He has come to London, then, as a kind of anthropologist (though his motives are never clarified), on the trail of Lady Julia’s descendants, and is welcomed into the culture of the natives: the chief of the natives being Mrs. Brookenham, Lady Julia’s daughter, who is at the hub of a fevered salon. All roads lead to Mrs. Brook’s, and the travelers are encrusted with bizarre trappings. The Duchess, a callously opportunistic Englishwoman who is the widow of a minor Italian aristocrat, is rearing her Neapolitan ward, Agnesina (“little Aggie”), as a snow-white slate on which “the figures were yet to be written.” The hugely rich Mr. Mitchett, known as Mitchy, rigged out in unmatched merry-andrew gear and tolerant to the point of nihilism, is the zany but good-hearted son of a shoemaker become shoe mogul. Vanderbank, or Van—a handsome, winning, self-protective, evasive young man of thirty-five, impecunious on a mediocre salary, whom Mr. Longdon befriends—is Mrs. Brook’s (relatively) secret lover. In and out of Mrs. Brook’s salon flow schemers, snobs, faithless wives and husbands, jesters, idlers, fantastic gossips; even a petty thief, who happens to be Mrs. Brook’s own son, Harold. And at the tea table in the center of it all sits (now and then) her daughter, Lady Julia’s granddaughter, Fernanda—Nanda—who smokes, runs around London “squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase,” and chooses as an intimate a married woman with an absent husband.
Nanda is fully aware of the corrupted lives of her mother’s circle. Her father is indifferent, negligent, a cipher; her brother sponges on everyone who enters the house, and on every house he enters; her parents live enormously beyond their means; all relationships are measured by what can be gotten out of them. “Edward and I,” Mrs. Brook declares to the Duchess, “work it out between us to show off as tender parents and yet to get from you everything you’ll give. I do the sentimental and he the practical.” With her “lovely, silly eyes,” Mrs. Brook at forty-one is youthfully attractive, but cuts two years off her daughter’s age in order to snip two years from her own. There is no shame, no guilt, no conscience; the intrinsic has no value.
All these people (but for the blunt Duchess, who is plain Jane) have names that are cursory, like their lives: Mrs. Brook, Van, Mitchy, Aggie, Tishy, Carrie, even Nanda; it is as if only Mr. Longdon troubles to take a long breath. “I’ve been seeing, feeling, thinking,” he admits. He understands himself to be “a man of imagination,” an observer, with a “habit of not privately depreciating those to whom he was publicly civil.” (A habit that James himself, on the evidence of the embarrassments of Alice’s diary, did not always live up to.) Mrs. Brook’s salon, by contrast, feeds on conspiracy, on sublimely clever talk, on plots and outrageous calculations, on malice and manipulation, on exploitation, on matchmaking both licit and illicit; everyone is weighed for cash worth. Mitchy rates high on the money scale, low on social background. Vanderbank, with his beauty and cultivated charm, is the reverse. Mr. Longdon has money, judiciousness, and an unappeased and unfinished love for Lady Julia, whose memory serves as a standard for fastidious decorum and civilized reciprocity—none of it to be found in present-day London, least of all in Mrs. Brook’s drawing room. Mr. Longdon despises Mrs. Brook and is almost preternaturally drawn to Nanda. Though Lady Julia was beautiful and Nanda is not, he is overcome by what he takes to be a magical likeness. In Nanda, Lady Julia is nearly restored for him—except that Nanda is a modern young woman with access to the great world; she knows what Lady Julia in her girlhood would never have been permitted (or perhaps would never have wished) to know.
