The plot in the case of this novel is far from being an original one: it is as if James, looking round for the events which were to bring his young woman, Isabel Archer, into play, had taken the first to hand: a fortune-hunter, the fortune-hunter’s unscrupulous mistress, and a young American heiress caught in the meshes of a loveless marriage. (He was to use almost identically the same plot but with deeper implications and more elaborate undertones in The Wings of the Dove.) We can almost see the young James laying down some popular three-decker of the period in his Roman or Venetian lodgings and wondering, ‘What could I do with even that story?’ For a plot after all is only the machinery – the machinery which will show the young woman (what young woman?) affronting her destiny (but what destiny?). In his preface, apparently so revealing, James has no answer to these questions. Nor is there anything there which will help us to guess what element it was in the melodramatic plot that attracted the young writer at this moment when he came first into his full powers as a novelist, and again years later when as an old man he set to work to crown his career with the three poetic masterpieces, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.
The first question is the least important and we have the answer in Isabel Archer’s relationship to Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove. It is not only their predicament which is the same, or nearly so (Milly’s fortune-hunter, Merton Densher, was enriched by the later James with a conscience, a depth of character, a dignity in his corruption that Gilbert Osmond lacks: indeed in the later book it is the fortune-hunter who steals the tragedy, for Milly dies and it is the living whom we pity): the two women are identical. Milly Theale, if it had not been for her fatal sickness, would have affronted the same destiny and met the same fate as Isabel Archer: the courage, the generosity, the confidence and inexperience belong to the same character, and James has disclosed to us the source of the later portrait – his young and much-loved cousin Mary Temple who died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. This girl of infinite potentiality, whose gay sad troubled letters can be read in Notes of a Son and Brother, haunted his memory like a legend; it was as if her image stood for everything that had been graceful, charming, happy in youth – ‘the whole world of the old New York, that of the earlier dancing years’ – everything that was to be betrayed by life. We have only to compare these pages of his autobiography, full of air and space and light, in which the figures of the son and brother, the Albany uncles, the beloved cousin, move like the pastoral figures in a Poussin landscape, with his description of America when he revisited the States in his middle age, to see how far he had travelled, how life had closed in. In his fiction he travelled even farther. In his magnificent last short story, Brydon, the returned expatriate, finds his old New York house haunted by the ghost of himself, the self he would have become if he had remained in America. At that moment one remembers what James also remembered: ‘the springtime of ‘65 as it breathed through Denton streets’, the summer twilight sailing back from Newport, Mary Temple.
In none of the company was the note so clear as in this rarest, though at the same time symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural at more points and about more things, with a greater sense of freedom and ease and reach of horizon than any of the others dreamed of. They had that way, delightfully, with the small, after all, and the common matters – while she had it with those too, but with the great and rare ones over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very figure and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as magnanimously far spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely fixed, as her splendid shifting sensibility, moral, personal, nervous and having at once such noble flights and such touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of indifference and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She was really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme case of a taste for life as life, as personal living, of an endlessly active and yet somehow a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it; something that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and charming tossed head, with long and yet almost sliding steps and a large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the very muse or amateur priestess of rash speculation.
Even if we had not James’s own word for it, we could never doubt that here is the source: the fork of his imagination was struck and went on sounding. Mary Temple, of course, never affronted her destiny: she was betrayed quite simply by her body, and James uses words of her that he could as well have used of Milly Theale dying in her Venetian palace – ‘death at the last was dreadful to her; she would have given anything to live’, but isn’t it significant that whenever an imaginary future is conceived for this brave spontaneous young woman it always ends in betrayal? Milly Theale escapes from her betrayal simply by dying; Isabel Archer, tied for life to Gilbert Osmond – that precious vulgarian, cold as a fishmonger’s slab – is deserted even by her creator. For how are we to understand the ambiguity of the closing pages when Isabel’s friend, Henrietta Stackpole, tries to comfort the faithful and despairing ‘follower’ (this word surely best describes Caspar Goodwood’s relationship to Isabel)?
