“I don’t know.”
“I have a book here. I read in it about some trial somewhere, and that a Jew first cut off all the fingers of a four-year-old boy, and then crucified him on the wall, nailed him with nails and crucified him, and then said at his trial that the boy died quickly, in four hours. Quickly! He said the boy was moaning, that he kept moaning, and he stood and admired it. That’s good!”
“Good?”
“Good. Sometimes I imagine that it was I who crucified him. He hangs there moaning, and I sit down facing him, eating pineapple compote. I like pineapple compote very much. Do you?”
It is not often that I am so discombobulated as I read that I am just stopped. What is the reader to do with Alyosha’s “I don’t know”? What are you, whoever you are, to do with Liza’s taste for pineapple compote and crucified boys? Consulting the going and accepted scholarly criticism of Dostoevsky does not make me happy. They dodge and they duck, they dance in and out of the question, and finally fall back on the greatness of The Brothers Karamazov.
They do sometimes invoke Vladimir Solovyov, a mystical exponent of Russian Orthodox Christianity who died at forty-seven of kidney failure, brought on by destitution. Solovyov was a friend of Dostoevsky, and some find in him a model for Alyosha. Though in his final years Solovyov became obsessed with the Yellow Peril, or Asiatic encroachment upon Russia, at his apex he preached a love authentically universal. In particular, he defended Jewish civil rights in Russia, worked hard to refute the blood libel, and hoped for an eventual reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity. Solovyov was a great man. Dostoevsky, depending upon your aesthetic judgments, may or may not have been a great writer, but to my mind he was a dreadful human being.
To invoke the genre of the novel does not help much in reading The Brothers Karamazov. We might call it Scripture, though that would be too broad a designation, since Dostoevsky seems to combine the book of Job with the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. Father Zosima’s peculiar reading of the book of Job—with the pious padding added to the end, that God gives Job an entirely new set of sons, daughters, and livestock, just as good as those that were destroyed—is exalted as Revelation itself.
It is Mitya’s novel, but Dostoevsky gave his own first name to old Karamazov, and the sensual exuberance of this worst of fathers makes us feel his absence after he is murdered by Smerdyakov. Dostoevsky, in his Notebooks, declared, “We are all, to the last man, Fyodor Pavloviches,” since we are all sensualists and nihilists, however we attempt to be otherwise. Dostoevsky, who compelled himself to religious belief, was anything but a mystic, and was the ancestor of Kafka’s passionate motto: “No more psychology!” There are almost no normative personalities among Dostoevsky’s characters: they are what they will to be, and their wills are inconstant. And so is Dostoevsky’s. His unfairness to Ivan is exasperating, but Dostoevsky intends to exasperate us.
He was a vehement parodist of Westernization, and firmly believed that Russians were the Chosen People and that Christ was the Russian Christ. It is one thing to be passionate and provocative, and quite another to preach hatred of non-Russians in anticipation of the End of the World. Western literary tradition was not for Dostoevsky the nightmare it constituted for Tolstoy, but I am uncertain that Dostoevsky could see the differences between Shakespeare and the novels of Victor Hugo, whose vision of the wretched of the earth was not far from Dostoevsky’s own.
What is left is Ivan’s notorious prose poem “The Grand Inquisitor” and the delirium with which Dostoevsky afflicts Ivan in the encounter with the most insipid devil in Western literature. I confess to a sense of indignation that his author so sacrifices Ivan’s integrity in order to demonstrate that life without God is impossible. By now the Grand Inquisitor has staled: he is not so much nasty as dreary. Dostoevsky himself deserved the vapid devil he bestows upon Ivan. If you want a devil, go to Iago or to Milton’s Satan, or to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, or to the agon between Byron and Shelley, or to Hawthorne’s Chillingworth, and from there to Nathanael West’s Shrike, and on to Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden.
