Life Sentences (18 page)

Peter Brench had a horror of error; he did not wish to risk making a fool of himself; hence his own general silence: no protestation of love, no public productions. And in the end, he knew none of the kinds of knowledge aforementioned: not Morgan Mallow’s faith in his talent or his joy in creation, not Lancelot’s recognitions, not Mrs. Mallow’s passion for passion. To keep his intelligence unsmudged, he cleaned the implement but failed to use it.

James’s satirical intent in this piece is clearly evident and broadly stated. The names of the characters are signal enough. Morgan Mallow cannot possibly be anything more than a soft bog; Mrs. Mallow
has lost sight of her own self, hence has no name of her own; and “Lancelot Mallow” is a ludicrous combination. What might have been a shrewdly observant “Peter Bench” is wrenched just enough to spell out confusion, so that when this gentlemen says he has “judged himself once for all,” his name belies the accuracy of that boast.

Critics have been no kinder to this story than the art world has been to Morgan Mallow. One dismissed it as “a bore.” Most writers on James ignore it altogether. Summaries of it in volumes pretending to be inclusive are curt and unflattering. “The usual narrator is given an external appearance which might have served to clothe a minor character in a better tale.”

The kind of knowledge that gives James his epistemological misgivings always concerns the nature of moral good and evil. Belief is grounded in gossip and depends upon the interpretation of social intentions. Its unreliable nature leads invariably to ambiguous conclusions, and guilt is spread over everyone like grease over toast. The screw that can be given one more turn is a regular feature. If Peter Brench is mistaken about Mrs. Mallow and her son, and they, in turn, are wrong about him as well as one another, might not Morgan Mallow be in no doubt really about his own deficiencies, and be keeping up the charade of his purity and ambition for everybody else’s sake, for how can he disabuse the faithful of their belief in him? The story does not turn this far, but it gives us the mechanism for its movement.

Moreover, what gives Morgan Mallow his dignity, despite his hollow pretensions, is that fact that his passion for art appears to be genuine if none of its products is.

There is, nonetheless, the suggestion that both Mallows might more readily succumb to mammon’s temptations than their ideals should approve, if ever they were offered the opportunity; and James has great fun with the wealthy Canadian couple who wish to commission Mallow to do a tomb for their three children. Here, the word
moral
is deployed like a skirmish line in front of an absent army.

The reader should be ready to believe that the arty ideal the Mallow clan embraces, they embrace because no prettier mate has made itself available. They have gone to bed with what they must.

James leaves us in a quagmire of doubt. Peter Brench believes that Mrs. Mallow believes that Mr. Mallow believes in his genius, although later he is led to believe that she has never believed in him any more than Peter Brench has. So it is not only possible that Morgan Mallow knows his failings too, as his wife knows, as his son knows, as the family friend knows, as the world, in its treatment of his work, seems to know; but that the Master’s purity from profit is also a pose, though as genuine as circumstances demand, and that were the world to come to his door with wealth and glory to confer, he would not turn the world away as he might a salesman with only encyclopedias to sell; rather he would graciously accept the proffered laurels, and sharpen his chisel, and endeavor to keep up with this welcome run of intercontinental custom.

Mrs. Mallow believes that her husband has a passion for art, if he hasn’t the genius we suppose he supposes he has, but she believes that Peter Brench hasn’t such devotion, and cannot have known “quiet joy.” Although joy has been denied him, we know that Peter has his passion and has been more faithful to it than most husbands. He knows quietness, and if his passion has been sterile, at least it has not peopled parlors with a “little staring white population” of mis-scaled statuary.

If the suspicions the story stirs in us are sustained during still
another turn, we may wonder if Morgan Mallow’s commitment to art isn’t more a matter of necessity than devotion. Then Mrs. Mallow would be wrong about the pure part of her husband’s nature. A plot that has turned itself to the point of Peter Brench’s epiphany and disillusionment might be turned almost interminably.

To eat of the fruit of the true tree of knowledge might not be, in our secular world, such a bad thing. Just beware of the berries on the bush of belief.

