Certain artists fall into that small but
worthy company of “non-influential geniuses” – men and women whose innovations
are so unconventional and jarring (and sometimes perverse) that they establish
the artist as unquestionably great without, in turn, inspiring a wave of epigones
and acolytes. A classic example is the multi-instrumentalist and composer Eric
Dolphy, whose playing was too ingeniously personal for anyone to rip off
entirely – or with any real success. And though Dolphy is an important figure
in the history of jazz (his recordings are enduring, exciting illustrations of
the tension between form and freedom in music), his relative lack of
“influence” becomes obvious when you contrast him with, say, Charlie Parker or
Ornette Coleman. The point being, I guess, that some great artists are just too
strange and irreducible to spark entire movements, to install themselves as
masters in schools of their own art.
For the past month or so, I’ve been
mulling over this concept, wondering how it applies (or, more likely, doesn’t apply) to the novelist Henry
James. For someone like me, who until recently had read only a few of James’s
briefer, breezier hits (Daisy Miller,
The Turn of the Screw, The Europeans), the notion of James as
“non-influential” might seem ridiculous. Constantly in print, firmly ensconced
in university syllabi, frequently invoked in the interviews and essays of our
greatest living novelists, James towers over American and English letters
simultaneously, straddling their canons like some bookish but eagle-eyed
Colossus of Rhodes. Yet for all of James’s eminence, I don’t know many peers
who’ve actually read him, besides the rare English major who slogged through
(or SparkNoted) The Portrait of a Lady.
And beyond the specialists and scholars in their cloisters, I can’t think of
many readers who are dying to invest in cinderblock novels about naïve American
ex-pats and the malevolent Euro-types who, armed with savage Old World wiles, seduce
and destroy their lamblike New World counterparts. It all reeks too much of
petticoats and mothballs and – far worse – of privilege. In the age of Trump, the era of the iPhone and the
drone, the last rickety precipice before what may well be complete ecological
collapse, James’s premises and themes (to say nothing of his prose) can seem
profoundly, goofily irrelevant.
But none of this stopped me from
plunging, at the start of my first summer break as a teacher, into James’s
late, lengthy masterpiece The Wings of
the Dove. There were plenty of reasons to do so: I had the time, and I had
seen James praised so often by so many of my literary heroes (Woolf, Gass,
Ford, Brodkey), and I wanted, finally, to read something “major,” to plug up
one of the countless holes in my learning. Now, after a month of see-sawing rapture
and bafflement, ecstasy and scorn, I’m glad I did it – and proud, too, that I
actually finished the damn thing. At the same time, however, I’m confused by
the mystery of James’s lasting importance and the utter weirdness of his prose
and narrative techniques – a strangeness made all the stranger, in the case of The Wings of the Dove, by the fact that
I’d never read anything like it. Yet
what, beyond my considerable ignorance of the Victorian novel, could this
weirdness signify? What, after all, does it mean for a book or its writer to be
“Jamesian” when James’s own books resemble almost nothing else? If we can’t
exactly call Henry James a “non-influential genius,” then we at least have to
own up to the fact that his approach to fiction seems incomprehensibly foreign
in 2019, as if James were not only from a different century, but from a
different planet altogether.
First, a brief synopsis, so that everything
that follows will make, I hope, a shred of sense. James begins The Wings of the Dove by introducing
Kate Croy, a beautiful, middle-class Londoner who’s fallen on hard times. At
the novel’s start, Kate (whose mother is dead, and whose father is a scandal-prone
gambler) accepts an ultimatum from her wealthy Aunt Maud to join the latter’s
household – if and only if Kate will disown the rest of her family. Meanwhile,
Kate and her secret, impoverished fiancé, Merton Densher, seek a way to
legitimize their union in the eyes of the disapproving Aunt Maud. When
Milly Theale, a sickly but moneyed American heiress, alights upon the scene, Kate
manipulates Merton into seducing the girl. Her hope is that Milly will die, leaving
her millions to Merton, who will then have the money to wed Kate on the
up-and-up.
This is the baroque, booby-trapped stage
on which James enacts his drama, the strutting, measured, polyphonic
strangeness of his mature style.
