Sierra Prasada

As Henry James himself recounts in the preface to his 1903 novel, The Ambassadors, first serialized in twelve installments of the North American Review, “never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion.”

A few years earlier, a young American, Jonathan Sturges had shared an anecdote with James: At a Paris garden party, he’d approached a downcast William Dean Howells (also a novelist and the former editor of the Atlantic Monthly), and, on attempting to raise his spirits, found himself the audience of a spontaneous and heartfelt declaration by Howells, who urged him to rejoice in his youth and “Live!”

In James’s novel, the matriarch of an American industrial concern in Woollet, Massachusetts, has dispatched a middle-aged, paid subordinate Lambert Strether to Europe to retrieve her son Chad, with the understanding that should he succeed, she will marry him. Even as Strether courts disaster in succumbing (spiritually, mind you) to the lavish temptations of turn-of-the-century Paris, he grasps that they are no longer his to claim and, at a similar party, he turns and confides in his companion, a young artist:

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? This place and these impressions – mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place – well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before – and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to now it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The affair – I mean the affair of life – couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured – so that one ‘takes’ the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it; one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion.

Strether, it turns out, is prepared to sacrifice much in struggling to claim even the “memory of that illusion.” Initially charmed by the clever and lively American expatriate Maria Gostrey, he finds the irresistible allure of Paris itself embodied in the unattainable Madame de Vionnet, the very woman whose entanglement with Chad threatens to block Strether from completing his ‘diplomatic’ mission.

During his lifetime, Henry James wrote enough novels and short stories to fill a 23-volume “artistic autobiography” with selected work, but in his literary afterlife, he’s embraced another role: fictional character.

As of 2010, he’d appeared in novels no fewer than 11 times, according to Reader’s Almanac, the Library of the America’s blog. (Incidentally, the LOA picked a James travel narrative as its most recent Story of the Week.) As quoted in the same blog, novelist Cynthia Ozick, who herself penned Foreign Bodies an adaptation of The Ambassadors, suggests: “Mysteriously, with the passing of each new decade, James becomes more and more our contemporary – it is as if our own sensibilities were only just catching up with his.”

In addition to the The Ambassadors, I’ll be covering two such fictional works this month, both of them published in 2004, Colm Toíbín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author. If anything, the comparison of even two such works forcefully undermines the illusion that a fiction writer can capture the truth of a historical figure’s life, though they can certainly give that figure new life.

Perhaps present day readers recognize in James a counterpart – he too spent his youth in one century and his old age in another, as many of us will. Perhaps in refusing to form (known) romantic ties during his lifetime, he made himself a potent symbol of our singles culture. Or perhaps we simply crave to look through the eyes of an author who captured people’s timeless foibles with such consummate mastery.

Shortly after docking in Liverpool, The Ambassadors‘s Lambert Strether meets the cordial American expatriate Maria Gostrey, who, on hearing of his mission, inquires as to the nature of the industry that calls Chad Newsome back to Woollett, Massachusetts; Strether declines to name it.

The little manufactured item is at once, he suggests, too “familiar, too “trivial,” too “common” and too “vulgar” to merit mention. By the time he decides to tell her, toward the novel’s end, she no longer wants to know. The last century’s readers of James’s novel have no such qualms and have freely speculated that the mystery object could be anything from a chamber pot to an alarm clock.

In October, 2007, however, a writer for Slate claimed to have cracked the case with the aid of logic and a fortuitous New York Times book review:

For years, I’ve had the Woollett Question in the back of my mind: What kind of article would fit every particular? First, the object must be small, trivially so: not a chamber pot, then, nor an alarm clock, the former being too large and the latter insufficiently trivial. Patricia Evans’ safety match is an inspired guess … but matches are neither ridiculous nor vulgar. Second, the article must be something controversial, and therefore likely to have been talked about “constantly,” in late 19th- and early 20th-century polite East Coast society: not a button hook, then, nor most artifacts used in making your toilet. Razors, toothbrushes, menstrual pads, earwax curettes, and the like may have been vulgar, but controversial they were not.

The answer was finally revealed to me a few weeks ago, via a new book by Henry Petroski, prolific author of case histories of “useful things,” from pencils to paper clips to the kitchen sink.

One last guess? Read on.

It arrived, in truth, the novel, late at self-consciousness; but it has done its utmost ever since to make up for lost opportunities.

So wrote Henry James on April 11, 1900, in an essay in The New York Times (PDF) on the future of the novel. He’d begun work on The Ambassadors the previous summer and, around the same time, sat for this portrait by his cousin Ellen Emmet.

