The Very Mill of the Conventional

 "We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have." 

-- Henry James, The Middle Years 

"The house had a name and a history..."* 

Page four in the Penguin paperback of The Portrait of a Lady and there it is: the longest sentence in Henry James -- at least according to the internet. I asked. Did not know. The funny part? I'd reread that sentence just about a month ago and I never noticed. Flowed right by in a perfectly pleasant way, as did ultimately the first hundred pages, almost before I'd looked up. That long sentence did not at the time seem a specially notable example of James' style or volubility. Turns out it's both. The words "architectural" and "labyrinthine" were used to describe it, also "masterful" and "clumsy." Fair enough. How did it not register as such?

Maybe I'm just used to the old boy. I've been reading Henry James since I first picked up The Turn of the Screw as horror obsessed kid so -- maybe fifty years now? Imagine. Hadn't thought about that until this very moment, honestly. Not a long list, authors I read fifty years ago who I'm still reading now. Longer than most people maybe, but I'm really not that fan who reads through all of the Anne of Green Gables books once a year. Basically I've read Tolkien twice and the second time was because of the Peter Jackson movies. I enjoyed my time with both of those authors, Lucy Maude and John Ronald Reuel, but I'm not a devotee. I do however have my favorites, writers I regularly reread, and Henry J. is definitely on my list. In fact, he's my favorite novelist, probably my favorite writer.

A few months ago I wrote a Staff Recommendation for  The Golden Bowl, by Henry James:

"This is my favorite novel. I've read it seven times. Why? Because it is beautiful and thrilling and I still don't understand why. Basically nothing happens. There's an engagement and shopping for a wedding present. It's perfect."

Then something shocking happened. Never would have predicted it. In three months we've sold seven copies. Seven!!! I'm not being fatuous or snippy. That may be more copies of that book than I've sold in all my nearly forty years of bookselling combined. My very un-Jamesian reaction when I saw the sales-sheet? "Holy shit, Henry! We're a hit!"

Normally I don't tell strangers that The Golden Bowl is my favorite book. If asked I'll own it, but I wouldn't lead with that unless I intended to end the conversation. Ol' HJ tends to shut that kind of giddy exchange of bookish enthusiasms right down. Nobody's fault. He just does not come up in this context that often. 

"Ohmahgawd, I love that book too! What's your favorite book ever?!"

"The Golden Bowl, by Henry James."

"... "

Most people who ask, "what's your favorite book?" are hoping to hear something they recognize if not endorse. We most of us want our opinions reflected flatteringly back in the shining, bespectacled faces of our fellow bibliophiles, readers. Reading is a solitary pursuit and yet for lots of people, myself included, it is the beginning of community. We want to like what other people read. We want other readers to like what we like. We want to like one another. So there's an allowance made for some variation -- some -- and an eagerness to hear about books and authors heretofore unknown to us, but you tell me your favorite book is Atlas Shrugged -- or come to that The Golden Bowl -- you aren't really looking for conversation, let alone community, so much as a platform or a soapbox. 

One tries not to be that guy. One really do.

Recently we had our semi-annual Employee Shopping Day. Our discount goes up ten percent on nearly everything. Back in the day we would all hoard up books to be purchased at the better price, but now most titles aren't stocked in a depth that allows for squirrelling away copies for weeks at a time. Fewer books. Fewer booksellers. Smaller stacks. The fact is that I am now too old to be bothered waiting for an extra 10%. Why wait? I could die. So come the day, instead of a cart, I carried my three books straight to the register. My purchases that day? Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright, The Joyful Song of the Partridge, by Paulina Chiziane, and a very fancy, almost vulgar new hardcover of The Portrait of a Lady, (fancy fonts and shiny silver and pink filigree on maroon boards. Looks like the act curtain for a not entirely tasteful musical adaptation that will close faster than the premiere of Guy Domville.)** I'd read just enough of the first two novels to know I wanted to not just finish them but to own them. That last one? The Portrait of a Lady I needed like an extra thumb. Why on earth buy yet another copy of that novel? In addition to a volume in the Library of America James I've collected since that project was undertaken, I have somewhere a truly hideous academic hardcover of The New York edition of the same, and at least one ancient Oxford World Classic and or a Modern Library.

And yet I bought that tarted-up hardcover Portrait anyway. Started rereading it that same day. Forgot just how good it is. Took it with me to Pennsylvania on my annual trip back to see my elderly mother. Read just a little bit every night before bed. Before I'd even come back to Seattle I'd decided to make The Portrait of a Lady my next selection for Brad's Big Fat Book Club, my virtual monthly group chat. My selection, I'm pleased to say, was met with unexpected enthusiasm.  Good for us.

