On Henry James and the Enduring Lessons of Love

In my late teens, when I read Henry James for the first time, the experience did nothing for me. I felt faintly repelled by the blocks of unyielding text, the walls of what appeared to be sadistically abstruse sentences that, serpentine in form and labyrinthine in prepositional phrases, never seemed content to simply end. Here, I thought, echoing the sentiments of many a ruffled online reviewer, was a writer, who had accomplished, possibly more than any of his contemporaries, the dishonorable feat of managing to say absolutely nothing in as many and misjudged words as possible. Verbose. Pretentious. And most unforgivable of all: deadly dull.

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Over a decade passed before I came across James again, and the reunion was not wholly unlike the moment in James’s novella, The Beast in the Jungle, when John Marcher meets May Bartram after a separation of nearly the same duration. Brushing shoulders once more with James was less a novelty than, as he describes Marcher’s encounter, “the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning…a continuation, but didn’t know what it continued.”

My rediscovery of James coincided with falling in love: suddenly, unexpectedly, and if I may be frank, involuntarily. It was as if I were Henry St George and Paul Overt in one. At the heart of the conflict, just as in The Lesson of the Master, was a book. I was under contract and under deadline. I pictured myself as Overt in St George’s comfortable room, and I heard the elder author’s encouragement of the young writer, “Try to do some really good work,” as well as, “You’re very strong—you’re wonderfully strong.” Strong enough to give up my version of Marian Fancourt, as St George hoped Overt would do? I considered the pair of mild blue eyes that had startled me into love in the first place, and wondered if I would, by St George’s measure, pass the test.

I don’t know that when one thinks of authors, who are considered great writers of love, that James necessarily stands forth as a prime candidate. Yet James understood what has not only endured but what also remains so critical to the world in which we live: first, that the almost immeasurable plenitude of social interactions does not render one less alone, and second, that love finds its greatest pleasure not stretched across an infinity of time like a patchwork quilt or tapestry that grows and grows larger with every weave, but rather that it thrives best in the infinitesimal, that is, in the unspoken moment, in the stillness and quiet between two people, and that it lives, as in James’s books, eternally on the precipice, hanging in the balance, the ball as it wavers on the top of the tennis net and which may fall either one way or the other, in your court or mine.

Part of the great value of love in James lies in its dogged fixedness to keep itself sensed at all times but unspoken, to permit that it should remain in a state of suspense—stifled, suppressed, even unreturned—but still an essential part of one’s identity.

As a society, we have managed to clothe love and swaddle it under so many layers that it has become virtually unrecognizable, unless it appears to us in the vision of the most conventional forms. The flashing of engagement rings. The vacation or honeymoon pictures, always featuring rows of smiling teeth so bright that they nearly outshine the very glare of the sunrise or sunset on the white-sand beaches. I don’t say that this is not love.

But love is characterized, too, by other traits: its stillness and its almost inestimable aptitude for endurance beyond the measure of human reckoning. Its greatness lies in the profundity of a near-oceanic depth, and in its chameleonic talent for blending in, for passing unnoticed through the world, even as it sustains at its heart a purgatorial blue flame.

In The Golden Bowl, when Charlotte Stant reunites with the Prince, she says, “I don’t want to pretend, and I can’t pretend a moment longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don’t care. I knew I shouldn’t and I find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else. For this.” The “this,” as Charlotte explains when the Prince obtusely requests clarification, is: “To have one hour alone with you.” This, despite the fact that the Prince is on the cusp of marrying another woman, Maggie Verver, and the sad one hour between the former couple is spent walking to seek a suitable present in celebration of that very event.

It is the same sensation of emotion reined in, of love standing only so far as the threshold, in The Spoils of Poynton, when Owen Gereth seeks to prolong his proximity to Fleda Vetch by the most transparent means: “He broke off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers…” Gereth wishes to make a gift to Fleda. He produces “incongruous offers – a travelling-rug, a massive clock, a table for breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of somebody’s ‘works,’” but Fleda, who actually reciprocates Gereth’s feelings, accepts only “a small pin-cushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked out with pins.”

Part of the great value of love in James lies in its dogged fixedness to keep itself sensed at all times but unspoken, to permit that it should remain in a state of suspense—stifled, suppressed, even unreturned—but still an essential part of one’s identity. It is a sacred pact between the lover and the object of desire; there exists an implicit trust that it will stay alive, that its longevity will somehow, against all odds, sustain itself, long after any hope of consummation, spiritual or otherwise, has been utterly exhausted.

It is not so much social graces, or even the bounds of moral rectitude, that constrain this form of love, but that the love belongs almost wholly to the self, such as in the case of Catherine Sloper in Washington Square or Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson, the latter surely a precursor to Lambert Strether’s character in The Ambassadors. It dictates its own rules; it draws its own boundaries. It acknowledges hurdles in the form of familial or financial pressures, but it also chooses to give in or to give up wholly of its own accord.

There is an immense self-sufficiency, and therefore a surprisingly independent attitude towards love in James, irrespective of circumstance. In The American, Christopher Newman’s passion for Madame de Cintré is galvanized by a flame that extends far beyond the countess. His love for her speaks as much to his devotion to his former betrothed as to his ideology and self-made convictions. After all, it is his character, his inherent good nature, that ultimately triumphs, even as he leaves Europe empty-handed.

