Henry James, “The Awkward Age”

The problem with Henry James is, sometimes I do not understand what he is saying. Usually, eventually, I can puzzle it out, and it’s worth the effort. But on this reading of The Awkward Age, I was repeatedly frustrated by the allusive, circular dialogue, which is supposed to carry the weight of the novel. (More on that in an instant.) The story itself — about a young English girl who is brought up in a racy social set and whose reputation is damaged by her mother’s shenanigans — is quite fascinating. The characters are, too: young Nanda Brookenham, whose rectitude remains unspoiled despite her milieu, her lazy fascinating mother, and the hovering deus ex machine Mr. Longdon, who pretty clearly stands in for James himself. This isn’t one of the great, late, longer books (The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl) that you expect to have to crack your head over. So I expected an easier read than it actually turned out to be.

Sargent’s “Miss Elsie Palmer,” currently at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Like Nanda Brookenham, Elsie is not a conventional beauty.

The foreword to my elderly Penguin provided some illumination after I’d battled my way through the novel itself. (That persistence, by the way, sprang largely from affection for Nanda, combined with curiosity about late 19th century London social mores.) Ronald Blythe made two important points about The Awkward Age. First, it was James’ first novel to be written after his disastrous attempt at playwriting. Hence the almost-complete reliance on dialogue to move the story along. Hence also the novel’s structure, which is basically a series of conversations taking place in various settings among various combinations of the characters. If you’re aware of James‘ recent theatrical experience you see how, well, stagey the novel is, with recurring props (a book, a five-pound note) and “business” like constant drinking of tea to provide something for the characters to do while they chat.

The other point Blythe makes is that this is the first novel James dictated rather than writing, and it introduces us to that inimitable serpentine style that has been the bane of many an English major. For instance, to take a random sentence, “There was therefore something in Vanderbank’s present study of the signs that showed he had had to learn to feel his way and had more or less mastered the trick.” (Blythe points out that often James‘ own friends didn’t follow his conversation either, which makes me feel better.)

So we’ve got this somewhat hybrid structure and this leap into James‘ late style, which, I know, I know, is proto-modern and pre-Proustian, etc. Maybe I was in the mood for a more immersive reading experience, without having to consider where twentieth-century fiction was headed. I’ll leave you with a bit of dialogue. Here, Mr. Vanderbank, the handsome man-about-town whom Nanda is in love with, discusses Nanda with her mother — who is his lover. The “blessed man” is Mr. Longdon, who has offered to give Nanda a dowry if Vanderbank will propose to her.

And what did you say about a “basis?” The blessed man offers to settle–?’

“‘You’re a wonderful woman,’ her visitor returned, ‘and your imagination takes its fences in a way that, when I’m out with you, quite puts mine to shame. When he mentioned it to me I was quite surprised.’

“And I,’ Mrs. Brook asked, ‘am not surprised a bit? Isn’t it only,’ she modestly suggested, ‘because I’ve taken him in more than you? Didn’t you know he would?’ she quavered.

“Vanderbank thought or at least pretended to. ‘Make me the condition? How could I be sure of it?’

“But the point of his question was lost for her in the growing light. ‘Oh then the condition’s you only–?’

“‘That, at any rate, is all I have to do with. He’s ready to settle if I’m ready to do the rest.’”

You see the problem.

Chad Harbach, “The Art of Fielding”

I don’t give a hoot about fielding. Or about pitching. Or catching, or batting, or any of the other elements of baseball that have always seemed excruciatingly dull to me. But people, now — we all like books about people, right? Earnest, diligent people who try to do wonderful things and sometimes succeed? Appealing and sometimes annoying people who long to be loved? Yes, there is a lot of baseball in The Art of Fielding but there’s also a lot of, oh, gosh, life. And I knew Chad Harbach had me totally hooked when I found myself worrying about his characters when I had to be away from them.

A classic stage for triumph or tragedy, right? Even looks like an amphitheater.

