We have another use for the fictional texts of Henry James: we use them as an exercise, a sort of parlour game, on evenings when our writing has tired us. We choose a set number of pages from the one text, say the pages of The Golden Bowl numbered from 100 to 150 inclusive in the Penguin edition of 1966. Then we compete during a given time, which is never less than an hour, to find in those pages the greatest number of passages in which the seeming third-person narrator reveals, by even as little as a word or a phrase, that he is, in fact, a first-person narrator, or, to use the terms of the passage quoted above, that behind the thoroughly interested witness or reporter stands always a sort of ghostly narrator such as is found often in James’s works but seldom elsewhere.
We could hardly be said to read the texts while we search. We perform a sort of scanning, alert always to key words of phrases more often, though not always, likely to appear at the beginnings of sentences. While I was making notes for this paragraph in this present work of fiction, I found, during an hour spent in scanning the fifty-one pages mentioned above, four examples of what I was looking for. On page 111 I found this passage: ‘We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with Mr Verver...’ I found this on page 130: ‘That, none the less, was but a flicker; what made the real difference, as I have hinted, was his mute passage with Maggie.’ I found this on the very next page: ‘So much mute communication was doubtless, all this time, marvellous, and we may confess to having read into the scene, prematurely, a critical character that took longer to develop.’ Finally, I found on page 135 the following passage, which might well be subject to dispute: ‘The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any judgement of their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak but for the way that, as a rule, they almost equally had others on their mind?’
We could hardly be called a demonstrative group but sometimes, late of an evening, when one of us has learned that he was the only one of all of us to have identified a certain brief passage of self-conscious narration, so to call it, in fifty or a hundred pages of the fiction of the Master, as some of us choose to call him, he, the lone identifier, will raise his glass of beer and will utter the sort of cry more likely to be heard when a football match or a horse-race is close to its end, mostly, we others suppose, in order to celebrate his prowess as a student of fictional narration but also, we like to hope, as a tribute to the richness of texts properly narrated.
Some of us play what might be called textual games not only in competition with one another but also alone and in private. One of us has sometimes mentioned an elaborate game that he first devised as a young man, hardly more than a boy, in order to decide the positions of various imaginary racehorses, so to call them, at successive points during imaginary races, so to call them, and, finally, at the winning post. The deviser of the game is mostly reticent about it. We know that he has played his game during most of his life, although we do not know how much of his time he devotes to it and how much more fiction he might have written if he had never been seduced by the game. We do not know, for example, when one of us sees him from the lawns below standing at his window and staring far past us for a few moments before returning to his desk – we do not know whether we have caught him straining to visualise one after another possible ending to some or another half-run horse-race in his mind or struggling to arrange the ending to some or another half-composed sentence of fiction in his mind. Nor do we know, when we hear from our corridor, as sometimes happens, the repeated thumping of his fist on his desk-top, whether he is celebrating his having composed, after much struggle, a sentence comprising numerous clauses or the arrival at the winning-post and ahead of its opponents of a horse that had been buried in the ruck at the home-turn. We know that the outcome of each race depends on the occurrence of certain letters or punctuation marks or even of certain common words in passages of prose chosen by the player of the game. We had assumed until recently that these passages were chosen at random, but we were lately told by the deviser of the game that he chooses his decisive passages in strict sequence from the opening page onwards of the nineteenth-century novel The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade. He had stolen an edition of this book, so he once told me, from a dusty upstairs library managed by a group of grey-haired women. Or, the book had been the last that he had borrowed from the meagre stock in the library and he had been too busy or too lazy to return it, so he told me on another occasion. His having kept the book may, in fact, be connected with a certain image of a dark-haired young woman, hardly more than a girl, in a duotone illustration among the preliminary pages of the book, which image, so he once told one of us in an unguarded moment, was the image of the daughter of a certain trainer of racehorses in a district of mostly level grassy countryside in the imaginary world, so to call it, where his imaginary races are decided.
This is almost all that we know about our colleague and his game-playing, which is probably no more odd than any other of the textual diversions that occupy some of us in private. What I find curious is that the man in question has read only a small part of the text of The Cloister and the Hearth and will die long before he has read to the end of it, so he has told several of us. He began to devise the elaborate rules and stratagems for his game during the first days after he had brought home from the library the book that he was never to return, and he had decided to read the text only during the hours while the game was going forward. A single race might take a whole afternoon or a whole evening to be decided and to have its results recorded in detail in the ledgers where he stores such things. But a race needs for its running only a few paragraphs of prose. Even if he were to give up writing and reading fiction and to keep mostly to his room, he would never learn the fictional fate, so to call it, of the dark-haired fictional young woman denoted by an image in the duotone illustration mentioned, and even the dark-haired daughter of the trainer of racehorses would grow older by no more than a few years during the remainder of his life.
