Quick review

A London Life by Henry James

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


For a trip home to the dreary wilds of Pennsylvania coal country in October, what was wanted was something brief, bright, tart.  The solution?  Wonderfully middling James. While I am a committed congregant in the church of Late James, I confess that I now and then long for a simpler communion.  Not much of a story, let it be said, even in so slight an effort, but then Henry couldn't tell a story anymore than he could ever have told a joke.  It wasn't in him to care much about such things.  Here's a bad marriage, with neither party innocent of anything, and while that's as near as we'll come to event, who we're here for is Laura Wing, the innocent American and younger sister of the bad wife.  What's on offer then is as an examination of the pinching dependence of the unmarried female, her hectic puritanism, and the very real insecurity of both her position and her person in such an increasingly scandalous household.

Like many another imperilled, Victorian virgin in many another novel of the period, much if not most of the thunderous flutter of the very moral Miss Wing comes to nothing.  What makes even middle James unique is that neither the ignominy nor the flutter is all.  (Think how Trollope, for instance, would have measured the field and arrayed the forces of respectability, religion and the rest across a broad front, and sent his poor virgins, male and female, on many a fruitless foray before they engaged so much as an indirection, let alone a proper skirmish.)  A woman, even a girl in a novel by Henry James will think.  Do what they may to discourage her.  (They in this instance being not only poor little Laura's wicked sister and her creepily attentive brother-in-law, but yet another of HJ's wonderful cadre of elderly Amazons, here, Lady Davenant.  They'd all dearly love to just shut the girl up, even if the latter finds her most companionable and decorative.)  Laura Wing doesn't just fly from danger, she actively tries to avert the coming disaster, but more than this, she thinks things through to conclusions she admittedly does not like.  This is why, despite her flurry, she interests the reader as an actual person, rather than simply as a narrative convenience.  She interest us as she interests the novelist, because she does, obviously interest him far more than the impending divorce, or an affair getting into the papers, or a secret flight to France with a lover, etc.

Witness what James does with her that almost might be in some other novel of the time.  In her desperation to find some purchase before it is too late, she flies right at the head of our rather thick juvenile lead.  Being American, and rather dear if also rather dull, he gives her rather the go-by.  (Give him a minute though.)  James only real interest in this scene, other than his obvious technical pleasure in working out the movements through the opera boxes and halls by the various parties to the finale -- and that worthy of Balzac or Flaubert in it's perfect, light choreography -- James' special magic, is in complicating the girls emotion with logic and consequences.  There's nobody else then, not even George Eliot, to do that as James does here, or rather, if, say Eliot did, there would be some magisterial judgement from the narrator, some moral pointed, or pity played out.  Not James.  James just lets her think, and speak, and then he lets her, rather cruelly, sink.  It is all quite melodramatic, more than a little confusing and silly, and it seems absolutely right for what this particular girl has proved herself to be.  It mayn't be much, but it's true and interesting, even exciting for that.

After that, the novelist admittedly hasn't much use for what he's made.  The plot, after his fashion, is, after a fashion, resolved.  At any rate, the book ends. 

I can't help but hope to find another at just this length for another plane ride.



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