is well written and well observed when Aragon wants it to be.  A classic of urban writing.  A classic of looking around.

What was I up to?  Let me put it like this: I thought I was prodding metaphysics forward an inch or two.  A laudable error.  But a delectable folly.  (184-5)

Not so far, really, from how I think about art.

Do you think it just to call me into existence - Conrad Aiken's puppets argue their case

After a long absence, I always feel like I have to remind myself how to write, so I will burn off this piece by writing about Conrad Aiken, useful for practice since almost no one cares about Aiken.

The last two books of his that I read were Punch: The Immortal Liar, Documents in His History (1921) and Priapus and the Pool (1922) – I know, what titles, yeesh.  But both are books as such, not collections of the poems of the moment, and thus unrepresented in Aiken's Selected Poems not because their contents are inferior but because the poems need the company of the rest of the book.

Aiken, since his earliest poems, had a tendency to turn his female characters into an abstract, idealized, Woman, which is perhaps not a problem from the point of view of accuracy, representing the all too real psychology of his male characters, and presumably himself, but is nonetheless tiresome.  I know it is too much to ask, physician, to heal thyself, but at least critique thyself.  Well, in these two books Aiken critiques himself.

Priapus and the Pool employs a symbolic male/female symbolic dichotomy that is not so original – lust versus love, restless motion versus stable depth, like that – but the directness of the confrontation has some interest.  The most curious effect is in the poems in which the voice is ambiguous, where the speaker could be either Priapus or the pool, with the meaning of the poem changing accordingly.  Unfortunately, the diction is high Romantic, or perhaps Symbolist, and any quotations will make Aiken look ridiculous.  I wonder if he had been reading D. H. Lawrence.

Punch: The Immortal Liar, though – this one is different.  The title character is the marionette.  His wife is the much-abused Judy.  Did he hurl her down the stairs, or was she driven to suicide by his abuse and philandering with Polly Prim?  Punch is a trickster figure, and a mix of Faust and Mephistopheles, with a Walpurgisnacht section.  Is he the devil or merely a puppet?

The great surprise for me was the end of the poem, the epilogue “Mountebank Feels the Strings of His Heart,” where poor Judy speaks for herself:

                                  “Listen! you puller of strings!
Do you think it just to call me into existence, –
To give me a name, – and give me so little beside? . . .
To Polly you give her laughter, to Punch his illusions, –
To me you give nothing but death!”  (ellipses in original)

The puppeteer, the poet, has an answer:

“I too am a puppet.  And as you are a symbol for me
(As Punch is, and Sheba – bright symbols of intricate meanings,
Atoms of soul – who move, and are moved, by me – )
So I am a symbol, a puppet drawn out upon strings,
Helpless, well-coloured, with a fixed and unchanging expression…”  (ellipses mine – The Biblical Sheba replaces Goethe’s Helen)

The poet then, for a stanza, exercises his power and makes Judy “real” for a moment.

                                                     I desire to see you
Under a pear-tree – (we’ll say that the tree is in blossom –)
A warm day of sunlight, and laughing, - at nothing whatever!...
A green hill’s behind you; a cloud like a dome tops the hill;
A poplar tree, like a vain girl, leans over a mirror
Trying on silver, then green, perplexed, but in pleasure;
And you there, alone in the sunlight, watch bees in the pear-tree,
Dipping the leaves; and you laugh – for no reason whatever!  (ellipses in original)

This meta-fictional gift is the most beautiful scene I have found in Aiken so far.  How sad that the puppeteer, the poet, finds no solace in it, for despite his imaginative efforts his puppets “lay huddled together / Arms over heads, contorted”:

Inscrutable, silent, terrific, like those made eternal
Who stare, without thought, at a motionless world without meaning.

five posts on Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale crammed into one

I returned for two days, and will now wander off somewhere else, so no writing for all of next week.  Two days, one to whine and one to glance at my vacation reading, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) by Arnold Bennett.

In ordinary circumstances, I would have taken many notes and written about the book for a week, but no note-taking while on vacation and see above.

Constance and Sophia are sisters.  Their life as teens takes up a quarter of the novel.  The sisters separate, Constance staying home, Sophia ending up in Paris, where she lives through the grisly Siege of the city.  Eventually, they reunite.  Eventually, they die.

