a gallimaufry

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (2)

I’m inching further along with The Portrait of a Lady. I realise that in my last post, I never once mentioned why I love Henry James’s writing so much – with the proviso that I do not love it quite so much, though I admire it, in The Golden Bowl. With his long, supple sentences and his exquisitely tuned choice of words, James can track every subtle shift in a character’s train of thought or emotion. He describes their rich, inner lives precisely and with nuance. He examines his characters’ motivations scrupulously and sympathetically; he allows them to be many things at once and experience many, maybe conflicting, feelings at once.

No detail is too tiny because every detail reveals something about a person. So Ralph, when he learns from Henrietta that Casper Goodwood has paid a visit and perhaps proposed to Isabel after she had told Ralph that she was expecting no visitors, experiences a pang, ‘and it was a new pang to him to have to suspect her of duplicity. On the other hand, he quickly said to himself, what concern was it of his that she should have made an appointment with a lover?’ Henrietta enlightens him immediately: Isabel had not expected Goodwood because Henrietta had sent him.

‘Isabel was cruel?’ – and Ralph’s face lighted with the relief of his cousin’s not having shown duplicity.

‘I don’t exactly know what passed between them. But she gave him no satisfaction – she sent him back to America.’

‘Poor Mr Goodwood,’ Ralph sighed.

And we know exactly how heartfelt that sigh was without James having to write anything further.

Even Goodwood, about whom I was not very complimentary in the last post, is presented as a complex individual, powerful and certain and yet also uncertain and humble. Although yes, still a bit stalkerish.

(James Tissot, A Widow, 1868, private collection; from here)

And so on to Madame Merle, who has now fetched up at Gardencourt as Mr Touchett lies on his deathbed. (Unfortunately for me, my daughter watched the cartoon film of The Sword in the Stone a couple of days ago and Madame Mim keeps popping into my head whenever I see the words ‘Madame Merle’ which is adding a layer to my reading of the novel that I think I can safely assume Henry James did not foresee.) Like the Touchetts, Madame Merle is a sort of hybrid although she veils her origins and Isabel initially thinks she is French as she appears at least to have sloughed off those ‘American’ characteristics of directness and simplicity, and steeped herself in European culture. Mrs Touchett remarks that Madame Merle loves mystery and she seems exotic to Isabel and a rôle model for her. Madame Merle is accomplished at everything the leisured upper classes most value: she is beautiful, witty but not too witty, worldly and adept at conversation; she plays the piano, sketches and embroiders with skill; she is well connected and knows the best people in Europe. She strikes Isabel as superior to other people; Isabel also considers herself to be somewhat superior to others and here is Madame Merle as the embodiment of all she most admires. She has perfect ‘taste’. Isabel is not uncritical: she recognises that for all her charm Madame Merle is unemotional and lacks ‘wildness’. However, she feels that Madame Merle has much to teach her.

Madame Merle, like Mrs Touchett, has not been happily married; she hints at a stormy past before she was widowed. As an older woman, is Madame Merle an alternative figure to Mrs Touchett of what Isabel, still forming herself, might become in later life?

I have also now met Gilbert Osmond. Interestingly, Osmond’s appearance is described in detail twice – more, I think, than that of anyone else in the book, including Isabel’s. The word ‘fine’ is often used of him, both of how he looks and of his taste. Osmond appreciates Isabel as an aesthetic object, something to own and display like his ‘bibelots’, an expression of his fine taste. Isabel, on being shown his collection, worries not that she will ‘expose’ not ‘her ignorance’ but ‘her possible grossness of perception’, a lapse in taste. Meanwhile, Madame Merle’s taste has been offended by Osmond’s sister, the Countess. (The Countess is also unhappily married!) The Countess immediately realises what Madame Merle has planned and accosts her; for Madame Merle this is ‘one of her pretty perversities’; she finds her ‘manner was odious’ and her expressions ‘coarse’. Directness and honesty, here, are offensive; lying and manipulation, however, are not. Madame Merle and Osmond seem to have refined themselves out of much sense of morality.

As for Pansy, what a cipher she is proving. ‘A convent flower’, ‘innocent’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘insipid’, she is treated by everyone like a baby yet they discuss her marrying the next year.

(John Everett Millais, Hearts are Trumps, 1872; Tate collection)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (1)

I am rereading this as part of a readalong organised by Dolce Bellezza. I notice that I acquired my copy in October 1994, a period of my life when I wrote my name and the date of purchase (and sometimes, the place of purchase!) in slightly pretentious handwriting at the front of each book I bought. At that time I had just graduated and was working in a bookshop while trying to find a job in publishing. I had managed to study English literature for three years without actually reading a word of James and I decided to start with his most famous work. As far as I remember I loved it, but found Isabel Archer mysterious and quite inscrutable.

As this is a readalong I plan to write two posts about it, as I read through it. These are some of my initial thoughts, up to Chapter 16 and Isabel’s encounter with Casper Goodwood.

(Sir John Lavery, The Lady in White, Manchester Art Gallery, from here; this is the painting used on the cover of my Oxford World’s Classics edition though incorrectly attributed there to ‘James Lavery’)

One thing that struck me more forcibly this time than I remember on my first reading is James’s needling of the English upper classes, with Ralph Touchett being an honorary member of that sect. My attention was caught in a description of Isabel’s drives in the countryside by a reference to ‘patches of ancient common and glimpses of empty park’ which I could not help interpreting as a reference to enclosure and to the holding of vast tracts of land by the aristocracy for their pleasure in contrast with the ‘ancient common’, land which belongs to the people and is grazed by their flocks and worked by them.

 While Isabel settles in to life at Gardencourt and enjoys its beauties, Henrietta Stackpole is less amenable and directly critical of Ralph’s ‘idle’ life (‘when I have to work like a car-conductor’) and ‘sophistication’ which, to her mind, has more than a tinge of dishonesty about it; her class-consciousness is sharpened by her awareness that Ralph is constantly and covertly mocking her. Lord Warburton is depicted as a true ‘noble’ man; he espouses land reform and is considered a ‘radical’. However, he is vague when pressed about actually relinquishing any of his own property; he’s a romantic without real substance, according to Mr Touchett:

He has elegant tastes – cares for literature, for art, for science, for charming young ladies. The most elegant is his taste for the new views. It affords him a great deal of pleasure – more perhaps than anything else, except the young ladies. [...] His views don’t hurt any one as far as I can see; they certainly don’t hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution he would come off very easily. They wouldn’t touch him, they’d leave him as he is; he’s too much liked.

Mr Touchett has been ‘watching these people for upwards of thirty-five years’, with less hostility than Henrietta Stackpole. Still, he points to the difference between the US and Britain:

You [Isabel] and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first.

Ouch – Britain is not a true democracy after all. The aristocracy, Mr Touchett explains, is an obstacle to this, well regulated though the country is.

For these leisured people, to amuse and be amused are central tenets of life. ‘You may do what you please [...] if you’ll amuse me till seven o’clock,’ as Isabel tells Ralph. People, including strangers with ‘an introduction’, are invited to country houses to visit. Lady Pensil’s place in Bedfordshire (Bedfordshire, according to Mr Bantling, is ‘tiresome’, tiresome being the opposite of amusing and therefore a damning epithet) offers ‘genuine English sport’ and ‘theatricals and picnics and that sort of thing’, the games with which the wealthy pass their time. Ralph assures Henrietta ‘You’ll amuse yourself much more in Bedfordshire’ than at Gardencourt’ – with two resident invalids and a chatelaine who is rarely there, Gardencourt is generally quiet, ‘not English at all’, ’dull’ and without entertainments, what would a visitor do there? ‘[W]ill they make themselves agreeable to me?’ wonders Isabel about the English. With no other purpose than entertaining each other, it is important to all the characters that the social surface remain smooth, charming, agreeable.

The other aspect that struck me is how condescending many of the male characters are to Isabel. (Even more to Henrietta, who is just that bit further off the feminine ideal of the time.) Casper Goodwood, whom 1990s Helen might have thought romantic in his pursuit of Isabel across the ocean, I now perceive as stalkerish in his refusal to accept no for an answer and his insistence that he knows what is best for her. Ralph badgers his mother: what are her ‘plans’ for Isabel’s future; he is taken aback when she declares that she has none and Isabel is a free agent. Even the generally sympathetic Mr Touchett gets all scoffy when Isabel asks him about books and boasts that he has no use for books since he learns through direct observation and experience of the world; actions that are denied Isabel by her gender. Worst of all: both Ralph and James feel that Isabel somehow needs to suffer in order to become wise and there’s a sense that they are wishing it upon her...

And finally, a foretaste of what may happen:

Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett. He never expressed this analogy to the girl herself, however; for if Mrs Touchett had once been like Isabel, Isabel was not at all like Mrs Touchett.

