The Other Side of a Frontier, page 53
Henry James, conquering London and its literary world, could be as assertive and powerful as Christopher Newman; but rejected like Newman – or pushed to the wall by his elder brother – told that he wasn’t fit to play with rough boys or that his writing was full of knots and bows and ribbons, found himself reminded forcibly that he was a perpetual ‘mere junior’.
Until now his novels had been about heroes. In the one seeming exception, Daisy Miller, the girl is seen through the eyes of a man. Henceforth they would be about heroines responding ‘to their destinies in a world that jilted, denied and betrayed’. He would write Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady. Was this a matter of imaginative dexterity, or did it come from his nature? A hermaphrodite – according to Mr Edel – discovered himself.
And in The Portrait Mr Edel directs us, with great perspicacity, to one of those inner dramas of compensation and confident self-extending that bring a writer’s powers to maturity – if they come at the right time. Who is Osmond in The Portrait? He is, Mr Edel says,
the hidden side of James himself, when his snobbery prevailed over his humanity and arrogance and egotism over his urbanity and his benign view of the human comedy … in creating him Henry put into him his highest ambition and drive to power – the grandiose way in which he confronted his destiny … In the hands of a limited being, like Osmond, the drive to power ended in dilettantism and petty rages. In Henry’s hands the same drive had given him unbounded creativity.
If he closely watches the ghosts in James’s life, Mr Edel is not tempted into those murkier areas of the psychological limbo which have been irresistible to the reckless school of biography. We are shown James living as we might have seen him. There he goes riding every morning in the Campagna with some lady he has charmed; there he goes out for his night walks in London; there he sits reading at the Reform; watching, very shocked, the great Turgenev playing with Pauline Viardot’s children on the floor; obdurately working all the afternoon in Italy while William wais impatiently for him to finish. James lived in the extremes of solitude and sociability; his is one of the most peopled lives lived by a man of genius, for the genius depended on their chatter. To have got all these people back out of literature into James’s life as Mr Edel has done is remarkable in itself, but the skill with which these things are made to build up James’s own life as a man is more remarkable. The short chapters, each carefully pointed, take one with alacrity along the crowded peregrinations of James’s mind and person, without a moment’s boredom. Mr Edel has come close to the excited spontaneous sensibility and intelligence of a man who baffles us by being enormous and yet who, in a way almost enviable, has no life at all.
By the time the fourth volume of Leon Edel’s rich and searching biography of Henry James opens, the Master has had to face the shattering fact of the suicide of Miss Woolson in Venice, and is about to receive another blow in the very sanctum of his so far invulnerable egotism: in his art. His plots for success in the theatre (and as an operator James was as exhaustive here as he was in his social stratagems), his hopes of the financial magnificence of the best-sellers at a moment when he was himself becoming noticeably less saleable, are to be brutually dashed by the booing of Guy Domville. He took the affair as if his person had been assaulted, as if he had been mugged. The strategist, in life and in art, the addict of military memoirs, has had a public defeat, and at a truly ‘awkward age’. He is fifty; a younger irreverent generation of realists, who have no interest in High Romance, has burst open the door. He is called further to account by his first humiliating attack of gout.
The next five years, in Mr Edel’s diagnosis, are a period of ‘nervous breakdown’, and he is to be shown slowly emerging from it by his invincible belief in the therapy of his art. At his age many artists turn to easier remedies, or slacken in their vigilance, for even art has its temptations; but James (perhaps because he was a solitary and a man of puritan energy) had always known that the important thing was to increase difficulty. In his case – and I would have said for all – the temptation is to thin oneself by looking forward: the difficult task is to reconstitute oneself by looking back. And so Mr Edel’s purpose is to show James performing on himself ‘what Freud was busily demonstrating’ – the power to heal oneself of hardening wounds by retreat to earlier experience. The process is dramatically clear: it is not a question of curing himself by work, but of divining the right work. James found it in the treacherous five years, by writing his tales of children, ghosts and phantasmagoria: it is the period of The Pupil, The Awkward Age, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw and of that mystifying search for the heart of personality, The Sacred Fount, before the spacious final works are attempted.
For the comedy of Jamesian anecdote Professor Edel has little use. The adroit letters (he has said before) are either recklessly discharged smoke-screens or a collection of tactical feints. They are histrionically concealing. Professor Edel notes enough of James’s familiar social life at Lamb House, his meetings with Kipling and Meredith, the devastating visits of Edith Wharton, the last journey to Italy, his bicycle rides and so on, to keep the spry, practical, restless ‘character’ alive and to preserve his engaging momentousness. But the cure is the thing and Professor Edel studies it, until it completes itself at the end of the book, with the tremendous sight of the Master shaving off his beard. But Professor Edel relies on James’s clue: ‘The artist is in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.’
