'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James

 ‘Do you know where you’re drifting?’ Henrietta pursued, holding out her bonnet delicately.

‘No, I haven’t the least idea, and I find it very pleasant not to know. A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see – that’s my idea of happiness.’

It’s like the movies where you see the gophers sticking their heads out of their burrows as the coach races on chased by miscreants.  There is going to be a crash.  James likes to tell you what he is going to tell you and then he tells you.  There is no sugar coating of the pill.  Willful innocence will be punished, silly over subtle thought will not save you.  The gift is to be simple, over elaborate idealization will be a trap for the unwary.  In the end:

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

If the ending stuns you can’t say James didn’t warn you.  She ought to have heeded one of the many maxims which he offers throughout his works.  “The great point is to be happy as possible”.  The very American love of affirmations.  Remember they are all American in this novel no matter how acculturated they are.

The amount of critique of ‘The Portrait’ scholarly and lay is extraordinary.  May I offer a couple of points which somehow seems to have escaped attention.  Isabel has Daddy issues.  James makes it clear that her idealization of the man is out of sync with reality big time.  He is in the argot of the era a cad:

Edward Rosier remembered Isabel as a little girl; it had been his father who came to the rescue of the small Archers at the inn at Neufchâtel (he was travelling that way with the boy and had stopped at the hotel by chance), after their bonne had gone off with the Russian prince and when Mr Archer’s whereabouts remained for some days a mystery.

‘Russian prince’ - a nice touch.  Much older men are an emotional focus for her, Daniel Touchet, Gilbert Osmond.  Her sexuality is somewhat blocked.  Again James tells us:

The girl’s prayer was very sufficiently answered; something pure and proud that there was in her – something cold and dry an unappreciated suitor with a taste for analysis might have called it – had hitherto kept her from any great vanity of conjecture on the article of possible husbands.

Another thing that is missed is the reference on a few occasions to the mother of Osmond who was a minor poetess as the American Corinne.  The novel ‘Corinne, or Italy’ by Madame Germaine de Stael tells the story of an Italian poetess and an English nobleman.  The  romance, published 1807,  was translated by Isabel Hill. Wikipedia’s entry:

The novel includes both observations and reflections on Italy, its history, its culture and the customs of its inhabitants. Influenced by Enlightenment thought, the novel is part of the French Romanticism movement. The novel is Madame de Staël's most famous work, and is the first aesthetic romance not written in German.

I’ve dipped into it. Turbid I think would be kind but it was popular.  

Nothing was left of the impetuous Corinne.  The active powers of her life were all exhausted and this annihilation, for which she could scarcely account, restored her composure.  Grief had subdued her.  Sooner or later all rebellious heads must bow to the same yoke.

Indeed.  Isabel is true to her vow as she sees it though she is the prey of the expert stalkers Merle  and Osmond who have thoroughly studied her for the purposes of the con.  She flatters herself if she thinks that he may have loved her in the beginning.  Lacking empathy Osmond merely mirrors her fascinated state.  He is remote from feeling even for his daughter Pansy; the irony of a common flower being hothoused.    

A very great novel.  Is it the pinnacle of James’s achievement?  I find the later stuff unreadable but I may have another go at ‘The Ambassadors’. My attention foundered not very far in. 

Somerset Maugham's Reality

 I was saying that in his collection of short stories entitled ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Maugham has a story entitled ‘Appearance and Reality’ in which he mentions the famous book of the same name by the Idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley.  This is not just a flaunting of his extensive reading or a mere adventitious entree into a story told him by a Frenchman which bizarre as it sounds makes sense to the French.  If you want to be technical this is a ‘detached observer’ framing. ‘This is what I was told, you may believe it or not.  To my native informant it makes sense.  Let me then commence’.

There is no filler or narrative putty applied to present a smooth surface to the reader in the work of Somerset Maugham. In his ‘Writers Notebook’ and ‘The Summing Up’ he refers to the compression, simplicity, precision, and exactitude of his favourite writers.  How then does ‘Appearance and Reality’ apply to the story?

