Review: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady is a Victorian (or perhaps modern) novel that chronicles a few years of the life of a young American woman, at the end of the nineteenth century. The book follows the heroine from her departure from America as a promising young girl with a great desire to see and experience the world, up to the moment when the marriage she has since contracted reaches a sharp crisis. The ending doesn't touch on how she intends to address this crisis and remains open. Her story spans half of Europe and is entangled with those of her family members (Ralph, Mrs. Touchett), her suitors (Warbuton, Goodwood) and her American and European friends (Henrietta Stackpole, Madame Merle). During the five years covered in the book, she inherits a fortune, turns down marriage proposals, gets married, loses friends and uncovers dark secrets.

This is the first James novel I've ever read, and my expectations were pretty high, obviously, since I hang out with a coblogger who is this committed to James. Luckily, The Portrait turned out to be an even better reading experience than I had hoped, and now I love it (well, maybe unluckily for the readers of this blog, because how much more entertaining would this place be if there were a flame war about James going on among the contributors?).

The Portrait is one of those books that strike the perfect combination of width and depth. Henry James manages to balance an extended cast of characters (and the logistics of their travels and financial situations) without losing sight of their inner life. While reading, the eagle-eye view of characters and their movements is secondary to the intense experience of intimacy with them, and it isn't until you try to retell the story for someone else's benefit that you realize how attentively they are coreographed, and how a large picture of the world is formed from the glimpses the characters offer. 

Review: The Story of a Year by Henry James

Genre: short story
Published: 1865 (March)
Available online: here

I've been really unfocused lately. I am moving along in my Know Your James project faster than I feel like reviewing. And I do want to review because I fear I will just forget everything if I don't. I am half-assedly reading some literary theory. I struggle with my post on Villette, because it's just one of those books that give me feelings. More feelings than I know how to express. And on top of this, I will soon need to write boring papers on boring topics for school. But one thing at a time: let's focus on James' second published story. 

I think I would have happier with this being James' first effort. It's not that I didn't appreciate some of the elements of A Tragedy of Error, because I did, but I just couldn't understand what made James publish it, what made him look at that material that could have been improved in so many ways and decide it was something he wanted the whole world to see. It just wasn't a piece to write home about. I do understand why he'd choose to publish this second story, though. The writing is more polished; the plotline more developed; the meaning, I think, subtler. 

John and Elizabeth and two young people that get engaged during John's leave from the Union Army. From the beginning, it is clear what the pattern of their relationship is. John is the reasonable one, the adult, and Elizabeth looks up to him. When John tells her he might die in the war, she replies with "Oh, my dear friend! [...] I wish you could advise me all my life." It's really a telling statement. She's saying she wants him to live, but the phrasing also hints at a need for guidance. Elizabeth's found in her fiancé an incentive to be good:

Review: A Tragedy of Error by Henry James

Genre: short story
Published: 1864 (February)
Available online: here

Discovering a hitherto unknown work by your favorite author has to be one of the most amazing things that can happen to a person. It is what happened to Leon Edel, Henry James' biographer and the guy who unearthed this short story, James' first published work of fiction. A Tragedy of Error was published anonymously in 1864, in the Continental Monthly, a publication that gave up the ghost shortly after that. Given these circumstances, and the fact that James was not proud of this piece and only referenced it obliquely in his memoirs, it is not very surprising that it remained unknown till 1953. And it sort of makes one wonder what other treasures are out there waiting to be found. (Byatt Quote of the Day? "Literary critics make natural detectives," natch.)

In any case, I am here to bring you good news and bad news about this story. The bad news is that 21-year-old Henry James was not the best of writers. The good news is that 21-year-old Henry James was not the best of writers. I don't know about you, but I find the idea of my literary hero having to work for his greatness very... reassuring. I might have felt differently if A Tragedy of Error was laughably bad. It is not. It is a story with a lurid plot: an unfaithful wife learns that her husband is soon to return to town. She hires a boatman to wait on him when he disembarks and kill him, but the boatman gets the wrong man and ends up killing her lover instead. But before you sneer at  it, this plot is somewhat redeemed by a series of elements that anticipate the later James:

1. The dialogue: The center of this story and its longest episode is not what you'd expect. It's not the murder, it's not the series of errors that lead to the tragedy--it's the conversation between the lady and the boatman she hires. This is the scene we get to see in detail, the scene where a woman of high social status decides to hire a murderer and the way she brings it about. It is like James is saying: this, this conversation here, is what's interesting and illuminating. Not the murder, not the adultery, but the moral transaction that leads to them or results from them. And the conversation itself does have a certain flow and subtlety that the rest of the story lacks.
2. The narrator's perspective: One of the most striking scenes in this short story is one where Hortense, the unfaithful wife, returns home in a shock, having received the telegram that announces her husband's arrival. She goes into her room but we don't get to follow her there. Instead we stay with a servant that watches her through the keyhole, sees her drinking and concludes she must be very upset. Why this artifice? It is because James' narrator is always tied up to a character's point of view, always limited. If there's no one watching, narration is impossible. And it's important who is watching too. James might have used Hortense here as his reflector, but then that would have compromised the whole effect of the moral conversation with the boatman. We needed to see Hortense's actions but be screened from some of her thoughts. That's why James needs the servants in this story.
3. Beauty and morality: This will be one of the major Jamesian themes later: how the unity of goodness and beauty is broken, how sometimes beauty serves to disguise immorality. It appears here as well: "It was perhaps fortunate for Hortense's purpose at that moment—it had often aided her purposes before—that she was a pretty woman. A plain face might have emphasized the utterly repulsive nature of the negotiation."

Is this what I expected when I signed up to read the complete Henry James? Yes and no. No, in that I was expecting everything he wrote to be perfect and this is not even close to it. Yes, because I wanted to trace his evolution as a writer and I expected to find some elements of his later work in an embryonic phase from the first story, and that did happen. So, overall I am pleased with this beginning. 

Know Your James

At the end of this month I'll have to decide what I want to study for the next 2 years, possibly 5, possibly my whole life. I don't want to do it. I can't properly explain how much I don't want to do it. So instead of agonizing over choices and all the ways in which they could go wrong, I have decided to do something fun, something to take my mind off things and give me the illusion of a purpose. I am reading Henry James from beginning to end.

Below is a list of his works that I put together from the Blackwell Companion. I will check it against this list as well. There are some differences, most of them coming from the fact that my list has the works in the order they came out, regardless of whether they were published in a newspaper or in book form, but if there are stories I missed I will add them. I will be reading through this list and updating as I go. I already read most of the novels, but rereading is always a joy. It might take me a long time to reach the end, but I hope to stick to it. 

I guess there's more to this than sheer escapism too. I love the internet, but sometimes I feel that it's pulling me in a hundred directions at once and throwing bits of knowledge at me faster than I can digest them. (It is also the only thing that makes this project possible, so don't think I'm bashing it.) I want to read something methodically and really get to know it. So James it is.

The List

1864 - A Tragedy of Error
1865 - The Story of a Year

1866 - A Landscape Painter, A Day of Days

1867 - Poor Richard

1868 - The Story of a Masterpiece, The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

1869 - Gabrielle de Bergerac

1870 - Travelling Companions

1871 - Watch and Ward, A Passionate Pilgrim, Master Eustace

1873 - The Madonna of the Future, The Sweetheart of M. Briseux

1874 - The Last of the Valerii, Mme de Mauves, Eugene Pickering

1875 - Roderick Hudson, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales, Transatlantic Sketches

1876 - The American

1877 - Four Meetings

1878 - French Poets and Novelists, Daisy Miller, An International Episode, The Europeans, Longstaff's Marriage

1879 - The Pension Beaurepas, Confidence, A Bundle of Letters, Hawthorne

1880 - Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady

1882 - The Point of View

1883 - The Siege of London; Daisy Miller: A Comedy, Portraits of Places

1884 - A Little Tour in France, Lady Barbarina, Pandora, The Author of 'Beltraffio', Georgina's Reasons, A New England Winter, The Art of Fiction

1885 - The Bostonians, Princess Casamassima

1888 - The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Reverbator, The Liar, The Modern Warning, A London Life, The Lesson of the Master, The Patagonia, Partial Portraits

1889 - The Tragic Muse

1891 - The Pupil, Brooksmith, The Marriages, The Chaperon, Sir Edmund Orme, The American: A Comedy in Four Acts

1892 - The Real Thing, The Private Life, Lord Beaupre, Greville Fane, Owen Wingrave

1893 - The Middle Years, Pictures and Text, Essays in London and Elsewhere

1894 - The Death of the Lion, Cotton Fund, Theatricals: Two Comedies, Theatricals: Second Series

1895 - The Next Time, The Altar of the Dead, Guy Domville

1896 - The Figure in the Carpet, Glasses, The Old Things (The Spoils of Poynton), The Way It Came, The Other House

1897 - What Maisie Knew

1898 - The Turn of the Screw, The Awkward Age, In the Cage, The Covering End

1899 - Europe, The Real Right Thing, Paste

1900 - The Great Good Place, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, The Tree of Knowledge, The Abasement of the Northmores, Maud-Evelyn, The Faces, Broken Wings

1901 - The Beldonald Holbein, Mrs. Medwin, The Sacred Fount,

1902 - The Wings of the Dove, Flickerbridge, The Story in It

1903 - The Ambassadors, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, William Wetmore Story and His Friends