The novel begins with Mike Schwartz, the enormous, hairy, soulful catcher for the baseball team of Westish College in northern Wisconsin. And Mike’s tale starts with Henry Skrimshander, a slender, taciturn teenager who plays shortstop for his South Dakota high school. Mike recruits Henry for Westish and the rest of the book is about their friendship and the fate of the Westish baseball team. But it’s about baseball the way Moby Dick is about whaling, a point Harbach makes clear with a hundred little touches. Westish College has a long scholarly relationship with Melville and the sports teams are called “the Harpooners,” not a bad image to implant in your readers’ minds. Throwing things? Long odds? Hard work? Grace and danger and teamwork? Baseball, whaling, life…  A “skrimshander” is someone who carves scrimshaw, so I’m not making this up. And if you think about the process of carving beauty from whalebone, you know that patience and effort are as essential to the process as any innate talent.

But why am I talking about Melville when I care so much more about Mike’s passionate determination to help the Westish teams win, or his complicated Svengali relationship with Henry? Not to mention the late-life amours of college president Guert Affenlight. Or Affenlight’s beautiful daughter Pella who flees a starter marriage to return to her father. (Home: “where they have to take you in.” Yes, she quotes Frost; it’s that kind of book.)

And though this is not a technically showy novel, I was awe-struck throughout by Harbach’s skill. Incident plausibly follows incident, cranking up the pressure on character after character. The narrative slides smoothly in and out of different characters’ viewpoints so that you, the reader, experience each scene with maximum impact. (There’s even a trademark Henry James moment, when two characters, observed from afar, reveal something astounding.) Time speeds up and slows down as it needs to. Scene-setting is lively but never drags on; minor characters are allowed to stay minor.

Ruminating about coaching baseball, Mike reflects that “All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to the final triumph.” Clever: Harbach puts the words in Mike’s mouth, but he’s followed his own advice.

Elizabeth Spencer, “The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales”

Uncomfortable feeling — I have not been fair to this book. Sometimes I forget that, as a reader, you have to bring something to the enterprise: sustained effort, and the ability to keep faith with the author’s intentions. Many books —  lots of what I read, anyway — can just be gulped down as diversion, but Elizabeth Spencer deserved better of me than being read in chopped-up chunks on a series of airplanes.

That being said, I may not be exactly her ideal audience anyway. This volume unites two novellas and seven stories of variable length. What they all have in common is Italian settings. (“The Light in the Piazza,” of course, is the source for the very successful musical of the same title.) I don’t read a lot of short fiction. I’m not even sure I know how to appreciate it. Some of Spencer’s stories go by so quickly that they seem little more than a gesture. A kiss caught on a stairway, a letter thrust down into a pot of white azaleas, a wisteria blossom drifting into a drink; maybe you are supposed to pause there and let Spencer’s images and characters expand in your imagination?

mid-20th century settings, did I say?

I was least comfortable with the long novella “Knights and Dragons,” set largely during a Roman winter. Its shifting point of view and time frame are effectively disorienting; the story concerns the volatile relationships among a set of expatriates. The thread between America and Rome is stretched thin, almost to rupture. Martha Ingram, teetering on the edge of madness, evades communications from her ex-husband, though she hears rumors about his death. Her boss, diplomat George Hartwell, has been abroad so long that he wears pointy Italian shoes. His affection for Martha, especially when his wife goes away, takes on a neurotic flavor. This alienation from “home” brings an untethered quality to relationships. The Introduction says that Elizabeth Spencer “disclaimed any real fondness for James and denied his influence.” Really?

The final tale is called “The Cousins” and it seemed the most effective. A group of Southern cousins  travels to Europe one summer. The narrator, Ella Mason, is looking back from late middle age, and she deftly depicts the affectionate but unsettled familial and romantic alliances within the group. The story cuts back and forth between the American scenes and the European. The latter includes a brilliant episode at the casino in Monte Carlo, when one of the cousins has an adventure at the roulette table. What could be more un-American than a fortune won or lost on the behavior of a little black ball? Yet the scene I remember best presents cousins lounging on a porch after supper: “‘A warm night and the streetlight filtering in patterns through the trees and shrubs and a smell of honeysuckle… And steps on the walk. They stopped, then they walked again, and Ben got up … and unlatched the screen. If you didn’t latch the screen it wouldn’t shut.’” This speech is delivered by the cousin who stayed in Florence, whom the family consider “lost.” To whom Ella Mason is in some sense an ambassador, in the Jamesian sense.