Bradley asks: where does the reality of what is presented to us by our perception reside.  In the object?  We can’t by definition know that.  That would be the God’s Eye view.  Essentially what we experience is an appearance or the object as it appears to us.  How he deals with Berkeley’s demurral on this point I don’t know, I haven’t come to that point yet in the book.  A chapter at a time savoured for its clarity is the way to read this extensive work which includes reality. 

The idea as  Maugham develops it is that we are informed by our experience.  What pops out as significant for us depends on our souls or the way we live our world.  There is a collectively learned aspect to this which we can recognise as French soul, Irish soul, Black soul.  It is an internally coherent way of living the world which the denizens of any particular cultural sector can recognise.  There are no neutral data.

Now read on.

'Flotsam and Jetsam' by Somerset Maugham from the collection 'Creatures of Circumstance'

 I think of Somerset Maugham as the consummate story teller.  You are brought in to a well lighted place shown the furniture which reflects the characters who go on their way as dumb as falling stones beset by their constitutional gravity.  He doesn’t often love his personae but anyone with knowledge by acquaintance, as Bertie Russell said, knows that distaste is a standard correct response.  His Malay stories are often a vision of humid hell.  

In the story entitled ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ from the collection called ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Skelton,a youngish anthropologist on his way to the Borneo coast, a three week trip, is struck down by malaria.  A rubber planter Grange and his wife who live nearby take him in while he recuperates.  Aha I thought anthropologist now gets to study OP (orang putay/white man) in his native habitat.  I won’t go into the story which is classic Maughamish  operative secret.  During the day while the anthropologist is recovering he talks to the wife who at one point seems to be about to reveal the source of the extreme nervous ticks that oppress her.  She tells a lot but holds that back.

When the sick man recovers he departs:  

“He was glad now that Mrs. Grange had not told him the story that was on the tip of her tongue to tell.  He did not want some tragic tale of sin or folly to connect him with them in a recollection that he could not escape.  He wanted to forget them as one forgets a bad dream.

It is left to Mrs. Grange to tell us the story talking to herself in the mirror as if in her past as an actress she was delivering a soliloquy.  A secret that is untold retains its power to trap one in that continually recurring scene of horror.  Skelton does not want this unloaded on to him even if this might free the teller of the secret.  Anthropology has its limits.

Is that direct address to the reader a weak ending, though I will grant screen playable?  Has Maugham slipped?  I’m not entirely happy that an observer has been removed from the scene but yes the response to incontinent sharing of ‘please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’ is a real one.

The next story in the collection is called ‘Appearance and Reality’ which sent me to F.H. Bradley’s book.  Maugham was a reader of philosophy and he liked the book.. The title of his novel ‘Of Human Bondage’ is taken from Spinoza’s ‘The Ethics’.

I’ve just started that and I have the distinct feeling that there may be more of appearance than reality in this tale.

'Virtually Intelligible' (Etienne Gilson)

 “In order to account for the possibility of abstract knowledge, Aristotle and St. Thomas had conceived. an elaborate scheme, according to which things them- selves were credited with virtually intelligible forms, which the human soul was supposed to abstract from things by its active intellect, and to know by its possible intellect.” (Etienne Gilson: The Unity of Philosophical Experience pub. 1937)

There I go again getting fixated on a word or phrase that is replete with creative ambiguity.  ‘Virtually intelligible’ is such a locution.  I see virtually here meaning originating out of its own power, its own virtue.  Of course it is intelligible to the perceiver as an instance of a universal but this nature is inherent.  ‘Virtually’ taken in the usual sense refers away from itself towards the root instance, the central example so to speak.  ‘She lived for most of the year by herself in Mallorca and they were, as husband and wife, virtually separated’. The common expression ‘virtually identical’ captures this reference to another  central example of something.  

S.O.D.     Virtual: Possessed of certain physical virtues or capacities effective in respect of inherent natural qualities  or powers; capable of exerting influence by means of such qualities. (now rare)

Curious that the usual sense of ‘virtually’ has moved away from inherance to an almost opposing sense.                

