Collected Essays (6 page)

It is tempting to reinforce this point – James’s belief in super-natural evil – with
The Turn of the Screw.
Here in the two evil spirits – Peter Quint, the dead valet, with his ginger hair and his little whiskers and his air of an actor and ‘his white face of damnation’, and Miss Jessel ‘dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty, and her unutterable woe’ – is the explicit breath of Hell. They declare themselves in every attitude and glance, with everything but voice, to be suffering the torments of the damned, the torments which they intend the two children to share. It is tempting to point to the scene of Miles’s confession, which frees him from the possession of Peter Quint. But James himself has uttered too clear a warning. The story is, in his own words, ‘a fairy-tale pure and simple’, something seasonable for Christmas, ‘a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught . . . the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious’. So a valuable ally must be relinquished, not without a mental reservation that no one by mere calculation could have made the situation so ‘reek with the air of Evil’ and amazement that such a story should have been thought seasonable for Christmas.

Hell and Purgatory. James came very close to a direct statement of his belief in both of these. What personal experience of treachery and death stood between the author of
Washington Square
and
The Bostonians
and the author of
The Wings of the Dove
and
The Golden Bowl
is not known. The younger author might have developed into the gentle urbane social critic of Mr MacCarthy’s imagination, the latter writer is only just prevented from being as explicitly religious as Dostoevsky by the fact that neither a philosophy nor a creed ever emerged from his religious sense. His religion was always a mirror of his experience. Experience taught him to believe in supernatural evil, but not in supernatural good. Milly Theale is all human; her courage has not the supernatural support which holds Kate Croy and Charlotte Stant in a strong coil. The rage of personality is all the devil’s. The good and the beautiful meet betrayal with patience and forgiveness, but without sublimity, and their death is at best a guarantee of no more pain. Ralph Touchett dying at Gardencourt only offers himself the consolation that pain is passing. ‘I don’t know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out.’

It would be wrong to leave the impression that James’s religious sense ever brought him nearer than hailing distance to an organized system, even to a system organized by himself. The organizing ability exhausted itself in his father and elder brother. James never tried to state a philosophy and this reluctance to trespass outside his art may have led Mr MacCarthy astray. But no one, with the example of Hardy before them, can deny that James was right. The novelist depends preponderantly on his personal experience, the philosopher on correlating the experience of others, and the novelist’s philosophy will always be a little lop-sided. There is much in common between the pessimism of Hardy and of James; both had a stronger belief in supernatural evil than in supernatural good, and if James had, like Hardy, tried to systematize his ideas, his novels too would have lurched with the same one-sided gait. They retain their beautiful symmetry at a price, the price which Turgenev paid and Dostoevsky refused to pay, the price of refraining from adding to the novelist’s distinction that of a philosopher or a religious teacher of the second rank.

1933

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

‘T
HE
conception of a certain young lady affronting her destiny’ – that is how Henry James described the subject of this book, for which he felt, next to
The Ambassadors
, the greatest personal tenderness. In his wonderful preface (for no other book in the collected edition of his works did he write a preface so rich in revelations and memories) he compares
The Portrait of a Lady
several times to a building, and it is as a great, leisurely built cathedral that one thinks of it, with immense smooth pillars, side-chapels and aisles, and a dark crypt where Ralph Touchett lies in marble like a crusader with his feet crossed to show that he has seen the Holy Land; sometimes, indeed, it may seem to us too ample a shrine for one portrait until we remember that this master-craftsman always has his reasons: those huge pillars are required to bear the weight of Time (that dark backward and abysm that is the novelist’s abiding problem): the succession of side-chapels are all designed to cast their particular light upon the high altar: no vista is without its ambiguous purpose. The whole building, indeed, is a triumph of architectural planning: the prentice hand which had already produced some works –
Roderick Hudson
and
The American
– impressive if clumsy, and others –
The Europeans
and
Washington Square
– graceful if slight, had at last learnt the whole secret of planning for permanence. And the subject? ‘A certain young woman affronting her destiny.’ Does it perhaps still, at first thought, seem a little inadequate?

The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the destiny, and about the destiny Henry James has in his preface nothing to tell us. He is always something of a conjurer in these prefaces; he seems ready to disclose everything – the source of his story: the technique of its writing: even the room in which he settles down to work and the noises of the street outside. Sometimes he blinds the reader with a bold sleight of hand, calling, for example,
The Turn of the Screw
‘a fairy-tale pure and simple’. We must always remain on our guard while reading these prefaces, for at a certain level no writer has really disclosed less.

The plot in the case of this novel is far from being an original one: it is as if James, looking round for the events which were to bring his young woman, Isabel Archer, into play, had taken the first to hand: a fortune-hunter, the fortune-hunter’s unscrupulous mistress, and a young American heiress caught in the meshes of a loveless marriage. (He was to use almost identically the same plot but with deeper implications and more elaborate undertones in
The Wings of the Dove.
) We can almost see the young James laying down some popular three-decker of the period in his Roman or Venetian lodgings and wondering, ‘What could I do with even that story?’ For a plot after all is only the machinery – the machinery which will show the young woman (what young woman?) affronting her destiny (but what destiny?). In his preface, apparently so revealing, James has no answer to these questions. Nor is there anything there which will help us to guess what element it was in the melodramatic plot that attracted the young writer at this moment when he came first into his full powers as a novelist, and again years later when as an old man he set to work to crown his career with the three poetic masterpieces,
The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors
, and
The Golden Bowl.

