The Golden Bowl - Henry James [3]
I barely noticed Adam Verver the first time I read the book. I saw him as an aged (at forty-seven!) proto-J. Paul Getty, out ‘to rifle the Golden Isles’ in order to memorialize himself with a museum back home – typical tycoon behaviour, I thought; and thought no more. But now that he could be my younger brother (and Maggie an exemplary niece), I regard him with new interest – not to mention suspicion. What is he up to? He is plainly sly; and greedy; and although the simultaneous possession and ingestion of confectionery is a recurrent James theme, my God, how this father and daughter manage to both keep and devour the whole great world itself! They buy the handsome Prince, a great name, palazzi, the works. They buy the brilliant Charlotte. But they do not know that the two beauties so triumphantly acquired are actually a magnificent pair, destined to be broken up by Maggie when she discovers the truth, and, much as Fanny Assingham smashes the golden bowl into two parts – and pedestal, Maggie breaks the adulterine situation into three parts: Amerigo, Charlotte, and Adam. Then, adulterine world destroyed, Maggie sends Adam and Charlotte home to American City at the heart of the great republic.
Best of all, from Maggie’s viewpoint, Charlotte does not know for certain even then that Maggie knows all – a real twist to the knife for in a James drama not to know is to be the sacrificial lamb. Once Mr and Mrs Adam Verver have gone for ever, the Prince belongs absolutely to Maggie. One may or may not like Maggie (I don’t like what she does or, indeed, what she is) but the resources that she brings to bear, first to know and then to act, are formidable. Yet there is a mystery in my second experience of the novel which was not present thirty years ago. What, finally, does Adam Verver know? and what, finally, does he do? Certainly father and daughter are so perfectly attuned that neither has to tell the other anything at all about the unexpected pair that they have acquired for their museum. But does Maggie lead him? Or does he manage her? Can it be that it is Adam who pulls all the strings? As befits the rich man who has produced a daughter and then bought her – and himself – a life that even he is obliged to admit is somewhat selfish in its perfection.
As one rereads James’s lines in his notebook, the essentially rather banal short story that he had in mind has changed into a wonderfully luminous drama in which nothing is quite what it seems while James’s pious allusion to the subject as ‘really the pathetic simplicity and good faith of the father and daughter in their abandonment’ is plain nonsense. James is now giving us monsters on a divine scale.
I think the clue to the book is the somewhat, at first glance, over-obvious symbol of the golden bowl. Whatever the king’s christening gift was made of, James’s golden bowl proves to be made not of gold but of gilded crystal, not at all the same thing; yet the bowl is massy and looks to be gold. The bowl is first seen in a Bloomsbury shop by Charlotte, who wants to buy a wedding present for her friend Maggie. Charlotte cannot afford anything expensive but then, as she remarks to her lover, Maggie’s groom-to-be, ‘ “She’s so modest,” she developed – “she doesn’t miss things. I mean if you love her – or, rather, I should