The wandering tribe in their assault on Rome, Nice, and Venice can speak a number of languages, but only the sick boy has an aspiration to culture. No matter. It would appear that the family’s feckless snobbery, their immunity to insult, the sad, rejecting emotions of their son, do not overwhelm the author’s back-looking affection for one condition—their impecuniousness. James came to prefer bohemian ne’er-do-wells to the loaded Americans he had seen on the continent in the subsequent years.
The Turn of the Screw, a “ghost story” of such dense complication it might be a strange craft washed up on a beach with a tattered black flag and crew missing. Critics have dived into the watery grave and surfaced to denounce each other, offer this piece of debris and that, and at last haul the mysterious vessel into a maritime museum. There the piratical thing can be viewed as you will. The story is land-locked for the most part, but skull and crossbones fly in the meadows.
James said the tale was a shameless bit of hackwork, “a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation.” That may be, but it is a brilliant composition, as humanly deep and convincing in psychological interplay as anything in his vast repertoire. The story is told in the first person by way of a manuscript left at her death by the unnamed governess, the star of her plot. In fact the manuscript was dictated by James to his dour typist, and the governess would not have been pleased. She is a young woman, inexperienced, daughter of a poor country parson. She answers an advertisement, journeys to a fine house on Harley Street in London for an interview. The employer is a handsome man, rich, busy, a lively bachelor about town. He is the uncle of two young children who have been left in his care when their parents, one his younger brother, died. The orphans are settled in a grand old house in the country, under the care, in the absence of the previous governess, of a good-natured, loyal housekeeper and “plenty of people to help.” Once the young woman is engaged as governess he makes a rather heartless demand, “his main condition,” which had led previous applicants to turn the post down. The condition: “That she should never trouble him—but never, never; neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone.” Gratefully unburdened of his charges, the attractive uncle “held her hand” and thereby entered the dreams of the poor daughter on her first escape from the prosaic vicarage.
At the estate, the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, is welcoming and the little girl, Flora, is astonishingly beautiful; the boy, Miles, is to return from school the following day. In the interval, the majestically raddled plot begins. The guardian has forwarded an unopened letter which says, without giving particulars, that the child has been expelled from school and is never to return. The kindly housekeeper, deeply fond of the boy, is offered the letter which she, illiterate, cannot read. But what has he done, the little thing not yet ten years old? The governess then offers a “mere aid” of her own. “That he’s an injury to others.” They discuss the nature of boys and agree that a certain amount of mischief is suitable and even agreeable, but then the governess oddly adds that one wouldn’t want a boy to contaminate and corrupt. Injury to others, contaminate and corrupt: dire intrusions from the brisk vocabulary of the new inhabitant settled in a large bedroom, the best in the house, in a landscape “a different affair from my own scant home.”
The inquisitive governess wants information about her predecessor and with her acute grasping of nuance senses that the housekeeper did not approve of the departed one. She learns that the lady, Miss Jessel, went off and did not return from her holiday and it was later told by the master that she had died. Died of what? Mrs. Grose does not know the answer and uncomfortable with the inquisition abruptly excuses herself. Young Miles returns and is beautiful and lovable “with something divine” in his being—for the governess.
The governess, an inspired narrator of past events and the conflicting emotions that enshroud them, has the glorifying position of being in charge and for this elevation she freely expresses vanity and determination. But being in charge calls for the underside of command, watchfulness and suspicion. “I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh in the right quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed.”
The “ghost” must appear and it will not be in the attic but on a late afternoon walk. It is a man, staring hard at the governess, a stranger and fearful, but she forbears the opportunity to mention the terrifying appearance until on a Sunday morning there he is again, at the window, staring. In the midst of this threatening visitation, the governess has one of her gifted, sudden intuitions: “. . . It was not for me he had come. He had come for someone else.” Mrs. Grose enters the room and the exquisitely ordered interrogatory matter proceeds:
“An extraordinary man. Looking in.”
“What extraordinary man?”
“I haven’t the least idea.”
“Have you seen him before?”
“Yes—once. On the old tower.”
“Was he a gentleman?”
“No.”
At this point, James confounds the reader by a reversal of the manner in which the governess has received information about the past: Mrs. Grose had given the hints for the flights of fancy of the new member of the household. However, as they go on about the face in the window it is the governess who describes him: red hair, queer red whiskers, handsome, wearing good clothes somehow not his own, looking like an actor. “Peter Quint!” the housekeeper cries out. He is now dead, having fallen while coming home “in drink” from a local pub.
Quint came to the estate as valet to the guardian on a previous visit and being in poor health was left to recover in the country air. Miss Jessel will arrive and the lonely house will be aflame with activity distressing to Mrs. Grose. Serious lovemaking between the two shatters the peace of the housekeeper, especially since Miss Jessel was a lady and Peter Quint a “base menial.” The two were impudent, reckless, and with the boy, Miles, Quint was “too free,” a troubling matter left hanging in the air. The new governess, unnamed as she is, has had her apparition given the name of Peter Quint and in a rush of perception decides he has come for the boy. As the tale unravels, Miss Jessel will float in the infernal mist. She is a frightful figure in suitable black, appearing while the governess and little Flora are outside in the pleasant grounds. The child takes no notice, a signal of her alliance, her corrupted state of collusion with the fascinating, malignant past.
