Authors: Cynthia Ozick
But it was Henry who backed away from the diary—much as
he had had second thoughts about going to Fenimore’s funeral. To begin with, he insisted that the diary not be published in his lifetime; and then he burned his copy—motivated, he said, by Alice’s habit of setting down his sometimes unseemly accounts of friends and acquaintances. (Years later he made a bonfire of all the thousands of letters in his possession, obliterating the revelations of decades.) Amusement had become, in his sister’s hands, document. James found himself shaken by “so many names, personalities, hearsays (usually, on Alice’s part, through
me
!)”; he informed William that Alice’s exposures made him “intensely nervous and almost sick with terror about possible publicity, possible accidents, reverberation etc.,” and that he “used to say everything to Alice (on system) that could
égayer
[entertain] her bedside and many things in confidence. I didn’t dream she wrote them down.… It is a ‘surprise’ that is too much of a surprise.” There was more for James to grapple with, though, than the mortification of stumbling on his own remarks. It might be disconcerting that Alice had mentioned a certain essayist’s “self-satisfied smirk.” Yet something else lay coiled at the bottom of his sister’s diary, and James was unequipped to live with it.
He met there, in fact—side by side with the bits of raillery and the vehement Irish nationalism—terrifying resonances and reminiscent apparitions. After the death of the James paterfamilias at home in Massachusetts, the diary disclosed, Alice, desolate in an empty house, was assaulted by the vibrations of a voice: “In those ghastly days, when I was by myself in the little house on Mt. Vernon Street, how I longed to flee … and escape from the ‘Alone, Alone!’ that echoed thro’ the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered from the walls, and confronted me, like a material presence, as I sat waiting, counting the moments.” James himself, five years after the undoing of
Guy Domville
, grieved over
“the essential loneliness of my life”
(the emphasis is his own). “This loneliness,” he put it, “what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper, about
me
, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.”
Alice James’s “Alone!” and Henry James’s “deepest thing” had
their antecedents in a phantasmagorical visitation endured by their father fifty years before. It was a vision, or a phantom, or an omen, so paralyzing to the spirit, so shocking in its horror, that Henry James Senior was compelled to give it a name (seemingly a fusion of “devastation,” “visitation,” “vast”) out of Swedenborgian metaphysics:
vastation
. One spring day after dinner, he testified, “feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion,” he was all at once flooded by panic: “To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck; that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy.” And another time he described himself as “inwardly shriveled to a cinder,” altered to a “literal nest of hell within my own entrails.”
The younger Henry James had turned away from Fenimore’s suicide. In nearly the same moment he had turned away from his sister’s diary. The suicide intimated influences fatal to life from a fetid personality. The diary was fundamentally a portrait of infantile helplessness, a shriveled soul, hell within the entrails. The elder James, with his damnèd shape; Fenimore, flinging herself to the pavement; Alice, listening to the ghostly susurrations of her abandonment—each had dared to look into the abyss of knowing-too-much; James would not look with them. It was not until he had himself succumbed to his own vastation—eye to eye with the sacred terror on the stage of the St. James Theater in 1895—that he was ready to exchange glimpse for gaze. The brawling pandemonium (it continued, in fact, for fifteen minutes) had not lasted ten seconds before he felt himself a wreck, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, sovereign artistry to one of almost helpless infancy. Everything he had thought himself to be—a personage of majestic achievement—disintegrated in an instant. He could not go on as he had. Simply, he lost his nerve.
But he found, in the next work he put his hand to, not only a new way of imagining himself, but a new world of art. By paring
away narrative rumination and exposition—by treating the novel as if it were as stark as a play-script—he uncovered (or invented) a host of labyrinthine depths and devices that have since been signally associated with literary modernism. For one thing, representation, while seeming to keep to its accustomed forms, took on a surreal quality, inscrutably off-center. For another, intent, or reason, gave way to the inchoate, the inexpressible. The narrative no longer sought to make a case for its characterizations; indirection, deduction, detection, inference proliferated. An unaccountable presence, wholly unseen, was at last let in, even if kept in the tale’s dark cellar: the damnèd shape, the sacred terror. The tale began to know more than the teller, the dream more than the dreamer; and Henry James began his approach to the Kafkan. In those “most horrible hours of my life” after his inward collapse on the stage of the St. James, the curtain was being raised for
The Awkward Age
.
