Vol. 46 No. 16 · 15 August 2024
Just say it, Henry
Colin Burrow
James could never be accused of failing to mill experience to the very finest of its visible shards. For a novelist, at least for one with his delicacy of perception, that was a source of greatness. But for a reviser of a set of collected works it was, shall we say, a less than perfectly productive commercial attribute. The fine dust of Jamesian scruple repeatedly clogged the wheels of production of the New York Edition. He revised ‘with extreme minuteness’ and dictated most of the prefaces to his typist Theodora Bosanquet (who must have got the job at least partly because she sounds like one of James’s heroines). According to Theodora’s diary, by the time James got to work on the preface to The Golden Bowl in October 1908 he was bored and had ‘lost his spring for it’.
All of this history is meticulously set out by Oliver Herford in the excellent introduction to this hefty volume of collected prefaces, which is part of the never-to-be-too-much-praised Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James – the only fault of which is an excess of meticulousness and scruple. I wonder how many of the volume’s target readers really need to be given glosses on ‘downtown’ or ‘tongue in cheek’, for instance? But the notes that connect the themes and images of the prefaces to the fiction, the notebooks and (especially) to James’s reading in French drama and prose will be of immense use to all but the most completely indoctrinated readers of James. As a work of scholarship it is entirely admirable.
Whether it was a good idea to print the prefaces in a single volume is a moot point, since they were not designed by their author to be encountered in a block. Together they cast much light on what James thought of his own work, on the art of fiction, and on how towards the end of his life he thought about his earlier career. But the process of reading them one after another, without the intervening joys of the fiction, is a bit like being forced to eat a roll of linoleum thickly spread with jam (to make it a little more digestible), while being overseen by a nostalgic nanny who repeatedly attempts to recall the precise origins of each splodge of jam, and of the fruit from which it was, meticulously and with much boiling and concentration, originally confected. James described writing one of his shorter stories as akin to jam-making, from which it emerged ‘after boilings and reboilings of the contents of my small cauldron, after added pounds of salutary sugar, as numerous as those prescribed in the choicest recipe for the thickest jam’.
In the preface to The Golden Bowl he compares the act of revising his early works to the process of sprucing up a child to make the transition from nursery to drawing room. ‘I had rather viewed the reappearance of the first-born of my progeny ... as a descent of awkward infants from the nursery to the drawing room,’ the author-as-nanny declares. This required ‘the rapid flash of an anxious needle, the not imperceptible effect of a certain audible splash of soap-and-water; all in consideration of the searching radiance of drawing-room lamps as compared with nursery candles’.
The prefaces display all the mannerisms of James’s late style, which, as you chew your way through, begin quite quickly to gnaw at the gut like some terrible recycling of regurgitation. Adverbs, frequently misplaced (exquisitely, refinedly) for emphasis, come to sound like little more than pauses in the dictating voice, as James seeks, hesitatingly, to resist saying the obvious. He loved to put a familiar or vulgar phrase in inverted commas, as though to show he was above it, or that it wouldn’t quite ‘do’, and italicised the simplest of words as though that would make them carry the most complex of meanings. These mannerisms don’t always make for lucidity. Take this description (from the preface to The Ambassadors) of the way a story emerges into life, which dances adverbially around the point without ever quite making it: ‘It then is, essentially – it begins to be, though it may more or less obscurely lurk; so that the point is not in the least what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnably where to put one’s hand on it.’
Yoking ‘delightfully’ and ‘damnably’ together conveys something of an author’s frustrated sense that there is something out there that needs to be written down, but that the darn story just won’t quite come to hand, like a lost set of keys. Elsewhere James’s mannerisms can simply get in the way. He regarded The Ambassadors as his best novel. That opinion comes out in late James-speak sounding like this: ‘Fortunately thus I am able to estimate this as, frankly, quite the best “all round” of my productions.’
James wanted every sentence to be artful. What he could often forget, later in life, is that some sentences just need to say what they need to say. But the prefaces are by no means all mannerism and circumlocution. Some passages take you right inside the operations of the creative mind, or even a little beyond this world. A great instance comes in the preface to The American when James compares the writing of a novel to a tethered hot-air balloon ‘tied to the earth’ under which ‘we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination.’ We rise gradually into the air until the novelist imperceptibly cuts the cable that connects the balloon of fiction to the terrestrial world and his readers are suddenly all adrift: ‘The art of the romancer is, “for the fun of it”, insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.’ Even in this magnificent description of how fiction can float free from the world I’m not sure the inverted commas around ‘for the fun of it’ add much, except to suggest that James is above what is vulgarly called ‘fun’. The adverb ‘insidiously’ does, I suppose, remind us that the author is not necessarily our friend when he sets us adrift in the stratosphere, and we might be in for a bumpy ride up there.
