The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  The Awkward Age is written for the most part in dialogue or conversation. The oddity of this glittering novel is that conversation, the plot, is seen as a sort of airborne disease, disabling the heroine, making her unfit for marriage in the manner of a deflowering. Nanda Brookenham is eighteen, the year of her coming-out, as we would have it; here in London it is spoken of as a coming-down to mingle freely in her parents’ drawing room, to hear the badinage of her mother’s set.

  At the time of composition, only three or four months it took, James was still smarting from the disaster of his drama Guy Domville, and perhaps wished to illustrate his command of action through dialogue. Indeed he had always mutely spoken his prose, which accounts for the large number of italicized words, even words such as the and that to give the vocal stress. As the preface to The Awkward Age indicates, he is contemptuous of the theater of his time, the “strait-jacket” which renounces the finer thing for “the coarser, the thick, in short for the thin and the curious for the self-evident.”

  Bewailing the lack of intellectual distinction, here are his thoughts on Ibsen:

  What virtues of the same order would have attached to The Pillars of Society, to An Enemy of the People, to Ghosts, to Rosmersholm (or taking also Ibsen’s “subtle period”) to John Gabriel Borkman,to The Master Builder? Ibsen is in fact wonderfully a case in point, since from the moment he’s clear, from the moment he’s “amusing,” it’s on the footing of a thesis as simple and superficial as that of A Doll’s House—while from the moment he’s by intention comprehensive and searching it’s on the footing of an effect as confused and obscure as The Wild Duck.

  It must be said that James in reviews written later was more “measured” about Ibsen, but the outburst in the preface to The Awkward Age is of interest because it indicates the suffering he endured throughout his life about the public’s rejection of his manner, his style, his evasiveness so intensely and vigorously elaborated. The prefaces also give a poignant clue that James was aware of the fragility of some of his “seeds” as they try to hold ground in the downpour of fiction.

  At the turn of the century, it was felt by many that England was afflicted by a drastic change in social life. The class system was so greatly weakened one couldn’t tell a lord from a manufacturer of leather goods; the latter, if very rich, might soon be a lord. Civilities, deportment, standards were uncertain and a man of the world needn’t know which fork to use. Mothers with a daughter in the marriage market became as beady-eyed and calculating as a speculator in the stock exchange. James seemed to feel the decadence of the atmosphere to be lamentable and such is the challenge of his novel The Awkward Age.

  It is a drawing-room novel, a meeting of the up-to-date and the out-of-date. Mrs. Brookenham, forty-one, has a daughter, Nanda, eighteen, and a very special friend, Mr. Vanderbank, or Van, thirty-four. They are in the England of 1899, the year of publication, to be judged by a man, Mr. Longdon, fifty-five years old. He is unmarried, lives in the country on his comfortable income, is making his first visit to London in thirty years. At the opening of the novel, Mr. Longdon emerges from one of the teatime gatherings at the Buckingham Crescent establishment of Mrs. Brook, as she is called. The older gentleman had been in love with Lady Julia, Mrs. Brook’s mother, and he has come to town to see what has happened to the daughter of the lady, long dead, who rejected his suit, a rejection he has never recovered from since he is, and rather proudly, the sort who does not recover from the days of dazzling hope. What Mr. Longdon learns of the daughter, Mrs. Brook, does not please him; in fact, “I think I was rather frightened.”

  In the rain, he shares a “four-wheeler” with Van and they end up at Van’s place and talk until midnight, setting the tone, as it were. Van is charming, light-hearted, well born, not rich, indeed the only member of the set who has a job. Mr. Longdon sees a portrait of Nanda which she has given to Van and, while he questions the propriety of such an exchange, he is struck by the fact that Nanda is the very image of the lost Lady Julia and it will be his mission to save her.

