The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  In short, Henry James’s style is only moderately successful even for its own delicate purpose. For, save to a few clever, persistent minds, it defeats itself for all time when it first defeats the reader. About the quality of the thought itself, no one who has read, for instance, The Ambassadors (which James considered his best book) can remain in doubt. For here was an author who knew more reasons why his characters should not do the things they did, than most authors seem to know for their actually doing. But anyone who has read The Golden Bowl will inevitably have all kinds of doubt about his grammar.

  Henry James was like a trick-dancer walking on eggs. Nine times out of ten he is marvellously successful. But on the tenth time we feel as though we have been present at a rehearsal.

  The reason for Henry James’s unique style is not perhaps so consciously artistic as has generally been imagined. He dictated the later books in which his style is at its most perverse. And no man living has any real command of his mannerisms in speech. Those jostling second thoughts, and the recurrent “as-it-weres ”—even the slang said self-consciously with rounded lips like a clergyman deliberately and decently swearing—probably have their origin in the air and not on paper. We seem even to see the gestures that accompanied the mannerisms.

  That is not, of course, to suggest that Henry James ever let his novels go out into the world as a busy business man sends out his letters, “dictated but not read.” But from the moment when he began to dictate his books his mannerisms began to run away with him. And his revisions then became merely the crystallising into prose of the loquacity of an elaborate and diffuse speaker.

  There is a phrase somewhere in The Wings of the Dove that exactly describes a Henry James novel. There are, indeed, many such phrases: it seems that something in the quality of Henry James’s thoughts does not lend itself comfortably to the ordinary apparatus of description. The phrase to which I am referring is the one that describes a girl as having “stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass ”: a veritable ghost of a girl. And, indeed, Henry James’s novels often seem to be merely splendid ghosts of real novels, needing just height, motion and mass to bring them into the full, fat life of fiction. As it is there is an intangible tenuousness about them that frequently makes the reader wish that he had read more carefully when nearer the beginning.

  With Henry James the novel becomes more consciously literary than ever before; and not with entire success. Henry James was an experimentalist who wrote fiction in the manner of a chemist in a laboratory. He was laboriously and lovingly trying to evolve a formula of fiction; and more of his professional life than a novelist should be able to spare was occupied with mixtures and messes.

  The prefaces to the Collected Edition of Henry James’s novels form a prose “Prelude or Growth of a Novelist’s Mind.” They are the most nearly complete declaration of a novelist’s policy that we have in the language. Every novelist must more or less plan a novel, must have within his mind at one moment or another a sudden bright shaft in which the whole pattern of the book is illumined. Yet, such is the weakness of the human brain, that detail and form can rarely be seen at the same instant. With Henry James they could.

  The preface to The Wings of the Dove, for example, opens with the explicit announcement that: “The idea, reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world …” And the rest of the preface contains an outline in the exact terms of a chemical formula of how the author is going to achieve the fulfilment of his idea. It is as though James had emptied his brain of the plan, in outline and detail, as it existed within him. And to what extent that meticulous brain of his concerned itself with detail may be seen from the way in which he describes how he is going to build up the novel scene by scene, character by character, ’value by value, with the awesome competence of a small child building a whole cathedral out of toy bricks.

  There was the “fun ” to begin with, of establishing one’s successive centres—of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject commanded by them as by happy points of view, and accordingly treated from them, would constitute so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and provide for beauty.…

  It would almost be true to say that if a Henry James novel fails, it fails because Henry James has intended it to fail in just that particular way. Certainly when it succeeds, the manner of its success has been exactly predetermined.

  In scope Henry James had a mind of remarkable narrowness of range; most “psychological ” novelists have. Once he had rid himself of the desire to be eerie, once he had disentangled himself from the Hawthorne tree that he had climbed in youth, he settled down to observing not only social comedy, but Society comedy; a comedy of manners in which all the manners were good ones.

  The only point at which life, crude and irresistible, scattered the bric-à-brac and orchids of his mind was when his beautiful cousin, Mary Temple, who was to Henry James through life as Agnes was to Dickens, a fixed, immutable, marvellous star among women, died at the age of twenty-three. Hers was a death in just those conditions of desperate vitality that were framed in The Wings of the Dove.

  If Henry James’s contribution to the novel could be described in a phrase it is thus: he gave the novel new nerves of sensitiveness, he taught it to explore the mind for the little half resolutions and misgivings as well as for the decisions and rejections that ultimately make for action.

  He was a man fascinated by the unexpectedness of the human mind. In that he resembled most of the post-Freudian novelists of to-day. But he was interested primarily in the normal mind; or at the most in the normally abnormal mind. And in that he differed from the novelists of to-day.

