Top-notch—the champagne of academic experience.
That last item reminds me that Mumm’s the word—or perhaps ought to
have been about such obviously inflated praise. But then I am so
pleased that this course seems to have gone over with its audience
that perhaps I am a bit out of control. I set out to teach it, I must
confess, with some trepidation. I say “with some trepidation,” but
it occurs to me that I have done most of my teaching with some
trepidation, though I have been told that such nervousness as I might
feel doesn’t show. Something else that doesn’t show, at least so
long as one is teaching other than foreign languages in the
humanities, is one’s effectiveness. How much of what one is saying
is getting through to students? How much thinking of a subtle or
textured kind can one expect to be absorbed by students between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-two who, if memory serves, have a few
other things on their minds?
Confidence in these matters is for fools. Five or six years ago, a
colleague, not normally given to bragging, told me that something
quite magical had been happening to his teaching. He didn’t quite
know how to explain it, but suddenly it all seemed to be coming
together for him. In class he would find himself making startling
connections, things flowed as never before, fascinating, possibly
even original insights that had not hitherto occurred to him seemed
to be there when he needed them.
That same afternoon I ran into one of the most impressive of the
then-current batch of undergraduate literature students. She was
quick at acquiring foreign languages; was writing a senior paper on
Rilke for Erich Heller; had been earnest enough to sit through an
entire course of mine, for no credit, on the sociology of literature,
for which she did all the reading and contributed brilliantly to
classroom discussion. In a casual, merely making-conversation way, I
asked her how her quarter was going. “All right,” she said, “but for
Professor L.’s class [the colleague mentioned in the above
paragraph]. He’s so dry, so dogmatic, so clearly talking to
himself.” Whoops, I took—and continue to take—the moral of that
story to be, Never say you are teaching well.
I was not about to say that I do, but I do say that I especially
wanted to teach Henry James well. As a graduate student once said to
me of another student in a different class who was floundering and
about whose fate she was worried, so I now say about Henry James: “I
love him, you see.” James seems to me the most artistically
intelligent, the most subtle, finally the greatest American writer.
No other writer has given me so much pleasure nor, I believe, taught
me so much about literature and life. I wanted ardently to get my
appreciation for James across. I wanted converts, not to my precise
views, but to at least a rough recognition of Henry James’s immense
achievement.
Before this could be done, I suspected, there was a need to scrape
free the barnacles of cliché that have clung to the vessel of James’s
reputation. The cliché that he was a very great snob—“an effete
snob,” into the bargain, in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase—must be
chipped away. So, too, the notion that Henry James’s subject was an
impossibly rarified one, that he wrote almost exclusively about
people who could really never have existed: unanchored in work,
nationally rootless, without financial concern, detached in nearly
every way, sheer engines of pure and apparently inexhaustible
cerebration. Although Henry James was an immitigably highbrow
writer—some would say the first American modernist writer, given his
tireless interest in the formal properties of his art—he also
happens to have been an extraordinary comedian, in my opinion one of
the funniest writers going. The cliché of Henry James as a great
square stiffo, the ultimate stuffed shirt, this, too, had to be
quickly swept away.
Were my students even aware of these clichés? Difficult to know. But
then it is a bit difficult to know what, exactly, is taught to
undergraduates nowadays. In the course descriptions that go out each
quarter, which I admit to reading in good part for the unconscious
humor I find in them, one often encounters offerings promising the
latest theory-a-go-go written in the most rococo gibberish. But
then there are also standard survey courses and teachers who haven’t
gone in for the nouvelle intellectual diet. My guess is that an
undergraduate majoring in English at Northwestern today is likely to
have been taught a single work by James—Washington Square, perhaps
Portrait of a Lady, just possibly “Turn of the Screw.”
I recalled my own introduction to Henry James as an undergraduate at
the University of Chicago in the middle 1950s. It came when I was
twenty years old in a course in the modern novel taught by Morton
Dauwen Zabel. The novel was The Spoils of Poynton, a book of 1897,
when James had already begun to write in his late—which is to say,
more complex and circumambulating—style; and its subject, that of
the passing on of a lovingly gathered collection of antique
furniture, doubtless must have seemed rarefied in the extreme to a
Middlewestern boy to whom the entire notion of “antique” held not the
least interest. How much of the novel I could be said to have
comprehended I cannot say. Yet I came away with respect for it,
which was in part owing to the respect I had for the respect in which
my teacher held it. I did at least grasp that Henry James was
serious stuff, and that if I were one day to consider myself a
serious literary man I should have to return to him.
