Faint receding whistle
Peter Quennell
Henry James: Letters Volume IV Edited by Leon Edel (Harvard University Press £25.50)
During his later years, as an acknow- ledged Old Master, Henry James was the subject of some of Max Beerbohm's most delightful sketches. In one, for inst- ance, we see the elderly, clean-shaven novelist confronting his middle-aged bearded self, while each vehemently dis- approves of the other's prose-style. Else- where, James and Conrad dramatically discuss their art against the background of a fashionable.Edwardian reception; and a third — I think the best of all — shows the aged genius, who has ponderously gone down on his left knee, scrutinising four shoes, a masculine and a feminine pair, deposited outside a bedroom-door, with a look of solemn wonderment and keen enquiry.
Sexual relationships were an aspect of human life that James, though he did not pretend to ignore their strange results, in his earlier books had usually observed from a certain cautious distance. Unlike his French and Italian contemporaries, he avoided too explicit details; and it was his sharp criticism of d'Annunzio's erotic rom- ances that inspired Max Beerbohm's pic- ture. The physical act, he there wrote, if deprived of its emotional setting, might alone be insignificant:
. . . It has no more dignity than — to use a homely image — the boots and shoes that we see, in the corridors of prom- iscuous hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms. Detached and unassociated, these clusters of ob- jects present, however obtruded, no importance. What the participants do with their agitation, or even what it does with them, that is the stuff of poetry, and it is never really interesting save when something finely contributive in themselves makes it so.
Not until he had reached his last period did he enlarge his point of view, and begin to describe both 'the agitation' together with its effect on those who share it, and passion as a separate force. Thus, in The Ambassadors and in The Golden Bowl there seems no doubt that physical attrac- tion as well as romantic affection play an exceedingly important part in the complex story he unfolds. Chad's attachment to the beautiful Madame de Vionnet, Strether learns, is very far from being 'virtuous' — they make love, he discovers, at a charm- ing country refuge; and Charlotte, the 'bad heroine' of The Golden Bowl, eagerly falls into the arms of her old friend's fascinating husband:
. . .Everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses, they passsionately sealed their pledge.
During his later years, remarks Leon Edel, his admirable biographer and editor, James was more 'open to feeling' than he had ever been in the past; and the letters he addressed to three young men — the ambitious but sadly ungifted Norwegian sculptor Hendrik Andersen, the devoted English disciple Hugh Walpole, and Jocelyn Persse, a genial Irish homme du monde — reveal the strength of his affec- tions, by which, now that he had grown old, he was perhaps occasionally surprised. Through the young, whose exuberant com- pany he loved, he appears to have caught a glimpse of the many rewarding experiences he had somehow missed in life; and when Strether urges a protégé to 'live all you can', regardless of what it is he does — 'the train has fairly waited for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I fear its faint receding whistle' — he may have voiced the novelist's own sense of loss.
Luckily, his imaginative zest and crea- tive vigour had not in any way declined; and, if he was more open to feeling, he was also still more determined to give his feelings and impressions a permanent aes- thetic form. The letters he wrote between 1895 and 1916 record the personal vicissi- tudes and professional achievements of a conspicuously well-filled life. In 1895 he was just recovering from the dreadful failure of his efforts as a dramatist — Guy Domville had been hooted off the stage; but, a year later, he returned to story- writing; and in 1897 he purchased a type- writer, which at once helped him to think, he said — he enjoyed its cheerful music — and which encouraged him to devise a new technique. By 1904 he had produced The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, the great works that, he personally be- ortioned and had 'a superior roundness
constituted the summit of his whole career. During the same year, he first met Edith
Wharton, the rich and talented novelist whom his letters repeatedly portray fr°111, half-a-dozen different angles — as the bri" liant transatlantic visitor, then, 'after a wild. extravagant, desperate, detached fashion • having 'the Time of her Life' in LultOrl' and receiving homage even in the suburbs; as 'our so high-flying Kite', otherwise his 'Angel of Devastation', owner of a brarld'A new motor-car, which he had nicknaule", her 'chariot of fire', and apt at the smalles' provocation to whirl him away across Europe; finally, as a respected felr, writer and sympathetic confidante arl" friend. James never relaxed his stately of language, though he was always naturedly prepared to adapt it to Ills correspondents' needs; and the letters be wrote Mrs Wharton are particularly arinis: ing, sharp-edged and allusive. He Che'-‘, ished her so long as he did not see her 11)" often, and liked to advise her about hei numerous private problems, whether 111 concerned her disappointing marriage ° an extremely agitated love-affair. The partner in that affair was Willia,111 Morton Fullerton, a dashing young Ang'°- American journalist who constantiY be trayed his promise, lost his job, or hod 1° (j rescued from some serious scandal; and rescued summing-up of Fullerton 's Preci dicament has a masterly acuteness. He just heard that 'W. M. F. hasn't done
in America and is coming back. • • quite a hideous little pang,
aving afresh . . . bang up against that excluisi•s art in him of not bringing it off to which Ilia treasure of experience and intelligence.i.,' accomplishment, talent, ambition, ch' everything, so inimitably contributes.' dom have a generous tribute and a &ni b', tinngterwanaolvyesnis. of character been more sul Other notable correspondents in .tollis absorbing series of letters are W1!11d James, the disiinguished brother he ao°ry, and reverenced, whose death in 1910 0:: the most dreadful blow he ever suffer Edmund Gosse and H. G. Wells. quarrel with the impudently 'dour:411a Wells has been chronicled by Pro e55 Edel over a quarter of a century ag°. 95 1915, after having been the younger 11111.,,I. friend (he assumed) and fatherly adv,,i since 1898, James opened Wells's satiric:is fantasy Boon, and found one of his rOv ch likened to a vacant but brightly lit chur,,e 'with every light and line focused on 17,, high altar', where, 'very reverently Place. of ,repose 'a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a b11_, string', and saw his creative attitude eo1 pared to that of 'a magnificent but paim'at hippopotamus resolved at any cost, eve° a the cost of its dignity, upon picking 1.1P pea . . sioJnamofefsn'sitrhejoAirndehrewdaeselaarsepdlendicl confe_es: makes interest, makes importan'ernea';keasricilittblice knew of 'no substitute whatever f°1 force and beauty of its process'. But, although he defended his view of art to the end, and methods, upheld the rightness of his own he was never self-complacent; and these letters draw the autobiographical Portrait of an often deeply troubled man. he the time of William James's death, he had an agonising nervous breakdown, and informed Edmund Gosse that 'black depression . . and the cruellest melancho- lia are my chronic enemy and curse.' During these crises, it was art that came to his rescue — art, combined with the habit of stern professional industry. He would not, could not, give up working. From his death-bed, early in 1916, he dictated the two extraordinary fragments — portions of yet unwritten books — that Professor Edel has printed as an appendix to the present volume.
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