Tag Archives: Henry James

Talk in Henry James’s “The Awkward Age”: The Brookenham Women Speak Forbidden Words

Henry James’ modernist masterpiece, The Awkward Age, was published in 1899, four years after he was booed off the stage at the premiere of his play, Guy Domville. Drawing on his experience as a playwright, James purged the demons of failure by composing The Awkward Age mostly in dialogue.

In this intricate novel, the characters reveal themselves through words. They speak urbanely, indirectly, sometimes falsely:  what is too indirect and verbose for the stage works in a novel. 

At the center of the novel are Mrs. Brookenham, nicknamed Mrs. Brook, and her 20-year-old daughter Nanda.  Mrs. Brook is a beautiful, savvy, seductive woman who entertains the wittiest society people in her salon, and manages to be charming when she talks about them behind their backs. Nanda is a free spirit who has many different kinds of friends: she spends time with Tishie, an unhappy woman whose husband has left her, and Aggie, a young woman so pure and sheltered she knows nothing about sex.

 But Mrs. Brook fears sexual competition with Nanda.  When she finally decides to allow the lovely 20-year- old to go about freely in society, she pretends to her friends that Nanda is 18 instead of 20:  Mrs. Brook wants no one to know her own age, 41. 

The two most important male characters, who are on the surface almost non-sexual, are both under the Brookenham women’s spell.  Though witty, smart, charming Mr. Vanderbank (Van) is the secret lover of Mrs. Brook (it takes a while to intuit this), he also admires Nanda. When Mrs. Brook and Van discuss Nanda’s future, Mrs. Brook reveals her jealousy.  “Are you ‘really’ what they call thinking of my daughter?”

Van reminds her that since Nanda has been allowed to come and go freely, he and Mrs. Brook have “put their heads together over the question of keeping the place tidy… for the female mind.”  And Mrs. Brook says she feels inhibited by Nanda.  “…Good talk: you know – no one, dear Van, should know better – what part that plays for me.  Therefore when  one has deliberately to make one’s talk bad – !”

And then there is another unwelcome intruder in Mrs. Brooks’ salon, Mr. Longdon, a stodgy man in his fifties, who by chance met Van at a party. Mr. Longdon has come to London to research the history of Mrs. Brook’s beautiful mother, Lady Julia, who rejected his proposal of marriage decades ago. He becomes obsessed with Nanda, because she looks exactly like her grandmother.

Mr. Longdon is an innocent, but he is also judgmental.  He shows his disapproval of Mrs. Brook:  she calls him on it. He also dislikes Nanda’s manners and free talk, but, before you know it, he has given her a reading list, been her personal docent at museums, and invited her to his house in the country.  Nanda thinks he is a “beautiful” person. Perhaps she likes him because there are no boundaries in her world, and Mr. Longdon knows the rules.

Mr. Longdon is an odd fish.  He hatches a monetary scheme that will benefit Van and, he thinks, Nanda.The scheme is a disaster. But it wasn’t actually Longdon’s scheme: Mrs. Brook’s friend the Duchess suggested it.

Nothing prepares the reader for the ending.

A Short Masterpiece: Henry James’s “Washington Square”

“Will a wrong motive always do wrong?” Cynthia Ozick in the introduction to James’s Washington Square (Modern Library, 2002)

When I first read Washington Square decades ago, it seemed one of Henry James’s simpler books. Now I’ve changed my mind. The twist of the plot leaves the reader breathless.

In James’s fictional universe, fortune hunters and heiresses abound. In The Portrait of a Lady, wealthy Isabel Archer falls for sophisticated Gilbert Osmond, who is a sadist and a mercenary; in The Golden Bowl, an American father and daughter are duped, Maggie Verver by charming Prince Amerigo, and Adam Verver by Maggie’s friend, Charlotte Stant. But in Washington Square, James has a different take. What if the heiress is unattractive? Is beauty part of the dowry? Or does a plain woman deserve love, even if it is feigned love? Are all fortune hunters bad?