Why do these features of James’s late style seem so much more irritating in the prefaces than in the late fiction? The main reason is that his style developed for a particular purpose which was not literary criticism. By the late phase of his career he was chiefly interested in the operations of consciousness. He wanted in particular to explore the discrepancy between what a person (regarded as a centre of consciousness in a novel) is able or willing to see, and what is actually happening. That is a deliberately flat-footed way of describing what the later novels are up to, of course. But it can be valuable, occasionally, to bring the hot-air balloon of James’s fiction back to earth. This is for two reasons. One is that a crudely terrestrial paraphrase of James can help you grasp what he’s on about. The other is that a paraphrase can help you understand why he chose not to put something in that flat-footed way, and so enables you to think about what gets lost when you do so.
Translate my description of what James’s later fiction is up to into (mildly parodic) Jamesian language by decking it with inverted commas and unnaturally emphasised adverbs and it becomes something subtly but significantly different: ‘He is interested in the gap between what a person (regarded as a “centre” of consciousness) “sees” and what is, actually, happening.’ Those irritating inverted commas might just look like fiddly intrusions, but they make a big difference. They suggest that we don’t know exactly what a ‘centre’ of consciousness is; that we don’t quite know what ‘seeing’ is; and that (actually) we don’t quite know what is ‘actually’ happening. Because if human reality (or ‘reality’) is indeed made up of a series of ‘centres’ of consciousness, each more or less deceived, then ‘reality’ really starts, burningly, to need inverted commas around it, and adverbs become an essential tool for distinguishing between different modes of experiencing that reality (you could experience it ‘really’, or ‘dully’ or ‘imperceptively’).
This multiplicity of human reality is evoked in a wonderful passage from the preface to The Portrait of a Lady:
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still piercable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other.
This passage wouldn’t encourage anyone to commission James to design a house, but it is an image of immense power: each person’s vision sears through a solid structure (and does so as an act of will) to create a multiplex panopticon of observation, each window in which is distinct from every other. It’s one of the moments in the prefaces when you sense not just any old master, but The Master himself at work. The human world may be one thing, or it may not be, but in fiction it is certainly seen from many distinct points of view.
The big difference between the prefaces at their less good moments and the later fiction, though, is that in the novels things happen against which it’s possible to calibrate the characters’ perceptions of them. The ‘windows’ within the novels all look out on something, even if each of them sees only an aspect of it. The centres of consciousness in the later fiction (that is, the people through whose minds experience is represented) will typically encounter something that pulls them up short. It might be sickness and death, as in The Wings of the Dove, but it’s often sexual infidelity or deceit, or the mingling of the two which is characteristic of the nastier sort of human being.
Imagine a typical Jamesian plot (or imbroglio as he preferred to call it, ‘plot’ being a ‘nefarious name’): an innocent American comes to Europe and is befriended by a Europeanised American and an older European woman (almost certainly a contessa or a princess, but titles are optional). The innocent American falls half or three-quarters in love with the contessa, and/or a shade homoerotically with the Europeanised American, or with the relationship between the two. Much conversation follows, and much ‘flirtation’ as we might be tempted to call it, in which the American is ‘seduced’ (culturally) by his hosts and maybe wants to be ‘seduced’ (physically) by the ambient culture. (Are you noticing all these adverbs and inverted commas, by the way?) Then the American sees the contessa with the Europeanised American arm in arm in the park or, perhaps, in the Soane Museum, when they have said they will be elsewhere. And at this point the climax of the Jamesian imbroglio occurs, a point of recognition at which a more vulgar author might have the Innocent American exclaim: ‘OMG. They’re fucking?’ At that moment the ‘centre’ does not hold, realising as it does that what it had admiringly thought to be the case is, ‘really’, not the case at all. James talks of the ‘original grossness of readers’. But there is an ‘original grossness’ at the heart of most of his exquisite fables: there is a thing going on, and probably a dirty thing, that the people in the fiction won’t or can’t see because their window is smeary or they are looking in the wrong direction.
People who are impatient with the late James may think his view of human reality is over-refined and unreal. It isn’t. It is a version of the world in which we live, although James’s hot-air balloon may sometimes take us so high above it that the air is starting to get a little thin: we occupy a delicate weave of emotions and beliefs that half beguiles us into thinking of ourselves as its centre, until something is seen or something happens which tells us, irrefutably, that we are not. We live in a state of bewilderment, even though we do not want to acknowledge it, and indeed may not always know it.
James’s late style evolved along with this multiplex vision of human reality, and it is not so much a vehicle for that vision as its enabling condition. That fusion of style and content was a great event in the literary history of the early 20th century. But this doesn’t mean James’s late style works well everywhere. Sometimes in the prefaces it just seems the wrong way of writing for the medium.
But only sometimes. The best moments in the prefaces are not just about the fiction but share with the later fiction a fascination with the dirty things that they are trying not to talk about, or from which they may even be flinching or recoiling. This is very apparent in the prefaces to the earlier works, in which James was looking back at himself across a gap of about thirty years. He wanted his early writings to be more like his later works than they were. So these prefaces often avoid talking in any direct way about the main ‘events’ of the early fiction. The preface to The Princess Casamassima, for instance, nowhere says that the novel is about murder, suicide and political assassination, but talks about it as though it were just another Jamesian fiction of the mind. Of The Spoils of Poynton (which is about a contested inheritance) he confesses that it is a bit grubby, deep down, and is about mere things: ‘Yes, it is a story of cabinets and chairs and tables; they formed the bone of contention, but what would merely “become” of them, magnificently passive, seemed to represent a comparatively vulgar issue.’ The ‘vulgar issue’ of cabinets and chairs is rapidly shunted aside in order to present the novel (first published in 1896) as belonging to the late phase of James’s work, and as concentrating not on things but on the experiences around things.
