Sarah Orne Jewett: The Tory Lover (1901)

[Image source: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51537/pg51537-images.html#the-parting-feast . Illustration by Charles Herbert Woodbury for the 1901 book edition of The Tory Lover.]

Just before nightfall, that same day, two travel-worn men came riding along a country road toward Old Passage, the ancient ferrying-place where travelers from the south and west of England might cross over into Wales. From an immemorial stream of travel and the wear of weather, the road-bed was worn, like a swift stream's channel, deep below the level of the country. One of the riders kept glancing timidly at the bushy banks above his head, as if he feared to see a soldier in the thicket peering down; his companion sat straight in his saddle, and took no notice of anything but his horse and the slippery road. It had been showery all the afternoon, and they were both spattered with mud from cap to stirrup.

As they came northward, side by side, to the top of a little hill, the anxious rider gave a sigh of relief, and his horse, which limped badly and bore the marks of having been on his knees, whinnied as if in sympathy. The wide gray waters of the Severn were spread to east and west; the headland before them fell off like a cliff. Below, to the westward, the land was edged by a long line of dike which walled the sea floods away from some low meadows that stretched far along the coast. Over the water were drifting low clouds of fog and rain, but there was a dull gleam of red on the western sky like a winter sunset, and the wind was blowing. At the road's end, just before them, was a group of gray stone buildings perched on the high headland above the Severn, like a monastery or place of military defense.

As the travelers rode up to the Passage Inn, the inn yard, with all its stables and outhouses, looked deserted; the sunset gust struck a last whip of rain at the tired men. The taller of the two called impatiently for a hostler before he got stiffly to the ground, and stamped his feet as he stood by his horse. It was a poor tired country nag, with a kind eye, that began to seek some fondling from her rider, as if she harbored no ill will in spite of hardships. The young man patted and stroked the poor creature, which presently dropped her head low, and steamed, as if it were winter weather, high into the cool air.

(From The Tory Lover, Ch 42)

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I didn't mean to say so much without saying more, now I have touched you with cold water when I only meant just lightly & kindly to sprinkle you as for a new baptism -- that is a re-dedication to altars but briefly, I trust, forsaken. Go back to the dear Country of the Pointed Firs, come back to the palpable present intimate that throbs responsive, & that wants, misses, needs you, God knows, & that suffers woefully in your absence.

Thus wrote Henry James to Sarah Orne Jewett on 5 October 1901, concluding his onslaught on historical fiction with a touch of compunction. 

Well, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), lightly fictionalized vignettes of Maine provincial life, -- this description hardly prepares you for what a wonderful book it is. But The Tory Lover, the book James deplored, is rather wonderful too, in its way. (It helps if you relish historical novels; James was clearly allergic to them.)

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I must admit I do. I'm not going to say much about the plot of The Tory Lover, but please don't assume that I think the plot isn't worth discussing (a view expressed by Alison Easton -- link at end of post). In fact I relish the most conventional aspects of Jewett's transatlantic romance just as much as the rest. I can idle away a whole morning on the Ranger (e.g. Ch 12), for instance  -- there is a complaining sailor called Starbuck on Paul Jones' ship -- so I read about the Starbuck surname and its Nantucket connections and how it came to be attached to the overpriced coffee chain where I spend too much time (but usually drinking tea... I wonder yet again why Starbucks doesn't offer a cortado...) or -- when Paul Jones decides to dole out a ration of grog to the crew -- I go off and read about the history of the naval rum ration. At the same time I'm thinking of how intimately Jewett understood sailing and boats and ships, both from her Maine background and from her constant travels; she and Annie Adams Fields had crossed the Atlantic eight times. 

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NB for British readers: in the context of the American War of Independence, a "Tory" was a term applied to a Loyalist, i.e. an American who still supported British sovereignty; in contrast to the Patriot majority who fought for Independence. 

Evidently their opponents saw the loyalists as vaguely resembling the English Tories of a century earlier who had maintained the claims of the Stuart monarchy. (See the carefully circuitous conversation between Master Sullivan and Mary Hamilton in Ch 17.) 

At the time of the American Revolution, the British monarch (George III) was a Hanoverian. In Parliament a clear bipartisan system hadn't yet emerged; the prime minister was still a royal appointment and didn't require a commons majority. But Lord North's government (from 1770) was generally seen as (and called) Tory, even though North and others were formally Whigs.

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Reading Jewett's books often produces that kind of conviction: that she knows what she's talking about, that she had lived every paragraph that she wrote. Especially of course in her Maine writings. And yet it wasn't always that simple. 

After we returned to the parlor Mr. James took occasion to tell Sarah how deeply and sincerely he appreciates her work; how he re-reads it with increasing admiration. "It is foolish to ask, I know," he said, "but were you in just such a place as you describe in the 'Pointed Firs'? --" "No," she said, "not precisely; the book was chiefly written before I visited the locality itself --" "And such an island?" he continued. "Not exactly," she said again. "Ah! I thought so," he said musingly; "and the language -- It is so absolutely true -- not a word overdone -- such elegance and exactness."

[from Annie Fields' diary, 12 September 1898.]

Jewett was in fact a master at making readers believe that she possessed local knowledge even when she didn't; just like Kipling, who greatly admired her writings.

The Tory Lover begins in Maine, but later the scene shifts to England, and it was then that I had my own moment of conviction, while I was reading the scene in which our heroine Mary Hamilton accompanies the elderly Mr Davis on a ride from Bristol to Bath along the Avon valley, countryside that I know very well. 

The fields and hedges, the bright foxglove and green ivy, the larks and blackbirds and quiet robins, the soft air against her cheeks, .....   this hazy landscape along the Avon... "You may see Bath now, there in the valley," said Mr. Davis, pointing with his big hand and the hunting crop. "'T is as fine a ride from Bristol to Bath as any you may have in England." They stopped their horses, a little short of breath, and looked down the rich wooded country to the bright town below.

(From The Tory Lover, Ch 35)

She must have been there! I found myself thinking. It was not because of the presence of any unusual fact, it was somehow the understanding of the topography and its proportions, the hazy Avon, the mild climate, Bath gleaming in its rather steep valley; things you can't easily convey in a guidebook, but instantly grasp when you go there. 

I didn't know much about Jewett's European travels at that point. Later, I did some research (see below); and sure enough, in July 1892 she had indeed spent a few days in Bristol, or rather Westbury on Trym (still just about separate). The Egyptologist Amelia Edwards had lived at "The Larches" until her recent death. Jewett had become friends with Miss Edwards and her assistant Kate Bradbury during their 1889 lecture tour. Now Kate was trying to sort out what to do about the contents of Miss Edwards' house, in particular the important library. 

Kate was very busy, but Jewett was an energetic sightseer. She would certainly have taken herself up to nearby Clifton Down and from there down to Bristol cathedral (the setting for an important scene in The Tory Lover). She could conceivably have taken a trip to Bath .... but then I thought of something. She must have arrived by train from Paddington, so she would already have passed through Bath and the Avon valley on her way to Bristol. Pleasant as it is to imagine Sarah Orne Jewett traversing this July landscape on horseback like her heroine, it's most likely that she just looked out of the train window. Her glance could take in everything, and then bring it forth eight years later when she needed it for her historical romance. 

She wasn't planning The Tory Lover then, as far as we know.  But by the time she returned to Europe in 1898, she certainly was. And a pattern emerges. In the novel, Paul Jones and Lieutenant Wallingford travel from Nantes via Vitré to Paris. Jewett herself, researching the locations, was staying in Paris; it was from here that she visited both Vitré and Nantes, in each case by train. So Jewett (unlike her model Sir Walter Scott, eighty years earlier) was using modern transportation methods -- train and passenger ship -- to whiz around France and England. Her life, once away from provincial South Berwick, assumed the hub-and-spoke shape that still characterizes the travels of the wealthy (the hubs being e.g. London or Paris). But in her imagined world of  1778, there was no rail network and her characters are shown travelling arduously cross-country between her endpoints -- by horse power (e.g. Nantes to Vitré,  Bristol to Plymouth). This single alteration, you might say, went a long way towards creating the conditions of historical romance.