Refreshingly, James is neither too serious nor too light in his treatment of fortune hunter Morris Townsend’s wooing of Catherine Sloper. We feel Catherine’s joy and astonishment when he begins to visit her at the house at Washington Square: she has simply never been so amused in her life. And yet she has leaned in the direction of fun before him: she likes bright red fashionable dresses that no one in her circle wears.

So here we have it: money and love, or at least pretended love. But the real question is Catherine’s future happiness. Catherine wants to marry Morris, but she is wary of her father, Dr. Sloper, as she should be. Although it is against tradition, Catherine decides to smooth the way for Morris and inform her father of their engagement before the two men meet.

And here’s where the question of morality becomes complicated. Dr Sloper, a grouchy widower who despises his daughter because she is neither smart nor pretty, investigates Morris in order to prove he is a crook. In his interview with Morris’s sister, who is reluctant to reveal details, Dr. Sloper learns that Morris is penniless, unemployed, and squandered his fortune in Europe.

Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Washington Square”

But what does this have to do with romance? What does this have to do with Catherine’s desire to marry? Yes, this is a romance: the romance of a lifetime for Catherine and experienced vicariously by her father’s widowed sister, Aunt Lavinia, who lives with them. Aunt Lavinia loves the drama: she sometimes meets Morris secretly. Catherine is more down-to-earth. She does not want to meet Morris out-of-doors. She wants the comfort of her own drawing room.

In some ways, this novel of manners is not quite Jamesian. It delves into the old New York of his friend Edith Wharton. Both writers were fascinated by the dynamics of courtship and marriage, but James usually traffics more heavily in the complexities of money, while Wharton specializes in intrigues that complicate or nix the marriage plot.

I can’t think of another Jamesian character remotely like Catherine Sloper, but I can see her as a character with a walk-in role in Wharton’s The House of Mirth or The Mother’s Recompense.

The question in the Jamesian universe, it seems, is whether fortune and love should marry. Washington Square attacks the question from a startlingly different point-of-view.

The Virginal Lambert Strether:  “The Ambassadors,” by Henry James

Charming Lambert Strether, the middle-aged hero of Henry James’s novel, The Ambassadors, may, or may not, technically be a virgin.  Although James never directly writes a sex scene, the uncomfortable lack of eroticism in The Ambassadors is unprecedented in his fiction.

The protagonist’s innocence may be exaggerated.  Strether, an American tourist who settles for several months in Paris to spy on his future stepson, is engaged to be married to Mrs. Newsome, a middle-aged factory owner in Woollett, Massachusetts. The factory manufactures an item too embarrassing to be mentioned, says Strether, and given his innocence, it might be condoms. Strether is the editor of a  journal owned by Mrs. Newsome, but for all his professional experience, he is incapable of imagining the sexual mores outside of Woollett.  And that can be particularly exasperating to the modern reader, since we know that James’s friend and contemporary,  Edith Wharton, was at this time writing fiction that explored sexual mores and sexual hypocrisy. Sex also is at least obliquely referred to in James’s other novels, and particularly in his two other Golden-period novels, The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove. Of course James was gay, and he could not write about homosexual relationships in 1903, and he claims that Strether is a widower, but that does not explain the awkwardness of the depiction of Strether.

It is as though something vital to life is missing in Strether’s character,  the passion that might have hastened Strether’s marriage to Mrs. Newsome if he had wanted it.  He is a widower whose child has died. In Paris he becomes aware that he has missed out on the joys of life. He used to be proud of Woollett, but Paris makes him understand the limits of that culture.

