There was another theme I found there. At the end of The Viper of Milan – you will remember if you have once read it – comes the great scene of complete success – della Scala is dead, Ferrara, Verona, Novara, Mantua have all fallen, the messengers pour in with news of fresh victories, the whole world outside is cracking up, and Visconti sits and jokes in the wine-light. I was not on the classical side or I would have discovered I suppose, in Greek literature instead of in Miss Bowen’s novel the sense of doom that lies over success – the feeling that the pendulum is about to swing. That too made sense; one looked around and saw the doomed everywhere – the champion runner who one day would sag over the tape; the head of the school who would atone, poor devil, during forty dreary undistinguished years; the scholar . . . and when success began to touch oneself too, however mildly, one could only pray that failure would not be held off for too long.
One had lived for fourteen years in a wild jungle country without a map, but now the paths had been traced and naturally one had to follow them. But I think it was Miss Bowen’s apparent zest that made me want to write. One could not read her without believing that to write was to live and to enjoy, and before one had discovered one’s mistake it was too late – the first book one does enjoy. Anyway she had given me my pattern – religion might later explain it to me in other terms, but the pattern was already there – perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done. Man is never satisfied, and often I have wished that my hand had not moved further than King Solomon’s Mines, and that the future I had taken down from the nursery shelf had been a district office in Sierra Leone and twelve tours of malarial duty and a finishing dose of blackwater fever when the danger of retirement approached. What is the good of wishing? The books are always there, the moment of crisis waits, and now our children in their turn are taking down the future and opening the pages. In his poem ‘Germinal’ A. E. wrote:
In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed,
The world’s great sorrows were born
And its heroes were made.
In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed.
1947
PART II
Novels and Novelists
[1]
HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE
THE technical qualities of Henry James’s novels have been so often and so satisfactorily explored, notably by Mr Percy Lubbock, that perhaps I may be forgiven for ignoring James as the fully conscious craftsman in order to try to track the instinctive, the poetic writer back to the source of his fantasies. In all writers there occurs a moment of crystallization when the dominant theme is plainly expressed, when the private universe becomes visible even to the least sensitive reader. Such a crystallization is Hardy’s often-quoted phrase: ‘The President of the Immortals . . . had ended his sport with Tess’, or that passage in his preface to Jude the Obscure, when he writes of ‘the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity’. It is less easy to find such a crystallization in the works of James, whose chief aim was always to dramatize, who was more than usually careful to exclude the personal statement, but I think we may take the sentence in the scenario of The Ivory Tower, in which James speaks of ‘the black and merciless things that are behind great possessions’, as an expression of the ruling fantasy which drove him to write: a sense of evil religious in its intensity.
‘Art itself’, Conrad wrote, ‘may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe’, and no definition in his own prefaces better describes the object Henry James so passionately pursued, if the word visible does not exclude the private vision. If there are times when we feel, in The Sacred Fount, even in the exquisite Golden Bowl, that the judge is taking too much into consideration, that he could have passed his sentence on less evidence, we have always to admit, as the long record of human corruption unrolls, that he has never allowed us to lose sight of the main case; and because his mind is bent on rendering even evil ‘the highest kind of justice’, the symmetry of his thought lends the whole body of his work the importance of a system.
No writer has left a series of novels more of one moral piece. The differences between James’s first works and his last are only differences of art as Conrad defined it. In his early work, perhaps, he rendered a little less than the highest kind of justice; the progress from The American to The Golden Bowl is a progress from a rather crude and inexperienced symbolization of truth itself: a progress from evil represented rather obviously in terms of murder to evil in propria persona, walking down Bond Street, charming, cultured, sensitive – evil to be distinguished from good chiefly in the complete egotism of its outlook. They are complete anarchists, these later Jamesian characters, they form the immoral background to that extraordinary period of haphazard violence which anticipated the first world war: the attempt on Greenwich Observatory, the siege of Sidney Street. They lent the tone which made possible the cruder manifestations presented by Conrad in The Secret Agent. Merton Densher, who planned to marry the dying Milly Theale for her money, plotting with his mistress who was her best friend; Prince Amerigo, who betrayed his wife with her friend, her father’s wife; Horton, who swindled his friend Gray of his money: the last twist (it is always the friend, the intimate who betrays) is given to these studies of moral corruption. They represent an attitude which had been. James’s from very far back; they are not the slow painful fruit of experience. The attitude never varied from the time of The American onwards. Mme de Bellegarde, who murdered her husband and sold her daughter, is only the first crude presentation of a woman gradually subtilized, by way of Mme Merle in The Portrait of a Lady, into the incomparable figures of evil, Kate Croy and Charlotte Stant.
