The Portable Henry James (2 page)

For example, André Maurois was mostly wrong when he called James “a great writer who spent his whole life wandering in a literary limbo between the paradise of European culture and the hell that was the Golden Age of America.” The fact is that, even in the earliest tales, signs of stagnation trouble that European seduction. Rare lives may unfold on wonderfully manicured English lawns or they may shift about behind beautiful Left Bank façades, but for the most part in Henry James, Europe waits and waits for new blood. Although it was in 1920, four years after James’s death, that Ezra Pound called Europe “an old bitch gone in the teeth,” Pound had long judged it a “botched civilization” for which so many young would soon die. Back in 1907, when Picasso had sensed that European vitality was dying out after a 2,000-year run, his visionary
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
thrust slashing African masks beside the languishing graces of Western high culture. For Picasso at least, if renewal was to come, it would have to come from the boundlessly raw.

Although admittedly milder than Picasso’s explosion onto the European scene, the cheerfully barbaric American vitality of Henry James’s fiction—“she’s not, after all, a Comanche savage,” someone says in defense of Daisy Miller—had been unsettling European culture for decades, and it had been offering its disruption in even the most casual gestures. When at the start of
The Portrait of a Lady
the American Isabel Archer walks out onto the lawn of a splendid English estate, a dog, “looking up and barking hard,” runs straight at her “with great rapidity.” Rather than cry out, as any young lady might do, she grabs up the quivering thing “without hesitation” and holds him up “face to face while he continued his quick chatter.” The American energy concentrated in her outstretched hands is characteristic—bracing, fearless, somewhat thoughtless. The listless men look up from their teacups and they stare—“The ladies will save us,” one of them has just said—and only then do they begin to move. When a Europeanized aunt soon reprimands the young woman from Albany that “Young girls here—in decent houses—don’t sit alone with gentlemen late at night,” Isabel asks to be told about all the things one should not do. “So as to do them?” asks her aunt. “So as to choose,” says Isabel. Choice. It was to become a tremendous American word, and it still has power to make the world tremble.

Elegant, smart, universally admired, and far better adjusted to the European ways than was Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer nonetheless betrays a fierce disposition when she describes a vision of happiness that may seem shocking even today: “A swift carriage of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see—that’s my idea of happiness.” Even more reckless and unattached than Whitman on the open road—at least he dreams of a
camerado
moving along vaguely beside him—this superior nineteenth-century woman suggests a self-reliant resistance that will make her hard to hold: by society, by family, by husband, children, friends, tradition, by any demands from the outside whatever, by anyone or anything.

With his so-called “International Theme,” James takes what is best in the American character—and his Americans can have remarkable vigor and freshness—and he attempts to merge it with the great European achievement. It is with such an ambition that James sweeps his generally appealing Americans over the sea, and then makes them—amiable people who love their liberty—squint hard into the complicating mists of history. That history generally reveals itself in a social aspect marked by manners, for an infinite past has taught James’s Europeans that there is a good way of doing almost everything—a good way to begin an acquaintance or end one, a good way to speak or remain silent or prepare an
omelette soufflée,
or raise your daughter or accommodate an exigent parent or express thanks or sympathy or grief, or properly hide that grief, or end an affair or begin one, or enter a room or a box at the opera or prepare to die, or perhaps even to pick up an apricot.

If you agree to conform, European life can be good, for that life will be more artful, polished, layered, subtle, skilled, practiced, ordered, serene, thoughtful, graceful, cultivated, and, sometimes, intelligent. But Europe makes powerful demands, and it takes things away, and what it takes away can make you restless and bored, and it can make you stand oddly still. James’s Venice, for example, may represent the ultimate European
polis
as social art, and yet in
Italian Hours
she is a stern mistress—the “fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is not easy to live with”—for such beauty does not come without sacrifice. If you wish to live with her or recline in her shadow, you must study and learn to conform, for every inch of the city must look and act as Venice always has—or almost. So keep your raucous invention to yourself, and your tonic wildness too, and a good deal of your self-expression—at least as long as you linger in the lagoon where James suggests that something may have gone wrong, that the long bewitching, accumulated heaped-up beauty can sometimes feel like splendid dying: “Decay is in this extraordinary place golden in tint and misery
couleur de rose.
”

