The Din in the Head
Page 21
JAMES (reddening): Andersen's sculptures, those monstrously huge swollen ugly things. Let us pass over this unseemly subject.
INTERVIEWER: Here in the twenty-first century we pass over nothing, we let it all hang out. You mentioned earlier your despondency over your theatrical failure.
JAMES: Madam, you hurl me from unseemliness to unseemliness! The sacro terrore of it all! My charmingly contemplated eloquences were vigorously upon the boards when out of nervousness I slipped out to sample a neighboring drama— An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde's juvenile folly, flailing its silly jocularity. When I returned to the St. James, the last act was just finishing—there were cries of "Author, author"—and then the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs began—roars—a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo—
INTERVIEWER: YOU fell into a long depression after that. One of the many in your life, despite brilliant friendships, fame, the richness of travel, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, family visits to America—
JAMES: Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
INTERVIEWER: But George Bernard Shaw was in the audience as a reviewer that night, and he praised and championed you. You've had scores of champions and admirers—Edith Wharton, for one.
JAMES: The Firebird! Her motoring habits and intentions, so potent and explicit, bent on catching me up in her irresistible talons, the whir and wind of those great pinions cold on my foredoomed brow! Oh, one's opulent friends—they cost the eyes out of one's head. Edith, always able and interesting, yet insistent and unpredictable. Her powers of devastation were ineffable.
INTERVIEWER: She came with her car and her chauffeur and took you away from your work. But she also facilitated it. There was that scheme she cooked up, getting your mutual publisher to give you a portion of her bestseller royalties—eight thousand dollars—while pretending they were your earnings. It was arranged so shrewdly that you swallowed it whole. And then she took up a collection for your seventieth birthday—
JAMES: A more reckless and indiscreet undertaking, with no ghost of a preliminary leave asked, no hint of a sounding taken—I am still rubbing my eyes for incredulity. I undertook instant prohibitive action. It was shame heaped on shame, following as it did on the failure of my jubilant yet woebegone New York Edition, for which I had had such vain hopes, the hopes, alas, of my vanity—my labors uniformly collected, judiciously introduced by the author, and improved upon according to the author's maturer lights. I have been remarkably unwanted and unread.
INTERVIEWER: Not lately. They make films of your stories and novels. They make novels of your life. You're an industry in the graduate schools. But isn't there something of this frustration in "The Next Time," your tragicomical short story about a literary genius who hopes to turn himself into a popular hack so as to sell, to be read?
JAMES (gloomily): With each new striving he can draw out only what lies in him to do—another masterwork doomed to obscurity. Poor fellow, he falls short of falling short!
INTERVIEWER: Which is more or less what happened to you when you were writing Paris letters for the New York Tribune at twenty dollars apiece. It ended with your getting sacked for being too good. Your brother saw it coming—he'd warned you not to lose hold of the pulse of the American public. You were over their heads.
JAMES (with some bitterness): William instructed me, in point of fact, and not for the first time, to pander. I gave it my best, which is to say my worst. It was the poorest I could do, especially for the money!—Madam, is there to be more of this extraordinary discourse?
INTERVIEWER: Well, I did want to ask about the women in your life. Your tubercular young cousin, Minny Temple, for instance, who inspired your heroines Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer and Milly Theale ... she pleaded with you to let her join you in Rome, a city she longed to see, hoping the warmer climate would cure her—
JAMES: The sublime, the generous, the always vivid Minny! Yet in the pursuit of my then burgeoning art, I could not possibly have taken on the care of a dying young woman.
INTERVIEWER: And what of your friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson? A novelist of sensibility herself, who hung on your every word ... you stashed her away, you kept your frequent visits to her a great secret from your London circle—
JAMES : I had a dread of being, shall we say, "linked" with Miss Woolson. I feared the public charge of an "attachment." But she was deranged, poor lady. She was not, she was never, wholly sane.
INTERVIEWER: YOU decided this only after she jumped out of a window in Venice and killed herself. Until then you regarded her, in your own words, as "a deep resource." She put aside her own work for the sake of yours. You exploited her. James is silent. The fire's flicker darts across the vast bald dome of his Roman head. Then, with a faint groan—he is notably corpulent—he rises from his armchair.
JAMES (calling out): Noakes, will you be good enough to escort our visitor to the door?—Ah, my dear lady, let us bring this fruitless exchange to the termination it has long merited. I observe with regret that you possess the modern manner—you proceed rather in the spirit of an assizes, you place me in the dock! You scrutinize without scruples. You pry into the dignified celibacy of a contented bachelorhood. Heartlessly you charge on, seizing upon one's humiliations, one's defeats—Mount Ossa on Mount Pelion! You come, in fine, not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. Put it then, madam, that you and I are not, cannot, shall never be, on the same page!
NOAKES (considerately): Mind the Master's bicycle don't strike you in the shins, ma'am. Miss Bosanquet, hers was black-and-blue, but she's got used to it, and goes round. The interviewer picks up her tote bag (unbeknownst to James, a tape recorder is hidden in it), and also one of the jellied pastries, and wordlessly departs.
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* Since writing these words, I have eagerly returned to Howells. Any reader familiar with, say, A Modern Instance, or A Hazard of New Fortunes, will repudiate, as I emphatically do now, this disparagement of a neglected American luminary. In intellect and wit, in judgment and insight, in apperception of moral violence, Howells is easily James's penetrating comrade; and surely they are equal practitioners of the fiction of manners. Where Howells differs from James is in a kind of stoic recognition (or resignation) that things are what they must be—whereas in James tragedy is starkly, darkly irredeemable, least of all by philosophical serenity.
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* Professor Hamid Dabashi, of Columbia University.
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* And how much more so in the summer of 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's newly elected president, an Islamic hard-liner, was said to have been recognized by his former American captives as one of the hostage takers who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979.
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