Stupidly, I tend to think of Henry James as a New England Brahman who devoted himself to literature. No. First of all, he was a New Yorker. Second of all, James was a professional writer, a hard-working one. Of the thirty-one stories in The Library of America’s Complete Stories 1898-1910 (which I recently finished reading), twenty-eight appeared in fifteen different periodicals. Like any successful professional writer, James had an agent, James Brand Pinker, who also represented Conrad, Bennett, Wells, Ford Madox Ford, and later, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence and Mansfield. Pinker didn’t treat James with the deference due a Brahman. "I can't knock off pages of prose like a war correspondent writing on his knee," James complained to Pinker in 1904.
Did James “write down” to his magazine readership?
In 1890, James wrote to a friend, "Give them [the readers] what one wants oneself - it's the only way: follow them and they lead one by a straight grand highway to abysses of vulgarity." Despite these admirable intentions, most of the magazine stories in Complete Stories 1898-1910, were tailored to cater, not to vulgarity, but to the diminished taste with which readers approached magazine fiction – not very different from the diminished taste with which today’s serious readers, and film buffs, approach television series.
James’ concession is to the stories’ contents, their plots, some of which are so contrived and improbable that they are absurd. The magazine stories are romantic comedies or bittersweet tear-jerkers. True to their genres they feature a hero or heroine in a tenuous romantic relationship that is threatened by a villain or by a stroke of bad luck, or as the effected, sympathetic observer of others’ woes. Like a movie-goer watching a genre film, James’ reader knows what three or four denouements are possible; the suspense is over whether it will be one of the happy ones or a bittersweet one.
Style – the way the story is told– is where James follows his precept of giving magazine readers “what one wants oneself.” The language, the vocabulary, the grammatical constructions, the play on tone of these sentimental, often silly stories confirm James as America’s greatest writer.
The plots of James’ novels, and stories written not for magazines but for inclusion in collections – “The Beast in the Jungle”, for example – are not silly. They are serious stuff. Whatever comedy and tragedy are in them are only coloration for the resolution of difficult questions about the individual in society, which is James’ overarching theme. The synergy between style and content are what makes them masterpieces.
The magazine stories are virtuoso showpieces. The plots are nothing but frameworks for the performer to show off his skills – like Durer’s rabbit, or a violinist’s encore of a Fritz Kreisler bon-bon (the former, a great work of art; the latter often a great performance).
Hemingway is considered a master stylist, and so he is. But the magic of Hemingway’s style is its transparency; the writing interferes as little as possible with the story. Both Hemingway’s stories and James’ are wonderfully nuanced – Hemingway’s, because narrative details are not obscured by the writing; James’, because narrative details are meticulously drawn by his intricate style.
“Crapy Cornelia” (an unfortunate title for us, with our ubiquitous “crappy,” but the adjective “crapy,” meaning somewhat funereal – from mourning crape – pops up elsewhere in James) is a bittersweet little romantic comedy, aimed at a middle-aged or elderly middle-brow audience – the kind of thing, in cinema, that the British churn out regularly – usually involving a number of senior citizens staying in a picturesquely situated hotel.
White-Mason, the middle-aged hero of “Crapy Cornelia”, to ensure his being able to maintain his smart and sophisticated Continental lifestyle, plans to propose marriage to a nouveau riche widow whose friends, whose appearance – her dress, her coiffeur, her gaudy jewelry – whose taste, he disdains, if not despises. Arriving at the widow’s, poised to pop the question, White-Mason finds his inamorata sitting with a drab, elderly lady. It turns out that this elderly lady, Cornelia, was once, in their childhood, a close friend of his. This so disconcerts White-Mason that he fails to propose to Mrs. Worthingham.
He pays a visit to Cornelia, and as they reminisce about the old days, which both agree were much finer than the lurid times they live in now, he realizes that he would rather age gracefully, as Cornelia’s old friend, sitting by her New York fireside, than be the bon vivant husband of a wealthy widow. It is a bittersweet romantic comedy.