We readers don’t know—can’t know—why, when, what, or whether. We can only believe what we believe. And understand how well we’ve been warned.

As I opened the first volume of Sheldon Novick’s biography of Henry James (
Henry James: The Young Master
. New York: Random House, 1996), I had to stifle a cry of “Oh, dear, are we going play palsywalsy?” when I read … “please allow me, after this brief preface, to direct your attention to Henry James, with whom I would like you to become better acquainted.” My designated leader then began the tour of his author’s life by drawing a curtain, like Parson Weems on a naughty Washington, to reveal that his man “is sitting comfortably at a sidewalk table on a broad crowded boulevard. Perhaps he is in Paris.…” How do you do, sir? … is that what I say? Then I rather impulsively asked myself whether I remembered Henry James being this chummy with anyone, although, after a thoughtful moment, I had to admit he must have been so with his nanny. Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit at a cafe table in a town I couldn’t safely call by name, next door to a man palpably enjoying “his usual pink grenadine glacée, with two straws, on the white tablecloth beside him” while “watching the passersby with grave eyes.” In less time than it takes to read a line, they would be “striking gray eyes,” and the object of our scrutiny would assume a Napoleonic posture that, “despite [its] dignity … seemed to invite confidences.” Ah. confidences, of course. “A young man stops to talk, and then sits down with him.”
Oh, dear. So my guide is going to take that tack. The paragraph, and the preface, conclude: “A couple in evening dress stop. Soon there is a circle of young people around him, and they remain until long after midnight, talking.” So this is the Henry James we are to meet—a man about town and a magnet for youth? Well, midnight is a bit past my bedtime, I’m afraid.

I had heard the gossip. The gossip was that a number of industrious scholars had recently discovered a “hurray-he’s-a-gay-guy” to put alongside Proust and Wittgenstein in the alternative pantheon, since countless previously unread, suppressed, or unpublished letters showed that the suspicion of gayness, before only briefly caught sight of, had to be changed to a conviction, because this new information replaced all prior hypotheses and removed their protections. These prior excuses for Henry James’s apparent chastity were: (1) he had never had much of an active sex life on account of a lackluster libido; (2) there had occurred a mysterious injury to his back that had unmanned him elsewhere; (3) the women he loved tended to meet tragic ends—Minny Temple’s death from TB had made him mourn, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s suicide had made him angry—so he became as skittish as a wary cat; (4) his vital juices were so thoroughly absorbed by his writing and his delicate social studies that the impulses of ordinary men only acted on him indirectly, the way an initiated carom slowly reaches its culmination by nicking the one remaining ball into a corner pocket; (5) his psychology was such that physical desires were allowed to manifest themselves only through an inordinate interest in the marriages of others, a trait odd for a confirmed bachelor, even though, in his circle, marriages were mostly matters of money and hierarchy, not love and passion; or (6) that ultimately James sought aesthetic transcendence, even saintliness, and was ascetic because heaving and grunting were simply not something a person of his excessive refinement should ever sink to, nor would he wish us to picture him doing anything that partook of common coarseness—eating kidneys ill lodged in a publican’s pie, for instance, or visiting the loo and enjoying his relief like Leopold Bloom.

Though the evidence was supposed to stare everybody in the face, it was also deemed scandalous and detrimental, so that otherwise admiring eyes were turned away, and mum was the word, or at least some form of discreet dismissal would be expected. Certainly, this has not been an uncommon reaction of biographers to bad news. They ignored Edith Wharton’s adulterous affair with Morton Fullerton (gay himself Monday through Friday); and devoted followers of Wittgenstein wore zipped lips for some time with regard to Wittgenstein’s homosexuality, as well as his “mysterical” leanings, to mention but two from a posse of precedent. For positivists the second failing was by far the worse. Although Fred Kaplan’s
Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography
(New York: Morrow, 1992) had spoken of Henry James’s homosexual tendencies plainly enough, Sheldon Novick (a lawyer by trade) apparently felt that there was still a case to be made, and in his first volume he argues his position as if he were before a jury.