This point is of importance. James has been too often regarded as a novelist of superficial experience, as a painter of social types, who was cut off by exile from the deepest roots of experience (as if there were something superior in the Sussex or Shropshire of the localized talent to James’s international scene). But James was not in that sense an exile; he could have dispensed with the international scene as easily as he dispensed with all the world of Wall Street finance. For the roots were not in Venice, Paris, London; they were in himself. Densher, the Prince, just as much as the redhaired valet Quint and the adulterous governess, were rooted in his own character. They were there when he wrote The American in 1876; all he needed afterwards to perfect his work to his own impeccable standard was technical subtlety and that other subtlety which comes from superficial observation, the ability to construct convincing masks for his own personality.
I do not use superficial in any disparaging sense. If his practice-pieces, from The Europeans to The Tragic Muse, didn’t engage his full powers, and were certainly not the vehicle for his most urgent fantasies, they were examples of sharp observation, the fruits of a direct objective experience, unsurpassed in their kind. He never again proved himself capable of drawing a portrait so directly, with such command of relevant detail. We know Charlotte Stant, of course, more thoroughly than we know Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians, but she emerges gradually through that long book, we don’t ‘see’ her with the immediacy that we see Miss Birdseye:
She was a little old lady with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom noticed – the vast, fair, protuberant, candid, ungarnished brow, surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes. . . . The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. . . . In her large countenance her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of a smile, a kind of instalment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that she would smile more if she had time, but that you could see, without this, that she was gentle and easy to beguile. . . . She looked as if she had spent her life on platforms, in audiences, in
conventions, in phalansteries, in seances; in her faded face there was a kind of reflexion of ugly lecture-lamps.
No writer’s apprentice-work contains so wide and brilliant a range of portraits from this very early Miss Birdseye to Mrs Brookenham in The Awkward Age:
Mrs Brookenham was, in her forty-first year, still charmingly pretty, and the nearest approach she made at this moment to meeting her son’s description of her was by looking beautifully desperate. She had about her the pure light of youth – would always have it; her head, her figure, her flexibility, her flickering colour, her lovely, silly eyes, her natural, quavering tone, all played together towards this effect by some trick that had never yet been exposed. It was at the same time remarkable that – at least in the bosom of her family – she rarely wore an appearance of gaiety less qualified than at the present juncture; she suggested for the most part the luxury, the novelty of woe, the excitement of strange sorrows and the cultivation of fine indifferencies. This was her special sign – an innocence dimly tragic. It gave immense effect to her other resources . . .
The Awkward Age stands formidably between the two halves of James’s achievement. It marks his decision to develop finally from The American rather than from The Europeans. It is the surrender of experience to fantasy. He hadn’t found his method, but he had definitely found his theme. One may regret, in some moods, that his more superficial books had so few successors (English literature has too little that is light, lucid, and witty), but one cannot be surprised that he discarded many of them from the collected edition while retaining so crude a fiction as The American, discarded even the delicate, feline Washington Square, perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen’s.
How could he have done otherwise if he was to be faithful to his deeper personal fantasy? He wrote of ‘poor Flaubert’ that
he stopped too short. He hovered for ever at the public door, in the outer court, the splendour of which very properly beguiled him, and in which he seems still to stand as upright as a sentinel and as shapely as a statue. But that immobility and even that erectness were paid too dear. The shining arms were meant to carry further, the outer doors were meant to open. He should at least have listened at the chamber of the soul. This would have floated him on a deeper tide; above all it would have calmed his nerves.
His early novels, except The American, certainly belonged to the outer court. They had served their purpose, he had improved his masks, he was never to be more witty; but when he emerged from them again to take up his main study of corruption in The Wings of the Dove he had amazingly advanced: instead of murder, the more agonizing mental violence; instead of Mme de Bellegarde, Kate Croy; instead of the melodramatic heroine Mme de Cintré, the deeply felt subjective study of Milly Theale.