At the beginning of the story, the governess insists that the children loved her, but her dissolute curiosity, her protective, oppressive intrusion will alienate them. Their harmless escapades to annoy her will only serve as interesting proof of their possession by evil spirits forever immune to the offered exorcism. “They’re lost” is the pronouncement.
Mrs. Grose says that Miss Jessel, although a lady, was infamous and Peter Quint a horror. Nevertheless, Peter Quint had his qualities; the guardian liked his company and for little Miles he could have been an interesting diversion; a rascal, free in his language, a handsome, careless young man of the people. In any case he was a man, flinging about the place, and in his concentration upon seducing the respectable Miss Jessel there is no reason to believe, as some critics do, that he sexually seduced Miles. But Peter Quint, with his red hair, easily seduced the imagination of the governess.
A devastating scene with Flora, Mrs. Grose, the governess, and the evil, “pale and ravenous demon,” Miss Jessel. Flora has slipped away and when she is at last spotted, the ghost of Miss Jessel arrives like a cloud. But Mrs. Grose does not see her, nor does Flora. To the girl, the governess insists, “She’s there, you little unhappy thing—there, there, there, and you know it as well as you know me!” Thus the resolution of the tale begins as Flora attacks the menace of the governess:
“I don’t know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you’r
e cruel. I don’t like you!” Then, after this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face. In this position she launched an almost furious wail, “Take me away, take me away—oh take me away from her!”
“From me?” I panted.
“From you—from you!” she cried.
Flora and the housekeeper depart for London, leaving the governess alone with Miles and with the opportunity to assault him about the misbehavior at school. Miles offers that he “said things.” To whom had he said things? To only a few, “those I liked.” And they must have repeated the remarks to those they liked. There is a penetrating knowledge here of the gloomy sludge of youthful experience. Those I liked betraying one to those they liked; I and they, an acute and pitiful perception of the trench warfare of schoolchildren.
In the prodigious fearfulness of the last few pages, the importunate mistress of inquisition will ask, “What were those things?” Miles averts his face and she falls upon him as if to force a humbling concreteness for her enlightenment. Then yet another visitation from the unquiet graves—“the white face of damnation”—and Miles, having perhaps been told about the previous emanations, in terror asks, “Is she here??. . . Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!” No, it’s not Miss Jessel, “But it’s at the window—straight before us. It’s there, the coward horror, there for the last time!” Peter Quint—you devil! Miles looks around the room again, Where?
The governess has her supreme moment. It’s all over because “I have you.” The child utters a cry of “a creature hurled over an abyss” and
I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
Miles, left alone with the triumphant, unearthly governess, dies in her ghostly arms.
James included the story in the prefaces for the New York Edition written some ten years later; an edition in which he excluded the perfect Washington Square, perhaps finding it too local for the fervent illumination of Americans abroad. The Bostonians was put aside, denying the imperious Olive Chancellor, Verena the forlorn elocutionist, the dashing Southerner Basil Ransom—not one agreeable to living Bostonians. About The Turn of the Screw, James may have been surprised by the enthusiastic reception here and there of his “bit of hackwork.” For aesthetic reasons he declined to offer details of the two wicked goblins and asked the reader to consult his own knowledge of evil. Reading today, one might ask just what the evil of the “ghosts” was, beyond the adjectives and shudders of Mrs. Grose.
The children when first introduced to the governess are surpassingly beautiful and serene, showing no mark of the beast, or beasts. Even Miles, expelled from school, is charming, pleasant, giving no sign of the humiliating scene he has endured. It is the governess who poisons their days and nights with the heavy oppression of her assumed protection, her cunning questions and rampaging suspicions. Flora flees her presence in horror and Miles, despite his previous failure, pleads to be sent away to another school. When he learns that the ferocious governess has banished the ghost and now all is well because Miles is hers, she has him; he dies of the fear of her. Throughout the governess is before us in action; her perverse miasma of family blight is more evil than the infamy of Miss Jessel and the freedom of Peter Quint.
What Maisie Knew is an elegant novel of wild imagination. Today it might be found among anecdotal, fitfully researched books that appear under the foreboding title Children and Divorce. That marketplace, if it knew of Maisie, would declare it a singular illustration of a couple’s legal breaking apart not useful as a statistical entry. On the other hand, it could not meet two more original parents who have in the mysterious ways of nature given birth to a child.
The story begins, as such will, in the courts. The father, by his wife “bespattered from head to foot,” has been appointed to keep the child, but to refund a sum of twenty-six hundred pounds the wife put down for the child’s maintenance. That money the father has squandered, but in the battle a compromise has been reached. Also the child, Maisie, has been broken in two and is to spend six months with each.
