The Golden Bowl - Henry James [2]
A decade earlier (November 28, 1892) Henry James sketched in his notebook the first design for The Golden Bowl:
. . . a father and daughter – an only daughter. The daughter – American of course – is engaged to a young Englishman, and the father, a widower and still youngish, has sought in marriage at exactly the same time an American girl of very much the same age as his daughter. Say he has done it to console himself in his abandonment – to make up for the loss of the daughter, to whom he has been devoted. I see a little tale, n’est-ce pas? – in the idea that they all shall have married, as arranged, with this characteristic consequence – that the daughter fails to hold the affections of the young English husband, whose approximate mother-in-law the pretty young second wife of the father will now have become.
James then touches upon the commercial aspect of the two marriages: ‘young Englishman’ and ‘American girl’ have each been bought. They had also known each other before but could not marry because each lacked money. Now
they spend as much of their time together as the others do, and for the very reason that the others spend it. The whole situation works in a kind of inevitable rotary way – in what would be called a vicious circle. The subject is really the pathetic simplicity and good faith of the father and daughter in their abandonment . . . he peculiarly paternal, she passionately filial.
On Saint Valentine’s Day, 1895, James again adverts to the story, which now demands to be written, though he fears ‘the adulterine element’ might be too much for his friend William Dean Howells’s Harper’s magazine. ‘But may it not be simply a question of handling that?’
Seven years later, James was shown a present given the Lamb family by King George I: it is a golden bowl. The pieces have now begun to come together. James has just completed, in succession, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. Comfortably settled in the garden room at Lamb House (later to be inhabited by E. F. Benson’s dread Miss Mapp and then the indomitable Lucia; later still, to be blown up in the Second World War), James wrote, in slightly more than a year, what he himself described to his American publisher as ‘distinctly the most done of my productions – the most composed and constructed and completed . . . I hold the thing the solidest, as yet, of all my fictions.’ The ‘as yet’ is splendid from a sixty-one-year-old writer. Actually, The Golden Bowl was to be the last novel that he lived to complete; and it has about it a kind of spaciousness – and even joy – that the other novels do not possess. In fact, pace F. R. Leavis, I do not think James has in any way lost his sense of life or let slip ‘his moral taste’ (what a phrase!), rather . . .
But that is enough setting up. Read the book now; then, if so inclined, check your own impression of this work with someone who first read it when he was the age of the Prince, who replaced the ‘young Englishman’; and has now reread it at an age greater than that of ‘the widower’ Adam Verver.
2
When I first read The Golden Bowl, I found Amerigo, the Prince, most sympathetic. I still do. I also found – and find – Charlotte the most sympathetic of the other characters; as a result,