Fame & Folly (17 page)

Yet one of the great avatars of modernism remains immune to this curious attrition: in the ripened Henry James, and in him almost alone, the sensation of mysteriousness does not attenuate; it thickens. As the years accumulate, James becomes, more and more compellingly our contemporary, our urgency.

The author of Daisy
Miller
(1878), and of
Washington Square
(1880), and even of
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881), was a nineteenth-century writer of felicitous nuance and breadth. The earlier stories and novels are meant to be rooms with a view, thrown open to the light. If mysteries are gathered there, they are gathered to be dispelled. The entanglements of human nature, buffeted by accident, contingency, mistaken judgment, the jarrings of the social web, the devisings of the sly or the cruel, are in any event finally transparent, rational. Isabel Archer’s long meditation, in
The Portrait of a Lady
, on her marriage to Gilbert Osmond leads her to the unraveling—the clarification—of her predicament. “They were strangely married,” she perceives, “and it was a horrible life”—directly seen, understood, stated, in the manner of the fiction of realism. Like Catherine Sloper, the heroine of
Washington Square
, Isabel has known too little and now knows more. For the James of this mainly realist period, it is almost never a case of knowing too much.

After 1895, the veil thickens. Probably the most celebrated example of a darkening texture is the interpretive history of “The Turn of the Screw” (1898); what was once read wholly in the light of its surfaces can no longer sustain the innocence, or the obtuseness, of its original environment. The tale’s first readers, and James himself, regarded this narrative of a frightened governess and her unusual young charges as primarily a ghost story, suitably shadowed in eerie riddle. In his Notebook sketch of 1895, James speaks of “apparitions,” of “evil presences,” of hauntings and their “strangely gruesome effect.” In the Preface to “The Turn of the Screw” for the 1906 New York Edition of his work, he appears light-handedly to toss out the most conventional of these rumblings. “I cast my lot with pure romance,” he insists, and calls “this so full-blown flower of high fancy” a “fairy-tale pure and simple.” But also, and contradictorily, he assigns his apparitions “the dire
duty of causing the situation to reek with the air of Evil,” the specifications of which James admits he has left it to the reader to supply. “Make him
think
the evil, make him think it for himself,” he asserts.

Since then, under the tutelage of Freud, later readers
have
thought it for themselves, and have named, on James’s behalf, a type of horror he could not or would not have brought to his lips. What was implicit in James became overt in Freud. With time, and with renewed critical speculation, James’s ghosts in “The Turn of the Screw” have swollen into the even more hideous menace of eros corrupted, including the forbidden, or hidden, sexuality of children. Whether James might have conceived explicitly of these images and hints of molestation is beside the point. There is, he contends in the Preface, “from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation,” and evil’s particulars are, on purpose, “positively all blanks,” the better to delegate the imagination of terror to anyone but the author himself. Still, is it likely that the privacy of James’s own imagination can be said to hold positively all blanks? Imagination works through exactitudes of detail, not through the abdication of its own authority. Whatever it was James thought, he thought something. Or, rather, he felt something: that gauzy wing that brushes the very pit of the mind even as the mind declares nothing is there. James is one of that handful of literary proto-inventors—ingenious intuiters—of the unconscious; it is the chief reason we count him among the imperial moderns.

The pivotal truth about the later Henry James is not that he chooses to tell too little—that now and then he deliberately fires blanks—but that he knows too much, and much more than we, or he, can possibly take in. It is as if the inklings, inferences, and mystifications he releases in his maturest fictions (little by little, like those medicinal pellets that themselves contain tinier pellets) await an undiscovered science to meet and articulate them. The Freud we already have may be insufficient to the James who, after 1895, became the recondite conjurer whom the author of
Daisy Miller
might not have recognized as himself.