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But what then of the Old Passage Inn, scene of the novel's denouement? The building still exists (it's now a private house) and Jewett's topography is remarkably accurate, as Graham Frater commented (in Terry Heller's edition, linked below). Charles Woodbury's splendid illustration, however, romanticized the contours of a landscape that is really rather flat (compare my photo at the end of this post).

There was indeed a dike or sea-wall running south from Old Passage (Mary Hamilton and Mr Davis will later arrive by that route). The headland does indeed end in a cliff (Aust cliff); this is where the Severn Bridge was constructed in the 1960s.

Could Jewett have gone there in 1892? Well, it's possible. She was very interested in rivers and from Westbury on Trym she might have been tempted down to the shores of the Severn; she was also interested in neglected harbours, but it was about a ten mile walk to Old Passage. More likely she would have taken a carriage. Still, it doesn't seem a very probable destination when you are only in Bristol for a few days. 

The most obvious reason that a tourist would go to Old Passage would have been to take a ferry across the Severn. But after the Severn rail tunnel came into operation in 1886, the ferry service at Old Passage no longer ran. In 1892 the inn must have been disused or nearly so. (And anyway though Jewett travelled widely in Ireland and England, as well as staying in Edinburgh twice, there's no record of her ever visiting the other side of the Severn.)

If she didn't see the Old Passage Inn with her own eyes, what's the alternative? How could she know so much about its setting, how did she know (for instance) about the Welsh drovers who used the ferry and stayed at the inn? She might have seen accounts in earlier literature, but I haven't found any with that level of detail. Most likely, the information came from someone she knew, perhaps one of her many English friends. 

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There's another strange thing about the Old Passage scenes in The Tory Lover. They had to some extent been anticipated by  "A Dark Night", a story she wrote in 1895 for Bacheller, Johnson and Bacheller (a publishing syndicate): it appeared in the Philadelphia Press. 

Compare this paragraph from "A Dark Night" with the first one quoted above. 

As night was falling two mounted messengers, spattered with mud from cap to stirrup, were riding wearily along a deep, worn country lane. They were in the north part of the county of Somerset, near the waters of the Severn. The lane itself, deserted enough that night, was a great thoroughfare for those who came from the south and west to cross over into Wales. By this immemorial stream of travel and the wearing of the weather it had been worn like a swift stream's channel, deep below the level of the country. One of the riders kept glancing fearfully at the bushy banks above him, as if he expected to see a head in the thicket peering down. The other man rode straight and stern in his saddle, and took no notice of anything but his horse and the slippery road.

(from "A Dark Night", Ch 1)

In "A Dark Night" the location is obfuscated and contradictory. The two riders, explicitly said to be "riding northward", are travelling towards Bristol from an unamed town in the West of England. This is consistent with them being on the Somerset coast; that is, on the Bristol Channel. But the historic county of Somerset didn't extend to the Severn: the boundary with Gloucestershire lay further south, at the Avon. 

Nevertheless, the travellers in "A Dark Night" reach the banks of the Severn, even though this would mean that they've already gone beyond Bristol. And it's apparent from the topography that the "old Black Eagle Inn", where they shortly arrive, is based on the Old Passage Inn. Here is the headland, the dike, the cliff and the Severn. The mistress of the inn tells the new arrivals that "She had ceased to keep the tavern since the travel had all gone, or been stolen away to the lower ferry"; a remark that makes perfect sense if this is the Old Passage at Aust, the "lower ferry" being the New Passage at Pilning. 

[This would suggest that "A Dark Night" is set in the late 18th-early 19th century, a period when the New Passage had gained the upper hand. The Old Passage recovered its primacy in the late 1820s, with two steamboats financed by the Duke of Beaufort, then gradually lost trade as the railway network spread; and in 1863 it reached New Passage. (Much later, there would be a resurrection of the Old Passage: a car ferry would ply between Aust and Beachey. It operated from 1926 until 1966.)]

The obfuscation, I suppose, seemed necessary because "A Dark  Night" (unlike The Tory Lover) portrayed the inn as a den of thieves. Because the story-lines take very different courses afterwards. Nevertheless, both are founded on a common image, comprising e.g. the two travel-stained horsemen, the rainy weather, nightfall, the sunken lane, the Severn scenery of Old Passage, the unfriendly-looking inn, stabling the horses, the fishing-boat by the shore, and various other details.

I feel it's right to understand this as a pre-existent image, because in both stories Jewett sought to preserve elements that were not strictly necessary. In  "A Dark Night", as we've seen, Jewett retained the scenery of Old Passage even though the story purports to take place elsewhere. Likewise in The Tory Lover she preserved the second rider (the anxious one) who accompanies the straight-backed hero, though Hammet (in The Tory Lover) has no such important role as his predecessor Rogers. She also preserved the red sunset and the steaming horse, details natural to the winter setting of "A Dark Night" but which are tagged as "like winter" in The Tory Lover, where it's in fact late summer. 

All the same, I feel a stubborn conviction that bad weather in late summer was the "true" context of the image. But maybe that's just another testament to Jewett's skill. (And maybe I'm influenced by knowing that she never saw the west of England in winter; a very different thing from winter in Maine.)

The buildings at Old Passage, Aust

[Image source: https://collections.bristolmuseums.org.uk/collections/2c1f3640-9461-3962-b253-0056c7eddd41/ . Drawing by Hugh O'Neill (1784 - 1824). (c)Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives.]

From A New and Accurate Description of All the Direct and Principal Cross Roads in England and Wales, and Part of the Roads of Scotland by Lieutenant-Colonel [Daniel] Paterson, 1811. It's on Google Books .

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If you just want to read The Tory Lover, the simplest and best way is on Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51537/pg51537-images.html

But if you want to dive a little deeper, or even a lot deeper, you'll be delighted and instructed by the annotated edition lovingly put together by Terry Heller in 2023 (downloadable as three PDFs):

Part 1:

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/1-jewettpress/e-Tory%20Lover%20--%20part%201.pdf

Part 2:

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/1-jewettpress/e-tory%20lover%20--%20Part%202.pdf

Part 3:

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/1-jewettpress/e-tory%20lover%20--%20Part%203.pdf

More or less all the information in this post comes either from there or (as regards their travels to Europe) from Sarah Orne Jewett's correspondence and Annie Field's diary: 

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/let/Corresp/1-correspondence.html

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Sarah Orne Jewett's travels to Europe. 

(Locations relevant to The Tory Lover are in bold.)

Sarah Orne Jewett [SOJ] and Annie Fields [AF] travelled to Europe in 1882, 1892, 1898 and 1900. 

1882 

(May-Oct)

Cork, Glengarriff, Enniskillen, Dublin, London, Isle of Wight, Stonehenge, Salisbury, Dawlish, Clovelly, Exeter, Lynton, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwick, Hull (then by ship to Norway, visiting the Ole Bulls), back to Edinburgh and London, then Antwerp, Amsterdam, down the Rhine, Interlaken, Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Genoa, Paris, London.

1892

27 Feb - c. 4 Oct

SOJ and AF sailed to Genoa, a rough crossing. In Italy until June, then France, arriving England in mid (?) July. The details of their first days in England are relatively poorly documented, but it seems they came to London, had some days at Bristol, perhaps back to London and then to Ilkley in late July. 

----- We had some days near Bristol at Miss Edwards's house with Katie Bradbury -- it was like a visit to a ghost by which I have no idea of saying that it was altogether sad -- on the contrary! and her library is a room you would like dearly. One always felt that she must be coming into it next minute. I shall tell you much more than this about the Larches some day.

