The Bostonians (4 page)

Once Ransom’s attraction to Verena has become conscious love, his pursuit of her is increasingly described in terms of force. “In playing with the subject this way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a man’s brutality—of being pushed by an impulse to test her good-nature, which seemed to have no limit” (p. 227). Later he understands that his relentless pressure has made her “tremendously open to attack” (p. 337), that he is engaged in a “siege” (p. 357). By the end of the novel, Verena is in a state of “surrender” (p. 409) and he has “by muscular force, wrenched her away” from Olive and the waiting public (p. 414). The war imagery is obvious. James is pointing to a second, far more personal version of the North/South conflict, but Mr. Ransom’s victory over Miss Chancellor, his conquest of Verena and her future in domestic bondage, isn’t achieved by “muscular force,” but by talk.

It is interesting to note that Ransom’s decision to chase Verena in earnest, despite his poverty and dim prospects, is fueled by the rather flimsy justification that one of his essays has at last found a publisher. A single publication does not change Ransom’s financial future, but he seizes upon it as a sign of a new public voice, which invigorates him in his quest to silence Verena’s. The newly acquired stature as public speaker gives credence to Ransom’s private utterance, a marriage proposal, just as his antifeminist ideas justify his very personal advance on Verena. The eloquent phrases describing the pathos of female oppression that Olive feeds to Verena can’t contend with Basil’s verbal seduction. His most potent phrase turns out to be his accusation that Miss Tarrant isn’t real. He tells her that in her desire to please others, she has come to resemble a “‘preposterous puppet”’ commandeered from behind the scenes, and the suitor turns his love object’s own phrase against her: “ ‘It isn’t you, the least in the world’” (p. 313). What she originally believed was selfless devotion to a cause, a belief that allowed her to proclaim with pride, “It isn’t me,” is transformed through Ransom’s steady rhetorical assault into an accusation of fraud: “These words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation” (p. 354). Sentence by sentence, Ransom enters the inner sanctum of her doubts. Although he has touched on a truth and offers Verena the hope of “standing forth in ... freedom” (p. 313), his is finally a promise of continued captivity under another name. Verena’s fate is sad, but she is too wobbly and empty a character to be tragic, and Basil Ransom’s hunger for Verena Tarrant is augmented by the stature of his adversary, Olive Chancellor, who, unlike Verena, is truly his equal. In terms of the book’s politics, this irony creates a final and terrible resonance. It also redeems James from the charge that
The Bostonians
is somehow against women. It is a book uncomfortable with causes but deeply, intimately comfortable with women.

In the novel, only Olive Chancellor achieves tragic dimensions, and it is because of all the characters in the book she feels most, and feeling is the domain where Henry James is transcendent. The painfully private Olive Chancellor will in the end suffer the horror of public exposure and failure as well as the loss of the person whom she loves most passionately in the world, and it is a fate she has brought upon herself. Her culpability, however, doesn’t in the least diminish the depth or reality of her pain or this reader’s immense pity for her. Stiff, humorless, prejudiced, and half blind to the reasons for her actions, the little Boston spinster becomes, in her profound sorrow and humiliation, heroic:

As soon as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was (p. 412).

“In the arts,” James wrote, “feeling is always meaning” (quoted in Edel,
Henry James: A Life,
p. 250). For me, these words illuminate not only the novelist’s
ars poetica
but also James’s great strength as a writer. His experience of the world and his great empathy for other people produced a body of work that adamantly refused ready categories, received ideas, and preordained notions of all kinds in favor of the difficult, strange, tender, and always multifarious arena of human relations and emotions. I think James felt that every attempt to reduce life to a system of beliefs—religious, political, or philosophical—must inevitably become a form of lying.

Late in his life, he tried to explain his wariness of system to two politically engaged writers: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. As a member of the committee that had rejected a play by James, Shaw told its author in a letter, “People don’t want works of art from you. They want help, they want above all encouragement” (quoted in a note in
Selected Letters,
p. 380). In his response, James argued that “all direct ‘encouragement’—the thing you enjoin me on—encouragement of the short cut and say ‘artless’ order, is really more likely than not to be shallow and misleading”
(Selected Letters,
p. 379). Wells had hurt James by publishing a cruel attack on the older writer in a satirical book called
Boon, The Mind of the Race
(1915), in which he had, among other things, criticized his “view of life and literature.” To Wells, James wrote, “I
have
no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner”
(Selected Letters,
p. 430). And later in the same letter, he elaborated further, “It is art that
makes
life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process” (p. 431). James believed in the power of art, not because he thought it would change the world or because he imagined it could be a mirror of life. Art, he explains to Wells, is “for the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift” (p. 431).

James was probably too subtle for his correspondents, but the idea of “extension” makes sense to me because art and the world can’t be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art it creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work
means.
I have lived with James’s characters and stories for many years and they do not leave me. They have become part of who I am, and I can’t help but feel that their creator, who worried over his paltry sales and lack of popularity with the reading public, would have been very happy to know how I feel. He would have been glad to know that his work has lasted and grown in importance, and that I am only one of many people who have been permanently altered by his books.

In its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, The
Bostonians
is an embodiment of James’s nonprescriptive idea about what a novel should be. Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced, precise, and sensitive prose in opposition to the dead phrases that stream from lecture halls, line the pages of newspapers, and float from one speaker to another in that arid climate that was Boston. That city has changed, and the United States has changed, since James wrote his American novel, but dead phrases, empty rhetoric, clichéd thought, as well as ready-made opinions and just plain nonsense proffered to the public by the press show no sign of abating anytime soon.