I am a little dejected in departing from The Brothers Karamazov on this note. Richard Pevear gently argues that it is a joyful book, because it ends in the joy of Alyosha and a group of youngsters proclaiming love for one another. I have never been happy with that final scene, as there is an element of cheerleading in it. Still, an exhausted eighty-eight-year-old Gnostic Jew is perhaps the very last person Dostoevsky would have wanted as his reader.
CHAPTER 27
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
HENRY JAMES
IT IS STRIKING that Henry James composed his political novel The Princess Casamassima, with its vista of London anarchists, well in advance of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. At about the same time, he wrote The Bostonians, also political, but there the war is between women and men. I prefer The Bostonians but have considered it at length in a book called The Daemon Knows (2015).
The problem of The Princess Casamassima, though compelling as it unfolds, is Hyacinth Robinson, the protagonist. James audaciously compared him to Hamlet and to Lear. I must admit that I do not understand how James could think that. Poor Hyacinth is a victim of social, economic, and cultural forces far beyond his ken. Hamlet’s consciousness is more capacious even than that of Henry James. The Prince of Denmark is his own worst enemy. King Lear’s range of affect transcends anything in the world of Henry James or of any other writer, be it Homer or Dante, Cervantes or Montaigne.
Hyacinth is the child of an affair between Florentine Vivier, a French courtesan, and an unnamed English lord. Florentine deftly stabs her lover, who expires, and she is sentenced to Millbank prison. As she dies, Hyacinth’s adoptive mother, Pinnie (Miss Pynsent, a close friend of Vivier), brings him into the prison. Much later, Hyacinth will learn that Florentine was his mother and the slain lord his father.
In many ways, The Princess Casamassima is a study in victimage. Hyacinth is sensitive, intelligent though held back by insufficient education, and is something of an artist, as he demonstrates by becoming an unusually skilled bookbinder. Bewildered by the inequities of London society, Hyacinth joins the anarchist movement, and volunteers to carry out an assassination. This is so clearly incommensurate with his personality that it seems to me a flaw in the novel. The great success is James’s representation of Christina Light, the Princess Casamassima, who has abandoned her boring husband and taken on a leading role in the anarchist conspiracy. This sends the reader back to James’s early novel Roderick Hudson (1875), where the young Christina enchants us with her beauty, high spirits, capriciousness, and endless capacity for mischief making.
Roderick Hudson, which I have just reread after many years, is a mixed performance. Roderick himself is the trouble. He is a perpetual adolescent, a sculptor of some talent but given to tantrums, selfish, egoistic, inconstant to his betrothed Mary Garland, with whom Rowland Mallet, Roderick’s generous patron, is hopelessly in love. Mallet at last reproves Roderick, who has requested a large sum of money (he is a perpetual sponger) merely for the purpose of going off to keep an amorous rendezvous with the Princess Christina. Hurt and dazed by some minimal self-recognition, Roderick Hudson wanders off in an Alpine snowstorm and perishes, in what seems more suicide than an accident.
I do not know whether D. H. Lawrence ever read Roderick Hudson. There is a foreshadowing of the icy suicidal death of Gerald Crich of Women in Love in Roderick’s fate. Henry James and Lawrence shared a mutual disdain, yet there are a number of shorter fictions by Lawrence that betray James’s influence.
Henry James, unlike Balzac, did not carry over characters from one novel to another. Christina Light is the large exception. He saw that she had potential that he had not fully realized. The happy consequence was The Princess Casamassima.
Christina patronizes Hyacinth but turns away when she me
ets Paul Muniment, chemist by profession, but high in the anarchist hierarchy. Muniment and Christina become lovers, followed from house to house by the wretched Prince Casamassima, still infatuated with his faithless wife. Hyacinth, gentle and caring, attempts to comfort the Prince but he is inconsolable.
When Amanda Pynsent, Hyacinth’s foster mother, is dying, she has the comfort of Hyacinth’s care and grief for her. On the moderate legacy she has provided, Hyacinth goes to France and Italy and begins to find his authentic self. He falls in love with scenic and atmospheric beauty, and his anarchist zeal vanishes. On his return to London, he cannot evade his pledge to assassinate a duke, and yet it is not possible for him to carry it out. He shoots himself through the heart.
