Henry
James is the “Master of nuance and scruple” in
Wystan Hugh Auden’s phrase. Unlike other novelists of the period—like
Howells, who seems dated and is virtually unread outside English
departments—Henry James still commands center stage — just think of all the
big movies made recently of James’s novels — not to mention the unending
avalanche of books and articles coming from academic critics as few American
writers surpass James in the attention they receive. William Dean Howells may
have reinvented the international theme (which in its simplest form is the
felt contrast between Europe and America), but James explored transatlantic
relations and complications to their limits. He began with tales which focused
on the theme of the innocent American being exposed to the temptations of
Europe; he soon grew more and more ambitious, probing the topic in carefully
structured plots with increased complications. From Daisy
Miller to The Portrait of a Lady
and The Ambassadors, James also marked
the development of what is termed realism. If we follow other definitions, the
various stages of Jamesean realism may be classified as pre-modernist,
proto-modernist, and modernist.
Henry
James is, in his own words, “a special case indeed.” A towering figure in
Literature, his books are exceptional not only by the standards of their times
or the English language. His output was extraordinary, filling shelves: more
than 20 novels, a dozen plays, several books of travel literature, over 100
tales, novellas and stories, 250 book reviews, some 30 critical essays and about
the same number of portraits, besides the notebooks and literally thousands of
letters. Not only the volume and variety are imposing. James is a true master of
the novel, whose mature work thrives on paradox and ambiguity, and his tales of
moral conflict continually elude any moral system. He is often labeled a
novelist of manners, though that label does not nearly do him justice. His
stories are not merely about manners; they are also metaphors expressing the
Jamesian truth. They are not allegories — he objected to the allegorical
qualities in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his closest predecessor in
American literature. His fiction is perhaps best regarded as an ongoing attempt
at disentangling himself as a writer from what he considered the trappings of
allegory and romance.
What
with the quantity and diversity of texts James produced, it is difficult to
extract and isolate the author from his surroundings — whether from the family
in his early days or from the social set he gravitated in during his later
years. His personal background is dominated by a powerful father. Henry James,
Senior, was independently wealthy, living off the money he inherited from his
father (who had made most of it in upstate New York real estate). A great
believer in a universal but wholly informal society, Henry James, Sr., was free
to devote himself to theological and philosophical studies and to the education
and cultural improvement of his children. He was a friend of Emerson and
Carlyle, acquainted with almost everybody who was somebody, intellectually at
least, in America. Thackeray and Dickens dined in his house when they visited
the United States. Henry, Jr., also had to cope with the fact that there was a
brother a year older than he, William, who went on to become America’s most
influential psychologist and philosopher. The way the social set later on
defined Henry James I hope will be clear at the end of this lecture. Howells’
travelers abroad always remained red-white-and-blue Americans to the bone;
James’s transatlantic wanderers soon refused to be classified so easily as by
reduction to their national origin. James himself had moved permanently to
Europe in 1875 and settled in England in 1876. His brother William wrote in 1889
that Henry’s “‘anglicisms’ are but ‘protective measures’ — he is
really, I won’t say a Yankee, but a member of the James family, and has no
other country.”
For
all his gregariousness, the older Henry James grew, the lonelier he became —
not because he lost touch with the U.S., but because he lost touch with his
audience — which was never very large and never predominantly American. The Portrait of a Lady was the last book to sell really well in his
lifetime. Marian Adams, the wife of Henry Adams, was highly sympathetic, a close
friend since youth (when Henry James was in Washington, he always stayed with
the Henry Adamses), but Marian complained that she could not read James’s
novels. The trouble with him, she said, “is not that he bites off more than he
can chew but that he chews more than he can bite.”