The contemporary author David Lodge, in his own novel about James’s life, Author, Author, suggests that James’s prose is “designed to defeat paraphrase. It is like a fine-spun web, flexible and delicate, designed to catch meaning rather than to express it. You have to negotiate the web, spread yourself over it, experience it to get the meaning. Stand back from the web and you can hardly trace its structure, its threads are so fine; try to condense it and you risk destroying it. Still, we will try.”

And so will I – because the essay’s print is small and smudged, not to mention considerably cramped in its final paragraphs, perhaps the turn-of-the-century remedy for an overly long article…?

Regardless, James, like Kipling, must be read slowly. Gallop at the peril of your own understanding and reading pleasure!

On the rise of the novel:

The flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole field of letters, as would often seem, with submersion. It plays, in what may be called the passive consciousness of many persons, a part that directly marches with the rapid increase of the multitude able to possess itself in one way and another of the book.

On the important role to be played by unmarried women:

Nothing is so striking in a survey of this field, and nothing to be so much borne in mind, as that the larger part of the great multitude that sustains the teller and the publisher of tales is constituted by boys and girls: by girls in especial, if we apply the term to the later stages of the life of the innumerable women who, under modern arrangements, increasingly fail to marry – fail, apparently, even largely to desire to. It is not too much to say of many of these that they live in a great measure by the immediate aid of the novel – confining the question for the moment to the fact of consumption alone.

On the seductive charms of fiction:

When we do respond to the appeal, when we are caught in the trap, we are held and played upon; so that how in the world can there not be a future, however late in the day, for a contrivance possessed of this precious secret? The more we think of it the more we feel that the prose picture can never be at the end of its tether until it looses its sense of what it can do. It can do simply everything and that is its strength and its life. Its plasticity, its elasticity, are infinite; there is no color, no extension it may not take from the nature of its subject or the temper of its craftsman. It has the extraordinary advantage – a piece of luck scarcely credible – that, while capable of giving an impression of the highest perfection and the rarest finish, it moves in a luxurious independence of rules and restrictions.

On sex in fiction:

I cannot so much as imagine Dickens and Scott without the “lovemaking” left, as the phrase is, out. They were, to my perception, absolutely right – from the moment their attention to it could absolutely be perfunctory – practically not to deal with it… The difficulty lies in the fact that two of the great conditions have changed. The novel is older and so are the young… It is certain that there is no real health for any art – I am not speaking, of course, of any mere industry – that does not move a step in advance of its furtherest follower…

It bears on this that as nothing is more salient in English life to-day, to fresh eyes, than the revolution taking place in the position and outlook of women – and taking place much more deeply in the quiet than even the noise on the surface demonstrates – so we may very well yet see the female elbow itself, kept in increasing activity by the play of the pen, smash with final resonance the window all this time most superstitiously closed… It is the opinion of some observers that when women do obtain a free hand they will not repay their long debt to the precautionary attitude of men by unlimited consideration for the natural delicacy of the latter.

In early January 1903, The New York Times deemed the serialization of a new James novel so noteworthy as to merit an article (PDF) about another article that itself heralded the debut of that serialization.

Both the serialization and the commentary ran in the North American Review. As The Times reported, William Dean Howells, the same man whose impassioned remarks inspired James to conceive of The Ambassadors, distinguished between James’s “readers” and his “enemies:”

Those people, who, [Howells] says, “frankly say they cannot bear [James], and then either honestly let him alone, or secretly hanker for him, and try if they cannot like him, or cannot bear him a little better,” are his enemies, but, [Howells] continues, many of [James's] readers are his enemies because they question his point of view and object to the world that, if there is truly such a world, the author does not paint truly.

Incidentally, Howells goes on to suggest that most of these “enemies” are women, those same readers who James credited for the rising swell of the novel just three years previous, and who are, apparently, reluctant captives of “the somewhat labyrinthine construction of Mr. James’s later sentences,” as Howells delicately puts it.

The renowned scholar William James, repeatedly chided his younger brother for the lack of “vigor and decisiveness” in his later works, and went as far as to urge Henry to write a more straightforward novel and publish it under the name of William James, who would then give Henry half the profits. Soon after, Henry inscribed one of his books, “To William James, [from] his incoherent, admiring, affectionate Brother, Henry James.”

