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after State – which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see them at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end – and I see them never come back.’ It is as if a beautiful, wealthy, American young woman of today were doomed to spend her life entirely in London. But the victorious Maggie believes that Charlotte will probably find life back home ‘interesting’ while she and her father are the real losers because they are now for ever parted. But Fanny is on to her. Fanny gets Maggie to confess that what was done not only suits her (‘I let him go’) but was indeed no more than the successful execution of Adam’s master plan: ‘Mrs Assingham hesitated, but at last her bravery flared. “Why not call it then frankly his complete success?” ’ Maggie agrees that that is all that is left for her to do.

At the end, Adam has brought together Maggie and Amerigo. James now throws all the switches in the last paragraph:

[Amerigo] tried, too clearly, to please her – to meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: ‘ “See”? I see nothing but you.’ And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast.

The golden cage has shut on them both. She is both gaoler and prisoner. She is both august and stern. In the book’s last line the change of the word ‘dread’ to ‘awe’ would have made the story a tragedy. But James has aimed at something else – another and higher state for the novel (for life, too, that poor imitation of art with its inevitable human flaw): he has made gods of his characters; and turned them all to gold.

Years earlier, when James first saw the gilded Galerie d’Apollon in the palace of the Louvre, he had ‘an immense hallucination’, a sense of cosmic consciousness; and over the years he often said that he could, all in all, take quite a lot of gold. At the end of Henry James’s life, in a final delirium, he thought that he was the Emperor Napoleon; and as the Emperor, he gave detailed instructions for the redoing of the Tuileries and the Louvre: and died, head aswarm with golden and imperial visions. Fortunately, he had lived long enough to make for us The Golden Bowl, a work whose spirit is not imperial so much as it is ambitiously divine.

GORE VIDAL

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The Golden Bowl, the last of Henry James’s novels, was originally published in 1904 and reprinted, with revisions, in the New York edition (Scribner’s, Volumes 23 and 24, 1909). It is the latter edition which has been used in this book.

PREFACE

Among many matters thrown into relief by a refreshed acquaintance with The Golden Bowl what perhaps most stands out for me is the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action; unless indeed I make up my mind to call this mode of treatment, on the contrary, any superficial appearance notwithstanding, the very straightest and closest possible. I have already betrayed, as an accepted habit, and even to extravagance commented on, my preference for dealing with my subject-matter, for ‘seeing my story’, through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter, some person who contributes to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it. Again and again, on review, the shorterthings in especial that I have gathered into this Series have ranged themselves not as my own impersonal account of the affair in hand, but as my account of somebody’s impression of it – the terms of this person’s access to it and estimate of it contributing thus by some fine little law to intensification of interest. The somebody is often, among my shorter tales I recognise, but an unnamed, unintroduced and (save by right of intrinsic wit) unwarranted participant, the impersonal author’s concrete deputy or delegate, a