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I always enjoyed reading and read a lot growing up. Still, I think one of my first truly literary experiences was when I first read Daisy Miller (1879). Though I had read some excellent books from excellent authors, Daisy Miller, for whatever reason, was the first one where I was truly cognizant of the writing itself. I’m sure I was impressed by a turn of phrase before, but in Daisy Miller suddenly I was struck by the arrangement of a sentence and how that in an of itself can help reveal the consciousness of a character. I have since read Daisy Miller many times, and it doesn’t get old.
Before I read it the first time, had someone told me the premise of the novella I probably would have been discouraged. Perhaps that’s exactly what happened; I don’t remember. But Henry James prose brings the story to life. It is so fluid without sacrificing precision and depth. Consequently, I am at a loss at how to convey my thoughts here. Oh well, that hasn’t stopped me before. Perhaps I can introduce it with one of my favorite lines, a funny line that, I believe, proves James’s ability at observation and wit — and it’s certainly not stuffy:
Mrs. Costello was a widow with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick-headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time.
That was just for fun. No need, at this point, to worry about who fusty Mrs. Costello is. This story has two principal characters, each American. The story is told from a close third-person narrator, the character this narrator is close to is a Mr. Winterbourne. Winterbourne has spent many years in Europe, particularly in Geneva. He’s gotten used to European customs and is struck by the glaring presence in the European landscape of a young, very foreward American girl named Daisy Miller (actually, as her little brother would tell you, her name is Annie), an “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.”
He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone. Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming; but how deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State — were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent.
Daisy Miller is unlike the continental girls, in disagreeable ways. She and her mother disregard all of the proper modes of conduct: they don’t understand wealth, they are unsophisticated, they dine with their servant, Daisy goes about with men without an escort — she flirts openly. It is this flirting that surprises and attracts Winterbourne (he obviously has an appetite). He’s perplexed: Is this young American girl innocent in her flirting? Or does she have schemes? He goes back and forth, most often settling on innocence. Afterall, this flirting might be proper for some women — Winterbourne has had experience with them — but they are dangerous; Daisy is not:
He had known, here in Europe, two or three women — persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability’s sake, with husbands — who were great coquettes — dangerous, terrible women, with whom one’s relations were liable to take a serious turn. But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt.
Winterbourne spends much of the story trying to pin down Daisy Miller, constantly offering to be at her service and escort her to the various places she’d like to go. This distresses his proper aunt, but, because he has some license as man, he doesn’t fret. He must know who Daisy is. He must decipher this young flirt.
Let’s step back a minute; I’d like to bring up my first experience with Daisy Miller. I was much younger. I was probably attracted to Daisy for the same reasons as Winterbourne (James is so good at her characterization), so I felt I understood Winterbourne. He was pleasant to her, didn’t seem to judge her as much as others, and, I thought, had her own interests at heart. As the years have passed I’ve come to despise the man. The following passage gives some insight into why I now understand why Winterbourne bears the name Winterbourne.
At the risk of exciting a somewhat derisive smile on the reader’s part, I may affirm that with regard to the women who had hitherto interested him it very often seemed to Winterbourne among the possibilities that, given certain contingencies, he should be afraid — literally afraid — of these ladies. He had a pleasant sense that he should never be afraid of Daisy Miller. It must be added that this sentiment was not altogether flattering to Daisy; it was part of his conviction, or rather of his apprehension, that she would prove a very light young person.
There’s a darkness to Winterbourne’s motives. Though he might not condemn Daisy’s innocent flirtations, niether does he desire them to be entirely innocent. If she is truly innocent, then the complicated social games he finds amusing in all their complexity and in all their secrets are for naught. This is all part of the layers James places in this story.
Daisy, for her part, is wonderfully drawn by James. Though an enigma, she certainly feels like a tangible character we know well. All of our questions about who she is are like the real questions we wonder about those around us in real life who intrigue us.
This is a marvelous short book. Before now, it had been about five years since my last reading. It won’t be that long before I read it again. There is so much here and so many reasons to want to get to know these characters better — it feels as if one has a personal stake in the outcome.
These little novellas, brought to us by Melville House, feel so nice in the hand, and it’s so fulfilling to read a good book in a sitting, that I’m hoping to keep expanding my collection and reviewing the classic and new works here. In their latest batch of classic novellas, Melville House offered a Henry James book I’d never heard of: The Coxon Fund(1894). You may remember from my previous post on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw that I am not well versed in James, but I thought I’d heard of most of his work here or there. Turns out I’m not the only one to find The Coxon Funda new discovery; a few of my friends, who also thought they were moderately familiar with James’s work, looked at me quizzically when I showed them the book.
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
On a first read, I can understand why The Coxon Fund is not as famous as Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, or The Aspern Papers. This story, still psychologically acute and full of beautiful sentences, lacks some of the drama found in the more famous works. At least, that’s true on the surface. While I was in law school, I always wanted to dig a bit deeper into the cases, particularly the areas of family, trusts, and estates. It’s amazing to see what money and inheritance can do to people, but we were often given only a dry version of the facts post-decline. I am always on the lookout for a book that explores this area better, and I never knew Henry James offered one. The Coxon Fund, as its title suggests, has at its center an endowment that will become the subject of a few disputes, wrecking the potentiality of one family while showing fault lines in others.