The other of the two known game-players among us talks openly and often about his game. He devised the first, primitive version of the game when he was a young man, hardly more than a boy, much given to daydreaming about sexual adventures, so to call them, and to masturbating while images of such adventures passed through his mind. He was continually dissatisfied with the contents of his image-adventures, so to call them. The image-females were always too compliant and too obliging. He might have said about them what an undiscerning critic or reviewer might write about certain characters in some of another book under review: he might have said that the females were not convincing. As a first effort towards making the females more so, he introduced the element of chance into his sexual fantasies, so to call them. He arranged to have two possible outcomes for each attempt on his part (I mean, of course, on the part of his imagined counterpart in the fantasy) to advance his cause, so to call it. If he attempted, for example, to kiss a certain female, the two possible outcomes were that she would permit him to do so and that she would not so permit him. Which of the possible outcomes became the actual, so to call it, was determined by the number of letters, whether odd or even, in a word or a phrase that he chose for the purpose. The word or phrase had to be chosen in haste, lest he be able to estimate in advance whether it contained an odd number of letters, and would therefore result in an unfavourable outcome, or an even number leading to a favourable outcome. As a means of preventing himself from calling on a word or phrase that he knew to have an even number of letters, he took to choosing in haste a word or phrase connected with the scene in mind. If, for example, he and a female personage were imagined as being together on a deserted beach, he might decide without hesitation on the phrase brief bathing-costume or the phrase bare sunburned shoulders and then set about learning what he genuinely did not know, which was whether the phrase comprised an odd or an even number of letters. (If he had visualised the second of the two phrases quoted as having a comma between the two adjectives, the comma who would have been counted as a letter.)
This practice satisfied him only until he found himself developing the skill of being able to estimate the number of letters in phrases of several words even while he was composing them.
It was a fateful day, so the game-player sometimes says – it was a fateful day, although he has no recollection of it, when he first decided that the only set of words suitable for deciding the outcomes of his image-events was the sentence, and not the simple sentence with a subject and a predicate but the complex sentence with at least two subordinate clauses. He could not possibly estimate in advance the number of letters in such a sentence, so he supposed, and he was right. Like the words and phrases that he had previously used, the complex sentences had as their subject-matter the persons, places, and events of the fantasy itself – I mean, of course, the images of such things. So, he might compose, in order to decide the outcome needed in the earlier example, a sentence such as He approved of the style of her brief bathing-costume, which was pale green and contrasted oddly with her bare, sunburned shoulders.
At some point during the developments reported in the previous paragraph, the game-player made a decision that seems to him now to have been inevitable but was slow to occur to him. He decided that the number of possible outcomes for every event should be not two but five. His having only two possible outcomes resulted often in his female characters, so to call them, displaying a not-to-be-believed fickleness. Sometimes he was stimulated by the unpredictability of one or another female, but mostly he was not only baffled and annoyed by her seeming changes of moods but hard pressed to devise new ways for his imagined self to approach her without turning his fantasy into farce. And so, on another fateful but unremembered day, he decided that each possible event should admit of five possible outcomes: one extremely favourable; one moderately so; one neutral; one moderately unfavourable; and one extremely so. His offering, on the beach, to kiss a female personage would have five possible outcomes ranging from her falling into his arms to her slapping his face. Of course, he now had to count by fives in his sentences, which made any sort of cheating quite impossible.
His imagined adventures had become by now much more satisfying but also much more drawn out, sometimes so much so that he was apt to forget, on some or another day in the real world, so to call it, what he had decided, on the previous day, were the latest happenings, so to call them, in the other. And so, on an even more fateful day than the earlier two, as he says, he began to record in writing what he likes to call his image-imaginings. From this he needed to take one small step towards the final, perfect modification of his game. He made it a rule that each sentence of his text would not only record the latest seeming-event in the game but would, at the same time, determine details of the event following. While he was composing some or another complex sentence to report the chief character’s offering to kiss some or another female character, he was, at the same time, deciding what would be the result of his so offering and the series of events that would afterwards follow. The game, it might be said, determined its own course; the text, it might be said, wrote itself.