It’s probably a bad idea to ask how much anyone gets out of a book.
(“None of us,” writes Ned Rorem, “can ever know how even our closest
friends hear music.”) The question is especially complicated when
applied to the young. I think of myself at nineteen reading Proust.
What was going through my mind? Probably chiefly delight at the
notion of myself reading Proust. When young, one does
a great deal of reading that,
if one is going to be among that
small portion of people who go on to take books seriously, will have
to be done again. As an earnest student of mine once put it shortly
before his graduation, “God, I wish I had a chance to do a second
draft on my education.” Some of us have been lucky enough to be able
to arrange our lives spending the rest of our days putting draft
after draft on our education.
Yet a teacher of the young must not dwell on the question of what,
even roughly, his students derive from the books he teaches them.
My own assumption is that they, or at least the best among them, do
not get much less than I do; and I have always tried to teach to the
best in the class. To do less would be to lapse into condescension of a
kind that would be defeating. This doesn’t mean that I don’t stop to
explain and discuss fundamental matters—how symbolism works, what
constitutes style—but I do assume that my students read for the same
reasons that I do: aesthetic pleasure and spiritual profit.
Not that this need preclude a certain quiet cozening on this
teacher’s part. In teaching Henry James I viewed myself as a
salesman. Like a salesman, I saw no point in making it any more
difficult than necessary for a customer to say Yes. No point, in my
view, in throwing anyone in at the deep end of the pool. Not that
Henry James’s pool has a shallow end; he adored, he positively
wallowed in complexity, and toward the end of his life he told his
niece that he wished he could find a more elaborate way to pronounce
his name. But some Jamesian works are a good deal less daunting than
others, and I planned to begin with these, working my way through and
up to the more complicated. Here is my reading list in the sequential
order that students would be asked to read James:
1. “The Art of Fiction”
2. “The Figure in the Carpet”
3. “The Aspern Papers”
4. Washington Square
5. “Daisy Miller”
6. “The Pupil”
7. The Europeans
8. “The Turn of the Screw”
9. The Princess Casamassima
10. The Ambassadors (to be read for the final exam)
Class enrollment was set at thirty students. I wanted the course to
be built around discussion of works, for I thought that straight
lecturing would be deadly. Something like forty-seven students
registered for it, but I closed out enrollment at thirty-six. What
their motives—beyond course credit—were in taking the course, I do
not know. Most were upperclassmen, four were graduate
students; the student who wrote far and away the
most brilliant examination in the course turned out to be a sophomore.
First day of class, right out of the chute, the sales pitch began.
After setting out the ground rules—examinations, papers, grades,
attendance—I announced what I took to be the point of the course.
This was to establish in their minds an appreciation for the work of
one of the most subtle of American writers, an understanding of what
constitutes an exemplary career in literature, and, somehow, through
all this, I hoped they would take away something that, in ways that
could not be predicted, would alter, however slightly, their ways of
thinking about life and make them a little bit smarter.
I next touched briefly on a question that, fifteen or twenty years
ago, would simply never have arisen—that of “how” we shall read
Henry James. “I suppose my answer to this question,” I said, “is,
‘As intelligently as possible.’ I do not myself read him as a
Marxist, a Freudian, a Deconstructionist, a Post-structuralist; I
don’t read him to discover that he might be ‘elitist,’ or
‘pro-capitalist,’ or ‘anti-feminist,’ or anything of the sort. One
of the interesting things about Henry James is that he makes all
these ways of reading seem rather beside the point. I read him for
the pleasure of his language, for his wit, for his meaning, which, if
I may say so, is not always that easily caught. A critic named
Philip Rahv [surely no one in the class, graduate students included,
is likely to have encountered that name], who once remarked that
James was a secular New Englander, interested in the same moral
questions that his fellow New Englanders had been interested in, once
formulated James’s way of coming at these questions thus: For Henry
James ‘any failure of discrimination is sin, whereas virtue is a
compound of intelligence, moral delicacy, and the sense of the
past.’”
Raising the sales pitch slightly, I began, in a brief lecture on
Henry James’s life, by calling him a genius. A genius, though, I
emphasized, of a particular kind. There are no Mozarts in
literature, nor Einsteins for that matter, so that Henry James’s
genius was not of the natural kind but came about as the result of
fortunate circumstances—chief among them being born into the James
family—and the most careful self-cultivation. And I quoted James
himself, in The Tragic Muse, on the nature of genius in the arts:
“Genius is only the art of getting your experience fast, of stealing
it, as it were. …” It is also, of course, the ability to make the
most of this experience, to have the energy and determination to make
that experience count and to make it tell in works of art. I also
quoted James on another character in the same novel: “Life, for him
[one Mr. Carteret], was a purely practical function, not a question
of phrasing.” To which I added that they, my students, ought to know
right off that for Henry James not entirely but in good part life was
a matter of phrasing—the right phrasing. I’m fairly sure no one in
the room quite knew what I meant.
