The Portable Henry James by Henry James Read Free Book Online
Authors: Henry James
death: a complete lack of cant.
V I .
This introduction has been particularly misleading in one important way. In an attempt to fight the stereotype of a tottering mandarin who was fussy, prissy, prim, and panicked by even one drop of vulgarity, it has dragged Henry James onto the field of battle and has watched him contend with turbulent forces. There has been all of America versus all of Europe, then a deep moral sense confounded by obsessive modern intelligence, and finally art’s chiseled perfection defied by the inconstant pulse of life. Those battlegrounds are in fact there, but such emphasis fails when it describes a writer who was a stranger to joy, for as much as anything else, one remembers the pleasure of the text. And then one recalls that years ago a professor told his students that Henry James was the funniest man who ever lived. Everyone blinked, but it did not take that long to get the joke.
Those who read Henry James—and there are more of them out there than is generally imagined—do so in part for the way he says things. He could do anything with a sentence except butcher it, and his friend A. C. Benson spoke with precision when he said that here was a style that could crack a walnut or pat an egg. James could be long-winded, extravagant, arch, polyglot, allusive, fierce, gentle, recherché, exquisite as hell, and then—at those gawky moments when he tried to be one of the boys—oddly slangy, indubitably so. Then he would “hang fire” all over the place, or describe a delicately dying heiress who would “pay a hundred percent—and even to the end, doubtless, through the nose.” His was a hungering, inching, devious style that could trace the dusky path and then roam too far into the woods, and he knew it: “I wander wild,” he notes after a particularly phantasmagoric aside near the end of Italian Hours. We read him on Matilde Serao’s depiction of “love, at Naples and in Rome,” and our lips part as we sound the mystic distinction of those two prepositions. He knew he was something called Jamesian, which most of all means that he was luridly loving of the byways of the sentence and scrupulous beyond the demands of any jealous god. Like anyone, he sometimes tired of his own ways, but most of the time he liked them. When a literary friend complained that Mrs. Thomas Carlyle had mastered “the art of mountaining molehills,” James considered and replied, “Ah! but for that, where would any of us be?”
When the mature James read Shakespeare, he apparently cared little for the “meaning” of the text. He kept coming back to the words. A “ripe, amused genius,” James’s Shakespeare—and it is telling and daring that he calls Shakespeare by his own given name “the master”—would heap up words in the “incomparable splendor” of a supreme poetic gift. As his style matured—yes, Shakespeare’s—it became “something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure.” Then, perhaps thinking of the mountaining elaborations of his own late works, James claims that such style can go anywhere: “Anything was a subject, always, that offered to sight an aperture of size enough for expression and its train to pass in and deploy themselves. If they filled up all the space, none the worse; they occupied it as nothing else could do.” Less a brooding artist than a supreme virtuoso, James’s Shakespeare is as careless of audience as he finally is of subject, and at the end he is a “divine musician who, alone in his room, preludes or improvises at the close of the day”:
He sits at the harpsichord, by the open window, in the summer dusk; his hands wander over the keys. They stray far, for his motive, but at last he finds and holds it; then lets himself go, embroidering and refining: it is the thing for the hour and his mood. The neighbors may gather in the garden, the nightingale be hushed on the bough; it is none
V I .
This introduction has been particularly misleading in one important way. In an attempt to fight the stereotype of a tottering mandarin who was fussy, prissy, prim, and panicked by even one drop of vulgarity, it has dragged Henry James onto the field of battle and has watched him contend with turbulent forces. There has been all of America versus all of Europe, then a deep moral sense confounded by obsessive modern intelligence, and finally art’s chiseled perfection defied by the inconstant pulse of life. Those battlegrounds are in fact there, but such emphasis fails when it describes a writer who was a stranger to joy, for as much as anything else, one remembers the pleasure of the text. And then one recalls that years ago a professor told his students that Henry James was the funniest man who ever lived. Everyone blinked, but it did not take that long to get the joke.
Those who read Henry James—and there are more of them out there than is generally imagined—do so in part for the way he says things. He could do anything with a sentence except butcher it, and his friend A. C. Benson spoke with precision when he said that here was a style that could crack a walnut or pat an egg. James could be long-winded, extravagant, arch, polyglot, allusive, fierce, gentle, recherché, exquisite as hell, and then—at those gawky moments when he tried to be one of the boys—oddly slangy, indubitably so. Then he would “hang fire” all over the place, or describe a delicately dying heiress who would “pay a hundred percent—and even to the end, doubtless, through the nose.” His was a hungering, inching, devious style that could trace the dusky path and then roam too far into the woods, and he knew it: “I wander wild,” he notes after a particularly phantasmagoric aside near the end of Italian Hours. We read him on Matilde Serao’s depiction of “love, at Naples and in Rome,” and our lips part as we sound the mystic distinction of those two prepositions. He knew he was something called Jamesian, which most of all means that he was luridly loving of the byways of the sentence and scrupulous beyond the demands of any jealous god. Like anyone, he sometimes tired of his own ways, but most of the time he liked them. When a literary friend complained that Mrs. Thomas Carlyle had mastered “the art of mountaining molehills,” James considered and replied, “Ah! but for that, where would any of us be?”
When the mature James read Shakespeare, he apparently cared little for the “meaning” of the text. He kept coming back to the words. A “ripe, amused genius,” James’s Shakespeare—and it is telling and daring that he calls Shakespeare by his own given name “the master”—would heap up words in the “incomparable splendor” of a supreme poetic gift. As his style matured—yes, Shakespeare’s—it became “something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure.” Then, perhaps thinking of the mountaining elaborations of his own late works, James claims that such style can go anywhere: “Anything was a subject, always, that offered to sight an aperture of size enough for expression and its train to pass in and deploy themselves. If they filled up all the space, none the worse; they occupied it as nothing else could do.” Less a brooding artist than a supreme virtuoso, James’s Shakespeare is as careless of audience as he finally is of subject, and at the end he is a “divine musician who, alone in his room, preludes or improvises at the close of the day”:
He sits at the harpsichord, by the open window, in the summer dusk; his hands wander over the keys. They stray far, for his motive, but at last he finds and holds it; then lets himself go, embroidering and refining: it is the thing for the hour and his mood. The neighbors may gather in the garden, the nightingale be hushed on the bough; it is none