The ground on which The Awkward Age is spread—and woven, and bound, and mercilessly knotted—is precisely this: what a young woman ought or ought not to know, in a new London that “doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, had neither time nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steamroller,” as Vanderbank cautions Mr. Longdon. “It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. Therefore you see it’s all as yet rather a dark question for poor Nanda—a question that in a way quite occupies the foreground of her mother’s earnest little life. How will she look, what will be thought of her and what will she be able to do for herself?” Nanda at eighteen, having come of age (Mrs. Brook, for all her shaving of years, can no longer suppress this news), is ready to be brought down—from the schoolroom, so to speak—to mingle among the denizens and fumes of Mrs. Brook’s nether realm. “I seem to see,” James complained in his Notebook, “… English society before one’s eyes—the great modern collapse of all the forms and ‘superstitions’ and respects, good and bad, and restraints and mysteries … decadences and vulgarities and confusions and masculinizations and femininizations—the materializations and abdications and intrusions, and Americanizations, the lost sense, the brutalized manner … the general revolution, the failure of fastidiousness.” And he mourned the forfeiture “of nobleness, of delicacy, of the exquisite”—losses he connected with “the non-marrying of girls, the desperation of mothers, the whole alteration of manners … and tone, while our theory of the participation, the presence of the young, remains unaffected by it.”
Nanda, in brief, still unmarried at twenty, becomes, by virtue (or, one might say, by vice) of her saturation in her mother’s circle, unmanageable. The Duchess has reared little Aggie on a different scheme—the strict continental preservation of her purity, mental and other. Little Aggie is consequently a marvel of protected innocence and ignorance, decorative and inutile, “like some wonderful piece of stitching.” She is “really the sort of creature,” Vanderbank offers, that Nanda “would have liked to be able to be.” And Mrs. Brook lightly yet chillingly notes, “She couldn’t possibly have been able … with so loose—or, rather, to express it more properly, so perverse—a mother.”
Nanda’s mother’s looseness and perverseness is pointed enough: she knows her daughter is in love with Vanderbank, but means to keep hold of him for herself. Vanderbank, in any event, is useless as a potential husband—he has no money. Mitchy has both money and hope, and is perpetually in pursuit of Nanda. But fond though she is of him, Mitchy—a free balloon, a whimsical cynic, dotingly unconcerned, endlessly kind, all without being rooted in serious discrimination—is for Nanda literally untouchable. She will not so much as allow him to kiss her hand. Mitchy, she tells Mr. Longdon, is “impossible.” Whom, then, will Nanda marry? In surroundings thickened by innuendo and conspiracy, Mr. Longdon, man of probity, himself descends to insinuation and plot—though he might think of these as inference and discretion. In combination with the Duchess, he cooks up the idea of inducing Vanderbank to marry Nanda. Despite the delicacy that veils his intent, it crudely comes down to money: Mr. Longdon will make it worth Vanderbank’s while to propose to Nanda. After which, hearing of Mr. Longdon’s scheme, Mitchy will relinquish Nanda (Nanda has herself urged Mitchy on Aggie), and the Duchess, finally, will have a clear field to sweep him up for her immaculate little ward. Shoemaker’s offspring or no, Mitchy is a prize promising strings of pearls.
Aggie, wed to Mitchy, turns instantly wild. What was yesterday a tabula rasa grows hectic overnight with prurient scribblings. But under Mrs. Brook’s reign (and London practice), a sullied Aggie is acceptable, predictable, even conventional. The Duchess is not simply calm. She is smug. Aggie, married, is promptly expected to know whatever there is to know of sexual heat, deceit, the denigration of husbands, the taking of lovers, the scufflings of wives. There is no surprise in any of it. English rules apply: abdications and intrusions, revolution and the failure of fastidiousness—as long as the wedding is past. Postnuptial contamination troubles no one.
Nanda’s is a different case. She is tainted and unmarried. “If Nanda doesn’t get a husband early in the business,” the Duchess advises Mr. Longdon, “she won’t get one at all. One, I mean, of the kind she’ll take. She’ll have been in it over-long for their taste.” “Been in what?” Mr. Longdon asks. “Why in the air they themselves have infected for her!” the Duchess retorts. The infection is carried by the clever young men who, “with
intellectual elbow-room, with freedom of talk,” hang about Mrs. Brook’s drawing room, putting their hostess “in a prodigious fix—she must sacrifice either her daughter or … her intellectual habits.” And the Duchess crows: “You’ll tell me we go farther in Italy, and I won’t deny it, but in Italy we have the common sense not to have little girls in the room.” Yet Nanda is far from being a little girl. “Of course she’s supposedly young,” the Duchess pursues, “but she’s really any age you like: your London world so fearfully batters and bruises them.”
