Two Jameses (2): Henry James

[Henry James]

When I said, in my previous post, that the Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James, scared me when I first read them, I was telling the truth, but not really the whole truth.

The truth is that I'd already heard one of those stories, one dark evening in a campground when I pestered my mother to tell me a ghost story before we went to sleep, and she'd obliged with a rather abridged version of "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" - it was that which really terrified me (perhaps it had something to do with the flapping tent and the pitch darkness outside, too). I had the greatest difficulty in getting to sleep at all that night, and the fear of that disturbingly material spectre has never quite left me.

[M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 1904. (London: Pan Books, 1953)]

I must have already been obsessed with ghosts and ghost stories, though, to have insisted so vociferously on being told one before I could get to sleep. I remember making a hunt through my grandmother's books for anything faintly supernatural, and having to be fobbed off with Wuthering Heights (which does, admittedly, contain a number of apparitions and ghostly occurrences) ...

[M. R. James: More Ghost Stories. 1911. (London: Edward Arnold, 1924)]

Henry James is clearly on quite a different level of eminence than M. R. James. Nor are his ghost stories anything like so likely to turn up in paperback anthologies of spooky stories or horrific tales. The best known of them, The Turn of the Screw, is a bit too long for that, and the others, too, are a bit too "literary" for such treatment.

Luckily there's been a recent attempt to collect the best of his stories in this genre:

[Ghost Stories of Henry James (2001)]

Ghost Stories of Henry James. Ed. Martin Schofield. Wordsworth Classics. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 2001.

1. The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)
2. The Ghostly Rental (1876)
3. Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
4. The Private Life (1892)
5. Owen Wingrave (1892)
6. The Friends of the Friends (1896)
7. The Turn of the Screw (1898)
8. The Real Right Thing (1899)
9. The Third Person (1900)
10. The Jolly Corner (1908)

As you'll observe, the stories are heavily weighted towards the latter end of James's career, after the traumatic failure of his theatrical ambitions (culminating in the horrific first night of his play Guy Domville (1995), when he was literally booed from the stage) ...

The blurb to Schofield's collection claims that:

Henry James was arguably the greatest practitioner of what has been called the psychological ghost story. His stories explore the region which lies between the supernatural or straightforwardly marvellous and the darker areas of the human psyche. This edition includes all ten of his 'apparitional' stories, or ghost stories in the strict sense of the term, and as such is the fullest collection currently available. The stories range widely in tone and type. They include 'The Jolly Corner', a compelling story of psychological doubling; 'Owen Wingrave', which is also a subtle parable of military tradition; 'The Friends of the Friends', a strange story of uncanny love; and 'The Private Life', which finds high comedy in its ghostly theme. The volume also includes James's great novella 'The Turn of the Screw', perhaps the most ambiguous and disturbing ghost story ever written.

Interestingly enough, our two very different Jameses did actually once meet:

"The following month, August [1903], [M. R. James] was in Kent, bicycling with Percy Lubbock ... In Rye they met Henry James, a friend of Lubbock's. 'A very pleasant man, he is,' was Monty's verdict, 'talking just as he writes, with punctilious effort to use exactly the word he wants: looks like a respectable butler.'

- Michael Cox. M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. p.123.

Henry would have been 60 at the time, Monty almost exactly twenty years younger.

The source of Henry's fascination with the occult probably lies in his very beginnings, though. His father (Henry James, Senior, almost as diligent an author as his two sons, William and Henry, Jr., though far less famous) suffered a strange cerebral disturbance in May 1844, when the family was living abroad in England, which dominated the rest of his life. He called it a "vastation" (in Swedenborgian parlance) and described it as follows:

... a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.

- Wikipedia

Whatever actually happened that day by the fire, it converted him to a strange type of religious enthusiasm, and formed the subject of most of his subsequent writings.

Henry, then, grew up in a hothouse atmosphere of supernatural credulity and religious fervour (which possibly had some part in inspiring his brother William's psychological investigations into the subject in later life, culminating in his masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)).

None of this really accounts for the continuing fascination of The Turn of the Screw, though. Readers were beguiled by its strange atmosphere and curious dead-end maze of self-defeating meanings long before the publication of Edmund Wilson's essay suggesting that there are, in fact, no ghosts: only an incipient mental breakdown on the part of the unnamed governess.

Since then the debate has tended to be framed in terms of whether there are or are not actual ghosts haunting young Miles and Flora (Benjamin Britten declaring himself definitely in favour of there being real ghosts rather than suggestive stage absences in his 1954 operatic version).