* * *
—
The Princess and a German anarchist, Schinkel, break down Hyacinth’s door:
The light was that of a single candle on the mantel; it was so poor that for a moment she made out nothing definite. Before that moment was over, however, her eyes had attached themselves to the small bed. There was something on it—something black, something ambiguous, something out-stretched. Schinkel held her back, but only for an instant; she saw everything, and with the very act she flung herself beside the bed, upon her knees. Hyacinth lay there as if he were asleep, but there was a horrible thing, a mess of blood, on the bed, in his side, in his heart. His arm hung limp beside him, downwards, off the narrow couch; his face was white and his eyes were closed.
One grants Christina shock but wonders if there is any true grief. Hyacinth would have committed a kind of patricide had he assassinated the Duke. He would also have identified with his murderous mother, an impossibility. It may be that Hamlet held back from slaughtering Claudius because he could not know when the adultery between Gertrude and Claudius had begun. Could he be the son of Claudius? If Shakespeare knows, he will not tell us.
Hyacinth is too good, too rare a growth, for the Dickensian London of The Princess Casamassima. Henry James is so subtle that he obliges us to surmise why Hyacinth simply did not walk away from his dilemma. As a skilled bookbinder, he could have survived in Italy or France. The fatality is within him. He knows too much and also too little to work out of entrapment. He may after all be the most Shakespearean figure in all of Henry James.
CHAPTER 28
The Ambassadors (1903)
HENRY JAMES
HENRY JAMES considered The Ambassadors the crown of his work. The book has divided qualified critics, the problem being the protagonist, Lewis Lambert Strether. Once, I wondered if Strether deserved to be compared to Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver. I thought that, though he is profoundly sympathetic and admirable, he does not give us enough grief to be truly memorable, since his saga is not painful to us. Nietzsche insisted that memory depends upon pain.
At fifty-five, Strether considers himself elderly. He is evidently betrothed to the fearsome and widowed Mrs. Newsome, who wishes her son, Chad, to break off his sojourn in Paris, where he has been greatly improved by his affair with Marie de Vionnet, a beautiful woman alive with tact and sensibility, who has separated from her unpleasant husband. On its surface The Ambassadors manifests the progressive re-education of Strether, largely by his conversations with Marie de Vionnet and with an American, Maria Gostrey, who falls in love with Strether and is in every way winsome and open.
I knew nothing about the homoeroticism of Henry James until I read and endorsed Sheldon M. Novick’s biographies Henry James: The Young Master (1996) and Henry James: The Mature Master (2007). Later, I read the letters of James to the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, to Dudley Jocelyn Persse, and to Howard Overing Sturgis and Hugh Walpole, both writers whose reputations have vanished. Clearly all four were James’s catamites, and there were others. Since Lambert Strether is a kind of self-portrait of Henry James, this may or may not illuminate his renunciation of the love offered to him by Maria Gostrey and implicitly suggested by Marie de Vionnet.
This is hardly to imply that Strether is homoerotic, since he all but falls in love with both Maria and Marie. Still, he is a widower in late middle age, and James never suggests that Strether has had any sexual experience since the death of his wife and then of his son. It is grotesque to think that so fine a sensibility as Strether’s could ever have united itself with the dreadful Mrs. Newsome. Yet James does not adequately explain, at least to me, why Strether (who has independent means) does not stay in Paris and shuttle between his two adoring and marvelous women. I do not mean sexually, since it is not at all clear that Strether now lusts for anyone, though he does admire how handsome Chad has become under the influence of Marie de Vionnet.
It comes down to whether we can detach Lewis Lambert Strether from the Master Henry James. I can do so only with difficulty. I wondered once why James, who loved Balzac, seems to have alluded to Louis Lambert (1832), a kind of Swedenborgian fantasy in which the young man of the title has preternatural gifts, and expires all too soon in the arms of his beloved Pauline, so that his true angel-self can rise up to heaven. This remains a Jamesian mystery, but, then, Henry, like his father and his gifted brother, William, entertained curious ideas about extrasensory perception and the ghostliness of our condition. They did and did not believe in life after death.