  In Mrs. Brook’s set there is a duchess, widow of a Neapolitan grandee whose niece, little Aggie, she is keeping in a kind of purdah to assure a proper marriage, but says she would offer her to “the son of a chimney-sweep if the proper guarantees were there.” There is Mr. Mitchett, the son of a bootmaker but very rich and very badly dressed in garments that have nothing in common save “the violence and independence of their pattern.” Mitchett, genial and unassuming, will marry the violently protected little Aggie who, once released, is soon on the town. There is Lord Petherton, of a “certain pleasant brutality,” who lives off Mitchett. And Mr. Cashmore, “who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald”; and whose straying wife, Fanny, is much discussed. Mrs. Brook’s husband, Edward, according to the crunching images of the duchess, figures in the drawing room “only as one of those queer extinguishers of fire in the corridors of hotels. He’s a bucket on a peg.”

  Van is the prize of the circle; he is handsome, agreeable, available but not dependent. He might be elsewhere if he chose, but here he is, amused, aware of the great charm and wit of Mrs. Brook and of her splendid effort to keep her boat afloat. Mr. Longdon is much taken with him; indeed he had known Van’s mother, who was a special comfort to him in the loss of Lady Julia before going off herself to marry another. Mrs. Brook is in love with Van and a competition, hidden and astute, comes about when she learns that Nanda is also in love with him. “He’ll never come to the scratch,” the mother says.

  Nanda, once down, is a serious, intelligent girl, strong in the defense of certain friends who are not quite respectable for an unmarried girl—that vulnerable condition. She is polite about the curiosity the men in the set are free to have about her; and penetrating about her pretty mother’s gallantry in hanging on with very little money and a worthless son who borrows from everyone with the deftness of Fagin’s crew lifting pocket handkerchiefs.

  The conversation to which Nanda has been exposed is entirely personal, more than a little cynical; it is gossip of an eloquent and relentless sophistication, rich in discoveries about the wives of the husbands and the husbands of the wives in the group. The many matters the gossip ignores are as interesting as what it squeezes from the lemons at hand. London itself does not often appear with its place names and diversions; the city is atmosphere. There is no mention of politics, nothing of the religious and intellectual turmoil of the period. At the time of writing, Queen Victoria is having her second Jubilee and will live a few more years; Gladstone has recently died and the superb object of gossip, Disraeli, although dead for some years, was a dramatic figure in the youth of Mrs. Brook and her set. Here, the conversation is about whether Lady Fanny will bolt and like Anna Karenina go off with her lover to some little Italian town. It must be said that the talk, if somewhat wrapped in too many shawls of intimacy, is brilliant.

  Mrs. Brook and Van are the spectacular accomplishment of the novel; their provocative interchanges are candid on the surface and yet swirling about in undercurrents of emotion, motive, self-awareness, and self-protection. Since Nanda, approaching nineteen, must be married sooner rather than later, Mr. Longdon advances the plot and the conversation by an offer to Van: if he consents to marry the young girl she will have a considerable settlement, money, made over to her. His reason: “I want her got out. . . . Out of her mother’s house.” Van, taken aback, says he cannot commit himself without time to consider it. Mr. Longdon proposes, as an inducement, to name the sum, a sum Van refuses to hear. Nanda is not to know, but Van delivers the news to Mrs. Brook and to Mr. Mitchett, honorably telling Mr. Longdon later that he has done so:

  [Van:] “We had things out very much and his kindness was extraordinary—he’s the most beautiful old boy that ever lived . . . but I feel I can’t arrive at any respectable sort of attitude in the matter without taking you into my confidence . . . though till this moment I’ve funked it.”

  [Mrs. Brook:] “Do you mean you’ve decline
d the arrangement?”. . . Her lovely gaze widened out. . . .“You have declined her? . . . Do you imagine I want you to myself?”

  [Van:] “. . . When he mentioned it to me I was quite surprised. . . .

  He’s ready to settle if I’m ready to do the rest.”

  [Mrs. Brook:] “Of course you know. . . that she’d jump at you. . . . What is it he settled?”

  [Van:] “I can’t tell you. . . . On the contrary I stopped him off.”

  [Mrs. Brook:] “Oh then . . . that’s what I call declining. . . . You won’t do it. . . . You won’t do it.”