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| Henry "Hank" James |
The standard critical rap on James is
that he pioneered a new focus on interiority, turning routine social and
emotional observations into dense, pages-long paragraphs of abstract
psychological exploration. This is a technique the modernists – especially
Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner – adopted and developed to an extreme. But in late
James novels like The Wings of the Dove,
the near-constant passages of interiority – studded though they are with gemmy
glimpses of the characters’ actual thoughts – always retain the sound of
James’s sensitive yet godlike authorial voice. There are no Woolfian moments of
unfiltered yearning, no Joycean grunts or belches or farts. This final point is
anachronistic, of course, a bit like blaming the ancient Sumerians for not
having invented the automobile. But James’s interiority is almost impossibly
dense, a bosky thicket of vague antecedents and even vaguer abstractions – a
style that’s responsible, in the end, for some of the most difficult, infuriating
prose I’ve ever read. The following passage, in which the shrewd Kate assesses her
recent familial setbacks and her relationship with Aunt Maud, is typically obscure
and long-winded, verging on the Ciceronian:
[Kate] had almost liked, in these weeks,
what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother, the
submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the confirmation of
their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial, of her having to
recognise that should she behave, as she called it, decently – that is still do
something for others – she would be herself wholly without supplies. She held
that she had a right to sadness and stillness; she nursed them for their
postponing power. What they mainly postponed was the question of a surrender,
though she couldn’t yet have said exactly of what: a general surrender of
everything – that was at moments the way it presented itself – to Aunt Maud’s
looming “personality.” It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious,
and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air of her
arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and parts certainly
vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim and the distinct, a strong
will and a high hand. It was perfectly present to Kate that she might be
devoured, and she compared herself to a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two
till her turn should come, but sure sooner or later to be introduced into the
cage of the lioness. (36-7)
Early
as it comes in the novel, this passage makes only slightly more sense in
context than it does outside of it. That’s not to say, however, that it’s a
particularly tricky stretch of Jamesian prose; we understand immediately that
Kate finds her aunt intimidating, a fact James communicates vividly in the
final images of the trembling kid and the lioness’s jaws. But any sane editor
or writing teacher, presented with this passage today, would bloody the page
with red ink, would scalpel the fat (the enumeration of Kate’s family issues,
all that gassy talk of “postponing power,” the pile-ups of tentative commas
and adjectives) and keep only the so-called essentials. And
if that teacher or editor is appropriately doctrinaire, they might even resort
to that dusty but venerable slogan, “Show, don’t tell” – not realizing, all the
while, that it was James himself who first uttered it. Further proof, I
suppose, that the phrase has always been meaningless.
This late Jamesian style did not,
however, conquer the literary landscape of 1902. Even the author’s greatest
admirers had certain reservations about The
Wings of the Dove. Henry’s older brother William, writing in a letter of beautiful
fraternal honesty, was ambivalent at best:
You’ve reversed every traditional canon
of storytelling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a
new genre littéraire which I can’t
help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages, and
innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly
mean) and all with unflagging curiosity to know what the upshot might become.
(458, emphasis in original)
At
the risk of inserting myself into a century-old sibling rivalry, I’ll have to side
with William on this one. Henry’s obstinate refusal to tell the story and, instead, to fiddle around with “innumerable” byzantine
sentences is, of course, the book’s chief frustration, and the force and
clarity of William’s complaint only underscore his brother’s baffling vagueness
and obscurity. The letter ends, however, with a touching bit of encouragement
(the kind of substantial pleasantry that makes reading old correspondence feel
instructive, even enriching, in these dizzy days of email and emojis): “At any
rate [your style] is your own, and no one can drive you out or supplement you,
so pray send along everything else you do, whether in this line or not, and it will add great solace to our lives”
(459, emphasis added). Thus William sanctions Henry’s sui generis creations, illuminating
his confusion and his encouragement alike in a warm, true beam of brotherly
love.
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| Hank and Willie James |
But if you prefer more objectivity in
your criticism, take this assessment, from an anonymous critic in the Times Literary Supplement of September
1902:
This is, we repeat, an extraordinarily
interesting performance, but it is not an easy book to read. It will not do for
short railway journeys or for drowsy hammocks, or even to amuse sporting men
and the active Young Person. The dense, fine quality of its pages – and there
are 576 – will always presuppose a certain effort of attention on the part of
the reader; who must, indeed, be prepared to forgo many of his customary
titillations and bribes. (481)
The
titillation, one assumes, of clear, straightforward prose; the bribe, perhaps,
of not withholding crucial plot points until the last possible moment, as James
so often does, to maddening effect, throughout The Wings of the Dove.
