Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE OUTCRY” by Henry James (first published in 1911)

Three or four years ago, I was trawling through a second-hand bookshop in Wellington, when my eye was caught by a novel of which I had never heard before. And yet the author was a canonical writer, the list of whose novels I thought I knew fairly well. Was this a newly-discovered treasure? I wondered. So I bought it. It was The Outcry, by Henry James (1843-1916), first published in 1911 and apparently the last novel James completed. (When he died, he left behind three or four uncompleted novels, as well as many unpublished essays.)

            How had this novel flown under my radar?

When I got home, I checked two or three critical studies of James on my shelves, and was none the wiser. I found no mention of The Outcry in their texts, though one of them did list The Outcry in its bibliography.

It was only recently, when I got around to reading the novel (in Penguin Classics, with an extensive introduction Toby Litt), that I found out why The Outcry is so little known. As I have said too often on this blog (look up my postings on Roderick Hudson, WashingtonSquare and The Portrait of a Lady), later James does not appeal to me, but here I was reading James’ very last novel out of sheer curiosity.

And my goodness it was bad.

Before I elucidate the mystery of the novel’s obscurity, let me offer you one of my notorious synopses.

The Outcry is an upper-class comedy.

Grumpy old Lord Theyne has a major problem. His elder daughter Kitty (who never appears in the novel) is addicted to gambling and has run up formidable debts. To pay her debts and keep her from scandal, Lord Theyne decides that he might try to sell off some of his more valuable paintings. The millionaire American art-collector Breckinridge Bender is in England. His main criterion is that a painting be worth a lot of money. He visits Lord Theyne’s stately home. He has his eye on an invaluable portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Fortuitously, Lord Theyne’s younger daughter Lady Grace introduces into the house an amiable middle-class chap, Hugh Crimble, who actually knows about art. Hugh Crimble persuades Bender, Lord Theyne and others that one of Lord Theyne’s Italian paintings might be even more valuable than the Sir Joshua Reynolds, although he will have to get it valued first by an expert. Of course Bender is interested.

But there are complications. One is that Lady Grace had been romantically attached to an inane upper-class twit called Sir John. As the story progresses, she drops Sir John and becomes more attached to Hugh Crimble, whom she seems inclined to marry. This is not at all to the liking of Lord Theyne who wonders if middle-class bounders are quite the thing. Then there is the fact that Lord Theyne doesn’t like people telling him what to do with his own property. If he chooses to sell a painting it’s his business and nobody else’s. He is even more confirmed in this view when an “outcry” is raised once Hugh Crimble does get the Italian painting valued and it proves to be priceless. The newspapers are saying that it is wrong for great works of art hanging in England to be sold out of the country. A subscription is begun to match anything that Breckinridge Bender may have to offer and to keep the painting in England.

Lord Theyne is furious that public pressure is being put on him, and he is furious that his daughter Lady Grace is on the side of the “outcry”.

Fear not. As a story it has a happy ending for all concerned, because it is a comedy after all. In fact, in conception, it has the makings of a jolly (if rather twee) upper-class farce. Lord Theyne the grumpy red-faced squire, and Bertie Wooster-ish Lord John could well be figures out of P. G. Wodehouse, while Beckinridge Bender is your British caricature of the fabulously wealthy American philistine. (My, how the American Henry James loved to suck up to English tastes in his mature years!)

But you forget that it was written by Late Period Henry (“pile on those redundant, prolix, subordinate clauses”) James, guaranteed to stultify comedy whenever it rears its head by over-explaining, over-rationalising and not allowing situations to speak for themselves. The Outcry is burdened in its opening stages by awful self-expository dialogue in which minor characters (Lady Sandgate and others) explain the premise of the lord, the paintings and the gambling debts. The Outcry develops as a series of conversations between two characters, who are regularly replaced in the same location by two other characters who have their own conversation, and so on and so on. The Outcry has really odd descriptions of place, where James is precise in telling us what is on the left-hand side and what is on the right-hand side. And The Outcry is divided into three “books”, each of which ends with a dramatic crisis.

So at last, we come to the mystery of what The Outcry really is. It is not a true novel. It is Henry James’ novelisation of the play The Outcry, which he had written two years earlier in 1909. All the phenomena I have given in the preceding paragraph are really surviving evidence of dramatic exposition, the stage convention of having two characters alone on stage discussing things, stage directions (what’s on stage left and stage right etc.) and a clear three-act structure. Henry James’ novelisation merely burdens a playscript with unnecessary authorial commentary on the characters.

Sometimes, in reading this pseudo-novel, I thought it sounded better to skip the authorial comments and just read the dialogue, and sometimes this dodge worked; although even in this ruin-of-a-play, Henry James can’t help having his characters talk allusively in a kind of code, as if they are avoiding saying essential (and obvious) things.

The Penguin Classics edition’s introduction tells me that Henry James himself came to have a low regard for this novel, saying that about it “hangs the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin” in “the unutterable Theatre”. James had no luck as a dramatist. The failure of his play Guy Domville is the stuff of literary legend. But the failure of the play version of The Outcry was not really James’ fault. The play was just about to open in London when King Edward VII had the bad taste to die and all London theatres had to close down at a time of official (and imposed) mourning. So no theatre audience ever got to see The Outcry. Cutting his losses, Henry James decided to make some money by refashioning it as a novel.