The second session of class I brought in a photograph of Henry James
in his early sixties, my only visual (non-audio) aid. In this
photograph, which I acquired some years ago from the Smith College
Archives, James wears pince-nez and is without his beard. I asked the
students to take a minute or so with the photograph so that they might
recall that the man they would be reading all quarter really was of
flesh and blood, however godlike at times he may seem. I also
suggested that the more penetrating among them might just discover,
behind what at first glance seems a most formidable
late-nineteenth-century countenance, a slight but very sly humor
lurking.
Together the class and I worked our way through the essay James
titled “The Art of Fiction.” He wrote it in 1884, when he was
forty-one, well launched on his career but far from having attained
the heights he would soon reach. The essay is too rich to summarize
here, but it is about what James calls the “artistic idea” and the
variety of possibilities that novels— which “are as various as the
temperament of man, and [are] successful as they reveal a particular
mind, different from the others”—and all that the glorious form of
the novel, then attaining its pre-eminence as a literary form, was
capable of achieving in the hands of serious practitioners. Best as
I remember it, the discussion was not exhilarating—it is generally
easier to teach imaginative than critical works—but earnest, and at
least nothing flat-out stupid was said. I also handed out Xerox copies
of a sheet of quotations. The most impressive of these, from James’s
essay on Turgenev, I read aloud, prefacing it by saying that James
himself, in the same essay, remarks that when we read a writer of
real power we want to know what he thinks about the world. This
quotation, I think, comes as close as any single passage from James
that I know to answering that question.
Life is in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists
agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare;
goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant;
wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in very great places,
people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the
world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a
night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither
forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome
experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for
something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as
it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there
is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there
hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to
understand.
I closed that second class, our first working session, by quoting
James yet again: “In every novel the work is divided between the
writer and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very much as
he makes his characters … the reader would be doing his share of the
task; the grand point is to get him to make it.” Would James be able
to turn this trick with these students? Remains, as political
journalists hedging their bets say, to be seen.
“Taught what seemed to me a decent class yesterday,” my journal for
March 30, 1990, reads. “Some bright and earnest kids in the room, I
think.” The fact is that, over the years, I have had little to
complain about in my students at Northwestern. There have been the
usual contingent of the mediocre; a vastly smaller contingent of the
genuinely hopeless; but always I have come upon a small number of
superior students who are capable of passion and intelligence about
art and other artifacts of the mind. Northwestern does not do all
that well in the snobbery sweepstakes that I think undergraduate
education in the United States has become; in rankings that appear in
newspapers or news magazines from time to time, it is usually listed
in some such slightly dreary position as fourteenth or eighteenth
best school in the country. Who knows what this means—and who
cares? But what I do know is that, in order to get into
Northwestern, which asks high grades and SAT scores, these students
have had to acquire the habits of achievement—which is to say,
they do the work. Ask them to read a novel by next Thursday, and
generally almost all will have done so; and those few who have not
will feel damned guilty about it. I, for one, am glad they do feel
guilty.
Originally, the James course was to meet from 9:00–10:30, but then I
thought perhaps Henry James at nine in the morning might be pushing
it, and so I changed the time to 10:30–12:00. The room we met in was
on the fourth floor of an old Charles Addams-like building called
University Hall, which has good light and for some reason thirty or
so extra chairs, all metal and plastic, many of which seemed to be
massed up at the front of the room, giving the joint the feel of an
abandoned warehouse once owned by a Scandinavian furniture
company. Within a week or so, I learned the names of the students,
whom as always I addressed as Mr. and Miss, and had my initial
hunches about their differing intellectual quality. A graduate
student named Pataky, who spoke ardently and well, could be depended
upon to come in anywhere from five to ten minutes late. Soon it
began to feel like that strange academic social unit—a class.
I generally began each session by gassing away for twenty or so
minutes on a general subject, such as the distinctions between
highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow art, the meaning and use of irony
as a literary method, the relation between morality and the novel,
the best short formulation of which, in my opinion, remains that of
R. P. Blackmur: “Novels do not supply us with morals, but they show
us with what morals have to do.” Sometimes I would use my twenty or
so minutes to talk about a more strictly Jamesian subject: James’s
friendhip with Edith Wharton; the history of his reputation; his
working methods, including the switch from handwriting his novels to
dictating the later books to a typist. But the greatest portion of
time in class was given to discussion of Henry James’s stories and
novels.