Daisy Goodwin, “The American Heiress”/”My Last Duchess”

The late-19th-century cultural phenomenon of American heiresses marrying into the English aristocracy has attracted literary attention from the moment it began: Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady was published in 1880, a mere six years after the foundational match between Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill. James worked this seam thoroughly, followed by Edith Wharton, most notably in her final, unfinished novel The Buccaneers. James and Wharton concentrated on the tension — both emotional and social — generated by these matches, but several of their contemporaries wrote escapist fiction on the same theme that focused more on the voyeuristic aspects of the situation. (Look for Gertrude Atherton’s 1898 American Wives and English Husbands, Constance Cary Harrison’s 1890 Anglomaniacs, or Mary E. Sherwood’s 1882 A Transplanted Rose.) The men’s castles, the women’s jewelry, the parties, the scandals, the love matches and the divorces — this was social climbing taken to the extreme and it entertained many people for a long time.

Sargent's portrait of the 9th Duke of Marlborough and his Duchess, formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt, plus the heir and the spare

Apparently it still does. Daisy Goodwin’s The American Heiress (which was published in the UK as My Last Duchess) revisits the heiress/aristocrat marriage. I have to say, I am not the right audience for this book, because I have previously written about it myself. So by page 10, I could identify not only the models of the characters and settings, but also the author’s sources. That’s my problem, not Goodwin’s. I finished the book because I was curious to see what she would make of it. Her heiress is the usual headstrong beauty, here named Cora Cash. (The elbow-in-the-side name is an unusually blatant touch.) The tale opens with a set-piece of a Newport ball before Cora is whisked over to England where she and her dollars will be trailed before impecunious English suitors. She and the handsome enigmatic Duke of Wareham meet cute in Paradise Wood on his estate — so far, so Georgette Heyer.

The interesting part of the book is not the courtship but what happens afterward, as Duchess Cora and her aristocratic Ivo begin to negotiate a relationship.  Goodwin is at her best imagining the obstacles presented by the Duke’s pride, Cora’s expectations, and their mutual misunderstanding. There were flickers of Wharton here: that sense you get in some of Wharton’s novels of appealing characters who can’t get out of their own way. Cora’s impetuous efforts to please her husband misfire repeatedly, understandably. (She’s slow on the uptake about how little he likes a surprise.)  Her money is almost a character in its own right, and looms large in the marriage.

Ultimately, though, The American Heiress is not interested in exploring the finer emotional shades. Ivo’s habit of running hot and cold with Cora turns out to have a more mundane cause and we’re back in Georgette Heyer-land. Without, sadly, Heyer’s light touch.

Jane Gardam, “God on the Rocks”

To me, “on the rocks” means on ice, so this title skews flippant. But I don’t think that’s what Jane Gardam intends. Those rocks are literal, since God on the Rocks is set in an English coastal resort with a pier and tide pools and a beach. As for the God part, he is very much present in this novel. Or at least, his followers are. Followers in a variety of flavors, with different levels of sincerity and effort.

Honestly, as I read this novel I had to marvel at Jane Gardam‘s imagination. God on the Rocks is less exotic than The Man with the Wooden Hat or Old Filth, and its structure is less complex. But Gardam has a startling way of creating drama. The big events here occur offstage, while the small events — a failed tea party, a walk in the woods — are crammed with conflict. Maybe you could say that her approach to life was elliptical. And make no mistake, this novel may not be long but it encompasses the big things in life: love, death, faith.

geographically inaccurate but atmospheric

For much of the book, the protagonist is the eight-year-old Margaret Marsh, a clever, observant girl. Gardam does a wonderful job imagining her tart and unsentimental but necessarily limited view of the world. In fact Margaret’s interpretations and misinterpretations of the world around her, especially her vivid apprehension of adult sexuality, are reminiscent of those of some of Henry James’ worldly children. What Maisie Knew, for instance, comes to mind. Also Jamesian are the crucial sights that become plot points: a pair of hands on a woman’s back, for instance.