Here are the first two paragraphs:
Three times within a quarter of an hour — shifting the while his posture on his chair of contemplation — had he looked at his watch as for its final sharp hint that he should decide, that he should get up. His seat was one of a group fairly sequestered, unoccupied save for his own presence, and from where he lingered he looked off at a stretch of lawn freshened by recent April showers and on which sundry small children were at play. The trees, the shrubs, the plants, every stem and twig just ruffled as by the first touch of the light finger of the relenting year, struck him as standing still in the blest hope of more of the same caress; the quarter about him held its breath after the fashion of the child who waits with the rigour of an open mouth and shut eyes for the promised sensible effect of his having been good. So, in the windless, sun-warmed air of the beautiful afternoon, the Park of the winter’s end had struck White-Mason as waiting; even New York, under such an impression, was “good,” good enough — for him; its very sounds were faint, were almost sweet, as they reached him from so seemingly far beyond the wooded horizon that formed the remoter limit of his large shallow glade. The tones of the frolic infants ceased to be nondescript and harsh — were in fact almost as fresh and decent as the frilled and puckered and ribboned garb of the little girls, which had always a way, in those parts, of so portentously flaunting the daughters of the strange native — that is of the overwhelmingly alien — populace at him. Not that these things in particular were his matter of meditation now; he had wanted, at the end of his walk, to sit apart a little and think — and had been doing that for twenty minutes, even though as yet to no break in the charm of procrastination. But he had looked without seeing and listened without hearing: all that had been positive for him was that he hadn’t failed vaguely to feel. He had felt in the first place, and he continued to feel — yes, at forty-eight quite as much as at any point of the supposed reign of younger intensities
— the great spirit of the air, the fine sense of the season, the supreme appeal of Nature, he might have said, to his time of life; quite as if she, easy, indulgent, indifferent, cynical Power, were offering him the last chance it would rest with his wit or his blood to embrace. Then with that he had been entertaining, to the point and with the prolonged consequence of accepted immobilization, the certitude that if he did call on Mrs. Worthingham and find her at home he couldn’t in justice to himself not put to her the question that had lapsed the other time, the last time, through the irritating and persistent, even if accidental, presence of others. What friends she had — the people who so stupidly, so wantonly stuck! If they should, he and she, come to an understanding, that would presumably have to include certain members of her singularly ill-composed circle, in whom it was incredible to him that he should ever take an interest. This defeat, to do himself justice — he had bent rather predominantly on that, you see; ideal justice to her, with her possible conception of what it should consist of, being another and quite a different matter — he had had the fact of the Sunday afternoon to thank for; she didn’t “keep” that day for him, since they hadn’t, up to now, quite begun to cultivate the appointment or assignation founded on explicit sacrifices. He might at any rate look to find this pleasant practical Wednesday — should he indeed, at his actual rate, stay it before it ebbed — more liberally and intendingly given him.
And here is the ending of “Crapy Cornelia” – a nice bit of Jamesian dialogue:
[Mason-White tells Cornelia that he no longer wishes to marry Mrs. Worthingham.]
“Yes — I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t — hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”
Cornelia magnanimously thought “No — but she knows other things.”
He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. “Too many — too many. And other indeed — so other! Do you know,” he went on, “that it’s as if you — by turning up for me — had brought that home to me?”
“‘For you,’” she candidly considered. “But what — since you can’t marry me! — can you do with me?”
Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you — just this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you renounced Bognor [a genteel London suburb]. That’s it — I know it at last, and I see one can like it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he said it without the scowl.
[Notes for youngsters (under 40): 1) When Mason-White says he’s “high,” he means “over-ripe,” like game. 2) Mason-White and Cornelia cannot marry because it just wasn’t done, a man-on-the-town marrying an older, grey-haired woman – a reason which, for James, needs no further explanation. (And don’t be snotty. There are plenty of things – different things – which are just not done in your generation, too.)]
Virtuosity?
