The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!

  So many "absent things," he concluded, "upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling." All this implied that James—an expatriate, after all—was equally appalled at how little America had to offer his own imagination. Yet in the same essay he tellingly qualified these objections: "It is on manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured and established, that a novelist lives—they are the very stuff his work is made of." Such stuff, he argued, could be found even in America: "The American knows that a good deal remains." In the winter of 1880, sheltered from the storms of Paris, he conceived his most American fiction—a novel of manners and customs, altogether barren of castles and ivied ruins, and set mainly in the front parlor of a New York brownstone in the early decades of the nineteenth century. He named it Washington Square, after a neighborhood redolent of his own childhood. Momentarily straying from the grain of the narrative, and invoking memory and reverie in a "topographical parenthesis," he recalls that it was in this place long ago, "as you might have been informed on good authority,"

  that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nurserymaid with unequal step, and sniffing up the strange odor of the ailanthus trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn't match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations.

  The digression is crucial. It points to a novel of absences—and not only of abbeys and thatched cottages. To write it, James absented himself from Paris, enduring a choppy Channel crossing, and returned to the confiding familiarity of his London flat. It was a stroke of self-possession. What he possessed, or repossessed, were the decisive absences of his own life: the Washington Square of his small boyhood, ripe for retrieval; America, self-driven into willing absence, except for the distant yet persistent pressure of his relations. William, James's older brother—older by more than a year—had recently married. Contemplating the urgent absence of such an eventuality in his own future, James congratulated the new husband with a brother's cautious defensiveness and a novelist's enlarging empathy: "I believe almost as much in marriage for other people as I believe in it little for myself—which," he added, "is saying a good deal."

  He believed in matrimony (and its absence) also as a primary subject for the novel as a form: the novel of usages and habits. Of the four major presences, and one minor one, who govern the action of Washington Square, three are widowed, and much the worse for it. Dr. Sloper is embittered because he has lost a rich and beautiful and clever wife who has left him a plain and unprepossessing daughter. Mrs. Penniman, the doctor's widowed sister, childless and unoccupied, expends her store of perilous energy on intrigues and flighty romancings. Mrs. Montgomery, the minor presence, a respectable young widow with many children, lives tidily on little money, burdened by a ne'er-do-well brother. For all these deprived persons, the novel—like its author—admits to a belief in the social advantages of matrimony. Had Dr. Sloper's wife not died, he would have continued to enjoy an adored and sprightly companion; as it is, he has only Catherine, the daughter he regards as irredeemably dull. Were Mr. Penniman still alive, Lavinia Penniman's fantasies and shallow mischiefs might sufficiently divert her clergyman husband, who presumably was not averse to having a silly wife to wag a silver tongue at. As for poor Mrs. Montgomery, who knows how a robust man in the house would have disposed of Morris Townsend, her shamelessly sponging brother? All these long-absent spouses, and their clear domestic benefits, foreshadow the husband that will always be absent in Catherine's story.

  Catherine Sloper, at twenty-two, is an heiress. Her father, by means of a strenuously fashionable practice, has grown rich; her dead mother, an heiress herself, was richer still. No wonder, then, that a decades-old Hollywood film made from Washington Square—Olivia de Havilland soberly regal in period silks—is melodramatically called The Heiress. The novel itself is melodrama, recognizably stereotyped in a venerably fixed pattern: a young woman courted by a blatantly charming fortune hunter, an angry father determined to thwart the match. Nor was James unaware of the well-trodden nature of his material. "I am almost a father in an old-fashioned novel," he has Dr. Sloper say, and Morris Townsend, questioned about his prospects, is made to remark, "I have nothing but my good right arm, as they say in the melodramas"—authorial self-consciousness here awkwardly tripping on its skirts. James loses no time, moreover, in presenting the handsome suitor as an attractive but manipulative scoundrel; Morris Townsend's aims are evident nearly from the first. Even Mrs. Penniman's role harks back to the ancient typology of the meddlesome go-between. James's narrative schemes, especially those that touch on a marriage, often enough rely on similar melodrama. The Portrait of a Lady, which directly follows Washington Square, allows the heiress to wed the scoundrel, thanks to the machinations of the go-between. But Gilbert Osmond is a darkly sinister villain; Morris Townsend is as light and transparent as air.

  At bottom, what can these acknowledged contrivances mean for James's art? What we call plot, and he called the fructifying "germ" of the tale, is mostly beside the point. Leon Edel, James's foremost biographer, informs us that James got the idea for Washington Square from an anecdote told to him by Mrs. Fanny Kem-ble, a celebrated actress of the time. "Her brother," Edel re-counts, "had jilted an heiress when he discovered that her father would disinherit the girl." But James's sources went deeper than anecdote, or germ, or plot, and deeper surely than the classical arrangements of sentimental drama. It was the jilting that drew him—jilting as flight, a thing James knew well. Putting an ocean behind him, he had jilted America. Fearing the responsibility of tending sickness, he had in effect abandoned his much-loved but tubercular young cousin, Minny Temple, who begged to follow him to Europe. He periodically deserted Constance Woolson, a novelist (and admirer) with whom he kept up a secret friendship; he dreaded the possibility of misperception, hers or the world's. Convivial as he was, sympathetic as he might be, his public life was a series of subtly executed relinquishments and escapes—from attachments unwanted, from ministrations imposed (as when he angrily discovered that Edith Wharton, whose novels were bestsellers, had charitably—and clandestinely—arranged for her publisher to transfer to James a portion of her own royalties). And once he was himself jilted, in a manner of speaking, through William's marriage—William, almost a twin, close in age, close in childhood experience, close in fraternal rivalry. (Leon Edel calls it a "divorce.")

