Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  The evidence, then, is that James would have welcomed film, with its quicksilver dissolves, its ghostly special effects (he was in love with the ghost story), its lavish costumes and intensified color, its precision of landscape and weather and sky, and particularly its capacity for living portraiture through the technique of the closeup, rivaling in facial revelation anything he might have seen in the great galleries of Europe. He was, besides, sympathetically open to technical advance. When writer’s cramp forced him to abandon his pen, he turned at once to the newfangled typewriter (the “typewriter” being, for James, the typist). Though still mainly in the period of the horse-drawn, he now and then enjoyed tooling up and down the countryside in Edith Wharton’s chauffeur-driven motorcar. The progress of sophisticated film technology, had he lived to see it, would not have daunted or inhibited him.

  Yet there was a Hollywood side, in the negative sense, to James’s script-writing experience. Theater managers—who at that time were both producers and directors—got in the way of his purist ideas of dramatic art. Like many television and movie potentates nowadays, they were apt to fix solely and wholly on mass taste and mass profits, hoping to woo the trendiest and most sentimental audiences. After several unsatisfactory theatrical ventures, and especially after the humiliating failure of his 1905 play, Guy Domville, when he was subjected to jeers and howls from the pit, James gave up trying to please a larger public. In shame and fury he railed against showbiz, its “vulgarities and disgusts, all the dishonor and chronic insult,” and said he intended “to chuck the whole intolerable experiment and return to more elevated and independent courses. I have come,” he burst out, “to hate the whole theatrical subject.”

  And in The Tragic Muse, his 1888 theater novel, he has a character cry: “What crudity compared to what the novelist does!”

  There is a temptation to say the same about any film adaptation of a complex and nuanced work of fiction. A novel is, first of all, made out of language; it is language that determines whether a novel’s storytelling trajectory will land it in the kingdom of art or in the rundown neighborhood of the hackneyed. The Portrait of a Lady, James’s earliest full-scale masterpiece, is at its core an effective melodrama, chillingly equipped with an unsuspecting victim and sinister schemes and disclosures. What lifts it beyond melodrama is exactly what movies have no use for: acute, minute examination of motives; the most gossamer vibrations of the interior life; densely conceived villains and comic figures who cast unexpected shadows of self-understanding; a rich population of minor characters, each of whom has a history. And more: something atmospheric, something akin to what we might call a philosophy of the soul—a thing different from up-to-date sensibility.

  A movie, by contrast, despite its all-encompassing arsenal of skills, probing angles, mood-inducing music, and miraculous technologies, is still a picture show. It shows us pictures above all, and Jane Campion’s backgrounds and views in her film version of The Portrait of a Lady are immaculately beautiful—reminiscent of nineteenth-century canvases, and of the era of Beaux Arts. And if they breathe out a kind of museum insularity, that is what confirms their power: we know we are in another time, another and older England and Europe. Fabled sites become fresh pageants. An English country house, Rome and Florence, ancient churches and crypts and palaces and plazas, the Colosseum itself, all pass before us with the picturesque glow of authentic old lantern slides. But they are not sentimental; they convince.

  At least three in Campion’s cast* are unerringly persuasive in the same way. John Malkovich plays the callous, languorous dilettante, Gilbert Osmond, precisely as James imagined him: an aesthete devoted to objets d’art, for whom human beings too are objects to be turned in the hand at will. Martin Donovan, as Ralph Touchett, the heroine’s consumptive cousin, sees omnisciently with eyes marvelously lit by both irony and longing. As Madame Merle, Barbara Hershey fully incarnates James’s idea of the schemer, as vulnerable as she is dangerous, who lures Isabel Archer into a pitiless marriage with Osmond, Madame Merle’s former lover and the father of her unacknowledged child.

  But Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, Madame Merle’s dupe, is far more Campion’s creation than James’s—even though, given the confinements of her medium, Campion keeps reasonably close to James’s plot. Fatherless and motherless, a spirited young beauty, Isabel is plucked out of provincial Albany, New York, by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett (Shelley Winters, banally miscast), and brought into the wider opportunities of aristocratic England.