What we do know about Strether is that he is incapable of understanding  that Chad Newsome, whom his mother, Mrs. Newsome, believes has loitered too long in France, is having an affair with the beautiful, intellectual, animated Madame de Vionette, a French countess separated from her husband and living with her teenage daughter.  Since it is Strether’s job to be an “ambassador” and persuade Chad to return home and take over the company’s advertising, it is uncanny that he cannot see what is in front of him.  But as soon as we hear the word advertising, we understand its tainted associations in literature (I have nothing against the professionals), and that Strether tacitly disapproves of the profession slated for Chad.  Perhaps Strether romanticizes the relationship between Chad and the countess to save Chad from the literary taint of advertising.

All the other characters in the novel are aware that the couple have a sexual relationship. Even Mrs. Newsome and her imperious daughter, Sarah Pocock, and Sarah’s sweet, goofy husband, Jim Pocock, know. Strether’s grave friend, Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose, Connecticut, also recognizes the situation.   And Strether’s special American friend, Maria Gostrey, whom he met in England, protects him from the knowledge of the affair, because she adores Strether and doesn’t want him to be hurt.  She speculates that the countess is training Chad for her daughter, Jeanne. This seems downright weird, but Strether embraces it.

Lee Remick as Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors (TV, 1977)

That theory of romantic chastity is acceptable to Strether.  He refuses to recognize the real relationship: he idealizes the couple.  He adores Madame de Vionette’s sophisticated parties and the aristocrats and painters he meets there. He believes that Chad, who has become elegant and polished by proximity to Madame de Vionette, a slightly older woman, owes everything to to her.  And he finds the older woman-younger man romantic friendship very chic. 

The Edward Gorey cover of the Anchor edition

As indeed it would be, if it were quite as Strether imagines.

As for Chad, he doesn’t confirm or deny, till later in the novel.  His policy seems to be to let well enough alone. His friend, little Bilham, an impoverished American artist, delivers a few hints to Strether about the couple. He assures Strether that Chad and Marie have “a virtuous attachment.”  Strether takes that literally, believing it means non-physical, rather than a sincere and heartfelt sexual relationship. Little Billham also hints that Chad is tired of the relationship and might be ready to go home to Woollett.  Strether literally refuses to hear this.

The style of this late novel, published in 1903 during James’ Golden period, is elegant, sophisticated, and intellectually challenging   Although audiences booed James’s play in the 1890s and criticized his artificial dialogue, it seems just right in his novels, though not quite in this one. I am mad about the characters and dialogue in The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, but can never quite believe in Strether or in what he says. Some critics compare Strether to the innocent Isabel Archer, the young heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, but it seems ridiculous to me, since Strether is in his fifties.

When finally he learns the truth of  Chad’s relationship, he has trouble accepting it, but when he learns that Chad is of his own volition preparing to return home and manage the company’s advertising,  Strether intercedes with praise of the countess.

“You owe her everything – very much more than she can ever owe you.  You’ve in other words duties to her, of the most positive sort; and I don’t see what other duties – as the others are presented to you – can be held to go before them.”

Strether’s support of the failing relationship is belated, and his change of attitude abrupt. Yet Paris has taught him flexibility, and he has the satisfaction of knowing he has taken nothing for himself during these strange negotiations. And finally, along with the other American expatriates, he embraces the joy of life.

The Blossoming of Henry James:  Objets d’art & Self-Sacrifice

A young Henry James

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.

My favorite James

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! 

The Daily Write

I planned to post this at a companion blog, The Daily Write, but decided to integrate these “journal” posts with my writing about books.

March 23, 2024

A gloomy, cold Saturday. Napped, read a little, and then looked at my THINGS. I identify with Henry James’s characters, ergo I must have THINGS. I have no THINGS, except Mom’s and my mother-in-law’s.

James’s obsession with objets d’art

A big chunky beer stein decorated with fat German drinkers (mom-in-law’s), three tiny floral-print china vases (mom-in-law’s), a three-tiered oak shelf for displaying chunky beer stein and vases (Mom’s), a framed painting of cats in the style of “American Gothic” (Mom’s, in the basement), and a 50th-anniversary Barbie that allegedly lights up and twirls if you add batteries to the base (Mom’s, in the basement, still in the box).