The difficulty here is to avoid theory or dogmatic assertion about the meaning of echoes, symbols and images, and I don’t know any writer who is so free of the vices psychology has offered to biography as Professor Edel is. He is pertinacious, but tactful, gracious and tender; indeed, this is the most moving of his four volumes. His suggestions, gathered from the novels, tend to build up a whole rather than a schematic figure, and he is aware that a writer may go far back into his past for a word or a crucial incident without consciously displaying an item of personal history. We can see Professor Edel’s method at work in what he has to say about the melodramatic ending of The Spoils of Poynton and its possible relation to James’s horrifying experience when he was booed off the stage after Guy Domville. Professor Edel notes that the book does not have one of James’s traditional endings: why melodrama?
Perhaps because he had himself been forced to the centre of the stage, in a bit of melodrama not of his own making. His imagery went further back however than the recent disaster in the St James’s. In describing Mrs Gereth’s departure from Poynton and her loss of her antiques, her work of art, James wrote ‘the amputation had been performed. Her leg had come off – she had now begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute and would stump for life, and what her young friend was to come and admire was the beauty of her movement …’ Thus James had recourse in this work to one of the most personal images out of his own childhood. It suggests how vivid for all his lifetime was the memory of his father’s amputation and ‘the noise … about the house’. The father had lost a leg in a stable fire and Henry subsequently had suffered a back injury while helping to fight a stable fire at Newport. Amputation and fire: these symbols out of the past now forced themselves into the story he was telling. Poynton and its ‘spoils’ had to be destroyed as Guy Domville was destroyed.
One practical result of the failure in the theatre was that he now turned to planning his stories as scenarios. This unluckily doubled their length. We are at the beginning of the period when over and over again his stories are too long for their subject. (This is true, for the contemporary reader, of masterpieces like The Pupil.) Before, he never revised; now he will revise interminably; and when he takes up dictation, the manner will take on the appearance of an intricate private reverie.
So the cure has its price. But the gains are extraordinary in life and in literature. By taking his mind back to childhood, James was obliged to consider his femininity. His masculinity had been driven underground.
To be male was to risk [in the remote fantasy of childhood] such things as amputation like his father; … he could escape by thinking himself a little girl.
The rivalry with the older male, William, appears in tale after tale in many forms. Lack of male conviction was the weakness of Guy Domville. In retreating to Lamb House and brooding on his past, James was retreating into a simulacrum of his life in the James family; and hence the buried struggles of childhood come to the surface. The feelings that arose out of the past were a ‘kind of conscious nightmare’. In The Turn of the Screw the ghosts are the ghosts of his boyhood. Little Miles’s ‘rude’ battle with the governess, telling her he doesn’t want to be cooped up with females, is a transference of James’s own conflict. Miles is defeated, and it is important to see that, told in the first person by the governess, the story is a statement of female hysteria. The femininity of Henry James is speaking. Maisie is a study of himself in boyhood – she is, I remember noting years ago, facetiously addressed as ‘my dear sir’ by one of her guardians. Nanda of The Awkward Age would be a projection of the Henry of late adolescence. The little girls – and without writing a conscious series (as Professor Edel shows) James studies them at progressive ages – emerge ‘out of the personal healing’ which was going on under the surface of the practical, ambitious, successful man of the world.
Professor Edel’s patient and careful method makes his point; for although one can say that any author’s life is buried in his work in this way, James’s distinction is that he knew what he was doing: his father’s faith in compensations was part of family training. Only occasionally does the reliance on verbal echoes seem to me strained. When the governess feels her ‘blow in the stomach’ it seems merely ingenious to trace this back to the blow in the stomach James said he had had at the St James’s Theatre. And when the child Effie is murdered by drowning, I think Professor Edel is pushing matters when he links this with what James called his ‘subaqueous’ feelings after Guy Domville.
The final chapters of the volume are as moving and perceptive as those that were given to the story of Miss Woolson in the earlier volume. There, a hardness of heart and a good deal of disingenuousness appeared in James’s character. He certainly feared entanglement, but the part played by a distaste that looks secretive and snobbish seems plain. That by dying our friends extinguish part of ourselves is true enough, and it is characteristic of James’s truth-telling and glacial egotism to show this as an affront. In The Beast in the Jungle he knows remorse. The present volume contains an account of James suffering as Miss Woolson suffered, in his extraordinary passion for the young, crude and climbing Norwegian sculptor Hendrik Andersen. They saw little of each other, but the separations were agonizing and the letters are filled not only with ironical advice to the young god who was vulgarly on the make, but with physical longings. He wanted to touch the young man. He wanted to hug and embrace him: ‘lean on me as a brother and a lover’. And ‘I hold you close’ and ‘I feel my arms around you’. These expressions may be simply a well-known mode of Victorian emotionalism:
Allowances must be made [Professor Edel says] for James’s long puritan years, the confirmed habits of denial, the bachelor existence, in which erotic feeling had been channelled into hours of strenuous work and the wooing of mon bon. One also must remember that James had a fear of loss of masculinity … James was constitutionally incapable of belonging to the underworld of sex into which Oscar Wilde had drifted.