I’m also ambivalent about James’s
achievement in this novel. The book is, as the elder James attests, an entry in
its own bewildering genre, a work that stupefies as much as it enlightens or
enriches or entertains. Its themes, while drawn from universal waters, are
muddied by what I can only describe as James’s elitism – racist and classist,
sure, but above all cultural. This snobbishness is inconveniently knotted up
with the novelist’s best features – his passion for precise language; his
subtle, winking lyricism; his flashes of unpretentious wit; his complex
portrayals of women; his artistic and intellectual rigor. These are commendable
qualities for any writer, to be sure, but in James, each facet is colored by a
tendency to dismiss as “vulgar” anyone or anything that falls below a certain
standard of wealth, education, talent, or beauty. The following scrap of
invective, taken from a letter to the novelist William Dean Howells,
illustrates James’s unfortunate tangle of high artistic seriousness and bitter,
snobbish entrenchment:
Of course, in our conditions, doing
anything decent is pure disinterested, unsupported, unrewarded heroism; but
that’s in the day’s work. The faculty of
attention has utterly vanished from the general Anglo-Saxon mind,
extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadére of Journalism, of the newspaper and the picture (above all) magazine, who keeps
screaming “Look at me, I am the thing, and I only, the thing
that will keep you in relation with me all
the time without your having to attend one
minute of the time.” (456, emphasis in original)
The
sympathetic modern reader will surely agree with much of James’s bitterness, his
cry against commercialism and the shrinking of the human mind (our man would
probably flip over the state of the average “Anglo-Saxon” – or, indeed, any – attention span in the age of
listicles and “Now This” videos). But these complaints, no matter how
righteous, still stink a bit of chauvinism, of polo clubs and Italian villas
and servant-stocked, dark-curtained, men’s-only dining rooms.
James’s art, however, is one of patient
accumulation, an art that demands much so that it can deliver much in return. Two
such scenes of intense cumulative beauty will always stick out for me when I remember
The Wings of the Dove – one a
veritable set piece, the other a moment of tender reflection. The first scene
occurs in the novel’s latter half, as the hapless, passive Merton Densher realizes
that his fiancée Kate actually wants him to seduce the dying Milly Theale so
that he (and thus Kate) will inherit her massive American fortune. As Merton
and Kate discuss the implications of this plan at a crowded Venetian soiree, their
victim catches sight of them from across the room: “Milly, from the other side,
happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them in
response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the value of
her life, the essence of her wealth” (310). In the context of the novel, this
moment is almost impossibly loaded, so that each of Milly’s attributes lands
with a terrible iron thud; this list of attributes, meanwhile, ends not with
the “value of her life,” but with the “essence of her wealth” – a crucial
detail that indicates Milly’s true value in the calculations of her “friends.” Later,
when Milly has died, Merton’s odd
mixture of guilt and scrupulous pride gives way to an even stranger, more
surprising emotion: he has fallen in love with the girl, in love – in a
complex, deeply Jamesian way – with the awful romance of her death. James
communicates this fact with great subtlety, through the layered conceit of
Densher’s love as both a child and a cherished, delicate curio:
The thought was all his own, and [Kate]
was the last person he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a
favourite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home
again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of
its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling
them, handling it, as a father,
baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. (398)
Moments
later, this love (or, more accurately, this loss)
is expressed as a sound, a “faint far wail” that Densher actually savors: “This
was the sound he cherished when alone in his rooms. He sought and guarded the
stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life,
once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it” (398).
This paradox of grief and guilt and pleasure captures the complexity not only of
Densher’s fictional soul but also of James’s art. The master’s dizzying
networks of abstraction, his refusal to be brief or blunt, his sensitivity to
every shade of human feeling – each demanding aspect of his work combines in
rare, precious moments like this one, moments of otherwise ineffable tragedy
and beauty. Moments, in the end, of unexpected soulfulness. It is in such flashes that the question of influence
becomes frankly banal, a coarse, harsh din, to be tuned out in deference to the
infinite subtlety, the fine, faint music of James’s genius.
Note: All quoted material is derived from
the Norton Critical Edition of The
Wings of the Dove, ed. by J. Donald
Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (1978).
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| You can't beat a good Norton Critical Edition. I got this bad boy for a buck at the Latter Library in New Orleans (my local favorite). |