Margaret’s father Kenneth Marsh is a Primal Saint — an adherent of a very strict branch of fundamentalism that rules out most fun. The Marsh household is severe. Margaret’s mother Elinor has just given birth to a baby, Terence, and as Gardam says, “The almost permanent pietà of Mrs. Marsh and the baby was the only sensuous thing in the house.” The nursemaid Lydia, with her brassy hair and her loud wardrobe, is an exception: it is Lydia who unsettles the household’s balance. Also in play here are Elinor’s long love for the effete Charles Frayling, Charles’ passive dependence on his sister Binkie, and their misunderstanding of their embittered mother. The novel eventually leaves Margaret to visit the concerns of all of these characters, which intersect in unexpected ways. There is a storm, several deaths, redemption arriving in a back-handed fashion. There is a fabulous scene involving, literally, worship on a rocky seashore — does that remind you of anything? In fact now that I think of it, there are little glancing allusions to Biblical images or themes everywhere. An adult Margaret says of her father, “he left me with a sense of God… It is a big present.” Yet in the end, Gardam seems to suggest that the path to God is found simply in caring for people and trying to be good.We could all do worse.

William Dean Howells, “Indian Summer”

The jacket copy calls Indian Summer “one of the most charming and memorable romantic comedies in American literature,” so I took the bait, despite skepticism. I have read  William Dean Howells before and he wasn’t charming. But for once the jacket copy approached accuracy. (Maybe that’s one thing I like so much about the New York Review Books editions: you pretty much can tell a book by its handsome cover.)  Indian Summer is honestly delightful.

ever-picturesque San Miniato

There are certain pre-sold audiences for this book. Italophiles, of course — it is set in Florence, in 1885, so you get a wonderful portrait of expat sociability 125 years ago, plus enough weather and topographical details for any armchair tourist. Fan of the 19th century that I am, I cherished the details of behavior, especially Howells‘ keen appreciation of women and their wardrobes. Fans of Henry James might like Indian Summer, too. It is not as dense as James, not as aristocratic: in fact at one point the characters are discussing themselves as if they were in a James novel and they have this to say: ”Don’t you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!” Yes, self-referential fiction, in 1885, who knew? For me the big difference between Howells and James is that Europe is not a character in this book, it is a setting. An important one, but the characters and emotions of Indian Summer are transplantable in both location and time.

Yes, it felt very contemporary. The main character is Theodore Colville, an American of forty-one who, having just ended a successful newspaper career in Indiana, has returned to Florence where he once studied architecture. Also, he was jilted in Florence twenty years earlier and has never married. Naturally, on this return visit he encounters a woman: in fact, two. One is Lina Bowen, the pretty and clever best friend of the girl who jilted him. She is now a widow, educating her daughter in Europe. There is also her protégée, the magnificent Imogene Graham, the classic American girl abroad.

Do I have to tell you that a love triangle results? What’s endearing here, though, is Colville. This is a real guy. He’s a guy you know and probably like a lot. He worries about dressing correctly for parties (really funny passages about him thinking about shaving off his beard). He worries about his weight — 182 pounds, if I remember correctly. He is funny, ironic, rueful. Howells sometimes mocks his masculine denseness but we always sympathize with him, especially in the part of the book when he gets involved in a hectic social whirl and cannot stand the lack of sleep. So inglorious! So human. The Indian Summer of the title is, of course, his. Howells focuses on how the different ages process emotion differently. Indian summers, by definition, don’t last. But it’s a comedy. Things work out, though Howells keeps you on the hook until the end. Very satisfying.

This is my third and final entry in the NYRB Reading Week co-hosted by Mrs. B of  The Literary Stew and Honey of Coffeespoons. It’s been fun, ladies, thanks!

Henry James, “The Coxon Fund”

Since Henry James’ “The Coxon Fund” is a novella rather than a full-blown novel, this post may be a cheat. On the other hand,the long tale is bound and sold independently as part of the “Art of the Novella” series published by Melville House. New to me, and enticing.  Anyway, I read it.