Sarah Orne Jewett to Sarah Wyman Whitman - Letter from Ilkley, 30 July 1892.

["Miss Edwards" was the Egyptologist Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831- 15 April 1892). Miss Edwards died while Jewett and Annie Fields were in Italy. Her home since 1864, was "The Larches" in Westbury-on-Trym. Kate Bradbury was Edwards' companion in her final years (accompanying her on her American lecture tour in 1889-90).]

SOJ and AF then visited Ilkley (Bolton Abbey, Wharfedale, Haworth), then travelled via Lincoln, Boston, Ely and Cambridge to London with visits to Warwickshire (Mrs Dugdale) via Oxford, Aldworth House (the Tennysons; at Blackdown, technically just in West Sussex but understandably described as Surrey by both SOJ and AF), Tring (Mrs Humphrey Ward), Cobham (Mrs Arnold), Canterbury, then left London and went to York, Whitby (George du Maurier), Edinburgh, Lake District, and Riversvale Hall (Kate Bradbury; Ashton-under-Lyme). Sailed from Liverpool 22nd Sept.

1898

SOJ and AF arrived by ship in Plymouth on April 18 1898, travelled swiftly through Devon and Somerset, apparently reaching London the following day (presumably by train, e.g. Exeter Taunton Westbury Reading Paddington). Then France: Paris, Provence, Paris, Meaux and Rheims, Paris, and Brittany (Vitré, Mont St Michel, St Malo, Dinan, Tréguier, Quimper, Quiberon, Carnac and Nantes), Paris, Loire valley and Tours, and back to Paris. Crossed the channel in August: London (briefly), Cambridge, Ilkley, Edinburgh (via Carlisle), Riversvale Hall (Kate Bradbury, now Griffith) at Ashton-under-Lyme, Stratford-upon-Avon, London: visits to the Humphrey Wards at Stocks House near Tring (Herts), Totteridge, to Henry James at Rye where they had a trip to Hastings, Eversley (Hampshire), Windsor, to the Kiplings at Rottingdean,  to the Hallam Tennysons at Haslemere (Surrey); then Ashton-under-Lyme again, and so to their return ship at Liverpool. 

AF's diary, July 11: We took the train for Nantes which Sarah wished to see because Paul Jones sailed away from there and if she writes his story as she hopes to do she will like to have seen the Loire before it sinks into the sea.

1900 

(28 Feb to c. June 1). SOJ, AF and Mary Garrett visited Greece, Turkey ("Constantinople"), Italy and France (including Paris); they did not visit Britain on this trip. 

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Alison Easton, "Nation making and fiction making: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Tory Lover, and Walter Scott, Waverley" [PDF]. Published in 2002, I think. 

https://www.manchesterhive.com/downloadpdf/display/9781526137654/9781526137654.00012.pdf

Argues that The Tory Lover asserts a distinctively nuanced view of the American Revolution that shows the influence of Scott novels such as Waverley in its critique of simple political binaries and its appeal to the practical virtues of compromise. Jewett certainly admired Scott the man, i.e. as seen in Lockhart and in Scott's own journal, letters and essays. 

"Along the Dike." Approaching the buildings on the headland from the dike, as Mary Hamilton and Mr Davis do in Ch 43.  Aust Old Passage, 27 February 2025.

Reading around Colm Tóibín: The Master (2004)

Terracotta bust of the twelve-year-old Count Alberto Bevilacqua by Hendrik Christian Andersen. Purchased by Henry James for Lamb House, Rye.

[Image source: https://jasoncochran.com/2014/04/29/henry-james-muses-the-bust-in-his-dining-room-and-a-sort-of-secret-dynasty/ .]

 

 ... For his friends, this night would be entered into the annals of the unmentionable, pages in which he had so studiously avoided having his name appear. As time passed, however, he realized that he could not betray the performers now. He could not give into his own horrible urge to be alone in the darkness, to escape into the night and walk as though he had written nothing and was nobody. He would have to go to them and thank them; he would have to insist that the repast planned after the triumph of his play should go ahead. In the half light he stood preparing himself, steeling himself, ready to suppress whatever his own urges and needs might be. He made his hands into fists as he set out to smile and bow and imagine that the evening in all its glory had been due entirely to the talents of the actors in the great tradition of the London stage. 

(From Colm Tóibín's The Master, end of Ch 1 (January 1895).)

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That final sentence is a little miracle; Tóibín showing us Henry's distressed thoughts preparing for verbiage; the nonsense he must say at the after-show party, so begins to imagine. 

The Master is the wonderful portrait of an artistic freedom gone rogue. The more desperately Henry needs to preserve his freedom, the more he must confine his life and his thoughts. The more uncompromising he needs to be, the more he must compromise. It's a trade-off that's almost ruinous, to his life and to his art. Almost. 

Like many of his stories, Guy Domville was helplessly personal in its accent on renunciation of marriage. Guy's willingness to marry is as lightly thrown off as it was assumed; it seems evident that he adores Mrs Peverel only as a mother-figure.

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GUY. What I must forget is that I've strayed! -- From the happiness that was near to the happiness that was far! 

MRS. PEVEREL. But the happiness that was "near" was a life you had put away.

GUY. The happiness that was near was a treasure not mine to touch! I believed that treasure then to be another's.

MRS. PEVEREL. You had too great things to think of -- and now I see how they've changed you. You hold yourself in another way. 

GUY. (Smiling.) I try to carry my "name"!

MRS. PEVEREL. (Triumphant, to prove how right she has been.) You carry it better than you did!

GUY. People have cried me up for it. But the better the name, the better the man should be.

MRS. PEVEREL. He can't be better than when his duty prevails. 

GUY. Sometimes that duty is darkened, and then it shines again! It lighted my way as I came, and it's bright in my eyes at this hour. But the brightness, in truth, is yours -- it grows and grows in your presence. Better than anything I sought or found is that purer passion -- this calm retreat! (Then on an ironic movement of MRS. PEVEREL'S.) Aye, calm, Madam (struck with the sight of LORD DEVENISH'S white gloves), save for these! I've seen them before -- I've touched them. (Thinking, recalling; then with light breaking.) At Richmond!

MRS. PEVEREL. (Deeply discomposed, at a loss.) My Lord Devenish left them.

GUY. (Astounded.) Was he here?

(From Guy Domville, Act III.)

Complete English text of Guy Domville, alongside a 2012 Portuguese translation by Mônica Zardo (PDF):

https://lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/10183/66289/1/000870716.pdf

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Guy Domville is set in 1780. The sets and costumes were designed accordingly (with mixed success), but Henry James took no great interest in the date he had specified. The characters speak modern Jamesian. Guy does indeed arrive in a "shay", that is, a chaise, a vehicle going out of use by the mid 19th century. But "shay" is American slang, perhaps recalled from "The Deacon's Masterpiece", a popular poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

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Henry was so agitated on the opening night at St James's Theatre (5 January 1895) that he knew he must keep away. He walked up the street to the Haymarket to see Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (which had opened two days before) returning to his own play only for its final lines and the catcalls. Seeing Wilde's play had made him feel worse; not only was it trash (Henry considered most plays to be trash), it had "smash hit" written all over it. 

LORD GORING. Come in there, father. Your sneezes are quite heartrending.

LORD CAVERSHAM. Well, sir, I suppose I have a right to sneeze when I choose?

LORD GORING. [Apologetically.] Quite so, father. I was merely expressing sympathy.

LORD CAVERSHAM. Oh, damn sympathy. There is a great deal too much of that sort of thing going on nowadays.

LORD GORING. I quite agree with you, father. If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world.

LORD CAVERSHAM. [Going towards the smoking-room.] That is a paradox, sir. I hate paradoxes.

LORD GORING. So do I, father. Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.