I believe it’s impossible to read
The Bostonians
without at least wondering about the ways we use language or language uses us. Moribund and idiotic political statements continue to influence and sway us because of the manner in which they are spoken or written. Even the most sincere declaration of devotion to a noble cause may be born from private venom or personal misery. There is always a gap between what we feel and what we say. Henry James knew that it was heartbreakingly difficult to capture the flux of experience in words, to articulate the riddle of human feelings and actions, but this was precisely his ambition, and I, as one of his faithful readers, love him for it.

Siri Hustvedt
earned a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College in 1977 and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1986. She has written a book of poetry,
Reading to You;
three novels:
The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl,
and
What I Loved;
and a book of essays,
Yonder.
She has published numerous articles and essays on various subjects in the United States and Europe.
What I Loved
was short-listed for the Prix Étranger Femina in France, the Waterstone’s Literary Fiction Award in England, and the Barcelona Bookseller’s Prize in Spain; it won the Prix des Librairies du Quebec in Canada. A regular contributor to
Modem Painters,
she has written widely on art. Princeton University Architectural Press will publish a book of her essays on painting,
Mysteries of the Rectangle,
in spring 2005.

A Note on the Text

The Bostonians
is the most significant work by Henry James not included in the New York Edition (1907-1909) of his novels and stories, for which James provided extensive revisions of his best-loved books along with prefaces. First serialized in
Century Magazine
between February 1885 and February 1886,
The Bostonians
was published by Macmillan in book form on February 16, 1886. This three-volume edition, for which James made minor revisions, has served as the source for all subsequent impressions of the novel. One of James’s modifications to the novel between its serialization and its publication in volume form was to divide his narrative into three “Books.” Scholars have pointed out that either James or his printer may have mistakenly designated Chapter XIX as the first chapter of the second book. Though this chapter opens the second volume of the three-volume set, it is not a logical place to begin book two. (Indeed, for the one-volume edition of the book published by Macmillan later in 1886, the second book begins two chapters later with Chapter XXI.) To avoid confusion, the present edition of
The Bostonians
follows the text of the first, three-volume edition, while omitting both volume and book divisions.

I
¹

O
live will come down in about ten minutes; she told me to tell you that. About ten; that is exactly like Olive. Neither five nor fifteen, and yet not ten exactly, but either nine or eleven. She didn’t tell me to say she was glad to see you, because she doesn’t know whether she is or not, and she wouldn’t for the world expose herself to telling a fib. She is very honest, is Olive Chancellor; she is full of rectitude. Nobody tells fibs in Boston; I don’t know what to make of them all. Well, I am very glad to see you, at any rate.”

These words were spoken with much volubility by a fair, plump, smiling woman who entered a narrow drawing-room in which a visitor, kept waiting for a few moments, was already absorbed in a book. The gentleman had not even needed to sit down to become interested: apparently he had taken up the volume from a table as soon as he came in, and, standing there, after a single glance round the apartment, had lost himself in its pages. He threw it down at the approach of Mrs. Luna, laughed, shook hands with her, and said in answer to her last remark, “You imply that you do tell fibs. Perhaps that is one.”

“Oh no; there is nothing wonderful in my being glad to see you,” Mrs. Luna rejoined, “when I tell you that I have been three long weeks in this unprevaricating city.”

“That has an unflattering sound for me,” said the young man. “I pretend not to prevaricate.”

“Dear me, what’s the good of being a Southerner?” the lady asked. “Olive told me to tell you she hoped you will stay to dinner. And if she said it, she does really hope it. She is willing to risk that.”

“Just as I am?” the visitor inquired, presenting himself with rather a work-a-day aspect.

Mrs. Luna glanced at him from head to foot, and gave a little smiling sigh, as if he had been a long sum in addition. And, indeed, he was very long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging, like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent upon his hostess’s deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low and wide, and the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the opening of his waistcoat, was adorned by a pin containing a small red stone. In spite of this decoration the young man looked poor—as poor as a young man could look who had such a fine head and such magnificent eyes. Those of Basil Ransom were dark, deep, and glowing; his head had a character of elevation which fairly added to his stature; it was a head to be seen above the level of a crowd, on some judicial bench or political platform, or even on a bronze medal. His forehead was high and broad, and his thick black hair, perfectly straight and glossy, and without any division, rolled back from it in a leonine manner. These things, the eyes especially, with their smoldering fire, might have indicated that he was to be a great American statesman; or, on the other hand, they might simply have proved that he came from Carolina or Alabama. He came, in fact, from Mississippi, and he spoke very perceptibly with the accent of that country. It is not in my power to reproduce by any combination of characters this charming dialect; but the initiated reader will have no difficulty in evoking the sound, which is to be associated in the present instance with nothing vulgar or vain. This lean, pale, sallow, shabby, striking young man, with his superior head, his sedentary shoulders, his expression of bright grimness and hard enthusiasm, his provincial, distinguished appearance, is, as a representative of his sex, the most important personage in my narrative; he played a very active part in the events I have undertaken in some degree to set forth. And yet the reader who likes a complete image, who desires to read with the senses as well as with the reason, is entreated not to forget that he prolonged his consonants and swallowed his vowels, that he was guilty of elisions and interpolations which were equally unexpected, and that his discourse was pervaded by something sultry and vast, something almost African in its rich, basking tone, something that suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton-field. Mrs. Luna looked up at all this, but saw only a part of it; otherwise she would not have replied in a bantering manner, in answer to his inquiry: “Are you ever different from this?” Mrs. Luna was familiar—intolerably familiar.