1904 - The Golden Bowl, Fordham Castle,

1905 - The Question of Our Speech, The Lesson of Balzac, English Hours

1906 - The Speech of American Women

1907 - The American Scene

1908 - Julia Bride, The Jolly Corner

1909 - Italian Hours, The Velvet Glove, Mora Montravers, Crapy Cornelia, The Bench of Desolation

1910 - Is There a Life after Death, A Round of Visits

1911 - The Outcry

1912 - The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book’

1913 - A Small Boy and Others

1914 - Notes of a Son and Brother, Notes on Novelists

1915 - The Mind of England at War

1916 - Ivory Tower, The Sense of the Past

1919 - Within the Rim and Other Essays

Henry James' Portrait Slashed by Suffragettes

It started in May, 1914. A small woman, dressed in stereotypical grey, entered the National Gallery and slashed Velásquez' 'Rokeby' Venus. She cut the picture in seven places with a meat chopper. Arrested, she explained she had destroyed the most beautiful woman in mythology to protest against the way the world was treating the most morally-beautiful woman in recent history, militant activist Emmeline Pankhurst. Would the art-loving public condemn her gesture while they allowed injustice towards real women to stand? Then they were hypocrites, for "justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas."

There is something very powerful about this image. 'Rokeby' Venus, slashed by Mary Richardson

Review: What Maisie Knew by Henry James

I was going to start this review by explaining how reading Henry James is like eating the most delicious, delicate and non-crumby pastry you've ever had: you're enjoying the flavor and at the same time wondering at the skill that made it all possible. Me being me, however, a great lover of pastry and Henry James, it all turned to food porn and I had to delete it. But this is the impression rereading What Maisie Knew left me with. I felt like I was given a dessert. This is a book that's shorter and perhaps lighter than some of James' masterpieces, but no less accomplished.

The Subject

As he explains in the preface*, James drew his idea for the novel from a dinner conversation in which the strange fate of a little girl used as ammunition in the war between her divorced parents was mentioned. In a decision unusual for that period, the child's custody was shared and she was to spend half a year with each of her parents. While at first they were both eager to take revenge on the other by depriving them of the child's company, at some point one of them remarried and the situation changed. The responsibility for the child became a punishment fit to be inflicted on the ex-spouse and the two irresponsible parents outdid each other in trying to get rid of their charge. This is the core on which James built the story of Maisie, a girl whose childhood was spent "rebounding from racquet to racquet like a tennis-ball or a shuttlecock" in the power games between her parents and, later, her stepparents as well.

The subject is surprisingly modern, and James, being James, wraps it in layers upon layers of elegant language and meaning. Maisie, his young heroine, is raised in an environment marked by high-class immorality (meaning selfishness, lies and adultery abound, but outright criminal offenses do not). In a way, she knows the things that go on around her. She is a direct witness to them and she's a very sensitive child. But in a different and very important way, she doesn't know them, because she can't yet grasp their moral value. Her factual knowledge seems to much exceed her moral knowledge, and this raises interesting questions about both knowledge and morality.

What Maisie Knew and Henry Told Us

This discrepancy between the things Maisie sees and her ability to interpret them is the driving force of the novel and the major source of its delicious irony. But the most interesting aspect of James' strategy is that he doesn't entirely limit his narrator to Maisie's perspective. We see the exact portion of the world Maisie sees, but we are allowed to make more of it than Maisie ever could. After all, Maisie can hardly be aware of her own ignorance or signal it to us. So Henry James finds a way for us to have our pastry cake and eat it too. We have a narrator that excels at capturing nuances and playing with various styles  (like the legalese/high-society gossip mix in the first chapter), but then this narrator  seems content to adjust his own perspective to reflect that of Maisie and borrow some of her concepts. It's one of the most charming juxtaposition of sophistication and ingenuity in a narrative voice I have ever seen.

But there is a second reason it's important to have a voice distinct from Maisie's tell the story. There is a certain ambiguity building as the story progresses. Maisie keeps learning more and more things about the world, and at some point one starts to wonder, what does she know? Is there a point at which she becomes aware of the moral implications of the things she's seeing? The evasive impersonal narrator is essential to maintaining this uncertainty to the very end, when we get to see a test of Maisie's moral faculty.

My Favorite Passage

This book contains one of my favorite passages from the whole of literature:

[...] it had taken her but an extra minute to arrive at such a quick survey of the objects surrounding Mrs. Beale as showed that among them was no appurtenance of Sir Claude's. She knew his dressing-bag now—oh with the fondest knowledge!—and there was an instant during which its not being there was a stroke of the worst news. She was yet to learn what it could be to recognise in some lapse of a sequence the proof of an extinction, and therefore remained unaware that this momentary pang was a foretaste of the experience of death.