In the fiction of realism—in the Jamesian tale before the 1895
crux—knowledge is the measure of what can be rationally ascertained, and it is almost never a case of knowing too much—i.e., of a knowledge beyond the reach not only of a narrative’s dramatis personae but also of the author himself. The masterworks of modernism, however, nearly always point to something far more subterranean than simple ascertainment.
The Castle
, for example, appears to know more than Kafka himself knows—more about its own matter and mood, more about its remonstrances and motives, more about the thread of Kafka’s mind. In the same way, “The Turn of the Screw” and other Jamesian works of this period and afterward—
The Awkward Age
above all, as we shall see—vibrate with cognitions that are ultimately not submissive to their creator. It is as if from this time forward, James will write nothing but ghost stories—with the ghosts, those shadows of the unconscious, at the controls. Joyce in particular sought to delineate whatever demons beat below, to bring them into the light of day—to explain them by playing them out, to incarnate them in recognizable forms, or (as in
Finnegans Wake
) to re-incubate them in the cauldron of language. This was what the modernists did, and it is because they succeeded so well in teaching us about the presence of the unconscious that we find them more and more accessible today. But the later James—like Kafka, a writer seemingly as different from James as it is possible to be—is overridden by a strangeness that is beyond his capacity to domesticate or explicate. James, like Kafka, enters mazes and penetrates into the vortex of spirals; and, again like Kafka, the ghost in the vortex sometimes wears his own face.

The 1895 crux, as I have called it, was James’s descent into failure and public humiliation. The story of that humiliation—a type of exposure that damaged James perhaps lastingly, and certainly darkened his perspectives—is brilliantly told in Leon Edel’s consummate biography: a biography so psychologically discriminating that it has drawn generations of its readers into a powerful but curious sympathy with James. Curious, because an admirable genius is not nearly the same as a sympathetic one, an instruction James himself gives us in, to choose only two, Hugh Vereker and Henry St. George, the literary luminaries of a pair of tales (“The
Figure in the Carpet,” “The Lesson of the Master”) bent on revealing the arrogance of art. Yet to approach James through Edel is, if not practically to fall in love with James, to feel the exhilarations of genius virtually without flaw. James, for Edel, is sympathetic and more; he is unfailingly and heroically civilized, selfless for art, gifted with an acuity of insight bordering on omniscience. He is—in James’s own celebrated words—one of those upon whom nothing is lost. Edel’s is a portrait that breaks through the frame of immaculate scholarship into generous devotion, a devotion that in the end turns on a poignant theory of James’s fragility of temperament—and never so much as on the night of January 5, 1895, when James’s play,
Guy Domville
, opening that evening, was jeered at and its author hissed.

Too nervous to sit through the rise of the curtain, James had gone down the street to attend Oscar Wilde’s new work,
An Ideal Husband
. When it was over, scorning Wilde as puerile even as he made his way out through a wash of delighted applause, he returned to
Guy Domville
just as the closing lines were being spoken. Though the clapping that followed was perilously mixed with catcalls, the theater manager, misjudging, brought James out on the stage. “All the forces of civilization in the house,” James described it afterward, “waged a battle of the most gallant, prolonged and sustained applause with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs, whose roars (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo) were only exacerbated by the conflict.” George Bernard Shaw, who was in the audience as a reviewer, wrote of the “handful of rowdies” and “dunces” who sent out “a derisive howl from the gallery.” James stumbled off the stage and walked home alone, brooding on “the most horrible hours of my life.” The catastrophe of public rejection, James’s biographer concludes, “struck at the very heart of his self-esteem, his pride and sovereignty as an artist.”

It
had
been a sovereignty. In fact it had been an impregnability. He would not have been so damaged had he not had so far to fall. Literary embarrassment, to be sure, was familiar enough to James; it depressed him, as he grew older, that his novels were no longer widely read, and that his sales were often distressingly
puny. But the assault on
amour-propre
that rocked James in the wake of his theater debacle was something else. It was a vulnerability as unprecedented as it was real—feelings of jeopardy, the first faint cracks of existential dread, the self’s enfeeblement. He was unused to any of that; he had never been fragile, he had never been without the confidence of the self-assured artist, he had never been mistrustful. What he had been all along was magisterial. Admirers of Leon Edel’s James may be misled by Edel’s tenderness into imagining that some psychological frailty in James himself is what solicits that tenderness—but sovereign writers are not commonly both artistically vulnerable
and
sovereign.