The
novels James wrote in his middle years — like Washington
Square, The Bostonians, and The
Princess Casamassima — were in parts brilliantly imagined, yet received
scant praise. For all their successful moments, they were somehow failures, if
measured against The Portrait of a Lady. The growing difficulty and obscurity of his
later fiction appear in retrospect as signs of the widening breach between high
and popular art that has characterized modern culture. The master novelist was
61 when in 1904 he finished the last novel he was to complete, The
Golden Bowl. (Two more were begun, but left unfinished. Their titles are
suggestive: The Ivory Tower and The Sense
of the Past.) The dozen years that remained of his life were spent revising
his works and preparing prefaces for what came to be known as the New York
Edition. Besides, he also looked back at his own beginnings in a series of
autobiographical works — A Small Boy and
Others, Notes of a Son and Brother,
and The Middle Years (which he could
not complete). The achievement of those years has not only shaped the terms of
James criticism but marked the twentieth century’s idea of the novel, of
literary criticism generally, and of the relation of the artist to his art.
The
small boy who appears in the opening chapters of Henry James’s memoirs,
“wandering and dawdling and gaping” as he rambles along the streets of old
New York, is at once the genesis of the future novelist and one of that
novelist’s most typical characters. Like many of the narratives James would
later write, the small boy’s own story is in one sense that of experience
missed. But at the same time, what came of that dawdling and gaping, was his
artistic gain. It nourished a keen gift of observation, a highly developed
pictorial talent that came out also in the wealth of pictorial analogies and
allusions characteristic of James’s novels. And these novels frequently deal
with artists as major characters, where the fate of the artist is somehow the
test of society.
The
“Master of nuance and scruple,” to repeat W. H. Auden’s phrase, is
generally regarded as a master of style. Carefully balanced statements full of
syntactical flourish, a gift for the precise word and ironic ambiguity, all in
seemingly perfect ease — those are the marks of his prose, even as, with old
age, it became increasingly prolix, oblique, verbose, indirect. Yet
surprisingly, even as the sentences sprawl further and further in the late
works, they become more colloquial, conversational. Part of the secret may be
that James for the last three novels, his biggest in all, used typists, and
often more than one, while he dictated. But there is more to that conversational
tone — and that is caught nicely by Edith Wharton in one of the finest
literary anecdotes I know of.
Edith
Wharton owned a motor car, and James liked to go on long rides with her. On one
occasion, they were gone all day and lost; she remembered him asking directions
from a passer-by in the town of Windsor. This is Wharton’s account of the
incident.
While I was hesitating and peering out into the darkness James
spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us.
“Wait a moment, my dear — I’ll ask him where we are”; and leaning out he
signalled to the spectator.
“My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little
nearer — so,” and as the old man came up: “My friend, to put it to you in
two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have
recently passed through Slough on our
way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of
departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if
you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street,
which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left
hand the turn down to the railway station.”
I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and
a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go
on: “In short” (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory
ramifications), “in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is
this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past
the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would
probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in
relation to . . .”
“Oh, please,” I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit
through another parenthesis, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”
“Ah —? The King’s Road? Just so!
Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in
relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”
“Ye’re
in it,” said the aged face at the window.
James
is a writer of class, and a very narrow class at that. His circles — his own
as well as those of his fictions — are described exemplarily by Gore Vidal in
the opening scene of his novel Empire
— itself an ironic remodeling of the opening scene of James’s The
Portrait of a Lady, where it says by way of introduction: “Under certain
circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated
to the ceremony known as afternoon tea” — especially if it is served in the
garden of a country house on a pleasant summer day. The setting of Vidal’s
novel is Surrenden Dering, a large manor in Kent, which Simon Cameron, the
retired Senator of Pennsylvania, has rented for the summer, for his large
family, and to entertain guests. Among the regular visitors were the family of
John Hay, the American Minister in London about to become Secretary of State
(the same John Hay who in 1875 had been editor of The Nation and sent James to Paris). Also present are the family of
Henry Cabot Lodge, majority leader in the Senate; Brooks and Henry Adams
(socially exclusive to the point of hysteria, but he relished that peculiar
company); and, of course, Henry James.