  So Washington Square, written not long after that marriage, is not only about an actual jilting; it is—in terms of fictive form—an act of literary jilting. It is a novel through which James escapes from the melodramatic frame that engaged him—the archetypes of faithless suitor and unforgiving father, the old lore of innocence wronged. James exploits all of these, and then throws them over. Nor is it simply that he jettisons familiar bathetic tropisms. The frame itself is wrung free of expectation and twisted out of all recognition. There is neither relief nor release; the protagonists are chained to what their innate characteristics of mind have wrought. What begins as melodrama ends as tragedy.
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br />   Dr. Sloper is a satirist. Under his cleverly penetrating eye every object, every person, is bound to wither. His delight is to expose the truth, so long as the truth is hurtful. His sister fears him. His daughter reveres him. When the barbs fly, Catherine is mild, meekly withdrawing; it will be a long time before she can admit to her father's cruelty. She cannot satisfy him. No one, he tells himself, "will ever be in love with Catherine ... poor Catherine isn't romantic." She lacks brilliance, she lacks taste; or, rather, a taste akin to his own: "It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed." He thinks this "in private," but aloud he is brutal. At a party, observing his daughter's lavish dress, he exclaims, "Is it possible that this magnificent person is my child?" And then, still more cuttingly: "You look as if you had eighty thousand a year."

  He is not alone in this evaluation. Morris Townsend, catching sight of the plain young woman in the dress heralding eighty thousand a year, glimpses an opportunity. But if he is a mercenary adventurer, he is something else as well: he can entertain, he can amuse, he can entrance. By way of approaching Catherine, he charms Mrs. Penniman, a woman who is too easily charmed. Dr. Sloper is decidedly not charmed. Until just lately, Morris "had been knocking about the world, and living in queer corners"; at present he is living with, and on, his needy sister. His manner is facile, his conversation sprightly:

  Catherine had never heard anyone—especially a young man—talk just like that. It was the way a young man might talk in a novel, or, better still, in a play, on the stage, close before the footlights, looking at the audience and with everyone looking at him, so that you wondered at his presence of mind. And yet Mr. Townsend was not like an actor; he seemed so sincere, so natural.

  It is Catherine who is sincere and natural. She is innately diffident, but she is also unassumingly direct. Toward her father she is adoring and humble. The skills of deception are far from her character. Her character: the shrewdly cynical Dr. Sloper believes he is in command of her every trait and limitation—"poor Catherine isn't romantic." And further: "He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child." Yet the unromantic and commonplace child is, despite all, attracted to imaginative influence; she senses that Morris is exactly this—a work of art. When she looks at him she is reminded of novels and plays, of paintings and sculpture.

  He had features like young men in pictures; Catherine had never seen such features—so delicate, so chiseled and finished—among the young New Yorkers whom she passed in the streets and met at dancing parties. He was tall and slim, but he looked extremely strong. Catherine thought that he looked like a statue.

  Morris is a work of art; he is also an artist. Like a painter or a novelist, he can create a young woman who never before existed. He can transform Catherine, to whom no one has ever shown honest affection, into a woman who for the first time feels herself to be worthy of love. Always she has abided by her father's low valuation of a weak child without spirit. Morris enchants her with an unforeseen portrait, that of an effulgent figure capable of the ardors of happiness; he has fashioned her, for the moment, into yet another work of art—a golden bride in the morning of life.

  Gold—the absence of gold—interferes. Dr. Sloper sees in Morris only the canny maneuvers of a man after money and ease. He abuses him unremittingly: Morris is "a vulgar nature," "extremely insinuating," "a plausible coxcomb," "a selfish idler." Coldly, he informs Catherine that he will disinherit her should she defy him by marrying Townsend. Whereupon Morris, persuaded finally of the force of this intention, disappears—precisely as Dr. Sloper, with all the power of practical intellect and well-tuned judgment, forewarned. But the doctor overlooks the power of joy. He discounts the power of art, however artfully proposed. He is blind to the power of beauty—his daughter's newly felt glory. He strips the commonplace child of the magnetically interesting husband she might have had—and what if Morris were made rich by the marriage, what is that to Catherine? And if rich and at ease, would he not be likely to remain kind? Might he not go on inventing her into something spirited and bold? The father, vindictive and dry, relegates the daughter's heart to barrenness and an absent future. He dooms her to a semblance of widowhood—to a mourning as empty as his own. Henceforth, unloved, bereft, unaccommodated, confined to her small domestic parlor, she will become a small domestic Lear. A Lear made mute by smallness.