And James’s record of sovereignty—of tough impregnability—was long. He was fifty-two when the rowdies hissed him; he was twenty-one when he began publishing his Olympian reviews. To read these early essays is to dispel any notion of endemic hesitancy or perplexity. In 1866, at twenty-three, reviewing a translation of Epictetus, he speculates on the character of this philosopher of Stoicism with oracular force: “He must have been a wholesome spectacle in that diseased age, this free-thinking, plain-speaking old man, a slave and a cripple, sturdily scornful of idleness, luxury, timidity, false philosophy, and all power and pride of place, and sternly reverent of purity, temperance, and piety,—one of the few upright figures in the general decline.” This has the tone not simply of a prodigy of letters, but of large command, of one who knows the completeness of his powers. If anything can be said to be implicit in such a voice, it is the certainty of success; success on its own terms—those terms being the highest imaginable exchange between an elite artist and his elite readership. And the earlier these strenuous yet ultimately serene expectations can be established, the stronger the shield against vulnerability; mastery in youth arms one for life.

Or nearly so. On the night of January 5, 1895, when the virtuoso’s offering was received like a fizzled vaudeville turn, the progress of unquestioned fame came to a halt. What was delicacy, what was wit, what was ardor, what was scrupulous insight? What, in brief, was the struggle for art if its object could be so readily blown away and trodden on? James might wrestle with
these terrors till dawn, like that other Jacob, but his antagonist was more likely a messenger from Beelzebub than an angel of the Lord. Failure was an ambush, and the shock of it led him into an inescapable darkness.

He emerged from it—if he ever emerged from it at all—a different kind of writer. Defensively, he began to see in doubles. There was drama, and there was theater. And by venturing into the theater, he had to live up to—or down to—the theater’s standards and assumptions. “I may have been meant for the Drama—God knows!—but I certainly wasn’t meant for the Theater,” he complained. And another time: “Forget not that you write for the stupid—that is, that your maximum of refinement must meet the minimum of intelligence of the audience—the intelligence, in other words, of the biggest ass it may contain. It is a most unholy trade!” Yet in 1875, twenty years before the
Guy Domville
calamity, he exalted what had then seemed the holiest of trades, one that “makes a demand upon an artist’s rarest gifts.” “To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws,” he reflected, “is always a strong man’s highest ideal of success.” In 1881 he confided to his journal that “beginning to work for the stage” was “the most cherished of my projects.”

The drama’s attraction—its seductiveness—had its origin in childhood theater-going; the James children were introduced first to the New York stage, and then to the playhouses of London and Paris, of which they became habitués. But the idea of the
scene
—a passion for structure, trajectory, and revelation that possessed James all his life—broke on him from still another early source: the transforming ecstasy of a single word. On a summer night in 1854, in the young Henry’s presence, a small cousin his own age (he was then eleven) was admonished by her father that it was time to go to bed, and ran crying to her mother for a reprieve. “Come now, my dear; don’t make a scene—I
insist
on your not making a scene,” the mother reproved, and at that moment James, rapturously taking in the sweep of the phrase, fell irrevocably in love with the “witchcraft,” as he called it, of the scene’s plenitude and allure. “The expression, so vivid, so portentous,” he said in old age, “was one I had never heard—it had never been addressed
to us at home.… Life at these intensities clearly became ‘scenes’; but the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose.”

That, however, was the illumination of drama, not the actuality of theater managers, actors, audiences. The ideal of the stage—as a making, a kneading, a medium wholly subject to the artist’s will—had become infected by its exterior mechanisms. “The dramatic form,” he wrote in 1882, “seems to me the most beautiful thing possible; the misery of the thing is that the baseness of the English-speaking stage affords no setting for it.” By 1886 he was driven to confess that the “very dear dream … had faded away,” and that he now thought “less highly of the drama, as a form, a vehicle, than I did—compared with the novel which can do and say so much more.” In James’s novel of the theater,
The Tragic Muse
, begun in 1888, a character bursts out, “What crudity compared to what the novelist does!” And in 1894, in a letter to his brother William, James speculated that “unless the victory and the spoils have not … become more proportionate than hitherto to the humiliations and vulgarities and disgusts, all the dishonor and chronic insult,” he intended “to ‘chuck’ the whole intolerable experiment and return to more elevated and independent courses. I have come to
hate
the whole theatrical subject.”