James
is most comfortable with fairly high society, and his true subject is displaced,
classless, innocent Americans with money, at sea in old Europe which, at the
beginning of his career, he saw as beguiling and dangerous and, at the end,
quite the reverse. James’s novels never leave those restrictions, no matter
where they are set — and they are literally set all over Europe, less
frequently in America. Europe was, for him, the familiar repository of tradition,
art, manners, civilization. It was equivalent to literature itself, and it made
possible his career. The American Scene,
an account of his 1904/05 visit to the United States, is clear evidence that
James would not have known what to do with America as fictional material.
Theodore Roosevelt, for one, did not approve of James’s expatriation and
called James “effete” and “a miserable little snob” — Gore Vidal is
certainly right when he says, “it takes one to know one.” The dislike was
mutual; James coined the appelation “Theodore Rex” for the most
active-minded of American presidents and called TR “the mere monstrous embodiment
of unprecedented resounding noise.”
Alfred
Kazin surely has Teddy Roosevelt’s expletive in mind when he says that James
“was a snob with a great purpose.” What he demanded for himself, and eventually
thought he had found in England, was a class, a style of life, the presentation
of which would produce its effect. Its complexity, he assured himself, would
answer to his deepest need as an artist: to bring out the hiddenness of personality. A leisured upper-class society provided
not only the surface that made for contrast with the secret soul but the
intrigue that exposed it.
The
Jameses were all exceedingly mental beings, far removed from actual society;
there was a heightened mental existence to daily life, an abnormal removal from
the “vulgar,” that made the Jameses strange to others and exceptional to
themselves. It radiated all too evidently from Henry James, Senior, who was a
belligerently independent religious philosopher and Swedenborgian, a utopian
socialist with a private income. Henry the father was known to be independent to
the point of eccentricity. His writings were generally considered unreadable.
William Dean Howells, whose father was also a Swedenborgian, wrote that “Mr.
Henry James has written a book called The
Secret of Swedenborg and has kept it.” George Bernard Shaw, conversely,
thought the father was the most gifted member of this remarkable family. He was
certainly the most influential, for he passed on even his neuroses.
Henry
Jr. and William — the one son America’s master novelist and the other its
most influential philosopher and psychologist — were not the only offspring
of Henry, Sr. There were two more brothers, Garth and Robertson (who struggled
painfully to establish themselves on their own), and a sister, Alice, an invalid
for much of her life. The high demands imposed by Henry, Sr., show in the forms
of psychological and spiritual breakdown he and his son William underwent.
William was over 30 when he broke away from home, and not until 1876, when he
was 34, did he settle into teaching at Harvard as a vocation, still a long way
from his first major publication. (That book, Principles
of Psychology, came out only in 1890. Important for our purposes here is
that William James focused on what he called “stream of consciousness,” an
expression that has since been widely used and abused in literary criticism.)
Henry
Sr. had been partly crippled as a boy and wore a wooden leg, having received
severe burns when he tried to stamp out a stable fire he and some playmates had
inadvertently set. His second son and namesake repeated the experience, in a
way, when as a young man of eighteen he suffered an injury trying to put out a
stable fire. He wrote of this “horrid” if “obscure hurt” in his
autobiography, where he associated it vaguely with the “huge comprehensive
ache” of the Civil War and his own failure to enlist. The evasive
circumlocutions with which he recalled the incident prompted speculation that he
had been wounded sexually; it seems more probable that he had somehow injured
his back — a slipped disk or something similar. (The sexual wound is
controversial, if we care for innuendoes. By some, James is regarded as
“aggressively celibate” and they point to his relation with Constance
Fenimore Woolson as evidence. Others — among them Gore Vidal — claim that
James was a closet homosexual who in his major phase let open the closet door
more and more widely.)
A
current joke identifies three different styles of Henry James and designates
them as follows: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender.
