Why Read the Classics? (24 page)

In this his most famous short story, the protagonist is the little town of Hadleyburg, ‘honest, narrow, self-righteous, and stingy’. Its nineteen most respected notables form a microcosm of the entire citizenry, and these nineteen in turn are embodied by Mr Edward Richards and his wife, the couple whom we follow in their inner changes or rather in the revelation of their real selves to themselves. All the rest of the population acts as a chorus, a chorus in the proper sense of the word in that they accompany the development of the plot singing refrains, and they have a chorus-leader or voice of civic conscience who is known anonymously as ‘the saddler’. (Every now and again an innocent loafer appears on the scene, Jack Halliday, but this is the only concession to ‘local colour’, a fleeting echo of the Mississippi saga.)

Even the settings are reduced to the minimum necessary for the story’s mechanism to function: a prize falls on Hadleyburg as though from the heavens — 160 pounds of gold, worth $40,000. No one knows who sent it or who is meant to receive it, but in reality, as we learn right from the start, it is not a gift at all but an act of revenge, a trick to reveal those champions of self-righteousness as so many hypocrites and charlatans. The trick is played with a bag, a letter in an envelope to be opened immediately, another letter in an envelope to be opened later, plus nineteen identical
letters sent by post and various postscripts and other missives (the texts of letters always play an important part in Twain’s plots). All these concern a mysterious phrase, a genuine magic formula: whoever discovers it will get the bag of gold.

The presumed donor, but in fact the real avenger, is a character whom nobody knows: he wants to take revenge for an offence (never specified) done to him (impersonally) by the town. This indeterminacy surrounds him like a supernatural aura, his invisibility and omniscience turning him into a kind of god: nobody remembers him but he knows all of them and can predict their reactions.

Another character made mysterious by indeterminacy (and by invisibility, as he is dead) is Barclay Goodson, a Hadleyburg citizen different from all the rest, the only one able to challenge public opinion, and the only one capable of the unheard-of gesture of giving twenty dollars to a stranger ruined by gambling. We are not told anything else about him, and the reason for his fierce opposition to the town is left in the dark.

Between the mysterious donor and the dead beneficiary the town intervenes, in the shape of its nineteen notables, the Symbols of Incorruptibility. Each of them claims — and almost convinces himself of it — to be if not the dead Goodson, at least the person that Goodson chose as his heir.

This is how Hadleyburg is corrupted. The greed to possess an unclaimed bag of gold dollars easily outweighs every scruple of conscience and quickly leads to lying and cheating. If one thinks about how mysterious, shadowy and indefinable the presence of sin is in Hawthorne and Melville, Mark Twain’s seems a simplified and rather basic version of Puritan morality, with a doctrine of fall and grace that is no less radical, only here it has become a clear and rational rule for good health, like remembering to use your toothbrush.

But even Twain has his reticences: if there is a shadow over the uprightness of Hadleyburg it is that of the sin committed by the Reverend Burgess, but it is spoken of only in the vaguest of terms as ‘the thing’. In fact Burgess has not committed this sin and the only one who knows this — but he was careful not to say it — is Richards, who perhaps committed it himself? (But we are also left in the dark about this.) Now when Hawthorne
does not say
what sin has been committed by the pastor who goes around with a dark veil over his face, his silence envelops the whole
story, but when it is Mark Twain who
does not say
, this is simply a sign that this is a mere detail which does not serve any function in the story.

Some biographers say that Mark Twain was subject to strict, preemptive censorship by his wife Olivia, who exercised her right to be moral supervisor over his writings. (They say also that sometimes he studded the first version of a story with scurrilous and blasphemous expressions, so that his wife’s rigorous eye would discover an easy target on which to vent her spleen, leaving the substance of the text intact.) But we can be sure that even more severe than his wife’s censorship was his own self-censorship which was so inscrutable as to border on innocence.