We others have mixed reactions to all of this. Some of us consider horse-racing games or games indulging sexual fantasies or any other such enterprises as wasters of the time and the mental energy that ought to be devoted to the writing of fiction. Others see the games as harmless recreation or even as a sort of training for the task of fiction-writing. One of us even considers these and all other such games as being themselves an esoteric sort of fiction. A few of us have been allowed to look into some of the series of labelled folders containing reports of the second sort of game and have reported as follows.
The account of each game consists of no fewer than a hundred handwritten pages and often of many more. Many a game has for its chief characters what seems to be a fictional version of the author of the game as a young man, hardly more than a boy, and one or more dark-haired young women, hardly more than girls, who are his cousins. Many a game ends with the humiliation of the chief male character by one or more cousin or with his being punished by one or more of their mothers, the dark-haired sisters of his own mother. The actual sentences reporting the games are faultless in shape but often contain words and phrases used often by the writers of what is commonly called romantic fiction. (Somewhere in this building is a colony of writers of this sort of fiction, although none of us has sought to learn where.) The author of the reports declines to answer questions about this last matter, and we are, as usual, divided in our opinions, some of us believing the passages in question to be mere parody and asserting that a place might well be found in some or another work of serious fiction for a summary, at least, of the sort of imagined events so to call them, that end sometimes with a scene, so to call it, in which a stern-faced woman throws a jug of ice-water into the groin of a young man, hardly more than a boy, who has exposed himself to a dark-haired young woman, hardly more than a girl, his cousin and the woman’s daughter.
While I was standing at my window early this morning and trying not to put off for too much longer the moment when I would sit yet again at my desk and would wait yet again for my first glimpse of the possible subject-matter of the first sentence that I would struggle to write, I saw far off in the mostly level landscape surrounding this house in every direction a flash of sunlight on what was surely the windscreen of a car or a truck passing along one or another of the back roads of this district. A farmer, perhaps, was driving himself and his dogs to an outlying paddock.
On many another morning, I would have wanted, even if briefly, to have been the driver behind that flashing windscreen. I would have wanted to have business other than the writing of fiction; to live among persons who read fiction hardly ever or not at all; to consider as my life’s work the management of a farm in the sort of mostly level grassy landscape that I see nowadays only in the distance when I look up from my desk and away from the sort of task that might well seem pointless to most of the inhabitants of that landscape. I would not have spurned fiction, I who sat behind a flashing windscreen this morning, far away from a house of two or, perhaps three storeys. Sometimes during an evening, when my other tasks had been finished, I would look into some or another book of fiction borrowed by my wife from the library in the town at the centre of our district. I might not set out to read the whole book; I might well let the book fall open and then begin reading the pages in front of me. However little I read, I would come to admire the achievement, as I saw it, of the author of the book in front of me, who was able to see in mind always the clear and solid details that made up the contents of his or her fiction. In short, I would suppose, wrongly, of course, that an author of fiction has always available an ample supply of – what shall I call them? – characters, plots, and dialogue in a storage-place called the imagination.
When I stood at the window this morning, I was trying to keep in mind the details of a dream that had occurred to me a few hours earlier, while I was asleep on my folding bed in a corner of this room. I had dreamed that I was conversing at length with a dark-haired and utterly unattractive woman in late middle-age. (I myself am past middle-age, but in the dream I felt myself to be a young man, hardly more than a boy.) At some point during my conversation with the dark-haired woman, my mother, herself dark-haired and past middle-age, appeared, as personages appear in dreams, and asked me the name of the dark-haired woman. The woman had not told me her name but I knew, as one knows things in dreams, that her name was Wilma, which happens to be a name that I dislike. My mother then asked me what was going on, as she put it, between myself and Wilma. It never occurred to my dreaming self to ask my mother by what right she had asked such a question of me. I simply denied to my mother that anything was going on, which was as true as any detail of a dream might be said to be true.
There was much more to the dream, so much more that I spent most of the morning trying to find connections between the subject-matter of the dream and what might be called the underlying meaning of this work of fiction. Then, at lunchtime, I tol
d the others a little about my dream and I tried to introduce into the slight-seeming discussion taking place in the common-room in this corridor these two questions: what differences, if any, may be said to exist between personages such as her whom I named Wilma and those personages who appear to us often while we write? And, if any such differences may be said to exist, must we conclude that the two sorts of personages have their origins in two separate places?
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