The Year of Henry James

by David Lodge

  Although the 1879 text is shorter, sparer, and stylistically simpler than the 1909 text it is paradoxically richer in meaning – but the meaning inheres as much in what is implied as in what is stated. One might almost say that in Daisy Miller James anticipated Ernest Hemingway’s theory of the short story: that ‘you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood’.21 Indeed William James (often a severe critic of his brother’s work) praised another, earlier story of Henry’s in precisely those terms:

  You expressly restrict yourself, accordingly, to showing a few external acts and speeches, and by the magic of your art making the reader feel back of these the existence of a body of being of which these are casual features.22

  Not a word in Daisy Miller is redundant. Where there is repetition, the repetition is functional (notably in the artless speech of the Miller family, whose members characteristically employ the same keyword or phrase again and again, contrasting with the elegant variation in the Europeanised characters’ dialogue) and the silences are eloquent.

  Comparison with the revised text helps to bring out the qualities of the original story. Consider, for example, the first scene. ‘Scene’ is a particularly appropriate term because the whole story unfolds in a sequence of dramatic encounters between the characters as they might be presented in a good play or film, where every line of dialogue (however banal), every bit of body language, every glance and pause, signifies. ‘Dramatise, dramatise!’ was James’s habitual injunction to himself as a novelist, and he was always much more successful in applying the lessons of drama to narrative than he was in writing for the theatre, including his early attempt to adapt Daisy Miller for the stage.fn3 Winterbourne is seated on the terrace of the hotel, enjoying a coffee and a cigarette, when he is accosted by young Randolph Miller, asking for a lump of sugar from his table. Randolph, who was not in James’s source-anecdote, is a brilliant comic creation. He is a little American barbarian, who affronts European standards of decorum in both speech and behaviour much more blatantly than his sister or mother – refusing to go to bed at an appropriate hour, eating what he fancies, doing what he likes, despising Europe and boasting about his native country; but he does it all with such self-assurance and amusing candour, combining youthful indiscretion with a certain knowingness, that he functions in the story as a kind of jester or wise fool, exposing the tensions and contradictions in the adult social world. In this first scene, he takes three lumps of sugar from Winterbourne, and bites one of them.

  ‘Oh, blazes, it’s har-r-d!’ he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a peculiar manner.

  The NYE reads as follows:

  ‘Oh, blazes, it’s har-r-d!’ he exclaimed, divesting vowel and consonants, pertinently enough, of any taint of softness.

  The verbal phrase in the second version is stylistically typical of late James, playing on the word ‘hard’ and opposing it to ‘softness’ (he loved figures of antithesis) and using muted metaphor in ‘divesting’ and ‘taint’; but one has to ask whether this rhetorical flourish serves any purpose other than to emphasise the obvious cultural distance between Winterbourne and Randolph, and to make the former seem rather too pleased with his own wit. In the original text he is much more interested in the boy. ‘Peculiar’ there has the meaning of ‘distinctive’ and leads more logically to the next sentence, which is almost the same in both versions:

  Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the honour of claiming him as a fellow-countryman. [‘countryman’ in NYE]

  There follows a droll speech from Randolph in which he blames the chronic loss of his milk-teeth on Europe and its hotels, and then a conversation about the relative merits of American and European candy, boys – and men. ‘Are you an American man?’ Randolph asks. On receiving an affirmative answer, ‘American men are the best,’ he declares (‘with assurance’ the NYE redundantly adds) and then, ‘Here comes my sister! . . . She’s an American girl you bet.’ To which Winterbourne, seeing a beautiful young lady advancing, ‘cheerfully’ replies: ‘American girls are the best girls.’ Because Winterbourne has to adopt the simple directness of the child’s speech, the conversation highlights issues which will be crucial to the story. Is Winterbourne a real American? Is he a real man? Is Daisy the best kind of girl?

