The Flutter of Those Stainless Pinions

 By the time a word — any perfectly serviceable, common word like “gratitude” — ends up as calligraphy on scented candles and whitewashed barn slats, it is pretty much done. It’s like picking up a dull knife. Stale as old cake. It’s a shame. It’s a particular shame as it’s a particularly good word, gratitude. (I suppose that no one wants a candle called “shame,” though I rather like the idea as a hostess gift.) As it is, the word now makes one blush to see “gratitude” in the title of a serious book or even at the foot of a letter. All the Oprah of it has not so much dispersed since the 90s as it has soaked and spread into a generalized wet. Local morning show Barbies in minor markets punctuate cooking segments with it. It must be heard in mega church services nearly as often as “Lord” — a word otherwise so archaic as to be abandoned now everywhere but the upper house of Parliament and Bridgerton. It seems everyone is now so very grateful for everything — and to whom? — as to actually be indifferent to context. See? I’m grateful! It’s right there on my travel mug.

I blame Zen. More correctly, I blame all those little old monks and nuns and Tibetan by adoption students from Kansas or Brooklyn who turned us away from Ravi Shankar’s slappin’ sitar and convinced us to sit still. So much sitting still. Not their fault really, but when not suggesting detachment from all of our stuff, they did tend to ask everybody to just sit still and study a blade of grass. And not just study the blade of grass but to be grateful for, I don’t know, the green of it all? (Reminding me of another nearly ruined word when used now in any non-agricultural setting, “cultivate.”)

Pure speculation and probably not helpful because it doesn’t really matter how the word came to be code for sunshine and coffee and puppies and another day cancer-free. What matters more is that it is a necessary word still to understand specifically 19th Century novels, and particularly Henry James — not that he would recognize the word now that it’s been tattooed everywhere.

Not the first word to arise in The Portrait of a Lady. It’s a novel chuck full of good words, but this one didn’t occur to me until I was rereading my way through Isabel Archer’s beaus. So many eager suitors even before the girl comes into her luck, as it were. Every one a gentleman. Every one of them surprisingly responsive to the lady’s charms, including a pretty figure and face, but also a pretty quick wit, as well as character and more will than is usual in Victorian heroines generally. (James never stints on what we might now call “agency” when it comes to his women — even in the face of custom and the expectations of the day, even when they can’t quite do anything about it.) All of these men are attractive one way or another, all possess what James might call “points” to their advantage; money, position in society, refinement, even sensitivity after a distinctly masculine fashion. And yet each potential romance proved incredibly frustrating to read again as a very grown person.

What they all want from Isabel and don’t get is — you guessed it — gratitude. She’s engaging, responsive, kind. She says, “no.” Actually she says, “no, but thank you for asking,” but that is not enough. They are flummoxed because she didn’t say “yes.” They’re indignant moreover because she didn’t say, “YES! Thank you!” It finally occurred to me that all these men were waiting not for the acceptance but the requisite gratitude. I mean, how could she not?!

Kindness confuses. It’s expected. Demanded. But without consent, kindness might as well be a slap in their bewhiskered chops. These guys (a word, to my knowledge, James never used,) are all willing to wait — but only because they assume that “yes” is inevitable. When it doesn’t come, well, that’s just ungrateful. That’s just wrong. It’s stunning.

Not to spoil anything for the reader, but eventually the lady does consent to marry. Not a great choice, by the way, but what the author has rather slyly let us know well beforehand is that making the choice isn’t really where her Fate goes awry. Reading the novel this time, in my very late middle age, I’m pretty sure that for a woman when James was writing, marriage was Fate. The fact that his heroine here might escape it altogether is an anachronistic modern reading. James wrote more than a few unmarried women, but even at their best, this was if not tragic, then at least not devoutly to be wished. And money wasn’t enough to compensate. Spinsterhood was hard. (Widows might be luckier.) What’s wrong with Isabel Archer’s Fate is in the possessive. That this woman thinks it is hers is her mistake.

