Elsewhere with Henry James

Elsewhere with Henry James

On the lessons of literary immersion.

Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady was one of the first substantial classic works of fiction I read unbidden by a curriculum. Roughly five decades ago, I was lured into its snares of sensibility and subordinate clauses via an old and quietly elegant edition I’d picked up for less than a dollar; it was one of scores of finds—many of them, like the James, 1930s-era Modern Library volumes—I’d come upon in a bewilderingly charming bookstore-in-an-apartment run by an elderly European couple a few blocks off Third Avenue in the Bronx, an unexpected literary lair to which I and a similarly book-drunk classmate would escape from the rigors of our Jesuit high school by climbing through a hole in a chain link fence and scrambling across the New York Central railroad tracks just north of the Fordham Road station.

I read that copy of Portrait over the summer and, proud at having navigated its 600-plus pages, felt at the end that I had completed an expedition to a remote and historic capital of the Republic of Letters. As I’d walked its streets, a wide-eyed and earnest tourist, I wasn’t always sure of the import of what I saw, but I was enchanted by the customs on view, haunted by the sophisticated emotional climate that overtook the story of Isabel Archer and suspended it in ominously uncertain weather. I’m sure I was unaware of much of James’s finer moral figuring, but I was smart enough, by intuition or instinct, to take at least one lesson from that adolescent tour of the author’s fictional world, invoking as an epitome of cultivated cruelty the figure of Isabel’s self-centered husband, a connoisseur of moral compromise: “Beware, you young and high-minded aesthete, of becoming Gilbert Osmond.” It’s a lesson I hope my family is grateful I never forgot.

I’ve revisited James’s masterpiece a few times since that first reading, most recently when writing about it for 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, and its allure for me has only grown across the decades. What’s true of Portrait in particular is true of James in general: in considering how to present James’s work in 1,000 Books, I’d grown increasingly alert to his peculiar achievement, to the persistence with which his apprehensive approach to human feeling—the sentiments that alternately confound and concentrate our being—didn’t so much ring true as reverberate with lived experience.

As I entered 2017, the final year of work on my own volume, I determined to devote my reading hours to as much of James’s prose as I could tackle. With a discipline I was not accustomed to applying to my new year resolutions, I spent the next twelve months immersed in James, making my way through more than a dozen novels, an equal number of novellas and short stories, and all five volumes of Leon Edel’s biography, every chapter of which is in a real way annotated by James himself, due to the biographer’s apt and abundant quotation from the novelist’s letters and notebooks. (I also read Colm Tóibín’s novel about James, The Master, and John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, a “sequel” to Portrait; as accomplished as both those writers are, their Jamesian fictions paled next to the real thing.)

This year-long immersion in The Master’s sensibility brought my older self into a kind of communion with that teenaged acolyte so pleased to have marked the progress of his bookmark through the Modern Library edition so many years ago, leading me to draw some unexpected conclusions about why, and how, we love the authors we love most, and what legacy their work leaves behind when the reading’s done. Against the grain of my long training as a bookseller, I realized that all those months absorbed in James’s oeuvre did not produce a list of recommendable books as much as it engendered enthusiasm for the atmosphere his fiction conjures, a milieu diminished when I tried to represent it on a title-by-title basis. In fact, with few exceptions, the novels blended together into a kind of literary weather, a climate of feeling, that lent light and shadow to a continuous landscape.

I’d preceded my year of James with one devoted to Elena Ferrante (although without the formality of new year’s resolve), and followed it with a more purposeful progress through the novels of Virginia Woolf, with divagations through her essays, letters, and diaries entries—expeditions of sentences determined to settle on a page, like outposts in life’s wilderness, every aspect of her experience. Through such steeping in a single writer’s work, what stays with one is not the shape and substance of particular books, but an air of being, an ambiance, that is like the sense of life (and not just place) one takes away from a prolonged stay in a foreign land. Italy feels different from France, India from Japan, in the same way the pages of one ingenious writer feel different from those of another, and one’s sense of alertness—of aliveness—is expanded in the same way it is by a sojourn in an unfamiliar setting, where one’s habits of behavior and perception—the manner of one’s presence—must find new footings. This is the reward of exploring deeply across a writer’s bibliography and not just stopping to admire its masterpieces. Once you’ve queued at the anointed monuments of any elsewhere to which you’ve traveled, you’re free to savor the hoverings of history and custom that animate your destination, the promise delivered to your senses rather than the pictures your camera can capture and keep.

“I remember an English novelist,” writes James in his essay “The Art of Fiction,”

a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience . . .

Just as byways and backstreets reveal a place’s character more tellingly than the landmarks guidebooks tout, so the insight encoded in literature is seldom expressed directly, but is revealed obliquely in the stance that, for example, James takes to the unfolding of our large and small hesitations (in which so much of life is suspended, always), or Woolf traces through the hearts and minds of people networked in their sentiments, or Elena Ferrante takes towards the structures of gender and class that are embodied not in political ideas but in the people on the street where we live, whether they know it or not: shoemakers, grocers, lovers, friends. Such authorial understanding transcends the plot of any particular book; it lives between the lines of prose for us to glimpse and gather in the stores of our attention.

“Experience is never limited and it is never complete;” James writes earlier in the essay I’ve just quoted,

it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative . . . it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.

He was in the midst of giving advice to novelists, but he could as well have been offering instruction to travelers, or to readers.

