BOOKS Beauty and the beastly
TONY TANNER
The fourth volume of Leon Edel's biography, Henry James: The Treacherous Years (Hart- Davis, 84s), covers the final decade of the last century, a period when James wrote some of his most curious and problematical fiction. He starts the 1890s with The Tragic Muse, among other things a study of the relation- ship between an aspiring artist and a great actress, Miriam Rooth. The novel is a curi- ous anticipation of James's own coming disastrous entanglement with the theatre. More than that, it strikes a note of dubiety which echoes and deepens in all the fiction of the decade to come. Of Miriam, James writes : 'you had to get the view of her face, but when you did so it was a splendid mask'.
Which is the mask and which the face? The same problem is taken up in the last work of the decade, that strangest of all James's stories, The Sacred Fount. A group of people stand in front of a portrait of a man holding a face-shaped mask, and discuss which set of features is intended as the real, which as the disguise ; and is it the mask of life or death? What indeed is The Real Thing', as another story of the time asks? During the decade everything becomes un- certain in James's work. What was reality and how was it to be found ; how much of what we see is illusion and how much is reliable evidence ; what is the relationship between the consoling devices of art and the concealing artifices of society? What did Maisie know? There is very little that is firm, clear, and assured during this period, and his characters flounder and flail as never before. Many of them, particularly writers, die. James calls one collection of stories Embar- rassments, and another Terminations.
Yet another he called The Two Magics. It contained 'The Turn of the Screw' and 'Covering End:and they bring together many of James's preoccupations, anxieties, and obsessions during this period. They are both about houses. One is haunted by some name- less evil, emanating either from the dead but active past, or the governess's febrile imagin- ation; the other is in decline, with disposses- sion threatened, until the aptly named Ameri- can Mrs Gracedew brings healing and res- toration just in time to save the European social edifice. This latter story anticipates The Golden Bowl and reveals something of James's hopes for a Vision of new harmonies and reconciliations : 'The Turn of the Screw' contains many of the dreads which seem to have beset his imagination with unappeasable urgency during this period.
In particular a child dies : whether Miles is innocent or corrupt, by the end 'his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped'. This is what happened to Morgan Moreen in 'The Pupil' (lie couldn't stand it ... the shock, the whole scene, the violent emotion'). It is what happens to gallant little Owen Win- grave who dies from the stress of holding out against his military family. In The Other House a child is actually murdered. Such children as do survive in James's work of this decade find that they have indeed entered 'the awkward age'—not only their own, but that of a distinctly corrupt and confusing fin de siècle society.
Now that Mr Edel has published his fourth volume, we can begin to appreciate what James was going through during this time, and see some of the facts behind the fictions. Edel's book offers compulsive reading for anyone with the slightest interest in James, or, indeed, in the declining years of the Vic- torian period. As usual one wants to com- mend Edel on the lucidity and liveliness of his presentation, and for maintaining the narrative pace. And, as usual, one wants to balk at some of his psychological specula- tions, and to note, in passing, the severe prin- ciple of economy he has applied to the docu- mentation of sources. However, let it stand as a tribute to Edel's ability to arouse and sustain interest, that one would readily sup- press any such minor dissatisfactions to accelerate the appearance of the concluding volume. With biographical work of this order, the reviewer cannot hope to do much more than point to the intrinsic interest in Mr Edel's material, and the aptness with which he has, for the most part, handled it.
As Mr Edel sees it, during the latter years of the decade James was suffering from a spiritual illness, even a kind of nervous break- down, and his strange stories of hauntings, hallucinations, sickness and death constituted an act of prolonged self-therapy. Mr Edel compares Freud's attempt to re-explore the past of an individual, to effect a present cure, with James's contemporary form of catharsis through memory and art—the evoking and laying of old ghosts. Certainly James's pre- occupation with the bewilderments—and 'terminations'—of childhood does seem to point to some prolonged re-exploration by James of the troubles and traumas of his own youth. I was struck by Mr Edel's felicitous observation that, if we look at the children in James's fiction, from Effie in The Other House (1896) to Nanda in The Awkward Age (1899), we find that their ages increase gradu- ally from four to eighteen, at which point James terminates the series. It is hard to resist Edel's conclusion that among other things this series also offers 'an extensive personal allegory of the growing-up of Henry James'.