  Mr. Mitchett enters and they discuss, chat, about the matter and whether Nanda might get more money if Van refuses. Of one thing, Mrs. Brook is still certain: “He won’t go in.” The banter back and forth seems to distress Vanderbank, as if perhaps it is an indictment of “the liberal fireside” to which Nanda has long been exposed, thereby creating some oblique disadvantage to herself, her life. On the other hand, he has no wish to marry her or her mother. Nanda, ultimately aware that Van is just a friend and nothing more, will tell Mr. Longdon that he did his best: “Oh, he’s more old-fashioned than you.” And that in the eerie resolution would seem to be the exact truth of the tale.

  Little Flora was to have the middle-aged Mrs. Grose and little Maisie to have as her companion the bereaved Mrs. Wix. For Nanda, kind, intelligent about the way things are and forgiving of them, it is to be Mr. Longdon. He has his country place, lovely gardens, and indeed quiet. With some jealousy of the withholding Van, he puts it to the young girl: “You understand clearly, I take it, that this time it’s never again to leave me—or to be left.” So it is yes, tomorrow. For Nanda, never to leave.

  In 1915, in the midst of World War I, James gave up his American passport and became a British citizen. It was a year before his death and having spent most of his adult life in Britain, he did not want to be booked as an alien while he was reporting for work with refugees and the wounded; and no doubt it seemed the proper thing to do. However, in his fictions the new citizen was not pleased by the rapid changes in British life starting at the end of the nineteenth century. He struggled to find a useful spot of environmental contamination from which to dramatize the inchoate mudslides. Thirty years earlier, Anthony Trollope, in his large novel, The Way We Live Now (1869), proposed as the landscape of decline and social corruption the history of a great capitalist speculator, Melmotte, and his illusory shares that sent an idle Lord this and Lord that into bankruptcy.

  For James, in The Awkward Age (1899), the tea-table of Mrs. Brook is the instrument of a vanished propriety and the dilution of suitable ways to raise a young daughter. But just what is the substance of the inflammable conversation in Mrs. Brook’s house? For the most part it is clever talk about money, the marriage market, and certain indiscreet follies. In the preface, James analyzes favorably the practical French manner of keeping the “hovering female young” out of the drawing room altogether until they are married. In America, he writes, the young female may be present, but the talk on such occasions is properly trimmed to the innocuous; perhaps a retreat to the weather or the day’s passage at school until, mercifully for the adults, the young one curtsies and departs.

  Mr. Longdon, with his scrupulous fidelity to the social censorship of the past, is offered as a moral hero; but the true prince is Van, who refuses Mr. Longdon’s bribe in exchange for the rescue by marriage of the threatened Nanda. In support of his theme of untethered conversation, James shows a reluctance or an incapacity to compose scurrilous dialogue; such is the charm of the conversation he actually produces, even though it may not serve as sufficient motivation for Mr. Longdon’s “I want her out of the house.”

  In these stories, James creates a span of mistreatment that is death, a drastic removal, for the young boys, Morgan Moreen in “The Pupil” and Miles in The Turn of the Screw. Morgan’s parents demonstrated neglect by moral or immoral frivolity; the indifference of the guardian in the “ghost” story, his giving the children over to the care of a young woman he spoke with for scarcely more than five minutes is a casual risking of their lives. The young girls, Maisie and Nanda, are stronger, able to survive the instability of their parents and the loss of the “beautiful” young men with whom they have innocently fallen in love. Survival is to be a sort of dimness as they pass into the charge of the caring ones, a twilight escape. The fictions show an acute disillusionment with family life, perhaps a bachelor’s cool eye on the common sentiments.

  On the other hand, such fondness for children has a dreamlike quality to it, an enchanted protectiveness. Although we cannot quite imagine James comfortably in the presence of a baby, his affection has in it some of the sweetness of the charming Sir Claude who, when asked why he had taken up with Maisie, says: “I’m not an angel—I’m an old grandmother. . . . I like babies—I always did. If we go to smash I shall look for a place as responsible nurse.”

  2001

  FUNNY AS A CRUTCH

  Nathanael West

  1.