Surprisingly, as a novel The Outcry at first sold quite well. But there was a topical reason for this. The novel’s first readers understood that the plot was based on a real case. In 1909, the Duke of Norfolk announced that he was going to sell to an American collector a valuable Hans Holbein portrait which he owned, but which hung in the National Gallery on long-term loan. There was a real outcry in the newspapers about English art treasures being sold abroad. Subscriptions raised almost enough to retain the painting, and finally it got to stay in the National Gallery when an anonymous benefactor outbid the American collector’s chequebook. So the first readers of The Outcry were (perhaps) chuckling over a recent news story.

But what happens once the topicality is gone? The Outcry is left as a poor, ineptly told, novel with artificial characters. After 1911, many decades went by before anybody bothered to republish it. In fact only in the 1990s was it reprinted for the first time. The mystery of its obscurity is thus solved.

Puerile and Gossipy Footnote: Toby Litt’s notes tell me that Henry James quite clearly based the character of the genial Hugh Crimble on the young popular novelist Hugh Walpole, thus nurturing the quaint fiction that Hugh Walpole was heterosexual. (See my post on Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, which was first published the same year that The Outcry was published). Walpole very much wanted to be identified with highbrow and culturally-esteemed writers like James. He spent much of his time paying court to James, who responded with kittenish letters to Walpole. Walpole also wrote a glowing newspaper review of The Outcry, for which James thanked him fulsomely. Thus do inward-turning literary cliques operate.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY” by Henry James (first published in 1881)

            I am sometimes embarrassed by the way I handle classics and other venerated books in the “Something Old” section of this blog. Often, I give a detailed synopsis and then feel abashed at the thought that people who read this section are probably fully aware of the general drift of the book in question anyway; and that therefore I am probably teaching them to suck eggs. Occasionally I avoid this process by taking the great book as read and simply making some general remarks [see my postings on Don Quixote and War and Peace]. Yet recently, when reading a selection of the critical writings of an eminent New Zealand critic, I was heartened to find that his basic method in writing a critique of a book is simply to synopsise it, add a few critical comments as he goes, and then produce a couple of paragraphs of verdict.

So here I go once again serving you up my own synopsis of a classic, which you might know as well as I do.

Given that this particular classic is by Henry James (1843-1916), I will forbear from repeating the sermon I have preached twice before (see postings on Roderick Hudson and WashingtonSquare) about how I like early- and middle-period Henry James, but find later-period James almost unreadable.

 The Portrait of a Lady is generally regarded as the masterpiece of “early” James and as inaugurating his “second” period.

As I summarised it, it goes thus;

Isabel Archer is the youngest and most intellectually inclined of three American sisters. While visiting the United States, Isabel’s aunt, Mrs Lydia Touchett takes Isabel up as her protégée and takes her to Europe to “polish” her. Mrs Touchett is largely estranged from her wealthy banker husband and spends a small part only of each year at the English residence Gardencourt, where her husband lives with their grown, but consumptive and sickly, son Ralph Touchett.

When Isabel comes to live at Gardencourt, Ralph is impressed with her. So is the

neighbouring nobleman Lord Warburton, whose fine mansion is called Lockleigh. Lord Warburton (family name – Molyneux) is esteemed as a radical and progressive-minded chap. Having met Isabel only a few times, he proposes marriage to her. She turns him down. From America there arrives Caspar Goodwood. He courted Isabel in America and has now crossed the Atlantic to propose to her. She turns him down too. She notes (Chapter 17) “the enjoyment she felt in the exercise of her power”. She wants to see and experience the world – not to be tied to conventional notions.

Old Mr Touchett is dying. Before he dies, Ralph persuades him to leave a large sum of money to his cousin Isabel. Ralph does not see himself as made for marriage, and his influence in this matter of the bequest is kept secret from Isabel.

So now Isabel is a woman of property and independent means.

She travels through Paris to Florence and Rome. In Italy, Lord Warburton again proposes to her and again is turned down. Caspar Goodwood makes a second journey and is again rejected. Partly through the influence of the experienced Madame Serena Merle, Isabel gets to know the American widower Gilbert Osmond, who has an adolescent daughter Pansy; and whose sister Amy, Countess Gemini, is married to a Florentine nobleman and is notorious for her extra-marital affairs.

Isabel is fully aware that Gilbert Osmond is penniless, but is attracted to him by his apparent indifference to convention, his artistic (dilettante?) impulses and so forth. Although everybody warns her that he is much inferior to an English noblemen as a marital catch, Isabel marries Gilbert anyway. Without fully articulating it, she believes she is thus rebelling from society’s expectations.

Whereupon the story (whose total time-range is six or seven years) jumps forward three or four years, but remains in its Roman setting. Pansy is now an attractive young woman aged about 19, and clearly becoming eligible for the marriage market.