It is rare in the present day to find, among James aficionados (both fictional and real), anyone reluctant to express a certain exasperation with James’s later works, that is The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904), as well as The Ambassadors. In Alan Bennett’s sublime novella The Uncommon Reader, the Queen of England discovers her own love of reading late in life and, eventually, as one does, picks up a James novel:

It was Henry James she was reading one tea time when she said out loud, ‘Oh, do get on.’
     The maid, who was just taking away the tea trolley, said ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ and shot out of the room in two seconds flat.
      ‘Not you, Alice,’ the Queen called after her, even going to the door. ‘Not you.’

In her contribution to NPR’s “You Must Read This” series, Anne Patchett gets to work reading The Ambassadors on the request of a friend:

And work it was. I followed Lambert Strether to Paris as he tried to reclaim the errant playboy Chad Newsome and return him home to his mother. The action was so subtle and the conversations so dense I could scarcely blink for fear of missing something. Suddenly reading felt more like deep sea diving, going miles out on a boat, suiting up in heavy gear, and then swimming down and down into that other world.

It’s an elegant backhanded compliment, and what follows is more unabashedly admiring. While reading The Ambassadors, I too felt as though I had been pulled into another world, not underwater but back to another era, and not merely the fact of it, which is hardly remarkable for a historic novel, but also the rich and wondrous feel. To read The Ambassadors, then, is to read with the same intensity that Lambert Strether urges his young friend to “live!”

Henry James plays a supporting role in Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough’s The Greater Journey, which might be said to describe the ‘middle act’ in Americans’ longtime liaison d’amour with Paris.

After Benjamin Franklin’s crucially timed diplomatic mission to France in 1776, and (about 100 years) before the glittering social circle that swirled around Gertrude Stein in the 1920s, Americans with the talent and means, or just the means, made the sea voyage to Paris to soak up the brilliance of the scene and to make “the greater journey,” i.e. to take part in the studios and the surgeries or enjoy less formal inspiration.

McCullough chronicles the overseas adventures of painters John Singer Sargent, Samuel F.B. Morse, and Mary Cassatt; authors James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe; women’s rights activist Emma Willard; and Illinois politician Elihu Washburne, among many others. To get a better idea, read reviews at The Economist, The New Republic and The New York Times, listed from least to most critical (also: least to most sarcastically amusing).

James first made the trip as a very young child when his father, heir to a real estate development fortune, resolved to take his family to Europe and, as he put it, “educate the babes in strange lingoes.” They returned in 1855 when the two eldest, William and Henry, were 14 and 12, respectively. James made the journey alone 20 years later to work on his third novel, The American, which would be serialized in The Atlantic Monthly, then edited by William Dean Howells. And that, dear reader, is how the story begins…

In the fall of 2003, on delivering the manuscript for his own fictionalized portrait of Henry James, the English novelist David Lodge learned that the writer Colm Tóibín would beat him to the punch. It turned out to be just the first unattended banana peel in a real-life literary farce.

The minor tragedy of the moment might have matured into dinner party comic gold given a few months (or years); instead Lodge wrote an entire book about it, which I, incidentally, have no plans to read. (Yes, dear reader, there has to be a limit.)

The book that inspired him to do so, however, the casually titled Author, Author, is eminently readable and – apart from a few too many pages in its middle section devoted to just one, admittedly significant, night – makes for a droll contrast with Tóibín’s more serious approach in The Master. Some critics have faulted Lodge for indulging in too many biographical asides and cameo appearances – Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, and so on – but by way of these so-called digressions, Lodge achieves a double portrait, illustrating both how James saw his world and how his world might have seen James.

Lodge’s larger story revolves around James’s ultimately futile efforts to establish himself in the theater and the author’s friendship with George du Maurier, the Punch illustrator and author of the unexpected blockbuster Trilby, the Twilight of its day. Du Maurier is now probably best known as the grandfather of Daphne du Maurier.

Critics have clearly found it challenging to review the one work without resorting to comparisons, as though Lodge’s and Tóibín’s books must do battle with each other and only one can triumph. Alan Hollinghurst, contributing such a review to The Guardian, is either the best man for the job or an ironic choice, perhaps both, given that his own 2004 novel The Line of Beauty also features James, though in a supporting role.

Here’s a thought: Read them both. First Lodge and then Tóibín, in order to make the more logical leap from James’s world into the murky depths of his consciousness.

