Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence
John
R. Bradley
Basingstoke & New
York: Palgrave, 2000.
£47.50, $65.00, 172 pages, ISBN 0-333-91874-6.
James Friel
Liverpool John Moores University
When Graham Greene described Henry James as being "as solitary in the
history of the novel as Shakespeare is in the history of poetry" it was
not, I’m guessing, because he thought the pair of them lonely closet cases.
Greene was admiring a predecessor, a writer who had developed his craft in such
a way that Greene felt he could only trail in his inestimable wake. Greene was
intent on nothing more than insisting on James’s central importance to the
novel’s development.
This is not John R. Bradley’s James, a considerably more marginal figure.
Bradley writes with admirable lucidity and a companionable briskness and, after
an intemperate start, his book settles into being a judicious and, at times,
illuminating study of James as a "gay" artist. He is often cogent and
persuasive but I’m not greatly impressed by the James he offers up. For
Bradley, Henry James is a writer who, in the late short story, "The Beast
in the Jungle", finally creates "a more explicit presentation of the
narcissistic, homo-erotic pattern of homosexuality that had been implicit in
his gay fiction for decades." This, coming on the penultimate page, is Bradley’s
summation of James’s achievement and, if that were all James managed to
achieve, we have before us a minor artist who nervously transgressed social
norms, a prosier A.E. Houseman.
Bradley’s Henry James seems the diminished figure of so much contemporary
criticism, the pouring of pint pots into Ph. D. sized thimbles. This is not because
Bradley insists on the centrality of James’s sexuality. This is not because
I find such practices distasteful, misguided or irrelevant. I am happy, even
eager, to believe that James was, at heart, a homosexual. James was evidently
averse to homosexuality of the "Oscar Wilde kind" and, especially and
significantly, to the way it manifested itself in Wilde’s work.
If James was homosexual, he was so in a way that, even today,
many men are. It often strikes me that in his antipathy to
a figure like Wilde and
in his
preference
for J. Addington Symonds's notion of homosexuality as "natural manliness," James
seems little different from a contemporary gay man who despises the "camp" and "effeminate" and
describes himself as "straight-looking/straight acting," and even "non-scene." Indeed,
James in later years quietly aligned himself with other male homosexual writers
and artists. Because of this I am not altogether convinced that it was, as Bradley
puts it simply, "James’s misfortune that he began to find contentment
in a series of relationships with men precisely at the historical moment when
English society moved, legally and socially, against homosexuality."
Misfortune, yes, but what looks like accident to the less than super-subtle
might be covert intention—and James was nothing if not super-subtle—and James
does find contentment in these relationships. Those letters most often cited
to prove his evasiveness on the subject of homosexuality seem to me both more
playful and more knowing than they are often given credit. If James was a homosexual,
then it is this late period of his life that seems most to confirm it. Certainly
it is this period which gives writers like Lyndall Gordon most difficulty and
queer theorists most of their evidence. However (as noticed by Bradley, who presents
the evidence), whether or not James was homosexual, there have always been a
significant number who have read him and discussed him as if he were—although
not necessarily in a positive fashion. His association with "The Yellow
Book clique" meant that, to his contemporaries, James’s late work was
tinged with lavender. Bradley even provides an example of this when he writes,
that Miles in "The Turn of the Screw", is "expelled from school
and the cause is said by the governess to have been 'revoltingly […] against
nature' and this would have indicated to the average Victorian reader that
Miles had been expelled for homosexuality."
James’s preference for female protagonists, his "sensitivity," his
deep curiosity about "the situation of women," the relative lack of
sexual regard in his creation of the female characters (cf. Dickens or Hardy,
Flaubert or Tolstoy), his emotionally constricted male characters, and the more
macho critics and rival writers’ dismissals of James as being a "spinsterish" writer,
fussy and feminized in his style, subject matters and concerns; these have always
allowed us to read Henry James as a homosexual writer. In his long life and after,
it wasn’t just his brother who figured James for a "sissy."
Bradley, to his credit, and others with him, are rescuing James
from such contempt, perhaps, but, even here, there is something
deeply depressing—even demeaning—in
the way James’s magisterial ambitions, his thoughtful and prolonged enquiry
into how fiction can develop its range and techniques, perfect itself and become
commensurate to the world it attempts to capture and understand, are ignored
or narrowed down to a debate over his sexuality and his attempts to disguise
it, excuse or come to terms with it. The complex truths to which he sought to
give expression are either overlooked or, as here, only partially given their
due.This is what too much of contemporary criticism ends up doing: considering
the work as no more than a series of discourses to be unmasked and writers as
self-deceiving fools led by their libidos, puppets only rarely able to escape
the pull of social forces on their strings. They are, of course, easier to understand
and discuss this way and it is easier to dismiss what they write—or not
appraise it to the fullest extent. We are looking at how the difficult business
of art is reduced to simplifications in the name of explicating it. The real
business of James’s life—the work—slips by, lazily attended.
Bradley writes of James, as one reviewer puts it on the dust
jacket of this attractively produced book, as a man who loved "boys sexually and sometimes physically
but, like any Victorian gentleman, he believed it was not the kind of thing one
talked about." To be fair, this is also a simplification: Bradley’s
James is more subtle and more discreet than this but let it stand for the moment
because it indicates one idea of Henry James and how sexual dissembling is at
the root of his art. Contrary writers like Lyndall Gordon convey the impression
that it was guilt over his parasitic relationships with women that powers his
work—as if his expressions became more opaque, his sentences more labyrinthine
and his observations more tentative because he did not dare to write more clearly
and so reveal himself. Either version and its (not so many) permutations have
it that James’s late style grows out of a personal evasiveness—that
there was something he could not say, feared saying—and not as a result
of a strenuous honesty, an intellectual pursuit, an artistic strategy, a deepening
realization that there was something that could not be said but which, as a
writer, he was compelled, nonetheless, to express.