Henry James is nothing if not discussable. He never comes straight
out to tell you what to think, though those of us who have lived long
with his fiction have a pretty good notion of his partialities. He
had a positive horror of generalization. When T. S. Eliot famously
said that Henry James had “a mind so fine no idea could violate it,”
he did not mean that James couldn’t understand or handle general
ideas, but instead that his mind was too finely textured ever to be
dominated by an idea and that he carried on his own aesthetic
operation at a level well above the ideational. “It is the business
of literature,” wrote Desmond MacCarthy, “to make ideas out of
facts.” James was content to work with the facts alone—the lush,
languorous, lovely facts—and let his readers discover in his writing
such ideas as they deemed useful. So that many a Henry James story
or novel, ending in renunciation or death, leaves a reader to work
out the true meaning of what he has read on his own. Some people
hate this challenge; others among us feel that this is precisely how
sophisticated commerce between a novelist and his audience ought to
be carried on. Naturally, I hoped my students would develop the
respect for Henry James and the aesthetic patience required to join
the latter camp.
Certainly, the very first story in the course, “The Figure in the
Carpet,” called for aesthetic patience in the extreme. It is a story
about a search for the deep and underlying meaning of a writer’s
work. “My little point,” the writer in question calls it, then
enlarges upon his meaning:
“By my little point I mean—what shall I call it?—the particular
thing I’ve written my books most for. Isn’t there for every writer
a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply
himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t
write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the
business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely?
Well, its that!”
Readers of James’s splendid story will recall that, although most of
it is about trying to discover what that little point, the figure in
the writer’s carpet, really is, we never finally find out. We can
only surmise, which is far from everyone’s idea of how a story ought
satisfactorily to end. What
is more, it is very difficult to be
human and not draw parallels with the writer in the story and its
author and wonder what the figure was in Henry James’s own carpet.
At least I hoped it was difficult. I put this story first on our
reading list because I wanted students to begin thinking of James’s
general intention, the passion of his passion, the part of the
business in which, for him, the flame burned most intensely.
I teach by what is very loosely called the Socratic method, though I
am much better dressed and epically less intelligent than the man
after whom it is named. Chiefly, I interrogate, sometimes pressing
fairly hard, asking four, five, six questions of the same student,
yet stopping, I trust, well short of the general tone of the Gestapo.
I ask a question, then call on those students who raise their hands.
If no one raises his or her hand, I call on someone anyhow. I try
quietly to convey that it is a mistake to come
to one of my classes
unprepared. Nothing wrong with injecting a small element of fear in
education. I know fear contributed greatly to my own.
Building gradually in complexity and in length, the course next took
up “The Aspern Papers,” a nouvelle, “the beautiful and blest
nouvelle,” James called it. He was much enamored of the form, for
it allowed him to undertake serious psychological examination while
practicing what he termed “exquisite economy in composition.” I
hadn’t read “The Aspern Papers” in more than twenty years and on
rereading this “other story about Venice” it struck me as even better
than I remembered it: more subtle, more powerful, more beautiful. I
attempted to teach it around a general issue—that of the correctness
of digging into the past of the personal lives of famous people to
make them public in the name of scholarship, biographical interest,
art, or what have you. I did not neglect to mention, by way of
introduction, how lively this issue remained in our own day (the
Mencken Diary had just been published against Mencken’s own wishes
with serious consequences for the author’s reputation), and I brought
up the fact that Henry James himself had at one point burned forty
years of his own correspondence, lest it fall into the hands of a
“publishing scoundrel” like the narrator of “The Aspern Papers.”
A number of other ways of approaching the work were available, not
least among them as a study into the nature of an idée fixe, or, as
F. W. Dupee puts it in his book on James, as a book about the “power
[of the past] to bargain with the present.” But I could have
lingered as well on the sheer beauty of James’s rendering of his
story, fondling details, highlighting descriptions, noting the scores of
delicate phrasings. When James speaks of Juliana Bordereau, the aged
lover of the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern, he remarks that, as an
American, she had first come to Europe before “photography and other
conveniences [had] annihilated surprise.” Forgive a bit of gushing,
but that phrase “annihilated surprise” seems to me worth the entire
price of the ticket. I pointed this out in class; I mentioned
other lovely Jamesian touches. But when teaching the work of
a genuinely elegant prose writer I have always felt that I have never
done this element in their work sufficient justice. If poetry is
what is left out of translation, it is the fine and artful details
that tend to depart in teaching.
