Fame & Folly (18 page)

It was a gradual but steady repudiation, repeatedly contradicted by James’s continuing and zigzag pursuit of managers and productions. In the end, the theater repudiated
him
; but the distinction he insisted on between theater, that low endeavor, and drama, that “highest ideal,” went on to serve him in what would become one of his strangest fictions. After
Guy Domville
, he undertook to imagine a novel which would have all the attributes of a theatrical production. The reader would be supplied with dialogue, sets, grand and ingenious costuming, gestures of the head and hand; there would be entrances and exits; there would be drawings rooms and wit. The “few grave, rigid laws” of the drama would wash away all the expository freedoms and flexibilities of the traditional novel—above all the chance to explain the action, to comment and interpret, to speak in metaphor. Narrative, and the narrator’s guiding hum, would give way to the bareness of talk
unaccoutered and unconstrued, talk deprived of authorial amplification; talk as
clue
.

The work that was to carry the burden of this lucidly calculated experiment was conceived on March 4, 1895, three months after the failure of
Guy Domville
. On that day James entered into his Notebook “the idea of the little London girl who grows up to ‘sit with’ the free-talking modern young mother … and, though the conversation is supposed to be expurgated for her, inevitably hears, overhears, guesses, follows, takes in, becomes acquainted with, horrors.” The Notebook recorded nothing about any intention to mimic the form of a play. But in his Preface to the New York Edition (1908) of
The Awkward Age
, James stressed that, from the start, the story and its situation had presented itself to him “on absolutely scenic lines, and that each of these scenes in itself … abides without a moment’s deflexion by the principle of the stage-play.” Speaking of the “technical amusement” and “bitter-sweetness” arising from this principle, he reflected on the rich novelistic discursiveness he had early determined to do without: “Exhibition may mean in a ‘story’ twenty different ways, fifty excursions, alternatives, excrescences, and the novel, as largely practiced in English, is the perfect paradise of the loose end.” The play, by contrast, “consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface, and as grave a dishonour, as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry.” Moreover, he pointed out, the play is committed to “objectivity,” to the “imposed absence of that ‘going behind,’ ” to eschewing the “storyteller’s great property-shop of aids to illusion.”

In choosing to write a novel confined to dialogue and scene; in deciding to shape
The Awkward Age
according to self-limiting rules of suppression and omission; in giving up the brilliant variety of the English novel’s widest and lushest potential, an art of abundance that he had long ago splendidly perfected—what was James up to? What system of psychological opposition had he fallen into? On the one hand, a play in the form of a novel, or a novel in the form of a play, was a response to “the most horrible hours of my life.” What the stage would not let him do, he would do in any
case—on his own venerable turf, with no possibility of catcalls. An act of triumph, or contempt, or revenge; perhaps a reward for having endured so much shame. And on the other hand, a kind of penance: he was stripping himself clean, reducing a luxuriant craft to a monkish surrender of its most capacious instruments.

But penance for what?
The Awkward Age
represents an enigma. Though it intends unquestionably to be a comedy—a social comedy, a comedy of manners (as “The Turn of the Screw” unquestionably sets out to be a ghost story)—some enormous grotesquerie, or some grotesque enormity, insinuates itself into this ultimately mysterious work. Having straitjacketed his tale with the “few grave, rigid laws” of the stage, James resolved not to “go behind” its scenes with all those dozens of canny analyses and asides that are possible for the novel; yet on the whole it is as if proscenium and backdrop, and all the accouterments between them, have melted away, and nothing is left but what is “behind”—a “behind” any ordinary novelistic explication would not be equal to and could not touch. Paradoxically, the decision
not
to “go behind” put James squarely backstage, in the dark of the wings, in ill-lit and untidy dressing rooms among discarded makeup jars and their sticky filth—in the very place where there can be no explanation of the world on stage, because the world on stage is an invention and an untruth. James descended, in short, into an interior chaos; or to say it otherwise, with the composition of
The Awkward Age
he became, finally and incontrovertibly, a modernist. Like the modernists, he swept past the outer skin (the theater and its stage, the chatter of counterfeit drawing rooms, the comings and goings of actors and audiences, the coherent conscious machinery of things) to the secret life behind—glimmers of buried truths, the undisclosed drama of hint and inference.

