BOOKS

The Wounds of Judgment

BY RONALD BRYDEN IN A,pgust, 1883, Henry James sailed back to Europe from Boston. It was his eighth east- ward crossing, and not his last, but in some ways lt.lvas his final parting from America. On his last trip home, the previous winter, his mother had died suddenly. This time he had been summoned by a message that his father was sinking, only to be met in New York with news of the old man's death. He stayed out the winter to settle the estate, quarrelling in the course of it with his brother William over the share to be allotted WilkY, the family black sheep in Milwaukee. Wilky had a rheumatic heart and four children— securing some part of Henry James Senior's fortune for them would obviously be the last „thing Henry could do for his once sunny and feckless younger brother. Boston, in deference to his mourning, left him to himself: the Image of the city which he evoked in his next novel, The Bostonians, was one of cold loneliness, desolate, snowy streets and withdrawn people in provincial black. Above all, on April 15 he was forty. His life had passed a point of balance. The pre- Ponderant mass of it now lay in London. The English capital, unobtrusively, had be- come home. It was 'not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach.' Its soot and Poverty appalled him, he was chilled by the r,igiditY and philistinism of its society. It lacked ,..tne grace of Paris, the aged warmth of Rome. tut it was 'the most complete compendium of the world.' The urge to travel, which had taken nun wandering across Europe in the Seventies, Was Waning: the pleasure of the purely Picturesque was losing its hold. He had taken What he needed from the French masters, and it. ow found them limited. The Naturalists were Sri Power, with whom he had no sympathy CCes Messieurs seem to me to have lost the perception of anything in nature but the genital organs'), and the whole tone of French intellectual life now he him as narrow. 'Chinese, Chinese, Chinese,' he wrote to William. 'They are besotted, finished mandarins and Paris is their celestial empire.' The adventure of experience, to which he had tiven his life, was taking a new turn. In Decem- et', 1885, he took a twenty-one-year lease on a flat in De Vcre Gardens, Kensington.

to Leon Edel has chosen a.s natural a watershed

Open the third stage of his four-volume life of biography as Froude did when he divided his ulography of Carlyle between the years before and after his coming to London. In other ways,

Edel's work recalls Victorian models. It is

based mainly the nineteenth-century manner, mainly on James's own letters—many para- graphs evidently paraphrase the novelist's own _or.ds—of which Mr. Edel is also preparing an edition. It is modern chiefly in probing for P_sYchological patterns common to James's life and his fiction, but this adds less than one would s „t,.1_PP°se• While, as everyone admits, his bio- 614Phy is clearly one of the major works of „ * HENRY JAMES: THE MIDDLE YEARS, 1884-94. 4111 Leon Edel. (Hart-Davis, 50s.)

scholarship in our time, Mr. Edel is not a particu- larly profound literary critic, and his passing comments on the novels take us little deeper than James allows us to go in his correspondence. Froude, with those arbitrary touches of dramatic insight, got further into his man.

Mr. Edel has seen that the death of James's parents made a radical change in the themes of his work. Up to 1884, he had been concerned, in Roderick Hudson, The American, The Euro- peans and Portrait of a Lady, with Europe as the Grosse Freiheit which could make or destroy Americans. The end of the family home on Quincy Street broke the ties from which Europe had provided escape. Thereafter all the world offered, so far as James was concerned, equal potential for freedom. The threat to liberty be- came not America, but people who sought to look into one's life as parents might, to establish the kind of bonds which exist in families. The stories which follow James's return to Europe are preoccupied with invasion of privacy, subjugation by intimacy : The Bostonians, 'The Reverberator,' 'The Aspern Papers.' Settling down at last to enjoy his freedom, James discovered two new menaces to it : as a permanent resident in London society, he became an eligible object of familiarity, gossip and of predatory_females.