This summary could be made by anyone who has read not the novel but simply the table of contents.  An innovation of Bennett’s is that the sisters’ stories are not interwoven but told separately, the stay-at-home first, the Parisian second.  It feels less like reading a six hundred-page novel than four separate hundred and fifty-page novellas, sequels but with a branching path in the middle.

Bennett was a great student of the French novel, of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola, but there is little in the voice or technique of the novel that he could not have learned from William Thackeray.  Bennett’s narrator, in his incessant light irony, reminded me of the narrator of Vanity Fair more than that of Germinal.  He describes more furniture and clothing than Thackeray ever did.  That is like Zola.  And some of the Parisian scenes, especially the scenes around the 1870 war, come close to imitations of Zola.

The Old Wives’ Tale is a domestic novel, with intrusions of melodrama, so even the Siege of Paris chapter is about ordinary life during the crisis, albeit ordinary life as experienced and even determined by a strong-willed, upright Victorian woman.  The novel, the French part, at times resembles a mix of L’Assommoir and Cold Comfort Farm, with the industrious Sophia determined to reform the corruptions of Zola’s ethos – of Paris.  And heck if she doesn’t succeed.  Some of this stuff is pretty funny.  Bennett’s comedy is generally pretty strong.

Reading an earlier Bennett novel set in roughly the same place, Anna of the Five Towns (1902), seraillon wrote “[i]t’s as though Bennett has refused to let go of the dominant form of the late 19th century novel,” and The Old Wives’ Tale has the same feeling of continuity.  Anyone comfortable with the English Victorian novel ought to be happy with Bennett, as with Forster or Wells.  It is not yet 1910, when everything changed.  Bennett, like his contemporaries, critiques the values of earlier Victorians, but gently, mostly.  The long scope of the novel, which begins in the 1840s and ends in the 20th century, creates much of Bennett’s irony.  Sophia may have lived the more dramatic life, but back in the five towns every little change – like a store putting up a sign – is a source of drama.

The metaphysics of the novel is grounded and pessimistic, authentically Naturalist.  People follow their temperaments.  They change, and yet they do not, cannot.  Thus the strategic decision to start the novel when the sisters are teens, more or less formed, skipping their childhood.

This looks like my notes for the five-part, quotation-packed series of posts I am not going to write.  Oh well.  Strongly recommended to anyone with a basic sympathy for the form of the long Victorian novel.

shamed by French bookstore displays

I was not going to write my usual praise of French bookstores, or, really, my lament about American bookstores, not this time, but near the end of my trip to France I was driven into embarrassment, as we can see on the left.

What we see here is part of the display of the works of Georges Perec, as found in the Decitre bookstore in Lyon – not the giant Decitre but the one at the mall.  The occasion is the release of the Pléiade edition of the works of Perec in two gigantic volumes, a stamp of Official High Status.

Lyon is a big city, but I found similar displays in the windows of two bookstores in Vichy, a town of 25,000, although a spa town that gets thousands of visitors.  But visitors who want to buy expensive editions of fifty-year-old avant-garde novels?  Yes, to some degree, apparently.

The great touch is the cardboard Perec holding a gigantic copy of his Pléiade “album,” or I guess really a tiny cardboard Perec holding a regular sized “album.”  A publisher designed, printed, and sent around this special display.  A bookstore employee punched it out and assembled it.  I saw it in the windows of many bookstores.  There were also posters.  I am trying to compare the marketing effort to that which will accompany, say, the Library of America editions of Don DeLillo, who was born in the same year as Perec.  Heck, the Philip Roth books did not get this kind of promotion.  Again, I remind myself, this particular photo is from the bookstore at the shopping mall.

French bookstores are legally protected in a number of ways, but this is really a difference of culture.  The ban on price discounting does not cause bookstores to give so much space to an author like Perec.  Does it actually sell books?

We, in the United States, do not treat our artists as well as we should.  Not that little cardboard figures are such good treatment in and of themselves.  Still.  To the right is one of Lyon’s many building-sized murals, this one devoted to writers and books and Lyon's history as a center of early modern publishing.  It’s culture, culture, culture.