LORD CAVERSHAM. [Turning round, and looking at his son beneath his bushy eyebrows.] Do you always really understand what you say, sir?

LORD GORING. [After some hesitation.] Yes, father, if I listen attentively.

Complete text of An Ideal Husband:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/885/885-h/885-h.htm

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Hendrik Christian Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence, 1894 painting by Andreas Martin Andersen.

[Image source: Wikimedia Commons .]

The painting has been given various interpretations: the homoeroticism seems blatant and yet is conceivably a figment. The same might be said of the scene in The Master from Henry's youth, when he spends a night in a single bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, both of them naked. [This was the Holmes who was later a US Supreme Court justice and proponent of eugenics.]

In the novel that formative scene, young Henry being cupped by Holmes' body, is quietly recalled much later in Andersen's sympathetic embrace of the older Henry in the Protestant cemetery in Rome (a scene, by the way, that also contains a cat who wants to be stroked). 

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Henry in the Protestant cemetery is overcome before the recent tomb of his friend, the author Constance Fenimore Woolson, who committed suicide in Venice in 1894. (Was she another, the novel asks, who made the fatal mistake of pinning her hopes on Henry?)

Anyway, she had her own comment on art without compromise, when the obscure heroine of "Miss Grief" asks a successful author to read her play. 

I followed up my advantage, opened the little paper volume and began. I first took the drama line by line, and spoke of the faults of expression and structure; then I turned back and touched upon two or three glaring impossibilities in the plot. "Your absorbed interest in the motive of the whole no doubt made you forget these blemishes," I said apologetically.

But, to my surprise, I found that she did not see the blemishes—that she appreciated nothing I had said, comprehended nothing. Such unaccountable obtuseness puzzled me. I began again, going over the whole with even greater minuteness and care. I worked hard: the perspiration stood in beads upon my forehead as I struggled with her—what shall I call it—obstinacy? But it was not exactly obstinacy. She simply could not see the faults of her own work, any more than a blind man can see the smoke that dims a patch of blue sky. When I had finished my task the second time she still remained as gently impassive as before. I leaned back in my chair exhausted, and looked at her.

Even then she did not seem to comprehend (whether she agreed with it or not) what I must be thinking. "It is such a heaven to me that you like it!" she murmured dreamily, breaking the silence. Then, with more animation, "And now you will let me recite it?"

I was too weary to oppose her; she threw aside her shawl and bonnet, and, standing in the centre of the room, began.

And she carried me along with her: all the strong passages were doubly strong when spoken, and the faults, which seemed nothing to her, were made by her earnestness to seem nothing to me, at least for that moment. When it was ended she stood looking at me with a triumphant smile.

"Yes," I said, "I like it, and you see that I do. But I like it because my taste is peculiar. To me originality and force are everything—perhaps because I have them not to any marked degree myself—but the world at large will not overlook as I do your absolutely barbarous shortcomings on account of them. Will you trust me to go over the drama and correct it at my pleasure?" This was a vast deal for me to offer; I was surprised at myself.

"No," she answered softly, still smiling. "There shall not be so much as a comma altered." Then she sat down and fell into a reverie as though she were alone.

(From "Miss Grief".)

Woolson's writings are available on Project Gutenberg, so I've read a few of her stories. The most challenging was "King David", a brazenly racist assault on northern do-gooders (and their own inner racism), anticipating Stephen Crane. Her writing responded more warmly to the American South than anywhere else, I think. 

As soon as they could speak, "Where are the two out in the sail-boat?" asked the Sister.

"God knows!" answered Melvyna. "The last time I noticed their sail they were about a mile outside of the reef."

"I will go and see."

"Go and see! Are you crazy? You can never get through that water."

"The saints would help me, I think," said the little Sister.

She had risen, and now stood regarding the watery waste with the usual timid look in her gentle eyes. Then she stepped forward with her uncertain tread, and before the woman by her side comprehended her purpose she was gone, ankle-deep in the tide, knee-deep, and finally wading across the sand up to her waist in water toward the lighthouse. The great wave was no deeper, however, even there. She waded to the door of the tower, opened it with difficulty, climbed the stairway, and gained the light-room, where the glass of the windows was all shattered, and the little chamber half full of the dead bodies of birds, swept along by the whirlwind and dashed against the tower, none of them falling to the ground or losing an inch of their level in the air as they sped onward, until they struck against some high object, which broke their mad and awful journey. Holding on by the shattered casement, Sister St. Luke gazed out to sea. The wind was blowing fiercely, and the waves were lashed to fury. The sky was inky black. The reef was under water, save one high knob of its backbone, and to that two dark objects were clinging. Farther down she saw the wreck of the boat driving before the gale. Pedro was over in the village; the tide was coming in over the high sea, and night was approaching. She walked quickly down the rough stone stairs, stepped into the water again, and waded across where the paroquet boat had been driven against the wall of the house, bailed it out with one of Melvyna's pans, and then, climbing in from the window of the sitting-room, she hoisted the sail, and in a moment was out on the dark sea.

(From "Sister St Luke". Like "King David" this story appears in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches.)

*

The ‘historical novel’ is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the difficulty of the job is inordinate and that a mere escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the invention, the representation of the old CONSCIOUSNESS, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose mind half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent. You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman or rather fifty – whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force – and even then it’s all humbug.

That was Henry James writing to Sarah Orne Jewett (5 October 1901) about historical fiction. She had just published The Tory Lover (1901), set in 1777-78 during the American War of Independence  -- her first historical fiction, and her final book before the carriage accident (3 September 1902) ended her career as an author.  

It was frankly ungracious so far as timing went, but it was sincere. James had indeed a kind of extreme fastidiousness, amounting to a block, about admitting history into his novels. We know from his stage reviews that he loved Shakespeare's plays, responding deeply if not with notable originality. He lived in an era when most novelists loved to quote Shakespeare and other hallowed poets in their chapter epigraphs or their fictional conversations, to build a fictional world that confessed its rootedness in a tradition. In America there was a contemporary glut of historical romance (now largely forgotten), and James wasn't alone in deploring it. But he stood almost alone in the utter banishment from his work of old literature and indeed the words of other writers generally. The past is in fact irretrievable; it only enters his stories when filtered through modern sensibility; silly, touristic, fabricated and at best comic (moonlight on the Alhambra, for instance). His 1903 story "The Birthplace" won't even name the storied poet whose birthplace the Gedges curate, nor does it quote a single word or name from the poet's works. 

Mr Henry James and I are now writing letters to each other, and he always believes in an 'extinct soul' of the last century but I do not. (How could I, when one of my most intimate friends was a Harvard man of the class of '05, and I have seen fashions far back into the 1700's parading up the aisle of our old Berwick Church?)

(Sarah Orne Jewett to S. Weir Mitchell, 23 October 1901.)

But James' observation to Sarah Orne Jewett proves that all fiction, not just historical fiction, is "almost impossible". If a complete reconstruction of another's consciousness is truly necessary, then how can you put any other people into a novel than yourself? You'll immediately run up against the mystery of people who are a little older than yourself, and the still more intractable mystery of people who are a little younger. But everyone's a mystery... A different cultural background, different gender, different childhood, different social class, different health history, different passions... and all the rest... You can't fully know anyone. To people your pages, however, demands not universal knowledge but a sort of happy knack. Fiction is necessarily cheap. It must borrow, adapt, intrude, stage, creatively misremember and distort, reverse engineer, make adroit use of clichés, indulge in mystification, be flagrantly anachronistic, imagine such discourse as never existed, plunder from the intimacies of friends, cover its tracks, and exploit a hundred other tricks to spark the miracle of a story coming to life.

*

"My dear," he said, speaking eagerly, so that she must listen and would not draw away, "my dear, you ask an almost impossible thing; you should see that a suspected man were better left ashore, on such a voyage as this. Do you not discern that he may even turn my crew against me? He has been the young squire and benefactor of a good third of my men, and can you not see that I must always be on my guard?"

