The
Classics (3): The Golden Bowl,
Henry James
Henry James is famous for being difficult. Clover Adams nailed
him precisely, and forever, with her remark that he "chews more than he bites off."
Her witticism is directed at a prose style made up of endless subordination and ambiguity, a
worrying of mood and tone so enveloping in its mannered fuzz one
frequently loses track of what is actually happening.
That is, if anything is actually happening.
This is not being unfair. It is simply giving expression to what
seems to be a nearly universal response. Re-reading The Golden Bowl
I was often reminded
of the "narcotic effect" I described Agatha Christie's prose as
having. Whole pages seemed to go by in a daze without any action registering on
my consciousness.
Even key events in the plot went missing. Were my critical faculties this out of
shape? Was I good for nothing any more but browsing the Internet and flipping
through "graphic novels"? Or was this highbrow sleepwalking a state
brought on by James himself?
Whatever the cause, it can lead to some embarrassing
moments. Just a month before I started preparing for this essay I made the monthly Trivia Challenge question "In what neighbourhood does the
Prince buy the golden bowl?"
That was how I remembered it happening the last time I read this
book, a little over ten years ago. Unfortunately, as one alert reader of this
site was quick to let me
know, it was a false memory. The Prince doesn't buy the golden bowl, Maggie
does.
My cheeks burned, but not for long. James has this effect on
everyone. He puts simple matters of what in grade school we called "reading
comprehension" to an extreme test. My slip-up put me in good company. When I
went to do a bit of background research to see what other
people had to say about The Golden Bowl one of the sources I turned to was
Tony Tanner's slim volume on the Master. Tanner is a good close-reader, and a critic I always enjoyed
flipping through when I
was at university. Unfortunately, in his chapter on The Golden Bowl he
has Maggie - not once but twice - smashing the titular object.
Maggie, in case you too have forgotten, does not smash the bowl.
Fanny Assingham does.
Having the book fresh in mind, I found other critics making
similar mistakes all over the place. Clearly this was nothing to be embarrassed
by. After all (and this is one of my all-time favourite literary anecdotes), the
first American edition of The Ambassadors even printed a pair of chapters in
reverse order and no one noticed. James himself didn't pick up on the
transposition when he revised the book for his New York Edition. In fact, no one
realized a mistake had been made until a scholar pointed it out over forty
years later!
What is it about James's writing that seems to so defy our close attention?
A large part of it has to do with that ceaseless mastication Clover Adams observed. The early James I find quite accessible, even
direct and straightforward. But as he entered the so-called "Major
Phase" he seemed to paradoxically decline into a verbosity that was
increasingly inarticulate. It doesn't take long for one to get the sense that
nothing essential is being said, or, to put it another way, that a large
part of the book is mere filler.
I had a friend once who would read fiction at an amazing speed.
I'd see him at work just leafing through novels. When I asked him how he managed
to read so fast he explained that he only read the parts in quotation marks.
Everything aside from the dialogue was, in his estimation, just meant to be
skimmed over. I suppose I felt at the time that this marked him as a bit of a
Philistine, but I couldn't help but think of his practical example while working
my way through this book again. Questions are asked and then . . . later . . .
much later . . . usually three of four pages later . . . an answer . . . well,
usually not an "answer," but rather some kind of ambiguous or vague
response . . . arrives. And then it's a quick thumbing back to the place where the question was asked because, of course, you've
quite forgotten what it was.
Which brings me back to where I started, which is that I
shouldn't have been surprised.
What I meant by that was my surprise at how little I enjoyed
this installment of the Classics. And it was a surprise since I had already read
The Golden Bowl and remembered liking it. It wasn't my favourite James
text (that, I still think, would be What Maisie Knew), but I didn't
recall disliking it to the extent I did this time around. This time it just
seemed longer. And for all the old,
obvious reasons already canvassed. I found my eyes glazing over during sentences
(and yes, it is all one sentence) like this:
What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the
generous mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving
with impatience, or kicking and crying, even, at moments, like some infant
Hercules who wouldn't be dressed; what with these things and the bravery of
youth and beauty, the insolence and fortune and appetite so diffused among his
fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity
and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note
in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one's
head, that, as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his
situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense.