Rather more interestingly, Leon Edel points out in his magisterial 5-volume Life of Henry James (1953-1972), the ages of the various endangered heroines in the works he wrote immediately after the debacle of Guy Domville seem to increase at a steady rate, as if charting some kind of internal psychological process of healing from the "obscure wound" of his public rejection:

Taking them in their sequence as he wrote them, we begin in the cradle with Effie, who is murdered at four (The Other House, 1896); she is resurrected at five (What Maisie Knew, 1897) and we leave her at seven or eight, or perhaps a bit older. Flora is eight ('The Turn of the Screw,' 1898) and the one little boy in the series, Miles, is ten: we are in the period of the child from eight to ten. Then we arrive at adolescence: the adolescence of an unnamed girl in a branch post office ("In the Cage," 1898). Little Aggie, in the next novel, is sixteen, and Nanda Brookenham eighteen when the story begins (The Awkward Age, 1899). With the writing of this novel, James completes the series. He wrote also a goodly number of tales during this time but the childhood sequence is embodied in the longer works ...

- Leon Edel. Henry James. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901. 1969. New York: Avon Books, 1978. p.261

Once it's been pointed out, this sequence of ages is a bit difficult to dispute. Of course, while it implies a certain self-identification with his heroines, there's also an unmistakable fear of the feminine apparent in James's work at this time.

Like so many other Victorian and Edwardian ghost story writers (the high water mark of the genre), James's spectres seem to embody the more smothering and therefore terrifying implications of domesticity (the "face of crumpled linen" in M. R. James's "Oh whistle and I'll come to you" is one case in point - translated in a recent (2010) TV adaptation of the story into an actual wife, suffering from dementia in a nearby nursing home; some of E. F. Benson's ghost stories - "The Room in the Tower", for instance - are even more unequivocal).

A recent graphic adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, by Guido Crepax, sees it (somewhat predictably) as a parable of the governess's repressed sexuality:

[Henry James. The Turn of the Screw. Adapted & illustrated by Guido Crepax. 1989. Translated by Stefano Gaudiano. New York: Eurotica, 1995.

Most readers would see her as more threatening than kittenish as she manifests in the pages of the story, though perhaps Crepax is right to couple her directly with the seductive brunette Miss Jessel in the front and back cover illustrations to his version.

James had, after all, observed at close hand the ingenious way his invalid sister Alice used her illness as emotional blackmail in the long struggle for the sole attention of her companion Katharine Loring. He'd also been appalled by his own close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson's suicide in Venice in 1894. Whatever the truth of his relationship with "Fenimore," he regarded this act as a betrayal of their intimacy, and immediately rushed to Italy to secure any of his letters or other papers which might be found lying around among her effects.

Seen in these terms, then, the other James's admission "that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw" might be seen as more the recognition of a kindred spirit than with any implication of disdain or bafflement.

More on that subject in my next post, though:

[Nicole Kidman in The Others (2001), Alejandro Amenábar's strange hommage to "The Turn of the Screw"]

The Sleep of Reason

Francisco Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. … The rest is the madness of art.

– Henry James, “The Middle Years,”
Complete Stories 1892-1898, ed. David Bromwich and John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 1996) 354.

In 1781, Francisco Goya was asked to provide a group of frescoes for the refurbishment of the cathedral in Saragossa, his home town. The commission, which came to him through his father-in-law, the then far better-known painter Francisco Bayeu, proved to be a bit of a headache from the first.

At 35, Goya had already earned himself a solid reputation in the capital, Madrid. Discovering just how much of a nobody he still was to the folks at home can hardly have been a comfortable experience, and when the "licentiousness" of his designs for the four cardinal virtues (Faith, Fortitude, Charity and Patience) was criticized by the cathedral authorities, he responded with an immense document detailing his intentions as an artist and his disdain for their ill-informed views (most cutting of all, perhaps, was the suggestion that his father-in-law "correct" his anatomy and choice of colours).

This letter could be seen as the birth-cry of the Romantic Artist, at odds with his time and convinced that his only duty was to listen to the promptings of a higher voice. It's the threat to his own livelihood that Goya begins with, though:

a master's reputation is a thing of great delicacy: his very subsistence depends upon it, and once darkened by some cloud his whole fortune may be destroyed ...

- Goya: A Life in Letters. Ed. Sarah Symmons.
Trans. Philip Troutman (London: Pimlico, 2004): 103.