Though of course it isn’t because ultimately it is. The book famously ends without quite telling the reader what we want to hear. James did that more than once. One of his most modern habits. One of the reasons he’s never been more widely liked, and one of the reasons he’s still widely and closely read. Fate isn’t real. It’s not an actual thing. Maybe when the old Gods still had a dog in every fight and held beauty contests with tragic outcomes and the like, but James didn’t give a snap for classical mythology and he certainly wasn’t beholden to Arcadian plotting or ancient ideals. The only God in James is Henry, and his only religion is his art. Remember, Henry James is never not an American. Outside looking in (maybe through the keyhole.) I suspect that for him this means seeing through things as much as looking at them. Cathedrals are architecture. Gods are false. People are real, and really fascinating if you’re always other — and Henry is the definition of other — and he’s always looking really, really hard.

Among his most arduous tasks as a novelist was to make women real. There were already lots and lots and frankly wagon-loads of wonderful women in novels, and some of the best novels by then were written by women. He appreciated Austen. He loved George Eliot. He didn’t assume he had any special insight, only his art — and that was made from observation and composition. Those were his tools. So when he set to writing women specifically it was in part because he saw them. Think. Name another male novelist even today who spent more time in the company of and listening to women. Doesn’t mean he was by any stretch either a feminist or a sociologist. He was social. What he collected was conversation, confidences, appearances. I don’t know that it’s even fair to say that he liked women, not because he was gay, you understand. Lots of us do, though by no means all, sadly. Still men. He liked company, mixed company as they used to say. Often as not women were the better half of society as he understood it. He owed them his attention, and in his way, characters like Isabel Archer are an expression of — yes — his gratitude.

***

Gratitude isn’t really the stuff of novels though, really more of a poetic theme: Stanley Kunitz in the garden, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry in the field, Jane Kenyon for Donald Hall, Donald Hall for Jane Kenyon and baseball and getting old. The getting older may be the key there. Thankfulness expands as the horizon narrows? The “To Whom?” question seems to trail off nearer the end and nearly every poet who gets to be old becomes a pantheist. (I used to explain late Mary Oliver to new readers as, “went to the mailbox this glorious morning” poems.)

Selling poetry is working at a fruit stand, if the reader will forgive the clumsy metaphor (not a poet, me.) There will always be a few people willing to try something exotic, something bitter or tart, but most people are looking for something ripe, something sweet. Not saccharine — though we have that in stock too (see Rupi Kaur.) 

“ The readiness is all” when it comes to emotion. Poetry gets right in there. “Gratitude — is not the mention/ Of a Tenderness / But its still appreciation / Out of plumb with speech.” See? Dickinson. 

Poetry is what’s wanted when I try to articulate this present moment, as I am at my mother’s house and I haven’t much time just now for novels.

I note that my mother has never been tall. Shorter now. She was plump most of my life. Now she’s as little and soft and vulnerable as a fawn. “I wish your Dad had lived to see me get small,” she tells me. He never did, but I can see it. Every day she seems smaller as I walk behind her as she can’t walk alone now. 

Every day she thanks me for this and that and every day I’m grateful to be here with her.

I’m grateful to be home and not home. I’m in the house I grew up in, doing my part as best I can to help care for the woman who raised me and I’m doing no better than one might expect. I’m not home with my husband in Seattle where I most want to be except here is where I want to be. (Henry James would not approve of the preceding sentences.) 

It’s hard to read in this house. Not a lot of down-time. Had to do my (virtual) monthly book club while I was here and that took some arranging, but it happened. I was grateful for all the help. Cousin Patty came and sat with Mum while I blathered away on my Zoom. My sister had to go back to Texas. First my sister-in-law then my brother got sick so it was a near run thing, getting those two hours to talk about Henry James.

“The debt immense of endless gratitude” as Milton called it, so perhaps that’s the measure of the thing. No matter how common the word now, there’s really no way to reduce the thing to less. 

So for Henry James and his Isabel and “the flutter of those stainless pinions,” for Dickinson and Milton and all the poets, for family and friends and the help of both, and of my fellow booksellers, and my employers for allowing me to be here, and most for the company of my mother nearer the end than the beginning, for being and not being home, I here express my gratitude.