This is the Prince at Matcham, though I would defy anyone to
have guessed. It is entirely typical. Like my friend who skimmed through books
reading only the parts in quotation marks I wanted to take a mental blue pencil
to the whole thing and just read "What with the noble fairness of the
place, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his
expense." I suppose a close reading of all this sentence's little
intricacies would not be without some rewards, but given it is part of a nearly
600-page concoction where everything else is just as rich I suspect it adds
almost nothing to one's appreciation of any aspect of the novel. It's a baroque
version of Gertrude Stein's "wallpaper effect", and only more
interesting than that for at least having some sense of forward progress.
This is too bad, because James can just as easily toss off a
magic phrase in only a couple of words. I love the bit about how Amerigo
"understood and practised every art that could beguile large leisure."
Or Charlotte's theatrically delivered "prodigious kiss." Or Maggie
recognizing in Charlotte's wail of pain "the felicity of her deceit."
Large leisure, prodigious kisses, and felicity of deceit stick in the mind. But
I have to wonder how many other moments like this I lost while I was
sleep-reading. Probably quite a few.
I did perk up a bit for the naughty parts. Not the overwrought
climax of the seduction scene ("their lips sought their lips, their
pressure their response and their response their pressure"), but the talking
around and about what's going on in the different bedrooms:
"In the first place Mr. Verver isn't aged."
The Colonel just hung fire - but it came. "Then why the deuce does
he - oh, poor dear man! - behave as if he were?"
She took a moment to meet it. "How do you know how he behaves?"
"Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does!"
Again, at this, she faltered; but again she rose. "Ah, isn't my
whole point that he's charming to her?"
"Doesn't it depend a bit on what she regards as charming?"
I got a grin out of this, but it's really not very funny. And
these bits with the Assinghams are
about it for humour. Which is unfortunate because I get the sense that James is
trying very hard to write a funny book. And there's nothing quite as tedious as
someone trying to be funny and not succeeding. I have to wonder at all the absurdist dialogue
where a character repeats back what's just been said as a question, or restates
a question as a statement. Or the confusion among masculine pronouns as
characters misunderstand which father/husband is being referred to. Jokes that
aren't very amusing the first time certainly don't bear repeating the
number of times (20? 50?) James repeats them here. At times the whole thing
seems descending into mere farce, an overwritten drawing-room comedy. Which might
also have been part of what James thought he was up to.
The Golden Bowl is an unhappy, maybe even tragic novel
precisely because it inverts the whole notion of what Northrop Frye describes as
the archetypal New Comedy plot. In New Comedy a pair of young lovers are
erotically involved but unable to marry, usually for some economic reason. The
plot revolves around their circumventing various blocking characters (typically
including an older parent who is also a sterile moneybags), and ending with
their marriage, the promise of a bright new future, and the establishment of a
more sensible order of things. In The Golden Bowl the archetypal New
Comedy situation exists as part of the set-up, but instead of getting around the
mean old man and establishing a just new order the lovers are torn apart and
sentenced to lives of impotent, loveless bondage. And I don't think James meant
us to read it any other way. In the end, the "superbly monstrous
couple" (Gore Vidal's name for Maggie and her dad) win. Youth and natural
romantic affection are crushed.
At least that's my reading of it. But perhaps I've lost my
ability to fully appreciate James. The subtlety and ambiguity of the language
this time out struck me as obsessively evasive and even shallow. And so little
actually happens. Looking back over it I recognize only two truly dramatic
moments: Maggie's challenge to the Prince to "find out for yourself!"
what her father knows, and, especially, the Prince's turning about in the
antique store when he realizes the shopkeeper knows Italian. Oh, if it were only
all this good! If only James could have been satisfied with something . . .
less.