He is also a bit embarrassed in the prefaces to the earlier works about how often he wrote about innocent Americans exposed to European corruption. This can result in horrible circumlocutory tangles, rather than just a simple statement along the lines of ‘yes, I was a bit stuck in a rut at that point.’ Take a sentence like this one (brace yourself) from the preface to Lady Barbarina: ‘What I was clearly to be treated to by fate – with the early-taken ply I have already elsewhere glanced at – was (should I have the intelligence to embrace it) some considerable occasion to appreciate the mixture of manners.’ Got that? What he means is that he was at that point interested in the mixture of manners between Americans and Europeans and was gifted a tale on that theme. Just say it, Henry.
Avoiding the thing, the real, the crude, the cabinets and chairs, the affairs, or the ugly simplicities of Anglo-European exchanges is one of the things going on in the prefaces. But like the fiction they’re at their most interesting when they do admit a grubby element of the real. There’s a beautiful instance of this in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady when James says he was living in Venice while he wrote most of the novel, and that it didn’t help to be in the midst of so much beauty. He says that the ‘romantic and historic sites’ of Italy ‘offer the artist a questionable aid to concentration’, which is true though bland. But he goes on:
They are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a little, he feels, while thus yearning towards them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who has given him the wrong change.
This is revealing about James in many ways: the ‘lame phrase’ is not just a thing to be avoided, but a kind of crime: it’s like a peddler who cons you out of a few coins. The writer wants to punish the peddler who has palmed him off with a bad phrase and find a good one instead, but the beauty of Venice can’t help him do that. Its majesty just distracts. That doesn’t simply tell us that James devoted a lot of energy (maybe at times too much energy) to avoiding a ‘lame phrase’. It’s also a sort of drama about a walk around the alleys and backstreets of Venice, in which you’re trying to make a piece of writing come out right, but people with grubby motives lurk ready to rip you off in the very shadow of the Santa Maria della Salute. It has that Jamesian tang of dirty reality within a world of beauty.
In the prefaces James often recalls the origins of his fictions in events he’s heard about or places he’s visited. The words he uses for these origins are ‘seeds’ or ‘germs’. Often the ‘germ’ is a remark by a friend about, say, a divorced couple whose child is being shunted between them. James insists that the ideal ‘germ’ is a very short version of a story or a bare set of relationships. Intrusive friends might try to hand him an entire developed plot, but that would not function as a ‘seed’ because it had already germinated: ‘If one is given a hint at all designedly one is sure to be given too much.’
One reason James talks about the ‘germs’ of fiction in this way is proprietorial: he wasn’t about to confess that he pinched ideas from friends, and certainly would not wish to be thought of as having written libellous representations of the adulteries or bad parenting of identifiable people. The ‘germ’ needs to be tiny so that it can be nurtured in the marvellously fertile nursery of the author’s mind and then blossom into a fiction under his care. But a further reason he talks of the ‘germ’ of a fiction is that a seed might look just like a speck of dirt, from which nothing could be expected to grow, and a ‘germ’ can of course also be something that infects you and makes you ill. James describes the ‘germ’ of The Spoils of Poynton as a ‘virus of suggestion’ and as giving him ‘the prick of inoculation’. The ‘germ’ – a minute quantity of infective alien matter – is at once a disease and its cure, rooted in the ‘real’ in the sense of something a bit grimy or even diseased.
So the ‘germ’ of What Maisie Knew is described as an ‘accidental mention’ of ‘some luckless child of a divorced couple’. ‘I am not sure its possibility of interest would so much have appealed to me,’ James says, ‘had I not soon felt that the ugly facts, so stated or conceived, by no means constituted the whole appeal.’ The ‘ugly facts’ are not enough in themselves, but they are an essential starting point; they are the real, the infecting germ, from which James wants to grow a centre of consciousness (in this case a child who ‘knows’ little about the schemes and love affairs going on around her).
The preface to What Maisie Knew also includes the telling remark that ‘the effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in the face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.’ Then, after having placed this extraordinary stress on the repeated adverb ‘really’, which it is tempting to see as just another instance of the mannerisms of his late style, he says: ‘The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities.’ ‘Really’ to see the world is to see it as the thing or the ‘ugly fact’ that produces muddlement; and human reality is the muddled state, which multiplies one reality into plural ‘realities’. In that preface James (who was usually careful over such things) misdated What Maisie Knew to 1907 rather than 1897. He wanted to see this novel about a child tangled up in the love affairs of her parents, the ‘reality’ of which she can barely perceive, as belonging to his later phase, in which being in a state of muddlement and only partially able to see the ‘ugly facts’ was the generative principle not only of fiction but of one of the most instantly recognisable styles in the 20th century.
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