The Portable Henry James (85 page)

It occurred to him as befitting Eva’s remoteness, which was a part of Eva’s magnificence, that her voice emerged somewhat muffled by the bedclothes. She was ever, indeed, the most telephonic of her sex. In talking to Eva you always had, as it were, your lips to the receiver. If you didn’t try to meet her fine eyes, it was that you simply couldn’t hope to: there were too many dark, too many buzzing and bewildering and all frankly not negotiable leagues in between. Snatches of other voices seemed often to interlude themselves in the parley; and your loyal effort not to overhear these was complicated by your fear of missing what Eva might be twittering. “Oh, you certainly haven’t, my dear, the trick of propinquity!” was a thrust she had once parried by saying that, in that case,
he
hadn’t—to which his unspoken rejoinder that she had caught her tone from the peevish young women at the Central seemed to him (if not perhaps in the last, certainly in the last but one, analysis) to lack finality. With Eva, he had found, it was always safest to “ring off.” It was with a certain sense of his rashness in the matter, therefore, that he now, with an air of feverishly “holding the line,” said, “Oh, as to that!”

Had
she,
he presently asked himself, “rung off”? It was characteristic of our friend—was indeed “him all over”—that his fear of what she was going to say was as nothing to his fear of what she might be going to leave unsaid. He had, in his converse with her, been never so conscious as now of the intervening leagues; they had never so insistently beaten the drum of his ear; and he caught himself in the act of awfully computing, with a certain statistical passion, the distance between Rome and Boston. He has never been able to decide which of these points he was psychically the nearer to at the moment when Eva, replying, “Well, one does, anyhow, leave a margin for the pretex, you know!” made him, for the first time in his life, wonder whether she were not more magnificent than even he had ever given her credit for being. Perhaps it was to test this theory, or perhaps merely to gain time, that he now raised himself to his knees, and, leaning with outstretched arm towards the foot of his bed, made as though to touch the stocking which Santa Claus had, overnight, left dangling there. His posture, as he stared obliquely at Eva, with a sort of beaming defiance, recalled to him something seen in an “illustration.” This reminiscence, however—if such it was, save in the scarred, the poor dear old woebegone and so very beguilingly
not
refractive mirror of the moment—took a peculiar twist from Eva’s behaviour. She had, with startling suddenness, sat bolt upright, and looked to him as if she were overhearing some tragedy at the other end of the wire, where, in the nature of things, she was unable to arrest it. The gaze she fixed on her extravagant kins-man was of a kind to make him wonder how he contrived to remain, as he beautifully did, rigid. His prop was possibly the reflection that flashed on him that, if
she
abounded in attenuations, well, hang it all, so did
he
! It was simply a difference of plane. Readjust the “values,” as painters say, and there you were! He was to feel that he was only too crudely “there” when, leaning further forward, he laid a chubby forefinger on the stocking, causing that receptacle to rock ponderously to and fro. This effect was more expected than the tears which started to Eva’s eyes and the intensity with which “Don’t you,” she exclaimed, “see?”

“The mote in the middle distance?” he asked. “Did you ever, my dear, know me to see anything else? I tell you it blocks out everything. It’s a cathedral, it’s a herd of elephants, it’s the whole habitable globe. Oh, it’s, believe me, of an obsessive-ness!” But his sense of the one thing it
didn’t
block out from his purview enabled him to launch at Eva a speculation as to just how far Santa Claus had, for the particular occasion, gone. The gauge, for both of them, of this seasonable distance seemed almost blatantly suspended in the silhouettes of the two stockings. Over and above the basis of (presumably) sweetmeats in the toes and heels, certain extrusions stood for a very plenary fulfilment of desire. And since Eva
had
set her heart on a doll of ample proportions and practicable eyelids—
had
asked that most admirable of her sex, their mother, for it with not less directness than he himself had put into his demand for a sword and helmet—her coyness now struck Keith as lying near to, at indeed a hardly measurable distance from, the border line of his patience. If she didn’t
want
the doll, why the deuce had she made such a point of getting it? He was perhaps on the verge of putting this question to her, when, waving her hand to include both stockings, she said, “Of course, my dear, you
do
see. There they are, and you know I know you know we wouldn’t, either of us, dip a finger into them.” With a vibrancy of tone that seemed to bring her voice quite close to him, “One doesn’t,” she added, “violate the shrine—pick the pearl from the shell!”

Even had the answering question “Doesn’t one just?” which for an instant hovered on the tip of his tongue, been uttered, it could not have obscured for Keith the change which her magnificence had wrought in him. Something, perhaps, of the bigotry of the convert was already discernible in the way that, averting his eyes, he said, “One doesn’t even peer.” As to whether, in the years that have elapsed since he said this, either of our friends (now adult) has, in fact, “peered,” is a question which, whenever I call at the house, I am tempted to put to one or other of them. But any regret I may feel in my invariable failure to “come up to the scratch” of yielding to this temptation is balanced, for me, by my impression—my sometimes all but throned and anointed certainty—that the answer, if vouchsafed, would be in the negative.

X

LEGACY

The Muses have been notoriously stingy with honorific titles, and of course it took more than a university degree to make Boswell’s distinguished friend into the icon known as Dr. John-son. When Joseph Conrad began addressing his own distinguished friend as
“Cher Maître,”
the appellation took, and soon James was being called “the Master” by many contemporaries, and then by the next generation of writers, and then by the next. Henry James’s influence on the twentieth century was widespread and profound, and the following passages merely suggest a range of appreciation by some prominent figures. For consideration of the luminous shadow James cast on literature, film, the visual arts, and even music, see Adeline R. Tintner,
Henry James’s Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction.