"But we must not distrust his word," begged Mary again, a little shaken.

"I have followed the sea, boy and man, since I was twelve years old. I have been a seafarer all my days," said Paul Jones. "I know all the sad experiences of human nature that a man may learn. I trust no man in war and danger and these days of self-advancement, so far that I am not always on the alert against treachery. Too many have failed me whom I counted my sure friends. I am going out now, only half trusted here at home, to the coasts where treason can hurt me most. I myself am still a suspected and envied man by those beneath me. I am given only this poor ship, after many generous promises. I fear a curse goes with it."

"You shall have our hopes and prayers," faltered Mary, with a quivering lip. The bitterness of his speech moved her deepest feelings; she was overstrung, and she was but a girl, and they stood in the moonlight together.

"Do not ask me again what I must only deny you, even in this happy moment of nearness," he said sadly, and watched her face fall and all the light go out of it. He knew all that she knew, and even more, of Wallingford's dangerous position, and pitied her for a single moment with all the pity that belonged to his heart. A lonely man, solitary in his very nature, and always foreboding with a kind of hopelessness the sorrows that must fall to him by reason of an unkindness that his nature stirred in the hearts of his fellows, his very soul had lain bare to her trusting look.

He stood there for one moment self-arraigned before Mary Hamilton, and knowing that what he lacked was love. He was the captain of the Ranger; it was true that Glory was his mistress. In that moment the heavens had opened, and his own hand had shut the gates.

The smile came back to Mary's face, so strange a flash of tenderness had brightened his own. When that unforgettable light went out, she did not know that all the jealousy of a lonely heart began to burn within him.

(from The Tory Lover, Ch 6)

*

Sarah Orne Jewett isn't in The Master -- more's the pity! -- but some of Henry's phrases are, for instance the "fatal cheapness" and the "humbug". In the novel he uses them while repelling his brother William, who thinks Henry should write a historical fiction about "the Puritan fathers". 

But The Master is emphatically a historical fiction, as John Updike pointed out in his review. All the same Tóibín, an intuitively un-Jamesian novelist in so many ways, is thinking about this matter of a vocation alongside his novelist-hero, thinking about its personal costs and what must be compromised and how what we repeatedly experience and what we're always having to deny and even what we dread are somehow what we have chosen, and how easy it is to fossilize into a horrible parody of what we hoped to be, and also how it's no good overthinking it, and that these questions aren't restricted to writing novels or any other vocation but sit unacknowledged at the centre of everyone's life.

In its totally different way The Master is just as personal a novel as Nora Webster. 

(It's a strange coincidence that one of the few unhistorical characters in The Master -- a young and arrogant English MP -- is surnamed Webster.)

*

On Colm Tóibín's Nora Webster:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2025/01/colm-toibin-nora-webster-2014.html

On Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/06/colm-toibin-heather-blazing-1992.html

the little feast

 

Dewberry

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.

(Opening of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881).)

Well yes, I can relate to the last bit. It's like the tea interval during a test match, when you know that the longest and often most eventful session of play still lies ahead of you.

This was before British Summer Time came into existence. James's five to eight o'clock is our six to nine o'clock (in terms of the July light). 

To really relish the "little feast" we seem to need an expanse of green and a lot of leisure. 

Perhaps, too, the absence of too much food: the outcome should be energising, refreshing us for a longer pull. Heavier meals slow us down, change our mood, break our impetus. But afternoon tea, not overly laden with cakes, prolongs it. 

And one final element of the agreeable hour (James' "hour" means a certain time of day, not a period of sixty minutes): the preparation of the tea should be carried out by others. Gardencourt, like everywhere else in this novel, is sustained by unnamed invisible servants. The characters in the novel need do no more than occasionally order a change of location. (It's a pitiful sign of Pansy Osmond's constrained position that she's always busying herself with pouring the tea.)

"Under certain circumstances .." The thrice-referred-to circumstances aren't specified. (The opening sentences have often been noted for their clumsiness.) When these circumstances offer "an admirable setting to an innocent pastime" James sounds like an estate agent. But perhaps his eventual aim is to contradict the sales literature, to show that the idyllic picture is conditional,  not guaranteed by money or anything else, and very definitely not timeless?

Who, actually, is experiencing the agreeable quality of the hour? Most evidently the reader, guided by the pleasantly waffling narrator. We're perhaps being readied too for Isabel Archer's response to the scene when she emerges from the house in the next chapter. 

But as for this afternoon's three partakers (or non-partakers) it's a bit less clear. It's perfect weather for tea outdoors, though Mr Touchett must keep the shawl over his knees, Ralph insists. It's nice that Warburton has ridden over. (That's what Ralph calls him; the narrator wouldn't dare.) Still there's a consonance between the hour (mellow light, ebbing sun) and the sickly father and son, the father much declined in the last year. His tea, we'll learn later, is diluted. There isn't much to talk about. The younger pair spin jokes out of misrepresenting what they've said to each other. Father and son have gone over and over Mrs Touchett's cablegrams, teasing every possible ambiguity out of their fairly plain substance. It's evident that the unknown niece has been much talked of; Ralph is very clear about her name, though it isn't in the cablegrams. And she's very much wanted too, in these senescent, comfortably numb surroundings. The moment they see her in person, see that she's pretty and smart, both Ralph and Lord Warburton are powerfully stirred, and it's just as the elder Mr Touchett has foreseen: the crosscurrents of acquisitiveness and protectiveness that will ripple through his exclusive backwater.

The freighted word "interesting" is thrown around in relation to Miss Archer; that familiar euphemism, in 19th-century literature, for feelings of a romantic nature. Still, the word of which the gentlemen are most aware is "Miss". Isabel's availability, her not yet settled state, is apparently like the unsolved clue that people can't stop being pleasantly tormented by. The Portrait of a Lady is monomanically obsessed with marriage; this tiresome staple of mediocre novels fills its every nook.

Litter, weedkilled field

*

Marriage is apparently highly desirable, hyperinflatedly identified with the lover's self-realization and summation, yet the actual marriages we glimpse in The Portrait of a Lady seem quite out of key with that idea. If not patently unsatisfactory (like the Touchetts'), they're at best rather mundane: Lilian's you would call a happy marriage, but not a magical one of the sort that the suitors seem to think is in their grasp. Anyway, Lilian's anxiously aware that her own kind of marriage wouldn't appeal to her sister; and that Isabel might do something awful, like marrying a foreigner. 

It's crudely pictured, but her insight is sound. Lilian and Edmund are doers, their marriage and their life are productive. But Isabel doesn’t look like being one of life's doers; for her, marriage isn't about doing but about experiencing, like a visit to Egypt.

Only at the end does Isabel really do something, when she makes her small rebellion and travels to England, against Gilbert's wishes, to say goodbye to Ralph. When she goes back to Gilbert and Pansy, we hope it's to do plenty more, but that isn't an inevitability.

Blackthorn

Henrietta’s letters from Spain had proved the most acceptable she had yet published, and there had been one in especial, dated from the Alhambra and entitled ‘Moors and Moonlight,’ which generally passed for her masterpiece.

I think that's my favourite sentence in The Portrait of a Lady.

(Here, as often in Sherlock Holmes etc, "dated" refers to location as much as date.)

In his later prefaces Henry James fought a rearguard action against readers who saw too much in Henrietta Stackpole and Maria Gostrey, figures he saw as ancillary, or even light refreshment. He knew he couldn't dictate how his novels would be read, but he didn't want their central focus to be overlooked in a simplistic or perverse way. 

Nevertheless, I sometimes think he wrote most naturally and penetratingly when he wasn't so fixed on making out his theme; when he neither overtreated nor undertreated -- in fact did not "treat" at all -- but just allowed his fancy free rein. 