As John Marcher comes to understand of May Bartram: “She had lived—who could say now with what passion?—since she had loved him for himself…” And in a similar vein, James wrote of Rowland Mallet, “…he seemed to feel the upward sweep of the empty bough from which the golden fruit had been plucked, and then and there accepted the prospect of bachelorhood.” To love, especially to love on one’s own terms, even in the certainty of losing, may be enough.

We don’t know what will happen to Fleda Vetch at the conclusion of The Spoils of Poynton, just as we can only guess as to Strether’s ambiguous future at the end of The Ambassadors. In both cases, and in many others, a loss has occurred, a muffled and quiet, but no less humiliating, defeat. Almost always, a less “worthy” character has won.

In James, though the attitude is not overtly cynical, there seems to be a lesson that may not wholly be without merit, which is that to care too much, to love too much, almost always guarantees defeat, while those who care perhaps a little less than they should, who love a little less than they should, and who “love” far more practically, may find themselves, at the very last, the victor with all the spoils well secured. In this, the Mona Brigstocks of the world tend more or less to prevail over the Fleda Vetches in getting what they want, and the Chad Newsomes sail with some jollity away into the sunset, none the poorer and none the worse for experiencing neither guilt nor enhanced self-awareness in the wake of the wreck they leave behind. The Strethers must gather their losses and move towards an as yet unknown horizon.

For simply having loved, you will change; you will learn something more about the world and probably about yourself.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know such muted and subtle forms of love could exist in literature until I picked up The Wings of the Dove more than ten years after my first cold and cursing foray into Jamesian waters. The revelation was incredibly freeing. For the first time, it was as if I could see my own reflection clearly, in the glass of James’s works. It is all here, I thought, every emotion that I’ve felt course through me. No other author has captured, has bottled it all up, so well and laid it out like a printed map to slowly trace and consume.

I have heard, almost as if a timepiece were held before me, the clock of my mortality tick, as it must in Strether’s or Miss Tita’s ear, and I have listened to the erratic heartbeat of one who is stirred by devotion and passion for another, only to find it was my own. I have, like Catherine Sloper, experienced an outpouring of tears for the sense of a life spent to good purpose but, perhaps, not lived as one would have preferred to live it. I have, like Fleda Vetch, lost to a Mona Brigstock, and sailed, as so many of James’s characters do, only further and further away from the source of my affections. Like Charlotte Stant. Like Maisie. Like John Marcher. Like Rowland Mallet. Like Kate Croy. Like Christopher Newman. Like Paul Overt.

In life, there is never an exact or perfect correlation between what one imagines and desires and what one actually gets. You might get something worse. You might, too, get something better. Or something altogether unexpected that falls somewhere in the middle, and then settle. More often than not in James, love ends neither in the melodramatic tragedy of an operatic climax nor with the glossy finish of fairy tales. Yet what James also seems to promise is love’s transformative power. For simply having loved, you will change; you will learn something more about the world and probably about yourself. And just as the reader is incapable of playing with any success the role of matchmaker in James’s books, we cannot decide what will make someone else happy, even if we, on our own, may envision a promising future painted in high-definition color. I learned this lesson from James, too.

There is a moment in Roderick Hudson when after Rowland Mallet has performed an eloquent monologue on what he would like to do with his life, his cousin Cecilia exclaims, “What an immense number of words to say you want to fall in love!” This is, in essence, James. We need the walls of text that James writes to understand love, to leave us, like the wave that crashes over our heads and which initially buries us under its overwhelming weight, to make us fully comprehend what love is, what it demands, and what it can brave. The performance of what some readers may deem to be verbosity, of taking too roundabout a way to get to the point, ironically compels us to realize that love has been sitting, like the golden bowl, center-stage all along. A profusion of language makes what is not said only more keenly felt, and we arrive at the complete and perfect distillation of those three simple though sacred words: “I love you.”

Not too long ago, I found myself at a crossroads in my life. I had the choice to stay, like May Bartram, in the orbit of the individual I loved, or to renounce, to pass my existence as a Paul Overt, a Catherine Sloper, or a Miss Tita might. I remembered that one time, as I stood in some public place with the person I cared for, the two of us deep in conversation, an elderly woman passed us, rolling her carry-on luggage noisily by. She caught my eye, looked at him, then looked at me, and, turning pink, smiled to herself (maybe she was my Madame Grandoni). In her expression, I saw, in a kind of reverse of the conclusion of The Beast in the Jungle, the revelation that my supposed secret was well known. All the adoration I felt must have been written on my face as plain as an obnoxious billboard one tries to ignore while driving on the highway.

In retrospect, this feels apropos to what it means to read and to understand love in James and, by extension, in life. Love is rarely, if ever, so direct, and one sees clearer what one feels for seeing it refracted through the prism of the face of a blushing stranger. The other day, I wrote these words on a Freud-themed sticky note (happily called Freudian Slips): “I still think of you, though I shouldn’t.” Then, “I miss you—though I have no right to.” I crumpled up the note and threw it away. Empty words, I thought. Too sentimental. Far better to cloak desire, to hide love behind a curtain, to dress it up in hifalutin thoughts, in existential monologue, in characters in literature, in dialogue that eludes or never answers the original question at all, that is, in typical Jamesian conversation.

“Wait…Wait,” the Prince says to Maggie Verver at the near conclusion of The Golden Bowl. “Live!” Strether entreats little Bilham in one of James’s most impassioned speeches in The Ambassadors. “It’s not too late for you,” Strether says. And so it might also be said for love. To wait. To live! And that it is not too late.