Disclosure: I have never read a book by Perec.  It is the principle of the thing that galls.

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.

"Who the devil was he? - Conrad tells his story

The most remarkable single chapter of Nostromo is Part III, Chapter 10, about five-sixths of the way in, which in a properly structured novel would be where the action ramps up and races to a thrilling conclusion.  That is exactly what Joseph Conrad does, but in his own perverse way.

At this point, the great action scene in the novel has involved three men on a boat in the dark, keep perfectly still, perfectly quiet, while trying to make out the actions of another boat that is perfectly still and quiet.  The scene is tense and terrifying, but also so static that it is amusing, in retrospect, to think of how exciting it was.  Well, now there ought to be some more action.  There has been a revolution in Sulaco, and the title character, thought to be killed, but no!, has been sent off to the rescue.

In this chapter, the fussy Captain Mitchell takes a guest on a tour of the city.  Conrad has flung the chapter into the future – how far is not clear – so that the Captain is telling his guest about the story that I thought I was going to read in a more direct fashion.  Conrad is deliberately telling, not showing, and the teller only has the most general comprehension of the events he is relating.  Even though it would seem that the Captain knows more than I do, having the privilege of living in the future, he understands less, so that as the blowhard fills me in, the gap between what I know and what he knows expands.  Irony, is what I mean.

Much of Conrad’s previous fiction was narrated by a master ironist, his stand-in Marlow, a story-teller so skilled that his dexterity raised suspicions.  What is Marlow not telling me?  He always seems to know more than I do.  Captain Mitchell is a parody, a pedant and a fool.  He tells too much, and not enough.  As he tells the story – how the hero Nostromo made his way to the allied army, how the revolution was suppressed, and so on – Conrad slips more and more over to the poor sap stuck on the tour along with me:

‘Abominable Pedrito!  Who the devil was he?’ would wonder the distinguished bird of passage hovering on the confines of waking and sleep with resolutely open eyes and a faint but amiable curl upon his lips, from between which stuck out the eighteenth or twentieth cigar of that memorable day.  (III.10)

What a strange sentence.  Pure Conrad.  The “distinguished bird of passage” is the visitor, bored out of his mind, stupefied by tobacco; the abominable Pedrito is a major figure in the revolution but a minor character in the novel, meaning that the distinguished bird is a deliberate substitute for the poor reader who just wants to know if Nostromo made his way back and if the silver mine was dynamited or not and whatever happened to that poor French fop Martin Decoud after the accident with the boat.  No, first, I get Pedrito.  Nothing wrong with asking who the devil he was.

Since Conrad’s narrator is genuinely omnipotent, and is more interested in irony than suspense, before the chapter ends I do get answers to all of my questions, including plenty of detail that no one alive would know, things even Marlow could not tell me.  Conrad never cheats.

I have read a number of other novels like Nostromo, but they were all written later, by people who had read it.

his profound knowledge of men and things - notes on Nostromo

What a relief – I have been reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) – that some novelist finally figured out that 1) stories do not have to be told like a medieval chronicle – “and then, and then” – and 2) that entire scenes – important­ scenes – can simply be skipped.  And there the story is, as intact, as told, as ever.

Henry James had figured this out around the same time as Conrad, as I saw in The Wings of the Dove.  I know, we can think of plenty – well, some – earlier examples. There’s that sequence in Ivanhoe (1820) of parallel chapters, right?  At the siege?  You know.

Nostromo is a bit of a thriller, even a bit of a heist story, so the time jumps could be used for suspense, but are instead generally used for irony.  Conrad moves me forward in one strand of the story so that when he goes back to pick up another strand, I know more than the characters.  This is a form of suspense, I suppose, but the question is what events will erupt when the characters learn what I know.  I bet they’ll be surprised!

The first chapter is hardly something that belongs in a novel at all.  It is more of a geography, but of a fictional town in a fictional country, Costaguana, that has some resemblance to Colombia.  Much of the chapter is about the exact arrangement of the islands in the harbor, some of which can be immediately forgotten, some of which is crucial to understanding the story.  A little inset tale about the ghosts of doomed treasure-hunters foreshadows the plot, but otherwise there are barely people in this chapter.