In his last book, The Elsewhere Community, Hugh Kenner relates a conversation he had while far from home:

I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a man on a train in Taiwan. He informed me that the whole vast oeuvre of the American novelist Henry James was available in Chinese translation. Remembering the intricate Jamesian hierarchies of qualifications that inform sentences sometimes half a page long, then reflecting on what I’d been told of the Chinese language with its minimal syntactic mechanisms, I could only ask in astonishment, “What holds it together?” To which his reply was simple: “Reality holds it together.”

And just what is the Jamesian reality that connects across books, languages, eras? What was shared across so many separate fictions I’d spent 2017 attending to—from Roderick Hudson, The American, and The Europeans to Daisy Miller and Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw and The Spoils of Poynton?

While the plots of many of James’s tales are about people away from home—Americans in Europe, English men and women on the Continent—it is striking how important domiciles and even specific rooms are to the complexion of his tales, as if his protagonists’ uprootedness condemns them to a tantalizing search for abiding comfort in settled abodes. Houses, apartments, hotel rooms, chambers of every stripe assume in his stories emotional contours that shadow, and sometimes shape, the longings of his characters. If such spaces assume a starkly allegorical shape in minor novels such as The Other House, they exude more refinement, a deeper psychological hue, in masterpieces like Portrait. Here’s the latter book’s heroine, Isabel Archer, being a brooding champion of her grandmother’s tattered house in Albany in the face of the more transactional real estate appraisal of her expatriate aunt, Lydia Touchett:

“In Florence we should call it a very bad house,” said Mrs. Touchett; “but here, I dare say, it will bring a high price. It ought to make a considerable sum for each of you. In addition to that you must have something else; it’s most extraordinary your not knowing. The position’s of value, and they’ll probably pull it down and make a row of shops. I wonder you don’t do that yourself; you might let the shops to great advantage.”
       Isabel stared; the idea of letting shops was new to her. “I hope they won’t pull it down,” she said; “I’m extremely fond of it.”
       “I don’t see what makes you fond of it; your father died here.”
       “Yes, but I rather like it for that,” the girl rather strangely returned. “I like places in which things have happened—even if they’re sad things. A great many people have died here; the place has been full of life.”
       “Is that what you call being full of life?”
       “I mean full of experience—of people’s feelings and sorrows. And not of their sorrows only, for I’ve been very happy here as a child.”

James’s attention to the fittings of life—the fabrics and furniture of rooms, the corners that hold us close and the doorways that suspend us between dimensions, the antiques and objets d’art that inspirit habitation, all the components of the exhibition of self and sensibility our apprehension, affection, and means curate—was endlessly nuanced. Isabel again, in that house in Albany:

There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender little girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror.

The bachelor novelist understood the furnishings of a child’s mind with surprising sensitivity, as What Maisie Knew, written from a young girl’s point of view, even more indelibly proved. What Henry knew, and what he translated into the art of fiction, was just how much of life is in fact felt rather than acted out. He was keenly aware of how much more of our time is spent in worry, or regret, or anticipation, than in sureness or endeavor, and of how much more closely we live to our feelings than to our ideas (unless, of course, we’re fooling ourselves, and maybe others, with the kind of unknowing self-deception often on display in James’s pages). Which is to say that what James explored in his ruminating prose, with a scrutiny no previous novelist had applied, was the character of our interior life: the privacy in which so much of our existence is passed and in which, ultimately, we find, or lose, our way. James intuited that our weightiest moments are internal and often unresolved, and it’s his arresting skill in measuring those moments that gives his work its special aura.

James’s novels grew in sophistication throughout his long career, culminating in a trio of late-period revelations: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Yet his masterpiece in the form to my mind remains Portrait, published in 1881. I’d even suggest that in a particular chapter of that book (Chapter XLII, to be exact), we can witness his fictional artistry mature. In that key scene, Isabel sits alone in her drawing room through a quiet night, meditating on the ruins of her marriage to the supercilious aesthete Osmond. The precious self-regard of Osmond’s world closes in about her:

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her. Of course it had not been physical suffering; for physical suffering there might have been a remedy. She could come and go; she had her liberty; her husband was perfectly polite. He took himself so seriously; it was something appalling. Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.

For page upon page, no action unfolds other than the gradual dawning of both the morning and her self-awareness. She ponders how she—who once seemed so original a young woman in possessing “intentions of her own” rather than expecting a man to furnish her with a destiny—has come to the grim reality of her present unhappiness, shaped with perverse connoisseurship by her husband: “She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was.” Against her husband’s selfishness, Isabel takes possession of a room of her own, although—since the novel ends with her setting off from England to return to Rome and an uncertain future—we never learn exactly how she’ll furnish it.

Few writers are less suited to reading in adolescence than Henry James, because his true subject is how we cultivate the experiences in which we dwell. That takes time as well as taste, luck as well as learning, a feel for contexts that transcends what one can glean from texts. For James, the context for what he had to say was, metaphorically at least, a decorated room, upholstered with stubborn privacies and shifting, shared emotions. As for Joyce it was the incorrigibly plural city, and for Virginia Woolf consciousness itself, a patterned energy that is of the world yet has fleeting presence in it. These writers immersed themselves in their realities, thereby enriching ours if we have the patience to parse their generosities.

“It goes without saying,” James tells aspiring writers in “The Art of Fiction,” “that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality: but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being.”

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

Can that cluster of gifts can be fostered by reading, too? I’ve always hoped so. Having spent a lifetime with my nose in books, it’s too late to explore another method. Which is to ask, as I think back to my fifteen-year-old self turning the pages of that Modern Library Portrait, what did I know, and when did I know it? With an aptly Jamesian misgiving, I can’t say for sure.

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