In the following excerpt from Author, Author, James learns more than he wants to know in conversation with Du Maurier’s publisher Clarence McIlvaine:

‘But Trilby was the best seller’
‘I detest that barbarous Americanism!’ he said emphatically.
‘ “Best seller”? What’s the matter with it?’
‘It confuses quality with quantity in a single word,’ he said, ‘and it’s a solecism – I mean, the way it’s used. I understand that the American newspapers now publish something called “best-seller lists”, numbered from one to ten.’
‘That’s right – The Bookman started it, and it caught on. It’s a darned good idea.’
‘But how can there be more than one best seller? “Best” means ” better than all the others”.’
McIlvaine thought about this for a moment. ‘You’re quite right, of course, James – in principle. But as regards “Trilby”. . . it really *is* our best seller. I mean, we’ve never sold so many copies of a single book before in the company’s history. And since Harper is one of the biggest general publishers in the world, and if you forget about pirate publishing in the old days, for which nobody knows the figures anyway. . . it’s quite possible that Trilby is the best-selling novel ever.’
‘Good God!’ Henry said.
‘A solemn thought, isn’t it? Can I get you another sherry?’
‘No thank you,’ he said. ‘I need some air.’

Update, 1/17: I didn’t realize when I first wrote this post that Colm Toibin published his own essays on Henry James as a book in 2010, though he appears to have been more haunted by James himself than the so-called rivalry with Lodge.

Incidentally, a brief scene from David Lodge’s novel about Henry James doubles as a pithy introduction to Colm Tóibín’s The Master. (And, really, since I excerpted Tóibín in Monday’s entry on Author, Author, it only seems fair to do the contrary here.)

As a free-ranging discussion turns to Catholicism, James confides in his good friend George du Maurier:

‘I rather envy the Romans their rituals and symbolism – the sung masses, the votive candles, the anointing of the sick…’
      ‘You wouldn’t convert, though, would you?’ Du Maurier enquired, almost anxiously.
      ‘No, no fear of that,’ Henry said with a smile. ‘Consciousness is my religion, human consciousness. Refining it, intensifying it – and preserving it.’

Tóibín takes the consciousness of the master artist as his topic, and beautifully illuminates it in a style, which, while certainly individual to each author, may also be unique to the contemporary literary novel.

Laura Miller, reviewing The Master for Salon credits it with possessing the “ripe stillness” of James’s own work. Miller describes Tóibín’s James as “elegiac and melancholy, aware at last of all that he has missed of life in his resolve to miss nothing that was going on around him,” without making it explicit that he clearly owes much to The Ambassadors‘ Lambert Strether.

Like most reviewers, I read the two books in the order they were published, first Tóibín’s and then Lodge’s, so the comparisons that inevitably followed my having completed both books actively intruded on my reading of Lodge’s Author, Author.

I recommended in my last entry that readers coming fresh to the pair begin with Lodge’s, but I now see there’s as good an argument for starting with The Master. Tóibín’s novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, delves deep to capture the “rich, darting, almost impressionistic glimpses of the moments of James’s life that made him the ‘Master,’” as Daniel Mendelsohn put it in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article, The Passion of Henry James.

In doing so, though, it is perhaps less suited than its comfortably baggy, buoyantly witty counterpart, Author, Author, to the kind of disruptive, associative rumination that such a comparison inspires. The Master is an absorbing, contemplative and deeply sensual work even if it does portray James as possessing a certain coldness to which some readers, notably Mendelsohn, have strenuously objected.

The final paragraphs of Mendelsohn’s article, which in its entirety manages to be at once admiring and deeply critical of Tóibín’s rendering of James, practically cry out for comparison with the then-yet-to-be-published Author, Author:

Toibin can’t acknowledge that James may have been ”the kindest of friends,” because it interferes with his larger vision of James the cold fish, the artistic vampire living off the lifeblood of his innocent and truly suffering victims

It’s possible that James just didn’t suffer in the way Toibin understands suffering. From everything we know, he was indeed quite a happy person (by his own standards, rather than ours) for most of his life — productive, sociable, well loved and remarkably kind. And, of course, a very great artist for whom art was the highest satisfaction. Yet Toibin never explores what it might feel like to be satisfied by art alone in the way that most of us want to be satisfied by love and sex; he just keeps showing you the damage that art causes without really suggesting what its compensatory value might be — for James or, indeed, for us.

Whether you agree with Mendelsohn’s assessment or not, there’s much to enjoy in Tóibín’s widely-praised, Booker short-listed portrait of James. It is officially fiction after all. Browse more aggregated reviews of The Master and Author, Author thanks to Reviews of Books.

Let’s give Tóibín’s James the last meditative word with this slow, lyrical tribute to solitude:

He loved the glorious silence a morning brought, knowing that he had no appointments that afternoon and no engagements that evening. He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society, nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.