The greatest threat came from an American authoress somewhat older than himself, Constance Fenimore Woolson. For once, James let himself be drawn into a relationship closer than he could control—something like Lambert Strether's slightly hunted friendship with Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors, She flattered and hectored him; he wrote an evasively laudatory essay for Harper's about her undistinguished fiction. Privately he admitted finding her 'intense,' but let the friendship take its course, hoping by calling her 'Fenimore' to keep it sex- less. She was plain, lonely, she suffered increas- ingly from deafness; she badgered him into summering together annually in Italy. In January, 1894, depressed by influenza, she threw herself from the window of her pension in Venice. James was too horrified, he said, to go out for the funeral; but two months later he arrived at the villa where her sisters were sorting her papers, to make sure his own letters to her were destroyed. 'The last six weeks,' he wrote in his notebook, `. . . have been a period of terrific sacrifice to the ravenous Moloch of one's endless personal social relations—one's eternal exposures, accidents, disasters. Basta.'

Mr. Edel traces the influence of Fenimore's tragedy on 'The Altar of the Dead' and The Wings of the Dove. But surely there is further to look. Again and again after 1894, James returned to the sterile relationships of lonely, middle-aged men and women who could not help one another —in The Ambassadors. The Bench of Desola- tion,' outstandingly in the scene between Mrs. Server and poor Brissenden in The Sacred Fount. In that novel one finds carried furthest the notion of a Moloch of personal relations: the

idea that every intimate relationship is one between victor and victim, eater and eaten, one who gains and thrives at the expense of one who falls obscurely wounded. It is the major theme of James's maturity. If James is a great tragic writer, it is because of his vision of life as a process in which men and women do not ripen, as Romanticism claimed, to a proper perfection, but gradually, invisibly wound and maim each other.

We are all walking wounded—seeing this was James's glory. One's main unease about Mr.

Edel's biography so far, for all its superb marshalling of material and interplay between the life and the books, is that he says almost nothing of its growth in James's mind, the peculiar signifi- cance it held for him. Why did he hold this vision so intensely, clearly identifying himself with the victims? Why should he have been the par- ticular, personal poet of the life gone wrong? What, one must surely ask, was James's wound.

Mr. Edel sensibly dismissed in his first volume the theory that a youthful accident rendered James impotent. He dealt with the childhood influences which probably inhibited James from close relationships, particularly with women. But thereafter his story is of scarcely-clouded success. A natural celibate, he claims, James became a monk of art, channelling his energies into deliberate, triumphant conquest of experience by literature. He makes a convincing case against identifying James with the protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle,' who after a lifetime spent avoiding the wounds of intimacy finds he has maimed himself another way by preventing any- thing from happening to him. Experience to James was adventure enough, and he never accused himself of refusing any. On the contrary, he identified himself with those scarred and brought low by experience. Why?

There is a logical progression. With the end of his wanderings, the adventure of experience turned from the devouring of art and landscape to the study of human beings. In knowledge of men and women he found the same satisfying exercise of power he had found in the conquest of Europe. Throughout his middle and later fiction, intimacy is seen as enslavement, some- thing to be resisted: to have your inner secret discovered is to be broken as May Server is broken in The Sacred Fount, Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors, little Giles by the governess in 'The Turn of the Screw.' But knowledge, experience, also wounds the conqueror. It is fatal tc, Nanda in The Awkward Age, as destructive to Lambert Strether as to Madame de Vionnet. Why?

The answer lies in The Golden Bowl. To know the soul of another fully is to judge it, and by judging the knower is saddled with responsibility for the destruction of the criminal he has judged. Once Maggie Verver has discovered her hus- band's adultery and broken his mistress with the discovery, she is guilty too, a predator wounded by her victory. The future of her marriage depends on whether the Prince will be strong enough to resist judgment, as Mrs. Briss resisted it in The Sacred Fount—to refuse to be judged, and refuse to judge her in turn. Henry James gave his life to knowing and judgment, discrimination, of cities, landscapes, books; pictures and people. By 'placing' poor Fenimore justly, he destroyed her, or thought he had. He could not resist judging others. He could not fail to judge himself. If he had some secret of his own to hide from the world, Mr. Edel does not tell us, and no one is more likely to know: What cannot be hidden is that James hid nothing from himself. He carried to his grave and into his greatness the self-inflicted wounds of his own judgment.