There is a major shadow hanging over Isabel’s life. She finds her husband Gilbert is far more conventional and domineering than she anticipated. He expects her to obey him and endorse all his opinions.  Slowly – very slowly – she comes to the obvious conclusion that he has married her mainly for her money; and she is disturbed by his relationship with Madame Merle. Are they in fact lovers? Is there something about them that she does not know? Sometimes she has returned home to find them in the type of attitudes that should be reserved for intimates.

Ned Rosier, a young and almost impecunious art-collector, wishes to marry Pansy Osmond. Gilbert disapproves of him. Lord Warburton comes to Rome. He too wishes to marry Pansy. Gilbert Osmond (and Madame Merle) approve; but for Isabel it is clear that Lord Warburton would merely use marriage to Pansy as a pretext to be close to Isabel herself; and that if she approved of such a marriage for her step-daughter, she would in effect be buying into the type of casually adulterous arrangement of (for example) her sister-in-law Countess Gemini. Ned Rosier sells all his art works to have enough money to be acceptable to Gilbert Osmond as a suitor for Pansy; but Gilbert makes his daughter go into a convent until she sees things his way.

At this juncture, Mrs Touchett telegraphs Isabel with the news that Ralph Touchett really is dying. Isabel wishes to visit him, but Gilbert Osmond refuses to let her, saying that this would be a breach of their marriage vows. Now fully aware of Gilbert’s totally mercenary attitude to marriage (his own; and Pansy’s), Isabel is extremely distraught. She expresses her anxiety to her sister-in-law Countess Gemini, who at last lets Isabel in on the true relationship of Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. They were lovers for many years, and Pansy is their illegitimate daughter, not the daughter of Gilbert’s late wife…

…Isabel feels a mixture of horror and pity when she meets Madame Merle at the convent where Pansy has been sent to cool her heels. Pansy has decided to obey her father’s wishes and marry into wealth…

…Isabel goes to England despite Gilbert’s wishes. She is present as Ralph’s death-bed, now aware that he was her true benefactor. Before Ralph dies, they agree that it might have been better if she had never come into money at all…

…Lord Warburton is now going to marry an English noblewoman. Although it is not clearly stated, the implication is that Lord Warburton now knows that marriage to Pansy would not place him close to Isabel, as the breach in Isabel’s marriage has become common knowledge.

Caspar Goodwood is present at Ralph’s funeral. He now presents himself to Isabel as her true and disinterested lover: somebody she can now turn to after tragedy has struck her marriage. He embraces her and passionately kisses her.

And Isabel flees from him back to Rome. End. With us knowing that her life has not ended and that she still has much experience ahead of her.

Thus did I summarise the novel in my reading notebook, adding the remark that my synopsis deliberately omitted the character of Henrietta Stackpole, a rather crass American journalist and bluestocking who gains entry into Isabel’s social milieu in order to “expose” it. Henrietta, who eventually marries the Englishman Mr Bantling and is a beneficiary of Ralph Touchett’s will, seems to be Henry James’ satire on less perceptive Americans, who trumpet democratic American values only until they succumb to European comforts. However, like Harold Skimpole in Dickens’ Bleak House, she is really detachable from the mechanics of the plot.

Now what are we to make of this mass of narrative matter? A woman I know well once told me, forthrightly if a little crudely: “I hated The Portrait of a Lady when we had to read it in 7^th Form. When Isabel Archer farts, it takes ten pages before anyone smells it.” There is indeed some of the dreaded Jamesian ponderousness in this novel, although it is not as bloated as the later James of The Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors. Indeed, parts of it are positively sprightly.

The Portrait of a Lady could provoke me into making the obvious comments about the leisured and moneyed classes with which James habitually deals. Save for the banker Mr Touchett (who is mainly a “noise off”) and the journalist Henrietta Stackpole (who is largely held up to ridicule) nobody works for a living. In an age when travel (except in steerage) was prohibitively expensive, nobody gives a second thought to setting off on journeys across the Atlantic, to London, to Paris, to Florence, to Rome. And (though there is a passing note to say that Isabel’s and Gilbert’s baby died) nobody seems to have any children. So people have time to cultivate their fine perceptions and intuitions while somebody else keeps the social engine running. In passing, I am [not for the first time in reading James] forced to wonder if it is the social conditions depicted that make James’ novels congenial to a certain class of modern reader – in an age of contraception (= no children); labour-saving machines (= no physical labour) and – at least for middle-class Westerners – unprecedentedly widespread affluent leisure. What do we now do in our spare time but refine our feelings and welcome a writer who encourages us in this attitude? Thus much for my knee-jerk negative reactions – to which I would add the sense of an hermetically-sealed world of expatriates. Note that most of the novel is set in Rome, but there are no significant Italian characters.