Mom was quite the Barbie fan. She gave Barbies to her grandchildren, though their parents were prim and disapproving. And she did hang on to what I call my Second Generation Barbies. When I was 10 (?) Mattel invited us to turn in our Barbie heads at Osco’s (the plastic heads popped off ) in return for new Barbie dolls. Really, pony-tail Barbie and bubble-cut Barbie with their slanty eyes were more fun than the bland all-American dolls that replaced them.

The Barbie Little Theater (these are not my dolls: I had Barbie, Midge, Skipper, and Imitation Ken.)

The last time I played with Barbie (age 10 or 11), my best friend and I did it in an ironic spirit. We dressed up Barbie as Queen Guinevere, sang something from Camelot, and then hanged Barbie’s sister Skipper from the proscenium arch of the Barbie Little Theater. Skipper may have played Mordred, but it was more likely a fed-up feminist rejection of the Barbie dynasty.

That said, I am not Mrs. Gereth in The Spoils of Poynton.

I have no THINGS!

The Biblio-Anarchist Meets Henry James:  “The Spoils of Poynton”

I have fond memories of reading Henry James’s The Golden Bowl on the roof.

It’s been a lifelong love affair. I recently reread The Spoils of Poynton, a short, suspenseful exploration of the love of beautiful objects, and the inverse greed that drives ignorant people to buy priceless objects for status. It is in some ways similar to The Golden Bowl, a darker novel in which two charming fortune hunters prey on two wealthy innocent American collectors.  The “things” are in the background, except for the golden bowl, but they marry the Americans for riches, luxury – and things!

James wittily explains,

 ‘Things’ were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gareth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental chine.

In The Spoils of Poynton, “things” are the center of a tussle.  The witty, single-minded Mrs. Gareth has devoted her life to acquiring a collection of priceless antique chairs, cabinets, tables, paintings, “brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed,” Venetian velvets, cases of enamels” – so many splendid things at Poynton, her lovely home. 

The Spoils of Poynton is about good taste, bad taste, and the consequences of incomparable taste. Mrs. Gareth is the incarnation of  incomparable taste. 

Are things more important than people? Mrs. Gareth thinks so. Most people are fools, in Mrs. Gareth’s view.  Take her son, Owen, a sportsman who wanders around in muddy boots and sweaty sports outfits.  Mrs. Gareth is horrified when Owen gets engaged to a bouncing nouveau riche girl named Mona.  Of course Mona does not care about the collection at Poynton, where  she and Owen will live after their marriage.  The dilemma is, what to do with the things?  Mrs. Gareth would rather die than let Mona have them, but when she piratically hustles all the things to the dower house, Mona throws a fit.  She won’t marry Owen unless the things are put back instantly.

Mona is, of course, the villainess, the person with the worst taste and a missing moral compass.  Owen is appalled, but does try to get the things back.  Mrs. Gareth has a scheme:  if only her lovely protegee, Fleda Vetch, who appreciates Poynton and its treasures,  could have the things.   Mrs. Gareth’s idea, and it isn’t a bad one, is to marry off Fleda to Owen.  

One feels the collector’s fever in The Spoils of Poynton.  There is a battle for the spoils. Owen doesn’t want them, but Mona does – only because they are valuable and have been removed.  Fleda doesn’t want them, but she does adore Owen.

Fleda and Owen know that there is more to life than things. But Fleda has the most mysterious set of sexual ethics I have ever encountered.  She loves Owen, but he must check with Mona first to make sure it’s all right, even though Owen says the wedding is of. I try to understand the Victorian complexity of morals, but I cannot say whether Fleda’s behavior is heroic or not, or whether it is Victorian or not, or whether it is realistic or Jamesian. I try not to paste my modern values on fictional characters, but perhaps James is using Fleda to explore an idea. Or were there people like Fleda? I’m sure there is a scholarly essay on Fleda somewhere.