  NATHANAEL West (1903–1940) published four novels, wrote many screenplays, and left strewn about among his papers “Unpublished Writings and Fragments.” West had the masochist’s subtle attachment to his failures, a recognition which is, in its fashion, somehow self-affirming. He reports that the income from his first three novels was $780: if one keeps accounts, woefully true, but, in a stretch, like Byron hobbling about on his lame foot and swimming the Hellespont. In a letter to Edmund Wilson:

  I forget the broad sweep, the big canvas, the shot-gun adjectives, the important people, the significant ideas, the lessons to be taught, the epic Thomas Wolfe, the realistic James Farrell. . . . The proof of all this is that I’ve never had the same publisher twice—once bitten, etc.—because there is nothing to root for in my books and what is even worse, no rooters. Maybe they’re right. My stuff goes from the presses to the drug stores.

  Biographical and critical studies appear, important reviews, if not in a flood, an impressive stream of recognition. And yet, it is the practice of critics to lament the neglect of Nathanael West, despite the daunting accumulation. West, sly hypochondriac that he was, puts the critics in the position of a crusading doctor reviving the moribund. It may be that West is not so much neglected as unread while more or less well known, a condition obscure and not subject to arithmetic. High reputation and, as the decades pass, the name honored, but the interest, the readers, the glare fading except for graduate students ever in the stacks seeking a “fresh” topic.

  Remember Edward Dahlberg, author of Bottom Dogs, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence, many other books and in particular Because I Was Flesh, a dazzling autobiography, starring, so to speak, his mother, a lady barber with her chair, her clippers and talc. Perhaps it was Dahlberg’s misfortune to have Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway as contemporaries.

  And there is the case of Willa Cather of Nebraska and Ellen Glasgow of Richmond, Virginia. Willa Cather is still a bright, commanding figure; Ellen Glasgow, honored and read in her time, is but dimly flickering now. True, breaking the sod and hustling cattle out west is more riveting than the manners of Richmond with echoes of Henry James, an old pioneer only in matters of nuance. Nathanael West’s “neglect” is not so striking. He is like the boy in the orphanage who, when the lads pass by, will be adopted by the town mayor but, after a time, not quite what was wanted and so returned to the line with his curls and snappy come-backs, there to be “placed” once again.

  A letter to Fitzgerald:

  My dear Mr. Fitzgerald, You have been kind enough to say that you liked my novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. I am applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship and I need references for it. I wonder if you would be willing to let me use your name as a reference? It would be enormously valuable to me. . . . I know very few people, almost none whose names would mean anything to the committee. . . . If you can see your way to do this, it would make me very happy.

  Fitzgerald responded, naming West as a “potential leader in the f
ield of prose fiction.” Other supporting letters were written by Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson. The application was rejected. West’s biographer, Robert Emmet Long, tells of him at a boys’ camp in the Adirondacks: “He tried out for baseball, but was the sort of boy who, in fielding a fly, would be struck by the ball on the forehead and fall to the ground, which did, in fact, once happen to him.” There you have it.

  •

  His first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, is not designed to please, beginning perhaps with the choice of the peculiar name “Snell” for the central character. Snell somehow finds himself in the ancient city of Troy, where he comes upon the famous wooden horse of the Greeks. The only way to enter the horse for his journey is by way of the alimentary canal. “O Anus Mirabilis!” A work of only some fifty pages, it is a dazzling parade of literary and cultural references written when the author was only twenty-six years old, years spent apparently reading everything in the public library. Balso’s guide in the classical journey through the intestine argues with him about Daudet, Picasso, and Cézanne, “the sage of Aix.” Fleeing the contentious guide, Balso comes upon a man, naked except for a derby with thorns sticking out, who is “attempting to crucify himself with thumb tacks.”

  The man is Maloney the Areopagite, who is writing a biography of Saint Puce, a flea who was “born, lived, and died, beneath the arm of our Lord.” Then he meets a young man named John Gilson who calls himself John Raskolnikov Gilson, has a Crime Journal in which he tells of murdering an idiot, a dishwasher at the Hotel Astor, the incident a sort of camp, homely version of Crime and Punishment, since this Raskolnikov is Class 8B, Public School 186. The book ends with the thoughts of a young man imagining the suicide of his girlfriend, Janey, who is pregnant. Her young man says, “Suicide is a charming affectation on the part of a young Russian, but in you, dear Janey, it is absurd.” Janey’s mother, seeing her daughter threatening to jump from a window, says: “Go away from that window—fool! You’ll catch your death-cold or fall out—clumsy!”