The first question is the least important and we have the answer in Isabel Archer’s relationship to Milly Theale in
The Wings of the Dove.
It is not only their predicament which is the same, or nearly so (Milly’s fortune-hunter, Merton Densher, was enriched by the later James with a conscience, a depth of character, a dignity in his corruption that Gilbert Osmond lacks: indeed in the later book it is the fortune-hunter who steals the tragedy, for Milly dies and it is the living whom we pity): the two women are identical. Milly Theale, if it had not been for her fatal sickness, would have affronted the same destiny and met the same fate as Isabel Archer: the courage, the generosity, the confidence and inexperience belong to the same character, and James has disclosed to us the source of the later portrait – his young and much-loved cousin Mary Temple who died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. This girl of infinite potentiality, whose gay sad troubled letters can be read in
Notes of a Son and Brother
, haunted his memory like a legend; it was as if her image stood for everything that had been graceful, charming, happy in youth – ‘the whole world of the old New York, that of the earlier dancing years’ – everything that was to be betrayed by life. We have only to compare these pages of his autobiography, full of air and space and light, in which the figures of the son and brother, the Albany uncles, the beloved cousin, move like the pastoral figures in a Poussin landscape, with his description of America when he revisited the States in his middle age, to see how far he had travelled, how life had closed in. In his fiction he travelled even farther. In his magnificent last short story, Brydon, the returned expatriate, finds his old New York house haunted by the ghost of himself, the self he would have become if he had remained in America. At that moment one remembers what James also remembered: ‘the springtime of ‘65 as it breathed through Denton streets’, the summer twilight sailing back from Newport, Mary Temple.

In none of the company was the note so clear as in this rarest, though at the same time symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural at more points and about more things, with a greater sense of freedom and ease and reach of horizon than any of the others dreamed of. They had that way, delightfully, with the small, after all, and the common matters – while she had it with those too, but with the great and rare ones over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very figure and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as magnanimously far spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely fixed, as her splendid shifting sensibility, moral, personal, nervous and having at once such noble flights and such touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of indifference and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She was really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme case of a taste for life as life, as personal living, of an endlessly active and yet somehow a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it; something that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and charming tossed head, with long and yet almost sliding steps and a large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the very muse or amateur priestess of rash speculation.

Even if we had not James’s own word for it, we could never doubt that here is the source: the fork of his imagination was struck and went on sounding. Mary Temple, of course, never affronted her destiny: she was betrayed quite simply by her body, and James uses words of her that he could as well have used of Milly Theale dying in her Venetian palace – ‘death at the last was dreadful to her; she would have given anything to live’, but isn’t it significant that whenever an imaginary future is conceived for this brave spontaneous young woman it always ends in betrayal? Milly Theale escapes from her betrayal simply by dying; Isabel Archer, tied for life to Gilbert Osmond – that precious vulgarian, cold as a fishmonger’s slab – is deserted even by her creator. For how are we to understand the ambiguity of the closing pages when Isabel’s friend, Henrietta Stackpole, tries to comfort the faithful and despairing ‘follower’ (this word surely best describes Caspar Goodwood’s relationship to Isabel)?

‘Look here, Mr Goodwood,’ she said, ‘just you wait!’

On which he looked up at her – but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.

It is as if James, too, were handing his more casual readers the key to patience, while at the same time asserting between the lines that there is no way out of the inevitable betrayal except the way that Milly Theale and Mary Temple took involuntarily. There is no possibility of a happy ending: this is surely what James always tells us, not with the despairing larger-than-life gesture of a romantic novelist but with a kind of bitter precision. He presents us with a theorem, but it is we who have to work out the meaning of
x
and discover that
x
equals no-way-out. It is part of the permanent fascination of his style that he never does all the work for us, and there will always be careless mathematicians prepared to argue the meaning of that other ambiguous ending, when Merton Densher, having gained a fortune with Milly Theale’s death, is left alone with his mistress, Kate Croy, who had planned it all, just as Mme Merle had planned Isabel’s betrayal.

‘He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: ‘I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.’

‘As we were?’

‘As we were.’

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. ‘We shall never be again as we were!’

Some of James’s critics have preferred to ignore the real destiny of his characters, and they can produce many of his false revealing statements to support them; he has been multitudinously discussed as a social novelist primarily concerned with the international scene, with the impact of the Old World on the New. It is true the innocent figure is nearly always American (Roderick Hudson, Newman, Isabel and Milly, Maggie Verver and her father), but the corrupted characters – the vehicles for a sense of evil unsurpassed by the theological novelists of our day, M. Mauriac or M. Bernanos – are also American: Mme Merle, Gilbert Osmond, Kate Croy, Merton Densher, Charlotte Stant. His characters are mainly American, simply because James himself was American.

No, it was only on the superficial level of plot, one feels, that James was interested in the American visitor; what deeply interested him, what was indeed his ruling passion, was the idea of treachery, the ‘Judas complex’. In a very early novel which he never reprinted,
Watch and Ward
, James dealt with the blackmailer, the man enabled to betray because of his intimate knowledge. As he proceeded in his career he shed the more obvious melodramatic trappings of betrayal, and in
The Portrait of a Lady
, melodrama is at the point of vanishing. What was to follow was only to be the turning of the screw. Isabel Archer was betrayed by little more than an acquaintance; Milly Theale by her dearest friend; until we reach the complicated culmination of treacheries in
The Golden Bowl.
But how many turns and twists of betrayal we could follow, had we space and time, between
Watch and Ward
and that grand climax!