The parents, mother Ida and father Beale Farange, are pugilists, facing each other with growls and grunts, left and right hooks in the marriage ring. Their personal equipment is very striking. “They made up together . . . some twelve feet three of stature.” The mother, Ida, had “a length and reach of arm conducive perhaps to her so often having beaten her ex-husband at billiards, a game in which she showed a superiority largely accountable, as she maintained, for the resentment finding expression in his physical violence.”
The father, Beale Farange, “had natural decorations, a kind of costume in his vast fair beard, . . . and the eternal glitter of the teeth that his long mustache had been trained not to hide. . . .” He had been trained in his youth for diplomacy and momentarily attached, without a salary, to a legation which often enabled him to say, “In my time in the East.” Indeed the parents are comic figures—comedians who will trip you if you cross their path. Little Maisie first court-ordered to stay with her father finds him showing her letters from her mother, but instead of giving them to her, throwing them in the fire. She is dangled on the knees of his cigar-smoking friends, pinched and tossed about. At last her term with her mother arrives and when the bejeweled, crimson-painted face appears the first words are: “And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mamma?” Maisie answers as if she has been asked for the correct time of day. “ ‘He said I was to tell you, from him,’ she faithfully reported, ‘that you’re a nasty horrid pig!’ ”
In the care of children, James shows a marked preference for women of the lower classes, ill-educated, homely, familiar with the rebuffs from their “betters.” Thus Maisie will have Mrs. Wix, who has lost her own daughter on a crossing on Harrow Road, crushed by a hansom. Her governess, Miss Overmore, if not as malign as the spectral hireling in The Turn of the Screw, is an ambitious visitation of a more practical nature, an easy-enough alliance with the divorced father. While the mother, Ida, has foregone her months with Maisie in favor of a time abroad with a gentleman, Miss Overmore and Mr. Farange find the child’s extended presence quite heavy and go off together to Brighton to find a school to place her in.
The mother Farange could not abide the pretty Miss Overmore and employs Mrs. Wix for the child’s companion when she must suffer her court-ordained rights. Mrs. Wix arrives with a message to Maisie: “You must take your mamma’s message, Maisie, and you must feel that her wishing me to come to you with it this way is a great proof of interest and affection. She sends you her particular love and announces to you that she’s engaged to be married to Sir Claude.” A discussion of this matter with Miss Overmore about the idea that her mother’s marriage would establish a special hold on the child is countered by a sly retort about what that would mean if the father were to marry:
[Maisie:] “Do you mean papa’s hold on me—do you mean he’s about to marry?”
[Miss Overmore:] “Papa’s not about to marry—Papa is married, my dear. Papa was married the day before yesterday at Brighton. . . . He’s my husband, if you please, and I’m his little wife. So now we’ll see who’s your little mother!”
Maisie, blinking, absorbing her world of ravaged sophistication, is thought to be dumb and indeed in the torrent of wanton insinuations she assumes an air of “harmless vacancy.” She is told by one side of the embattled forces that her mother “loathes you” and by the presiding officer of the other side that “your father wishes you were dead.” Her mother is not only engaged to Sir Claude, they are married, and Maisie accepts that she now has four parents, even if in her now precocious experience “they struck her as after all rather deficient in that air of the honeymoon of which she had so often heard. . . .”
Sir Claude,
like a handsome knight on a white steed, gallops to the rescue of the pummeled offspring of his wife because, in his way, he genuinely likes children and in this instance could not like any child less than he likes his long-armed wife, her mother. He appears at the door of her new little mama, the former Miss Overmore, to take the child for her ordained spell of residence with her first mother. Sir Claude is younger than his wife and Miss Overmore is younger than the toothy Beale Farange; on the doorstep there is, naturally it must be named, a flirtation between the two.
Sir Claude, always spoken of as beautiful, is one of the author’s most appealing and credible male creations. He’s a blade, not a saint, and from the doorstep meeting with Maisie’s stepmother, plotting, with the lady’s voracious assistance, to see her again. With Maisie, he’s comradely, honest insofar as the circumstances permit, humorous. When Maisie asks him if he is afraid of his wife, his answer is “Rather, old man!” The two go about town, buy sweets as they please, share a complicated interlude on the coast of France, and talk about the conditions of their curious lives. The married couples it soon appears are not together. The mother, when not supposedly off for a billiards competition in Brussels, is seen in the park on the arm of a peculiar alliance. The stepmother has moved to her own place and divorced a not unwilling Mr. Farange; Maisie’s mother has divorced Sir Claude and that leaves the two free for an alliance that breaks Maisie’s heart. James shapes his young charges with touching affection and sympathy and yet their endings are doleful; the beautiful Flora in The Turn of the Screw flees disaster with the loyal, illiterate, uninspiring Mrs. Grose and Maisie ends in the arms of the pessimistic, needy Mrs. Wix. The grown-ups in this superb novel will do as they will or as they must. The licentious ronde is composed with vivacity and speed, free of the scrupulous painter’s usual second and third coats.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 67