The second introduces some people, including Captain Mitchell, “’Fussy Joe’ for the commanders of the Company’s Ships, Captain Joseph Mitchell prided himself on his profound knowledge of men and things in the country – cosas de Costaguana” (I.2).

All of the Conrad I have read, aside from The Secret Agent (1907) and “The Secret Sharer” (1908) has been from the fertile period of 1897 to 1902, the time of the southeast Asian seas or his stand-in narrator Marlow or both, in Lord Jim (1900), say.  My understanding is that Conrad had something of an artistic crisis that moved him elsewhere, to the London anarchists of The Secret Agent and here, earlier, to the remote Pacific province of a South American country that he had visited once, twenty-five years earlier, and that he mostly patched together from a couple of books.  He fooled me, at least.  I was convinced.  Some of the extraneous history Conrad includes made me think that that Nostromo was a precursor of The Lord of the Rings.  World-building is what I believe people call this.

The other break is the Captain Mitchell character, an anti-Marlow.  In a novel by an ironist, we can guess that anyone who prides himself on his profound knowledge is actually a fool, which makes Captain Mitchell a great recurring narrative device: when Conrad needs someone who does not really understand what is going on, here he is.  Irony ensues.

Patrick Kurp writes that he is currently reading Nostromo for “moral education.”  I wonder what he is learning.  I will likely write one more repetitive post about how events are not quite in order.  That’s what I learned.

All with a sense of the ridiculous, keen yet charitable - Thomas Hardy's Human Shows

Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925) is the second of the three books Hardy wrote and assembled in his eighties.  It is almost exactly like the first one, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (1922).  There are a few poems, polished up, I assume, originating in the 1860s, a few from later in the 19th century, a few about Hardy’s first wife, a few about the war.  Mostly, though, the poems were written since the last book.  (These last two sentences describe both collections, and I bet will work for Hardy’s last book, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928) as well.

The verse is all formal, and in a variety of forms, with lots of surprising line breaks and line lengths, lots for the eye and ear to do.  The subjects are failed love affairs, graces, and music.  Some Wessex, some London.  Two poems are narrated by dogs, which I believe is a new touch:

‘Why She Moved House’

          (The Dog Muses)

Why she moved house, without a word,
    I cannot understand;
She’d mirrors, flowers, she’d book and bird,
    And callers in a band.

And where she is she gets no sun,
    No flowers, no book, no glass;
Of callers I am the only one,
    And I but pause and pass.

In his “Introductory Note” to his next book, Hardy complains about critics missing the “flippant, not to say farcical pieces in this collection [meaning Human Shows],” although he will not say they had “wilfully misrepresented the book… knowing well that they could not have read it,” which seems like a wise guess about a lot of criticism.

Anyway, there is a lot of humor in Human Shows, of the human folly type:

All with a sense of the ridiculous, keen yet charitable;
In brief, a rich, profuse attractiveness unnarratable.

This is from “A Watering-place Lady Inventoried,” which as the title suggests is satirical, although of whom, I wonder, given these lines:

Till a cynic would find her amiability provoking,
Tempting him to indulge in mean and wicked joking.

A six-poem sequence of winter poems was a highlight for me, winters from the 1920s, winters from the past:

    The steps are a blanched slope,
    Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
        And we take him in.  (from “Snow in the Suburbs”)

Come to think of it, there is more love of animals in this collection than usual, including a poem written to support the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.  Here’s more snow:

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though
            But half an hour ago
The road was brown, and now is starkly white,
A watcher would have failed defining quite
            When it was transformed so.  (from “A Light Snow-fall after Frost”)

And how about one that ends, to remind me that this is Hardy, with a long-ago death:

While she who grieved
At the sad lot
Of her pretty plants –
Cold, iced, forgot –
Herself is colder,
And knows it not.  (from “The Frozen Greenhouse”)

If I were assembling a long selection of Hardy’s poems, I would include lots from Human Shows; if a short selection, possibly none, since I would have already picked plenty of similar poems from earlier books.  Here, said Hardy, have more, which from a man his age was a gift.