The student response to “The Aspern Papers” seemed to me generous in
its appreciation. I felt that there was a strong sense in the room
of the quality of the work that we had just read and of the
superiority of the artistic intelligence that had produced it.
Meanwhile, personalities began to emerge, and they were not
uninteresting. Of a class of thirty-six students, twelve or so were
fairly impressive talkers, and three or four were capable of saying
things of the kind that kept the old professor on his own wobbly
toes. The class, in other words, had begun to take on character, and
it was not a displeasing one. “Students in my Henry James course
seem filled with good will,” I note in my journal for April 7.
“Don’t know if my Henry James sell is working, but thus far no one is
walking out.”
Washington Square, the next book in the course, is a novel that
James chose not to include in the New York Edition of his works, The
Novels and Tales of Henry James, which he prepared for publication
between 1905 and 1909. Around the time the Edition began to appear,
James wrote to the novelist Robert Herrick that “by the mere fact of
leaving out certain things (I have tried to read over Washington
Square and I can’t and I fear it must go!) I exercise a control, a
discrimination, I treat certain portions of my work as unhappy
accidents.” Not a good decision, in my view, for this slender novel,
written when James was thirty-seven, continues to stir the mind and
agitate the heart of an attentive reader. Dealing with one of the
great Jamesian themes—the immorality of an attempt by one human
being to dominate the spirit of another, or to use another as a means
to his or her own ends—the novel also provides a potent argument
against theoretical modes of thinking in its attack on the figure of
Dr. Austin Sloper, the successful physician who kills the love and
respect in which he was held by his own daughter by treating her as
essentially a pawn in a chess game of his own theoretical
devising. Scientific by training, the doctor is a man used to
dividing people into classes and types, and as he avers at one point
in the novel, nineteen times out of twenty he is right. The problem
is that the twentieth case can be decisive—it can be, this twentieth
case, your own daughter. Implicit in this I read James’s criticism
of scientific—and in our day, social-scientific and
psychoanalytic—thought. “Never say you know the last word about any
human heart,” James wrote, and it ought to stand as the permanent
motto for those, great writers and all readers alike, who take their
instruction from literature seriously.
In class, discussion of Washington Square revolved around the
question of how
James had taken a relatively small cast of what
looked to be fairly stock characters—an ugly-duckling daughter, a
busybody aunt, a severe father, a handsome fortune hunter—and made
them vivid and serious and immensely interesting. I recall the talk
about this question being of good quality. I raised the question,
too, of how James was able to transform his heroine, Catherine Sloper,
the ugly-duckling daughter, from a rather dreary, misbegotten young woman
to a formidable, quite admirable woman of resolute character.
I mentioned a formulation of Desmond MacCarthy’s in this connection,
which runs, if I have it correctly, that in the novels and stories of
Henry James only the good are beautiful and there is no shortcut to being good.
All that it generally takes to qualify as good in James is consistent kindness,
heightened awareness, scrupulosity of behavior, and just possibly an
act of renunciation that at the time it is made is likely to seem the
moral equivalent of amputation. Yet in James it always, in the
elaborate working out of his plots, seems persuasive.
I was putting in a good deal of time in class preparations, and I
found I was enjoying myself greatly, looking forward to entering
class and feeling a slight drop in emotional temperature after each
session was over. This was owing in part to the students, but even
more, I believe, to Henry James. A few months before the course had
begun, I read some of James’s novels that I had not read before
(Watch and Ward, Confidence, The Reverberator, The Tragic
Muse) and reread others that over the years had become blurry in
memory (Roderick Hudson, The American, The Bostonians). I also
read the one-volume abridgment of Leon Edel’s original—and, in my
opinion, triumphant—five-volume biography of Henry James. I read
some of James’s art criticism and reread some of his travel pieces.
I read a fair amount of the vast body of criticism of James; and in so
doing was reminded how the revival of James’s reputation in the 1920s
and 1930s, consequent upon the creation in the university of American
literature as a respectable academic subject, happily paralleled the
emergence of a brilliant group of critics, including T. S. Eliot,
Yvor Winters, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, F. W. Dupee, Joseph Warren
Beach, William Troy, Edmund Wilson, and Jacques Barzun, all of whom
much admired James and wrote interestingly on him. For four or five
months, then, I had been living on an almost exclusively Henry James
literary diet and felt myself flourishing on it.