‘Look here, Mr Goodwood,’ she said, ‘just you wait!’
On which he looked up at her – but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.
It is as if James, too, were handing his more casual readers the key to patience, while at the same time asserting between the lines that there is no way out of the inevitable betrayal except the way that Milly Theale and Mary Temple took involuntarily. There is no possibility of a happy ending: this is surely what James always tells us, not with the despairing larger-than-life gesture of a romantic novelist but with a kind of bitter precision. He presents us with a theorem, but it is we who have to work out the meaning of x and discover that x equals no-way-out. It is part of the permanent fascination of his style that he never does all the work for us, and there will always be careless mathematicians prepared to argue the meaning of that other ambiguous ending, when Merton Densher, having gained a fortune with Milly Theale’s death, is left alone with his mistress, Kate Croy, who had planned it all, just as Mme Merle had planned Isabel’s betrayal.
‘He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: ‘I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.’
‘As we were?’
‘As we were.’
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. ‘We shall never be again as we were!’
Some of James’s critics have preferred to ignore the real destiny of his characters, and they can produce many of his false revealing statements to support them; he has been multitudinously discussed as a social novelist primarily concerned with the international scene, with the impact of the Old World on the New. It is true the innocent figure is nearly always American (Roderick Hudson, Newman, Isabel and Milly, Maggie Verver and her father), but the corrupted characters – the vehicles for a sense of evil unsurpassed by the theological novelists of our day, M. Mauriac or M. Bernanos – are also American: Mme Merle, Gilbert Osmond, Kate Croy, Merton Densher, Charlotte Stant. His characters are mainly American, simply because James himself was American.
No, it was only on the superficial level of plot, one feels, that James was interested in the American visitor; what deeply interested him, what was indeed his ruling passion, was the idea of treachery, the ‘Judas complex’. In a very early novel which he never reprinted, Watch and Ward, James dealt with the blackmailer, the man enabled to betray because of his intimate knowledge. As he proceeded in his career he shed the more obvious melodramatic trappings of betrayal, and in The Portrait of a Lady, melodrama is at the point of vanishing. What was to follow was only to be the turning of the screw. Isabel Archer was betrayed by little more than an acquaintance; Milly Theale by he
r dearest friend; until we reach the complicated culmination of treacheries in The Golden Bowl. But how many turns and twists of betrayal we could follow, had we space and time, between Watch and Ward and that grand climax!
This then is the destiny that not only the young women affront – you must betray or, more fortunately perhaps, you must be betrayed. A few – James himself, Ralph Touchett in this novel, Mrs Assingham in The Golden Bowl – will simply sadly watch. We shall never know what it was at the very start of life that so deeply impressed on the young James’s mind this sense of treachery; but when we remember how patiently and faithfully throughout his life he drew the portrait of one young woman who died, one wonders whether it was just simply a death that opened his eyes to the inherent disappointment of existence, the betrayal of hope. The eyes once open, the material need never fail him. He could sit there, an ageing honoured man in Lamb House, Rye, and hear the footsteps of the traitors and their victims going endlessly by on the pavement. It is of James himself that we think when we read in The Portrait of a Lady of Ralph Touchett’s melancholy vigil in the big house in Winchester Square:
The square was still, the house was still, when he raised one of the windows of the dining-room to let in the air he heard the slow creak of the boots of a lone constable. His own step, in the empty place, seemed loud and sonorous; some of the carpets had been raised, and whenever he moved he roused a melancholy echo. He sat down in one of the armchairs; the big dark dining table twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent There was a ghostly presence as of dinners long since digested, of table-talk that had lost its actuality. This hint of the supernatural perhaps had something to do with the fact that his imagination took a flight and that he remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at which he should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading the evening paper. I say he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of the fact that he thought at these moments of Isabel.