Famously Wilde, the gay writer best known for witty plays like The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, as well as the fittingly age-defying novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray died in 1900. While Oscar Wilde’s life and work, then, falls outside the purview of the 20th Century Unlimited, his influence and considerable appeal carry over into the current century, most imminently with the upcoming release of Al Pacino’s unusual documentary Wilde Salomé, not to mention any number of theater productions ongoing around the world.

Wilde’s shadow may have loomed large in Henry James’s life – or, at least, both Colm Tóibín and David Lodge imagine it so in their respective novels. The two fictional James pay close attention as Wilde tempts fate by countering the Marquess of Queensberry’s accusation of “sodomy” with a libel suit in 1895.

The real James, according to biographer Leon Edel, found Wilde lazy and irritating, all the more so because, before Wilde’s brilliant luck ran out, the two competed for the attention of English theatergoers; they were rivals, that is, but not exactly equals. As Edel puts it, unkind in pun if not intent, “James was not only too subtle, but also too earnest; and when he tried to be less subtle, he became banal.”

Despite the efforts he made to cloak his life from the independent historical record, James left clues as to his own sexual preferences, and there’s nothing like an enduring mystery to fuel speculation. An excerpt from Edel’s index offers an amusing snapshot of this kind of biographical detective work:

Fantasies: women as statues, 73…Homoeriticism: in relation to elder brother, 82-83, 244-46, 722; Wilde and Symonds, 273, 437-39…Sexual diffidence: J. will not marry, 229, 233-36; bachelor life, 229-34; passivity, 59-60, 77, 85, 110; apparent lack of sexual experience, 58, 166-67; older women, 230-32; no interest in bedroom sex, 379; danger of “total” sex in fiction, 511-12… “possibilities I don’t embrace” and…Hemingway and Fitzgerald on J.’s “impotence,” 720-21

Both Tóibín and Lodge take James’s homosexuality as a given; while Tóibín plumbs the psychological depths of intense longing unfulfilled, Lodge prefers to tap the comic potential in James’s fastidious disgust for the physical.

In a memorable scene in The Master, James is forced to share a bed with the then-future renowned jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a scene that finds its own unintended parody in a certain 1987 film:

When Holmes turned away from him, as he did now as suddenly as he had turned before, Henry realized that it would be his fate to lie here through the night, his mind racing, with this figure beside him, who was perhaps unaware of him, used to the company of men at close quarters. Holmes had, he now believed, fallen asleep. Henry did not know whether he was disappointed or relieved, but he wished he, too, could fall unconscious so that he would not have to think again until morning.”

In a contrasting scene from Author, Author, James goes to lunch with his contemporary, the French author Guy de Maupassant, author of The Necklace, and Maupassant wants to order more than food and drink:

‘Go and ask her if she would like to join us, Henri,’ Maupassant said. (Mercifully they were both speaking French.)
‘I couldn’t possibly, Guy,’ said Henry. ‘I don’t know who she is.’
‘Well, send her a note by the waiter. Tell her we would like to make her acquaintance.’
‘Certainly not…You simply cannot do such things here, Guy,’ Henry protested. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘Why not?’ Maupassant demanded… ‘She is available, without doubt. Why else is she dining alone in a public restaurant?’
‘There is a new species of respectable but emancipated ladies in this country who are laying claim to some of the traditional prerogatives of men. I daresay she is one such.’
Maupassant snorted derisively. ‘I want a woman,’ he grumbled. ‘Not an emancipated one, just an ordinary woman, as long as she has a pretty face and a nice arse. I haven’t had one since I got to London.’
Henry was relieved to get him out of the restaurant without creating a scene. It confirmed all his prejudices about the morals of French writers. How right he had been to flee Paris!

James would likely have found Wilde’s tomb impossibly garish but approved of his being interred in Paris. I myself visited Wilde’s grave at the Père Lachaise Cemetery a while back and found the tributes imprinted on its surfaces by his admirers charmingly appropriate, so long as I didn’t think too hard about what each required. Perhaps I have a bit of James’s puritanical streak in me.

As far as the tomb is concerned, and only the tomb, one might say that James has had the last laugh.

In The Master, Colm Tóibín images the particular discomfort a young Henry James might have felt on being forced to share a bed with another young man.

If that book became a movie, the filmed scene would almost certainly be exactly nothing like the above, even if the two would undoubtedly share (with a nod to James’ francophilia) a certain je ne sais quoi.