The feeling you get when you don't find the familiar signs of someone's presence is a foretaste of the experience of death. This moves me every time I think of it.

The Bottom Line

I feel I can never be eloquent enough in praising Henry James. What Maisie Knew is one of my favorite books, so 5 out of 5 stars and endless squeeing are a given. But, more than that, if you are looking for a good gateway drug to James, this book could be it. It has all the wonderful features of his style, but it's less dense than some of his other books.

---

*What Maisie Knew was published in 1897 and is copyright free. You can find it online on Project Gutenberg among other places, but beware, most of the editions floating on the internet lack James' preface discussing the inception of the book and his narrative strategy. I am of the school that thinks the author's intentions are more entertaining trivia than indispensable instruments to reading, but still, there is no reason to deprive oneself of entertaining trivia. Here's a link to the preface.

Henry James Reviews Daniel Deronda

What's a footnote?

Here's a snippet I very much enjoyed. If you love Henry James or George Eliot, or both, you will probably enjoy it too. It's about Henry James' very unconventional review of Daniel Deronda. First some background details: Daniel Deronda was published in monthly installments between February and September of 1876, and Henry James' first reaction to it appeared in The Nation at the end of February. It was an unsigned note and largely positive, saying among other things this:

The "sense of the universal" is constant, omnipresent. It strikes us sometimes as rather conscious and over-cultivated; but it gives us the feeling that the threads of the narrative, as we gather them into our hands, are not the usual commercial measurement, but long electric wires capable of transmitting messages from mysterious regions.

Isn't the metaphor of the electric wires so suitable for Eliot and the way she incorporates universal messages into her narrative? Anyway, as more installments were published, Henry James' opinion changed. By June, we know from his correspondence with his brother, William, that his feelings about the novel were mostly negative, William too had a bad opinion of Daniel Deronda and its moralistic tone, an opinion sprinkled with a good dose of sexism. (Because we all know the world's greatest moralists were women?) Here's what Henry wrote to William in 1876:

Daniel Deronda strikes me (in proportion to its elaborate ability) a great failure compared with her other books. Gwendolen to me lives a little; but not the others: D.D. least of all. But the episode with Mordecai is fine.

But the interesting part came in December, when James published Daniel Deronda: A Conversation. It was a very unusual review, written as a dialogue between three characters. I was charmed by the idea, because all those contradictory feelings I had about the book could be expressed and discussed in one place and every character had something of value to add, in the end. I think it's the best way to convey the impression this book gives: a book complex enough to be discussed at length, but with a number of weak points that make one hesitate to declare it great.

So, what I am going to do now is give you a taste of each of the characters with a short description and an emblematic quote and then, at the end, a link to this piece that can be read online.

Theodora is portrayed as a romantic and somewhat silly girl. She is in love with Daniel Deronda and completely in awe of the book that contains him. She is George Eliot's groupie.

A book like Daniel Deronda becomes part of one's life; one lives in it or alongside of it. I don't hesitate to say that I have been living in this one for the last eight months. It is such a complete world George Eliot builds up; it is so vast, so much−embracing! It has such a firm earth and such an ethereal sky. You can turn into it and lose yourself in it.

Pulcheria, the other female character in the review, dislikes the book. Part of her dislike clearly stems out of anti-Semitism. (And there is more than a hint of her disliking Deronda because he's not masculine enough. He is a prig, but also too emotive, too womanly.) She attacks Eliot at every level imaginable, but she also scores some valid points along the way.

I never read a story with less current. It is not a river; it is a series of lakes. I once read of a group of little uneven ponds resembling, from a birds−eye view, a looking−glass which had fallen upon the floor and broken, and was lying in fragments. That is what Daniel Deronda would look like, on a birds−eye view.

Constantius is the level-headed man who brings nuance to the table. He admires George Eliot and understands what she tried to achieve in her book, but he calls Daniel Deronda the weakest of her books. Constantius' opinions are the most interesting and detailed, and he seems to be the one channeling James. To me, the following quote stood out, because I can't decide a. if it's true for Eliot and b. how much of it was informed by sexism (a woman who wants to philosophize rather than Feel is just denying her own nature and squandering her talent).

But it comes back to what I said just now about one's sense of the author writing under a sort of external pressure. I began to notice it in Felix Holt; I don't think I had before. She strikes me as a person who certainly has naturally a taste for general considerations, but who has fallen upon an age and a circle which have compelled her to give them an exaggerated attention. She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still as naturally a sceptic; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to feel it, to feel it with admirable depth.

Intrigued by this? Go read the rest here, courtesy of the California Digital Library. And if you have an opinion about this problem of sense vs. sensibility in George Eliot's writing, please share. It's bugging me.