1947
THE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES
THERE had always been – let us face it – a suspicion of vulgarity about the Old Master. Just as the tiny colloquialism was sometimes hidden unnoticeably away in the intricate convolutions of his sentences, so one was sometimes fleetingly aware of small clouds – difficult to detach in the bland wide sunlit air of his later world – of something closely akin to the vulgar. Was it sometimes his aesthetic approach to the human problem, his use of the word ‘beautiful’ in connexion with an emotional situation? Was it sometimes a touch of aesthetic exclusiveness as in the reference to Poynton and its treasures, ‘there were places much grander and richer, bus no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those really informed’? Was it sometimes a hidden craving for the mere treasures themselves, for the cash value? We must do James justice. He would not have altered a sentence of a novel or a story for the sake of popularity or monetary reward, but the craving was there, disguised by references to financial problems that did not really exist – his private income was adequate, even comfortable. But if only, it surely occurred to him, there were some literary Tom Tiddler’s ground he could enter as a stranger, where he would not be compromised if observed in the act of stooping to pick up the gold and silver; in that case he was ready for a while to put integrity in the drawer and turn the key. Fate was kind to him: other artists have had the same intention and have been caught by success. James found neither cash nor credit on the stage and returned enriched by his failure.
Of course it would be wrong to suggest that the appeal of the theatre to James was purely commercial. He was challenged, as any artist, by a new method of expression; the pride and interest in attempting the difficult and the new possessed him. He wrote to his brother:
I feel at last as if I had found my real form, which I am capable of carrying far, and for which the pale little art of fiction, as I have practised it, has been, for me, but a limited and restricted substitute. The strange thing is that I always, universally, knew this was my more characteristic form – but was kept away from it by a half-modest, half-exaggerated sense of the difficulty (that is, I mean the practical odiousness) of the conditions. But now that I have accepted them and met them, I see that one isn’t at all, needfully, their victim, but is, from the moment one is anything, one’s self, worth speaking of, their master: and may use them, command them, squeeze them, lift them up and better them. As for the form itself, its honour and inspiration are (à défaut d’autres) in its difficulty. If it were easy to write a good play I couldn’t and wouldn’t think of it; but it is in fact damnably hard (to this truth the paucity of the article – in the English-speaking world – testifies), and that constitutes a solid respectability – guarantees one’s intellectual self-respect.
But even in this mood is not the self-respect a little too underlined, the protest purposely loud to drown another note, which was to be repeated again and again? ‘I am very impatient to get to work writing for the stage – a project I have long had. I am . . . certain I should succeed and it would be an open gate to money making,’ and later he turned with some ignobility on Wilde, when The Importance of Being Earnest had followed his own catastrophic failure Guy Domville at the St James’s Theatre: ‘There is nothing fortunately so dead as a dead play – unless it be sometimes a living one. Oscar Wilde’s farce . . . is, I believe, a great success – and with his two roaring successes running now at once he must be raking in the profits.’ The ring of the counter is in the phrase.
Until Mr Edel published this huge volume*1 (over 800 pages, the greater part in double column) we had no idea how completely James had failed. The two volumes of Theatricals published in his lifetime were slight affairs. The theatre of his time was so bad, we had wondered whether it was not possible that his contemporaries had simply failed to recognize his genius as a playwright. We knew the sad story of the production of Guy Domville, the successful first act, the laughter in the second, the storm of catcalls at the close; we had heard how the critics had defended it, how the prose was praised by the young Bernard Shaw, and yet there existed, so far as one could discover, only a typewritten copy in the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Yes, one had expectations and excitement. Now the picture has been filled in, and reading the deplorable results of ‘the theatrical years’ we need to bear always in mind James’s recovery. This is unmistakably trash, but it is not the end of a great writer: out of the experience and failure with another technique came the three great novels The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. He was never so much of a dramatist as when he had ceased to have theatrical ambitions.