Of course it would be very easy to give a feminist reading to the novel. Independent Isabel Archer, by the conditions of society and the conventions of marriage, is reduced to being dependent on her husband. Marriage is a commercial transaction – a transfer of power and money – and hence adultery is taken for granted as a necessary outlet for the passions. In this sense, then, the novel is about what it takes to be regarded as a “lady” – it is to have money; to be a marketable commodity; to give away any ideas of intellectual independence; to shut your mouth and to play along with conventions. When Isabel reflects on her unsatisfactory marriage, we are told:

“The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his [i.e. her husband’s] – attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor…” (Chapter 38)

There would be much truth to my hypothetical feminist reading. Certainly the novel’s title – much as we sympathise with Isabel – strikes me as ironic. Isabel Archer is not a “lady” to begin with. She becomes one only when she is bequeathed money and marries. In the same way, perhaps, Mrs Touchett is a “lady”, and James seems to have consciously brought the novel back to its beginning in the final chapters. Mrs Touchett, as we knew to begin with, was estranged from her husband and attempting to influence a younger woman (Isabel); just as Isabel at the end is estranged from her husband and attempting to influence a younger woman (Pansy).

OR is the title NOT ironic? Is Isabel Archer genuinely a lady, in the sense of a moral and compassionate person? She does not play the social game of adultery and deceit, and chiefly feels pity, rather than anger, for the woman (Madame Merle) who has most systematically deceived her.

Or am I deluded in both readings? The fine stirrings of taste and conscience among people who aren’t willing to address the basic injustices of the society they inhabit? How much is James conscious of this as a theme? Surely, when we first learn that Isabel regards Gilbert as “unconventional” we are allowed to chuckle, knowing that it is the people most immured in convention who can play at being unconventional in those matters that don’t touch their bank balances.

Most essentially, I read The Portrait of a Lady as the tale of a young woman’s education through systematic disillusion. Isabel begins with the illusion that she is independent and has free choice when she is in fact consistently manipulated by “players” who are more experienced at the social game than she is. Then there is her long disillusion with her married state. [Insert here, if you will, the inevitable reflexions one gets at this point on Henry James’ perspective as a closeted homosexual looking at the married state with a jaded eye as an outsider.] Even without the discovery of Pansy’s parentage and Madame Merle’s relationship with Gilbert, this long disillusion would have been conveyed by the second half of the novel.

Regarding the process of actually reading this novel, the worst of James continues to be what is under-dramatised and left as interior musings and monologues. Twelve pages of intellectualisation might divert when one is reading them, but they are never as memorable as a single dramatic action. For this reason I find the second half of the novel, when Isabel moves from her tentative state into a state of discovery, to be much the stronger and more readable. I admit, too, that some things which I at first took to be weaknesses in style prove on reflexion to be strengths. For example, we are often told that Isabel Archer is intellectual and reads very much; but we hardly ever hear what she either reads or thinks… but then had we been told, the novel might now seem much more dated, like the novels of George Meredith. Though Isabel marries Gilbert, there is no wedding scene – but then this is a deliberate artistic elision, so that the novel’s psychological focus does not blur. In this respect it reminds me of the masterly way Theodor Fontane leaves offstage the crucial duel scene in Effi Briest.

Having picked tentatively at the novel and its meaning, how do I evaluate it?

When I last read The Portrait of a Lady, I filled by reading notebook with deft and ironic and witty quotations from Henry James’ text – often as funny as could be devised by Jane Austen. I have been tempted to quote some of them in this notice, but my conclusion would be an obvious one. The Portrait of a Lady was written before James’ style ossified – before he became the “hippopotamus rolling a pea” that H. G. Wells cruelly called him. Along with The Bostonians, I would simply call The Portrait of a Lady the best long novel by Henry James that I have been able to finish.

Cinematic footnote: As far as I know, there has only ever been one film version made of The Portrait of a Lady, and despite the cold admiration that it received in some quarters, it was not the greatest of successes. This was Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, released in 1996-97. Campion had already made her three best films, Sweetie, An Angel at My Table and The Piano, the last of which had earned Academy Awards and briefly made her a hot property as a director. So she was given Hollywood’s blessing to film a respectable literary classic. She also had a big-name cast. Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, John Malkovich as Gilbert Osmond, John Geilgud as Mr Touchett etc. Campion said she and her fellow scriptwriter were giving the film a “feminist sensibility”, but alas – this caused problems. Perhaps the film-makers didn’t notice that, in his elusive way, Henry James had already given the novel a feminist sensibility. As presented in the film, Isabel Archer is already a knowing and assertive modern woman when the story begins, which renders much of the story nonsensical on an emotional level. Why should this aware woman marry Gilbert Osmond when, as played by Malkovich, he is clearly a conniving poseur from the start, with none of the charm and culture that the novel’s Isabel initially sees in Gilbert? The film has its moments and is faithful to the novel’s storyline, but it fizzles badly on every dramatic level and was a box-office flop. To be cruelly accurate, it was really the end of the golden weather for Campion’s directing career, which has been less than stellar ever since.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“WASHINGTON SQUARE” by Henry James (first published 1880)

A couple of years ago on this blog, writing about Henry James’ Roderick Hudson , I explained what my basic attitude to Henry James was and still is. I admired and enjoyed the novels of James’ early and middle periods, but I could never get my head around those rambling, ruminative, frequently pompous and often otiose dissections of the wealthy and the privileged that made up his last period. I recycled the old joke about James the First, James the Second and James the Old Pretender – and I still can’t stand the Old Pretender. From The American up to Portrait of a Lady – fine. From there on to the likes of The Awkward Age and The Golden Bowl – no thanks.

