I love the novels of Henry James but I do sometimes fervently wish he had been able to write as clearly as that!
After completing his two-volume Principles of Psychology, William James rewrote it and published it in a single volume titled Psychology: Briefer Course. There is a temptation to read this instead of the massive original version, but it should be resisted. Psychology: Briefer Course presents the psychological doctrine of James in a succinct and dependable way, and doubtless many students of psychology are content with what they find there. But it does so at a price; in the shorter work, James excised many quotations and wise observations about human life. It is just those things above all that make The Principles of Psychology a valuable book.
HENRY JAMES
1843–1916
The Portrait of a Lady
The Ambassadors
The Golden Bowl
Henry James was born in New York City in 1843, the son of a well-to-do Swedenborgian philosopher who provided Henry, and his brother William, with every possible intellectual luxury: excellent schools, trips to Europe, visits to museums and the theater. In their late teens William studied painting and Henry attended Harvard Law School, but it soon became apparent to the latter what he wished to be: a writer. That is what he was for the rest of his life.
Henry James was not nearly so sure, at least at first, where he wanted to live. The more he thought about it, the more inadequate America seemed as a literary locale; the example of Hawthorne, whom James considered to have been insufficiently challenged by his New England surroundings, was deeply disturbing. In his early thirties, therefore, James went to Paris, hoping to find a more congenial environment for his art. He met everyone and enjoyed a social triumph, but he soon concluded that he would never be able to bridge the linguistic gulf that separated him from the French—this despite the fact that he spoke French nearly perfectly. He moved to London in 1876 and there discovered his spiritual home. The next year he wrote: “I am now more at home in London than anywhere else in the world … My interest in London is chiefly that of an observer where there is most in the world to observe.”
James had social as well as literary ambitions, and the former were soon rewarded when he could boast that he had been invited to dinner more than one hundred times in a year. Literary success was another matter; the fact is he never had it, although he continued to write and to publish for forty years. Toward the end he began to be appreciated by a small coterie of the best English writers—they called him “The Master”—but he never enjoyed a large public success. At one point, recognizing that he would never be able to write a really popular novel, he turned to producing works for the stage, but his failure was even more catastrophic there. His persistence was heroic, and to his heroism in simply keeping at it we owe some of the finest literary novels ever written.
The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, shows the great skill that its author had acquired in the steady writing he had been doing for more than ten years. It is, I think, the most affecting of James’s novels; it may be his only genuinely tragic story. The American also ends unhappily, but Christopher Newman, the hero, although he loses his love (and although her end is tragic), still has a great deal of life to look forward to, and we know that nothing will hold him back from doing so. At the end of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer has no future to look forward to. It touches your heart to think of what she is going to have to endure for the rest of her life.
Her life, at least the part of it we see, began so well, so hopefully. She is American and rich and, what is more, in control of her own money. She has nothing to do, as she says, but “confront her destiny,” and at first it seems she will do this well and courageously. But a woman must marry, she thinks, to complete herself, and she finds that what really confronts her is a choice among suitors. The tragedy of this beautiful, intelligent, accomplished young woman is that she chooses the wrong man and thus ruins her life.
At first Gilbert Osmond does not seem to be the wrong man. At any rate, he has everything Isabel lacks, and desires: most notably culture and a solid position—albeit as an expatriate—in Italian society. Their life together, Isabel believes, will be a work of art, in accordance with the many fine pieces in Gilbert’s home, which becomes her own and which she further embellishes with her wealth. But Gilbert, although he possesses impeccable taste, is a cruel, bad man, and he begins to torture Isabel in small, bland ways that become more and more frightful as the novel proceeds. He never says an angry word to her; he never strikes her; but he makes her inexpressibly unhappy.
In the end, one of her old admirers, the rejected suitor Caspar Goodwood, tries to reach her, to offer her an escape from her misery. Divorce is not out of the question, he says; and if she is unwilling to take her wealth back from her husband (or finds herself unable to do so owing to Italian law), then he, Caspar, will give her everything he has, and that is a great deal. But Isabel cannot accept this generous offer. She hates Osmond; she is willing to admit that she could love Goodwood. But the woman who sought, as a girl, to confront her destiny cannot now pretend that life is a game one can abandon when it becomes unpleasant.
The novels of Henry James are often criticized for their lack of events, their paucity of action and adventure. The Portrait of a Lady has more action than many other novels of James. The book’s main defect is James’s failure adequately to answer the question of why Isabel marries Osmond. We know she should not, but we cannot stop her! But given that choice, that donnée, as James liked to say, the rest is inevitable—and deeply moving.
The Ambassadors (1903) is one of the most complex novels ever written. An American gentleman of a certain age, Lambert Strether, who is engaged to marry a wealthy widow (also of a certain age) in Massachusetts, is sent by his fiancée to Paris to bring back her son Chad, who has apparently become involved with a woman of … how to say it . . . easy virtue? No, that’s not right, far from it, but certainly a woman of a type not easily understood by moralistic New Englanders. Strether meets Chad and is immediately struck by how much he has changed. The naïve young man he knew has become very much a gentleman of a type he has never confronted before: smooth, refined in his manners and his taste, elegant in all the best senses of the word. Strether is certain that a woman has somehow been involved, and when he meets the Comtesse de Vionnet he realizes that it is she who has brought about this remarkable transformation.