Here we have a nameless narrator who is only tangentially involved in any of the main events in the novella. However, he knows all of the primary actors, and his interactions reminded me somewhat of Nick Carraway’s. At the beginning of the story, he tells us he’s just left the Mulvilles. They have recently began boarding Mr. Saltram, a remarkably talented artist who nevertheless is broke and estranged from his wife, “a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person.” On the one hand, our narrator is awed by Mr. Saltram, amazed by his intelligence and articulate manner. But Mr. Saltram is not really sophisticated. He fails to show up to his scheduled lectures, or perhaps worse shows up to lecture drunk. Our narrator, while attracted to Saltram, is also aware that Saltram takes advantage: “remarkable men find remarkable conveniences.”
One of our narrator’s friends is Mr. Gravener. Gravener doesn’t accept Saltram — “there was no cad like your cultivated cad.” In fact, Gravener finds Saltram so unimportant that Gravener fails to understand the man’s pull on other people. One of the individuals is Miss Ruth Anvoy, an American who’s come to visit her aunt in Britain. We first meet Miss Anvoy when she attends one of Saltram’s lectures — one Saltram failed to attend. Our narrator tells her she must come again; Saltram is worth it. But our narrator also tells her that Saltram is far from perfect.
A few years pass, and Gravener and Miss Anvoy are engaged to be married. There are some deaths and failed aspirations. Through Gravener we become aware that Miss Anvoy’s aunt has a sum of money she wishes to put to good use:
“She wishes to endow — ?”
“Some earnest and ‘loyal’ seeker,” Gravener said. “It was a sketchy design of her late husband’s, and he handed it on to her; setting apart in his will a sum of money of which she was to enjoy the interest for life, but of which, should she eventually see her opportunity — the matter was left largely to her discretion — she would best honour his memory by determining the exemplary public use. This sum of money, no less than thirteen thousand pounds, was to be called the Coxon Fund; and poor Sir Gregory evidently proposed to himself that the Coxon Fund should cover his name with glory — be universally desired and admired. He left his wife a full declaration of his views, so far at least as that term may be applied to views vitiated by a vagueness really infantine. A little learning’s a dangerous thing, and a good citizen who happens to have been an ass is worse for a community than bad sewerage. He’s worst of all when he’s dead, because then he can’t be stopped. However, such as they were, the poor man’s aspirations are now in his wife’s bosom, or fermenting rather in her foolish brain: it lies to her to carry them out. But of course she must first catch her hare.”
Lady Coxon gives the money to Miss Anvoy to dispose of how she sees fit. Miss Anvoy feels the moral obligation to use the money to support someone who can help the world: “He was like a jelly minus its mould, he had to be embanked; and that was precisely the source of her interest in him and the ground of her project.” Not an idealist, Mr. Gravener disagrees.
Typical of Henry James, what I’ve told you above merely gives structure to a deeper inquiry into the human psyche. All of the characters are greatly realized and offer much to think about. I was only partially disappointed that James left so much for me to figure out on my own (just like those old legal decisions!). An interesting strain of inquiry — the one Melville House focuses on in its book blurb — is that of the artist’s role in the world. Can the artistic abilities of the crass Saltram really make things better? And what do the rest of us do to support such a person? There is plenty of food for thought. Though there were parts, even in this novella, where I became easily distracted by what was going on around me, in the end it had my complete attention — and I have continued thinking about it ever since.
Henry James pops up everywhere I look. So many of my favorite (and many of my not-so-favorite) writers reach back to him, not only in their writing style but explicitly in their prose. Also, last year in my post on Patrick McGrath’s Asylum many people recommended I read Henry James if I wanted some good ghost stories. And last week when my review of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the comments made room for Henry James because he is a contemporary of Wharton’s and also roams in the murky contrasts between the United States and European society at the end of the nineteenth century.
Now, I’m not completely ignorant—only mostly ignorant—when it comes to Henry James. I know that he was born in America but basically left that all behind to become British. It is because of his ties to both countries that I have read Daisy Miller a few of times, in a survey course on American Literature and a survey course on British Literature (the only other author that I read in both classes was T.S. Eliot). But, though I loved Daisy Miller, I avoided the sometimes coercive attempts to get me to read James further. Sometimes it’s nice to hold with pride to a bit of ignorance. It shocks people. I did the same thing by successfully avoiding The Wizard of Oz until I was 25, when my urge to watch all 100 of the AFI’s top movies overcame my urge to shock people by saying, “I’ve never seen that.”
And now it’s time to move on and read more Henry James. Looking for something quick to get my palate warmed up, I chose the ghost story—some say the most sophisticated ghost story ever—The Turn of the Screw (1898).
As I have not read that many ghost stories, I cannot say with certainty that this is the most sophisticated, but I believe it. This is one of the most sophisticated narratives I’ve ever read.