Similarly, James’s biography is often divided into three phases, of which the
first goes till about 1881, the year his first masterpiece, The
Portrait of a Lady, was published, or 1882, the year his father died and his
closest personal American connnections were severed. The second phase, “the
middle years,” covers the years until about 1895 (after the failure and
frustration of his play Guy Domville,
which was a flop booed off the stage mercilessly and ending his aspirations of
becoming a great dramatist). The third, from 1895 to the author’s death, is
termed the major phase, the period of his settling at Lamb House, Rye, in
Sussex, where he lived till his death. In those years he wrote and published
what are arguably his three major achievements as a novelist, The
Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The
Golden Bowl. He became a British subject in July, 1915 (it is said because
he resented American neutrality in World War I). In the following New Year
Honors, he was awarded the Order of Merit; and in February 1916, he died.
This
lecture wishes to focus on “the pre-modernist and proto-modernist James,”
that is, his career up to and including The
Portrait of a Lady. So I will do no more than cast short glimpses on his
later work but look closely at the early texts Henry James has to his name. For
a meaningful analysis, some biographical information is pertinent.
Henry
James was born on April 15, 1843, in a house just off Washington Square in New
York City. Apart from Albany, New York City is also the site of a good deal of
his youth; the location is significant as it functions rather prominently in
works like Washington Square and
“The Jolly Corner.”
Paternal
design provided for peripatetic phases in the early years. William and Henry
James spent about a third of their first eighteen years abroad, in various
European countries; in Henry’s own words, he had been “a hotel child” in
Europe. His schooling was equally irregular, eclectic, much of it coming from
private tutors or from time spent at private schools at Geneva, London, Paris,
Boulogne, and Bonn. He recalls foremost having by himself devoured “whole
libraries.”
In
1860, the Jameses made their home in Newport — the Rhode Island resort was in
those years perhaps the most fashionable place of residence in the U.S. and at
the same time the least American of towns. The stay was important for Henry, for
he established lasting friendships, for instance with Thomas Sargent Perry and
the painter John La Farge. Here he also encountered Minnie Temple, his cousin,
for whom he developed a great affection. James was a volunteer fireman in
Newport, in the autumn of 1861, when he suffered the injury that would cause so
much speculation.
Then
followed a few rather dilatory years at Harvard, ostensibly to study law, though
Henry studied in effect almost anything else but law. He was intent on taking up
a career in writing; few American authors were so assured of their choice of
vocation and so single-minded in pursuing their plan, though it must be said
that few American authors ever could afford to be so determined about their
ambitions regarding authorship. In 1864 Henry James received his degree and,
barely twenty-one, published his first story. “A Tragedy of Error” is a melodramatic
tale of adultery and misdirected murder bearing the imprint of his avid reading
in French romance.
The
magazine era after the Civil War gave James his great opportunity as a reporter
and practitioner of the new European-style fiction of manners — magazines like
The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s
Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s
Monthly, and Century had a
distinct middle-class audience whose moral standards and literary tastes editors
busily anticipated. The magazines welcomed especially James’s knowledge of
“foreign parts,” his special ability to write “transatlantic scetches.”
The
next few years witnessed a considerable outpour of stories, travel sketches, and
literary criticism — all forms in which James would continue to exercise his
talent for the remainder of his life. Appearing in such journals as The
North American Review, The Nation,
and the Atlantic — the last under
the sympathetic editorship of his friend William Dean Howells — these stories
and reviews reveal the influence of his generously eclectic reading in contemporary
American, English, and continental fiction; the critical voice is at once
sensitive, shrewd, and brashly opinionated — the voice of an ambitious young
man of letters, self-consciously cultivating and defining his art. The ambitions
were all the more surprising when contrasted with the passivity of his observer
characters. The ambitions occasionally gave rise to false airs of authority,
especially in his “book chat.” (Many of his early book reviews are uneven,
to put it mildly. Vidal claims with some justification that James was far too
young when doing the first book notices.)
Those
activities acquainted him with men like James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot
Norton (the joint editors of the North
American Review) and E.L. Godkin of The
Nation. In 1869/70 there followed a fourteen-month tour of Europe. In London
he met Ruskin, Dickens, Morris, and George Eliot; but the highlight of the tour
seems to have been Rome. There had been plans that Minnie Temple was to join him
in Italy; instead, he received word in March 1870 that, at age 24, Minnie had
died of tuberculosis of the lung. The letters responding to the news reveal
him to be deeply shocked. It is often asserted that Minnie Temple was the only
woman he ever loved truly. He certainly would redo her in his fictions —
most obviously as Milly Theale in The
Wings of the Dove.