Odd but I have found that I can write with enthusiasm about things I
dislike—anger, after all, can be an inspiration—but I can only
teach with delight what I love. Part of the reason for this may be
that, with undergraduate life so brief, it seems pointless to me to
waste any portion of it asking students to read and think about
third- and fourth-rate things. One can scarcely hope to acquaint
them, in the span of four years, with more than a soupçon of the ample
quantity of the first-rate available in art and thought. Perhaps this
is why the heavy dosage of recent academic talk about changing the
canon in undergraduate education has always seemed to me a sad
(usually political) cheat, where it has not been altogether beside
the point. Besides, I have my own selfish motives for teaching.
Apart from doing one’s job—teaching the Kinder properly—I need to
feel some sense of intellectual progress while doing so, usually in
the way of feeling I am getting a bit smarter myself, and possibly
learning a thing or two about writing. Teaching Henry James allows
one to think one is progressing in both ways.
Not that all was euphoria. “Daisy Miller,” which I taught to
introduce James’s international theme—or, as he called it, “the
Americano-European legend”—presented a few bumps in the road.
(“Daisy Miller” was the story that gave James his initial jolt of
fame: the character of the American girl loose on the Continent
established a type, as F. Scott Fitzgerald was later to do for the
flapper; and James was asked to provide stories of the same kind for
other magazines, which, being Henry James, of course he didn’t.) One
of the difficulties the story provided was that many of James’s
little jokes about the vulgarity of the Miller family sailed blithely
over the heads of students for whom vulgarity isn’t currently a vivid
category. A small business early in the story, for example, has
Daisy’s younger and thoroughly spoiled brother announce the names of
the members of his family each with his or her middle initials: Annie
P. Miller, Ezra B. Miller, Randolph C. Miller. The use of the middle
initial is a wholly American phenomenon, and James brings it in
merely to show the comic combination of American naïveté and
pomposity. Explaining this admittedly minor point, I distinctly felt
a collective fish eye upon me, as if the entire class were asking
itself, “Why is this man bothering to tell us this?”
But the problem went deeper. It felt somewhat strange to explain to
a roomful of students who, so far as I knew, had been going at it
with their boy and girl friends since high school that there was
something quite scandalous about a young American woman going about
Rome unchaperoned but otherwise quite innocently with a
lower-middle-class Italian. In “Daisy Miller” Henry James wrote a
comedy of manners, a rather dazzling one at that, but when manners
change radically, as they have in our time, other comedies are
played. Or so I felt up there in front of the class explaining what
exactly it was that Daisy did to scandalize the American colony in
Rome in the last third of the nineteenth century.
Things picked up with “The Pupil,” one of James’s middling-long
stories, written when he was forty-seven and very much at the top of
his game. It is a pure Jamesian tale, fascinating in and for itself.
It tells that story of a boy of vastly precocious sensibility and
intelligence who is being brought up by a family of failed social
climbers who are monstrously unreliable. The tutor quickly senses
how extraordinary the boy is, and rather more slowly discovers how
shabby is the family. Meanwhile, the two of them, tutor and pupil,
in moments of shared fantasy, talk about how fine it would be if they
could one day escape the family and live together on their own.
At the close of the story precisely that opportunity arises, and the
tutor, vacillating ever so slightly, is caught doing so by the boy,
which causes his already weakened heart to fail. It is a story that
demands the utmost attention, particularly at the very end, lest the
tutor’s vacillation be missed. Many students did miss it, and a good
discussion followed upon the subject of whether a young boy would
have been so delicately attuned as to be able to pick it up. “Why,”
said one of the best students in the class, who didn’t really think
so young a boy could pick up so subtle a hint as James provides, “in
order to do so, he’d had to be a little Henry James.” (As the odious
radio performer Art Linkletter used to say, “Don’t kids say the
darndest things?”)
Not long after this I ventured a quotation about “The Pupil” from
F. W. Dupee: “A kind of fraternal-homosexual affection unites the boy
and the tutor in ‘The Pupil.’” Anything to it?, I asked. I myself
didn’t think there was, though I did not just then say so. But
suddenly the discussion in the room was once again enlivened; the
class in fact, divided. A few students came forth to say they felt
that homosexuality was the key to the story. Another student said
that he hadn’t really thought of it before, but now that it had come
up he discovered a few passages—one of which he read out to the
class—that sounded rather homosexier than he had at first realized.