What I neglected to note in my dyspeptic comments were two very important points. First, that the earlier James had a sly sense of humour, and it should never be underestimated. Second, that he wasn’t always the best judge of his own work.

I take as my example of these two things the wholly delightful early piece of James, the very short novel Washington Square (154 pages of text in the paperback edition on my shelves). James himself did not think highly of it. He excluded it from the collected edition of his works that he oversaw late in life. And maybe this was a good thing. James had the unlovely habit of tinkering with, and rewriting, bits of his earlier novels when they came to be collected - and I’m glad Washington Square escaped this fate.

Part of the delight of Washington Square is that it is often so funny, even if it has sometimes been interpreted as a domestic tragedy.

Plain, untalented, and in fact not particularly bright, young Catherine Sloper lives with her widower father Dr Austin Sloper in New York’s fashionable Washington Square. Dr Sloper is a wealthy man and naïve Catherine will obviously inherit his money. The lively and handsome young fortune-hunter Morris Townsend takes an interest in her. Catherine believes he loves her for herself and believes she is in love with him. She is encouraged in this delusion by her aunt Lavinia Penniman, whose view of young lovers is moulded by the drivelling romantic fiction she reads, and who acts as letter-carrying and assignation-making go-between behind Dr Sloper’s back. But Dr Sloper stands in the way of the union of his daughter and the young man. He knows full well that Morris Townsend, without a profession or means of support, has only a mercenary interest in Catherine. He is all flash and no cash.

Given his stern demeanour, given the patronising way he treats his daughter, given the downright cruel things he sometimes says about her lack of both talents and good looks, Dr Sloper could easily be seen as nothing more than a villainous, tyrannical father. He frequently remarks that she has none of the beauty, poise and wit of her mother, who died giving birth to her. But the nuanced thing is that he is absolutely right about lively, charming Morris Townsend. The young man really is interested only in Catherine’s inheritance; the father has read the situation more accurately than the daughter has; and for all his unkindness, the father really is protecting the daughter from making a match that can only end in unhappiness.

In the novel this plays out as Catherine only gradually being undeceived. Realising that he will never get his hands on Catherine’s money, Morris goes off on a “business trip” from which, despite his protestations to Catherine, he never returns. The years go by, and Catherine (whose father has died in the interim) slowly comes to realise that Morris never loved her and has deceived her. This, as she continues to live unmarried with her aunt Lavinia, becomes the great psychological fact in her life. She was not loved for herself. She was cheated by a young man with his eyes on her inheritance.

After about twenty years, Morris Townsend returns to New York. Foolish Aunt Lavinia arranges for him to meet with Catherine, much against Catherine’s will. When she lays eyes on him (in the novel’s last chapter) “[Catherine] would never have known hm. He was forty-five years old, and his figure was not that of the straight, slim young man she remembered.” Morris, clearly having made nothing of his life, wants once again to court her for her money. Catherine is not moved and firmly tells him to be on his way. He leaves. Catherine goes back to her crocheting, and the novel ends.

There are some scenes in which Catherine defies her father even when she has come dimly to understand the truth about Morris; but if she has grown in any way, it is simply in a very limited self-knowledge. She now knows that she is not attractive to men, she will never marry, and her lot is to sit out life quietly in the residence her father has left her.

The novel is told in the third-person. James lets us share the thoughts of Catherine, Dr Sloper and Aunt Lavinia; but Morris is seen from the outside only. The tone is consistently ironical, witty, barbed. We pity and sometimes laugh at Catherine’s naïvete, but we are never encouraged to see her as a tragic heroine. Dr Sloper’s cruel comments about Catherine are often cruelly funny (Chapter 13 – a minor character asks of Catherine “Doesn’t she make a noise? Hasn’t she made a scene?” to which Dr Sloper dryly replies “She isn’t scenic.”)

So this is, first and foremost, a sad little social comedy, perfectly proportioned.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Okay, gentle reader, I have been leading you on a bit here. In deciding to write about Washington Square this week, I was really looking for the excuse to tell you what the movies have made of this dry, ironical, witty little domestic tale.

For years I have had a DVD copy of William Wyler’s 1949 film The Heiress, based on the stage adaptation of Washington Square by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, which had already wowed Broadway before the film was made. I have seen this film a number of times.

When I was a film reviewer, I saw on its first release Agnieszka Holland’s 1997 film version of the story, called Washington Square. I recently borrowed a copy of it from my local video library and watched the two films once again. And – goodness – it did tell me something about the difficulties of adapting this sort of literary source to the screen.