The
visit to Rome was significant, not merely by the exclamations of his first
letters written there. He befriended the sculptor William Wetmore Story (he
would eventually write the official biography of Story), Matthew Arnold, and
Fanny Kemble (the famous actress and author of the remarkable Journal
of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839).
The visit to Italy inspired such tales as “At Isella” and “A Passionate
Pilgrim” and marked the beginning of James as a travel writer.
1875
was a year of decision. James published Roderick
Hudson, his first novel (which actually was his second, but Watch and Ward, published serially in 1871, did not come out as a
book until 1878, and is not included in the New York edition). Roderick
Hudson shows already some of the concerns that would be the preoccupations
and themes of much of the later fictions: the artist-hero torn between the
demands of his art and of “life”; the New England puritans intoxicated and
bewildered by their sensuous education in Europe. Roderick himself is a
promising but egotistical young sculptor, an American whose European adventures
conclude in a spectacular fatality. Torn between grandiose visions of
possibility and disgust at the limitations of his achievement, Roderick
undergoes a kind of spiritual collapse, ultimately plummeting to his death
during an Alpine storm. Such a theatrical exit would not occur in James’s
later fiction, even though melodrama would continue to exert a powerful hold on
his imagination.
1875
also saw the publication of two other firsts — the first volume of short
stories, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other
Tales, and the first volume of travel literature, Transatlantic
Sketches. In the fall of that year Henry James also decided to expatriate
himself and move to Europe. He took up residence in the Latin Quarter of
Paris, where he stayed for over a year before moving to London. Except for two
longer visits to the U.S. in 1881/82 and in 1883, he would spend the next thirty
years in Europe.
Once
he was settled in London, his social circle widened immeasurably. Any list of
names of newly-made acquaintances of that time would by needs be partial and
incomplete.
James in those days was a fussy bachelor expatriate, growing fat from too much
dining out; he seemed to meet and chat with everybody who was somebody, and he
proudly announced to an American friend in 1879 that he had “dined out
during the past winter 107 times.”
By
that year, Henry James had found access in London society; more than that, he
became one of its darlings. Bret Harte complained of the change that James
affected:
he “looks, acts, thinks like an Englishman and writes like an Englishman.”
Thomas W. Higginson of Boston noted at the same time, “Mr. James’s life has
been so far transatlantic that one hardly knows whether he would wish to be
counted as an American writer after all.”
More
to the point on the matter was Mrs. Henry Adams. Marian Hooper had known James
as a teenager in Newport and was friends with Harry and Willy when the James
family settled in Boston. On meeting James in London in 1879, she wrote her
father: “it is high time Harry James was ordered home by his family. He is
too good a fellow to be spoiled by injudicious old ladies in London ... He had
better go to Cheyenne and run a hog ranch.” (Hog ranch, Gore Vidal notes, is a
code word of the time denoting a bordello.)
When
explaining for himself why he had expatriated himself, James contended that it
was for artistic reasons. In his study of Hawthorne he asserted “that the
flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of
history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery
to set a writer in motion.” His complaint against America was not just that it
did not have any history; but that deficit entailed other deficiencies — as he
so famously put it in a catalogue of what America lacked.
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty,
no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors; nor old country
houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals,
nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great universities nor public schools
— no Oxford, no Eaton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no
pictures, no political activity, no sporting class — no Epsom nor Ascot!
The
first novel James wrote in England came out in 1877. Its title was simply The American. Doing the preface to the New York Edition of The
American in 1907, he was forced to admit that he had unwittingly turned the
first novel he had composed after settling in Europe into an American romance.
He was was surprised to see how “romantic” it was, how arbitrary and
unsupported he had made the tragedy of his American hero and French heroine.
“Romantic” meant, of course, that the narrative was grounded in the romance
conventions Hawthorne subscribed to.