In the end, who will win the Poynton collection?  The ending, however, is stranger than I can say.

Summer Reading: Henry James & Maud Cairnes

It was a gorgeous June day. We take these days when we can get them.  We didn’t exert ourselves, except to make sandwiches in the kitchen, because it was 90 degrees, and all anybody wants is to sit under a tree and indulge in light reading. I almost said “sit in a tree,” but I must admit those days are gone.  Not gone, however, are days when we lounge under a tree and sigh over Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove.

On a recent rereading of The Wings of the Dove, I loved it as much as I did in my twenties.  Back then, I always had a classic going at night, and James, though considered soporific by cynics, seemed to me surprisingly stimulating.  I was absorbed by his magnificent characters, especially the innocent Americans, among them Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady), tricked into marriage by an impecunious Italian prince, and Milly Theale (The Wings of the Dove), a charming, rich, terminally ill young American woman who attracts fortune hunters.

Milly hides her illness even from her companion, Mrs. Stringham, her chaperone in their European travels.  But Milly is manipulated by her clever English friend Kate Croy into confessing she is ill, and then isthrown together with Merton Densher, an English journalist with no prospects. And Milly likes him very much.

To complicate things further, Densher is Kate’s secret fiancé: her rich Aunt Maud will cut her off if she marries a poor man, though Densher would like to marry her on his own income.  Kate’s  scheme is to get her hands on Milly’s money by making her fall in love with Densher.  Densher doesn’t take this too seriously, and  is desperate to spend time with Kate, who becomes colder as the book goes on. Kate’s  hopes for Densher and Milly are  obscene. This is not quite James noir, but in a way it is a novel about a psychological murder.

I’m fascinated by Kate, because in the first section of the novel, she is a kind, ethical woman who offered to stay with her impecunious father and share with him her 100 pounds legacy a year from her mother, while giving the other two hundred to her sister, a poor widow with children. He declined to live with her in poverty and sent her to Aunt Maud, with the hope that she would pass him the odd bit of change (though Maud has forbidden her to see her father). And she is very much in love with Densher at that point.

In a way, Kate’s ruthlessness is the end of Kate. The prospect of money ruins her. And yet I’m not sure James pulls off the transition from Kate the Good into Kate the Cold. She didn’t care about money when she offered to sacrifice herself to her father.

The other novel I’ve read under a tree, or shall I pretend IN a tree, is Maud Cairnes’s Strange Journey, a book in the British Library Women’s Series.  In this charming, comical, very smart little book, Cairnes draws an unforgettable portrait of two women, Polly Wilkinson, the narrator and a housewife, and Lady Elizabeth, who has everything that money can buy and yet has been unhappy since her miscarriage and her husband’s affairs.  Suddenly Polly and Lady Elizabeth  swap bodies, and  have no idea who they are supposed to be.   Have they gone mad?.

How would you feel if you suddenly were translated to another person’s body?  Not only another person, but someone you’d never met and didn’t know?   Suddenly Polly is expected to ride horses, hunt, and exchange witty repartee with sophisticated upper-class folk. And Lady Elizabeth finds herself living in a middle-class home on a budget, responsible for two children and a hard-working husband. 

Later, the two women find out how they became aware of each other. Polly wistfully observed Elizabeth oe night in a Rolls Royce.  She longed to climb in, lean against a soft cushion, and be driven to a pleasant home where everything would be done for her.

And when they try to reconstruct what happened,  Elizabeth also remembers seeing Polly and envying her access to a simpler life. 

Oddly enough, each learns by body-swapping to cope better with her problems by learning the other’s skills.

A charming, lively, light novel which I will read again!

A Henry James Binge: “The Other House” and “The Spoils of Poynton”

I paid $1 for a used copy of Henry James’s The Other House (NYRB Classics).  I had never heard of it, for reasons which became clear as I read on. The prose is un-Jamesian, consisting of short, spare sentences rather than elegant, serpentine periods.   Divided into three short books, it reads like a three-act play.

