He also realizes, as time passes, two things that are really inseparable. First, he has ruined his life by refusing to live it—by succumbing to the numb satisfactions of provincial American society, so different from the intricate and beautiful customs and beliefs of Parisian existence. Second, he finds that he is unwilling to destroy the bond that has been formed between his prospective stepson and this elegant and beautiful femme du monde. In fact he finds himself being drawn into her spell, and he accepts what is for him almost as remarkable a transformation. He hardly knows what to do, and when Chad’s mother sends out another “ambassador,” her cold-hearted daughter, he accepts with some equanimity her threat that if he does not immediately change his ways the rich widow who is his fiancée will drop him like a hot coal. But in the last analysis he knows he is willing to accept the loss of everything he has thought most dear.
The novel, in fact, is strikingly suspenseful and I will not spoil it for you by telling you what happens. I will only say that despite its “Jamesian” faults of complex sentence structure, thinking, and feeling—thus permitting you to decide for yourself—it is very much worthy reading. Don’t let those apparent faults turn you off.
The Golden Bowl, the last of Henry James’s novels (published in 1904), is quintessential James, the perfect example of what James did better than almost any writer who ever lived, and also of what he did not and could not do. What Henry James could not be bothered to do, especially in his last years, was tell a story full of dramatic incident. In fact, almost nothing happens in The Golden Bowl; the book is about things that do not happen. The characters talk—endlessly; they feel deeply, they suffer, they exult. But they do nothing. Those readers should be forgiven who have struggled over The Golden Bowl and come away almost frantic with frustration, exhausted by their effort to pierce through the fog of conversation to find out what has really occurred.
Indeed, the climax of The Golden Bowl, instead of being an act, is a nonact—a refusal to act on the part of one of the four main characters, who may be called the heroine. Maggie, having tortured Charlotte almost to madness by her refusal to notice what is evident to everyone else, is teased, tempted, taunted by Charlotte in the great, climactic scene on the terrace of Adam Verver’s country house. There, Maggie resists the temptation, avoids being drawn down and into Charlotte’s last, desperate attempt to escape from the web of silence that surrounds her. Maggie’s brilliantly intelligent escape from being herself entrapped in a series of ultimately disastrous revelations and accusations is one of the most remarkable events in fiction.
Or nonevents. For many readers that is just the problem—with The Golden Bowl and with the other late novels of Henry James. To readers brought up on popular fiction, The Golden Bowl is boring, trivial. Why bother to read five hundred pages that finally add up to nothing—to the status quo, which now will persist forevermore? Why strain to understand what is so hard to understand? Why make the enormous effort required to cut through the miasma of polite euphemisms, glancing allusions, and half-truths—as well as half-lies—to arrive at the tiny kernel of reality resting at the center of this conundrum?
The reason is that the story of The Golden Bowl is more real by far than the stories of many of those eventful entertainments. Reality is almost unbearable to many people; they do not like Henry James. But if you are able to face it, to see something that is real and not be appalled (the Gorgon’s head!), then The Golden Bowl becomes not unbearably boring but unbearably exciting instead.
Consider the situation—the donnée—of The Golden Bowl. An Italian prince, young, handsome, brilliant, but nearly penniless, is to marry the shy, inexperienced, but pretty daughter of an American multimillionaire, Maggie. She adores the prince and half knows her doting father has bought him for her; but the prince loves Maggie, too, in his aristocratically correct and honorable way. In the past he has also loved another woman, a friend of Maggie’s, a tall, beautiful, accomplished American who is as poor as the prince himself. The prince marries the heiress; and then—very surprisingly—the wealthy American, a widower, falls in love with the prince’s ex-mistress and marries her. The two couples then proceed to live together in London and in Mr. Verver’s magnificent home in the English countryside.
So much is fact, is undeniable. But the book is not about these facts and could not care less about these obvious, surface relationships. Its real subject is not the open loves but the covert ones, concerning each of which there are many unanswered, perhaps unanswerable questions. Rather, it is about the frantic search for those answers, and for a solution to the problem of the book, on the part of all four of its protagonists—a solution that will avoid social ruin for Charlotte, financial ruin for the prince, and the loss of all they most deeply love for both Maggie and her father.
The solution is found, and they all survive. You have to look sharp to see it happen. The Golden Bowl is difficult reading. Take it slow and easy. Be patient. Remember that it is probably no more difficult to discern what the prince is thinking, for example, or the princess, than to discern the thoughts in your own mind—or your lover’s. Follow the thread; the clues are skillfully laid down and in the last analysis are hard to miss.
I hope you will end up agreeing with me that no book ever had a more satisfying conclusion.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
1859–1930
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
In one of her Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen tells of a certain young man who proposes a singularly original theory of creation. Nature is wasteful, the young man declares; not only does she produce many more fish eggs than ever develop into fish, but she also produces many more simulated human beings than ever develop into real ones. Her method, the young man explains, is to produce billions of simulations, of which only a few are artists, and a much smaller proportion great artists; these in turn write fictions, the heroes of a few of which are real, and the only real human beings in the world. Hamlet, the young man says, Faust, and Don Giovanni—these and a handful more are all that wasteful Nature has managed to create in half a dozen millennia.
The young man might have included Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in his list.
Whatever credence you pay to his theory, the young man is right about one thing: this sort of reality is not a common occurrence. Many good books, even great ones, lack characters like Holmes and Watson. Characters that move out of the stories and into our imaginations, freely, like living persons. Characters about whom we can compose other stories, as has happened more than once to Holmes and his entourage.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. He attended the University of Edinburgh, gained a medical degree, and engaged a small suite of offices just off Harley Street, in London, then as now the fashionable street for London doctors. But few patients came, and Doyle had plenty of time to dream up adventures for his imaginary hero. The first Sherlock Holmes story, and still one of the best, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in 1887, when Doyle was twenty-eight. Others followed quickly. Writing, Doyle discovered, was more remunerative than medicine, even though he had sold the entire copyright of “A Study in Scarlet” for twenty-five pounds. (He never made that sort of mistake again and in time became one of the most prosperous of authors.) By 1891 he had given up medicine altogether.