The Facts of Fiction (26 page)

A legend has grown up around Henry James that he is, if not actually unreadable, at least readable only in a quiet room, with the aid of ice-packs, grammars and a reverent nature. In that, James is simply a victim of himself. He is like a man who gets a reputation for an ass simply because he has deliberately cultivated an extreme mannerism in youth, and cannot throw it off in age; there is about him a suggestion of grey hairs and corsets. The trouble is that Henry James's later books have obscured his life's work.

He is judged by
The Golden Bowl
and not by
Roderick Hudson
or
Daisy Miller
; which is as patently unfair as judging a supreme talker like Coleridge by what he said on his death-bed.

Henry James's was a mind of remarkable lucidity. He had a tight-rope walker's nerve, and could keep his head in traversing the thinnest threads of narrative suspended over vertiginous deeps of psychology. Unfortunately for his success, he did not realise that other people simply
lacked the nerve, and that after a few steps they halted and turned back to try again—or fell floundering right out of the bottom of the tale.

Consider a typical passage from
The Wings of the Dove.

It was to the honour of her sincerity that she made the surrender on the spot, though it was not perhaps altogether to that of her logic. She had wanted, very consciously, from the first, to give something up for her new acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that she was practically giving up all. What settled this was the fulness of a particular impression, the impression that had throughout more and more supported her and which she would have uttered so far as she might by saying that the charm of the creature was positively in the creature's greatness. She would have been content so to leave it; unless indeed she had said, more familiarly, that Mildred was the biggest impression of her life. That was at all events the biggest account of her, and none but a big clearly would do.

That short explanation of the conduct of a soul contains both what is typical of Henry James's qualities and shortcomings. Even raped from its context the thought remains perfectly intelligible; it proceeds elaborately and usefully.

The grammar on the other hand, is moderately baffling. It is clearly that of a very clever man—or of a man who works at his prose like a child practising scales on a piano, going over it again and again, so that he meets the reader on unfair terms, having prepared all the difficult bits beforehand. There is that awkward ellipsis in the opening sentence, clumsily repaired by the insertion of the words
“that of”; there is the doubt in the mind as to whether “consciously ” should, or indeed can, be modified by “very,” and the further doubt as to whether “practically ” should come before or after “giving up ”; and at the end there is that horrible murder of words, by poison drawn from metaphysical text-books, “none but a big clearly would do.” To complete some of the ellipses the mind must hop like a frog, and to appreciate the method of speaking in terms of philosophic abstractions the mind must also be able to hover over certain words and phrases like a hawk. At times, and in such a sentence as, “To be the heir of all the ages only to know yourself, as that consciousness should deepen, balked of your inheritance, would be to play the part, it struck me, or at least to arrive at the type, in the light on the whole most becoming,” the syntax and the punctuation are bad to wickedness.

In short, Henry James's style is only moderately successful even for its own delicate purpose. For, save to a few clever, persistent minds, it defeats itself for all time when it first defeats the reader. About the quality of the thought itself, no one who has read, for instance,
The Ambassadors
(which James considered his best book) can remain in doubt. For here was an author who knew more reasons why his characters should not do the things they did, than most authors seem to know for their actually doing. But anyone who has read
The Golden Bowl
will inevitably have all kinds of doubt about his grammar.

Henry James was like a trick-dancer walking on eggs. Nine times out of ten he is marvellously successful. But on the tenth time we feel as though we have been present at a rehearsal.

The reason for Henry James's unique style is not perhaps so consciously artistic as has generally been imagined.
He dictated the later books in which his style is at its most perverse. And no man living has any real command of his mannerisms in
speech.
Those jostling second thoughts, and the recurrent “as-it-weres ”—even the slang said self-consciously with rounded lips like a clergyman deliberately and decently swearing—probably have their origin in the air and not on paper. We seem even to see the gestures that accompanied the mannerisms.

That is not, of course, to suggest that Henry James ever let his novels go out into the world as a busy business man sends out his letters, “dictated but not read.” But from the moment when he began to dictate his books his mannerisms began to run away with him. And his revisions then became merely the crystallising into prose of the loquacity of an elaborate and diffuse speaker.

There is a phrase somewhere in
The Wings of the Dove
that exactly describes a Henry James novel. There are, indeed, many such phrases: it seems that something in the quality of Henry James's thoughts does not lend itself comfortably to the ordinary apparatus of description. The phrase to which I am referring is the one that describes a girl as having “stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass ”: a veritable ghost of a girl. And, indeed, Henry James's novels often seem to be merely splendid ghosts of real novels, needing just height, motion and mass to bring them into the full, fat life of fiction. As it is there is an intangible tenuousness about them that frequently makes the reader wish that he had read more carefully when nearer the beginning.

With Henry James the novel becomes more consciously literary than ever before; and not with entire success. Henry James was an experimentalist who wrote fiction in the manner of a chemist in a laboratory. He was laboriously and lovingly trying to evolve a formula of
fiction; and more of his professional life than a novelist should be able to spare was occupied with mixtures and messes.

The prefaces to the Collected Edition of Henry James's novels form a prose “Prelude or Growth of a Novelist's Mind.” They are the most nearly complete declaration of a novelist's policy that we have in the language. Every novelist must more or less plan a novel, must have within his mind at one moment or another a sudden bright shaft in which the whole pattern of the book is illumined. Yet, such is the weakness of the human brain, that detail and form can rarely be seen at the same instant. With Henry James they could.

