Henry James's magic touch

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Henry James's magic touch

Henry James
THE COMPLETE LETTERS
Edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias
Volume One, 1855-1872
492pp. University of Nebraska Press. £57.
978 0 80322 584 8

The letters of writers offer a strangely public view of their private selves. Most people put on a show in their correspondence, but for a writer that show involves a professional display. How much they decide to invest in it says a great deal about them – about how deeply they have been stained by work. It may be a sign of more important virtues if a writer writes boring letters, for it proves that he doesn’t take his literary self too seriously, that he is willing, at times, to let it drop. Henry James’s correspondence presents a particularly interesting test of that willingness. As a novelist, he created a kind of prose that was most remarkable, perhaps, for its finish. His style gave his characteristic colour to whatever it touched on. Part of the attraction of his letters lies in the fact that they allow us to question how consistently, as a friend, a brother and a son, he managed to keep it up.

The answer, refreshingly, at least in the first instalment of The Complete Letters, is hardly at all. 1855–1872, published in two volumes, edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, covers the period from his twelfth birthday to his twenty-ninth. His letters have never before appeared in their entirety. The University of Nebraska Press is attempting, slowly, to make up for that fact in a scholarly edition that obviates the need for any other. They have included at the end of each letter, among very full explanations of every possible obscurity, a list of line breaks, elisions, misspellings, deletions and rewritings. The effect, sometimes, is to create the impression of a man not of flesh and blood but of footnotes, errata and abbreviations, though these in fact rarely get in the way of a full appreciation and often help it along. They allow us to see James in the process of rewriting himself. One sign of a great letter-writer may be that the chief interest of the letters does not lie in the way they expose their author. On these terms, the young James was far from a great correspondent.

The most interesting thing about the early letters is the clue they offer as to how he outgrew them. Martin Amis, in Experience, mentions Osric as the type of his adolescence – Hamlet’s fawning courtier is shown up by his pretensions. There are flashes of Osric in the young James, to such an extent that one suspects that he must have inherited a good deal from the shared banter of his extraordinary family. Dissatisfied with his children’s American education, Henry’s father moved the family to Geneva, in 1859. On arrival there, Henry wrote to a friend from home, Thomas Sergeant Perry, “It came to pass three weeks ago, and since then I have’n’t had the time to write – yes, for the first time in my life almost I can really say I have’nt had the time”. What is so characteristic about the line isn’t immediately obvious – something, perhaps, about the slightly particular insistence on an otherwise commonplace phrase. There is also the little boastful presumption of his experience: “for the first time in my life”. He was sixteen. But the true Jamesian touch may lie in the simple fact of the statement: three weeks at school seemed to him so great an event that it exhausted his own capacity to relate it.

But the Osric manner, far from suggesting a false note, is really the line James will eventually learn to stick to. He doesn’t much at first, and often shows himself capable of a touching straightforward simplicity. “Perhaps you would like to know about my school”, he writes to Perry a little later. And again: “Here are five pages all about myself, but the reason I have written so much is because I like nothing better than for you to write about your own manners + customs, and suppose that you have the same taste in regard to me”. Later, in a burst of un-Jamesian excitement, to the same friend, he writes, “I think I must fire off my biggest gun first. One—two—three! Bung Gerdee bang—bang . . . . . !!! What a noise! Our passages are taken in the Adriatic, for the 11th of September!!!!!”. After three years in Europe, the Jameses were coming home, and Henry was going to see his friend again.

His relations with Perry are both the occasion and the subject of his most interesting early letters, but his pen can sketch his feelings as well as he can write them: there is a charming little drawing of the way he intends to fly, hat and dog scattering in the burst, into Perry’s arms on their reunion. The manner in which he gives himself up to the friendship suggests, as much as anything else, the appetite of a younger and less prodigious son for pre-eminence in someone’s affections. But he fears at times that he cannot live up to it:

I pictured to myself in writing yesterday, your joy in hearing we were at last so near – but you frighten me by telling me that you think of me so much, sleeping and waking – I am not so white as your imagination paints me.

What, one wonders, was his great concealed sin, unless it was only the excuse for a kind of invitation? Still, there is something modest and pleasant in his deprecation, which seems at odds with the great confident unabashed subtleties of his later style.

Finding a style is, of course, one of the things these letters help him to accomplish; he begins, as he himself admits, by trying several on. “To no style am I a stranger”, he writes, with conscious pomp, to Perry (James was seventeen), “there is none which has not been adorned by the magic of my touch.” After the fact, we can begin to trace several of the tricks that will become characteristic: his quaint insistent dips into idiom, for example, “Travellers of all nations wish to ‘do’ a few Swiss Mountains”, or his wonderful bursts of brevity (“I delight in seeing you ferment. One day rich wine will come of it”). He reserves his most elegant flourishes, like many young writers, for the beauties of nature: these mark, amid the more casual prose of his letters, a notable break in tone, and one can occasionally see him gathering his forces to make it. William, the revered older brother, receives many of these poetical tributes. “The Spring arrives with little steps”, Henry writes, between gossip from home, and after a significant dash. (A “will” has been crossed out – his thoughts had outrun his pen.) “The grass is green but the air is almost as cold as March. Nothing has befallen us.” That last phrase is the great refrain of these volumes, and James gives the sentiment a constantly varied repetition. “This place is at the present moment as empty as this blank page + as silent withal . . . . You may imagine that existence has not been thrilling or exciting. To have seen no one and done nothing – unless it be read; which I have done to some extent”, he tells Perry some years later. By then he is twenty-four, and it is wonderful how time advances, by painless bounds, in someone’s correspondence. One feels, with James, that the gaps between letters are expressive of another kind of gap. How to fill the blank page, in both senses, without a conscious active striving after life or effect, is the difficult task he has set himself.

