Breathing and sighing

My latest challenge: finding my way through a James' novel that even the dust jacket calls "problematic" and obscure. Looked at through the right lens, though, it's quite a funny story about four people -- three Americans and one Italian prince --  in a soap-opera-style love quadrangle. 

“Say it out, for God’s sake, and have done with it!” That’s the plea William James, eminent American philosopher and psychologist, made to his younger brother, novelist Henry James, after wading through the tangled thickets of his later prose. Now that my little reading group is tackling The Golden Bowl, one of Henry James’ last books, I am feeling William’s pain.

According to W.W. Robson’s introduction to the 1904 novel, William contrasted his own style -- “to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then drop it forever” – to his brother’s. Which he described, in a style getting close to Henry’s own, as being “to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and around it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn’t!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the ghost in the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air and the prismatic interference of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty spaces.”

Robson says much of the difficulty of James’s style is his use of colourless words that replace abstractions and point backwards or forwards to other words. “The mystified reader must be prepared to cope with a flood of its, whats, thats, theses, whiches, most of them of the murkiest antecedents.”

Here's an example – and by no means the muddiest: Rich American art collector Adam Verver steels himself to propose marriage to his daughter’s best friend, Charlotte Stant, during a trip to Brighton:

He liked, in this preliminary stage, to feel that he should be able to ‘speak’ and that he would; the word itself being romantic, pressing for him the spring of association with stories and plays where handsome and ardent young men, in uniforms, tights, cloaks, high-boots, had it, in soliloquies, ever on their lips; and the sense on the first day that he should probably have taken the great step before the second was over conduced already to make him say to his companion that they must spend more than their mere night or two. . . He was acting – it kept coming back to that – not in the dark, but in the high golden morning; not in precipitation, flurry, fever, dangers these of the path of passion properly so called, but with the deliberation of a plan, a plan that might be a thing of less joy than a passion, but that probably would, in compensation for that loss, be found to have the essential property to wear even the decent dignity, of reaching further and of providing for more contingencies.

You can see the problem, especially given that I spent my career revising and clarifying murky prose. But now that I can wander a bit, I find it interesting to look at other ways of presenting ideas. Not “straight and explicit” as William James prescribed, but roaming around, using evocative words (“tights, cloaks, high-boots” and “high golden morning”) to spark images in the reader’s own mind. Since I’m reading this for pleasure (!) I try to get a general sense of what’s happening, rather than parsing out the clauses, the dashes, the complex punctuation for an exact meaning. It comes through: When thoughts about an upcoming marriage proposal include words like “less joy than a passion,” “deliberation,” and “decent dignity,” and avoid “love” altogether, I’m suspecting we’re not talking about mad passion.

James provides other compensations. His figures of speech are wonderful: Verver’s son-in-law, an Italian prince, is like an ancient gold coin embossed with glorious medieval arms; he’s also a Palladian church. Verver himself, a “small, spare, slightly stale person,” is like a “small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture.” Often buried in the verbiage are James’s stiletto jabs of humour. For example, there's Verver’s marriage-minded guest Mrs. Rance, not “at all deliberately or yearningly invited,” who pursues him to a deserted billiard room in the hopes of getting something going.  Verver looks at her across the “expanse of desert sand” that is the billiard table and wonders what to do. “She couldn’t cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round it; so that for him to convert it into an obstacle he would have to cause himself, as in some childish game, or unbecoming romp, to be pursued, to be genially hunted.”

  

 James couldn’t have written that without smiling. Despite all his circuitous "breathing and sighing," for that sentence alone, I forgive him.