The Bostonians (2 page)

Introduction

“It is not that I have anything strange or new to relate,” the twenty-eight-year-old Henry James wrote to American arts scholar and Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton in 1872. “In fact when one sits down to sum up Cambridge life
plume
en main, the strange thing seems its aridity”
(Selected Letters,
p. 91; see “For Further Reading”). In 1913, two weeks before his seventieth birthday, James would use the same word, this time as an adjective, to describe the city in which his family had settled in Massachusetts. By then he had been living in England for many years, and in a letter to his sister-in-law Alice, he declared a visit to America impossible. He could not, he explained, spend the summer in “utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge”
(Selected Letters,
p. 407). I am interested in this repetition because, despite the image of desiccation, twelve years after the first letter and twenty-nine years before the second, Henry James began an entire novel devoted to that “arid” part of the world and called it
The Bostonians.

Although Henry James, Junior, was born in New York City and spent a good part of his childhood en route from one European city to another as he, his siblings, and mother followed the restless Continental wanderings of Henry James, Senior, Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, would become deeply familiar places for the novelist. During the academic year 1862-1863, Henry, Jr., studied law at Harvard University before giving it up for a life of writing. His family moved to Boston in 1864 and shortly thereafter settled permanently in Cambridge at 20 Quincy Street. But long before the family’s relocation, the ideas of New England had been running in the senior Henry James’s blood. The James children grew up in an atmosphere of idealism, reform, and new thought. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists, including Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott were all friends of the family. Henry, Sr., was also an ardent advocate of immediate emancipation for the slaves and sent his two younger sons, Garth Wilkinson (“Wilky”) and Robertson (“Bob”), to the Concord Academy, where Thoreau had taught and where three of Emerson’s children were enrolled, as was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian. Under the direction of Franklin Sanborn, a fund-raiser and active conspirator in the stand his fellow abolitionist John Brown took at Harper’s Ferry in what was then Virginia, the school was more than an experiment in coeducation; it was a locus of feverish ideology. Both Wilky and Bob James left school to fight for the Union cause. Wilky enlisted at age seventeen and, not long after, joined the first regiment of black troops—the 54th regiment—as adjutant to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. On May 28, 1863, accompanied by rousing fanfare, the 54th marched out of Boston. By the end of July that same year, nearly half of that regiment’s men and most of its officers had been killed during the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Bay, South Carolina. Wilky James was badly injured but survived. After the war, he and Robertson, subsidized by their father, became the owners of a plantation in Florida that employed black laborers. The venture failed, but their effort remains a testament not only to the idealism of the brothers but to the hopes of the world that played a crucial role in shaping them—zealous, high-minded New England.

There were other ideas wafting about the James household—imported ones. A disciple of both Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish natural scientist turned mystic, and François-Marie-Charles Fourier (1772-1837), the French social philosopher, Henry, Sr., embraced a miasmic coupling of spiritual enlightenment (Swedenborg believed he had found a key to an angelic reading of the Scriptures) and a utopian vision of a new society in which human beings freed from repression and inhibition could release their true passionate selves and lead orderly, harmonious lives in communities known as phalanxes.

As in every age, rigorous intellectual ideas mingled with more dubious notions. In both Europe and the United States, a rage for Mesmerism—a method of hypnosis and suggestion practiced by German physician F. A. Mesmer (1734-1815)—and the occult shook fashionable society and intellectual circles. Seances—group meetings during which participants try to communicate with the spirits of the dead—abounded. The novelist’s brother William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, maintained a belief in spiritualism throughout his life and hoped to continue his researches beyond the grave. He asked his wife to attempt to contact him after he was dead, and she did try, but in vain. On another occasion, however, without his widow present, William was reported to have spoken from the other side. When Henry received news of the phantom voice, he called it “the most abject and impudent, the hollowest, vulgarest, and basest rubbish” (Edel,
Henry James: A Life,
p. 670). Then, as now, vegetarianism was in vogue among the forward thinking, but the enlightened fell for other health fads as well. A number of the Transcendentalists became enamored of Fletcherism, an eating practice devised by the nineteenth-century nutritionist Thomas Fletcher that encouraged chewing food into a liquid mush before swallowing. Henry, Jr., took up the cause for a while and masticated with such vigor that William, a nonbeliever, blamed Fletcherism for Henry’s myriad bowel troubles.

If contemporary readers find these beliefs and ideas remote, I ask them to pause and reconsider. We live in an age of religious sects and mad militias, of gurus scattered about the country from California to New York, of channeling, colonies, crystals, and raw-food crazes. In the United States, utopian quests for purity, perfection, and self-improvement, no matter how wacky, have always found fertile ground in which to flourish. The question remains, however: Why did Henry James describe the lively intellectual climate (with its admittedly nutty fringes) of Boston and its environs as “arid” and “vacuous”? James felt that American culture was simply too young and too thin to sustain him as an artist. He was continually pulled by the lure of Europe, by its old and visible history—its architecture, painting, ruins, and, of course, its literature.

For James, the single most important American writer was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He read and loved Hawthorne’s books as a youth, and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two would never be dissolved. Hawthorne, a sublime storyteller who criticized both American Puritanism and utopianism in his fiction, became the American literary precedent for James. When he woke up on May 19, 1864, to the news that the great American novelist was dead, the young Henry James sat on his bed and wept. Like most literary sons, however, he was critical of the father, and when writing about Hawthorne, he articulates his ambivalence about American fiction:

But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has widely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth are the sum of what the world usually recognizes, and in this modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance
(Literary Criticism,
vol. 1, p. 320).

