ARTS
`Through a verbal hedge backwards'
The novels of Henry James may seem dense and unreadable, but Selina Mills urges us to try again
In heaven there'll be no algebra No learning dates or names; Just golden harps playing And reading Henry James.
AAnon, found at Lamb House, Rye week before Christmas, England's second rose, Helena Bonham Carter, attended the premiere of her new film, The Wings of the Dove. On the front page of the Times, she confessed that, while she enjoyed the screenplay that might win her an Oscar, Henry James's original novel left her cold. 'He writes so densely,' she said, `it's hard to tell what the hell he's talking about.' While Miss Bonham Carter might not be wise to reveal such details publicly, she is by no means the first to bemoan the master's crypticness. In 1915, H.G. Wells found James's novel to contain `no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships'. Virginia Woolf noted that reading a James sentence was akin to going through a verbal hedge backwards, and in March 1907 a Spectator critic remarked that 'a casual reader cannot even get a glimmering of Mr James's meaning'.
While James remains elusive for some, he stands firmly in the canon of English and American literature. His novels are on `A' Level reading lists, his Penguin paper- backs predominantly sell well, and a bevy of scholars around the world are still debat- ing the rather painful claim that James, aged 19, lost one of his testicles when he fell off a fence. Alongside last year's The Portrait of a Lady, a crop of period dramas this year also pays homage to his work. Films out, or soon to be released in Britain, include fain Softley's The Wings of the Dove, Agnieszka Holland's Washington Square and rumours have it that The Aspen Papers and The Turn of the Screw are in the pipeline. Evidently, film studios turn to period drama for reliable box-office returns, and James is easily popular in that his novels are set in the splendour of 19th- century London, Paris, Venice and Rome. But James is also this year's 'hot ticket' because he demands much more subtlety of an audience and, by implication, film direc- tors and actresses. While his narratives are indeed complex and dense, he puts us far more in control of our own interpretation of his fictional worlds, and, as a conse- quence, dares us to be just as clever and imaginative as he is.
As Mark Steyn pointed out (Arts, 3 Jan- uary), James's novels first appear not to have sufficient plot to hold our attention. Our traditional notion of plot has trained us to want to know what happens next, who did what to whom and, however fantastical the world we enter, to be given the sem-
Mary Evans Picture Library
Portrait of a gentleman: Henry James blance of external order and signposts along the way. With James, however, much of the plot takes place in the interior land- scapes of people's minds. We are privy to them by way of conversation, and their intricate conventional exchanges often demonstrate the deep misunderstandings between Old World ethics and American social freedoms. In the Jamesian meeting of the two cultures, Europe's social tradi- tions are strong enough to censor or tor- ment the young ingenues who arrive on British or Italian shores.
Plot thus unfolds itself through character in a James novel. 'What is character but the determination of incident?' James wrote in 1884. 'What is incident but the determination of character?' More often than not, James's characters are ambiguous and complex, and it is sometimes hard to tell where evil begins and good ends. Yet in an age where attention spans are short, and skills of detection and inference are devolv- ing, it is a novelty when our knowledge of people does not have to be spelt out. With James we cannot always know where we are going and the time it will take, but the journey itself can be a pleasure and of great value. To read James is to understand that nothing is fixed, stable or of perma- nent design, and his focus on eternal themes reveals that we cannot always come to conclusions or rigid definitions — since the old is always encountering the new. Moreover, James's text reveals the interac- tion between environment and character, whereby environment is the projection of what's going on in people's minds — a con- nection that film is well equipped to por- tray. The mythical paradise of Rome in The Portrait of a Lady is severely destroyed as Isabel Archer discovers the truth about her husband, and the shades of colour and hue of Venice allow us to see the variety of emotion shared between Kate, Milly and Merton in The Wings of the Dove.
Of course, as serious readers of Jane Austen know, the characters in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility attract readers and viewers in the same way. Austen's novels centre on the same clash between social hypocrisy and the authentic feelings of characters who, because of their class, are not allowed to speak except through the narrow perimeters of social propriety. Yet, what makes James's fiction even more poignant to us in 1998 is that he was writing in a time of great change and social upheaval, and when America still looked to Europe to define herself. The 1890s were a time when machines were taking over the means of production, when photographs and cinema were dramatically changing the way in which people looked at themselves and when social boundaries and moral codes were transforming daily.
The popularity of James now as a source of entertainment coincides well with our own anxiety concerning our arrival into the new millennium and our desire to feel secure in a world where there is little room for the individual. Now, over 100 years after James began writing, it is Britain's traditions that have been subsumed by America's corporate culture and it is Europe that cuts its economic policies and fashions to shape the needs of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. James taps into our nostalgia for the past: when our social roles, despite being under threat, were still simple and predetermined, and where free- dom of choice had not become so over- whelming as to be tyrannical.
The supreme virtue of the novel, James declared in his essay The Art of Fiction (1884), is `to capture an air of reality and the solidity of specification' and to 'render the look of things .. . the substance of a place or a human spectacle'. As Helena Bonham Carter discovered, to do this can take a lot of dense words. But density can be deceptive. Underneath the writerly addiction of playing with language, James is a generous writer who at his core is very simple. One does not read James for plot but for the higher philosophical truths that drive his protagonists into the most univer- sal of human predicaments. After you have seen the film, bought the T-shirt and the CD, buy the book. Reading James is a worthwhile endeavour to those who are patient for their rewards.
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