  The Case Against D. H. Lawrence

  It was only to be expected that the novel which had become a supplement to the Universal Dictionary of Psychology (the modern counterpart of Fielding’s “vast authentic doomsday book of nature ”) should now become a supplement to the Universal Dictionary of Abnormal Psychology: for connoisseurs always finally go after the few and the freakish. And the writer whose frantic intensity of expression and fantastic conception of mankind promote him above all his kindred is D. H. Lawrence.

  Lawrence was so sensitive to the rest of life that he was like a man born without his skin; impressions and emotions everywhere struck him full on raw, naked nerves. Having none of those useful barriers that ordinary thickskinned men have between themselves and experience, he seemed to be a part of experience itself—which is really what is meant by people who take Lawrence to pieces and reconstruct him in the Middleton Murry manner to show that he is a huge symbolic figure; not a man but Man himself.

  Lawrence was never greater than any situation in which he found himself. He strove hard to be equal. But he remained always inferior to circumstances. And his books are essentially the expression of the rat in the trap.

  Mr. Murry, whose eloquent volume Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence has all but become the Bible of Lawrence’s faithful, has been responsible for a thin and rather tiresome comparison between Lawrence and Christ. In a slight, superficial sense it is just. In neither case can we understand the works without the life. But the works of Lawrence grew steadily and inevitably out of the life, and not the life necessarily and remorselessly out of the works as in the more important case.

  The details of the dark and distressing childhood of Lawrence are now better known to a great many people than the details of the fresher and more fragrant childhood of Christ. But just as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John must be forgiven a somewhat trying reiteration of one well-known theme, so must any commentator on D. H. Lawrence be forgiven the repetition of the open secrets of Lawrence’s life.

  Lawrence was the fourth child of a drunken collier, and a woman who
should never have made the blunder of becoming a collier’s wife. David Herbert was not wanted. But once he was born his mother sent wave upon wave of love crashing over him. This is his infancy reflected in his fiction:

  In her arms lay the delicate baby … A wave of hot love went over her to the infant. She held it close to her face and breast. With all her force, with all her soul she would make up to it for having brought it into the world unloved. She would love it all the more now it was here; carry it in her love. Its clear, knowing eyes gave her pain and fear. Did it know all about her? When it lay under her heart, had it been listening then? Was there a reproach in the look? She felt the marrow melt in her bones, with fear and pain.

  Paul Morel’s life in Sons and Lovers is more like Lawrence than a good many portraits-of-the-artist are like the original. He was the first of a band of characters who stretch through the novels in tormented profusion, whose difficulties have been their author’s.

  Lawrence’s love for his mother would seem exquisitely beautiful in a world in which sons could remain sons and not have to grow into husbands. In the world as it is, the beauty of that love is too thickly streaked with what is morbid for the whole to remain beautiful.

  Just as we can see a child’s being spoiled by being given too much toffee so we can see Lawrence’s life being spoiled by being given too much womanly love. Lawrence’s mother would have been considerably more kind to him if she had continued in her dislike. As it was, she concentrated on him all the love she had once directed on her husband. And the son, made too delicate for the task by too much loving, was called upon to give an unhappy woman the assurance that should have come from her husband.

  If the emotion could have stopped short at that deep, though possibly destructive, devotion that Ruskin felt for his mother, and had not steered towards darker waters, the mind of the reader who sees the events from a distance would be lighter. But in the shape that events took we cannot view this relationship with anything but a mounting nausea. For Lawrence tragically grew; and in a passage in Sons and Lovers, that sends a moan of anguish up from the page into a reader of any sensitiveness, he describes how a mother went to the very Hell Gates of sex with her son:

  Paul was very ill. His mother lay in bed at nights with him; they could not afford a nurse. He grew worse, and the crisis approached. One night he tossed into consciousness in the ghastly, sickly feeling of dissolution, when all the cells in the body seem in intense irritability to be breaking down, and consciousness makes a last flare of struggle, like madness.

  “I s’ll die, mother! ” he cried, heaving for breath on the pillow.

  She lifted him up, crying in a small voice:

  “Oh, my son—my son! ”

  That brought him to. He realised her. His whole will rose up and arrested him. He put his head on her breast, and took ease of her for love.

  Mercifully Lawrence was romantic and not realistic. That passage otherwise would have been intolerable.

  And so this son grew to worship his mother like a god, and to have adopted her like the slave of his bosom; which is bad theology. And Lawrence’s strangely beautiful funeral poem to his mother, beginning:

  My little love, my darling,

  and running on to:

  I kiss you good-bye, my dearest,

  It is finished between us here.

  Oh, if I were as calm as you are,

  Sweet and still on your bier!