Late blackthorn, unopened hawthorn buds

Freedom is highly problematized here. It must be freedom to do something; if it's just freedom it's an empty set, for instance the idleness gently criticized by Mr Touchett in that opening chapter. Ralph has an idleness licensed by ill health; Lord Warburton's is maintained by a framework of opposing values (upper-class guilt, as it were) and we readily believe Ralph when he predicts that his friend, in consequence, won't do anything very much.

Mrs Touchett's freedom is mainly expended in asserting itself. For instance, by an uncowed judgment of "the great ones of the earth", or by proceeding with her own plans in proud disregard of her husband's or son's approaching deaths. Isabel "found her a strange and interesting figure: a figure essentially—almost the first she had ever met".

But that's a delusion; this isn't the kind of freedom that Isabel's looking for, which is something like freedom to fulfil her destiny. None of the Touchetts, enablers as they may be, can give her that freedom. It's a freedom that no-one can give you, you have to take it. 

Perhaps the wretchedness of being married to Gilbert Osmond confirms Isabel's youthful premonition that she, at least, needed adversity to fully come to life.

Weedkilled field

*

I wrote this after reading The Portrait of a Lady in the revised version published in 1908. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2833/2833-h/2833-h.htm#link2H_PREF

It wasn't a conscious choice, and I might not have chosen the revised version if I'd seen Nina Baym's essay, in which she demonstrates how it overlays a rather different story onto the one James told in 1881. (But without completely obliterating it, producing a sometimes blurry impression of character and action.)

Nina Baym, "Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady", Modern Fiction Studies, Vol 22 No 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 183-200.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26280289

The 1881 text can be found here: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Portrait_of_a_Lady_(James)

Rainbow

The Portrait of a Lady ... The definite article is teasing. James liked a definite article; most of his novel titles begin with "The". It usually suggests something that the novel is about: a character (The American), a symbol (The Golden Bowl), a theme (The Awkward Age)... Yet in this case the simplest thought is that it describes the novel itself, i.e. James's remarkable attempt to draw a large novel out of his initial vision of a young woman. But this would more naturally be expressed as A Portrait of a Lady.... like A Tale of Two Cities.

So I find myself looking for possible acts of portraiture within the story; for instance Gilbert Osmond framing his wife as a living artwork; or Isabel's own behaviour being shaped by how she wants to see herself. I'm not sure it works out, but I'll keep on being bothered about it.

“don’t say, now, you don’t know me—if I have not got a white parasol!”

This post is about Henry James' novel The American (1877). Spoilers will follow immediately!

Matthew Modine as Christopher Newman

[Image source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215514/ . From the TV Movie The American (1998), directed by Paul Unwin. Matthew Modine looks fantastic, but the adaptation defuses the story into genre fluff. You can watch it on YouTube.]

To give due credit, the TV movie was funded by ExxonMobil.  

It's impossible now, I think, to read The American without feeling that the book is as much about the good-natured hero's economic aggressiveness as about the sinister emptiness of the old culture figured by the Bellegardes. The latter, so to speak, can only destroy each other. Christopher Newman can destroy the planet. 

The title pitches it in nationalistic terms. But then James himself rather complicates things by making his Bellegardes both French and English. In fact they aren't an expression of a single nation's essence; the ruling class has always been international in its marriages, connections and transactions. The novel confronts, not so much nations with each other, as an old ruling class with a new ruling class. The Bellegardes, it turns out, can't bring themselves to extend their international connection to merge with the new power that Newman has acquired. Newman finds it ridiculously easy to see all that is wrong with the Bellegardes, and he feels it strongly, as a desperate waste of life and potential; that is, as an offence against economy or productivity. At his own position, however, he doesn't look too closely or ask too many questions. That kind of self-consciousness would be a handicap in business. And his success, with clean hands so far as criminality is concerned, may feel as if it sanctifies him. To have started from so little and been so conspicuously prosperous. Doesn't that economic triumph sound like it has a kind of moral aspect, too? Compared e.g. with those whose wealth hasn't been worked so hard for?

“Since you ask me,” said Newman, “I will say frankly that I want extremely to marry. It is time, to begin with: before I know it I shall be forty. And then I’m lonely and helpless and dull. But if I marry now, so long as I didn’t do it in hot haste when I was twenty, I must do it with my eyes open. I want to do the thing in handsome style. I do not only want to make no mistakes, but I want to make a great hit. I want to take my pick. My wife must be a magnificent woman.”

“Voilà ce qui s’appelle parler!” cried Mrs. Tristram.

“Oh, I have thought an immense deal about it.”

“Perhaps you think too much. The best thing is simply to fall in love.”

“When I find the woman who pleases me, I shall love her enough. My wife shall be very comfortable.”

...

“Present me to a woman who comes up to my notions,” said Newman, “and I will marry her tomorrow.”

“You have a strange tone about it, and I don’t quite understand you. I didn’t suppose you would be so coldblooded and calculating.”

Newman was silent a while. “Well,” he said, at last, “I want a great woman. I stick to that. That’s one thing I can treat myself to, and if it is to be had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and struggled for, all these years? I have succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument. She must be as good as she is beautiful, and as clever as she is good. I can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good deal myself. She shall have everything a woman can desire; I shall not even object to her being too good for me; she may be cleverer and wiser than I can understand, and I shall only be the better pleased. I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.” ...

 “ ... I made up my mind tolerably early in life that a beautiful wife was the thing best worth having, here below. It is the greatest victory over circumstances. When I say beautiful, I mean beautiful in mind and in manners, as well as in person. It is a thing every man has an equal right to; he may get it if he can. He doesn’t have to be born with certain faculties, on purpose; he needs only to be a man. Then he needs only to use his will, and such wits as he has, and to try.”

“It strikes me that your marriage is to be rather a matter of vanity.”

“Well, it is certain,” said Newman, “that if people notice my wife and admire her, I shall be mightily tickled.”

...  

“And you have seen nothing that satisfied you?”

“No,” said Newman, half reluctantly, “I am bound to say in honesty that I have seen nothing that really satisfied me.”

...

“She is perfect! I won’t say more than that. When you are praising a person to another who is to know her, it is bad policy to go into details. I won’t exaggerate. I simply recommend her. Among all women I have known she stands alone; she is of a different clay.”

“I should like to see her,” said Newman, simply.

...

(from The American, Chapter III)

The reader is evidently to understand in what ways Newman is not cold or calculating or driven by vanity. 

But at any rate he is quite explicit about marrying "with my eyes open". Not in the blindness of love that discovers new values. Here the substantive value comes first, and then "I shall love her enough".

I suppose the expression "trophy-wife" didn't exist in those days. But after all, the trophy idea is embedded deep in Newman's outlook. He applies it, for instance, to the business of choosing lodgings; or rather, of allowing someone else to choose his lodgings.

He had a relish for luxury and splendor, but it was satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort was to inhabit very large rooms, have a great many of them, and be conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical devices—half of which he should never have occasion to use. The apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person that everything was “handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was situated on the Boulevard Haussmann, on the first floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily, immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for three months in his drawing-room.

(from Chapter VI)

When it comes to a wife Newman is choosy: "I have seen nothing that really satisfied me". 

And in Chapter V, on his travels, he makes "a point of looking" at women as well as churches, and reports to Mrs Tristram: "I am more than ever in the state of mind I told you about that evening; I want a first-class wife. I have kept an eye on all the pretty girls I have come across this summer, but none of them came up to my notion, or anywhere near it."

And a little later, to Valentin:

" . . . If I get hold of a woman that comes up to my standard, I shall think nothing too good for her. I have been a long time looking, and I find such women are rare. To combine the qualities I require seems to be difficult, but when the difficulty is vanquished it deserves a reward. My wife shall have a good position, and I’m not afraid to say that I shall be a good husband.”

