Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [116]
When still very young, James had witnessed the Civil War in America. Physically, he was prevented from participating in a war in which his two younger brothers fought with courage and honor by a mysterious backache, acquired on a mission to rescue a burning barn. Psychologically, he kept the war at bay by writing and reading. Perhaps his frenetic activities to support and aid the British in World War I were partly to compensate for his earlier inactivity. It is also true that the war that had evoked his horror mesmerized him. He wrote to a friend, “But I have an imagination of disaster—and see life as ferocious and sinister.”
In his youth, James wrote to his father that he was convinced of the “transitory organization of the actual social body. The only respectable state of mind is to constantly express one’s perfect dissatisfaction with it.” And in his best works of fiction this is what he did. In almost all of his novels the struggle for power is central to the way the plot moves and is resolved. This struggle for power is rooted in the central character’s resistance to socially acceptable norms and in his desire for integrity and recognition. In Daisy Miller, the tension between the old and the new leads to Daisy’s death. In The Ambassadors, it is Mrs. Newsome’s almost awesome power and pressure over her ambassador and her family that creates the central tension in the plot. It is interesting to note that in this struggle the antagonist always represents worldly concerns, while the protagonist’s desire is to preserve a sense of personal integrity in the face of outside aggression.
During the Civil War, when James was discovering his own powers, he wrote in part to compensate for his inability to participate in the war. Now, at the end of his life, he complained about the impotence of words in the face of such inhumanity. In an interview on March 21, 1915, with The New York Times, he said: “The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.”
Despite his despair, he turned to words again, this time to write not fiction but war pamphlets, appeals to America to join the war and not to remain indifferent to the suffering and atrocities in Europe. He also wrote poignant letters. In some he expressed his horror at events; in others he consoled friends who had lost a son or a husband in the war.
He fell into a round of activities, visiting wounded Belgian soldiers, and later British soldiers, in hospitals, raising money for Belgian refugees and the wounded and writing war propaganda from the fall of 1914 until December 1915. He also accepted the post of honorary head of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps and joined the Chelsea Fund for Belgian refugees. All these were whirlwind activities for a shy and reclusive writer whose most ardent pursuits and passions had previously been reserved for his fiction. As his biographer Leon Edel would later say: “. . . the world seemed to find too much comfort in him and he had to often protect himself against its weeping too profusely on his shoulders.” While visiting the hospitals, James likened