The Golden Bowl - Henry James [1]
Over the next twenty years, as James’s novels got longer and longer, they became, simultaneously and oddly, more concentrated. There are fewer and fewer characters (usually Americans in a European setting but Americans at some psychic distance from the great republic) while the backgrounds are barely sketched in. What indeed are the spoils of the house Poynton? James never tells us what the ‘old things’ are that mother and son fight for to the death. Balzac would have given us a catalogue; and most novelists would have indicated something other than an impression of a vague interior perfection. As James more and more mastered his curious art, he relied more and more on the thing not said for his essential dramas; in the process, the books become somewhat closer to theatre than to the novel-tradition that had gone before him. Famously, James made a law of the single viewpoint; and then constantly broke it. In theory, the auctorial ‘I’ of the traditional novel was to be banished so that the story might unfold much like a play except that the interpretation of scenes (in other words, who is thinking what) would be confined to a single observer if not for an entire book, at least for the scene at hand. Although James had sworn to uphold for ever his own Draconian law, on the first page of The Ambassadors, where we meet Strether, the principal consciousness of the story and the point of view from which events are to be seen and judged, there is a startling interference by the author, Mr James himself, who states, firmly: ‘The principle I have just mentioned . . .’ Fortunately, no more principles are mentioned by the atavistic ‘I’.
There is the familiar joke about the three styles of Henry James: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. Yet there are indeed three reigns in the master’s imagined kingdom. James I is the traditional nineteenth-century novelist, busy with the usual comings and goings of the ordinary fiction writer; James II is the disciplined precise realist whose apotheosis is The Portrait of a Lady. From 1890 to 1895 there is a break in the royal line: James turns to the theatre; and most beautifully fails. Next comes the restoration. James returns in triumph to the novel – still James II (for purposes of simile, Charles II as well); and then, at the end, the third James, the Old Pretender, the magician who, unlike Prospero, breaks not his staff but a golden bowl.
After 1895, there is a new heightening of effect in James’s narratives; he has learned from the theatre to eliminate the non-essential but, paradoxically, the style becomes more complex. The Old Pretender’s elaborateness is due, I should think, to the fact that he had now taken to dictating his novels to a series of typewriter operators. Since James’s conversational style was endlessly complex, humorous, unexpected – euphemistic where most people are direct and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual – the last three novels that he produced (The Ambassadors, 1903; The Wings of the Dove, 1902; and The Golden Bowl, 1904) can be said to belong as much to the oral tradition of narrative as to the written.
James was fifty-seven when he started The Ambassadors and sixty-one when he completed The Golden Bowl. In those five years he experienced a late flowering without precedent among novelists. But then he was more than usually content in his private life. He had moved out of London; and he had established himself at the mayoral Lamb House in Rye. If there is an eternal law of literature, a pleasant change of house for a writer will produce an efflorescence. Also, at sixty, James fell in love with a young man named Jocelyn Persse. A charming