  There she enters the life of the grand country estates, and declines the offer of a brilliantly advantageous marriage to Lord Warburton, a member of Parliament (Richard E. Grant). Alone and dependent, she has seemingly given up her chance of access to a glittering society, and old Mr. Touchett, her wealthy banker uncle (John Gielgud), is bemused by such perversity. She has earlier refused a persistent American suitor, Caspar Goodwood (Viggo Mortensen)—she is ambitious beyond the velvet enclosures of marriage.

  Just here is the conceptual spine of James’s novel, its electrifying and chancy theory. Isabel Archer dreams of living hugely, of using her vivid capacities to take in the great and various world of boundless experience. Ralph Touchett, her admiring invalid cousin, sympathizes, understands, and makes it all possible. He persuades his dying father to leave Isabel a magnificent fortune. The Albany orphan is now an heiress, freed to infinite choice.

  This is the point Campion unluckily loses sight of. She misses it both in detail and in scope. Isabel’s first and buoyant choice is to voyage around the world, the bold outward sign of her valued new freedom—a freedom that Campion burlesques in a series of scenes (Isabel riding a camel, visiting the Pyramids) rendered playfully but reductively in silent-film style. Yet James recounts Isabel’s worldly education as a serious enrichment: “She had ranged … through space and surveyed much of mankind, and was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measure of Europe.”

  And while Nicole Kidman is lovely, slender, and effectively winning, Campion has omitted the buoyancy and the ambition. Kidman’s Isabel takes the measure mainly of herself, in erotic and autoerotic fantasies: Isabel caressing her own lips and cheek, Isabel prone in a vortex of three suitors who surround her like a whirligig, Isabel walking moodily through a landscape with a hand at her breast.

  The film’s opening moments startle with the faces and voices of a group of contemporary young women who comment on the act of kissing—and though such a prologue may seem extraneous to what follows, it is plainly offered as a key to the director’s sensibility. Self-oriented eroticism (or call it, more generally, a circumscribed interest in one’s body), a current theme of a certain order of feminism, here replaces James’s searching idea of a large and susceptible imagination roiling with world-hunger. James describes Isabel, fresh from America, as “at all times a keenly-glancing, quickly-moving, completely animated young woman” who emits a “radiance, even a slight exaltation.” No flicker of this expressive vitality can be glimpsed in Kidman’s passive, morose, tearfully suffering Isabel.

  This is partly because a film based on a novel is, perforce, essentially an excerpt, and Campion mostly gives us the climax and sorrowful denouement of Isabel’s story, and little of its eagerly yearning premise. Of motives there is nothing. Isabel, who had earlier eschewed marriage as too narrow for her possibilities, marries after all, and discovers herself to be Gilbert Osmond’s unsatisfactory, even inferior, bibelot. The palatial interiors darken, husband and wife turn bitter. The two old lovers, Madame Merle and Osmond, working together, have seized on Isabel only for her money, to assure their daughter’s future. And the daughter, Pansy, a pitifully obedient child warehoused in a convent, is still another victim of this pair of polished plotters. (But Valentina Cervi, a robust young Italian actor, is irritatingly unsuited for the timorously fragile Pansy.)

  Here, in these final concentrated scenes—trust tainted by malignancy—Campion is w
holly faithful to the outer progress of James’s narrative. Beyond this, her art supplies what no novel can: the direct sensation of voluptuous gazing—so many doors opening into spaciousness, objects, liveried servants, a boiling, dizzying ballroom.

  Yet the aim of Campion’s film is surely not a literal faithfulness to the crowded, chesslike movements of the original. A film strives to be, so to speak, a condensed second original, which means that it will fail if it strays from or perverts the discriminations of its source. Campion sets out to alter and coarsen those discriminations. Ralph Touchett on his deathbed is hurled, in Campion’s hands, from deeply held cousinly love (“Oh my brother!” James has Isabel cry in her grief) to driven lover’s love, in wholesale repudiation of James. It is as if he is not to be trusted to tell the truth about men and women, and about the justice of willed reticence. And if James’s Isabel is generously and earnestly outward-turning, Campion’s Isabel is just the opposite—fastened, as that mischievously anachronistic prologue warns, on the inner chamber of the sensual kiss.