'Lucky Jim' by Kingsley Amis (pub. 1954)

 

Lucky Jim - we don’t envy him.  What the first thing to remember about Jim Dixon is that he is a Beta male and  he knows it.  During the war he served in a non-heroic role, somewhere well clear of the enemy lines. All the others in his digs saw action or commanded.  Even one of his students Michie had; I don’t know whether to call Jim’s war a good or a bad one.  It’s an English usage that I can’t get quite straight.  If you were decorated was that a good war.  It may be reticence or irony or understatement.  Dixon seems to have been producing triplicate for the duration.  Another mark of his less than silver back maleness is the way that an emotional vampire woman, Margaret, fastens on to him for the life giving supply of emotional plasma.  Those ladies know their clients.

Funk is his ongoing condition which he treats with that common over the counter medication: beer.  His place in the History dept. of a provincial university is in jeopardy unless he gets a paper  out that his head of dept. can show to the board.   The end of the final term of his first year of probation is upon him and the paper on mediaeval shipbuilding is still with a publisher whose reply to a query, when?, is written on a sheet  torn from a pad and written in green ink.  A: as soon as I can get round to it, I’m busy.  Uh, uh, not auspicious.  Be that as it may his head Mr.Welch seems kind and in the best tradition of academic serfdom has Dixon doing research for him.  Looking up he calls it.  Still he wants Jim out at his house in the country for an arty evening of madrigals and tiny glasses of sherry.  That doesn’t end well.  After slipping out slyly to the pub and having several pints slightly Brahms and Lizst as the Londoner said the last cigarette in bed slips from his nerveless fingers.  That might have been academic sutee but was just a hole in the blanket and the sheet.  Megatomy with a palsied hand held razor blade leave things worse but in his case a fair maiden comes to the rescue.

Who she?  Callahan by name but the important thing is that she is the girl friend of Bertrand a soi-disant artist and all round poseur.  In the best traditions of the campus novel he is perhaps having an affair with the wife of another member of the History dept.  The girlfriend who is beautiful catches Dixon’s eye as it would probably do for all males with active blood circulation.  Alas Jim thinks that she is out of his class.  More thumos deficency.  She seems a good sport and helps Jim tidy up his incendiary drunkeness.

Another reason that Dixon is nervous is that Margaret from the English dept. is there at the madrigals also.  The Welches have been putting her up after the suicide attempt which even Jim thinks has odd features to it.  Why during the attempt  play the wireless so loudly inviting a call from the flat downstairs.

So there you have it - the main dramatis personae of this novel.  Their interactions with the hapless protagonist pulling faces through one contremps after another is the fun.  The high point of this low comedy is Jim’s lecture on Merrie England with him quite merry himself.  With a hey and a hoy and a hey nonny no - around the maypole of disaster.

There is much satire about academic life and artistic pretensions.  We remember that Amis was an academic himself and fond of a tipple and that his emotional and marital life was not the shortest distance between two points.  We are invited to fill in the B and C between Amis and Dixon.

It’s a good comic novel which give the unlikely experience of improving on re-reading.  Always a good sign. Cheers.

Confusion not Confounded in Advaita Vedanta

 There is an excellent reason why Vedanta has chosen the apparently paradoxical way of talking about perception using the phenomenon of confusion.  Confusion in Vedanta is taking something to be what it is not. The rope is taken to be a snake, the stump at dusk is taken to be a human form etc.  It is important here to distinguish between this mis-take and the related phenomena of delusion and illusion.  

The point is that there can only be confusion when there is a state of affairs that is the case.  We are thus tied into a reality.  The mental modification (vritti) is not the true reality but that true reality can be found.  

This way of looking at things runs counter to the Western conundrum known as the argument from illusion.  If, it is said, we are mistaken in this instance, may we not be globally in error. This view has its origin in Cartesian doubt.  What we are in contact with is the mental experience.  That there is an external world corresponding to this is due to the mercy of a God who is not a deceiver.  Vedanta is different in that there is an ontological connection between the vritti (mental modification) and the upadhi (limiting adjunct).  They share the same substratum.  They meet on the plane of being.

Too Much

 What is there to do?

You are here now.

This is not going to go away.

You may get the fascination of consciousness for itself which is perhaps what samadhi is.

But this is not everything.

This is not dissolution.

We only want everything.

Is that too much to ask?