This plot-driven novel may well be the right choice for non-James fans.  It is very short, and almost a genre novel.  It is not quite a whodunit, but there is a murder.  One might call it a psychological horror novel.  The moral is, Be careful what you wish for.  Words can be weaponized – and that happens here. 

The premise of the novel depends on a deathbed promise exacted offstage by Julia Bream from her husband, Tony Bream. After giving birth to their daughter, she feels ill and is convinced she is dying.  The doctor can’t find anything wrong but insists that Tony humor her.  And so Julia elicits a promise that Tony will not remarry within their daughter’s lifetime.  That last phrase seems very lawyerly – and yet its inclusion proves to be fatal.  To ensure the fulfillment of the promise ,  Julia repeats it to her neighbor, Mrs. Beever, asking her to repeat it to all in the house. Julia had an evil stepmother, but it is hard to see this promise as a safeguard for her baby.  Asking Mrs Beever to repeat the promise publicly can also read a a warning:  Women, keep off.

Julia has reasons for jealousy. Two attractive young women are in the house, Julia’s best friend, Rose Armiger (whose name means “arms-bearer”),  and Jean Martle, a very young, pre-Raphaelite beauty, who is staying with Mrs. Beever in the house across the bridge. Rose, a clever, plain woman who becomes beautiful when she is animated, is the most complex character in the novel, though whether anyone can be more complicated than the Machiavellian Julia I cannot say.  All the men except Tony are in love with Rose.  In fact, when her fiancé returns from China, Rose refuses him. 

So doesn’t Rose have everything? Well, she doesn’t have Tony.

The other young woman, Jean Martle, attracts Tony. His reaction to Jean makes us understand why poor Julia wanted an eye kept on Tony:  while she is dying, he is admiring Jean’s masses of red hair and flirting .  

Julia does die.  And when four years later, the same set of people meet again, the situation becomes very – shall I say complex? 


This novel, though a fast read, is not one of James’s best.  The characters have little depth.  Once he reveals the identity of the villainess, we continue to see her only on the surface.  Her character lacks the intricacy of Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, or Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl.  The women in The Other House are not materialistic like Kate and Charlotte, but it doesn’t prevent bad behavior. 

What I think about this novel is:  it is James’s beach book.  It is what you read when you have read all or most of James.


Do Read Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton!
             
On the other hand, I was enthralled by a third reading of The Spoils of Poynton,  a masterpiece that examines the fine line between collecting objets d’art and materialism.

Mrs. Gereth’s house, Poynton, is filled with a collection of precious objects.  She and her late husband scrimped and saved to buy them. 

But the novel begins with a friendship. Mrs. Gereth meets Fleda Vetch at the Brigstock family’s hideous country house, Waterbath.  Mrs. Gereth and Fleda are skulking in the garden Sunday morning to avoid the other guests. They begin to chat, and discover that they have similar tastes, and even deplore the same people.

The following excerpt  is very Jamesian, witty,  exquisite, convoluted, and stylistically stunning.  Mrs. Gereth is very much a collector, and as such has her eye on Fleda Vetch.


This girl, one of the two Vetches, had no beauty, but Mrs. Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been straightway able to classify such a figure as the least, for the moment, of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps with not much else; and that made a bond when there was none other, especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation…. for a minute, as they sat together, their eyes met and sent out mutual soundings. “Are you safe? Can I utter it?” each of them said to the other, quickly recognizing, almost proclaiming, their common need to escape. …That the poor child no less quickly perceived how far she could now go was proved by the immense friendliness with which she instantly broke out: “Isn’t it too dreadful?”

“Horrible—horrible!” cried Mrs. Gereth, with a laugh, “and it’s really a comfort to be able to say it.”


The Brigstocks’ house is particularly horrible to Mrs. Gereth because of the mass-produced furniture and decorations that reflect no one’s taste.  And  Mrs. Gereth is so taken with Fleda’s wit and understanding that she invites her to Poynton .  Fleda is hungry for knowledge – she is ecstatic to learn about art.

