At Home

by Gore Vidal

A decade earlier (November 28, 1892) Henry James sketched in his notebook the first design for The Golden Bowl: “…a father and daughter—an only daughter. The daughter—American of course—is engaged to a young Englishman, and the father, a widower and still youngish, has sought in marriage at exactly the same time an American girl of very much the same age as his daughter. Say he has done it to console himself in his abandonment—to make up for the loss of the daughter, to whom he has been devoted. I see a little tale, n’est-ce pas?—in the idea that they all shall have married, as arranged, with this characteristic consequence—that the daughter fails to hold the affections of the young English husband, whose approximate mother-in-law the pretty young second wife of the father will now have become.” James then touches upon the commercial aspect of the two marriages: “young Englishman” and “American girl” have each been bought. They had also known each other before but could not marry because each lacked money. Now “they spend as much of their time together as the others do, and for the very reason that the others spend it. The whole situation works in a kind of inevitable rotary way—in what would be called a vicious circle. The subject is really the pathetic simplicity and good faith of the father and daughter in their abandonment…he peculiarly paternal, she passionately filial.” On Saint Valentine’s Day 1895, James again adverts to the story which now demands to be written, though he fears “the adulterine element” might be too much for his friend William Dean Howells’s Harper’s Magazine. ‘But may it not be simply a question of handling that?’

  Seven years later, James was shown a present given the Lamb family by King George I: It is a golden bowl. The pieces have now begun to come together. James has just completed, in succession, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. Comfortably settled in the garden room at Lamb House (later to be inhabited by E. F. Benson’s dread Miss Mapp and then the indomitable Lucia; later still, to be blown up in World War II), James wrote, in slightly more than a year, what he himself described to his American publisher as “distinctly the most done of my productions—the most composed and constructed and completed….I hold the thing the solidest, as yet, of all my fictions.” The “as yet” is splendid from a sixty-one-year-old writer. Actually, The Golden Bowl was to be the last novel that he lived to complete, and it has about it a kind of spaciousness—and even joy—that the other novels do not possess. In fact, pace F. R. Leavis, I do not think James has in any way lost his sense of life or let slip “his moral taste” (what a phrase!).

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  When I first read The Golden Bowl, I found Amerigo, the Prince, most sympathetic. I still do. I also found—and find—Charlotte the most sympathetic of the other characters; as a result, I don’t think that her creator does her justice or, perhaps, he does her too much conventional justice, a black cloth on his head as he sentences her to a living death. But then James appears to accept entirely the code of the class into which he has placed both himself in life and the characters in his book. This means that the woman must always be made to suffer for sexual transgression while the man suffers not at all or, in the case of the Prince, very little—although the renewed and intensified closeness to Maggie may well be a rarefied punishment that James only hints at when, for the last time, he shuts the door to the golden cage on Husband and Wife Victrix. For once, in James, the heiress has indisputably won; and the other woman, the enchantress, is routed.

  I barely noticed Adam Verver the first time I read the book. I saw him as an aged (at forty-seven!) proto–J. Paul Getty, out “to rifle the Golden Isles” in order to memorialize himself with a museum back home—typical tycoon behavior, I thought; and thought no more. But now that he could be my younger brother (and Maggie an exemplary niece), I regard him with new interest—not to mention suspicion. What is he up to? He is plainly sly; and greedy; and although the simultaneous possession and ingestion of confectionary is a recurrent James theme, my God, how this father and daughter manage to both keep and devour the whole great world itself! They buy the handsome Prince, a great name, palazzi, the works. They buy the brilliant Charlotte. But they do not know that the two beauties so triumphantly acquired are actually a magnificent pair, destined to be broken up by Maggie when she discovers the truth, and, much as Fanny Assingham smashes the golden bowl into three parts and pedestal, Maggie breaks the adulterine situation into three parts: Amerigo, Charlotte, and Adam (she is, plainly, pedestal). Then, adulterine world destroyed, Maggie sends Adam and Charlotte home to American City at the heart of the great republic.