  The first encounter between Winterbourne and Daisy is beautifully handled and full of subtle implication. We sense Winterbourne’s immediate interest in and attraction to her, and also his uncertainty about how to proceed. He is constrained by a code of manners which requires that a gentleman be introduced to a lady before he speaks to her. According to the same code, Daisy should either find a gracious way of overcoming this difficulty, perhaps by employing Randolph, or remove herself and her brother promptly from the stranger’s presence, but Daisy seems disinclined to either course of action. She reproves Randolph for ‘scattering the pebbles about Winterbourne’s ears’ without acknowledging the young man’s existence at all. Winterbourne addresses a remark to Randolph, who tells his sister ‘He’s an American man,’ but ‘the young lady gave no heed to this announcement’ (the NYE has ‘this circumstance’ which is weaker, departing from the ‘introduction’ subtext). ‘“Well, I guess you had better be quiet,” she simply observed.’ Winterbourne then presumes to treat Randolph’s remark as an introduction and addresses Daisy directly. She glances at him but says nothing and looks over the parapet at the lake and the mountains.

  While he was thinking of something else to say, the young lady turned to the little boy again.

  ‘I should like to know where you got that pole,’ she said.

  The NYE has ‘. . . the young lady turned again to the little boy, whom she addressed quite as if they were alone together’. The additional clause is not really necessary, and indeed the scene works much better if we sense the unconventionality of her behaviour without having the reasons spelled out. ‘I bought it!’ responded Randolph. The NYE has ‘Randolph shouted’. It’s a trivial change, but makes Randolph seem ruder and less ‘smart’ – to me, a loss of subtlety.

  ‘You don’t mean to say you’re going to take it to Italy!’

  ‘Yes I am going to take it to Italy!’ the child declared.

  The NYE has: ‘“Yes, I’m going to take it t’Italy!” the child rang out.’ The contraction ‘I’m’ in the revised text perhaps sounds more natural (though ‘I am’ could be Randolph’s way of asserting his independence). The contraction ‘t’Italy’ is less convincing. In later life Henry James became increasingly disturbed by the slovenliness of American demotic speech – a concern he explicitly voiced in a 1905 lecture called ‘The Question of Our Speech’ – and one can’t help suspecting that this affected his revision of the dialogue in Daisy Miller. The NYE, for instance, has Daisy saying of Randolph, a little later in this scene, ‘He don’t like Europe,’ instead of the 1879 text’s ‘He doesn’t like Europe.’ One would trust Henry James’s ear for how a young girl like Daisy would speak in the mid-1870s in the earlier text rather than the later. (An early American reviewer said he ‘had succeeded to admiration in the difficult task of representing the manner in which such people as Mrs and Miss Miller talk’.23) As for the metaphorical ‘rang out’, it belongs to a whole series of elegant variations in the NYE on the basic speech-tags of the original story which make the prose more ‘poetic’. There are further examples shortly afterwards in the reworking of this passage:

  The young girl glanced over the front of her dress, and smoothed out a knot or two of ribbon. Then she rested her eyes upon the prospect again. ‘Well, I guess you had better leave it somewhere,’ she said, after a moment.

  The NYE has ‘gave her sweet eyes to the prospect’, which seems too fondly sentimental at this early stage of Winterbourne’s acquaintance with the girl, and loses the sense of Daisy’s completely relaxed manner; and it has ‘she dropped’ instead of ‘she said’. A few lines later there is an un
fortunate repetition of ‘drop’ in the NYE when ‘“Are you – a – going over the Simplon?” Winterbourne pursued, a little embarrassed’ becomes: ‘“And are you – a – thinking of the Simplon?” he pursued with a slight drop of assurance.’ It is unfortunate because obviously unintended: when elegant variation is the rule, then unmotivated repetition becomes intrusive. James may have looked for an alternative to ‘a little embarrassed’ because the word ‘embarrassed’ occurs twice not long afterwards in the original text – although there the repetition is motivated:

  . . . Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself.