Take The Heiress first of all. Filmed in crisp black-and-white, it follows James’ plot fairly closely, but manages to turn James’ ironical social comedy into a sort of hothouse Racinian drama, focusing almost exclusively on the four main characters. 28-year-old Montgomery Clift is appropriately charming as Morris Townsend, and his habitual tentativeness (and bewildered Method Acting stare) makes it credible that he has half-convinced himself that he really loves Catherine for more than her money. Miriam Hopkins flutters around effectively enough as silly Aunt Lavinia. The outstanding performance is by Ralph Richardson as Dr Sloper – stern and mocking of his daughter, but very sly in the way he interrogates Morris and ironically cuts the young man down to size. At this point I note how amusing Old Hollywood always was in its habit of casting English actors in American roles that required some gravitas. But there is the big problem of Catherine herself. How can you get a really young actress (Catherine is about twenty years old for most of the story) to carry the story with the proper nuance? The Heiress has 33-year-old Olivia de Havilland in the role. To her and the producers’ great credit, she is deglamourized and is made as credibly “plain” as Catherine is supposed to be. She acts well (she won an Academy Award for her turn here). But – alas – all the time we are aware that this is a grown woman, far too old for the role and pretending to be a giddy and innocent 20-year-old.

Then there is the ending. The Heiress makes it far more melodramatic than the novel. Morris arranges to elope with Catherine, but he discovers he will not gain as much money as he thought he would out of such a manoeuvre. Catherine sits up all night waiting for him to snatch her romantically away. He never turns up. She realises that he has deceived her. But the film-makers want to give her heroic status by showing that she is capable of turning the tables on him. Some time later (but when he is still young and attractive – not middle-aged) Morris turns up again, seeking her hand in the hope of at least getting a comfortable life out of her. Catherine pretends to be ready to go with him. He dashes off to get his things, but when he returns, she has barred the house door to him and ordered the servants not to let him in under any circumstances. The film ends with her, stoic and grim-faced, climbing the stairs away from the door upon which Morris is hammering futilely and which we know she will never open to him.

So, as seen in The Heiress, Catherine has got her revenge, even if she still faces an unhappy and loveless life. (And might I add that that fade-out shot of Montgomery Clift hammering on the door and shouting “Catherine! Catherine!” reminds me of another Method Actor, Marlon Brando, a couple of years later at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire wailing “Stella! Stella!” to the wife who won’t let him in.)

It is a very good film, the acting is fine, it works well as a tightly-structured melodrama and I have enjoyed it thoroughly a number of times. But it is not the ironical thing that Henry James wrote.

Turning to the 1997 film Washington Square, we find a very different sort of beast. It more-or-less follows James’ story, but from the opening shots we know that this version (scripted by one woman, Carol Doyle, and directed by another, Agnieszka Holland) is going to do its darndest to turn Washington Square into a feminist tract. We begin with a shot of Dr Sloper’s wife dying in childbirth, with blood smeared all over the sheets (so, dear viewer, see what women had to endure in those days when fathers ruled households). Later there is a scene where Catherine, as a child, is so frightened at having to sing a song in public that she urinates on the carpet. (See the cruel things little girls were forced to do in these male-dominated households.) Following the tradition of gravitas-seeking Old Hollywood, most of the leading roles in this American story are played by English actors – Albert Finney as Dr Sloper, Maggie Smith as Aunt Lavinia and 28-year-old Ben Chaplin as Morris Townsend (a comely enough lad but – as even heterosexuals such as I can see – not as gorgeous a chap as the young Montgomery Clift). And once again, when the main part of the story finally gets going, we have an over-aged Catherine Sloper, played by 35-year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh. Let me make it clear that I think she is a very, very good actress. In her coyness, her finger-counting, her moments of embarrassment, she does get across Catherine’s little girl qualities in the early parts of the film. But she is still a grown woman and a very attractive one. It is hard to believe that there is no eligible bachelor who would court her for herself.

In this version, Morris’ venality is downplayed. We do know he is after Catherine’s money, but the emphasis is thrown onto the father’s cruelty. The film is stacking up to show us the evil of the domineering patriarchy, rather than the naïvete of the girl. By film’s end (and rather improbably given the helpless thing she has been earlier on) Catherine has become an assertive woman, scorning both father and suitor. In the last sequence, Morris visits her when she is undeceived about his motives. She is busily running a kind of creche for little girls. She is seated at a piano playing. She sends Morris away curtly, then turns and gives a wise smile to the little girl sharing the piano bench with her. The implication is obvious, dear sisters. In the nineteenth century, women cannot have power, but Catherine is a pioneer in showing that women can live free of fathers and dodgy men who might become their husbands; and the little girl represents the future generations who will assert their full equality with men.

This version has some good moments, but also some supremely silly ones. As an example, there is a sequence where Maggie Smith’s doddery Aunt Lavinia (far more doddery than Miriam Hopkins’ turn in the same role) makes one of her covert appointments with Morris to keep his connection with Catherine going. The scene is set in what is obviously a brothel and we can hear women in the background moaning orgasmically as they are rough-handled by customers. Ah yes, dear viewer, see another way in which women are exploited and mistreated by men. But the possibility that a woman like Aunt Lavinia would enter such a place is virtually nil.

