The Portable Henry James (4 page)

But the consequent strain on moral judgment was as great as any artistic or psychological strain. Almost a century before Mrs. Assingham’s explanation, Madame de Staël had contemplated all the possible causes and connections, and she had declared that to understand all is to forgive all—
“tout comprendre, tout pardonner.”
She may have understood too much—or so it seemed, as with one neat declaration she eviscerated not only sin but the heart of blame and the guts of moral responsibility. So her 1807
Corinne
betrays fear—or at the very least chic weariness—as to where the growing sophistication of her time was taking her and taking everyone. By the end of the nineteenth century, society had grown even more clever, and morality had become even more slippery. In his preface to the 1890
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Oscar Wilde declared, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Wilde was scandalous and few people troubled over his ethical decrees. Yet one stops and thinks when, in James’s final novel, Mrs. Assingham asserts that “stupidity pushed to a certain point
is,
you know, immorality. Just so what is morality but high intelligence?” Here is a shocking, elitist morality to be sure, and yet her view addresses a suspicion of much of the modern world, that the bright ones are the better ones and that “intelligence” is, now, finally, the only supreme good.

Despite her imperious tone, Mrs. Assingham does not speak for Henry James. Or at least it is not that simple. Especially in the late fiction, great intelligence so complicates judgment that the consequent ethical ambiguity brings the best people close to crisis. The difficulty of James’s style may in fact be a necessary expression of a moral sense that will never again know the sharp edges of any Hebraic decalogue or any other venerable righteousness. George Steiner has observed that since the late nineteenth century “difficulty” has moved to the center of the aesthetic experience, and there it insolently remains. “No themes,” James explains in the preface to
What Maisie Knew,
“are so human as those that reflect for us out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of things that help with things that hurt, so dangling before us for ever that bright hard metal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other somebody’s pain and wrong.” Consideration of “point of view” becomes a prime tool of an artistic intelligence that must always move, challenge, test itself, and then perhaps discover an unexpected story at the end. “He and his neighbors are watching the same show,” writes James in the preface to
The Portrait of a Lady,
“but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may
not
open.”

James’s preface to
What Maisie Knew
suggests the difficulty, in the increasingly intelligent, increasingly relativistic modern world, of “really keeping the torch of virtue alive in an air tending infinitely to smother it; really in short making confusion worse confounded by drawing some stray fragrance of an ideal across the scent of selfishness, by sowing on barren strands, through the mere fact of presence, the seed of the moral life.” When R. P. Blackmur praised James’s “pure intelligence,” he offered a false congruence, for he blurred the moral/intellectual dilemma. Blackmur claimed that in Henry James, “intelligence is conscience, and the eloquence of conscience is heroic truth,” but James’s moral determination is never as tidy as that. It has been said that his was the tragedy of a man born between two worlds and at home in neither, and there is some truth in that. Yet equal strain came from a divide as troubling as any between the European and the American ideals. Beautifully raised by a noble father—“our father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably more than for anything else”—Henry James everywhere pursued the unwavering moral flame that was still just visible from out of the mists of the past. Yet at the same time he knew what was coming and he looked ahead to seek the fullest expression of human intelligence, which in fact may be the most restless fire that burns.

In 1918 T. S. Eliot called Henry James “the most intelligent man of his generation,” a man with a “mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” He was not being sarcastic. Eliot understood that when relations never stop, judgments rarely settle, and therefore James’s sublimely open mind indeed might have been the best model of the best kind of thought. Of course, at the moment he made his judgment, Eliot was already seeking something other than such expansive liberality and perhaps something other than the best kind of thought, for amid the ashes of the war, Eliot believed that society would be rebuilt with the pillars of judgment and the stones of belief. And so he soon found comfort in the old orthodoxies of traditionalism, Anglo-Catholicism, and the Christian state. Yet his praise of James still seems sincere, even if his declaration hints at something ambiguous and troubling, perhaps that although “be one of the people on whom nothing is lost” may be a noble call, it sounds out a heartless rule, one impossible to fulfill and potentially paralyzing—politically, socially, even morally.

The purely modern intellect of Prince Hamlet discovered that the radically examined and interiorized life is not without grave risks, for the more one thinks about things, the harder action can become, and, yes, of course, there can be few philosopher kings. Dr. Watson, that most decent Polonius, never really gets it, but he moves easily about town and he seems happy, while it is Holmes, with his magnificent teeming brain, who settles in for the night and mainlines cocaine. Eliot suggests such psychological strain for the highly exercised intelligence when he says that James “makes the reader, as well as the personae, uneasily the victim of a merciless clairvoyance.” Authorial omniscience once sounded godlike and smug, but if merciless clairvoyance is what guides the creative intelligence through the age of anxiety, the heightened consciousness will know more than it bargained for, more than it wanted to know. What it was to learn, especially about itself, would be terrifying.