The preface to
The Wings of the Dove,
for example, opens with the explicit announcement that: “The idea, reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world …” And the rest of the preface contains an outline in the exact terms of a chemical formula of how the author is going to achieve the fulfilment of his idea. It is as though James had emptied his brain of the plan, in outline and detail, as it existed within him. And to what extent that meticulous brain of his concerned itself with detail may be seen from the way in which he describes how he is going to build up the novel scene by scene, character by character, 'value by value, with the awesome competence of a small child building a whole cathedral out of toy bricks.

There was the “fun ” to begin with, of establishing one's successive centres—of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject commanded by them as by happy points of view, and accordingly treated from
them, would constitute so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and provide for beauty.…

It would almost be true to say that if a Henry James novel fails, it fails because Henry James has intended it to fail in just that particular way. Certainly when it succeeds, the manner of its success has been exactly predetermined.

In scope Henry James had a mind of remarkable narrowness of range; most “psychological ” novelists have. Once he had rid himself of the desire to be eerie, once he had disentangled himself from the Hawthorne tree that he had climbed in youth, he settled down to observing not only social comedy, but Society comedy; a comedy of manners in which all the manners were good ones.

The only point at which life, crude and irresistible, scattered the bric-à-brac and orchids of his mind was when his beautiful cousin, Mary Temple, who was to Henry James through life as Agnes was to Dickens, a fixed, immutable, marvellous star among women, died at the age of twenty-three. Hers was a death in just those conditions of desperate vitality that were framed in
The Wings of the Dove.

If Henry James's contribution to the novel could be described in a phrase it is thus: he gave the novel new nerves of sensitiveness, he taught it to explore the mind for the little half resolutions and misgivings as well as for the decisions and rejections that ultimately make for action.

He was a man fascinated by the unexpectedness of the
human mind. In that he resembled most of the post-Freudian novelists of to-day. But he was interested primarily in the normal mind; or at the most in the normally abnormal mind. And in that he differed from the novelists of to-day.

It was only to be expected that the novel which had become a supplement to the
Universal Dictionary of Psychology
(the modern counterpart of Fielding's “vast authentic doomsday book of nature ”) should now become a supplement to the
Universal Dictionary of Abnormal Psychology
: for connoisseurs always finally go after the few and the freakish. And the writer whose frantic intensity of expression and fantastic conception of mankind promote him above all his kindred is D. H. Lawrence.

Lawrence was so sensitive to the rest of life that he was like a man born without his skin; impressions and emotions everywhere struck him full on raw, naked nerves. Having none of those useful barriers that ordinary thickskinned men have between themselves and experience, he seemed to be a part of experience itself—which is really what is meant by people who take Lawrence to pieces and reconstruct him in the Middleton Murry manner to show that he is a huge symbolic figure; not a man but Man himself.

Lawrence was never greater than any situation in which he found himself. He strove hard to be equal. But he remained always inferior to circumstances. And his books are essentially the expression of the rat in the trap.

Mr. Murry, whose eloquent volume
Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence
has all but become the Bible of Lawrence's faithful, has been responsible for a thin and rather tiresome comparison between Lawrence and Christ.
In a slight, superficial sense it is just. In neither case can we understand the works without the life. But the works of Lawrence grew steadily and inevitably out of the life, and not the life necessarily and remorselessly out of the works as in the more important case.

The details of the dark and distressing childhood of Lawrence are now better known to a great many people than the details of the fresher and more fragrant childhood of Christ. But just as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John must be forgiven a somewhat trying reiteration of one well-known theme, so must any commentator on D. H. Lawrence be forgiven the repetition of the open secrets of Lawrence's life.

Lawrence was the fourth child of a drunken collier, and a woman who should never have made the blunder of becoming a collier's wife. David Herbert was not wanted. But once he was born his mother sent wave upon wave of love crashing over him. This is his infancy reflected in his fiction:

In her arms lay the delicate baby … A wave of hot love went over her to the infant. She held it close to her face and breast. With all her force, with all her soul she would make up to it for having brought it into the world unloved. She would love it all the more now it was here; carry it in her love. Its clear, knowing eyes gave her pain and fear. Did it know all about her? When it lay under her heart, had it been listening then? Was there a reproach in the look? She felt the marrow melt in her bones, with fear and pain.

Paul Morel's life in
Sons and Lovers
is more like Lawrence than a good many portraits-of-the-artist are like the original. He was the first of a band of characters who
stretch through the novels in tormented profusion, whose difficulties have been their author's.

Lawrence's love for his mother would seem exquisitely beautiful in a world in which sons could remain sons and not have to grow into husbands. In the world as it is, the beauty of that love is too thickly streaked with what is morbid for the whole to remain beautiful.

Just as we can see a child's being spoiled by being given too much toffee so we can see Lawrence's life being spoiled by being given too much womanly love. Lawrence's mother would have been considerably more kind to him if she had continued in her dislike. As it was, she concentrated on him all the love she had once directed on her husband. And the son, made too delicate for the task by too much loving, was called upon to give an unhappy woman the assurance that should have come from her husband.

If the emotion could have stopped short at that deep, though possibly destructive, devotion that Ruskin felt for his mother, and had not steered towards darker waters, the mind of the reader who sees the events from a distance would be lighter. But in the shape that events took we cannot view this relationship with anything but a mounting nausea. For Lawrence tragically grew; and in a passage in
Sons and Lovers,
that sends a moan of anguish up from the page into a reader of any sensitiveness, he describes how a mother went to the very Hell Gates of sex with her son: