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):

 

Joseph Conrad’s Amazonian Warrioresses in the Sex War . . . . . . sans Stovepipe Hats

A recent feature in a magazine, a profile of that infinitely subtle actress, Isabelle Huppert, prompted me to reread Joseph Conrad’s The Return, on whose drama of marital hellishness  – a kind of Huis Clos for La Belle Époque – the French movie Gabrielle (2005) is based. Huppert is Gabrielle, trapped in the stifling claustrophobia of a marriage that turns out to be a sham. It is a remarkable performance. As a warrioress in the Sex War, Huppert is even cooler and more understated in her dominance of the male than in her tyranny as Erika, her notorious rôle in The Piano Teacher, the movie based on Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel of the same name.  

The elephant in the room.

Extraordinarily, the literary nuances of Conrad’s dense text are adapted to the screen with remarkable fidelity save in one particular, hitherto unremarked, yet which in a real sense is the elephant in the room.  For instance, take this description by the husband of the brow-beaten, put-upon wife, Mrs. Alvan Hervey:

The girl was healthy, tall, fair, and in his opinion was well connected, well educated and intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as if packed in a tight box, her individuality — of which she was very conscious — had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head.

So we gather she is tall, moreover, of significant height, if those comparisons to a grenadier and an obelisk are to be believed. However, it is not until several paragraphs later that we learn of the phenomenal gigantism with which Mrs Hervey is afflicted.

The door-handle rattled under her groping hand as though she had been trying to get out of some dark place.
   ‘No—stay!’ he cried.
   She heard him faintly. He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door.          She swayed as if dazed. There was less than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation . . .

He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door?

Any self-respecting textualist must take account of the import of these passages, while the student of contextualisation cannot ignore the fact that, in Victorian England, the heights of the standard interior door frame from sill to lintel were 6ft 8in and 7ft, and exterior doors were of greater heights to accommodate stovepipe hats.

This giantism in Conrad’s fictional women can be read in a number of texts, where it begins to assume the aspect of a fixation. Take this passage from his tale, Gaspar Ruiz.

The daughter, in rough threadbare clothing, and her white haggard face half hidden by a coarse manta, stood leaning against the lintel of the door.

Elephantine women.

From an intimate memoir (Ford Madox Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 1924), we learn that . . .

He was small rather than large in height; very broad in the shoulder and long in the arm; dark in complexion with black hair and a clipped black beard.

So has this author’s identifiable physical squatness nurtured, one wonders, in this particular case, a predilection for elephantine women so extreme (see movie, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 1958) that a preeminent literary imagination suffers their forbidding bulk to dominate its fictive projections, enslaved in a sort of love-hate submission?

Well, this is a question only Conradian experts of profoundest scholarship can answer.
 
As it is, we must continue to wonder at Joseph Conrad’s inclination before the camera to strike the Amazonian pose of the disaffected trapped spouse he so vividly describes in The Return . . .  here he is, leaning against his trellis porch, a characteristic attitude of the Amazonian when desperately cornered in marriage. . . or is he, as it were, a captive, no different from the heroine of his bitter tale, in a sticky predicament attempting to propel himself from the marital threshold to get free of a jamb . . . or is his plight that of a seafaring author who has relinquished his helm to the pilot . . . a woefully inattentive editor.

See my next post for the curious origins of Conrad’s Amazonian fixation . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/secret-sharers-henry-james-and-joseph.html