Showing posts with label Max Beerbohm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Max Beerbohm. Show all posts

Monday 24 March 2014

Secret-Sharers . . . Henry James and Joseph Conrad’s Junoesque Women

Since my last post, it has been pointed out to me by a Jamesian scholar that Henry James shared Joseph Conrad’s tendency to fixate on exceedingly tall heroines; certainly, the beautiful Julia of James’s The Tragic Muse must be of a height approaching that of Małgorzata Dydek, reportedly the tallest professional female basketball player in the world (7 ft 2 ins.). Appropriately, given Conrad’s own nation of origin, Małgorzata was born in Warsaw.

See my last post:

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/joseph-conrads-amazonian-warrioresses.html

Joseph Conrad and Henry James by Max Beerbohm

My correspondent points out that, at a lunch in London in February 1897, James and Conrad probably discussed the theme of Conrad’s The Return, since Conrad began writing the text shortly after their meeting and its style is not only characteristically Jamesian but, in the emergence of a Junoesque woman, the textual patterning very closely resembles that of the ‘Master’ in The Tragic Muse.
. . . There, however, he [Nick] stayed her, bending over her while she
sobbed, unspeakably gentle with her.
   ‘. . . What do you accuse me of doing?’ Her tears were already over.
   ‘Of making me yours; of being so precious, Julia, so exactly what a man wants, as it seems to me. I didn’t know you could,’ he went on, smiling down at her. ‘I didn’t—no, I didn’t.’
   ‘It’s what I say—that you've always hated me.’
   ‘I’ll make it up to you!’
   She leaned on the doorway with her forehead against the lintel. ‘You don’t even deny it.’                                           [Henry James. The Tragic Muse 1889]


The Secret-Sharers

This text of James’s was published, then, nearly a decade before the publication of Conrad’s The Return in 1898. As Conrad wrote, in affirmation of his admiration for James (Henry James: An Appreciation), he was bowled over by ‘the magnitude of Mr Henry James’s work.’ Evidently, it was work studied by the younger man assiduously. 
 

So we can surmise that their secret obsession for giantesses was shared not only from their first meeting in the winter of 1897 but even earlier and, certainly, until James’s death in 1916.


The Beam in the Eye

Seriously, though, surely Conrad read James’s The Aspern Papers in 1888? And, no doubt, read the following, wholly Pateresque, passage in Chapter Five. Though Walter Pater and, more particularly, John Ruskin, would have known that in no known universe do the twin columns of the Piazza San Marco resemble lintels. Or had James downed too many cocktails at Florian’s?
The wonderful church, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looking ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea breeze passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta, the lintels of a door no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there.                                  [Henry James’s The Aspern Papers 1888]

Paterism is all very well as an aesthetic measure but it’s no use looking upon beauty if you considerest not the lintel-beam that is in thine own eye.  

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

 

Pedantry Corner 

Since this post, seven years have passed, yet the persistence of this ‘lintel’ misnomer puzzling the literary world has reappeared, see my letter published in London’s Private Eye last Wednesday (April 31 2021):


 

Friday 8 June 2012

Fruits secs and the Napoleon of Over-Stippled Prose


A recent fossicking in a rummage sale at a Cambridge country house brought to light a rare volume by that scourge of poetastry, eminent francophile, and most donnish of philographers, George Saintsbury: his recondite Scrap Book of 1922.
His manner is dry. Extra Dry. His phrasing is convoluted with very often qualifying clauses further qualified by supplementary clauses before the subject of the sentence has been introduced, a practice that makes one’s head hurt.*

But never mind these incidental torments, Saintsbury is prescient and eloquent in his appreciation of Swinburne as the exemplar of Matter and Form, perfectly expressed in the poet’s ‘rush and roar’ of ‘volleying anapaests’ and the ‘rocketing soar’ of that masterpiece, a Song in Time of Revolution.

As to Saintsbury’s own views on criticism as a vocation, he writes: ‘Criticism is the result of the reaction of the processes of one mind on the products of another.’  The critic is to be considered, chemically, purely as a ‘reactant’ and he, Saintsbury, complains that ‘in the whole preceding history of criticism’ the mischief of prejudgement has prevailed, with critics ‘looking for certain pieces anticipated, not finding them, and judging accordingly.

Well. My chemical reaction to Mr. Saintsbury’s tortuous 19th Century prose has been more a muted whimper than an outburst, for, regardless of my first impulse to recoil from over-ornateness, I find myself respecting the subtlety of thought that can introduce secondary shades of qualifications into such a recollection as this: ‘...a more delightful place than it then was I have seldom known.’