The Awkward Age
is, ostensibly, a comedy of manners, and resembles its populous class in that it concerns itself with the marriage-ability of a young woman. Nearly a hundred years after James wrote, no theme may appear so moribund, so obsolete, as the notion of “marrying off” a daughter. Contemporary daughters (and contemporary wives) enter the professions or have jobs, and do not sit on sofas, month after month, to be inspected by possibly suitable young men who are themselves to be inspected for their incomes. The difference between late-Victorian mores and our own lies in female opportunity and female initiative, with freedom of dress and education not far behind. Yet the similarities may be stronger than the differences. It is still true that the term of marital eligibility for young women is restricted to a clearly specified span of years; it is still true that a now-or-never mentality prevails, and that young women (and often their mothers) continue to be stung by the risks of time. The gloves, parasols, boas, corsets, feathered hats, and floor-sweeping hems have vanished; the anxiety remains. A century ago, getting one’s daughter appropriately married was a central social preoccupation, and, though marriage is nowadays
not a young woman’s only prescribed course in life, it is as much a gnawing preoccupation as it ever was. In this respect, no one can call the conditions of
The Awkward Age
dated.
In respect of sexual activity, those conditions are equally “modern.” If sexual activity, in habit and prospect, defines manners, then—as a comedy of manners—
The Awkward Age
is plainly not a period piece. To be sure, society no longer pretends, as the Victorians did, to an ideal of young virgins kept from all normal understanding until the postnuptial deflowering; but in
The Awkward Age
, which depicts a public standard of ineffable purity not our own, that standard is mocked with bawdy zest. (Henry James bawdy? Consider the scuffle during which little Aggie sets her bottom firmly down upon a salacious French novel.)
The Awkward Age
, as a matter of fact, teems with adultery and emblems of incest; what appears to be wholesome finally suggests the soiled and the despoiled.
Still, it is not sexual standards and their flouting that move this novel from its opening lightness toward the shadowed distortions that are its destination. Rather, it is the unpredictable allegiances of probity. Probity arrives in the shape of Mr. Longdon, who “would never again see fifty-five” but is rendered as an aged, even antediluvian, gentleman, complete with pince-nez, old-fashioned reticences, and touchy memories of his prime. In his prime, in a moral atmosphere he judges to be superior to that of the present, he (long ago) loved and lost Lady Julia. He has never married, and for years has lived away from London, in the country, in a house poignantly similar to James’s own Lamb House in Rye. He is a meticulous watcher and silent critic, sensitive, upright, certainly elderly in his perception of himself; a man of the past. One might imagine at first that Mr. Longdon (he is always called “Mr.”) is yet another incarnation of James’s eager old gentlemen—the life-seeker Strether who, in
The Ambassadors
, opens himself to the seductions of Paris, or the thrill-thirsty John Marcher of “The Beast in the Jungle,” who waits for some grand sensation or happening to befall him. Mr. Longdon, by contrast, is a backward-looker. Lady Julia was his Eden, and the world will never again be so bright or so right. “The more one thinks of it,” he remarks, “the
more one seems to see that society … can never have been anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of time—and I belong, you see, to the twilight—it had made out much less how vulgar it
could
be.”
He has come to London, then, as a kind of anthropologist (though his motives are never clarified), on the trail of Lady Julia’s descendants, and is welcomed into the culture of the natives: the chief of the natives being Mrs. Brookenham, Lady Julia’s daughter, who is at the hub of a fevered salon. All roads lead to Mrs. Brook’s, and the travelers are encrusted with bizarre trappings. The Duchess, a callously opportunistic Englishwoman who is the widow of a minor Italian aristocrat, is rearing her Neapolitan ward, Agnesina (“little Aggie”), as a snow-white slate on which “the figures were yet to be written.” The hugely rich Mr. Mitchett, known as Mitchy, rigged out in unmatched merry-andrew gear and tolerant to the point of nihilism, is the zany but good-hearted son of a shoemaker become shoe mogul. Vanderbank, or Van—a handsome, winning, self-protective, evasive young man of thirty-five, impecunious on a mediocre salary, whom Mr. Longdon befriends—is Mrs. Brook’s (relatively) secret lover. In and out of Mrs. Brook’s salon flow schemers, snobs, faithless wives and husbands, jesters, idlers, fantastic gossips; even a petty thief, who happens to be Mrs. Brook’s own son, Harold. And at the tea table in the center of it all sits (now and then) her daughter, Lady Julia’s granddaughter, Fernanda—Nanda—who smokes, runs around London “squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase,” and chooses as an intimate a married woman with an absent husband.