Believe it or not, I do not condemn films for being different from their sources – it is almost inevitable that they will be – but I do note that both these films play to the audience expectations of their day. The Heiress, in the 1940s, gives us romantic melodrama. Washington Square, in the 1990s, gives us girls-can-do-anything tract. The wit of Henry James is lost in both. But for sheer entertainment value, and as a well-structured drama, The Heiress still wins hands down.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“RODERICK HUDSON” by Henry James (first published 1875)

One day I know I will have to stand before the recording angel and explain why I never got wholeheartedly into the novels of Henry James.

Yes, I will say, I did read with delight and attention many of his short-stories and novellas and I marvelled at how compressed and meaningful he could make his prose – The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle, The Turn of the Screw. Yes, I enjoyed the brash confidence of earlier books like The American and I climbed happily into shorter novels like The Europeans, Washington Square and What Masie Knew; then into mature and full-bodied psychological studies like The Bostonians and The Portrait of a Lady. All of these I regard as great pieces of writing. But I was never able to crack the later novels like Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl or The Awkward Age, which sit unread (except for the first few pages) on my shelves. Like, I suspect, many literati, I know The Golden Bowl only because I once watched the 1972 BBC TV adaptation of it, in which Cyril Cusack spent long periods looking at the camera and reciting James’ words, as the story’s impotent narrator. I recall that when The Ambassadors was one of the set texts in the Honours course I did as a student, I struggled to get even halfway through it, and then gave up.

For the life of me, I can’t improve on that old wisecrack about Henry James’ writing career falling into three periods – James the First, James the Second and James the Old Pretender. James the First and Second I quite liked. It was the Old Pretender who stumped me and who just could not express himself clearly and concisely. His sentences waffled on, often missing their ostensible subject in elaborate and redundant subordinate clauses. (I recall one lecturer saying that James in later career took to dictating his works to a secretary. It shows.) He ruminated at far too great a length over trivialities. As one of my fellow students curtly remarked, James “took about three pages for somebody to cough.”

I hope I do not appear a complete philistine in making these remarks, as I know there are dedicated Jamesians who regard him as the master stylist, the master psychologist, the man whose penetrating gaze looked deeper into the human soul than any other writer’s did. But, apart from his later prose style, there were two other things that alienated me from the man’s later works.

The first was the social classes with which he mainly dealt. Some stories of wealthy Americans and titled Europeans are interesting up to a point; but when that point comes, you start asking why you are reading about these privileged people and their domestic dilemmas in the first place. So wealthy Mr X from Boston may or may not marry sensitive Princess Y from Florence, and their coupling may or may not affect the feelings of Mrs Z with her discreetly scandalous past, and of the naïve young Mr J, also from Boston. Very well. I am giving a crude caricature here, but there is in James’ later novels that oppressive sense of a wealthy in-group with enough time on their hands to stroke and stroke their feelings until they are refined beyond reason. And I was never fully convinced that America was always as wide-eyed, and Europe as sophisticated and corrupt, as James depicted them.

My second problem had to do with the matter of what I can only call “evasion”. So often in James’ novels you get the sense that something is not being mentioned – that much which is thought or said or described is really beside the point of what really animated James. I have read both (the heterosexual English novelist) David Lodge’s novel about James, Author! Author! and (the homosexual Irish novelist) Colm Toibin’s novel about James, The Master, both coincidentally published in 2004. In their own different ways (Lodge far more wittily) they both tell me that James was a non-active homosexual, sexually attracted to men but apparently living and dying a virgin. I also know that, thanks in large part to the American critic Leon Edel, it is now considered unforgivable to discuss James’ work without mentioning this fact. Among activists, he’s now supposed to sit in the pantheon of Great Gays. Except that you would have to be very ingenious indeed to detect clear indicators of male homosexual activity in his writings. (The lesbian desire of one character is heavily implied in The Bostonians). After all, the subject was verboten when James was writing. So maybe this is the unnameable, which leads to what I have called “evasion”. Are all these agonisings over whether one should or should not get married in fact coded tales of frustrated homosexual status? I think not, but I do think James’ condition could have contributed to James’ habit of talking about and about things without ever directly addressing them.

This is all by way of prelude to discussing one of James’ very earliest novels, written before the really oppressive stylistic mannerisms kicked in. Roderick Hudson, published in 1875, was only James’ second novel, written when Henry James was 31, with over forty years of literary production still ahead of him. True Jamesians regard it as an immature piece, an early Bildungsroman about a young man’s development. But to me it already appears to have most of the Jamesian preoccupations.

Rather than giving you one of my notoriously overlong plot-summaries, I will attempt to describe the plot of this one as pithily as I can.

Wealthy New Englander Rowland Mallet is impressed with the work of the young sculptor Roderick Hudson, becomes his mentor, takes him under his wing and takes him to Europe to learn his craft fully. The emotional complication is that both Rowland Mallet and Roderick Hudson are in love with the same intellectual American woman, Mary Garland, to whom Roderick is engaged.

Over in Rome, Roderick’s sculptures impress the small American expatriate artistic community. Could he possibly be the great hope for American art? At which point, Roderick becomes obsessed with the American beauty Christina Light, who seems about to make a wealthy marriage to an Italian aristocrat, Prince Casamassima. Roderick is both inspired and distracted from his art by Christina. For a while she returns his feelings. But Rowland fears that Christina is having too much influence over Roderick.