  Admittedly, a few of James’s revisions were genuine improvements. When, for instance, Daisy tells Winterbourne at their penultimate meeting in Rome that she is engaged and immediately adds, ‘You don’t believe it!’ the 1879 text has:

  He was silent a moment; and then, ‘Yes I believe it!’ he said.

  The NYE has:

  He asked himself, and it was for a moment like testing a heart-beat; after which,

  ‘Yes, I believe it!’ he said.

  The simile is very effective, partly because the word ‘heart’ is closely associated with the emotion of love as well as with life. But many of the revisions make one wonder what James thought he had gained by them. In their penultimate meeting, when Winterbourne is trying to convey to Daisy the disapproval of Mrs Walker’s circle, he asks her if she has not noticed anything, and she replies, in the 1879 text: ‘I have noticed you. But I noticed you were as stiff as an umbrella the first time I saw you.’ This homely simile is vivid and (like ‘heart-beat’) it has a contextual appropriateness: Winterbourne is just the kind of man, prudent and correctly dressed, to carry with him a tightly furled umbrella – and it is a furled umbrella that is evoked by ‘stiff’. The epithet is one Daisy often applies pejoratively to Winterbourne in the course of the story. (When he tells her in the Pincio Gardens that she should get into Mrs Walker’s carriage, she says, ‘I never heard anything so stiff,’ and when on another occasion he says he can’t dance, she says, ‘Of course you can’t, you’re too stiff.’) In the NYE this speech becomes: ‘But I noticed you’ve no more “give” than a ramrod the first time ever I saw you.’ ‘Ramrod’ has military associations which make this an unlikely figure of speech for Daisy to use, and inappropriate to describe Winterbourne; and the echo of Daisy’s previous complaints about Winterbourne’s ‘stiffness’ is lost. There is a danger, when a writer revises his work after a very long interval, of disturbing, for the sake of a local effect, delicate relationships of sameness and difference between the component parts of the text that, even with an artist as self-conscious as Henry James, evolved organically and intuitively in the original creative process.

  I have tried to show how the surface simplicity and economy of the story’s style and narrative method actually generate a great density of meaning and implication. These qualities are by no means completely effaced in the New York Edition, but they are more consistently present in the original text, right up to its beautifully understated conclusion. Imagine what a sentimental meal a Victorian novelist would have made of Daisy Miller’s last illness! There are no deathbed histrionics in this story. Winterbourne never sees Daisy after the scene in the Colosseum, and James conveys the pathos and finality of her death by the almost brutal brevity with which he reports it, ‘cutting’ (like a film-maker) quickly to the funeral. Daisy sends him a message through her mother to say that she was not engaged to Giovanelli:

  ‘I don’t know why she wanted you to know; but she said to me three times – “Mind you tell Mr Winterbourne.” And then she told me to ask if you remembered the time you went to that castle, in Switzerland. But I said I wouldn’t give any such messages as that. Only, if she is not engaged, I’m sure I’m glad to know it.’

  But, as Winterbourne had said, it mattered very little. A week after this the poor girl died; it had been a terrible case of the fever. Daisy’s grave was in the little Protestant cemetery . . .

  The phrase ‘it mattered very little’ is not quite as callous as it sounds out of context. It takes us back by a direct echo to the climactic scene in the Colosseum. As Giovanelli goes off to see to the carriage, Daisy chatters defiantly about the beauty of the moonlit scene. When she wonders why Winterbourne is silent he merely laughs, and she asks: ‘Did you believe I was engaged the other day?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I believed the other day,’ said Winterbourne, still laughing.

  ‘Well, what do you believe now?’

  ‘I believe it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not.’

  There is a double implication here: that if Daisy were engaged to Giovanelli it would not affect the impropriety of her being alone with him at that hour in such a place, and that for the same reason Winterbourne is no longer interested in whether her affections are engaged or not. He is in a state of shock, and there is a touch of hysteria about his laughter. But of course the question does matter to Daisy, because she really cares for him, as she later reveals by the message she sends him through her mother.