And then a threat to the collection looms.  Owen is engaged to Mona Brigstock, one of the daughters of Waterbath.  On a visit to Poynton, Mona shows no interest in the objects and paintings: she tells Vleda she wishes there were a billiards room and “a winter garden.”


Money matters to Mona, though.  When she learns  that Mrs. Gereth plans to move the things to the dower house, she realizes they must be valuable.  She tells Owen she will not marry him unless the collections remain intact at Poynton.  She nags Owen to hire lawyers and sue his own mother.


And so begins the battle between Mrs. Gereth, the collector, and the materialists. her son and his fiancee.  Mrs. Gereth genuinely delights in her things, loving the details of the work, as does Fleda.  But Owen is riled up and insists he is the master of Poynton, and that he has inherited his mother’s collections.  And Mona  is greedy;  she will deprive Mrs. Gereth of her lifetime collections just for the sake of ownership.


Are Owen and Mona in love?  Owen seems cowed by Mona.   Mrs. Gereth’s hopes for her collections depend on something less tangible than the legal courts:  can she manipulate  Owen into falling in love with Fleda?

And poor Fleda!  She loves Owen, who says he loves her and wishes they could live together in the dower house.  But Fleda’s ethics are so strict that she insists on a plan of action unlikely to end in anybody’s happiness. And that is primarily because she doesn’t understand Mona Brigstock.  She cannot imagine that Mona would not be, ultimately, as chivalrous and generous as Fleda.

Fleda’s naivete may prove disastrous, as did Julia’s in The Other House.  But I guarantee that you will not predict the ending of The Spoils of Poynton.

Jill Biden’s Coffee, What I’m Reading, & Guerilla Housework

On the morning of March 1, Jill Biden went to Brewer’s Cafe, a Black-owned business in Richmond, Virginia, and ordered a cup of drip coffee. I gravitate toward fun features rather than political news, and was thrilled to discover “common ground” with Dr. Biden.

Jill Biden at Brewer’s Cafe

Jill Biden is a new kind of First Lady, obviously brilliant, an instructor of English at a community college, and she has an Ed.D. from the University of Delaware. A boutique coffee habit turns her into one of the java people. She was working: she stopped for coffee on the way to speak on a panel at Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In the article at The Washington Post, the stop at the cafe is a light preface to the larger issue of her visit to the Cancer Center. The reporter possibly overthinks it: “Maybe the first lady wanted to support small businesses. Maybe she wanted to signal to Black Americans that President Biden was serious when he said his administration would not abandon them. Maybe she just likes places that are touted as having some of the best French macarons and coffee in their respective towns. Her press office would not comment.”

I may be naive, but isn’t a good cup of coffee the perfect brain boost before work? You can want good coffee, and decide to support a small Black-owned business.

By the way, I read a few weeks ago that the book on Dr. Biden’s bedside table was The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. I do hope she’s allowed to read this without being told it’s a photo-op!

And so it goes…

WHAT AM I READING? I just read Henry James’s The Golden Bowl for the third time, and am scandalized by the evil Charlotte’s schemes to commit adultery with her friend Maggie’s husband, Amerigo, her former lover. To make it more Jamesily intricate, Charlotte has married Maggie’s father, Adam Verver, a wealthy collector of art and antiques. In the introduction to the Penguin, Gore Vidal finds wicked Charlotte more interesting than Maggie. But my guess is that many of us women find ourselves siding with Maggie. This is an intricate, beautifully-written page-turner. Europeans always marry rich Americans in James’s novels.