Then there are the Americans in their prototypical “terrible town” of New York, where, in 1907 in
The American Scene,
James already recognized “the power of the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing, as with the voice of the morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions.” Although breathing in a “thinner air” than in any European capital, James is nonetheless stirred by “the universal will to move—to move, move, move as an end in itself, an appetite at any price.” His American city “grows and grows, flinging abroad its loose limbs even as some unmannered young giant at his ‘larks,’ and that the binding stitches must for ever fly further and faster and draw harder; the future complexity of the web, all under the sky and over the sea, becoming thus that of some colossal set of clockworks, some steel-souled machine room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws.” The wondrous, monstrous, rejoicing New World capital amazes and astounds Henry James, and it seethes with life, but the truth is that it never really works as a place for him.

And yet, still, he never forgets that magnificent Europe is a subtly damaged culture—or perhaps he merely discovers inevitable features of a mature one. In
The American,
Christopher Newman goes to Paris and in all innocence first mistakes a marquis for a butler, and then mistakes an aristocratic family’s ruthlessness for merely stubborn manners. Yet it is unwise to make too much of Americans deceived by weary Europeans who have steeped so long in experience that their every move has become cautious, calculated, shrewd, and manipulative. James’s Europeans have learned over time what his Americans do not yet know, that survival is never secure, that great care must always be taken, that bad air blankets the town every night, that a swift carriage of a dark night can smash into a wall, that it is not so easy to discover a mountain of gold, that one can never be sure of a lover, or in fact sure of anything. In
The Ambassadors
the charming Marie de Vionnet does not explain to Lambert Strether why she has decided to marry off her daughter in a loveless but advantageous—in her terms, surely, a suitable—match. She merely invokes an inflexible old wisdom, a
“vieille sagesse,”
as the foundation of her actions, and she leaves it at that. The shaken American stares into her exquisitely delivered revelation, suddenly aware that he is glimpsing something “ancient and cold in it—what he would have called the real thing.”

Some Europeans might insist that American innocence in Henry James is less ignorance of evil than an inability to comprehend how insecure and dangerous life can be, and so James’s daring, generous, sometimes lucky, optimistic, incurably young, and frequently rich Americans make big mistakes and often fare badly—even when Europeans have nothing to do with it. After ignoring their counsel, Daisy Miller walks into the miasmal Colosseum at midnight and then takes ill and dies. When experience gets redefined by James as intense awareness, and when tradition instructs that every perception and every action has a past, a present, and a future, the value of innocence becomes a tough call. The innocent eye that rakes the horizon may be as glorious as Emerson’s transparent eyeball or as fresh as the eye of an American Adam who would extinguish prejudice and see the world as if for the first time. But then again it may only be an eye that offers a fearfully blank stare, and then blinks and forgets.

From the vantage of the early twenty-first century, the clash of civilizations that James considered can seem relatively mild, and yet his exploration remains sobering. If even between sibling cultures an abyss was discovered to have quietly ripped open—and in his fiction none of the marriages between the Old World and the New claim sure success—what chance does the West have to reconcile with the world of the real East, where stern authority has no desire to mask its will with exquisite charm? In Melville’s book an island harpooner awakens out of Ramadan and then slides into bed beside his newly found American friend, but Queequeg and Ishmael drift through a woozy political idyll virtually impossible in or out of Henry James. The divide between a culture of individual freedom and a culture of tradition—H. G. Wells identified communities of will, and communities of faith and obedience—is a great divide, and it is a persistent and deep one in Henry James, as it should be, even though many Americans in the novels scarcely seem to notice. In the tales and novels it often is the exact place where things tear asunder, a place of broadly political crisis that stubbornly resists reconciliation—at least without the virtual annihilation of one side or the other.