  James’s Isabel, in the hope of freedom, looks to the broadening world. Campion’s Isabel, all too programmatically, looks to the limits of self. That is why the novel is a tragedy—it enacts the defeat of freedom. And that is why the movie, through its governing credo, adds up to little more than a beautifully embroidered anecdote of a bad marriage.

  What crudity compared to what the novelist saw!

  * A film in a canister (and who today would dispute that movies are an art form?) is nevertheless not the same as a book in a library. The names of James’s characters endure; nothing is more ephemeral than the names of the actors who portray them. The difference between characters in literature and actors in performance is the difference, say, between a waterfall and a drink of water. No matter how pretty the cup, the drink is short-lived.

  A Prophet of Modernism

  What is the difference between a literary icon and an ordinary writer? The writer is sometimes read, the icon almost never; a symbol is independent of readers. The writer transfigured into symbol leaves behind such earthbound circumstances as reputation, controversy, acclaim, fame—including the highest degree of fame. All these are swallowed up in the Representation of an Era. Consider those nineteen-sixties luminaries (they are all male) who have come to personify—indelibly and incontrovertibly—one liberating scenario after another: the mystical vagabond, the Whitman-like bard, the macho rebel, the generational clown, the soused ex-prodigy. They are like medieval “humors,” confined to the narrowest temper of their noisiest time. They have transcended their own labors: they denote, they delineate, they typify. They stand for an age. Of their celebrated passions, only a handful of stray phrases and shockworthy gestures survive. They have ascended—or fallen—into legend. Though alive, they are no longer urgent. They are animate statues.

  Literary women are less likely to suffer such wholesale deportations into the straits of American personification. Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Susan Sontag go on being newly and hotly read: they speak in the language of life, not of monument. Not that we are altogether without female monuments. The poet Emma Lazarus is mostly indistinguishable from her inscription on the Statue of Liberty. Julia Ward Howe, of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” is thumpingly memorialized by those ungodly grapes of wrath (unless John Steinbeck has stolen them away). “So you’re the little woman who started this big war,” President Lincoln is said to have declared to Harriet Beecher Stowe, as if she were Helen of Troy. Yet not even the emblematic author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin could fully embody the bleeding psychological wilderness of the Civil War. And neither she nor Howe nor Lazarus ever became the goddess of an age.

  One woman did, and she did it by abandoning America and settling in Paris. She became the goddess of her age; she became the incarnation of that age; she became its legend; she became its symbol. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she announced. And another time: “Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.” But we do not remember Gertrude Stein for saying any of these outrageous things. As a writer she is defined for us by four quotations only—egoless catchphrases, her logo and trademark: “Pigeons on the grass alas.” “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” (Four roses: heavier brew than the three commonly cited.) To Ernest Hemingway, after the First World War: “You are all a lost generation.” On her deathbed: “What is the question?”

  She intended to seize and personify modernism itself, and she succeeded. Consequently we cannot imagine Gertrude Stein without Picasso. Like him, she wanted to invent Cubism—not in oils but in words, where refraction produces not abstraction but subtraction. She worked to subtract plain meaning from English prose. Whether she was a charlatan or a philosopher, it is even now hard to say. William James, with whom she studied psychology at Radcliffe, sent her on to Johns Hopkins to do research on automatic writing. (She earned an M.D. while she was at it.) Certainly there appears to be more than a little of the subconscious in many of her sentences, but mainly they are mindful, calculated, striven after, arranged. “Think well of the difference between thinking with what they are thinking”—is this nonsense, or is it an idea too gossamer to capture? She was deliberately, extravagantly, ferociously extreme, and as concentrated and imperial as Picasso himself, who painted Stein just the way her companion Alice Toklas described her: a woman with the head of a Roman emperor.