However shallow James may have found American literary soil, he acknowledged that Hawthorne sprouted from it, and
The Bostonians
owes a debt to the older writer’s work,
The Blithedale Romance
in particular, which was inspired by Hawthorne’s brief, discontented participation in Brook Farm, Margaret Fuller’s Transcendentalist-Fourierist experiment in communal living. In his essay “Brook Farm and Concord,” James quotes the words of the skeptic Coverdale from Hawthorne’s utopian romance: “No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from the old standpoint”
(Literary Criticism,
vol. 1, p. 387). It is a sentence that speaks directly to
The Bostonians
—not to any particular character, but to the effect of the narrative as a whole, which unearths its truths through the continual push and pull of people and ideas that find themselves in rigid opposition.

In the novel, two ideologies and two people are pitted against each other. In its simplest terms, the book presents us with a conflict between a reformer and a reactionary, between a triumphant North and a defeated South, between a woman and a man.
The Bostonians
is a novel of ideas, but the ideas articulated by James’s two battling characters, who are also distant cousins—Ohve Chancellor, a Boston spinster and champion of women’s rights, and Basil Ransom, a bitter archconservative from Mississippi—are not the ideas the book probes. Indeed, both characters are guilty of mouthing sentimental or clichéd tripe, and I don’t think their creator was terribly interested in their beliefs per se. He was drawn by something infinitely more complex than a conflict between two hardened ideological positions. Like all of James’s novels,
The Bostonians
is an investigation of what happens
between
and
among
people, and how that arena of interaction can take on a life of its own and determine the fates of those involved.

Miss Chancellor and Mr. Ransom are ferocious rivals in what becomes a love triangle. Both want possession of Verena Tarrant, the pretty, weak, and very charming product of a Cambridge quack healer and the daughter of an abolitionist. The innocent Verena, who has a “gift” for inspirational speaking, is nothing if not a child of the
new ideas.
“She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and had been passed from hand to hand by trance-speakers; she was familiar with every kind of ‘cure,’ and had grown up among lady-editors of newspapers advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the marriage-tie” (p. 77). Through this tug-of-war over a person, Verena, who is also the creature of a particular New England subculture, James explores the psychological implications of belief—how a climate of ideas can invade, affect, mingle with, and be used, both consciously and unconsciously, by a person in the throes of passion.

The book’s intellectual vigor, then, is not located in what the characters
say
they believe, in their dogmatic positions, but rather in a dialectical tension between the “personal” and the “impersonal,” the “private” and “the public,” “the particular” and “the general.” These words in their various forms occur so often in the novel that they become a conspicuous and pointed refrain. What they
mean,
however, is another, far more complicated business. Because
The Bostonians
skips from one person’s point of view to another’s, the narrator gives us access to the thoughts of all his major characters and to each one’s idiosyncratic uses of these words, a fact that further complicates their meaning. When Basil first meets his cousin Olive, he notes the bourgeois opulence of her house and feels that he has never found himself “in the presence of so much organised privacy” (p. 14). This is exactly the realm in which he hopes to place Verena. He emphatically believes that she is meant “for privacy, for him, for love” (p. 249). On the other hand, the narrator tells us that Mrs. Farrinder, formidable spokeswoman for the emancipation of women, has “something public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet” (pp. 27-28). The foggy, attenuated Miss Birdseye, relic of an earlier abolitionist age, is also a being of generalities, a person who, though rumored to have had a Hungarian lover in her youth, could never, the narrator tells us, “have entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those days, only with causes” (p. 26). Dr. Prance, on the other hand, devoted physician and living proof of female competence in a profession usually reserved for men, has no use for causes: “She looked about her with a kind of near-sighted deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should not be expected to generalise in any way” (p. 28). The society matron Mrs. Burrage, only marginally involved in causes, is also a woman whose “favours” are “general, not particular” (p. 141). Selah Tarrant stresses that his daughter’s success as a speaker is “thoroughly impersonal,” and Verena herself insists that when she addresses an audience, “It is not
me
...” (p. 51). In sharp contrast, Ransom, as he watches Verena’s performance, thinks to himself that what he is witnessing is “an intensely personal exhibition” (p. 56). And while Olive Chancellor hopes and believes that she will never be like her frivolous sister, Mrs. Luna—who, like Mrs. Farinder, is “so personal, so narrow” (p. 153)—Basil Ransom finds Olive to be “intensely, fearfully, a person” (p. 87). Verena, too, discovers “how peculiarly her friend” Olive is “constituted, how nervous and serious... how personal, how exclusive” (p. 72). The words slip according to each character’s perceptions, blind spots, and feelings, and only through their interplay can we begin to make sense of James’s meaning.

In a letter to his friend Grace Norton, who was going through a difficult time in her life, James gave this advice: “Only don’t I beseech you generalize too much in these sympathies and tender-nesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can” (Selected Letters, p. 92). On the other hand, when Hugh Walpole, novelist and friend of James, quoted “The Master” in his diary, the sentiment expressed appears to be quite different: “I’ve had one great passion in my life‾the intellectual passion.... Make it your rule to encourage the impersonal interest as against the personal—but remember also that they are interdependent” (quoted in Edel, Henry
James: A Life,
p. 697). The two passages dramatize what I would call the focused ambiguity of James’s language. He begged Grace not to “generalize” or “melt” but rather to encourage in herself the particular, the personal, the fixed, and he advised Hugh to encourage the opposite, “the impersonal interest,” with the important caveat that he remember that the impersonal and the personal are always connected.