“Yes — I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t — hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”
She hasn’t – she doesn’t – she...hasn’t. This is a delightful little play of verb forms. The first “she hasn’t” means “she has not a certain ‘all.’” “She doesn’t” has an odd ring, then. She doesn’t – what? – in relation to that “all?” The reader quickly realizes that “doesn’t” refers not to the “all” that Mrs. Worthingham lacks, but to the predicate of the previous sentence, “know.” She doesn’t know what Mason-White knows about what she hasn’t. She doesn’t know and hasn’t a glimmer of suspicion of it.
I don’t know about you, but I find that fun. It’s a meaningless bit of linguistic virtuosity which, I am sure, was as much a pleasure for James to write as for a reader to suss out.
“And other indeed — so other!”
At first glance, a peculiar exclamation. It sounds awkward, until the reader understands that Mason-White is not indeed-ing and so-ing the otherness of the too many other things Mrs. Worthingham knows, but is commenting on the word “other,” the adjective in Cornelia’s previous remark. That’s clever; that’s fun; if you love the language, it is beautiful.
“Scowl” is not by chance the final word of the story. Mason-White’s “scowl” is a leitmotif in “Crapy Cornelia.” The word appears seven times in twenty-nine pages. It is introduced as Mason-White waits in Mrs. Worthingham’s anteroom.
He met the whole vision with something of the grimace produced on persons without goggles by the passage from a shelter to a blinding light; and if he had — by a perfectly possible chance — been “snap-shotted” on the spot, would have struck you as showing for his first tribute to the temple of Mrs. Worthingham’s charming presence a scowl almost of anguish.
“Crapy Cornelia” might just as well have been titled “How He Stopped Scowling”.
Here’s a bit of virtuosity – nothing serious, when it comes to the plot (a twist of fate bringing together, in a Swiss pension, a man and a woman who have been discarded as infra dig by socially ambitious partners), but as a twist of language, it carries the reader from a cliché, pointed question, to an original and telling physiognomic description, pointed smile, that, as a brushstroke in a painted portrait of Madame Massin, would signal it was the work of a master.
The first sentence of “Fordham Castle”:
Sharp little Madame Massin, who carried on the pleasant pension and who had her small hard eyes everywhere at once, came out to him on the terrace and held up a letter addressed in a manner that he recognised even from afar, held it up with a question in her smile, or a smile, rather a pointed one, in her question — he could scarce have said which.
Do you see? Isn't that good? The displacement of "pointed" from its usual, boring partner, "question," to "smile." Does anyone else read like this? Or is it only I?
Did James “write down” to his magazine readership?
In 1890, James wrote to a friend, "Give them [the readers] what one wants oneself - it's the only way: follow them and they lead one by a straight grand highway to abysses of vulgarity." Despite these admirable intentions, most of the magazine stories in Complete Stories 1898-1910, were tailored to cater, not to vulgarity, but to the diminished taste with which readers approached magazine fiction – not very different from the diminished taste with which today’s serious readers, and film buffs, approach television series.
James’ concession is to the stories’ contents, their plots, some of which are so contrived and improbable that they are absurd. The magazine stories are romantic comedies or bittersweet tear-jerkers. True to their genres they feature a hero or heroine in a tenuous romantic relationship that is threatened by a villain or by a stroke of bad luck, or as the effected, sympathetic observer of others’ woes. Like a movie-goer watching a genre film, James’ reader knows what three or four denouements are possible; the suspense is over whether it will be one of the happy ones or a bittersweet one.
Style – the way the story is told– is where James follows his precept of giving magazine readers “what one wants oneself.” The language, the vocabulary, the grammatical constructions, the play on tone of these sentimental, often silly stories confirm James as America’s greatest writer.
The plots of James’ novels, and stories written not for magazines but for inclusion in collections – “The Beast in the Jungle”, for example – are not silly. They are serious stuff. Whatever comedy and tragedy are in them are only coloration for the resolution of difficult questions about the individual in society, which is James’ overarching theme. The synergy between style and content are what makes them masterpieces.
The magazine stories are virtuoso showpieces. The plots are nothing but frameworks for the performer to show off his skills – like Durer’s rabbit, or a violinist’s encore of a Fritz Kreisler bon-bon (the former, a great work of art; the latter often a great performance).
Hemingway is considered a master stylist, and so he is. But the magic of Hemingway’s style is its transparency; the writing interferes as little as possible with the story. Both Hemingway’s stories and James’ are wonderfully nuanced – Hemingway’s, because narrative details are not obscured by the writing; James’, because narrative details are meticulously drawn by his intricate style.
“Crapy Cornelia” (an unfortunate title for us, with our ubiquitous “crappy,” but the adjective “crapy,” meaning somewhat funereal – from mourning crape – pops up elsewhere in James) is a bittersweet little romantic comedy, aimed at a middle-aged or elderly middle-brow audience – the kind of thing, in cinema, that the British churn out regularly – usually involving a number of senior citizens staying in a picturesquely situated hotel.
White-Mason, the middle-aged hero of “Crapy Cornelia”, to ensure his being able to maintain his smart and sophisticated Continental lifestyle, plans to propose marriage to a nouveau riche widow whose friends, whose appearance – her dress, her coiffeur, her gaudy jewelry – whose taste, he disdains, if not despises. Arriving at the widow’s, poised to pop the question, White-Mason finds his inamorata sitting with a drab, elderly lady. It turns out that this elderly lady, Cornelia, was once, in their childhood, a close friend of his. This so disconcerts White-Mason that he fails to propose to Mrs. Worthingham.
He pays a visit to Cornelia, and as they reminisce about the old days, which both agree were much finer than the lurid times they live in now, he realizes that he would rather age gracefully, as Cornelia’s old friend, sitting by her New York fireside, than be the bon vivant husband of a wealthy widow. It is a bittersweet romantic comedy.
Here are the first two paragraphs:
Three times within a quarter of an hour — shifting the while his posture on his chair of contemplation — had he looked at his watch as for its final sharp hint that he should decide, that he should get up. His seat was one of a group fairly sequestered, unoccupied save for his own presence, and from where he lingered he looked off at a stretch of lawn freshened by recent April showers and on which sundry small children were at play. The trees, the shrubs, the plants, every stem and twig just ruffled as by the first touch of the light finger of the relenting year, struck him as standing still in the blest hope of more of the same caress; the quarter about him held its breath after the fashion of the child who waits with the rigour of an open mouth and shut eyes for the promised sensible effect of his having been good. So, in the windless, sun-warmed air of the beautiful afternoon, the Park of the winter’s end had struck White-Mason as waiting; even New York, under such an impression, was “good,” good enough — for him; its very sounds were faint, were almost sweet, as they reached him from so seemingly far beyond the wooded horizon that formed the remoter limit of his large shallow glade. The tones of the frolic infants ceased to be nondescript and harsh — were in fact almost as fresh and decent as the frilled and puckered and ribboned garb of the little girls, which had always a way, in those parts, of so portentously flaunting the daughters of the strange native — that is of the overwhelmingly alien — populace at him. Not that these things in particular were his matter of meditation now; he had wanted, at the end of his walk, to sit apart a little and think — and had been doing that for twenty minutes, even though as yet to no break in the charm of procrastination. But he had looked without seeing and listened without hearing: all that had been positive for him was that he hadn’t failed vaguely to feel. He had felt in the first place, and he continued to feel — yes, at forty-eight quite as much as at any point of the supposed reign of younger intensities
— the great spirit of the air, the fine sense of the season, the supreme appeal of Nature, he might have said, to his time of life; quite as if she, easy, indulgent, indifferent, cynical Power, were offering him the last chance it would rest with his wit or his blood to embrace. Then with that he had been entertaining, to the point and with the prolonged consequence of accepted immobilization, the certitude that if he did call on Mrs. Worthingham and find her at home he couldn’t in justice to himself not put to her the question that had lapsed the other time, the last time, through the irritating and persistent, even if accidental, presence of others. What friends she had — the people who so stupidly, so wantonly stuck! If they should, he and she, come to an understanding, that would presumably have to include certain members of her singularly ill-composed circle, in whom it was incredible to him that he should ever take an interest. This defeat, to do himself justice — he had bent rather predominantly on that, you see; ideal justice to her, with her possible conception of what it should consist of, being another and quite a different matter — he had had the fact of the Sunday afternoon to thank for; she didn’t “keep” that day for him, since they hadn’t, up to now, quite begun to cultivate the appointment or assignation founded on explicit sacrifices. He might at any rate look to find this pleasant practical Wednesday — should he indeed, at his actual rate, stay it before it ebbed — more liberally and intendingly given him.
And here is the ending of “Crapy Cornelia” – a nice bit of Jamesian dialogue:
[Mason-White tells Cornelia that he no longer wishes to marry Mrs. Worthingham.]
“Yes — I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t — hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”
Cornelia magnanimously thought “No — but she knows other things.”
He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. “Too many — too many. And other indeed — so other! Do you know,” he went on, “that it’s as if you — by turning up for me — had brought that home to me?”
“‘For you,’” she candidly considered. “But what — since you can’t marry me! — can you do with me?”
Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you — just this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you renounced Bognor [a genteel London suburb]. That’s it — I know it at last, and I see one can like it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he said it without the scowl.
[Notes for youngsters (under 40): 1) When Mason-White says he’s “high,” he means “over-ripe,” like game. 2) Mason-White and Cornelia cannot marry because it just wasn’t done, a man-on-the-town marrying an older, grey-haired woman – a reason which, for James, needs no further explanation. (And don’t be snotty. There are plenty of things – different things – which are just not done in your generation, too.)]
Virtuosity?
“Yes — I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t — hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”
She hasn’t – she doesn’t – she...hasn’t. This is a delightful little play of verb forms. The first “she hasn’t” means “she has not a certain ‘all.’” “She doesn’t” has an odd ring, then. She doesn’t – what? – in relation to that “all?” The reader quickly realizes that “doesn’t” refers not to the “all” that Mrs. Worthingham lacks, but to the predicate of the previous sentence, “know.” She doesn’t know what Mason-White knows about what she hasn’t. She doesn’t know and hasn’t a glimmer of suspicion of it.
I don’t know about you, but I find that fun. It’s a meaningless bit of linguistic virtuosity which, I am sure, was as much a pleasure for James to write as for a reader to suss out.
“And other indeed — so other!”
At first glance, a peculiar exclamation. It sounds awkward, until the reader understands that Mason-White is not indeed-ing and so-ing the otherness of the too many other things Mrs. Worthingham knows, but is commenting on the word “other,” the adjective in Cornelia’s previous remark. That’s clever; that’s fun; if you love the language, it is beautiful.
“Scowl” is not by chance the final word of the story. Mason-White’s “scowl” is a leitmotif in “Crapy Cornelia.” The word appears seven times in twenty-nine pages. It is introduced as Mason-White waits in Mrs. Worthingham’s anteroom.
He met the whole vision with something of the grimace produced on persons without goggles by the passage from a shelter to a blinding light; and if he had — by a perfectly possible chance — been “snap-shotted” on the spot, would have struck you as showing for his first tribute to the temple of Mrs. Worthingham’s charming presence a scowl almost of anguish.
“Crapy Cornelia” might just as well have been titled “How He Stopped Scowling”.
Here’s a bit of virtuosity – nothing serious, when it comes to the plot (a twist of fate bringing together, in a Swiss pension, a man and a woman who have been discarded as infra dig by socially ambitious partners), but as a twist of language, it carries the reader from a cliché, pointed question, to an original and telling physiognomic description, pointed smile, that, as a brushstroke in a painted portrait of Madame Massin, would signal it was the work of a master.
The first sentence of “Fordham Castle”:
Sharp little Madame Massin, who carried on the pleasant pension and who had her small hard eyes everywhere at once, came out to him on the terrace and held up a letter addressed in a manner that he recognised even from afar, held it up with a question in her smile, or a smile, rather a pointed one, in her question — he could scarce have said which.
Do you see? Isn't that good? The displacement of "pointed" from its usual, boring partner, "question," to "smile." Does anyone else read like this? Or is it only I?
RSS Feed