It’s funny. Sometimes I forget this about James: he could be a real bitch. About someone the narrator doesn’t like, he says, “She had arts of her own of exciting one’s impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her assumption that we were kind to her because we liked her.” Notice how the sentence requires a moment’s untangling before you appreciate the sting at the end, and remember that a good deal of comedy is in the timing.

Some, though, resides in the premise. Here the butt of the joke is the “magnificent” Felix Saltram, a brilliant talker and thinker, so brilliant that he attracts various unlucky patrons who support him in hopes that he will be able actually to “do something.” Lecture series are organized, but Saltram shows up drunk, if at all. He moves into the home of the nice Mulville family and casually ruins them. The inimitable Jamesian twist is that a rich American invents a fund (as in the title) to support a great thinker. It’s too complicated to explain how, but Saltram’s eligibility for the fund becomes entwined in the marriage prospects of a charming American heiress.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t slapstick and it isn’t first-rate James either. But sometimes — as with chocolate — a little bit of James‘ writing, even if not the best, can be quite satisfying.

George Gissing, “The Odd Women”

Odd as in, not one of a pair. As in, wouldn’t fit on Noah’s Ark. As in, unmarried. George Gissing was a late-nineteenth century English novelist who had come from the lower middle class and knew better than most of his colleagues the fine-grained miseries of the attempt to survive respectably on very little money. He himself had married a prostitute who became an alcoholic, and struggled to earn a living by writing. His best-known novel is probably New Grub Street, which explores the delicate dance between literary integrity and material survival.

The Odd Women is Gissing’s exploration of The Woman Question. Must women be subservient? Can they be intelligent, educated, self-supporting? What will hold them back? (Easy answer: men.) Gissing focuses on two sets of women. There are the three Madden sisters, “ladies” (which means something very specific) who were left poor, single, and untrained to earn money by their ineffectual father. The two elder must settle for barely-paid drudgery as companions and governesses, while the youngest and prettiest “may marry.” The other set of females are New Women: Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who together run an organization that trains respectable girls to work in offices and become self-supporting. Rhoda gets entangled romantically with Mary’s scapegrace cousin Everard and this large portion of the book is pretty tedious. He wants to subdue her; she wants to manipulate him; they actually contemplate entering into a “free” relationship but pride and miscommunication come between them. Plus, they are both faintly self-righteous and annoying, so I didn’t care what happened to them.

JS Sargent's portrait of Vernon Lee, an "odd woman"

Far more interesting to me was the dilemma of the sad Maddens. It’s a saga of furnished lodgings, shabby clothes, bad food and not enough of it. This is not the world of Henry James, though James and Gissing were friends. These women would have been invisible to Isabel Archer. Gissing is eloquent about the energy required to retain middle-class status; it’s a matter of how you speak, your perceptions, how you spend your free time. Above all, though, for a young girl, being respectable means fending off predatory men at every hour of the day. Gissing is also eloquent about boredom, the inevitable companion of this kind of poverty. If you can’t afford to eat, you certainly can’t afford a lending-library subscription or train fare to a pretty park or even the shoe leather for a walk around the block.

Here’s a passage I marked: “With extreme care she had preserved an out-of-doors dress into the third summer; it did not look shabby. Her mantle was in its second year only; the original fawn colour had gone to an indeterminate grey… Yet Virginia could not have been judged anything but a lady. She wore her garments as only a lady can (the position and movement of the arms has much to do with this).” I’m sure the permitted “movement of the arms” was extremely limited, like the options for these odd women. It’s no wonder that the last lines of the book, addressed to an infant girl, are “Poor little child.”

Wilkie Collins, “The Black Robe”

Wilkie Collins is a second-tier writer. Nothing wrong with that — I’ve gotten hours of entertainment from The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Just that a third reading of his novels probably wouldn’t net you much more than you’d gotten out of them the first time around. And The Black Robe, it must be said, is second-tier Wilkie Collins. Which is to say that much as I enjoyed it, I doubt it will deserve revisiting.