From his Scrapbook I can quote a no more representative fragment of Saintsbury’s dense prose than this remark: ‘There is no more mischievous class of human beings than a dissatisfied intelligentsia – no more pitiable or worthless one than a congregation of fruits secs.’

Here, surely, Saintsbury pierces to the root the discontent of a writer like Henry James, his exact contemporary, who famously lamented that both critics and the reading public failed to understand the modernity of his highly wrought prose technique, a matter of regret that never ceased to pain him.

Yet can one wonder at this exasperation with Jamesian mannerisms – the clotted adverbs, the finicky ramblings, the quaint syntax, the quibbling asides, the over-stippled effects – when even one of James’s later critics (Clara MacIntyre in 1912) could identify ‘such a sentence as “with the sense, moreover, of what he saw her see he had the sense of what she saw him” [as] not only hopelessly obscure; it seems grammatically incomplete.’ (The Golden Bowl, Chapter VIII.)

I suppose that I, too, like Clara, can quite easily take against this archetype of the Omniscient Narrator who fixedly intercepts each fleeting glance and counts each breath and flutter of heart and eyelid, if only because we mortals lack the infinite idle hours required to read these orotund ledgers of emotions encyclopedically itemised by a sedentary recording angel.

If this seems glib, please recognise here my veneration for a writer who, on his death bed, even in delirium, could yet compose perfectly measured and cadenced sentences.

Here, for your appreciation, is Henry James’s last dictation, dictated in delirium in 1915, weeks before his death. It's known as the ‘Napoleon** fragment’ or ‘Bonaparte letter’. As to its content, Henry may have thought he was writing to his brother William and his sister-in-law Alice. William had died six years before, but Henry probably thought of him as alive, and – significantly for an Omniscient Narrator – he may have seen him in his confused mind in the guise of Napoleon’s brother.

Dear and Most Esteemed Brother and Sister,
I call your attention to the precious enclosed transcripts of plans and designs for the decoration of certain apartments of the palaces, here, of the Louvre and the Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workmen who are to take them in hand. I commit them to your earnest care till the questions relating to this important work are fully settled. When that is the case I shall require of you further zeal and further taste. For the present the course is definitely marked out, and I beg you to let me know from stage to stage definitely how the scheme promises, and what results it may be held to inspire. It is, you will see, of a great scope, a majesty unsurpassed by any work of the kind yet undertaken in France. Please understand I regard these plans as fully developed and as having had my last consideration and look forward to no patchings nor perversions, and with no question of modifications either economic or aesthetic. This will be the case with all further projects of your affectionate NAPOLEONE

A Nightmare Courtroom Scene by Sir Max Beerbohm
Mr. Henry James subpoena’d, as psychological expert,
in a cause célèbre (1908).
Cross-examining counsel: ‘Come, sir, I ask you a plain question,
and I expect a plain answer!’  

* The puzzle of a number of George Saintsbury’s labyrinthine sentences resides in the unorthodox ‘order of appearance’ of nouns and pronouns, when a noun as a natural ‘antecedent’ is placed in apposition after the pronoun, sometimes challenging a reader’s comprehension with a pronoun’s referent placed towards the end of a sentence, and too distant from its noun-ish stand-in for us to readily grasp.


Edgar Allan Poe is conditioned by metrical constraints to succumb to the same stylistic tic.

I could not love except where Death
Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.
                                                                                               Edgar Allan Poe 1831

and, Tennyson, of course:
. . . long since a body was found,         
His who had given me life—O father! 


**Consider this: The narrator of The Aspern Papers (a.k.a, Henry James), states, ‘I have been looking at furnished rooms all over the place, and it seems impossible to find any [in Venice] with a garden attached. Naturally in a place like Venice gardens are rare.’ (The narrator finds himself the possessor of such a rare garden.) Then, reader, consider that Napoleon, himself, with Venice as his dominion, caused the Giardinetti Reali (the Royal Gardens) to be created for his own pleasure, since he too recognised the scarcity of such an oasis in the ‘City of Water’.
 
 

PS: Those Who Believe they Know the Way the World Wags

Such exhibitions of narcissistic grandiosity as the foregoing Jamesiana – and by a ‘Master’, after all – certainly give us pause for thought; a thought that might prompt the question: Is the Omniscient Narrator just another term for Incipient Megalomaniac?

One is reminded of the words of Nietzsche, in one of his letters from Turin to Strindberg, where the signatory for Nietzsche – as madness overtook him – was The Crucified One.

That Nietzsche considered himself not only the Godhead but a god-given World Conqueror is evinced by his final brief note to Strindberg in the last days of 1888, his Year Zero.

I am powerful enough to break the history of humanity into two parts. I have commanded a royal holiday at Rome. I wish to order a fusillade.
Caesar Nietzsche



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremisCompulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)