He goes on to denounce the general frivolity and ignorance of those making the complaints:

after his professional work was presented for public examination at the unveiling of the paintings in the Cathedral of Our Lady of El Pilar, his attention was drawn to a certain group of people whom he overhead seeking to criticise his work and whose intention was clearly not inspired by any impartial criticism, or at least had nothing to do with the art of painting, which alone is relevant to just criticism of his work.

The points that Goya makes in his letter have a continuing relevance for any criticism of the arts. It's easy to feel that subjective irrelevances constitute the main criteria of judgment for those uninformed in the technicalities of one's metier; also (alas) that professional jealousy and feuding colours the assessment of those who are.

And yet, one can't help feeling that Goya's paintings, then and now, can be quite difficult to assimilate. Their blurred outlines and exaggerated figures make them far less sensuously appealing than his immediate predecessors (Velázquez, in particular). The fact that Goya's titanic genius would come to tower over his contemporaries can hardly have been apparent to those shocked and horrified by his brutally uncompromising series of engravings The Disasters of War, or the nightmarish intensity of Saturn Devouring His Chidren.

Goya, in short, had a lot to say. But his continued success as a professional painter at the Spanish Court depended more on his technical dexterity as a portrait painter than on his self-appointed task as chronicler of the abuses of the age.

You're all (I presume) familiar with Goya's print "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1799). A man resting with his head on a pen and piece of paper on top of a desk is besieged by bats and creatures of the night. The design is generally seen as a comment on the French Revolution, or the Age of Reason generally – the return of the repressed unconscious forces of nightmare the moment one is distracted from the pursuit of Enlightenment.

Francisco Goya: Preliminary Sketch for The Sleep of Reason (1797)

Goya himself wrote an interesting caption for an earlier state of this engraving:

The author dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful, commonly-held beliefs and to perpetuate in this work of caprices the solid testimony of truth. Universal language drawn and engraved by Francisco de Goya in the year 1797. [52]

The sleeping figure is intended to be the author, then. And the "universal language" he refers to is, presumably, the language of art. Any suggestion of satire on the pretensions of Enlightenment savants seems entirely absent here. And yet, when Goya's print was actually published two years later, Robespierre's reign of terror was what it appeared to be commenting on.

Perhaps that's the lesson to be drawn from this little artistic parable. When we're most sure of what we're trying to express, we're most liable to be misinterpreted - or, rather, even more disconcertingly, to find out that we were really talking about something else all along.

Diego Velázquez: Las Meniñas (1656)

What is the "meaning" of "Las Meniñas", for instance? The observer being observed is clearly part of it - Velázquez can be seen painting the actual picture that we're looking at, overlooked by the Spanish King, who's standing by the back door. Is it the claustrophobia of court he means to comment on? The maids ("meniñas") tending to the famous troop of royal dwarfs? Or is it some larger mise-en-abime of self-reflexive consciousness he wants to set up in our minds? Nobody knows. One doubts that the painter himself could provide much elucidation on such complex and teasing subject-matter. Quite apart from the instinct for survival which led him to cloak his meaning in airy allegories.

I quoted, above, from Henry James, never the easiest of authors to fathom. The Sacred Fount (1901) is not popular even with his greatest admirers. Rebecca West denounced it as a “small, mean story” in which:

a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant … in an unsuccessful attempt to discover if there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows.

I could never quite see where the sparrows came in, but (leaving that aside for the moment), we can say that it is the story of an unnamed – and almost certainly unreliable – narrator, who is attempting to find the source of a strange influence on two acquaintances of his. One, a woman, looks much younger than before, and the narrator equates this with the fact that her youthful husband now looks much older. The second, a man, has grown far wittier, and most of the book is occupied with an increasingly frustrated (and finally futile) search for the “fount” of this enrichment.

Edmund Wilson decided that the point of the book was that it contained “two separate stories to be kept distinct: a romance which the narrator is spinning and a reality which we are supposed to divine from what he tells us about what actually happened.” The strange story of sympathetic vampirism is therefore the narrator’s invention, which is meant to mask a more sordid – but still deducible – reality. It is, in essentials, the method of "The Turn of the Screw," but Wilson sees it as working well in the latter context and falling flat in the former: “Henry James was not clear about the book in his own mind.”

It's difficult not to value the strident courage of a Goya above the sinuous emblematic subtleties of a Velázquez or a James. Were either of them ever really "clear about" their work even (especially) in "their own minds"? Yet the burden of bolshie Goya's greatest works seems to be precisely these forces of irrationality that redirect us when we feel most clear.

Perhaps the best model for the artist, then, remains the Haruspex, that Roman priest, trying to divine the future from the entrails of a bird?

Francisco Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children (c.1819-21)