  Best of all, from Maggie’s viewpoint, Charlotte does not know for certain even then that Maggie knows all—a real twist to the knife for in a James drama not to know is to be the sacrificial lamb. Once Mr. and Mrs. Adam Verver have gone forever, the Prince belongs absolutely to Maggie. One may or may not like Maggie (I don’t like what she does or, indeed, what she is) but the resources that she brings to bear, first to know and then to act, are formidable. Yet there is a mystery in my second experience of the novel which was not present thirty years ago. What, finally, does Adam Verver know? And what, finally, does he do? Certainly father and daughter are so perfectly attuned that neither has to tell the other anything at all about the unexpected pair that they have acquired for their museum. But does Maggie lead him? Or does he manage her? Can it be that it is Adam who pulls all the strings, as befits the rich man who has produced a daughter and then bought her—and himself—a life that even he is obliged to admit is somewhat selfish in its perfection?

  * * *

  As one rereads James’s lines in his notebook, the essentially rather banal short story that he had in mind has changed into a wonderfully luminous drama in which nothing is quite what it seems while James’s pious allusion to the subject as “really the pathetic simplicity and good faith of the father and daughter in their abandonment” is plain nonsense. James is now giving us monsters on a divine scale.

  I think the clue to the book is the somewhat, at first glance, over-obvious symbol of the golden bowl. Whatever the king’s christening gift was made of, James’s golden bowl proves to be made not of gold but of gilded crystal, not at all the same thing; yet the bowl is massy and looks to be gold. The bowl is first seen in a Bloomsbury shop by Charlotte, who wants to buy a wedding present for her friend Maggie. Charlotte cannot afford anything expensive, but then, as she remarks to her lover, Maggie’s groom-to-be, “ ‘She’s so modest,’ she developed—‘she doesn’t miss things. I mean if you love her—or, rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go.’ ” The Prince is puzzled by this use of let, one of James’s two most potent verbs (the other is know): “She lets what—?” Charlotte expatiates on Maggie’s loving character. She wants nothing but to be kind to those she believes in: “It’s of herself that she asks efforts.”

  At first the bowl enchants Charlotte. But the shop owner overdoes it when he says that he has been saving it for a special customer. Charlotte knows then that there must be a flaw and says as much. The dealer rises to the challenge: “But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?” Charlotte wonders how—or if—one can give a present that one knows to be flawed. The dealer suggests that the flaw be noted to the recipient, as a sign of good faith. In any case, the bowl is a piece of solid crystal and crystal, unlike glass, does not break; but it can shatter ‘on lines and by laws of its own’. Charlotte decides that she cannot afford the bowl; she joins Amerigo, who has been waiting for her in the street. He had seen the flaw at once. “Per Dio, I’m superstitious! A crack is a crack—and an omen’s an omen.”

  For the moment, that is the end of the bowl itself. But James has now made the golden bowl emblematic, to use a Dickens word, of the relations between the lovers and their legal mates. To all appearances, the world of the two couples is a flawless rare crystal, all of a piece, beautifully gilded with American money. Of the four, the Prince is the first to detect the flaw; and though he wanted no part of the actual bowl, he h
imself slips easily into that adulterine situation which is the flaw in their lives. Charlotte refused to buy the bowl because she could not, simply, pay the price; yet she accepts the adultery—and pays the ultimate price.

  In due course, Maggie acquires the bowl as a present for her father. Although she does not detect the flaw, the dealer believes himself mysteriously honor-bound to come to her house and tell her that the flaw is there. During his confession, he notices photographs of the Prince and Charlotte; tells Maggie that they were in his shop together. Thus, she learns that they knew each other before her marriage and, as she tells Fanny, “They went about together—they’re known to have done it. And I don’t mean only before—I mean after.”