On and on it went, unresolved as the bell rang to end the class. In
the hall, Miss Jennie Davidson, who has been in another of my
classes, remarked dryly that perhaps there ought to be a statute of
limitations on discovering homosexuality in literature. No dope,
Miss Davidson. At the next class session I simply announced that,
for my money, the element of homosexuality in the story, if indeed it
could be said to exist, was quite beside the point. But then, I
added, you must realize that a critic’s work is never done. How many
students in the class picked up the irony of that last comment I am
not prepared to say. I felt, though, that I owed it to them not to
explain it.
It was in “The Pupil,” too, that that miserable old hag, Auntie
Semitism, staggered into the room. In a line toward the middle of
the story James notes of the boy’s family: “They were good-natured,
yes—as good-natured as Jews at the doors of clothing shops! But was
that the model one wanted one’s family to follow?” Several were the
Jewish students in the class. The teacher’s last name is Epstein.
What was to be done? I offered a brief sermonette—the question had
come up near the end of the class—saying that I wished Henry James’s
work was entirely clear of this sort of blotch, but it wasn’t. In
this he did not, as he did in so many other ways, rise above his time
and social class. I then went on to say that it might assuage people
much disturbed by this to know that, in the Dreyfus Affair, James was
absolutely on the correct side, applauding Emile Zola’s J’accuse
and deploring the anti-Semitism of such longtime French friends as
Paul Bourget, which quite sickened him.
When I asked how many in the class had ever heard of the Dreyfus
Affair, none had. Everyone who teaches has stories about what
shockingly obvious knowledge the current generation of undergraduates
doesn’t have. For my part, I must report that I no longer get much
worked up by this sort of thing. If I knew anything about the
Dreyfus Affair as an undergraduate, it couldn’t have been much. Such
historical material as most of us possess we come to through our
special interests or by simple accident. Thus I know a fair amount
about the Russian Revolution but not a single fact about the administration
of President James Polk. Perhaps the one serious difference between my
students and me at their age is that, I suspect, I was more embarrassed
about my ignorance than they, and I still may be.
More significant is what the lack of experience owing entirely to
being young does to one as a reader. This came up when we read The
Europeans, another novel James claimed not to think much of but
which impressed me (and F. R. Leavis, among others). In this slender
novel, in which the international subject runs the other way round,
with two immensely Europeanized Americans visiting their New England
cousins, the conduct of the characters and the nature of the
situation into which James has inserted them, calls for a reasonably
strong flow of generalization on the author’s part. “It must be
admitted … that nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the
imagination of very rigid people” is a mild example. But the
generalization that incited the most strenuous comment was that which
reads: “a woman looks the prettier for having unfolded her wrongs or
sufferings.” What about it, I asked, is this true? Do women look
prettier under such conditions?
The young women in the room with conventional—and none were
rabid—feminist views felt not. They were generally committed to
denying that there are any serious differences between men and women,
which may or may not be sound social policy but is certainly tough on
literature, which is in good part the historical record of these very
differences. Others, male and female, who thought of themselves as
operating solely on reason, said that they just didn’t see how this
generalization could hold up. A few students—all of them
women—said, yes, that it seemed to them true, at least when they
recalled women they knew who recounted genuine sufferings to them.
(Mere kvetching, I insisted, didn’t count.) I said that I thought
James’s generalization true, too, though my word on this point didn’t
come anywhere near carrying the day.
I asked what checks there were on generalizations, and when no one
come forth with any, I said that I could myself think of only two:
reason and experience. The interesting problem, I noted, was that
experience, as Pascal and other powerful thinkers have testified,
frequently outrages reason. I cited an instance from an Anthony
Powell novel. In the novel the narrator remarks of another character
that he was very quick at picking up speaking knowledge of foreign
languages and that, like every other man whom the narrator knew who
had this skill, this man, too, was fundamentally untrustworthy.
“Crazy,” I said to the class, “quite nuts, right?” Much shaking of
heads in agreement. “Very well, then, what am I supposed to do if
the only four men I have known who are similarly quick at picking up
speaking knowledge of foreign languages are also, yep, fundamentally
untrustworthy?” No advice was offered.
As for the hard sell, I thought it going very nicely indeed when, the
week that we read “The Turn of the Screw,” the class overwhelmingly
rejected Edmund Wilson’s theory that everything the governess saw and
felt during the course of the story was imagined, the result of
neurotic sexual repression. The theory was rejected, moreover, on
the interesting grounds that, in the class’s view, it made the story
itself less interesting; that it somehow degraded James’s artistic
intention; and that, finally, Henry James being Henry James, his
intentions ought to be assumed to be of the highest. (Philip Rahv,
writing about “The Turn of the Screw,” similarly remarked: “So far as
intention goes, we should keep in mind that in James we are always
justified in assuming the maximum.” Don’t grown-ups say the darndest
things?)