Truth is I'd never heretofore considered reading James in the Book Club. Unlike some of my other major enthusiasms like Dickens and Boswell, I hadn't much confidence in convincing even my friends to read Henry. I have been talked into a number of great books in my time and I have managed to persuade a number of otherwise perfectly indifferent and contented souls to read bits of Montaigne and Lamb and even the novels of Ivy Compton Burnett. So why should Henry J. be the one I couldn't sell for love or money?

The man has a reputation. It's mostly to do with those long sentences. In his autobiography G. K. Chesterton describes HJ's conversation as, "graceful groping." It's that, people's impatience at the idea of that. Henry James does many things exceedingly well and some, in my opinion, perfectly. He does not get on with it. For a lot of people that's a problem. 

If we are taught at all still to read English poetry, we hopefully learn first where and when to breath. Then emphasis, yes? (Verbs are good.) That's the trick of the whole business, isn't it? An actor's reading I admit but it has served me well. There are other ideas, other aesthetic considerations, but then I confess I've never really understood those even when they've been explained to me. Using words to do something other than mean what they're meant to has always seemed to me like having an elephant or a chimpanzee paint. I get that there's a novelty there, even some potential point to be made about... art? empathy? -- but ultimately it's like teaching a chicken to play the piano; not really the means to any end beyond that, is it?  

Prose literature is no different to me, at least in so far as to how I believe it's meant to work. What do Chaucer and Shakespeare and Joyce and Beckett -- hell, come to that add even a circus acrobat, in translation no less, like Laszlo Krasznahorkai to the merry band -- what do all great writers have in common? Read them aloud and see. Breath. Literature is as much breath as it is ideas or it isn't art, it's science and philosophy and polemic and agitprop, alphabet soup and graffiti. All but that last are legitimate uses of language I should think -- few things are as consistently banal, repetitive, and ugly as tagging -- but I personally need the sound of a recognizably human voice. Breath. A heart beat. Life. Sense.

Say what you will about the obscurity of James' vocabulary, the density of his language and his consistent modification and refinement of even the simplest declarations with all manner of dependent clauses, conditions, and contingencies, read his prose aloud and it breathes. Reading James, particularly late James like The Golden Bowl or for example his last unfinished memoir, The Middle Years, it would not be unreasonable to think, "Nobody talks like this. Nobody ever said these sentences aloud." But  you'd be wrong. James said them exactly this way. He dictated all his later books to a secretary -- with punctuation. This is then exactly how James talked, how he thought, the way his breath came. 

It is unlike the way we talk now, mostly. That's true. Increasingly we don't even want to talk if we can text. All to do with time, I should think. We seem to think there's less of it every day. Also? What we usually mean to convey isn't frankly very complicated. Kiss. Eggplant emoji. Shocked emoji. Laughing emoji. And ghost emoji. This isn't just something Henry James would not understand, it is the antithesis of everything he did and was and believed. Don't have to agree, but it is what makes reading him such a distinct pleasure; the time he takes, and the care is how he makes his meaning.

Also? He's funny. Honestly. People forget. Or they've never read The Portrait of a Lady.

But then there are the people who have read Henry James. Not always a good thing.

My generation had many great writers who were ruined for us by the indifferent teaching of usually their shortest novels. Length. Leave it to people answerable to lesson plans and semesters to reduce art to length. Poor Edith Wharton! Great writer. What did we read? The grim rural tragedy of Ethan Frome. George Elliot? The grim rural tragedy of Silas Marner. Charles Dickens? The grim urban tragedy of Hard Times. And our Henry? Did the man ever talk to children? The only examples we have, which may well be apocryphal, are all funny stories like Chesterton's again wherein James tries to give some urchins pennies to buy candy but then explains himself until they run away in confusion, much to his shock and disappointment. So, yeah, ask teenagers to read Henry James. Explain to most pimpled pubescents why The Turn of Screw is a masterpiece of ratcheting psychological horror or why Daisy Miller is a heartbreaking story of thwarted youth. Go on. Mention "thwarted youth." I'll wait.

It seems this sort of thing hardly happens anymore and I can't say that the world is any the worse for it. Those of us who love the great 19th Century novel tend to shake our shaggy gray heads sadly at the falling off of literacy and art. Rather our assignment now, shaking. The reality is that there have been at least two generations (three?) since my own who have come to maturity with a whole age-specific literature carefully calibrated to their every developmental requirement and they are every bit as indifferent to literature and art as were the majority of my contemporaries in my rural Pennsylvania high school, despite the theories of Education Majors and Library Scientists. (No one as endearingly confident in their evangelism, bless 'em, optimists all.) Bluntly readers read. Most don't. Most who do don't read Henry James. So what's worse really? Forced to read Silas Marner or never heard of Silas Marner? Same.

Most of my parents' and grandparents' generations read shit too, if they read at all. Harlequin romance and Don Pendleton, and before them Elinor Glyn and Owen Wister, and so on back through the annals of popular fiction, Philistinism, and the predictable disapproval of the rising generations by the passing. 

Even Henry James had a pretty dim view of his chances as a popular artist. 