Language is insufficient. It is allusive and unsatisfactory and
yet language is all a novelist has—there is nothing else. James, with some justice, saw
the English and American fiction that preceded him as, for the most part, crude,
unwieldy, unlovely and even untrue. He was intent on correcting this. He worked,
too, in a form that selects, discriminates, narrates, directs, evokes, and appears
to do so—but only appears—with authority. Fiction, he knew, can only
fail in its profounder ambitions. How then, the later novels and the prefaces
to the New York Edition ask, to fail better? This is only part of James’s
legacy and it is a legacy neglected in contemporary English language fiction
and criticism. A. S. Byatt in The Whistling Woman, the
conclusion of her quartet, is a rare recent example of a contemporary
English
writer interested
in and capable of continuing it. Byatt has a seriousness and
ambition with which James would identify and so, too, has Philip
Roth. James
makes the
Roth of The
Ghost Writer to The Human Stain possible and Roth
in Writing and
the Powers That Be writes for James and for all serious novelists
when he observes: "What has most engaged me has had to do with expressiveness, rather
than bringing about change or 'making a statement.' Over the years whatever serious
acts of rebelliousness I may have engaged in as a novelist have been directed
far more at my imagination’s own system of constraints and habits of expression
than at the powers that vie for control of the world."
What if James’s sexuality was part of the constraints and determined his
habits of expression? What engaged him most was testing and transcending those
constraints, those habits—not out of shame but artistic necessity? There
is something deeper in a writer’s life than biography. We should be curious
about the details of a writer’s life and how it informs the work but, finally,
having taken due cognizance of them, we should move beyond them. It is like being
in a car and pondering how the petrol moves through the engine instead of concentrating
on driving to our destination. Academics who start from the life, who do not
discriminate between letters dashed off in minutes and works of highly wrought
fiction, deliver us lesser truths. The biographical approach only works if art
is considered mere self-expression. A great novel is never merely self-expression.
Fiction is not a lyric form. What intrigues and inspires is otherness, characters
and situations distinct (but not necessarily different) from one’s own.
A novel is a product of a generous imagination, not selfish fantasy. It is essentially
a self-less activity. It does not announce. It does not declare. It is not a
mirror but a lake: it offers something deeper than one’s own reflection.
Biography must prove. It must assert. It must "give us the man" or
else it fails. It must ponder mystery, contradiction, muddle and cross-purpose
but it must also resolve them whereas fiction, like music, only requires a formal
resolution and so can revel in such things, deepen them further, complicate and
contradict them so that a great novel or short story (and James wrote a score
of them), when re-read, is never the same. James had that same desire as Yeats
for a form of utterance "carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice." Fiction
is slippery and so are the minds that create it and James was pre-eminently a
mind given wholly to fiction. He will always evade the biographer’s grasp
because, no matter the limitations of his life, he was involved in transcending
them through his fiction. Bradley is uninterested in this transcendent James
and is happily intent on a more minor figure. His James is a man who is "particularly
sensitive to the way male-friendship cultivated in late adolescence and early
manhood can have homoerotic undertones that in later adult life remain as sources
of emotional and psychological security."
This is what Bradley means by "permanent adolescence" and, while such
a James and such a theme do exist, it is a fraction of the man and the theme
is evident in only a fraction of his work. It is there in a very early story
like "The Light Man" (which Bradley explicates well) and, beautifully,
it is there in his last novel, The Ambassadors, but
it is a theme that does not feature regularly, variously
or predominantly
in
James’s fiction.
One only needs to refer to the index of Bradley’s book and one fails to
see any mention of The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait
of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The
Spoils of Poynton, "The Aspern Papers", What Maisie Knew, The
Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, "The Jolly Corner", "The
Middle Years" (a story—one of several—that contradicts the theme
of "permanent adolescence": a story that features a plea not for a
return to youth but an extension of life, and why—to work), The Golden
Bowl and The Wings of the Dove. This is a significant
amount of James output to ignore even in so short a book.
Gay, straight or
neuter, I am uninterested
in an account of James that is capable of ignoring them.
In these works, the "gay" James
is less apparent but he is no less responsible for their creation and they are
just as importantly connected to what James knew and experienced as a "gay" man.
In these novels, novellas and stories we experience what Seamus Heaney discovers
in the most original and illuminating poetry, "the mind’s capacity
to conceive a new plane of regard from its own activity, [we are] forwarded
within ourselves."
Bradley (and others before him) continue to concentrate
on lesser works such as Confidence, Roderick Hudson, "Author of Beltraffio" and "The
Pupil" to persuade us of James’s claims as a gay artist—and what
might that imply about gay art? Bradley does do fine work on "Daisy Miller" and
deepens and reinterprets the story in a manner that is almost Jamesian. He also
made me reappraise a late story like "The Great Good Place". At such
moments—and in the commendable felicity of his style—Bradley’s
scrutiny of James’s fiction suggests he is capable of appreciating and
conveying the Henry James Graham Greene so rapturously describes.