I also sensed, in our discussion of “The Turn of the Screw,” a
patience with James’s ambiguity. Perhaps it had come with all else
that we had earlier read of James, but there seemed to be an understanding
that for Henry James ambiguity, along with irony and penetrating observation,
had its own rich artistic uses. “The Turn of the Screw” is the ultimate tale
of ambiguity. Edmund Wilson was not wrong when he said that in it
“almost everything from beginning to end can be read equally in
either
of two senses.” The story’s devastating ending, in which the
governess, hitherto entirely a force for good, contributes to the
child Miles’s death, is itself a paradigm of the ambiguity in the
human soul, where good and evil often cohabit. But without the
student’s respect for James’s intentions and understanding of his use
of ambiguity, I don’t think we could have worked our way through this
great tour de force of James’s with anything like the appreciative
reading that emerged.
“May 23, 1990. Taught first flat Henry James class yesterday. Too
few students finished reading the 591-page Princess Casamassima,
the little dears. Too late in the quarter to yell at them.” In
fact, I was angrier than this journal entry reveals; lest there be
any doubt, “little dears” is pure euphemism. The academic quarter
was drawing to a close; papers were due in other courses;
examinations in other courses would soon have to be taken. Let us
not speak of love lives, emotional crises, and simple lassitude,
complications not unknown to phylum studentia. Still, with the
greed of every selfish teacher, I wanted these students to save their
very best for me, which, up till now, I think the majority of them
had done.
I also wanted to make good use of The Princess Casamassima to help
nail down my quarter-long hard sell. In many ways it is among my
favorite of Henry James’s novels. He never availed himself of a
larger canvas. Not only is the book filled with rich and beautiful
things, but in it James puts to rout almost all the arguments that
have been used to make him seem a less complete writer than he really
is. The dark third chapter of the novel, with its terrifying tour
through Millbank Prison for women, is as good as anything Dickens
ever did in the same line and worthy of the great Russians. The cast
of characters in the novel ranges through the entire English
class
system. James’s depiction of working-class characters is beautifully
brought off, and without a trace of snobbery. “I take no interest in
the people,” says Mme Grandoni, a secondary yet important character in
the novel, “I don’t understand them and I know nothing about them.
An honorable nature, of any class, I always respect; but I won’t
pretend to a passion for the ignorant masses, for I have it not.”
The Princess Casamassima is, in fact, a philippic in novel form
against political snobbery and shows its dread consequences in the
world. It is also the ultimate defense of the literary mode of
thought, as opposed to the political or social-scientific, and sets
out, with no ambiguity this time round, the forces that, for the literary
imagination, rule the world. As another character in The Princess
Casamassima puts it:
The figures on the chessboard were still the passions and jealousies
and superstitions and stupidities of man, and thus positioned with
regard to each other at any given moment could be of interest only to
the grim invisible fates who played the game—who sat, through the
ages, bow-backed over the table.
Well, perhaps no salesman can expect utter satisfaction. Better to
close the deal and move on to the next customer. I think that with
perhaps a third of these students I got across what it meant for
Henry James to be “the historian of fine consciences” that Joseph
Conrad called him. Maybe, too, at the end of our nine weeks together
reading this one writer, several of these students would depart with
a glimmer of what James himself meant when he said that “It is art
than makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our
consideration and application of these things, and I know of no
substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” At the
end of the course, they wrote those generous student evaluations.
The two sets of examinations they wrote for me were strong, with an
occasional James-like formulation popping up in them. “James’s
endings,” wrote one student, “seem often to be a twist of the knife
rather than the actual stab.” “In this story, as in so much of
James,” wrote another, “The victories are small and often so much
more valuable because of it.”
What sticks? Will there be residue? What remains? Will any of these
students eventually join the narrator of James’s story “The Next
Time,” who remarks of the select band of readers devoted to high
literary culture, “We’re a numerous band, partakers of the same
repose, who sit together in the shade of the tree, by the plash of
the fountain, with the glare of the desert round us and no great vice
that I know of but the habit perhaps of estimating people a little
too much by what they think of a certain style”? These are questions
the answer to which a teacher of Henry James wishes to but cannot
know. Still, the prospect of having possibly put two or three more
Jamesians in the world, from the standpoint of a high-pressure,
hard-sell literary salesman, makes all those mornings talking one’s
head off seem, just possibly, worth it.
From The New Criterion Vol. 9, No. 3, November 1990