But, oh, what a wild ride it was! I downloaded it blindly from Eucalyptus, hoping that the title promised evil Jesuits, and lo, evil Jesuits abounded! Lurking, skulking, disguised as laymen, scheming for gain, reading other people’s mail, reporting back to Rome, breaking up a marriage…. Collins was perfectly serious, but with the faintest push, a film version would be high camp. One scene toward the end, which takes place in a Roman church at night, doesn’t even need to be pushed. (Those Catholics…. so emotional!)

There is too much in the book, and the pacing bogs down. It begins with a high-strung, rich and well-born Englishman, Lewis Romayne, getting involved in a duel in France and killing his opponent, an incident that sets his mental balance awry. This is familiar Collins: atmospheric, puzzling, tense. You settle down to his oblique way of conveying information and try to keep track of what’s going to be important. But it turns out that this business (which includes a mysterious voice that only Romanye can hear) is merely the preface to the dastardly Jesuit plot to reclaim Romayne’s property of Vange Abbey, which was originally a Jesuit foundation.

There is a beautiful young lady who falls in love with Romayne at first sight. She has a Past. There is a noble young Jesuit who allows his humanity to come between him and the Church. There is a circus-rider. She dies. Collins unwisely allows the mysterious voice to fade away and we’re left with the preoccupation of so many English novels of the era: a will.

In fact the enduring mystery turns out to be what Collins had against Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular. This is a late novel for him (1881) and I’m not aware of any particular Jesuit threat to English stability and well-being at the time. What seems to have annoyed Collins the most is the self-control and what we would call “forward-thinking” strategy of the bad guy, Father Benwell (note ironic name). Yet he also disapproves of the characters who “give in” to their emotions. And there’s one poor fellow who is only allowed to be emotionally unbuttoned in the presence of his dog. Henry James manages his characters better than that.

Elif Batuman: “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”

Whooosh! That sound I hear is the flames taking hold as Elif Batuman burns her bridges, leaving academia behind — or so I thought. After writing The Possessed, with its hilarious accounts of graduate student cliques and academic conferences, how could she ever go back? I was certain, after snorting and giggling my way through this book, that it was a not-so-fond farewell. Yet I have to admit that I began to doubt this interpretation. For funny as some of it is, The Possessed is animated by a deep love of literature, and of Russian literature in particular. I am no great connoisseur of the Russian novel but even I can tell that Batuman has thought hard about those great old guys, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Isaac Babel and Arthur Conan Doyle. (Yep. That’s what’s fun here.) And she cares about what they have to say. More, she believes firmly that literature can help us make sense of life, and she demonstrates how it has done so for her. The moment when she won me over completely was when she wrote, “I was at that time greatly under the sway of The Portrait of a Lady, a book in which one finds the following line :’ Afterwards, however, she always remembered that one should never regret a generous error.’ As a result I was constantly rethinking all my conservative decisions and amending them in favor of ‘generous errors,’ a category which surely included going to Samarkand to learn the great Uzbek language.”

Okay, that’s complicated. Let me back up. Elif Batuman is a very smart girl of Turkish descent who grew up in New Jersey. She learned Turkish at home, and Russian as a linguistics undergraduate. Somehow — she hardly seems to know how herself — she got sucked into Russian literature, and became a comparative literature graduate student at Stanford. The Possessed tells this tale, along with analyzing some of the books she read most attentively. The comic set-pieces are a conference on Babel (this is the one that had me laughing out loud on the subway and attracting way too much attention), another conference on Tolstoy at his home in Russia, and Batuman’s summer learning Uzbek in Samarkand. Her life intersects with literature, which in turn informs her decisions and the way she perceives the world, never more clearly than in the final section when she analyzes Dostoyevsky’s Demons (which used to be called The Possessed). It occurred to me, reading the last segment, that perhaps each narrative section of the book, which more or less tracks one literary work, mirrors that work,  but I’m too lazy to go back and check this theory. But I wouldn’t put that kind of tricky structure past Batuman, who in fact now teaches at Stanford.