The façade of comedy and the horror behind. And the penalty for “going behind”—while rigging up, via those “few grave, rigid laws,” every obstacle to it—was the impenetrable blackness, the blankness, the
nox perpetua
, that gathered there, among the ropes and pulleys, where it is inevitable that one “hears, overhears, guesses, follows, takes in, becomes acquainted with, horrors.” (The condition, one might note, of K. in
The Castle
.) And the horrors
themselves? They cannot be named. It is their namelessness that defines them as horrors.

Yet James did give them a name—amorphous, suggestive, darkened by its imperial Roman origins, reminiscent of ancient clerical pageantry, more a riddle than a name: “the sacred terror.” A translation, or, more likely a transmutation, of
sacro terrore:
the awe one feels in the presence of sacred or exalted personages, pope or emperor, before whom one may not speak; the dread one feels before the divine mysteries, or the head of Medusa. The face of a knowledge that is beyond our knowledge—intimations that cannot be borne. In the Preface to “The Turn of the Screw,” James referred (handling it lightly so as not to be burned) to “the dear old sacred terror” as “the withheld glimpse” of “dreadful matter.” The glimpse is withheld; to be permitted more than the glimpse would be to know too much. The sacred terror is, in fact, the sensation—not simply fright, but a kind of revulsion—that comes when glimpse perilously lengthens into gaze.

I
N
1894, the year before the idea of
The Awkward Age
materialized in his Notebook, and not long before
Guy Domville
went into rehearsals, two electrifying personal events brought James close to the sacred terror, far closer than he wished to be. In both instances he stopped at glimpse and contrived to shut himself away from gaze. The first event was the suicide, in Italy, of Constance Fenimore Woolson. A relation of James Fenimore Cooper, Fenimore (as she was called) was an American novelist who settled successively in Florence, Venice, and Rome. Bent on homage, she had first approached James in 1880, in Florence, with a letter of introduction from America. James found her intelligent and moderately engaging, and offered his assistance as an acutely sophisticated guide to Florentine art. But what was a cautious friendship on his part became, on hers, a worshipful love. James could not reciprocate. She was middle-aged, unmarried, deaf in one ear—an admirable companion whom he was learning to be wary of. He worried that she might mistake occasional camaraderie
for an encouragement of the affections. The news of her death in 1894, after nearly a decade and a half of correspondence (her letters were very long, his very short) bewildered and initially misled him. He had the impression she had died of “pneumonia supervening on influenza,” and prepared to journey from London to her funeral in Rome. “Poor isolated and fundamentally tragic being!” he summed her up. “She was intrinsically one of the saddest and least happy natures I have ever met; and when I ask myself what I
feel
about her death the only answer that comes to me is from what I felt about the melancholy, the limitations and the touching loneliness of her life. I was greatly attached to her and valued exceedingly her friendship.” All that, however, was glimpse, not gaze. The moment James learned it was suicide that had removed Fenimore—she had leaped from a second-story window—he retreated quickly and decided against attending her burial. Leon Edel speculates that James felt some responsibility for the hopelessness that had led to what James termed her “suicidal mania.” Whether that is so or not, it is certainly true that James came to rest in a conventional, and distancing, judgment—“fundamentally tragic being!”—and averted his eyes from any connection he might have had with Fenimore’s dread, or her destruction. He would not seek to know too much. He would evade the sacred terror. He would not “go behind”: the preparation for going behind—the horrible hours—had not yet occurred.