  Who—or what—is to blame? Is it Mrs. Penniman, who by a thousand blandishments has encouraged Morris to believe that a softly importuning Catherine might prevail over her father's hard will? Is it the cavernous greed of an intransigent Morris, whose charms wear off as the money recedes? Is it Dr. Sloper, who places deadly prognostication over hope, and punishment over possibility? Is it Catherine herself, obstinate in her perilous trust? Is it the treacherous idea of the romance of art?

  Or perhaps the fault lies in a different breed of art—not the seductions of a transfiguring imagination, but the far darker art of imposture. A harsh and relentless father impersonates a loving and protective parent; a fortune hunter impersonates a sincere lover; a flibbertigibbet aunt impersonates a reliable confidante. And Catherine, when Morris returns after years away, older but no better than before—Catherine for a few deceptive moments appears to him to be the passively quiescent Catherine he remembers. But this too is an imposture. She is fierce; she is strong; she is implacable. Her father is dead, she is rich and unmarried, and Morris, prompted yet again by Mrs. Penniman, once more comes a-courting. Long ago he had reinvented Catherine by pledging her joy. In the wake of abandonment she has reinvented herself—in her father's remorseless image. With quick cruelty she dispatches her belated suitor: the jilter jilted.

  But climax is anticlimax. There is no satisfaction in it. Washington Square is a novel about the abuse of imagination, the abuse of trust, the abuse of propriety and form; about, above all, the absence of pity. When James spoke of those "manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon...[which] a novelist lives," he was not unaware that it is on their rupture that a novelist can also—and still more vividly—live. Though it may be a bad thing to break the rules of a fixed society (disinheritance of a child is such a breach, jilting is such a breach), it is a worse thing to break a heart. Whether Dr. Sloper or Morris Townsend is the deeper miscreant is, in the end, a tossup. Is it always right to be right? Will a wrong motive always do harm? And what are we to think of the secret susceptibilities of the novelist who sets this tale of tragic desertion in the weedy-smelling ailanthus streets of his own childhood, and in the country he himself deserted? "Morris, Morris, you must never despise me!" Catherine is made to cry. Can it be that this is what Henry James heard America whisper in his ear—that he must never despise what he had abandoned?

  Shadowy complexities like these aside, Washington Square is among James's most exquisitely proportioned shorter masterpieces. "There is no living novelist," Virginia Woolf wrote in 1905, "whose standard is higher, or whose achievement is so consistently great." Her single reservation (she was reviewing The Golden Bowl, a work of James's "late style") attached to what she called his "overburdened sentences," "trivial instances of detail which, perpetually insisted on, fatigue without adding to the picture. Genius would have dissolved them, and whole chapters of the same kind, into a single word."

  No such stricture can be applied to Washington Square (nor, a century after Woolf's impatient complaint, does anyone any longer doubt James's genius). There is no possibility of reader's fatigue in Catherine Sloper's story. Every line, every paragraph, every chapter, is a fleet-footed light brigade, an engine of irony; and the charged wit of the dialogue is equal to Jane Austen's in another celebrated novel of manners and customs, one similarly concerned with getting a young woman married. Pride and Prejudice (its preliminary title was First Impressions) is a comedy of thwarted courtship that ends in jubilation. Everyone knows its sparkling opening, a sentence incised in literary history, signaling bright vitality: "It is a truth universally acknowledg
ed, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." But (given custom and habit) reverse the sexes—and choose the earlier title—and the brilliantly lit comedy is gone; you have Catherine and Morris. The final note of Washington Square, a kind of codicil, is dour and dire and unforgettable. It too has left its lasting signal—that of a light growing dimmer: "Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancywork, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were." The muted fading of that "as it were"—a nuanced gesture typical of James—stands for the snuffing of the light. Even a small and unsung Lear may be consigned to darkness.

  Smoke and Fire: Sylvia Plath's Journals

  SYLVIA PLATH'S VOICE, reading her poems on tape, is a daunting, not to say intimidating, astonishment. It is not, as you would expect so many decades after her death, ghostly, a vaporish backwash; it is instead a voice made of marble, the diction burnished, precise, almost inhumanly perfected: as if Eliot's tones, so pervasive in that period, had, with all the authority of their ritualized cadences, been transfused into a woman's veins. The voice is dark and deep and dangerous, the sound not of youth but of some overripe being, an old woman, or even an old man; its register is surprisingly low and nearly sinister; it surprises and unsettles.

  It surprises and unsettles, I think, because its hard marble has so long been masked by Styrofoam. Sylvia Plath's posthumous celebrity—her legend—has pitched her into a protean plastic weightlessness. She has become all things to all men, and especially to all women. She has been undone not so much by her own hand as by that deadening thing we nowadays call Icon. Through the throngs of her ideological explicators her voice comes to us as light, high, fragile, and faint. Her grief pales to grievance. "Does not my heat astound you," she asks, accompanied by no question mark, in "Fever 103." But her heat has been purloined by publicity. She is the object of confusion and misunderstanding and mistake.