In reference to that annihilation, the death of Daisy Miller is really only a little death, and soon some battles go to the Americans. In James’s 1884 “Pandora,” a German aristocrat on a New York-bound ocean liner sits on deck and reads a tale about a “forward little American girl, who plants herself in front of a young man in the garden of an hotel.” Of course he is reading Henry James’s
Daisy Miller.
After having dismissed Pandora Day as merely a “Daisy Miller
en herbe,
” Count Otto Vogelstein soon recognizes her more hard-boiled charm, and later in Washington he observes the young woman on a sofa beside the President of the United States: “He looked eminent, but he looked relaxed, and the lady beside him was making him laugh.” Soon news comes that her unremarkable fiancé from Utica, New York, has been offered the post of minister to Holland. With “Pandora,” James extends his consideration of the general American character, here as that of the “American Girl” defined by a simple fact: “You knew her by many different signs, but, chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents that told the story; you always saw that her parents could never have made her.” She, this American girl, had invented herself. And by 1884 one already suspects that, unlike Daisy Miller, Miss Pandora Day—with her half-ominous, half-innocuous name—will be hard to kill.

But stray victories or not, for the most part in James’s fiction, those Americans who would be free take great personal risks, and those societies that would be very free risk losing some of the most alluring and stabilizing features of civilization. James presents a cultural and moral interplay where there are always trade-offs. One way or another in his fiction, freedom—and it is heady freedom—figures as a wild ride into the night, even when a young lady merely stays up late with gentlemen, or chooses an ill-advised husband, or takes a quiet stroll around town after dark. When at the end of
Daisy Miller
the two rivals meet over the young woman’s grave, her Italian escort sputters out his excuse: “For myself, I had no fear; and she wanted to go.” When James revised the tale, he intensified the declaration: “‘For myself I had no fear; and
she
—she did what she liked.’ Winterbourne’s eyes attached themselves to the ground. ‘She did what she liked!’ ”

To do what one likes. If it does not quite suggest the dark side of democracy, it nonetheless sounds a hint of brutality as obdurate as anything that motivates the aristocrats who work for themselves, for their families, for their heritage, for their own specific kind. And as much as James loves the Americans he creates—and that is almost always the case—he brings few of them close to happiness. Again and again as their personal paths trace the long bloody unfolding of human liberty, James shows their freedom as extraordinary—as a wondrous thing—and yet he never fails to present it as perilous, and as one of the most fragile inventions that has been brought out onto the face of the earth.

Then there is the complaint that James is unfathomably slow and dull. And in fact after the great, astounding, and sometimes freakish works of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, the post-Civil War ambition for something called realism could seem woefully tame. William Dean Howells, James’s early editor and then lifelong friend, was writing his own fiction with the expressed ambition of presenting “poor Real life,” but the younger novelist soon grew tired of such humility, and in 1871 James would report to Grace Norton that, concerning his mentor, “Thro’ thick and thin I continue to enjoy him—or rather thro’ thin and thinner.” But Howells, with his healthy democratic sense that there was “nothing insignificant,” was on a good path, and in time that path would become quietly exciting and unquestionably important. As unengaging as the word “realism” may sound, it shouldered a genuinely monumental task as it addressed the radical question of what remained of interest and value once the gods had vanished and all the altars had been stripped bare. No longer encouraged to be remotely religious, dimly transcendental, or even, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, obscurely magical, literature found itself moving onto a potentially dispirited plain of bluntly materialized existence. Some writers, like Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, and Mary Noailles Murfree, would develop a narrower focus than Howells and dress things up any way they could, throwing out lots of asides that were regional, colloquial, indigenous, or merely peculiar to the elders sitting in rush-bottomed chairs close to the walls. But although local color had diversity and much charm, even such keen observation would never carry the day. The realist revolution had to come from a different focus, and it did.