“It’s so sad! The cranes have flown away!” - Bunin turns memory into prose

The Ivan Bunin that Graham Hettlinger translates in Collected Stories is a nostalgist.  His longing for a vanished Russian was reinforced but not caused by the Russian Revolution and Bunin’s emigration.  He had lost his Russia a long time ago.

The first story in the book, “The Scent of Apples” (1900) is openly nostalgic.  “The early days of a lovely autumn come back to me.”  This is barely a story, but more a series of childhood experiences, of sensory impressions.

You dress slowly, winder in the garden, find a cold, wet apple that’s been forgotten among the leaves.  For some reason it’s remarkably delicious; it seems unlike any other apple.  (13)

I remind myself that “The Scent of Apples” is the single representative in the collection of the first twenty years of Bunin’s writing, and may be a freak.  But it sure sounds like the later writer, and it feels like a poet’s prose.

And so I see myself once more in the country.  Deep fall.  Cloudy, dove-grey days.  (15)

The sky, in Bunin, is perpetually dove-grey, at least in the north.  Look at the language in “Caucasus” (1937), about adulterous lovers who sneak away to the south for an idyll (this is an unusual Bunin story in that catastrophe strikes not the lovers but the husband):

The plain went on and on in all its emptiness: burial mounds and native graves under the dry, killing sun; the sky itself like a cloud of dust, the rising ghosts of mountains…

Fireflies drifted like topaz in the murky dark; the songs of tree toads rang like small glass bells…

How wonderfully the falling water flashed, scattering itself like glass among the stones at that secret hour when the late moon comes from behind the mountains and the woods like a divinity, and looks down watchfully.  (284)

This is the lushness of the sexual idyll, contrasted with the plain despair of the husband: “Then he went back to his room, lay down on the couch, put a pistol to each of his temples, and fired.”

The language is not always so poetical.  Bunin has other modes of intensification, always grounded in material things, though.  “He ate half-sour pickles with dill and downed four shots of vodka, thinking he’d willingly die tomorrow if some miracle would let him bring her back, let him spend one more day with her just so he could tell her everything” (“Sunstroke,” 193).  Suffering, with pickles.  This is another story where a love affair, the sexual act, makes the entire world more sensorially interesting to the character.  He now perceives what he had not, not just in himself but all around him.  “How terrible and savage everything mundane and ordinary becomes when the heart’s been destroyed – yes, he understood that now – destroyed by sunstroke, destroyed by too much happiness and love” (194).  All of the description enacts the word “everything” in prose.

A number of pieces are less than a page, sketches or anecdotes, a brief setup leading to a kind of punch line, for example:

“Sir,” he shouts into the dirt.  “Sir, the cranes!”  He waves his arms in despair.  “It’s so sad!  The cranes have flown away!”  And shaking his head, he chokes on drunken tears.  (“Cranes,” 1930, 110)

And for a moment, it is sad, ridiculous, but sad.

Ivan Bunin stops time - But already it was passing, the fall of 1916

Ivan Bunin was a prolific short story writer for most of his life.  Early on he was best known as a poet.  He wrote novels, a book about Chekhov, a book about Tolstoy – he wrote a lot.  And here I have Graham Hettlinger’s Collected Stories (2007), 360 pages of short fiction, from which I will generalize.  What errors I will make!

In my defense, a century of English translations of Bunin keep returning to the same stories, and Hettlinger presumably selected this set for a reason.  Hettlinger skips Bunin’s first decade, and then after “The Scent of Apples” skips the next decade.  About a third of the book is from the 1946 collection Dark Avenues.  Most of the rest is from the 1920s.

Here is what I see:

1. Bunin writes in the tradition of Turgenev and Chekhov.  He is if anything at times too derivative of Chekhov, although his style is less plain.  His stories are mostly set in a Russia – “The Gentleman from San Francisco” is an aberration – that is instantly recognizable as that of Turgenev etc., just updated a bit.  Country estates, students home from Moscow or St. Petersburg.

And love affairs, first loves – as per the 1860 Turgenev novella, First Love – first sex, often followed by catastrophe.  If first sexual encounters led to suicide as often as they do in Bunin, there would be many fewer people on Earth.

