Diary: Jean McGarry considers a new edition of Henry James
As a beginner, I took it as axiomatic that a writer could only get better over time; and I judged my work-in-progress, whatever it was, as the acid test of capability. Now, after reading many novelists in full, all and every one of their books, I see that it’s far more likely that a writer arrives at the perfect meshing of subject and style—probably not first time out, but neither as a last shot. There is no straight line of better and ever better. The divine Proust wrote the first and last volumes of In Search of Lost Time before the start of World War I. During that war and just after he filled in the middle by adding four more volumes, so the last work completed might well lie not in volume six, Time Regained, but in tedious longueurs tracking the capture and release of the elusive lover Albertine.
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Henry James’s oeuvre, stories, novels, essays, travel writing, and reviews, newly released in thirty-four densely annotated volumes by Cambridge University Press, shows an interesting arc-like pattern, especially where the drawing of character is concerned. Consider snatches from three periods, early to middle James.
From his first novel, Watch and Ward: a young gent, American, an operator.
He was tall and lean, with a keen dark eye, a smile humorous but not exactly genial, a thin, drawling, almost feminine voice, and a strange Southwestern accent. His voice, at first, might have given you presumptuous hopes of a soft spot in his stiff, young hide; but after listening a while, you would have felt, I think, that though it was an instrument of one string, that solitary chord was not likely to become relaxed.
To my ear, this seems labored, with hedging—“not exactly genial,” “not likely to become relaxed”—and interpolations—“might have given you” and “you would have felt, I think.” Also the sweep of attributes—height, weight, eye color, voice, hide—somehow doesn’t add up to much. The Jamesian touch, though, is there in the contrast between the one-string note, the soft spot, and the “almost feminine” drawling, and in the tension implied in a certain rictus. Even here, though, James undermines the contrast by putting the period not on the positive (force), but the negative (softness).
In a story published thirteen years later, “A New England Winter”: A Boston “spinster” resident of Beacon Hill.
She had a plain, fresh, delightful face, and in whatever part of the world she might have been met, an attentive observer of American life would not have had the least difficulty in guessing what phase she represented. She represented the various and enlightened activities which cast their rapid shuttle—in the comings and goings of eager workers—from one side to the other of the Boston Common.
After supplying a few physical details, James describes Miss Daintry, a character he respects, with a whiplash swerve to how she would be seen by (other) knowing eyes. And here, he earns his laugh not just by the use of the negative (“not have the least difficulty”) in placing her (Boston Brahmin, Unitarian, abolitionist suffragette, etc.) but in ridiculing how she blends into a bevy of “eager workers” trekking back and forth from the exclusive Hill to commercial downtown, busy in her labors (open-door Atheneums, settlement houses, the franchise) for the public good. The repetition “she represented” adds to the stiffish portrait.
Four years later, when he still had some of his great novels before him, James wrote “The Aspern Papers,” one of his most popular stories. Here he is at his Jamesian best, depicting the reclusive Miss Tita and Miss Bordereau, hiding not only the poet’s papers of the title but themselves in their funereal Venetian palazzo. The narrator, a literary critic who aims to steal those papers, identifies their seclusion as “more than keeping quiet—it was like hunted creatures playing dead.” Later in the same story, but from an entirely different vantage, Miss Tita, viewed by the narrator, as they sit together in St. Mark’s Square:
She had forgotten what an attractive thing the world is, and it was coming to her that somehow she had for the best years of her life been cheated of it. This did not make her angry, but as she looked all over the charming scene her face had, in spite of its smile of appreciation, the flush of a sort of wounded surprise.
As James rings the changes of his key motifs, he reminds us why we love fiction—especially when written by a master: because it shows us intricate psychic states we instinctively grasp, but have no words for. In the twenty years following “The Aspern Papers” he will pump up his clauses and unleash his reservations and conditionals, but perhaps never surpass this moment where style enfolds substance like a shell its nut.
Jean McGarry’s most recent book is, Blue Boy, a novel. She has written for Book Post on Natalia Ginzburg, Samuel Johnson, eating in James Joyce, and spaces of literary seclusion.
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What a lovely essay! I just finished teaching "The Portrait of a Lady," and chapter 42 is the perfect example of "show[ing] us intricate psychic states we instinctively grasp, but have no words for."
I like many of the novels: Portrait, American, Washington Square, Wings, Bowl, and a lot of the stories, including "The Aspern Papers". Thanks for asking.