"You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself.”

He knew.

Which is not to say that he isn't fun. He is. Never more so perhaps than in the book I've picked for the Club this time. Why I picked it, remember? I'd forgotten myself how well this one starts even as our heroine is orphaned! The charms and attraction of Isabel Archer are far more obvious than any to be found in The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver & Co. Isabel is one of literature's most appealing heroines, not least because her story is not altogether a happy one. Fresh and sharp and surprisingly determined to dictate her own terms with life to whatever extent she can, the Lady in James' Portrait is endearing in a way many of his major characters tend to be. She's young. She's intelligent. She's curious. The world is as it were all before her. Unlike so many of her contemporary fictional heroines, she's neither insipid nor dull nor moony with romance and sex. The people she meets are interesting if not always altogether what they seem, and isn't that always better for us too? When we involve ourselves then with Isabel Archer (somehow always both names in my head) we aren't simply interested in her, we want for her all she rather inchoately wants for herself. Her pleasures and fortune we share. Her disappointment hurts us too. She is real. She breathes.

“You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.”

Interesting to me that when I quote from this novel I seem to be quoting mostly older characters rather than our young leading lady. She says pithy things. People do, particularly in Henry James. But then very grown persons and very small children tend to the quotable more, don't you find? (Won't meet many toddlers in a Henry James novel and that is just as well. Their general level of conversation is not reliable.) Isabel thinks very well and says well what she means to, but really it is the author who speaks to us most directly. This is what makes Henry, so modern in so many ways from his psychology to his contempt for conventional romance, perhaps the last great practitioner of the novelist's direct address. Later very clever writers like Proust and Gunter Grass would find interesting ways 'round that by then quite dated convention, but Henry tells as much or more than he shows. He is therefore in direct line back to all the Victorians, to Fielding and Richardson, and on.

That is the joy of the thing, that Henry James has much to say. He has characters to say much of it and very well indeed. That is one of the conventions of his fiction. Even the least articulate character speaks to us in a characteristic rather than an eccentric or exaggerated way (see Dickens) because every character is of a class and a time to do so. Leisured people need not be particularly bright, or educated, but the writer who uses them has in them all the time in the world to put them into the society of others equally unoccupied by anything other than emotion and afternoon tea. We know that as a critic Henry James was the admirer of all sorts of writers who did not write about rich American bankers, art collectors, lords and ladies, country houses and rented villas in Italy. James chose to write about the people he chose to live among largely so that he might write the way he did -- and eat well at other people's tables more nights than not. He liked these people and the society of these people for the same reason he wrote about them: they talked and said or did not say what they meant but nearly always intentionally. What a thrilling departure that must have been from the bluestockings and New England Mandarins among whom he was raised. Those people meant every fucking word. Delicacy, irony, suggestion, nuance -- none of those are really American, are they? (Henry was from a family of great talkers and writers himself, come to that, but it's worth noting that his father and his brother and even his beloved if distinctly neurasthenic sister were all talkers at people. Henry listened more than he talked and wrote more than he generally did either. For all the spoofing of his talk and his style, no one ever suggested that the man was a bore. He might be boring occasionally, and trying in his syntax bless him, but his manners were perfect.)

“Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was.”

And in the balance and mordancy of that sentence is nearly all of Henry James, for our purposes anyway. I intend for the Book Club that we should have a ball. It's right there to be had in nearly every lovely long paragraph of The Portrait of a Lady, in every witty rejoinder, eventually every wicked deed, every mystery.

There are of course all sorts of interesting things to discuss in the fiction of Henry James and in his biography and times. We may well. I find him strangely irresistible, this rather virginal, obviously queer bachelor, scribbling away, then dictating some of the most complicated sentences in English prose. I like his barely disguised prurience and his hatred of vulgarity and cruelty and cant. I enjoy that he meant to reform no one and correct nothing but literature itself. I appreciate his preoccupation with the private thoughts of the passionately reserved English and their often bumptious but ever so slightly better intended American cousins.

That "mill of convention" by the way? He never tried to stop it. He was fascinated by the works. He never suggested it ought to be stopped turning. He watched, as he watched everything, with great sympathy and curiosity but with no thought to improve it's motion or question it's necessity. His intentions were, in their way, pure, as probably was his person. 

And really, no one ever made more books or better art from intentions than did dear Henry James. That is really where every book starts. What is the intention? What were her intentions? His? And no one ever had a sharper eye for the distance between “... the high brutality of good intentions ...” and the actual. That's where the man lived. Glad of the chance to spend some time there with le Maitre, and to bring friends. He loved company. Though I'm sure he would be shocked by our language and want of tact. 

And by how few buttons we all seem to require now. I'm quite sure he'd notice the brevity of our buttons.

*Here's the whole thing:

"The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances—which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure."

** Guy Domville was James' 1895 theatrical flop. The author was jeered and booed. The show did not run.