It was just a bad party, a party where Henry James would not have been caught dead.
“It’s fine if you like that kind of thing,” said a friend with an English degree who was working on a Ph.D. In physics “What’s wrong with being serious? In my line of work we’re all serious.”
“That guy told told me not to be uptight!’”
“That’s because you wouldn’t make out with him, babe. Hell, you don’t have to be perky if you read Henry James.”
That should be my slogan: You Don’t Have to Be Perky If You Read Henry James. It would have saved time and grief had I tattooed it on my forehead.
As a woman of a certain age, I am no longer expected to be perky. (Vivacity is a different thing altogether.) In fact, it is a wonder to people under 30 that I am still upright. And the fact that I ride my bike astonishes everyone. Two women applauded (kindly, I hope) a few years back when I biked up an easy hill (I’ve ridden hills for decades), women my age claim I’m an inspiration, and still others clearly thank God they will never ride a bike again.
But people almost expect one to read Henry James after a certain age. James, who busied himself with objets d’art and Italian countesses and attractive princes at house parties, settled for being a literary god and may or may not have ridden a bike. N.B. I have no data on this point.
You will have noted that I am a “Henry James-head.” I recently raved about his remarkable short novel, The Spoils of Poynton, a celebration of a collection of rare objets d’art at the center of an inheritance tug-of-war.
In my teens and twenties I read most of James’s oeuvre, awed by the elegance of his prose and loving this elite world I had never glimpsed. I found his obsession with objets d’art both fascinating and disturbing. James is a lyrical materialist whose characters despise undiscerning or uneducated taste. In a certain milieu of people in James’s books, taste is the only important quality. James certainly knew and understood the sensibilities of the aristocratic materialists.
Collectors of beautiful things permeate the pages of James. Throughout The Spoils of Poynton, Mrs. Gereth treats her protegee, Veda Fletch, as if she were the only other person who has really understood the significance of her beautiful collection of “things.”. Veda, however, is ambivalent about Mrs. Gereth’s pride and her battle with her son’s future wife for the collection. Veda’s ethics are more tortured even than James’s other self-sacrificing heroines. She is unwilling to sacrifice herself for the sake of Mrs. Gareth’s collection, even though the sacrifice is one she would willingly make under other conditions.
I am especially interested in Henry James’s Golden period, the turn of the 20th century, when his three masterpieces, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors, were published. The first two depict struggles between materialism and appreciation.
I especially love The Wings of the Dove, which I have read and cried over several times. In my late thirties, I intensely identified with the saintly heroine, Milly Theale, a young, beautiful, rich American invalid who is dying of an unidentified disease but confides only in her new English friend, Kate Croy, whom she has met on her travels in England. Perhaps I identified because I had survived a serious illness, due to the miracle of modern medicine, and such experiences do change one. But Milly is noble: she tries to conceal her illness even from her devoted traveling companion.
Not everyone, alas, is as noble and loyal as Milly. Her twisted friend Kate is impecunious and scheming: Kate pushes her attractive boyfriend, Merton Densher, a journalist who makes low wages, practically into Milly’s lap. Milly had met hm in America and been taken with him. Merton is impatient, because he wants to be with Kate, and Kate insists that they hide their relationship from Milly. Kate has turned cold and mercenary: she thinks she can capitalize on the situation for both of them. When Merton begins to understand what she expects, he is impatient, incredulous. He is Kate’s dupe and has no desire to exploit Milly.
Milly is a total class act – I won’t let you know what she knows and how she behaves when she knows, but I do wish the world were full of bright, generous people like Milly. Instead, we have a world of manipulative Kate Croys who will stop at nothing to get their hands on money.
James knows the Kate Croys and the Milly Theales. He does not condemn Kate altogether: at the beginning she and Densher are walking in a park; they are secretly engaged, but her rich aunt will not countenance her marriage to a poor man. Kate’s family is poor, and thus she is living with a rich, bossy aunt. Until Kate meets Milly, she seems perfectly normal but then she becomes so obsessed with Milly’s money that she is metaphorically ready to kill for it.
James himself is materialistic: he refrains from painting her as a monster, though her ethics are appalling. But the rest of us, who are not quite so taken with Kate, are relieved that classy Milly makes an unexpected escape.
Henry James, like his brother William, was a philosopher in his way.
MORE JAMES COMING SOON!