I don’t want to count, but I will bet that a majority of the stories in this book are variations on this theme.  The novella “Mitya’s Love” (1924), then “Sunstroke” (1925), this time a one night stand between a soldier and a married woman, then “The Elagin Affair” (1925), with a soldier and a femme fatale actress – Bunin’s writes the story over and over.  He is in his seventies, barely scraping by in Nazi-occupied France, and he writes the story over and over.

2.  I said he updates Chekhov’s Russia “a bit,” and I mean it seriously.  Bunin left Russia for France in 1920 and never returned.  I assumed that many of the stories written after that date would be set in the world of the Russian émigrés in Paris, much as Vladimir Nabokov’s stories are set in Russian Berlin, the world in which he lived.  Oh no.  A single story, “In Paris” (1940), is about Russians in exile, a general and a waitress at a Russian restaurant.  It’s a lovely, sad story, about a kind of first love.

Every other story is set in Russia before the Revolution, and generally before the war.  It was surprising to see Bunin end the half-page sketch “The Eve” (1930), about the passengers on a train, end with “But already it was passing, the fall of 1916.”  It was almost shocking when “Tanya” (1940), another heart-breaking version of “first love” ends:

That was in February, in the terrible year of 1917.  He was in the countryside for the last time in his life.

At least the reason this particular mismatched couple cannot stay together is not their fault.

In the stories written in the 1920s, this did not stand out so much, but as the chronology pushed along, as Bunin wrote surrounded by a second war, it began to seem pretty strange.  “Cleansing Monday” (1944) is, aside from the “first love / single sexual encounter leads to etc.” story, a marvelous portrait of Moscow, with the young couple enjoying everything: “boxes of chocolates, new books by Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmajer, and Przybyszewski,” a lecture by Andrey Bely “which he delivered in song as he ran and danced around the stage,” a performance by Stanislavski, and a range of restaurants.  Those blini!  They visit the grave of Chekhov; they read medieval Russian chronicles.  And they visit churches.  There is more religious language and imagery in this story than usual.  It ends in a church.

May 12, 1944, is the date attached to this story.  It may well be some kind of patriotic response to the war, but the Moscow Bunin describes is long gone, destroyed by the Soviets, not the Nazis.

This frozen quality of Bunin, the obsession with late adolescence circa 1910, began to overwhelm whatever else was in the stories.

But maybe this is an effect created by the translator.

Quietude and calm settled on the island - Ivan Bunin's "Death on Capri"

“The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915) is Ivan Bunin’s most famous story at this point, I think, although I do not remember ever seeing it anthologized anywhere.  The title character, never named “– no one really learned his name in Naples or Capri –” is taking his wife and adult daughter on a long tour of Europe.  Grown rich on the back of Chinese labor, “he decided it was time to rest.”

The first seven pages of the nineteen page story are set on the ocean liner and in Naples.  It takes another six pages to move the characters from Naples to Capri, and to get them settled in at their hotel.  The tone throughout is lightly ironic, mildly satirical, and observant:

During one of the stops he rose up on the couch, and saw a wretched mass of little stone houses with mildewed walls stacked on top of one another at the water’s edge below a rocky slope, saw boats and piles of rags, tin cans, brown nets – and fell into despair, remembering that this was the authentic Italy to which he’d come in order to enjoy himself.

In the gentleman’s defense, the sea between Naples and Capri is rough and he is seasick.  Even Italy loses its savor when seasick.  They land: “The earth smells sweet in Italy after rain, and the scent of every island is distinct.”  That’s more like it.

Let me add up those pages.  Bunin has six pages to go.  What is this story going to be about?  Will the gentleman learn a lesson about what it means to live, toe really live (“He hadn’t lived before – he had only existed”)?  Will he have an epiphany of some kind?

Not exactly.  Reading the newspaper before dinner (“a few sentences about the endless Balkan War”) he instead has a stroke, and dies.  Most of the remaining pages are about what happens in a nice Italian hotel when a guest dies.  The family members appear, but as problems to be managed.  Soon enough, they are all, alive or dead, back on the ocean liner, bound for home.  “Quietude and calm settled on the island in its wake.”  Then comes a paragraph as startling as any in the story:

Two thousand years ago that island was inhabited by a man who somehow held power over millions of people.  He gratified his lust in ways that are repugnant beyond words, and carried out immeasurable atrocities against his subjects.