For the notables of Hadleyburg, as for the Fosters in
The $30,000 Bequest
, the temptation to sin takes the insubstantial shape of an estimate of capital and dividends; but we need to be clear that their sin is a sin because this is money which does not exist. When figures with three or six zeros are exchangeable in a bank, money becomes the test and the reward of virtue: no suspicion of guilt touches Henry Adams in
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note
(curiously enough, the same name as the first critic of the American mentality), who speculates on a Californian mine under the protection of a genuine banknote, though it is one that cannot be spent. He remains unsullied, like the hero of a fairy-tale or of one of those 1930s films in which democratic America still shows that it believes in the innocence of wealth, just as in the Golden Age of Mark Twain. Only when we look down into the bottom of the mines (both real and psychological ones) will we suspect that the real flaws are different.

[1972]

Daisy Miller
came out in instalments in 1878 and was published as a book in 1879. It was one of the few stories (perhaps the only one) by Henry James that one can say enjoyed instant popular acclaim. Certainly in the context of the rest of his work, which is typified by evasiveness, by what is not said, by reticence, this stands out as one of his clearest tales, with a female character who is full of life and explicit aspirations to symbolise the openness and innocence of young America. And yet it is also a story that is no less mysterious than others by this introverted writer, steeped as it is in the themes that appear, though always in chiaroscuro, throughout his entire oeuvre.

As with many of James’ short stories and novels,
Daisy Miller
takes place in Europe, a Europe that is also in this tale the touchstone against which America measures itself. An America reduced to a single, typical specimen: the colony of carefree American tourists in Switzerland and Rome, that world to which James himself belonged in his youth after turning his back on his native land but before putting down roots in Britain, his ancestral homeland.

Far from their own society and the practicalities that determine the rules of behaviour, they are immersed in a Europe which represents on the one hand the attractions of culture and nobility, and on the other a world that is promiscuous and somewhat unhealthy, which they must keep at a distance. In such circumstances these Americans of James are prey to an insecurity that makes them double their puritan rigour and the safeguards of convention. Winterbourne, the young American studying in Switzerland, is destined — according to his aunt — to make mistakes since he has been
living in Europe too long and does not know how to distinguish his ‘decent’ compatriots from those of low social extraction. But this uncertainty about social identity applies to all of them — these voluntary exiles in whom James sees a reflection of himself — whether they are ’stiff or emancipated. Stiff rigour, both American and European, is represented by Winterbourne’s aunt, who not by chance has taken up residence in Calvinistic Geneva, and by Mrs Walker, in a sense the aunt’s foil, who is down in the softer atmosphere of Rome. The emancipated ones are the Miller family, who are cut adrift in a European pilgrimage which has been imposed on them as a cultural duty concomitant with their status. Provincial America, perhaps with new millionaires of plebeian origin, is exemplified in three characters: a dyspeptic mother, a petulant young boy, and a beautiful girl whose only strengths are her lack of culture and her spontaneous vitality, but who is the only one who manages to fulfil herself as an autonomous moral being, and to construct for herself a kind of freedom, however precarious.

Winterbourne glimpses all this, but too much of him (and of James) is in thrall to society’s taboos and the dictates of caste, and above all too much of him (and all of James) is afraid of life (in other words, of women). Although at the beginning and the end there is a hint of the young man having a relationship with a foreign woman, from Geneva, right in the middle of the tale Winterbourne’s fear at the prospect of a real confrontation with the opposite sex is openly stated; and in this character we can easily recognise a youthful self-portrait of Henry James and of the fear of sex which he never denied.

That imprecise presence which ‘evil’ was for James — vaguely connected with sinful sexuality or more visibly represented by the breaking of a class barrier — exercised over him a feeling of horror mixed with fascination. Winterbourne’s mind — that is to say that syntactical construction which is all hesitation, delay and self-irony — is divided: one part of him ardently hopes that Daisy is ‘innocent’ in order to make up his mind to admit to being in love with her (and it will be the post-mortem proof of her innocence that will reconcile him to her, like the hypocrite he is), while the other part of him hopes to recognise in her an inferior creature relegated to a lower class, whom he might no longer ‘be at pains to respect’. (And apparently this is not at all because he feels impelled to ‘disrespect’ her but perhaps only for the satisfaction of thinking of her in these inferior terms.)