Among the significant things that happened to James the adult during this time, Edel points to two major events—his theatrical failure, and his purchase of Lamb House— and a variety of minor ones, among which I would single out the Oscar Wilde trial, the impact of Ibsen, and James's growing absorp- tion in military memoirs from the Napoleonic era. (I mention this last because it points to James's interest, not only in the past, but in heroism. Himself a pacifist, he found his own form of heroics—in the struggles of art and on the battleground of self.) The disastrous first night of James's play, Guy Domville, makes a complete story in itself, and Edel tells it very well. Some of the details are hilarious.
At the same time—with Shaw, Wells, ai Bennett all, oddly enough, in the audien to review the play—the evening becomes significant moment in which `the Edwardi/ world-to-come' was sitting in judgment on product of the late Victorian age.
For the ageing, deracinated James, the lea (and subsequent purchase) of Lamb Hon at Rye in 1897 was clearly a very importa step, and here again Edel makes an intere ing story. He is perhaps a little generous str detail ('the knocker had to be turned sharp to the right to unlatch the door'), but we ci scarcely know too much about this decisii shift in James's life. It was a step away fr society to solitude, from importunate ur distractions to meditative rural peace.
This major change in the pace and pan of James's life coincided with his purch of a typewriter and engagement of a typ, both would have an important influence his later style. An example of the sort speculation at which one demurs is Ed assertion that 'in "The Turn of the Scre James was saying, on the remote levels of buried life, that Lamb House was a se% threat to his inner peace'. Edel himself n how crucial the impact of Ibsen's work on James at this time, and, though la had always shown himself sensitive to fiber ing and menacing architectural atmospher I find Edel's confident statement hard accept. On the other hand, there is no do at all that Lamb House does figure sign cantly in The Awkward Age.
The Oscar Wilde case interested James much as it appalled him. He had also sho great curiosity about the affairs of J. Symonds, well known to be a crusad homosexual, and clearly James had a m than passing interest in 'the love that dare speak its name'. It would be in keeping %% his `prehensile' consciousness to be intern in any aspect of human relationships, yet E makes it quite clear that while it is ens possible, indeed very probable, that .1a never practised homosexuality, there is doubt that as he grew older and lonelier relationships with certain young men cam mean a great deal to him. In particular feelings for the large blond sculptor, Hen Andersen, whom he met while he was roi ing Italy in 1899, seem to have arrived at intensity, even a desperation, which we a usually associate with falling in love. E implies that he will have a poignant to tell in tracing the end of this relat ship.
The decade obviously had much of `beastly' about it for James : he comPla of `beastly hours at the beastly theat Wilde was an `unclean beast' ; he feels Kipling will never rise above `some stories' ; and Edel has many things to which suggest that James's great story. Beast in the Jungle' (1903) was evolving ing these years. Loneliness, too, becomes influential factor in his life. Many friends during this period—Robert Louis Steven George du Maurier, Edward Burne-J among them—and to a young friend I wrote of 'the essential loneliness of my as being deeper than anything else, even deep counterminings of art'. At the time, as Edel pertinently notes, James ine ingly makes use of the word 'sacred.— sacred mystery of structure' ; and, in re spect, 'the strange sacred time' when learned his painful, profitable lessons in theatre.
At the end of this volume, Edel James working confidently on The Am sadors in Lamb House. A period of cri over and James is on the threshold of a
of artistic triumphs which will con- his particular kind of victory. What- had been beastly in life would now be nsated for by all that was sacred in
Previous page