His feelings had been transferred to the intellect. His philanderings with his many women friends went to fanciful lengths, and were really utterances of High Romance. But clearly, this time, there was passion on James’s part. He was still writing it at the age of seventy. He comes out of the affair with his reply to another young man who had asked him what port he had set out from as a novelist:
The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life – and it seems to me the port, in sooth, to which again finally my course directs itself. The loneliness [since I mention it!] – what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else, deeper than my ‘genius’, deeper than my ‘discipline’, deeper than any pride, deeper above all, than the deep counter-minings of art.
He wrote this while correcting the proofs of The Sacred Fount – that baffling and even trivial book which Professor Edel sees as the final therapeutic act that would mark his self-healing. Until now, as a novelist, he had never dealt with love in his novels, except as a ‘force destructive of – or in competition with – power and aesthetic beauty’. He had now discovered that his egotism was vulnerable. Professor Edel’s Life has not only scope and mastery of lively details and argument; it goes with bold and yet controlled insight into the labyrinth of a great creative imagination. The man and the artist have been joined – a feat that biography so rarely succeeds in.
Henry James’s The American Scene is still one of the very few excellent books of travel by an American about his own country. He is as exact and prophetic in his own restricted way as the extraordinary and very different Tocqueville was in his. The book is unique in a genre where – strangely enough, among a foot-loose people – American literature is very poor; for penetrating observation and evocation of the land and the cities we have to turn to novels and, above all, poetry. The remarkable thing about the book is that although it was written in 1905, and in spite of the huge changes that have occurred in America since that time, it presents (as Leon Edel says in a troubled introduction) an essential America that is still recognizable.
This ought not to surprise us: great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetishism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical ‘problem’ hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.
It should be unfailingly proved against me that my opportunity found me incapable of imparting information, incapable alike of receiving and imparting it; for then, and then only, would it be clearly attested that I had cared and understood.
He was looking for a personal relationship to the scene he had left twenty years before. In so many other books on the country the sense of a relation is lacking; indeed, they leave one with an impression of a lonely continent, uncontemplated, unloved, unfelt by a people who have got so much out of it, as they move on, that they see little in it and give or leave nothing of themselves to the scene. How else to explain that sensation of things, places, even people abandoned which is so painful in the American landscape! How often one has felt what James sensed about certain American scenes, especially in New England:
And that was doubtless, for the story-seeker, absolutely the story: the constituted blankness was the whole business, and one’s opportunity was all, thereby, for a study of exquisite emptiness.
Or:
Charming places, charming objects, languish all round, under designations that seem to leave on them the smudge of a great vulgar thumb – which is precisely a part of the pleading land appears to hint to you when it murmurs, in autumn, its intelligent refrain. If it feels itself better than so many phases of its fate, so there are spots where you see it turn at you, under some familiar tasteless inflections of this order, the plaintive eye of a creature wounded with a poisoned arrow.
Henry James knew what the poison was. It would eventually wreck the American cities – a process our planners always out of date, are eager to imitate in England today.
James was a traveller, that is to say, a story-seeker to the marrow. His novels themselves are conscious journeys into the interior. He had started writing travel sketches of things in France, Italy and Germany and England when he was young; the ‘vignettes’ of a sentimental traveller, meant to tease the American fancy for the Atlantic trip. The American Scene is a totally different matter. Perhaps at the age of sixty the returning expatriate originally promised himself one more sentimental pilgrimage. But in twenty years American life had passed through a crucial change. It could either sink him or raise him by the challenge. He was roused. Half the pleasure of the books comes from the sight of a travelling mind reinvigorated. He met the challenge with a richer and revived analytical gift. He rejected the journalistic temptation. In the twenty years since 1883 a huge immigrant invasion had changed the character of the cities; big business, the great industrial monopolies, had taken total power and had imposed the business ethos; the pursuit of money had become the engulfing and only justifying role. New York had been a rough, low-built sea port with pigs rooting in the streets of lower Manhattan when he left, Central Park was farmland. He returned to find Manhattan crammed, and the skyscrapers rising – ‘simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves’.
James ignored the colossal news item. He saw that his subject was not shock and that he was not there to advertise or boost the obvious. His subject was how the consciousness of a half-repentant expatriate would be affected, and what inner meanings and sensibilities he could offer in return. Guilt there would be, but distaste: nostalgia for what was gone, but a feeling for the drama; he would have to be both personal and yet the analyst. He became the seeker. He would have to lay himself open to the full bewilderment of his situation. In his introduction to an earlier edition of this book, W.H. Auden described it as a prose poem; an excellent description. Generously evocative and labyrinthine in its tact, it also shows a man struggling with love and menace. The skyscrapers are a ‘vocabulary of thrift’ but there are ‘uglier words’ for that. With mild but deadly truth they evoke (he says):