In the end Vanderbank declines to marry Nanda, not even for profit. She delights him; he admires her; he may even adore her; and he is certainly not in love with her mother. Nanda, on her side, seemingly ignorant of Mr. Longdon’s bribe (though she is ignorant of nothing else), longs for Vanderbank’s proposal. On a lyrical summer afternoon, it appears about to come; finally it does not. Nanda is “infected”: she knows too much. Superficially, one may protest fashionable London’s double standard—excessive worldliness does not interfere, after all, with the marital eligibility of young men. And the argument can be made—it is made—that if Vanderbank cannot marry without money, he cannot marry with it either: perhaps he scruples to wed on means not his own. But it is not Mr. Longdon’s bribe that Vanderbank finds impossible. It is Nanda herself, Nanda in her contamination. Nor is the infection he intuits in her merely social worldliness, however alarming that worldliness may be.
Nanda’s infection is more serious than that. Her knowing pestilential things heard and seen in her mother’s salon is not the whole source and sum of her malady. What might have stopped at taintedness through oversophistication has, since the arrival of Mr. Longdon—to whom she has passionately attached herself—deepened into another order of contagion. Behind the comedy, a seal lifts from over the void; the sacred terror is seeping into the tale. A gentleman of integrity, universally understood as such, Mr. Longdon begins to draw after him a gradual toxicity, screened by benevolence. Nanda speaks affectionately of his “curious infatuation.” She is herself curiously infatuated: “I set him off—what do you call it?—I show him off,” she tells Vanderbank, “by his going round and round as the acrobat on the horse in the circle goes round the clown.” And she acknowledges that her conversations with Mr. Longdon explore “as far as a man and a woman can together.” To her mother she explains, “I really think we’re good friends enough for anything.” “What do you call that then,” Mrs. Brook inquires, “but his adopting you?” And another time Mrs. Brook wonders whether this “little fussy ancient man” is attempting to “make up to” her daughter.
But the bond between Mr. Longdon and Nanda is more mysterious than any December-May flirtation, and it is assuredly not an adoption. It is true that Mr. Longdon pursues, he courts, he possesses. He takes Nanda away to his country house for a long stay. And finally he takes her to live with him permanently. Still, it is not an adoption, not a liaison, not anything like a marriage. It may be intended as a salvation: Nanda must be removed from Mrs. Brook’s polluting household; Nanda, infected, is not marriageable. Mrs. Brook is privy to the fact of Mr. Longdon’s bribe (Vanderbank has tattled to her), and though it may (or may not) portend her losing Vanderbank as lover, nothing could gratify her more. “I can’t help feeling,” she observes, “that something possibly big will come of Mr. Longdon.” “Big” means, in this lexicon, money; and when the bribe to Vanderbank fails, Nanda, for want of an alternative falling under Mr. Longdon’s protection, decidedly does fall into money.