Mr Edel has done a magnificent editorial work. Why should the word ‘painstaking’ carry implications of dullness? Here every pain has been taken and every pain has had its reward. Each play has a separate factual preface of extreme readability; particularly fascinating is the long preface to Guy Domville which traces the disastrous first night almost hour by hour: the early afternoon when two unknown ladies sent a telegram from Sloane Street Post Office to George Alexander, ‘With hearty wishes for a complete failure’; James sitting in the Haymarket listening to Wilde’s epigrams and unaware of the applause at his own first curtain; the disastrous laughable hat in the second act; the first mutter from the gallery in the third, when Alexander began to deliver the speech, ‘I am the last, my lord of the Domvilles,’ to be answered, ‘It’s a bloody good thing y’are’; the pandemonium at the close when this too sensitive author, who had anticipated failure but not this savage public execration, was flung helplessly into the turmoil from the peace of the night in St James’s Square and fled into the wings, his face ‘green with dismay’; the grim first night supper party which took place ‘as arranged’.
It is easier now to understand the public than the critics who were perhaps influenced by horror of the Roman holiday. H. G. Wells found the play ‘finely conceived and beautifully written’: Shaw wrote, ‘Line after line comes with such a deli
cate turn and fall that I unhesitatingly challenge any of our popular dramatists to write a scene in verse with half the beauty of Mr James’s prose. . . . Guy Domville is a story and not a mere situation hung out on a gallows of plot. And it is a story of fine sentiment and delicate manners, with an entirely worthy and touching ending.’ To us today the story of Guy Domville seems singularly unconvincing, one more example of the not always fortunate fascination exercised on James by the Christian faith and by Catholicism in particular. It stands beside The Altar of the Dead and The Great Good Place as an example of how completely James could miss the point. Mr Edel writes truly of James’s interest in Catholicism being mainly an interest in a refuge and a retreat; when James wrote in that mood from the outside he conveyed a genuine and moving sense of nostalgia. But in Guy Domville he was rashly attempting to convey the sense of Catholicism from within: his characters are Catholics, his hero a young man brought up to become a priest. Domville is on the eve of leaving England to enter a seminary when he becomes heir to a fortune and estate (money again!) and is tempted temporarily by a mistaken sense of duty to his family to re-enter the world. The story is set in the eighteenth century, and the period falls like a dead hand over the prose. Unlike the hero of The Sense of the Past we never really go back. Can we believe in a young man who speaks of a girl as ‘attached to our Holy Church’? There is really more truth to the religious life in the novels of Mrs Humphrey Ward. Here for example is Guy Domville’s first reply to temptation:
Break with all the past, and break with it this minute? – turn back from the threshold, take my hand from the plough? – the hour is too troubled, your news too strange, your summons too sudden!
Strangely enough the failure of Guy Domville was not the end. Now that he had given up any hopes of stage success, perhaps he felt a certain freedom in his relations with that ‘insufferable little art’. The love affair was at an end and he need no longer try to please. ‘The hard meagreness inherent in the theatrical form’ could be ignored. One critic had observed of his early plays, ‘We wish very much that Mr James would write some farces to please himself, and not to please the stage’, and right at the close with The Outcry – a thin amusing story of how a picture was saved for the nation against the will of the owner, an individualistic peer who wanted to sell it for sheer cussedness to an American dealer – he very nearly succeeded in producing an actable comedy. A comedy, for the author of The Turn of the Screw and The Wings of the Dove strangely failed when he tried on the stage to express the horrors or tragedies of the human situation. ‘You don’t know – but we’re abysses,’ one of the characters cried in his creaking melodrama, The Other House, but it was just the sense of the abyss that he failed on those flat boards ever to convey. Turn to his ghost story of Owen Wingrave, the story of a young man who refused to continue the military tradition of his family and died bravely facing the supernatural in his own home (‘Owen Wingrave, dressed as he had last seen him, lay dead on the spot on which his ancestor had been found. He was all the young soldier on the gained field’) and compare the dignity of this story, which does indeed convey a sense of the abyss, with the complicated and unspeakable prattle of the stage adaptation.
Collected Essays Page 5