“And these qualities that you require—what are they?”

“Goodness, beauty, intelligence, a fine education, personal elegance—everything, in a word, that makes a splendid woman.”

“And noble birth, evidently,” said Bellegarde.

“Oh, throw that in, by all means, if it’s there. The more the better!”

(The American, Chapter VIII)

Well, why is Newman so choosy?  Given his own history and its inspiring evidence of the potential in ordinary human beings, why not find an ordinary woman, uneducated as he is perhaps, why is her potential not good enough? 

Unlike all those others that Newman rejects, there is value attached to Claire de Cintré, not in his own eyes but (more objectively, from his point of view) in the eyes of others. Mrs Tristram identifies her as "of a different clay". Newman trusts that endorsement more than he trusts his own heart. It's enough to start his imagination spinning romantic ideas around her. That Mme. de Cintré is also difficult to obtain adds another incentive. That she is also "of noble birth" is, we sense, much more than something merely "thrown in". Newman likes a challenge. His own sense of honour, that of an outstanding businessman who gets what he wants, is provoked into play. It's different from Valentin's idea of honour, but only extrinsically. 

The thought that Claire is a trophy is enhanced by the book's striking occlusion of this heroine and her relations with its hero, our lack of a sense of the couple getting to know each other, of whether Newman does in fact love her and of what there might be, in Claire's own personality, that he might love. Our increased acquaintance with her, anticipated since Chapter IV, is endlessly deferred. At first there are appreciable reasons, the barriers put up by her family and so on. But eventually those explanations are no longer adequate. There's a void here, most obtrusive (as James admits in his 1907 Preface) straight after the engagement when we meet the hero, not spending time with his intended, but attending the opera on his own. Reading the book without knowing the story in advance, I found the thought crossing my mind that he might back out; for what lay behind his stated commitment other than a demonstration of good business conduct? 

 James wrote:

I have been stupefied, in so thoroughly revising the book, to find, on turning a page, that the light in which he is presented immediately after Madame de Bellegarde has conspicuously introduced him to all her circle as her daughter's husband-to-be is that of an evening at the opera quite alone; as if he would n't surely spend his leisure, and especially those hours of it, with his intended. Instinctively, from that moment, one would have seen them intimately and, for one's interest, beautifully together; with some illustration of the beauty incumbent on the author. The truth was that at this point the author, all gracelessly, could but hold his breath and pass; lingering was too difficult—he had made for himself a crushing complication. Since Madame de Cintré was after all to "back out" every touch in the picture of her apparent loyalty would add to her eventual shame. She had acted in clear good faith, but how could I give the detail of an attitude, on her part, of which the foundation was yet so weak? I preferred, as the minor evil, to shirk the attempt—at the cost evidently of a signal loss of "charm"; and with this lady, altogether, I recognise, a light plank, too light a plank, is laid for the reader over a dark "psychological" abyss. 

(1907 Preface)

But isn't there a dark psychological abyss, too, in a man who so "knows his own mind"? Perhaps a more intimate portrait of their relationship would necessarily expose not just the lady but the gentleman too to the "shame" of, well, being rather less than impeccable?  But in The American James was, as he felt in retrospect, engaged in writing a kind of romance; a cutting of the balloon cable holding his vision to reality, more or less subtly managed. It was essential to his conception that Newman was understood to have been thoroughly wronged, but that judgement, on the part of the reader, might have been complicated by too much of the real. 

*

In Brussels (Chapter V)

He stood for half an hour in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself—on the back of an old letter.

We can make a guess at those reasons, though. The history does not redound to the credit of the Catholic church. It's also an important preliminary to the founding of the Dutch Republic, the world's first real democracy and as such an honoured forerunner of America. Two things we know about Newman, by the end, are that he is proud of being an American and that he doesn't like the Catholic church. Until the end, however, this latter view is well concealed, perhaps even from himself. 

For instance, during his first visit to Mme de Cintré:

“Your house is of a very curious style of architecture,” he said.

“Are you interested in architecture?” asked the young man at the chimney-piece.

“Well, I took the trouble, this summer,” said Newman, “to examine—as well as I can calculate—some four hundred and seventy churches. Do you call that interested?”

“Perhaps you are interested in theology,” said the young man.

“Not particularly. Are you a Roman Catholic, madam?” And he turned to Madame de Cintré.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, gravely.

Newman was struck with the gravity of her tone; he threw back his head and began to look round the room again. 

(from Chapter VI)

Newman begins the novel by trying to buy a copy of a Madonna. He doesn't seem to have felt that his church inspections entailed a question about the faith that built them. Babcock was troubled by his lack of seriousness on such matters. Nor, it seems, is Newman dismayed that the woman he wants to know is a Catholic. He finds it surprising that she should be grave about it. 

He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the form in which her religious feelings had moulded themselves would have seemed to him on his own part a rather pretentious affectation of Protestant zeal. If such superb white flowers as that could bloom in Catholic soil, the soil was not insalubrious. But it was one thing to be a Catholic, and another to turn nun ....

(from Chapter XXI)

When Newman is baulked from his trophy, he sees that this cultural relativism has gone quite far enough.

*

In a strange way The American is an early prefiguration of one of James' obsessions: not marrying. ("The Lesson of the Master", The Ambassadors, "The Beast in the Jungle" . . .). It becomes a great and prescient theme: these non-marrying individuals and their inability to form the kind of open personality that can admit someone else on equal and permanent terms. 

In Newman's case the conscious will is there, the passion is there (he says so, anyway), but his conception of marriage is too like a business transaction, and his pursuit of the most unobtainable bride has something perverse about it. His egotism is not so far from John Marcher's, in the end; both men are over-committed to a story about themselves. 

*

In the 1907 Preface James reflects on this romance that, at the time, he did not even know he was writing. "I must decidedly have supposed, all the while, that I was acutely observing—and with a blest absence of wonder at its being so easy." 

As he points out, writing romantically or realistically is often not a conscious choice:

Of the men of largest responding imagination before the human scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola, we feel, I think, that the deflexion toward either quarter has never taken place; that neither the nature of the man's faculty nor the nature of his experience has ever quite determined it. His current remains therefore extraordinarily rich and mixed, washing us successively with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock, as may be, of the far and strange. 

As someone who is far more simply a fan of Scott and Balzac and Zola than I am of James, I must say I warmed to The American. I thoroughly enjoyed the very un-Jamesian experience of finding myself whisked off to Switzerland to attend the outcome of a fatal duel, or hearing dark secrets in a ruined chapel. 

But such-like things are only trappings of the romantic. Its essence, James thought,

is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities.

Newman, we remember, is abroad and has no family. His wealth is a more double-edged thing. After all, there are many romances in which the disengagement from community arises from being poor, or apparently so (e.g. "lost heir" plots). But there certainly is a strong economic element in all the authors that James refers to. The American feels particularly close to the Scott model, not only in its exposure of different cultures to each other but also in its central consciousness; I'm thinking especially of Frank Osbaldistone (in Rob Roy), another hero of the new ruling-class.

Diana Rigg as Madame de Bellegarde (Claire's implacable mother)

[Image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJdR48AFQE . From the TV Movie The American (1998), directed by Paul Unwin.]

The American, 1877 version:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/177/177-h/177-h.htm

The American: James' revised 1907 text and his interesting Preface. 

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_American_(New_York:_Charles_Scribner%27s_Sons,_1907)

Stanley Tick. "Henry James's The American: Voyons", Studies in the Novel Vol 2 No 3 (Fall 1970), pp. 276-291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29531399

"The theme of the novel is pressed in epistemological rather than ethical forms." It concerns Newman's difficulty with seeing, that is, discerning. In a note, Tick points out that Newman's self-knowledge is less than perfect; for instance, he never admits his own sexual attraction to Noémie Nioche. 