GUERILLA HOUSEWIFERY. At the best of times, I have a hard time with housewifery. Clearing the surfaces of tables is the extent of my daily housework. I do not vacuum and scrub the floors daily. Marie Kondo had no effect here. You will not find me folding the laundry: my method with sheets is to roll them up and sort them according to fitted and flat. If they get mixed up…! That’s our life-style

I am still recovering from the weekend a friend stayed and decided to clean my house. I feebly begged her to stop, because I was too exhausted to help. When I went into the kitchen to grab a glass of water, she lectured me on why I should never mix bleach with…something! That would not be a problem of course, because it would never occur to me to squirt more than one cleaning product on anything! Plus did I have two cleaning products?

The gift of guerrilla housecleaning–and I do believe it was meant to be a gift– became just another contest in the never-ending tournament of femininity–I lost when I wasn’t even in the round!

“Remember when X cleaned the house,” my husband sometimes says.

“Please don’t use that against me,” I say.

The guilt of inadequate housewifery never stops, and studies of housework make me cynical. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, most women say they spend 5.7 hours daily doing housework and looking after the family. This raised a red flag for me: What housework, I wondered, do they find to do for 5.7 hours?

In this last year of the pandemic, I have begun to have a glimmer of compassion for cleaning maniacs. The house seems dirtier now that my husband and i both work at home, and it is not the time to hire a maid. The kitchen has become a treacherous repository of what I call “attack groceries”: a six-pack of paper towels falls off the refrigerator onto my head, I sweep up 100 blueberries after a box of blueberries jumps off the edge of the counter, I find rings on the coffee table when SOMEONE I love fails to use a coaster. I swear so much I need to cover the cats’ ears.

I need to reorganize the kitchen. But first I have to get a good cup of coffee.

So Near and Yet So Far: What Would You Do to Acquire a Favorite Writer’s Papers?

One of the highlights of a trip to London was staring at the manuscript of Jane Eyre at the British Museum. I could hardly see it in the dimly-lit glass case, but it was there. So near and yet so far. That was my first inkling of what scholars must feel when they get their (gloved) hands on a manuscript.

I was thinking of this the other day when I read Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, a strange comical novella about a besotted scholar who will do anything to acquire the papers of Jeffrey Aspern, his favorite dead Romantic poet. The papers are reputed to be in the hands of the dead Aspern’s ancient mistress, Juliana, who has already refused the request of another scholar. So how can he get his hands on the papers?

The artful narrator daringly pretends an interest in Juliana’s garden so he can persuade her to rent him an apartment in her dilapidated Venetian villa. And Juliana’s niece, Tina, inadvertently becomes his collaborator: she innocently reveals that Juliana still has the papers in her bedroom. Let me just say that the narrator can’t resist searching for the papers even when Juliana is on her deathbed. Is such bad behavior rewarded? Read the book.

Barbara Pym is well-known for her charming novels about witty spinsters, indexers, librarians, and much-sought-after vicars. In her posthumously-published novel, An Academic Question, the narrator, Carol, is a bored faculty wife. Her husband thinks she should get a job, but she does not want to join the band of frowsy faculty wives who file things in the library to get out of the house. Instead, Caro volunteers at a nursing home, where she finds herself reading aloud to an elderly anthropologist who has not written up all his research. Her anthropologist husband and the chairman of his department want to get their hands on these papers. How far will they go?

In Doris Langley Moore’s hilarious novel, My Caravaggio Style, a bookseller and impecunious biographer decides to forge a manuscript of Byron’s alleged “lost” memoirs. He plans to “find” themanuscript in his aunt’s attic so he can sell it to an irritating American collector. Let us just say that things get out of hand.

Doris Lessing is one of my favorite writers, but let me be clear: I have no desire to go through her papers. Let the biographers go through her papers! When she announced she would not publish a third volume of her autobiography because she did not want to hurt people who were still alive, I respected that decision. But, ironically, Lessing was barely in the ground before Jenny Diski, an excellent writer who sometimes went too far, published her memoirs of Lessing, who took her in when she was a homeless teenager. I was appalled by Diski’s hatred of Lessing.

Anyway, I eagerly await a biography of Lessing. Shouldn’t one be coming out soon?