The
line of The American would also be the
thread of The Portrait of a Lady.
Seduced by Europe, the innocent American awakens belatedly to the knowledge of a
secret past, to the discovery of sexual intrigue and betrayal. And Daisy
Miller would also be a variation of that innocent American abroad. Before I
go into The American, it is perhaps well to consider why the transatlantic
theme had gained special relevance for the generation of Howells, James, Adams,
and Twain. One important factor was the Civil War, the changes it entailed.
Before the war, Americans thought of themselves in a way as colonials who
embarked for Europe to receive the finishing touches of culture and education.
After the war, Americans traveled to Europe as tourists rather than as students.
The change is momentous; the different attitudes it entailed can perhaps best
be seen in Henry Adams’s reflections on Vienna. On his first visit to the city
in 1860 he took note that the city had the “thousand and one sights of a great
capital.” In 1901, it is “an improved — or inferior — Chicago,” merely
the copy of an American city and thus second-rate.
James
was more Europeanized than Adams (though their contemporaries, familiar with
Adams’s cutting English accent, probably would not have thought of making much
of that distinction between the two Henrys). In particular, James was weary of
what he regarded as American provincialism. Again and again he probed the
question, in novels as well as in such tales as “A Bundle of Letters,” “An
International Episode,” or “The Pupil.” Two groups of Americans are at the
center of interest: the “expatriates” who left America and are more or
less stranded in Europe; and the American Innocents traveling to Europe in
search of culture. The contrast between America and Europe is complex;
Europeanized
Americans are generally the source of evil in James’s novels, for Europe
is not only the place of culture, but also of corruption and decadence.
Those
sides of Europe become readily apparent in The
American. Its protagonist is named Christopher Newman; the telling name
and the heavy-handed play with it are all too obviously inspired by the
romance. (James would be more careful and exercise more restraint on that matter
in his later works.) When the story of Christopher Newman opens, he has
already made his millions, though it is never specified how, precisely, he
made them. Like Henry Sr.’s family, the Jamesian novel typically avoids any
direct engagement with business itself. The first scenes of the novel, then, are
full of affectionate irony at Newman’s expense, as the aesthetically
ignorant millionaire is hoodwinkled into vastly overpaying for a third-rate
copy of a painting in the Louvre. Newman’s principal transaction he
attempts in Paris is the buying of a wife; James’s representative American
proves at once vulgar and generous, credulous and honorable. The ending of the
novel is typically Jamesian: Newman is deprived of the woman he desires and is
granted the ambiguous triumph of renunciation when he abandons his chance to
seek revenge on the proud French family that would not want to have him as a son
in law. (Howells, for one, pleaded, while The
American was still being serialized, that the ending be changed to allow
for the marriage between Newman and Claire de Cintré. — Howells had a point
there, though I am not sure if he knew, as I will demonstrate in a moment.)
The
novel is finally a romance because of its very construction. James was so intent
on having Newman be, as he said, “ill-used” by the Bellegardes, that he
ignored the probable behavior of the French aristocrats, who would, in James’s
words, “positively have jumped” at marrying their daughter to so “rich and
easy” an American. He might also have argued that he inserted a bit of gothic
melodrama for the same end, for it is Newman’s discovery that Madame de
Bellegarde has secretly murdered her husband, and their daughter’s decision to
shut herself up in a convent, that transform the Bellegardes to the villains
of melodrama. Such shifts are not without their strain, but in its very mixture
of narrative modes, its simultaneous satire of and indulgence toward the hero, The
American anticipates some of James’s most mature achievements — even as
it is propelled by a good many mechanical contrivances and seems to be social
comment masquerading in allegorical fiction, or a melodrama of manners.
Before
I continue this survey of James’s early works, I want to draw your attention
to the fact that on the side James has produced a large body of writing that
comments on the novel, on individual authors (e.g., the famous study of
Hawthorne published in 1879), or on the art of fiction (also the title of a
collection
of critical essays published in 1888.) James is said to have transformed the
novel — and not only the novel in English — from something relatively loose
and miraculous to something relatively tight and predictable. He gave the novel
structure, design, a theoretical base — what he called “the coercive charm
of form.”