James Agate said
The Turn of the Screw
could freeze the scalp of a man reading it on a sunny afternoon at the seaside with the band playing Gilbert and Sullivan. Years before that James had dismissed it as a “bogey-tale” and an
“amusette,”
and for decades most readers took him at his word, at least until 1924 and 1934 when Edna Kenton and then Edmund Wilson questioned the perceptions of a woman on whom nothing is lost—and not the vibration of a hair seems lost on the governess at Bly. In his 1884 “The Art of Fiction,” James had offered the apotheosis that “impressions
are
experience,” but almost fifteen years had passed when a young woman, one who admitted to a “terrible liability to impressions,” was to see, or sense, the presence of two ghosts who, she is sure, wish to possess the children. What she discovers is cataclysmic, although her own homespun Dr. Watson—that most trustworthy housekeeper, Mrs. Grose—has never noticed a thing.

It is in fact a serious tale with broad implications. When it is understood that the ghosts may not be real, but instead that a clergyman’s daughter may project the entire ghastly parade, then the grandeur of human perception and human intelligence gets thrown into grave doubt. Although
The Turn of the Screw
was written before Freud would up the sexual ante and finally annul any Enlightenment claim for a purely rational intelligence, back in 1873 Pater had already guessed what was coming: “Experience,” he had written, “already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by the thick wall of personality. . . . Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.”

With
The Turn of the Screw
it is hard to say what is the truth, and the tale does not say. Perhaps a sensitive and intelligent young woman saves an imperiled soul, or perhaps a very unstable young lady merely squints out from a chamber of consciousness that is just a fetid little room. And that room might be heaped with sexual repression and jammed to the rafters with all the lurid and unlovely things a person trails behind from the moment of birth. It is an extreme case here, but in principle it is a general one—that the idea of objectivity may be absurd, for although we may sincerely believe that demons walk the path, the truth may be that the only place they inhabit is the psychic landscape within. Then the little boy would have died for nothing, except to show how in 1898 a fresh psychology was rewriting the world, and showing it—a “real” world so close only a few years before—as farther away than anyone knew and as more uncanny and complex than anyone had ever guessed.

The terrors are countless in
The Turn of the Screw,
but above all there is the tremendous moral ambiguity, and then at the end there is the weight of the dead child, his forehead glistening with a perfect dew of sweat. But perhaps the real fear comes from the isolation the tale comprehends: that here is a life one can make with intelligence, that an attentive, thoughtful, and well-meaning person—even a person who reads Henry James with confidence and care—may in fact be a solitary prisoner in a dream or a nightmare of a world and may never suspect it for a moment.

The narrator of James’s 1896 “The Figure in the Carpet” seeks the “
secret,
or latent intention” in the
oeuvre
of the novelist Hugh Vereker, but that secret remains hidden—if indeed there ever was one. In recent years a hunger for such a clue has focused on the sexuality of Henry James. Although this general introduction can pay scant attention to James’s complex biography, it must note the related revolution that has come to the criticism, for although it was with trepidation that James’s early biographers circled the ground around “latent homo-erotic tendencies,” recent biographers and recent critics have often identified homosexuality as the figure in the carpet.

Yet such considerations are not new. As early as 1902 J. P. Mowbray wrote, “In trying to form anything like a comprehensive estimate of Mr. James’s mature work, the effeminacy of it has to be counted with. One cannot call it virile.” When in Hemingway’s 1926
The Sun Also Rises
Bill Gorton advises Jake Barnes about the sexually debilitating injury he received in the war, he recommends, “That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle.” The reference is to the injury that James reported in his 1914 autobiography
Notes of a Son and Brother
: “Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences . . . I had done myself . . . a horrid even if an obscure hurt.” A legend soon grew concerning what James had described as “a private catastrophe or difficulty, bristling with embarrassments.” Evidence suggests a back injury, but this is what that legend developed: the young Henry James had fallen from a high bicycle, or from a horse, onto a picket fence, and he had, in some way, been castrated. Some took his admission as an explanation of why he never served in the Civil War. Others said it accounted for his lifelong celibacy.

Some agreed with Blackmur’s judgment that, “Like Abélard who, after his injury, raised the first chapel to the Holy Ghost,” Henry James turned to art. Others hinted at less theological aspirations. By the time of Hemingway’s novel, the “mystery” was so generally well known that the two easygoing fishermen could chat about “Henry” and Hemingway could expect his readers to get it. “It wasn’t a bicycle,” Jake corrects his friend:

Such oblique and suggestive wordplay—about a bicycle, a tricycle, a pedal, and a joystick—is uncharacteristic of Ernest Hemingway. The two men sense a lapse of decorum and they change the subject. The key to this strange passage is surely the fact that since at least the 1920s in France—and Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton are on their fishing trip in southern France—
une pédale
has been a common term for a male homosexual.

Hemingway went no further. Critics go much further today. Do more recent biographical considerations help explain why in the fiction the marriages generally fail, why isolation so often rules, why so much remains unspoken and passions dry up, why an old man urges a young one to live, why a strange spreading syntax shrouds the place, why a baffled little boy is sent home from school, or, why, facing another man in a graveyard, John Marcher repents the shape of his entire life? Yes and no. The reader is permitted and encouraged to ask any questions whatsoever. Yet back when tradition saw Emily Dickinson’s poetry as a retreat from a botched love affair with a gentleman, Allen Tate offered a corrective which still seems sound now that Dickinson is discussed as a lesbian poet: “If we suppose—which is to suppose the improbable—that the love affair precipitated the seclusion, it was only a pretext: she would have found another.”