It is the tour of Europe, which he makes on his own at the age of twenty-six, that gives him the means. The subtlety of which he was capable, of which his style was capable, seems to have struck him, on landing in England, with something of the same astonishing force that it strikes many of his readers. It opened up for him, and us, a world of beautifully grained uneventfulness. One has the sense, almost, in reading his successive impressions, of London, of England and its countryside, of Geneva and the Swiss Alps, and then, after an initial reluctance, most magically of Italy, that we are watching someone in the process of getting dressed – into something very fine. James, it turns out, as a letter-writer, is more interesting clothed than naked; even if, as his style matures, he has learned to exercise a greater control over how much he gives away. Such control comes with its own problems; and in the course of his tour, these are expressed by an almost comically literal “objective correlative”. “Uneventfulness” is just what he suffers from, in the most painful way. The great drama of James’s European tour, which gives a point and plot to the scattershot narrative of the letters, is the story of his constipation – though we must wait for him to write to Willy, his beloved older brother, to hear the real progress of his condition:

I may actually say that I can’t get a passage. My “little squirt” has ceased to have more than a nominal use . . . . In fact, I don’t pretend to understand how I get on. When I reflect upon the utterly insignificant relation of what I get rid of to what I imbibe, I wonder that flesh + blood can stand it.

A series of pills prescribed by a doctor in Florence provide him with a temporary relief, sufficient to allow him to see Rome. England in general, and Malvern in particular, is the place that beckons to him when they begin to fail. The preference hardly flatters his adopted home, though it may go a little way to explaining why he settled there in the end instead of Italy: “In the midst of these false + beautiful Italians [the English] glow with the light of the great fact, that after all, they love a bath-tub + they hate a lie”. Plumbing matters as much as art.

The problem seems too perfectly Jamesian (he was, famously, the writer accused of chewing more than he could bite off), but it also reveals one of his most surprising strengths, both as a correspondent and a novelist. His subtlety and elegance are only the excuse for an unembarrassed frankness. Frankness is important to him. It doesn’t come easily, and much of his artfulness is really only a striving after it. “Thank Willy for his excellent letter”, he writes to his sister. “I feel at last, almost for the 1st time since my departure, as if some real speech had passed between us.” Real speech is what he turns to his family for; and it is touching to see how dependent the young James remains, not only on his parents’ money, but on their good opinion of his use of it. He insists from the first that his European tour is only a form of investment, from which they can expect in the future a very high rate of return. Money is another one of the dirty facts of life that he is willing to exploit as a metaphor for something less dirty: “I had far rather let Italy slumber in my mind untouched as a perpetual capital, whereof for my literary needs I shall draw simply the income . . . ”. The parents of feckless and spendthrift children can everywhere take heart: sometimes they do come good.

Nothing tests his capacity for “real speech” so much as the death from consumption of his dear cousin Minny Temple, at the age of twenty-four. Mourning generally stretches our talent for finding what Philip Larkin called “words . . . not untrue and not unkind”. What James makes of it also gives our sympathy for him its first real test. Minny became the model for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. James is surprisingly honest, as soon as he hears the news, about his desire to consider it from an aesthetic point of view. “A few short hours have amply sufficed to more than reconcile me to the event + to make it seem the most natural – the happiest, fact, almost in her whole career.” That seems a quick digestion of real life, even for a novelist; and it is wonderful and slightly chilling how soon he can turn it to real use:

You will all have felt by this time the novel delight of thinking of Minny without that lurking impulse of fond regret + uneasy conjecture so familiar to the minds of her friends . . . . There is nevertheless something so appealing in the pathos of her final weakness and decline that my heart keeps returning again + again to the scene, regardless of its pain. When I went to bid Minny farewell at Pelham before I sailed I asked her about her sleep. “Sleep,” she said: “Oh. I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up.” And I well remember the laugh with which she made this sad attempt at humor. And so she went on, sleeping less + less, waking wider + wider, until she awaked absolutely!

Of course, artfulness in a writer can also be an impulsive defensive gesture, and later James is frank enough, and subtle enough, to admit the fact: “While I sit spinning sentences she is dead: and I suppose it is partly to defend myself from too direct a sense of her death that I indulge in this fruitless attempt to transmute it from a hard fact into a soft idea”. That “suppose” deserves our admiration: he isn’t sure of the excuse, and neither are we.

By the end of these volumes, James is twenty-nine years old and about to set forth for Europe again. He has become more or less the writer we know him as – no longer in awe of father or brother, sufficiently convinced of his own extraordinary sensibilities to give them, in his letters, a free rein. The peculiar diffidence he suffered from has been transformed into a more positive and forceful quality: the public man has emerged from the private correspondent. Taken as a whole, these two volumes tell a terrific and sometimes terrifying story, of the effect on a personality of its own growing sense of the talent at its disposal. “Wherever we go we carry with us this heavy burden of our personal consciousness + wherever we stop we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton ombrella, to obstruct the prospect + obscure the light.” James’s umbrella was certainly large, but it let in a great deal of light, and on the whole, these letters show him in the best of it. The fact that we still like him as much in his confident maturity as we did in his hesitant youth may have something to do with the sweet, dull, generous, loving loneliness of the role he has been cast in here: a man on his own, thinking of others, and sitting down to write them a letter.
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Benjamin Markovits's third novel, Imposture, was published earlier this year.