The world of ‘evil’ that competes for Daisy’s soul is represented first by the courier Eugenio, then by the urbane signor Giovanelli, the dowry-hunting Roman, and in fact by the whole city of Rome with its marble, moss and malarial miasma. The most poisonous gossip which the European Americans aim at the Miller family are the constant, dark allusions to the courier who travels with them and who, in the absence of Mr Miller, exercises a vaguely defined authority over mother and daughter. Readers of
The Turn of the Screw
will know just how much the world of domestic staff can embody for James the shapeless presence of ‘evil’. But this courier (the English term is more precise than our ‘maggiordomo’ and does not really have an Italian equivalent: the courier was the servant who accompanied his masters on long journeys and who had to organise both their travel and their accommodation) could also be quite the opposite (for the little one sees of him), that is to say the only one in the family who represents the father’s moral authority and respect for manners. But already the fact that he has an Italian name prepares us for the worst: we will see that the descent of the Millers into Italy is a descent into the underworld (as fatal, though perhaps less fated than Professor Aschenbach’s visit to Venice, in the story which Thomas Mann will write thirty-five years later).

Unlike Switzerland, Rome has no natural power of landscape, protestant traditions and austere society, that could inspire self-control in American girls. Their rides in carriages to the Pincio is a vortex of gossip, in the midst of which one cannot tell whether the American girl’s honour has to be protected in order to save face in front of Roman counts and marquises (the heiresses of the Mid-West are now starting to want coats-of-arms) or to avoid descending into the morass of promiscuity with an inferior race. This presence of danger becomes identified not so much with the gallant Signor Giovanelli (for he too, like Eugenio, could be the protector of Daisy’s virtue, were it not for his humble origins), but much more with a silent but nevertheless crucial character in the tale’s mechanism: malaria.

The marshes that surrounded nineteenth-century Rome would, every evening, breathe their deadly exhalations all over the city: this was the ‘danger’, an allegory of all possible dangers, the deadly fever that was ready to seize girls who went out in the evening on their own or not suitably accompanied. (Whereas going out at night in a boat on the salubrious waters of Lake Geneva would not have presented such risks.) Daisy Miller is sacrificed to malaria, that obscure Mediterranean deity: neither the puritanism of her compatriots nor the paganism of the natives had
succeeded in winning her over, and it is for this very reason that she is condemned by both groups to be sacrificed right in the middle of the Colosseum, where the nocturnal miasmas gather in an enveloping, impalpable swarm like the sentences in which James always seems to be about to say something which he then omits.

[1971]

The Pavilion on the Links
is above all a story of misanthropy: youthful misanthropy, born of self-satisfaction and savagery, misanthropy which in a young man actually means misogyny, and which spurs the protagonist to ride alone over the Scottish moors, sleeping in a tent and existing on porridge. But a misanthrope’s solitude does not open up many narrative possibilities: the narrative develops from the fact that there are two misanthropic, or misogynistic, young men, hiding from each other, spying on each other, in a landscape which by its very nature evokes solitude and savagery.

We can say, then, that
The Pavilion on the Links
is the story of the relationship between two men who resemble each other, two brothers almost, bound by their common misanthropy and misogyny. It is also the story of how their friendship is transformed, for reasons which remain mysterious, into enmity and strife. But traditionally in the novel rivalry between two men presupposes a woman. And a woman who forces a change of heart in two misogynists must be the object of a love that is uncontrollable and unconditional, one that forces the two to outdo each other in chivalry and altruism. It must therefore be a woman threatened by danger, by enemies before whom the two ex-friends now turned enemies find themselves united and on the same side once more, even though still rivals in love.

We can, then, add that
The Pavilion on the Links
is a huge game of hide-and-seek played by adults: the two friends hide from and spy on each other, and the prize in their game is the woman. In addition, the two friends and the woman on one side hide from and spy on their mysterious enemies on
the other, and the prize in their game is the life of a fourth character who has no other role but that of hiding, in a landscape which appears to be the perfect setting for hide and seek.