  No one now reads Gertrude Stein, though a few of her titles have a life of their own: Four Saints in Three Acts, which Virgil Thomson made into an opera; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written by Gertrude Stein about Gertrude Stein. Those who valiantly read her in her heyday often gave up. Clifton Fadiman’s view was that her prose “puts you at once in the condition resembling the early stages of grippe—the eyes and legs heavy, the top of the skull wandering around in an uncertain and independent manner, the heart ponderously, tiredly beating.” “A cold, black suet-pudding,” Wyndham Lewis concluded. “All fat, without nerve.”

  And still the modernist pantheon came to sit at her feet. The visitors who passed through the bohemian dazzle of her Paris apartment—Picasso and Matisse on the walls—were nearly all illustrious; she knew what she was after, and so did they. Hemingway said that he and Stein were “just like brothers.” Juan Gris, Sherwood Anderson, Clive Bell, Wyndham Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, André Gide, John Reed, Paul Robeson, Jo Davidson, and the geniuses on her walls, Picasso and Matisse—all these paraded by her witty tongue, while squat Alice Toklas looked loyally on. During the German occupation of Paris, when Jews were being hunted by the thousands in every neighborhood, these two Jewish women of Montparnasse were somehow left unmolested. And when Gertrude Stein died in 1946, at seventy-two, her name was a household word (or quip), her mannish head an avant-garde image; and she had become one with the movement she touted.

  At the close of its century of brilliance and triumph, modernism begins now to look a little old-fashioned, even a bit stale or exhausted, and certainly conventional—but what is fresher, and sassier, and more enchantingly silly, than “Rose is a rose is a rose …”? This endearing, enduring, durable and derisible chant of a copycat Cubist is almost all that is left of Gertrude Stein. It signifies what was once a mammoth revolution in literature and art. Gertrude Stein was modernism’s outermost manifestation and prophet; and so she remains.

  Imaginary People

  Readers often ask—and writers ask themselves—where a work of fiction “comes from.” A captivating question: it implies that stories don’t always originate in the writer’s mind, but in some outside source or force, like the sting of a passing insect. Henry James, in fact, concocted a germ theory to account for the sudden recognition that a tale is already there, at least in embryo. The “germ,” in James’s view, was the smallest fructifying hint, no bigger than a seed, out of which a story might grow. He collected these useful germs at dinner parties, listening to anecdotes and gossip—but he turn
ed away, on principle, as the teller moved on to the story’s real-life outcome.

  What gripped James was not what had actually happened, but what might happen, what lay implicit in any overheard circumstance—the intimation, the possibility, the initiating spore. His notebooks swarm with such germs. “Mrs. F.F. mentioned to me,” he would write, “a little local fact that strikes me as a good small ‘short-story’ … The man had engaged himself to a young woman, but afterward had thought better of it,” etc. James’s elaborations would soon massively depart from the original “little local fact”—but this, the germ of the narrative, was indispensable to his imagination.

  Writers’ inspiration tends to divide itself between memory and observation—or call it between the self and ideas about the world. For writers on the memory side, it is autobiography that engenders story—or if not autobiography literally, then the matrix where psychology and personality and social surroundings meet. Memory-writers begin with character and situation, as James does. For writers magnetized by ideas—think of Hawthorne or Kafka—it is idea that precedes character. But of course no writer is purely on one side or the other; every novel is a complex partnership of both memory and idea, with one finally outweighing the other, as on a seesaw.

  The act of reading, too, has a stake in this divide. Readers ride the seesaw along with the writer, but may weigh in against the writer’s proclivity. E. M. Forster’s early novel, The Longest Journey (a novel I reread obsessively in my twenties and thirties), is mainly—possibly exclusively—a memory work, rooted in autobiography, and far more dedicated to the exposition of character than to idea in the “philosophical” sense. But what I have taken away from it, over decades, is an idea about the nature of the moral life. (Readers discover their own “germs.”) The idea—an insight into vice—resides in a single sentence in Chapter Eight. Agnes and Rickie have just announced that they will marry. Ansell, Rickie’s blunt friend, asks when the marriage will take place. “Not for years, as far as we can see,” Agnes replies.