James’s
own wide acquaintance with the literature of his day continued to nourish both
his practice and his theory of narrative. To his avid reading of the great
mid-century novelists — Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot — as well as a host
of lesser writers on both sides of the Atlantic, he added a knowledge of the
French unusual among the Victorians; more than any of his contemporaries, he
brought theoretical sophistication to Anglo-American criticism of the novel. French
Poets and Novelists (1878), the first published collection of his reviews,
includes extended appraisals of George Sand, Balzac, and Turgenev. In the winter
of 1875/76 he had frequented the circle of realists and naturalists gathered
around Flaubert, Zola, and Edmond de Goncourt in Paris; and though he would
insist that the programs followed by those writers were to him too narrow
(especially Zola’s), he would strongly sympathize with their insistence on
their freedom to choose their subjects and with their seriousness about the
novelist’s vocation.
James
proclaimed that “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does
attempt to represent reality.” Plot was for him but the extension of
character.
The novel must show rather than tell — he was interested in why
people did as they did, rather than simply in what they did; motive was more important than deed. The observer
of the dinner table and the drawing room, the country house and the salon, the
library and the smoking room, James was driven, Richard Palmer Blackmur asserts,
to excesses of substantiation and renunciation and refinement (in
experience and morals and style). If I put Blackmur’s statement more
positively, I would say that James in his endless probing of character pushed
the novel from pre-modernism to modernism by turning the novel inward, from an
outward perspective to an inward one, and by focusing increasingly on a
character’s inner life. This transition begins to take its effect with The
Portrait of a Lady.
The
Europeans, the novel that came out in 1878, is something of an anomaly in
James’s canon. It reverses the usual trajectory of his international fiction
by sending the representatives of the Old World to invade the New, and it
resolves their comic entanglements in a quartet of marriages.
James’s
greatest popular success, Daisy Miller
appeared in 1879 and established his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic
and helped to make the American girl a celebrated cultural type. Yet oddly, Daisy
Miller, while the first commercially successful work of Henry James, was
also the cause that he lost much of his original popularity as supposedly it
offended the proprieties. For, so it was asserted, no “decent” American girl
would go about Rome unchaperoned, with a mere Italian — of the Latin lover
type, we would say these days, rehashing old stereotypes. Daisy had betrayed her
class, not her sex; and middle-class editors and readers would not forgive Henry
James for that.
The
story of “Daisy Miller” is simple. The central character is Mr.
Winterbourne,
a twenty-seven-year-old American who has long been residing in Geneva —
“studying” there, it says a little vaguely. Winterbourne thinks rightly that
his too-long absence from America has affected his ability of judging his
compatriots;
in his own words, he is “dishabituated to the American tone” by his long
stay abroad. He is highly respectable, prim, stiff, and cold. (His is a
telling name, of course, and it is also telling that in the version of 1878 he
is not given a first name; in the 1907 edition James is overdoing it when
christening him Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne.) Mr. Winterbourne is on
a visit to a hotel in Vevey, where he is puzzled by the appearance of Daisy
Miller, an American girl who seems to be of well-to-do background but as a
tourist from Schenectady, New York, seems also rather ignorant of the ways
of the world, of European social conventions in particular. Daisy is accompanied
by her mother and brother Randolph (a brat that is surely one of the more
memorable
boys that appear in large numbers in James’s fiction). The Millers altogether
lack worldliness, the social refinement of expatriate Americans. For one,
they treat their courier with undue familiarity. For another, Daisy moves about
Europe as though she were in the back yard of the parental house in Schenectady,
not on the fashionable terrace of a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva.
... Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon
the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to
perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself. There had not been
the slightest alteration in her charming complexion; she was evidently
neither offended nor fluttered. If she looked another way when he spoke to
her, and seemed not particularly to hear him, this was simply her habit, her
manner. Yet, as he talked a little more, and pointed out some of the objects of
interest in the view, with which she appeared quite unacquainted, she
gradually gave him more of the benefit of her glance; and then he saw that this
glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking. It was not, however, what would
have been called an immodest glance, for the young girl’s eyes were singularly
honest and fresh. They were wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterboume
had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman’s
various features—her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a
great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analysing
it; and as regards this young lady’s face he made several observations. It
was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was
eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it—very forgivingly—of a want
of finish. He thought it very possible that Master Randolph’s sister was a
coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet,
superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it
became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation. She told him
that they were going to Rome for the winter—she and her mother and Randolph.
She asked him if he was a ‘real American’; she wouldn’t have taken him
for one; he seemed more like a German—this was said after a little
hesitation, especially when he spoke. Winterbourne, laughing, answered that
he had met Germans who spoke like Americans; but that he had not, so far as he
remembered, met an American who spoke like a German.
Throughout
the novella — its full title is “Daisy Miller: A Study,” which James
himself
has termed “Nouvelle” — Daisy
(also a telling name, of course, for her real name is “Ann P. Miller”), this
daisy remains a type rather than developing into a full character. If she
lacks depth as a personality, that is the result of James’s method of
presentation;
it is hinted that her American background may be one cause, but the reader is
never given an insight into her character. The presentation is restricted, for
the most part, to Winterbourne’s views of her, or more precisely, to an
authorial narrator focusing on Winterbourne’s views of Daisy Miller. She is
the prototype of the innocent American — “mythically
innocent,” Leslie Fiedler declares her to be in Love and Death in the American Novel, where he takes note of the
misreadings
produced by contemporary readers, who saw in the novella “an outrage to
American girlhood.” “Daisy Miller: A Study” was first published in
England, not in the U.S., because the editor of Lippincott’s rejected it on moral grounds, but a pirated edition
sold 20,000 copies after the narrative was published by Sir Leslie Stephen in The
Cornhill Magazine. Daisy’s fundamental innocence is misunderstood also
in the story itself, and there the chief culprits are expatriate, Europeanized
Americans like Winterbourne’s aunt, Mrs. Costello, who thinks Daisy is
just infinitely “common” and “dreadful.” Winterbourne is also
guilty. At first he holds her to be well-meaning if naive, “wonderfully
pretty” though “completely uncultivated.” When he sees her “in the
garden, wandering about in the warm starlight, like an indolent sylph, and
swinging the largest fan he had ever beheld,” this implicitly erotic
description
reveals him to be smitten. He will not discourage Daisy when she commits a
clear breach of decorum by agreeing, after only half an hour’s acquaintance
with him, to accompany him to Chillon and inspect the castle. Yet Winterbourne
is caught in a curious contradiction: he wishes for a romantic entanglement
while at the same time he is looking for some evidence that will condemn
Daisy. She may be a flirt, but she is no coquette, even if he brands her as that
and thus marks her course toward destruction. Indeed, the case is finally
against Winterbourne — whose behavior led Daisy to believe that he was
interested
in her and then withdrew without telling her why. Instead, he watches her and
outwardly seems unmoved as she meets with her fate.
When
Winterbourne encounters Daisy again in Rome, he learns that she has offended
the sensibilities of the expatriate colony, or more precisely, their sense
of propriety and decency, when going about unchaperoned in the company of
Giovanelli, a young Italian. The assessment of some critics, who saw in Daisy
Miller “a sort of female Natty Bumppo,” is untenable; she may be open and
straightforward, but she is also immature, superficial, and inconsiderate. Her
affronting the expatriate community is foolhardy and goes too far. She will
not admit that the individual freedom of decision may be impeded by the
necessity to adapt oneself to conventions. She will not listen to those
warning her against going to the Capitol at night because that area was infested
with mosquitoes; malaria, the ominous
warning goes. Feeling rejected by the expatriate community, she gives in to a
self-destructive urge. She ignores the advice, and when she goes to the Capitol
at night, the bad airs take their effect. Daisy catches the Roman fever and dies
within a week.
(to be continued -- concluded next week)