  The sentence, ‘But, as Winterbourne had said, it mattered very little’, is charged with emotions carried over from the previous scene. The 1909 text, ‘But as Winterbourne had originally judged, the truth on this question had small actual relevance’, contains the same information, but loses the echo of the dialogue in the Colosseum, and makes Winterbourne sound coldly forensic – assuming we attribute this reflection to him rather than to the narrator. It is in fact hard to distinguish between them in either version. We can but guess at the conflicting emotions Winterbourne must be feeling about Daisy’s death. Only after the funeral, when Giovanelli assures him that Daisy really was ‘innocent’, and that he had no hope of marrying her, do they resolve themselves into real grief and regret:

  ‘Why the devil,’ he asked, ‘did you take her to that fatal place?’

  Mr Giovanelli’s urbanity was apparently imperturbable. He looked on the ground for a moment, and then he said, ‘For myself, I had no fear; and she wanted to go.’

  In the NYE he says: ‘For myself I had no fear; and she – she did what she liked.’ One might speculate that James thought that the phrase, ‘she did what she liked’, sounded more like an epitaph on Daisy Miller’s life than ‘she wanted to go’, and he set it up accordingly with Giovanelli’s somewhat histrionic ‘she – she’. But for the attentive reader – and surely for Winterbourne – the phrase, ‘she wanted to go’, evokes poignant echoes of the hero and heroine’s first two meetings by the lakeside at Vevey, scenes in which the verb ‘to go’ is constantly in use, as the question is debated and pondered whether Daisy will go to Chillon, and how, and with whom.

  It is interesting that neither Giovanelli nor Winterbourne seems to fear catching the ‘Roman fever’ in the Colosseum. If the former, as a native, was less vulnerable, Winterbourne would surely have been at risk; but in the story the fever seems to be a lethal threat exclusively to women. It operates as a symbol, or what T. S. Eliot called an ‘objective correlative’,24 of Daisy’s jeopardy as a woman who refuses to abide by the rules, designed for her protection, of the society in which she finds herself. Because Daisy merely claims the kind of freedom that a young woman today would take for granted, it is tempting to regard her as a kind of proto-feminist heroine, defying patriarchal society, but there is nothing ideological in her rebellion against the stuffy ethos of the Mrs Walkers and Mrs Costellos. On the other hand it would be a great mistake to interpret the fever as some kind of providential punishment or poetic justice for misbehaviour. Daisy is indeed partly responsible for her own fate by recklessly ignoring warnings about the fever; but it is the disapproval of the Europeanised Americans, and Winterbourne’s chilly reserve in Rome, that push her into more and more extreme demonstrations of her independence and of her determination to enjoy herself, c
ulminating in the fatal visit to the Colosseum. Henry James’s comments about Daisy’s motivation, two years after the story’s first appearance, in a letter already quoted, make this clear – indeed, almost too clear:

  Poor little D.M. was (as I understand her) above all things innocent. It was not to make a scandal – or because she took pleasure in a scandal – that she ‘went on’ with Giovanelli. She never took the measure, really, of the scandal she produced, and had no means of doing so: she was too ignorant, too irreflective, too little versed in the proportions of things . . . She was a flirt – a perfectly superficial and unmalicious one; and she was very fond, as she announced at the outset, of ‘gentlemen’s society.’ In Giovanelli she got a gentleman who to her uncultivated perception was a very brilliant one . . . and she enjoyed his society to the largest possible measure. When she found that this measure was thought too large by other people – especially Winterbourne – she was wounded; she became conscious that she was accused of something of which her very comprehension was vague. This consciousness she endeavoured to throw off; she tried not to think of what people meant and easily succeeded in doing so; but to my perception she never really tried to take her revenge upon public opinion – to outrage it and irritate it . . . The keynote of her character is her innocence – that of her conduct is of course that she had a little sentiment about Winterbourne that she believed to be quite unreciprocated . . .25