Nanda is fully aware of the corrupted lives of her mother’s circle. Her father is indifferent, negligent, a cipher; her brother sponges on everyone who enters the house, and on every house he enters; her parents live enormously beyond their means; all relationships are measured by what can be gotten out of them. “Edward and I,” Mrs. Brook declares to the Duchess, “work it out between us to show off as tender parents and yet to get from you everything you’ll give. I do the sentimental and he the practical.” With her “lovely, silly eyes,” Mrs. Brook at forty-one is youthfully attractive, but cuts two years off her daughter’s age in order to
snip two years from her own. There is no shame, no guilt, no conscience; the intrinsic has no value.
All these people (but for the blunt Duchess, who is plain Jane) have names that are cursory, like their lives: Mrs. Brook, Van, Mitchy, Aggie, Tishy, Carrie, even Nanda; it is as if only Mr. Longdon troubles to take a long breath. “I’ve been seeing, feeling, thinking,” he admits. He understands himself to be “a man of imagination,” an observer, with a “habit of not privately depreciating those to whom he was publicly civil.” (A habit that James himself, on the evidence of the embarrassments of Alice’s diary, did not always live up to.) Mrs. Brook’s salon, by contrast, feeds on conspiracy, on sublimely clever talk, on plots and outrageous calculations, on malice and manipulation, on exploitation, on matchmaking both licit and illicit; everyone is weighed for cash worth. Mitchy rates high on the money scale, low on social background. Vanderbank, with his beauty and cultivated charm, is the reverse. Mr. Longdon has money, judiciousness, and an unappeased and unfinished love for Lady Julia, whose memory serves as a standard for fastidious decorum and civilized reciprocity—none of it to be found in present-day London, least of all in Mrs. Brook’s drawing room. Mr. Longdon despises Mrs. Brook and is almost preternaturally drawn to Nanda. Though Lady Julia was beautiful and Nanda is not, he is overcome by what he takes to be a magical likeness. In Nanda, Lady Julia is nearly restored for him—except that Nanda is a modern young woman with access to the great world; she knows what Lady Julia in her girlhood would never have been permitted (or perhaps would never have wished) to know.
The ground on which
The Awkward Age
is spread—and woven, and bound, and mercilessly knotted—is precisely this: what a young woman ought or ought not to know, in a new London that “doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, had neither time nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steamroller,” as Vanderbank cautions Mr. Longdon. “It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. Therefore you see it’s all as yet rather a dark question for poor Nanda—a question that in a way quite occupies the foreground of her mother’s earnest little
life. How
will
she look, what will be thought of her and what will she be able to do for herself?” Nanda at eighteen, having come of age (Mrs. Brook, for all her shaving of years, can no longer suppress this news), is ready to be brought down—from the schoolroom, so to speak—to mingle among the denizens and fumes of Mrs. Brook’s nether realm. “I seem to see,” James complained in his Notebook, “… English society before one’s eyes—the great modern collapse of all the forms and ‘superstitions’ and respects, good and bad, and restraints and mysteries … decadences and vulgarities and confusions and masculinizations and femininizations—the materializations and abdications and intrusions, and Americanizations, the lost sense, the brutalized manner … the general revolution, the failure of fastidiousness.” And he mourned the forfeiture “of nobleness, of delicacy, of the exquisite”—losses he connected with “the non-marrying of girls, the desperation of mothers, the whole alteration of manners … and tone, while our theory of the participation, the
presence
of the young, remains unaffected by it.”