Two years before Fenimore’s death, James’s sister Alice died in London. The cause was breast cancer, but she had been strangely invalided since girlhood, and was in the care of a young woman companion, Katharine Loring. Alice had followed James to London, or had at least followed his inclination to extract himself from America. Hers was an activist temperament (she interested herself in the hot politics of Irish Home Rule) that had chosen, for reasons neither her physicians nor her family could fathom, to go to bed for life. An 1889 photograph of her lodgings at Leamington—a health resort outside of London—survives: a capacious sick-room, high-ceilinged, with a single vast window, curtained and draperied; pictures dropped on long wires from the wainscoting; a chandelier sprouting fat globes; a tall carved mirror over a black
fireplace; a round table with lamp, vase, flowers, books, magnifying glass. The effect is of Victorian swathing—layers of cloth over every flat and vertical surface: the mantel hung with cloth, the table, the back of a chair. Lamps, jugs, flowers, photos parade across the mantel. The Persian hearthrug smothers still another carpet, splotched with large flowers. Alice James herself seems swathed, almost swaddled, half-erect on a kind of sofa muffled in voluminously sprawling bedclothes, pillows propping her shoulder and neck. Next to her, nearer the window, holding a book, sits Miss Loring, her throat and bosom lost in a flurry of scarves. Both women are severely buttoned to the chin. It is a photograph that incites the lungs to gulp air; if it were possible to step into this scene, though the looking glass is polished and clear, one might feel choked by too many flower-patterns, the mistiness of light incarcerated, the stale smells of unrelieved enclosure.

William James, in his farewell letter to his sister, wrote that “if the tumor should turn out to be cancerous,… then goodbye to neurasthenia and neuralgia and headache, and weariness and palpitation and disgust all at one stroke.” To this physician brother, Alice had all along suffered from “the inscrutable and mysterious character of the doom of nervous weakness which has chained you down for all these years.” Alice’s illness, in short, was—until the advent of cancer—what we nowadays call “psychological.” The genius sister of two genius brothers, she was self-imprisoned, self-restricted. Engulfed by cushions and shawls and wrappings at Leamington, in 1889 she began a diary: “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather what doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me.”

She had had a history of terrors and nightmares. At twenty she had her first nervous breakdown (if that is what it was), at thirty her second, whereupon she was launched into an infinite series of undiagnosable ailments and their dubious, sometimes bizarre, remedies. She talked of suicide, and kept lists of contemporary suicides. She struggled for intellectual autonomy in an age when young women submitted, through marriage or otherwise, to the limitations of the domestic. Invalidism was, obliquely, one manner
of solution: it yielded up an escape from ordinary female roles and contexts. At rest on her sofa, surrounded by heaps of books on every table-top, Alice lived in her head.

In her head she fought for Irish liberation; in her head she fought for her own. A famous sentence in her diary records a passionate revolution, in fantasy, of body and soul against a ruling class of one: “As I used to sit immovable reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly invading my muscles, taking some one of their myriad forms such as throwing myself out of the window or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table, it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and straitjacket upon me too.”

In contrast to these dark recollections, Alice’s diary offers a mellow view of Henry James, who often came to divert her and Miss Loring, bringing catty news and speculative gossip from his broader social world. “I have given him endless care and anxiety but notwithstanding this and the fantastic nature of my troubles I have never seen an impatient look upon his face or heard an unsympathetic or misunderstanding sound cross his lips. He comes at my slightest sign,” she wrote, and spoke of a “pitch of brotherly devotion never before approached by the race.” After Alice’s death in 1892, Katharine Loring took away with her to Boston an urn containing Alice’s ashes, and two thick notebooks; the latter were the pages of the diary. Two years later—in 1894, the year of Fenimore’s suicide—Miss Loring arranged for the diary to be privately printed, and dispatched one copy to Henry, and another to William. Both brothers were impressed. Henry described his sister’s literary claim—he recognized that the diary
was
a literary work—as “heroic in its individuality, its independence—its face-to-face with the universe for and by herself,” and praised the “beauty and eloquence,” the “rich irony and humor,” of Alice’s pen. William’s own high pleasure—“a leaf in the family laurel crown”—was tempered by a graver evaluation: “personal power venting itself on no opportunity,” he concluded.