Because much of this review will be taken by the structure of the story and how James uses the narrative devices to craft a fantastic look at the psyche, I need to say a word or two now about the writing. This was written in James third period—his last. By this time his syntax is incredibly complicated, subjects tied to multiple verbs strewn throughout sentences filled with multiple interjectory phrases. But that shouldn’t frighten anyone away. It’s invigorating and forces you to examine each word’s meaning. And it’s not all complicated. James doesn’t sacrifice nice phrases and build up:
There was many a corner round which I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way, would have favoured the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its grey sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theatre after the performance—all strewn with crumpled playbills.
The novella begins with a curious framing device. An unnamed narrator explains that a few years ago, around Christmas time, a group of sophisticated friends were telling ghost stories to one another. Though it’s obvious this group loves a good ghost story, they are incredibly sceptical. They accept little at face value and interrupt whoever is telling the story many times to read into what the speaker says, whether it be sexual undertones in apparently innocent statements or flagrant romaticism which deserves to be derided. After a successful ghost story involving one child, Douglas, one of the older men in the group, says he has a story about two children that will turn the screw. It’s been forty years or so since he received it from the mouth of his sister’s governess, with whom he was possibly in love, giving some way for derision:
They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference.
This setup in itself is incredibly sophisticated. In this framing device, James tells his audience how to read the story that is coming: be critical, deride the romantic, read between the lines, draw the inference—raising our expectations. And then James will astound us by clearing by a mile the hurdle he’s set up for himself. So off we go . . .
The main narrative is told in the first person by the unnamed governess. As it begins, she is arriving at Bly, an estate where she will meet her new assignments, Miles and Flora, the orphaned nephew and neice of her new employer, whom she met briefly in London and with whom, in that short time, she fell in love.
At first, all seems innocuous enough. Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, tells her the children are both angels. The governess can’t help but agree when she meets Flora, charming with her mixture of perfect manners and cherubic features. Mrs. Grose assures the governess that Miles, too, is beyond reproach. But even before Miles has arrived from school, an unopened letter arrives accompanied by a note from the employer (“This, I recognise, is from the head-master, and the head-master’s an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you don’t report. Not a word. I’m off!”). The unopened letter is from Miles’s school saying that he has done something unspeakably terrible and is not going to be allowed to return after the holiday. The school didn’t disclose the details. After meeting Miles, the governess cannot imagine what he did that could be so bad because he is so perfect. Furthermore, she cannot bring herself to mention it to Miles, even to figure out what it was to rectify the situation, for fear of corrupting him by speaking about something taboo. And even if she did know, she’s from a time where, if it was truly bad, she wouldn’t write the details of it in her own narrative, which is all we have here. So James allows his reader’s imagination to run wild. Just what did this ten year old angel do? Brilliant! The ambiguity is so great that the spectrum of what this boy could have done is as large as the reader’s imagination. Whatever happened is assumed unspeakable and therefore remains completely unspoken, though James teases the reader with other clues that are equally ambiguous and capable of just as many readings.
The ambiguity increases. One evening the governess is out for a walk, thinking of her employer, wishing he would appear before much like Rochester appears to Jane Eyre, when she sees a man walking around one of Bly’s towers. No one of his description is at Bly. A few days later she sees the man again, staring through the window, looking for someone other than the governess. When she runs out to confront the man, he is no where to be seen. After discussing the matter with Mrs. Grose, the governess finds out that the man fits the description of one Peter Quint, who is dead. Adding to the horror, one day while at the lake with Flora, the governess spots a woman in black watching them. This new presence, the governess is certain, she feels it, is the ghost of Miss Jessel, the governess’s predecessor. Eerily, the governess senses that Flora feels the presence but is purposefully pretending to not notice by keeping her back turned to the ghost.
The governess knows these ghosts have returned from the dead to continue their influence on the children. From Mrs. Grose she learns that they were very bad people (again, because they had bad manners? because they were bawdy? or because they sexually abused the children? It’s all up to the reader to imagine, along with the governess). Worse, it appears the children are welcoming the influence, almost colluding with the ghosts. Nevertheless, the governess sees it as her role to prevent the ghosts from further corrupting Miles and Flora.
They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screen—I was to stand before them. The more I saw the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised tension, that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madneses.
We can take this story at face value. We can assume the governess is telling the truth as it happened. However, in the narrative, James gives us many clues about the governess’s subjectivity. For one, we see that her love for her employer warps her judgment. When he tells her not to bother him with anything, even when she gets a letter from Miles’s school saying Miles cannot return to school due to some unspeakable act, she takes this as an expression of his utmost trust and faith in her ability to manage his affairs. She is flattered where she should be concerned. This is our narrator.
And just as he uses our narrator’s imagination and lack of information to infuse deep layers of ambiguity into the narrative, James uses the reader’s own imagination to further deepen the layers. Given the governess’s fears and the way she presents her own narrative, dialogue that might seem normal in another context we cannot help but read into a sort of horror we cannot define, making it all the more horrific.
But we definitely do our best to fill in the blanks! And the great thing is that any way the story is read, it is still a fascinating tale, an incredible look at the human psyche from any direction. Which James then reverses on the reader. In the end, because James gives us so much room to use our imagination, the book reveals more about us than about what realy happened at Bly.
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