'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.