The biography, which concludes with the second volume, called
Henry James: The Mature Master
, just published (New York: Random House, 2007), begins with another forward flash. The ill and aging James has had to leave his home in Rye and take up lodgings in London once again, and there we find him, entering his seventies, his typewriter on his desk and his literary secretary, Theodora Bosanquet hard at it, transferring his voice to the page “through her strong, boyish fingers.” But our guide has only begun beating his drum. “It is curious to think of James striding about the Chelsea flat evoking for her powerfully sensuous images, and at the last, when he was close to death, dictating
The Ivory Tower
, an intricately constructed phallus around which he set his characters dancing to Miss Bosanquet’s music.” If “boyish fingers” is sly innuendo, what must the ivory phallus be?

What are the data that determine any person’s life? Of the things we desire, do, see, think or feel, what ones should be discarded like spoiled paper, and what should be retained? How shall the residue be weighed? How shall these elements be joined to one another? And why should we really bother putting the puzzle together at all, at such expense of time and cogitation? because our own aims—our worship and our animus—certainly direct the construction—the gathering, the sorting—of even the least scraps of information. What is important to the genius of our author? Shall we watch, if we are able, while the poet washes his hands in the lavatory basin? Or follow our subject’s fingers slipping through her lingerie drawer? Study her dance card? Or count the clapping in his last ovation? Are we simply in need of matters of greasy fact, and desire to proceed directly to essentials as on a fast train, or are we altogether in love, and value like a sheared curl every wisp caught by a collar, every lip mark on a glass, any footprint made by our darling descending from a carriage, and regard the shriveled core of our hero’s gnawed apple as a religious relic? Perhaps our prizes are to be those two straws lying on a café cloth, or are the ones we cherish peeking out the neck of an abandoned soda bottle?

Although we know she launched a thousand ships, we do not know the color of Helen’s eyes. To look into Medusa’s was to suffer consequences, but what of Henry James’s gray gaze? Was what he saw sucked up and carried off into a narrative he was engaged in making, or has he saved a trait for use in creating a lady of quality? Was it filed next to more looks like it—perhaps of apology or reproach—behind the master’s imperious brow? Not long ago, biographers read Freud first, then made their subject a patient. It was an important but tiresome development, as most are. Other biographers buried their victim under mounds of data, a democracy of detail that admitted of no hierarchy and held out no hope. Still others loved backgrounds so much their portraits were like those avant
garde Turners that depict figures, castles, passes, peaks, disappearing in a smoke of color.

Novick is a novelistic biographer. By that I mean that a great deal of what he includes in his life of James is decoration. It is not necessary for the reader to know that “For a small fee, a stout red-faced woman carried off his dirty linen once each week and returned it heavily starched and pressed,” but to learn these trivial daily tasks makes us feel at home. Still, unless the linen was metaphorically unclean, Lytton Strachey would not have given any notice to it. Of course, Strachey was not above pulling facts from their contexts as if they were aching teeth. Novick provides rich social and intellectual backgrounds for the actions he depicts. He is aware of his subject’s psyche but he does not psychoanalyze.
Honorable Justice
, his fine book on Oliver Wendell Holmes, has prepared him for the necessity of historical and geographical surroundings, and he supplies them: hills, dales, barns, and towns; wars, riots, scandals, labor movements, acts of Parliament; but he is acutely aware that although James was an ordinary guy when nature required him to be—our bowels do more to make us equal than the revolver—it is Henry James’s head that bends when he enters a taxi, and that not even a spot of tar on the street is safe from his scrutiny.

Novick is also attracted by the lonely little item that might enliven the page and brighten its story. Some are irresistible. When James’s aunt Kate dies she leaves a rather hefty estate. Among the lesser spoils is a shawl to which Alice James is given a “life interest,” and which, to an amusement that barely covers her annoyance, she understands must be returned to the estate when she herself is through with it—a restoration only her ghost can carry out.