"The American (1877): Life and Form", a chapter in Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, Henry James: The Vision of France, Presses universitaires de Liège, 1970. https://books.openedition.org/pulg/933?lang=en

A chapter from an excellent book about James' tussle with the problem of French culture through his career. The American represents one pole, The Ambassadors another.

Enrico Brotta. "The Wavering Ruins of The American", in Henry James's Europe: Heritage and Transfer, ed. Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding (2011), pp. 113-120.  https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0013.pdf .

"the idea of ruins -- which oscillates throughout the novel between the emblem of an artistic and cultural past to be achieved, and the tragic witness of the decline of Western civilisation --"

Scott and American violence

 

The Lost Cause, 1868 painting by Henry Mosler

[Image source: Wikimedia . The painting is in the Johnson collection, Spartanburg SC. ]

[These notes previously appeared at the end of my post on Sir Walter Scott's 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein, but they're not specifically about that novel and I've decided they're better in a separate post. The hinge paragraph appears in both.]

*

. . . At around the same date Anne of Geierstein may have had another and more dire influence. The Ku Klux Klan (formed 1865) may have based some of the details of their operation  on descriptions of the secret court of the Holy Vehme, ultimately from Goethe but most likely taken from this very novel. (For example the black cloaks and hoods; the white cloaks came later.) This at any rate was the theory put forward by James Taft Hadfield (PMLA, Vol 37 No 4 (Dec 1922), pp. 735-739):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/457170

Forty years later Thomas Dixon Jr, in The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), invented the detail of the Klan's burning crosses, apparently basing it on the Gaelic crann-tara, which he probably knew from Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. Subsequently, the reviving Klan adopted Dixon's idea. 

Scott's novels were certainly popular reading in the southern states. That was the context of Mark Twain's "wreck of the Walter Scott" in Huckleberry Finn and his subsequent onslaught in Life on the Mississippi (1883). He thought Scott had done "measureless harm", amounting, almost, to causing the US Civil War. But the passage deserves to be read in full. (I include a bit of outlying context here, but not all of it: the chapter starts by musing on Mardi Gras.) 

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ancien regime and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.

   Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

   Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. 

   One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too—innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could. 

   But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it—clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany—as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two—and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. 

   A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.

(Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, end of Chapter 46)

Twain was more concerned, I suppose, with modern American culture than with a dead author who was rapidly going out of fashion. He said nothing about Scott's own many critiques of chivalry and romance, but I suppose these critiques are always nuanced; the underlying respect for rank in Scott's books is undeniable. Twain's allegation of Scott's deep influence on the culture of southern aristocracy seems to lack foundation. Scott was popular in both the northern and southern states, but he wasn't taken very seriously as an author. 

Henry James' early comments on Scott give a flavour. "[He is] the ideal fireside chronicler. And thoroughly to enjoy him, we must again become as credulous as children at twilight" (review of Nassau W. Senior's Essays on Fiction, 1864). Later James would take Scott with increasing seriousness. In his 1907 Preface to The American, he wrote of "the men of largest responding imagination before the human scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola...": that's quite a striking grouping of names.

But Mark Twain always took Scott seriously. There was something about Scott -- and also about the Civil War -- that never ceased to bother him. 

(I'm taking that information from Susan Manning's "Did Mark Twain bring down the temple on Scott's shoulders?" an illuminating essay in Special relationships: Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936 (Manchester University Press, 2012):

https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/downloadpdf/9781526137654/9781526137654.00006.pdf  )

Here he is, ill in bed in 1903:

To Brander Matthews, in New York:

NEW YORK CITY, May 4, '03. DEAR BRANDER, -- I haven't been out of my bed for four weeks, but -- well, I have been reading, a good deal, and it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, and jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help and elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Colombian lectures out of the results and do your students a good turn.

1. Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English -- English which is neither slovenly or involved?

2. Are there passages whose English is not poor and thin and commonplace, but is of a quality above that?

3. Are there passages which burn with real fire -- not punk, fox-fire, make believe?

4. Has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cadesses?

5. Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their characters as described by him?

6. Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires, and knows why?

7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous?

8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to lay the book down?

9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being artificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere and in earnest?

10. Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't want to?

11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one when he saw it?

13. Can you read him? and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day -- an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics -- but land! can a body do it today?

Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-and-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of the invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation -- elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you live to get to it you don't believe in it when it happens.

I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering -- I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great study rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either of them rank high now? And do they? -- honest, now, do they? Dam'd if I believe it.  . . .

RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 . DEAR BRANDER, -- I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering -- that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being -- Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage properties -- finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward? Yrs ever MARK.

*

I wonder if Twain originated what seems to have become a long-lasting meme: reading Scott caused American violence. In Stephen Crane's Wild West story "Moonlight on the Snow" (1900), the gambler Larpent shoots a man who calls him a cheat, then:

He sat down to read, his hand falling familiarly upon an old copy of Scott's Fair Maid of Perth. 

Maybe Hadfield's Ku Klux Klan theory is also influenced by that meme. 

And perhaps the influence is still floating around. Reading on Wikipedia about a protracted wave of killings in Kentucky and West Virginia (roughly from the 1840s through 1870s), I saw the suggestion that Scottish and Irish settlers had imported a tendency to violence within honour culture and that the killings were considered feuds because of the influence of Scott and Shakespeare. 

*

I don't know what I think of all this, but I do see another connection. Scott's idea of reconciling past conflicts involved securing his nation's unity by safely admitting and celebrating, in highly romanticized form, the values of the losing side: e.g. in Waverley the Jacobite cause and the Highland clans that supported it. The losing side are given a cultural cachet in order to compensate for being superseded in the real world. 

You can probably see where I'm going with this, because that's exactly what happened with the romanticizing of the South after the Civil War, sometimes referred to as "The Lost Cause of the Confederacy". This romanticizing was an attempt by the losers to alleviate the trauma of losing, but it was countenanced and even encouraged by the victors, because it did reconcile white southerners to forgetting about secession and feeling part of a united nation, proudly contributing their distinctive culture and sense of romantic nostalgia. The long-term influence of that romanticizing is obvious in the movies, e.g. Gone With the Wind, and can't be excluded from e.g. the subsequent flourishing of southern literature (Faulkner et al) or the birth of rock'n'roll (largely in the Deep South). As a myth its influence continued to resonate through (white) music in subsequent decades, an irresistibly potent iconography, whether we think of The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", or Randy Newman's "Rednecks" (the Lost Cause cleverly affirmed in a song you can badge anti-racist), or the whole sub-genre of Southern Rock, or R.E.M's Fables of the Reconstruction, or Nick Cave's immersion in mythical southern Gothic, or... well, so much more. The problem is, national reconciliation is only one side of that story. In e.g. Thomas Dixon Jr and D.W. Griffith, the myth of the Lost Cause, apart from its distortedly romantic idea of the antebellum South (complete with beneficent plantations of happy slaves) was explicitly linked to racist beliefs and fears and to a philosophy of white supremacism. It opened a path to segregation, the disenfranchisement of black votes across the whole of the Deep South, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, spates of lynchings . . . And even aside from that, the Lost Cause, if it was a reconciliatory myth that bonded whites, did so by explicitly understating/excluding the perspective of African Americans. In a resonant 2009 article for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about why, for him, a song like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" could only ever be prejudged as "the blues of Pharoah". Unlike (what he then proceeds to quote), the chaplain Garland H. White's inspiring records of black soldiers entering Richmond, Va. in 1865, the freeing of thousands from the slave pens, the joyful re-uniting of families . . .  

This is almost too big a subject to come back from it to Scott without a sense of bathos. But anyway, it demonstrates that a Scott-like romanticizing of the past can inflame as well as reconcile, and it can also exclude. 

Scott's novels: A brief guide