I return to Strether. The best critics of The Ambassadors include Sallie Sears and Tony Tanner. Their Strether is a detached impressionist, an all but Paterian paragon of perception. His genius is to see. Unlike Louis Lambert, he is not a seer. Sights, sounds, odors, tastes, touches: these are his world. And all this is raised to a kind of secular ecstasy by the greatness of Paris.
Henry James and his surrogate Strether have a complex relation to such Victorian sages as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman, with their emphasis upon seeing as the road to the palace of wisdom. James and Strether do not seek for wisdom or for complete knowledge. They want to raise perception itself to the status of an art.
I suppose that I really cannot fully distinguish between Henry James and Lambert Strether. That may be all to the good. As I reread yet once more, I have to resist becoming more like Strether, though I do not resemble him in the least. I wish that James had allowed himself to end the book with Strether staying on in Paris indefinitely, allowing himself to enjoy the chaste delights of loving and being loved by Maria and Marie. But James is too great the artist for that. Strether insists that he must gain nothing for himself from his Parisian experience.
Back to Woollett, Massachusetts, he goes, but not to the dubious embrace of Mrs. Newsome. What will he do there? I like to believe that his conscience will relent and allow him to return to Paris, and so to Maria Gostrey and Marie de Vionnet. In mere life, it would be probable, but not in the comedic vision of the Master Henry James.
CHAPTER 29
Nostromo (1904)
JOSEPH CONRAD
JOSEPH CONRAD was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, and before that of Poland. He grew up speaking Polish, learned French, and turned to English as a third language.
Conrad’s early life was outrageous enough even for a young Polish person of letters, let alone for an English writer. At twenty-seven, he helped run a munitions-smuggling operation for the Carlist rebels in Spain. Before it was over, he came close to being killed, attempted suicide, fell in love with a fatal beauty, and gambled on a grand scale. Four years later, he began a more conventional career in the British merchant marine, which continued until 1894, during which time he commanded his own vessel, and was granted English citizenship. For his remaining thirty years, he was a superb and successful novelist, bringing forth such masterworks as Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Victory.
His early stories and novels reflect the influence of Flaubert and of Maupassant. Henry James, who became a close friend, changed Conrad’s literary mode to what we now think of as James’s middle style: The Spoils of Poynton,
What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age.
It is a truism to see Conrad’s swerve away from James in the figure of Marlow, who allowed Conrad an effectively sinuous narrative perspective. Henry James dismissed Marlow as “that preposterous magic mariner,” which was good fun, but rather beside the point. Marlow makes the difference, for a while, between the impressionism of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. To judge that Conrad was much less a metaphysical idealist than James is not to suggest that Conrad was the greater novelist. But it helps explain why Conrad, and not Henry James, was the major influence upon the American generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. The milieu of The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying evidences the saliences of Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, and not of The Princess Casamassima and The Ambassadors.
I first read Nostromo in 1948, for a seminar on the novel conducted by a remarkable teacher, William Merritt Sale, Jr., who, together with M. H. Abrams, guided my undergraduate studies at Cornell University. Sale also introduced me to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which, with Don Quixote and In Search of Lost Time, is still one of my favorite novels.
In my later years, teaching at Yale, I learned most about the novel from Martin Price, who died at the age of ninety in 2010. In 1983, Price published a remarkable book: Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel. In the chapter on Conrad, Price subtly traced what he called “the limits of irony” in the novelist’s work.
And yet where are the limits of Conrad’s irony in Nostromo? The magnificent Nostromo is in love with his own magnificence, and though he is a hero of the people, he is essentially hollow. With few exceptions, all of Conrad’s protagonists are hollow men. One of the many paradoxes of Conrad is that the mirror of the sea allows us to perceive a heroic ideal, one that is not available in Conrad’s great fictions.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 29