  * * *

  As James’s other triumph of knowledge gained through innocence was called What Maisie Knew, so this story might easily have been called When Maggie Knew. As the bowl is the symbol of the flawed marriages, so the line: “knowledge, knowledge was a fascination as well as a fear,” stands as a sort of motto to this variation on one of our race’s earliest stories, Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit of knowledge which, once plucked, let the first human couple know both the joys of sex and the pain of its shadow, death. But if James was echoing in his last novel one of the first of all our stories, something is missing: the serpent-tempter. Is it Adam Verver? Or is he too passive to be so deliberate an agent? Actually, the shop owner is the agent of knowledge; but he is peripheral to the legend. Fanny Assingham has something slightly serpentine about her. Certainly, she is always in the know, but she is without malice. In fact, she prefers people not to know, and so she makes the splendid gesture of smashing the bowl and, presumably, the knowledge that the bowl has brought Maggie. But it is too late for that. Maggie moves into action. She sets out to rid herself of Charlotte because “I want a happiness without a hole in it….The golden bowl—as it was to have been.”

  In the first of a series of splendid confrontations, Maggie tells the Prince that she knows. He, in turn, asks if Adam knows. “Find out for yourself!” she answers. Maggie is now having, as James colloquially puts it, “the time of her life—she knew it by the perpetual throb of this sense of possession, which was almost too violent either to recognize or to hide.” Again, “possession.” When the suspicious Charlotte confronts her in the garden (of Eden?) at Fawns, Maggie lies superbly; and keeps her enemy in ignorance, a worse state—for her—than even the United States. Finally, Maggie’s great scene with her father is significant for what is not said. No word is spoken by either against Charlotte; nor is there any hint that all is not well with Amerigo and Maggie. But James’s images of Maggie and Adam together in the garden—again the garden at Fawns (from the Latin fons: spring or source?)—are those of a husband and wife at the end or the beginning of some momentous change in their estate. The images are deliberately and precisely marital: “They were husband and wife—oh, so immensely!—as regards other persons.” The reference here is to house party guests but the implication is that “other persons” include her husband and his wife. They speak of their social position and its ambiguities, of the changes that their marriages have made. She is a princess. He is the husband of a great lady of fashion. They speak of the beauty and selfishness of their old life.

  Maggie remarks of her husband that “I’m selfish, so to speak, for him.” Maggie’s aria on the nature of jealousy (dependent in direct ratio on the degree of love expended) is somewhat mystifying because she may “seem often not to know quite where I am.” But Adam appears to know exactly where he is: “I guess I’ve never been jealous.” Maggie affirms that that is because he is “beyond everything. Nothing can pull you down.” To which Adam responds, “Well, then, we make a pair. We’re all right.” Maggie reflects on the notion of sacrifice in love. The ambiguities are thick in the prose: Does she mean, at one point, the Prince or Charlotte or Adam himself? But when she says, “I sacrifice you,” all the lines of the drama cross and, as they do, so great is the tension that James switches the point of view in mid-scene from daughter to father as James must, for an instant, glimpse Adam’s response to this declaration: “He had said to himself, ‘She’ll break down and name Amerigo; she’ll say it’s to him she’s sacrificing me; and it’s by what that will give me—with so many other things too—that my suspicion will be clinched.’ ” Actually, this is supposed to be Maggie’s view of what her father senses, but James has simply abandoned her in mid-consciousness for the source of her power, the father-consort. How Adam now acts will determine her future. He does not let her down. In fact, he is “practically offering himself, pressing himself upon her, as a sacrifice…” The deed is done. He will take Charlotte back to American City. He will leave the field to Maggie.

  * * *

  Adam has been sacrificed. But has he? This is the question that reverberates. Maggie finds herself adoring him for his stillness and his power; and for the fact “that he was always, marvellously, young—which couldn’t but crown, at this juncture, his whole appeal to her imagination.” She gives him the ultimate accolade: “I believe in you more than anyone.” They are again as one, this superbly monstrous couple. “His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew her to his breast and held her. He held her hard and kept her long, and she let herself go; but it was an embrace that august and almost stern, produced, for its intimacy, no revulsion and broke into no inconsequence of tears.”