AT THE GRAVE OF HENRY JAMES 1941

 

The snow, less intransigeant than their marble,
Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs;
For all the pools at my feet
Accommodate blue now, and echo such clouds as occur
To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing
Moment remarks they repeat

 

While the rocks, named after singular spaces
Within which images wandered once that caused
All to tremble and offend,
Stand here in an innocent stillness, each marking the spot
Where one more series of errors lost its uniqueness
And novelty came to an end.

 

To whose real advantage were such transactions
When words of reflection were exchanged for trees?
What living occasion can
Be just to the absent? O noon but reflects on itself,
And the small taciturn stone that is the only witness
To a great and talkative man

 

Has no more judgement than my ignorant shadow
Of odious comparisons or distant clocks
Which challenge and interfere
With the heart’s instantaneous reading of time, time that is
A warm enigma no longer in you for whom I
Surrender my private cheer.

 

Startling the awkward footsteps of my apprehension,
The flushed assault of your recognition is
The
donnée
of this doubtful hour:
O stern proconsul of intractable provinces,
O poet of the difficult, dear addicted artist,
Assent to my soil and flower.

 

As I stand awake on our solar fabric,
That primary machine, the earth, which gendarmes, banks,
And aspirin pre-suppose,
On which the clumsy and sad may all sit down, and any who will
Say their a-ha to the beautiful, the common locus
Of the master and the rose.

 

Our theatre, scaffold, and erotic city
Where all the infirm species are partners in the act
Of encroachment bodies crave,
Though solitude in death is
de rigueur
for their flesh
And the self-denying hermit flies as it approaches
Like the carnivore to a cave.

 

That its plural numbers may unite in meaning,
Its vulgar tongues unravel the knotted mass
Of the improperly conjunct,
Open my eyes now to all its hinted significant forms,
Sharpen my ears to detect amid its brilliant uproar
The low thud of the defunct.

 

O dwell, ironic at my living centre,
Half ancestor, half child; because the actual self
Round whom time revolves so fast
Is so afraid of what its motions might possibly do
That the actor is never there when his really important
Acts happen. Only the past

 

Is present, no one about but the dead as,
Equipped with a few inherited odds and ends,
One after another we are
Fired into life to seek that unseen target where all
Our equivocal judgements are judged and resolved in
One whole Alas or Hurrah.

 

And only the unborn remark the disaster
When, though it makes no difference to the pretty airs
The bird of Appetite sings,
And Amour Propre is his usual amusing self,
Out from the jungle of an undistinguished moment
The flexible shadow springs.

 

Now more than ever, when torches and snare-drum
Excite the squat women of the saurian brain
Till a milling mob of fears
Breaks in insultingly on anywhere, when in our dreams
Pigs play on the organs and the blue sky runs shrieking
As the Crack of Doom appears,

 

Are the good ghosts needed with the white magic
Of their subtle loves. War has no ambiguities
Like a marriage; the result
Required of its
affaire fatale
is simple and sad,
The physical removal of all human objects
That conceal the Difficult.

 

Then remember me that I may remember
The test we have to learn to shudder for is not
An historical event,
That neither the low democracy of a nightmare nor
An army’s primitive tidiness may deceive me
About our predicament,

 

That catastrophic situation which neither
Victory nor defeat can annul; to be
Deaf yet determined to sing,
To be lame and blind yet burning for the Great Good Place,
To be radically corrupt yet mournfully attracted
By the Real Distinguished Thing.

 

And shall I not specially bless you as, vexed with
My little inferior questions, to-day I stand
Beside the bed where you rest
Who opened such passionate arms to your
Bon
when It ran
Towards you with Its overwhelming reasons pleading
All beautifully in Its breast?

 

O with what innocence your hand submitted
To those formal rules that help a child to play,
While your heart, fastidious as
A delicate nun, remained true to the rare noblesse
Of your lucid gift and, for its own sake, ignored the
Resentful muttering Mass,

 

Whose ruminant hatred of all which cannot
Be simplified or stolen is still at large;
No death can assuage its lust
To vilify the landscape of Distinction and see
The heart of the Personal brought to a systolic standstill,
The Tall to diminished dust.

 

Preserve me, Master, from its vague incitement;
Yours be the disciplinary image that holds
Me back from agreeable wrong
And the clutch of eddying muddle, lest Proportion shed
The alpine chill of her shrugging editorial shoulder
On my loose impromptu song.

 

Suggest; so may I segregate my disorder
Into districts of prospective value: approve;
Lightly, lightly, then, may I dance
Over the frontier of the obvious and fumble no more
In the old limp pocket of the minor exhibition,
Nor riot with irrelevance,

 

And no longer shoe geese or water stakes, but
Bolt in my day my grain of truth to the barn
Where tribulations may leap
With their long-lost brothers at last in the festival
Of which not one has a dissenting image, and the
Flushed immediacy sleep.

 

Into this city from the shining lowlands
Blows a wind that whispers of uncovered skulls
And fresh ruins under the moon,
Of hopes that will not survive the
secousse
of this spring
Of blood and flames, of the terror that walks by night and
The sickness that strikes at noon.

 

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

 

Because the darkness is never so distant,
And there is never much time for the arrogant
Spirit to flutter its wings,
Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry
For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author
And giver of all good things.

from
HENRY JAMES: AN APPRECIATION

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.