She also falls into a peculiar aura: the aura of James’s post-Guy Domville mood. James endowed Mr. Longdon not only with his own house, but with his own age, and with his own intimations of mortality and loss. To Nanda Mr. Longdon bursts out: “Oh, you’ve got time—you can come round again; you’ve a margin for accidents, for disappointments and recoveries: you can take one thing with another. But I’ve only my last little scrap.” Mr. Longdon, one surmises, is here a mirror for certain darkening aspects of James himself. And so, interestingly, is Nanda, whose early self-recognition—“I shall never marry”—is a version of James’s own youthful announcement: “I am too good a bachelor to spoil.” The price of being so good a bachelor was a latterday profundity of loneliness, and in his later years—though there was no Lady Julia in James’s past on which to hang a present attachment—there were sentimental yearnings toward a whole series of engaging and gifted young men. The journalist Morton Fullerton (who became Edith Wharton’s lover for a time) was one of them; Hendrik Andersen, a sculptor, was another. A third, who struck James as especially endearing, was Jonathan Sturges. Sturges, crippled by polio in childhood, was an American residing in England, “full of talk and intelligence, and of the absence of prejudice,… saturated with London, and with all sorts of contrasted elements in it, to which he has given himself up.” This account of Sturges, appearing in one of James’s letters, might easily be a portrait of Nanda. During the course of composition of The Awkward Age, which James was just then serializing for Harper’s, Sturges was received with tender hospitality in Lamb House, and remained for many weeks. Nanda’s visit to Mr. Longdon in his house in Suffolk (Lamb House is in Sussex) similarly lasts a number of weeks. The charming young men who so much appealed to James in this desolate period may have turned up, in Nanda, as a kind of imagined solution to isolation and despair. In real life, the charming young men came and went. In the novel, Nanda will move in and stay forever.
But The Awkward Age offers no solution after all. Nanda’s ultimately going to live with Mr. Longdon is—for James’s time and for our own—a serious anomaly. Nanda has twice been the subject of a bribe—once with Vanderbank, and again with her parents, who are only too glad to see that Mr. Longdon, by taking her in, really is doing something “big” for her. There is nothing honorable in Vanderbank’s refusal of Mr. Longdon’s bribe, and there is nothing straightforward in that refusal, which is never directly spoken. Vanderbank, pleasing everyone and no one, simply drifts away. He has the carelessness of consummate indifference; what is too tangled, or too demanding, can have no claim on him. He will never come through. “There are things I ought to have done that I haven’t,” he reluctantly tells Nanda in their brief last meeting. “I’ve been a brute and I didn’t mean it and I couldn’t help it.” Moments before this admission, he sums it all up: “The thing is, you see, that I haven’t a conscience. I only want my fun.”
Mr. Longdon himself, presumably a man of acute conscience, does not escape corruption. Entering a corrupt community—a bribable community—he uncovers in himself an inclination to offer bribes. For Nanda’s parents, the thing is more flagrant than a bribe. Mrs. Brook has, beyond question, sold her daughter to a rich man who will undoubtedly make her his heir. Mrs. Brook’s acquiescence in Nanda’s removal confirms the smell of the marketplace: plainly she would have declared against Nanda’s going off with a “little fussy ancient man” who was poor. Mr. Longdon, in consequence, has succeeded in buying for his empty house a young woman nearly a third his age—and no matter how benign, or rescuing, or salvational this arrangement may appear to him, it is at bottom a purchase transaction, intended to assuage his lonely need. The young woman he purposes to protect will be sequestered from society on the premise that she is anyhow unmarriageable; on his account (even if he supposes it to be on her account) she will be foreclosed from the turnings and chances of a life beyond his own elderly precincts.
But Nanda has been brought to Mr. Longdon’s house for still another reason: the revenge of love and the revenge of hate. Love of Lady Julia, hatred of Mrs. Brook. If Lady Julia in all her loveliness once passed him by, two generations afterward he is in possession of her grandchild. “I’m a hater,” he says bluntly, reflecting on the decline of the standard that once made a “lady.” In secluding Nanda from her mother’s reach, he is trumpeting his contempt for Mrs. Brook: private hatred becomes public scorn. Nanda, for her part, goes with him willingly. She is complicit in the anomaly of their connection; she is
the instrument of her own retreat. It is not the money—the being provided for—that lures Nanda; it is the strangeness, and, above all, the surrender.
For Nanda, Mr. Longdon’s house holds out a suicidal peace: renunciation, a radical swerving from hope. Agreeing to enter that house of relinquishment (and moribund refinement)—this time never again to leave it—she is hurtled into a final storm of grief. Long ago, Mr. Longdon lost Lady Julia. Now Nanda has lost Vanderbank. They are matched in desolation.
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