  Oh God, if I had not to leave you

  Alone, my dear.

  is a poem in which even the language has changed from that of the son to that of the lover. Anyone who is not aware of a rare beauty in these passages must be insensitive to the facts of writing. But anyone who is not aware also of a strange ugliness must be blind to the facts of life.

  If Lawrence’s love for his mother is full of shadows there is a corner of his mind that already by the time he was sixteen is midnight black. In Sons and Lovers he is as frank about Paul Morel’s fornications as about his affections. At sixteen Lawrence was pestering a girl of his own age to have sexual intercourse with him. This is the fictional account:

  I held forth with rapture to her, positively with rapture. I simply went up in smoke. And she adored me. The serpent in the grass was sex. She somehow didn’t have any; at least, not where it’s supposed to be. I got thinner and crazier. Then I said we’d got to be lovers. I talked her into it. So she let me.

  She let him. But it was not enough. She did not encourage Lawrence in his persuasive rape. And Lawrence left her in the first of those disgusts that were to sweep through his soul like a whirlwind scattering and destroying all that was good, all that was beautiful, in his mind.

  Mr. Middleton Murry has penetratingly and exactly explained Lawrence’s desertion of the passive partner in this adolescent escapade by saying that while Lawrence’s mother still lived, “he was incapable of giving to another woman the love without which sexual possession must be a kind of violence done; done not to the woman only, but also and equally to the man: above all to a man like Lawrence.” And not only while his mother lived. After her death Lawrence could still look back to that embracing love, the only utterly satisfying love that he had known in his life, with regret heightened by his present awful hunger. A Freudian might explain the whole thing by saying that what Lawrence was really longing for, with an insatiable desire, was the blissful twilight of the womb, where perfect union was the natural state of life.

  Lawrence’s books, in one important particular are by no means the mirror of his life. There was only one woman—a passionate school-teacher, a tempting Sue Bridehead—who came between the incident of the farmer’s obliging daughter and the woman who became Lawrence’s wife. “Now, why ”—the reader must inevitably ask—” did Lawrence, the liver of this comparatively placid life, write novels which were simply proud and protracted phallic hymns? With Lawrence, as with St. Augustine did the strength of the Devil lurk, roaring in his loins? “The answer apparently, is, ” no.” On Mr. Murry’s authority, founded on intimacy, we are assured that Lawrence was “almost a sexual-weakling.” All those colossal strainings of which his novels are full, which seem to shake and shatter the very foundations of sex, are obviously not the emotions of a man to whom accomplishment brings rest. There is always a hint, rising in some places to an articulate suggestion, and in others—The Rainbow is one of them—to a shout, that Lawrence’s novels are the work not so much of a potent novelist as of an impotent man.

  If we compare the work of a novelist whose manhood was an affliction, Tolstoy, with that of Lawrence, I think we might guess that Lawrence was not the great husband but the small lover; a physically bankrupt man, ashamed of living on a woman’s charity.

  Tolstoy begat a family, and ploughed the fields of Yasnaya Polyana, and danced Cossack dances, and defied the Church and the State, and wrote War and Peace. Life roared through his veins like a stream in flood. His sexual pleasures and remorses were as great as Lawrence’s. But sex to him was simply a sudden and usually uncontrollable outburst of his tremendous vitality. With Lawrence, it was sex for which he lived and sex which kept him alive. Sex with him is not only a means but an end. It was an inescapable circle; a vicious circle which he blindly saw as a magic circle.

  It is not possible to write of Lawrence merely as an urgent and intense story-teller, though there is some strangely emotional compulsion within all his best work that drives the reader irresistibly onwards. Neither is it possible to think of him merely as one of the supremely imaginative writers whose language (when he could forget the dismal jargon of psychology with its hyphens, like stiles that have to be climbed) could soar without effort and remain aloft without fatigue.

  True, both these qualities do occur within his good work, and even break through in his bad like a pure note in the voice of a platform speaker. But the story is always a story with a moral, even though the moral may happen to be a bad one. And the prose at its most persuasive is never without a purpose, usually a dark purpose, i
n its persuasion. The moral and the purpose are that man has ceased to worship sex as it should be worshipped, that only through sex can man arrive at the true understanding of life, and that it is the duty of man ’to repair the great rent in the cloth of nature that Christ had made in tearing body and soul apart; in dividing the body by a girdle of chastity.

  And so it is that the critic of Lawrence is driven away from such works as Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, which really established Lawrence as a novelist, to the Fantasia of the Unconscious, in which he could teach his lessons about sex without the accidental interruption of having to write fiction; lessons which would have startled the Serpent—who probably had not even thought of the sharper daggers of impotence at the time of the original temptation.