  Where Maggie leaves off and Adam begins is not answered. Certainly, incest—a true Jamesian “horror”—hovers about the two of them, though in a work as delicately balanced as this the sweaty deed itself seems irrelevant and unlikely. It is enough that two splendid monsters have triumphed yet again over everyone else and, best of all, over mere human nature. But then Maggie contains, literally, the old Adam. He is progenitor; and the first cause; fons.

  It is Adam who places Charlotte in her cage—a favorite Jamesian image; now James adds the image of a noose and silken cord by which Adam leads her wherever he chooses—in this case to the great republic of which Fanny observes to Maggie: “I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State—which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see them at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end—and I see them never come back.” It is as if a beautiful, wealthy, American young woman of today were doomed to spend her life entirely in London. But the victorious Maggie believes that Charlotte will probably find life back home “interesting” while she and her father are the real losers because they are now forever parted. But Fanny is on to her. Fanny gets Maggie to confess that what was done not only suits her (“I let him go”) but was indeed no more than the successful execution of Adam’s master plan: “Mrs. Assingham hesitated, but at last her bravery flared. ‘Why not call it then frankly his complete success?’ ” Maggie agrees that that is all that is left for her to do.

  At the end, Adam has brought together Maggie and Amerigo. James now throws all the switches in the last paragraph:

  [Amerigo] tried, too clearly, to please her—to meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: “ ‘See? I see nothing but you.” And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast.

  The golden cage has shut on them both. She is both jailer and prisoner. She is both august and stern. In the book’s last line the change of the word dread to awe would have made the story a tragedy. But James has aimed at something else—another and higher state for the novel (for life, too, that poor imitation of art with its inevitable human flaw): He has made gods of his characters; and turns them all to gold.

  Years earlier, when James first saw the gilded Galerie d’Apollon in the palace of the Louvre, he had “an immense hallucination,” a sense of cosmic consciousness; and over the years he often said
that he could, all in all, take quite a lot of gold. At the end of Henry James’s life, in a final delirium, he thought that he was the Emperor Napoleon; and as the Emperor, he gave detailed instructions for the redoing of the Tuileries and the Louvre: and died, head aswarm with golden and imperial visions. Fortunately, he had lived long enough to make for us The Golden Bowl, a work whose spirit is not imperial so much as it is ambitiously divine.

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  January 19, 1984

  CHAPTER 18

  LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH LOVES THE ADVERB

  Should the human race survive the twentieth of those wondrous centuries since shepherds quaked at the sight of God’s birth in a Middle Eastern stable (all in all, a bad career move), our century will be noted more for what we managed to lose along the way than for what we acquired. Although the physical sciences took off, literally, and some rightly stuffed American men with nothing much to say lurched about the moon, sublunary population was allowed to get out of control to such an extent that much of the earth’s good land was covered with cement in order to house the new arrivals while the waters of the globe are now so poisoned that on the just and the unjust alike pale acid rain everywhere softly falls. As we get more people, we lose “amenities” of every sort.

  The century that began with a golden age in all the arts (or at least the golden twilight of one) is ending not so much without art as without the idea of art, while the written culture that was the core of every educational system since the fifth century B.C. is now being replaced by sounds and images electronically transmitted. As human society abandoned the oral tradition for the written text, the written culture is giving way to an audiovisual one. This is a radical change, to say the least, and none of us knows quite how to respond. Obviously the change cannot be all bad. On the other hand, what is to become of that written language which was for two millennia wisdom’s only mold? What is to become of the priests of literature, as their temples are abandoned? What happens to the work of (now one strikes plangently the diminuendo!) Logan Pearsall Smith?