To rein Roderick in, Rowland Mallet invites Roderick Hudson’s mother and Mary Garland to come and join the group in Rome. Rowland has conflicting feelings – if Roderick married Christina, then he (Rowland) would have Mary Garland to himself. But inexplicably (perhaps because she has been discreetly told that as an illegitimate child she would have no other chance of entering high society) Christine Light does marry the Prince Casamassima.

Roderick’s inspiration dries up. He idles. He does not work. We are not told directly how he is wasting his time (James here pioneers his habit of alluding without stating), but there are some indications of possible loose living.

The novel ends in Switzerland, when Rowland tells Roderick that he loves Mary and that Roderick is selfish, immature and wasting the talent that could produce real art. Roderick walks off into the mountains. There is a tremendous snowstorm. Roderick does not return. The following day his frozen body is found at the bottom of a ravine. Whether he committed suicide or died by misadventure is left unclear. (Of course. This is an allusive novel by Henry James.) At any rate, he lost in love and his art never flourished and there is the tragedy of a young, unfulfilled American artist.

A brief ironical epilogue tells us that Rowland Mallet never did win Mary Garland, but at best became an occasional visitor to her.

Years before I read this young man’s novel, a stray remark from somebody led me to expect something far more melodramatic than James’ more mature novels. In fact, save for its conveniently final and melodramatic ending, Roderick Hudson strikes me as typical of James’ lifelong preoccupations – fine emotional perceptions among the moneyed classes, the clash of American and European cultures and the status of art. It springs as fully-formed from young James as Minerva from the brow of Jove.

And, to do the author credit, he does at least prepare for the ending with some foreshadowing symbolism. Long before Roderick’s death, there is a scene where Rowland observes Roderick in the Roman Coliseum, perched perilously over a precipice as he is about to pluck a flower for Christina. She tells him not to risk his neck. Later, in Switzerland, Roderick reaches out to pluck a flower for Mary Garland, who lets him take the risk. The contrast between the two women is symbolically established – but so is the image of Roderick hanging over the abyss into which he will eventually crash to his death.

Inasmuch as the novel focuses on Roderick, it is the tale of an American artist in Europe, both feeding off, and stultified by, the past. The novel does not exactly set up the dichotomy of innocent American and worldly European, but the potential for such a dichotomy is there. There is also a theme of the difficulties an artist faces when he needs both the emotional stimulus that gives inspiration and also the mental detachment to work methodically. Roderick achieves no such balance.

Here, however, is the rub. The novel does not really centre on Roderick. Despite its title, it centres on Rowland Mallet. Although it is written in the third-person (with the odd first-person authorial aside), Rowland is the centre of consciousness and events are seen through his eyes. Essentially he is the looker-on rather than the partaker-in – Nick Carroway to Roderick Hudson’s Gatsby. Often he is the puppet-master – financing Roderick’s journey to Europe; and calling over Mrs Hudson and Mary Garland when Roderick is afire with Christina. We end up seeing passionate events (especially between Roderick and Christina) only at a distance, as seen by a concerned observer.

I’m sure the names are significant – Garland (=safe posy of flowers); Light (=inspiration); Mallet (=one shaping others to his will). In this post-Edel age, it is impossible to read it without at least considering a homosexual subtext. Personally I do not believe in Rowland’s (swiftly-established and only occasionally-mentioned) love for Mary Garland and I do note that he ends up as an unattached male, as so many of James’ narrators are. His attitude towards Roderick is more that of one who wishes to possess rather than to encourage. If you are so inclined, you could interpret Rowland’s and Roderick’s final quarrel as being like a lovers’ spat; you could note that at one point Roderick calls Rowland “unnatural”; and you could observe that the mainspring of the plot is a male patron trying to get his male protégé out of the clutches of a woman. Except that, if you are going to join the dots this way, you would also have to note that there is no suggestion that Roderick has any strong feelings for Rowland and also that, if homosexuality is implicit, it is certainly never spelled out and would presumably not have been evident to the novel’s first readers. And remember, it is a young and beautiful woman who distracts and inspires Roderick.

Very well, this is not one of James’ mature novels, but it does have some nice strokes of irony and at least a couple are worth quoting.

When Roderick first reaches Europe, James remarks “Wherever he went, he made not exactly what is called a favourable impression, but what, from a practical point of view is better – a puzzling one.” (Chapter 5)  This is a neat account of the appeal of novelty.

Then there is this little piece of class and cultural feeling. Mrs Hudson and her wealthy friends are at one of Rome’s better-known sites. James observes:

“During this little discussion our four friends were standing near the venerable image of Saint Peter, and a squalid, savage looking peasant, a tattered ruffian of the most orthodox Italian aspect, had been performing his devotions before it. He turned away crossing himself, and Mrs Hudson gave a little shudder of horror. ‘After that’, she murmured, ‘I suppose he thinks he’s as good as anyone.” (Chapter 17)

Goodness! A praying Italian peasant imagining he is as good as wealthy Americans! Fancy that.