For to render the highest justice to corruption you must retain your innocence: you have to be conscious all the time within yourself of treachery to something valuable. If Peter Quint is to be rooted in you, so must the child his ghost corrupts: if Osmond, Isabel Archer too. These centres of innocence, these objects of treachery, are nearly always women: the lovely daring Isabel Archer, who goes out in her high-handed, wealthy way to meet life and falls to Osmond; Nanda, the young girl ‘coming out’, who is hemmed in by a vicious social set; Milly Theale, sick to death just at the time when life has most to offer, surrendering to Merton Densher and Kate Croy (apart from Quint and the Governess the most driven and ‘damned’ of all James’s characters); Maggie Verver, the unsophisticated ‘good’ young American who encounters her particular corruption in the Prince and Charlotte Stant; the child Maisie tossed about among grown-up adulteries. These are the points of purity in the dark picture.
The attitude of mind which dictated these situations was a permanent one. Henry James had a marvellous facility for covering up his tracks (can we be blamed if we assume he had a reason?). In his magnificent prefaces he describes the geneses of his stories, where they were written, the method he adopted, the problems he faced: he seems, like the conjurer with rolled sleeves, to show everything. But you have to go further back than the anecdote at the dinner-table to trace the origin of such urgent fantasies. In this exploration his prefaces, even his autobiographies, offer very little help. Certainly they give his model for goodness; he is less careful to obliterate that trail back into youth (if one can speak of care in connexion with a design which was probably only half-conscious if it was conscious at all). His cousin, Mary Temple, was the model, a model in her deadly sickness and her high courage, above all in her hungry grip on life, for Milly Theale in particular.
She had [James wrote of her] beyond any equally young creature I have known a sense for verity of character and play of life in others, for their acting out of their force or their weakness, whatever either might be, at no matter what cost to herself. . . . Life claimed her and used her and beset her . . . made her range in her groping: her naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end of the scale. . . . She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder; and I think it is because one was to see her launched on that adventure in such bedimmed, such almost tragically compromised conditions that one is caught by her title to the heroic and pathetic mask.
Mary Temple then, whatever mask she wore, was always the point of purity, but again one must seek further if one is to trace the source of James’s passionate distrust in human nature, his sense of evil. Mary Temple was experience, but that other sense, one feels, was born in him, was his inheritance.
It cannot but seem odd how little in his volumes of reminiscence, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, Henry James really touches the subject of his family. His style is at its most complex: the beauty of the books is very like the beauty of Turner’s later pictures: they are all air and light: you have to look a long while into their glow before you discern the most tenuous outline of their subjects. Certainly of the two main figures, Henry James, Senior, and William James, you learn nothing of what must have been to them of painful importance: their sense of daemonic possession.
James was to draw the figure of Peter Quint with his little red whiskers and his white damned face, he was to show Densher and Kate writhing in their hopeless infernal sundering success; evil was overwhelmingly part of his visible universe; but the sense (we got no indication of it in his reminiscences) was a family sense. He shared it with his father and brother and sister. One may find the dark source of his deepest fantasy concealed in a family life which for sensitive boys must have been almost ideally free from compulsions, a tolerant cultured life led between Concord and Geneva. For nearly two years his father was intermittently attacked by a sense of ‘perfectly insane and abject terror’ (his own words), a damned shape seemed to squat beside him raying out ‘a fetid influence’. Henry James’s sister, Alice, was a prey to suicidal tendencies, and Willam James suffered in much the same way as his father.
I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth the greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse grey undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his entire figure. . . . This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me a
ltogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life, that I never knew before. . . . It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.
This epileptic idiot, this urge towards death, the damned shape, are a more important background to Henry James’s novels than Grosvenor House and late Victorian society. It is true that the moral anarchy of the age gave him his material, but he would not have treated it with such intensity if it had not corresponded with his private fantasy. They were materialists, his characters, but you cannot read far in Henry James’s novels without realizing that their creator was not a materialist If ever a man’s imagination was clouded by the Pit, it was James’s. When he touches this nerve, the fear of spiritual evil, he treats the reader with less than his usual frankness: ‘a fairy-tale pure and simple’, something seasonable for Christmas, is a disingenuous description of The Turn of the Screw. One cannot avoid a conviction that here he touched and recoiled from an important inhibition.
To a biographer the early formative years of a writer must always have a special fascination: the innocent eye dwelling frankly on a new unexplored world, the vistas of future experience at the end of the laurel walk, the voices of older people, like ‘Viziers nodding together in some Arabian night’, the strange accidents that seem to decide not only that this child shall be a writer but what kind of a writer this child shall be.
Collected Essays Page 2