Why the change of scale?  Why has Emperor Tiberius appeared in the story?  Because tourist to Capri visit “the ruins of his stone house on one of the island’s highest peaks.”  The trip is arduous enough to require a good night’s sleep, and now that “the dead old man from San Francisco – who’d planned to make the trip with all the others, but wound up only frightening them with an unpleasant reminded about mortality – had now been sent away to Naples, the guests slept very soundly.”

The long last paragraph is like something out of Kipling, with a lot of detail – well, not a Kipling level of detail – about the ocean liner’s engines and driveshafts, and about the dancing in the ballroom, where no one thinks or knows about “what lay deep, deep below them, in the blackness of the hold.”

The only hint that the story is written by a Russian is the appearance on Capri of “a few disheveled, bearded Russian who had settled on the island, all of them wearing glasses and looking absent-minded, the collars raised on their threadbare coats.”  One of these Capri Russians is presumably the author.  I mean of course the only hint in the English version, translated by Graham Hettlinger.

My only care my language on Homer’s shores - Odysseus Elytis finds his subject - He was a brave young man

After reading a book of the poems of Angelos Sikelianos, I pushed on into modern Greek poetry a bit with the 1981 Selected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard in response to Elytis’s 1979 Nobel prize.

By chance, Keeley has a poem in the current Hudson Review (Spring 2017), titled “The Village Called Kolonaki,” which contrasts the Athens he clearly loves, a touristy place where a waiter recites the specials “in a modern epic mode,” with images of

the dark sides of disaster
of migrants crawling through holes
in barbed-wire fences
or falling off flimsy rafts
to drown in the once-blue Aegean.  (pp. 38-40)

His image of Greece is built of “certain charming clichés” which can be hard to surrender.

Odysseus Elytis was a descendant of Sikelianos, another poet who wrote against classical Greek reason.  He found his way through French surrealism, which he pulled into Greek.  The results, in his first books from 1940 and 1943, at least as seen in this selection, often look like clichés rearranged.  Take some images, some strong, some the usual stuff, shake them up, and sprinkle some Greek content – Santorini, Helen, the Aegean.  Maybe the English makes it too flat, I don’t know.

Then Elytis wrote the “Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign” (1945).  My prejudice, confirmed here, is that surrealism is a great training ground for young writers with no subject.  His war experiences, fighting the Germans, gave him a subject.  Elytis was also a second lieutenant, for what that is worth, and was likely lost in his own way, but not, like the hero of the poem, killed and left on an Albanian mountainside.

The mountains of Albania thundered
Then they melted snow to wash
His body, dawn’s silent shipwreck
And his hands, open space of solitude
The mountains of Albania thundered
They did not weep
Why should they weep?
He was a brave young man.  (stanza VI)

The poem is like Pindaric ode to a fallen soldier rather than a victorious athlete.  Much of the poem describes the lieutenant’s apotheosis, his ascent to some kind of heaven.  He is Hercules; he is Orpheus.

Hermaphroditic flowers salute him secretly
And with soft voices that fade into the air they speak to him
Love-sick trees bend towards him
With nests sunk in their armpits
And their branches dipped in the sun’s oil
Miracle – what a miracle – down on earth
White tribes with blue ploughshares engrave the fields
Peaks shine in the background
And, deeper still, the inaccessible dreams of spring mountains.  (XII)

The imagery is a mix of the pagan and Christian.  The last words of the poem are “Easter of God.”

In his next book, The Axion Esti (1959), Elytis plunges deeply into the language of the Greek Orthodox church.  The long poem is a liturgy mixed with prose passages that are autobiographical, from Elytis’s war – “First Reading: The March toward the Front” – and more traditional poems, or elements of the service turned into different kinds of poems:

from “The Passion”

     Greek the language they gave me;
poor the house on Homer’s shores.
    My only care my language on Homer’s shores.

The language transforms, though, and by the end of this passage, though, his only care is “my language with the first words of the Hymn!”

Keeley and Sherrard only sample The Axion Esti.  I would like to read the whole thing someday.

The poems from the 1970s, well, Elytis is back to poems I do not understand.  That middle period, though!

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 titled “James’s Elusive Wings” and 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.