I interpret this as suggesting a number of things: that, like Mrs Touchett, Isabel will make an unhappy marriage but that she will also find a way to assert her independence anyway, unconventionally if need be. I also note that Mr Touchett seems to take no responsibility on himself for those aspects of Mrs Touchett which he once admired and yet seem to have been mostly crushed out of her by marriage to him. I am wondering if there might be a thread here about bright, sensitive young girls being failed by marriage.

that mutton-eating, public-hanging junkie Chas Dickens

I know that practically everyone on the internet has already read this quotation, but every time I see it I start laughing…

Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

Steve Hely, from How I Became a Famous Writer

what shall helen read? February edition

Although it’s cold as witch’s spit here today – I type this wearing woolly hat, gloves, blanket, three pairs of socks and an orange cat – the sun is feebly shining, which is heartening after weeks of grey gloom, and so I have managed to take a photograph of February’s contenders for What Shall Helen Read? This time there were plenty to choose from, so I didn't have to resort to cheating.

I zoomed right in on the books so you can’t see the thick dust or mounds of unattractive papers, articles of clothing (we all dress in the sitting room as our bedrooms are too cold) (that makes us sound a tad destitute but I assure you we aren’t), ugly plants (I feel sorry for them so they linger on, half-dead and misshapen) and Lego bricks.

The books are:

• Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
• Only Revolutions, Mark Z. Danielewski
• The Song Before it is Sung, Justin Cartwright
• Half in Love, Justin Cartwright
• Small Island, Andrea Levy
• Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai
• The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert

I was surprised that so many of them are hardbacks; some were presents and some the fruits of remaindering. I was also surprised at how unenthusiastic I feel about them, even the Rachel Seiffert and the Andrea Levy. In fact, the only one that drew me in even a little was Only Revolutions. I am tempted to get rid of them all. However, one of them will be read, according to your votes in the comments. And if you can persuade me to keep any of the others, please do!

the perils of updating classics: Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey

(Illustration from A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870)

The Austen Project – instigated presumably by HarperCollins, who are publishing its fruits – has commissioned six well-known authors to provide ‘new’ versions of Jane Austen’s novels. Joanna Trollope, Val McDermid, Alexander McCall Smith and Curtis Sittenfield have tackled Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Emma and Pride and Prejudice; the others have not yet been issued. I read Trollope’s Sense & Sensibility a few years ago and have just finished McDermid’s Northanger Abbey and I have to admit I am underwhelmed by both. Not that Trollope and McDermid are poor writers or that the books are not enjoyable, but that their works act as perfect examples of the dangers of updating older novels.

Whether by instruction or choice, both writers have stuck quite closely to the original plot and characters and while they have done their best, the jarring notes this approach produces just highlights how much society has changed in two hundred years. Elinor, Marianne and Catherine are teenagers in these modern versions as well as in the originals, and I struggled to believe that middle-class parents these days would jump for joy at the prospect of their seventeen-year-old daughter getting engaged. The authors also felt constrained to have their characters meet each other face to face, as would have been necessary in Austen’s time, when nowadays surely the telephone would have been employed (a particularly egregious example is Henry Tilney’s panicked overnight drive down to see Cat after he discovers that she’s been thrown out of his father’s house; if you were truly worried that someone had not got home safely why wouldn’t you phone, text or email them first?).

For me, Trollope’s novel worked less well than McDermid’s. Trollope’s characters never struck me as much like modern teenagers – at least McDermid’s Cat Morland made liberal use of her mobile: Trollope was a bit vague about social media – and oddly didn’t seem to have any friends. Elinor is forced to quit her degree in architecture in London because the family are moving to the West Country to downsize. It’s as if student grants and student digs don’t exist, and it’s only at the end of the novel that the family discovers there are universities outside London anyway. While Trollope always writes fluently, her retelling lacked Austen’s sharpness and, far from commenting acutely on modern manners, which might be in the spirit of Austen, she describes a class so upper-upper-middle and so divorced from mainstream society that it was difficult to believe it existed or have much patience with the perceived travails of its characters. However, I did think that Trollope did an extremely good job with Mrs Dashwood, who was convincingly impractical, vague and self-indulgent.

Despite being disappointed with Sense and Sensibility, I had high hopes of Northanger Abbey and overall I felt that this version worked better. McDermid cleverly substitutes Edinburgh during the Festival for Bath during the Season, and this works very well. She also, as Austen did, uses her book to poke sly fun at fiction, in this case literary snobbery, although again she shies away from much social commentary. But like Trollope, where McDermid follows Austen too closely, things go awry. The most marked instance of this is Cat’s love of vampire fiction, and her growing concern that the Tilneys are vampires. McDermid failed utterly to convince me that any seventeen-year-old girl could possibly believe that vampires really exist. It might have worked better had she substituted crime fiction for gothic horror and have Cat fancy General Tilney a serial killer, but even so she would have needed to work harder to build up Cat’s delusion so that the reader could understand if not necessarily share it.

If you are in need of a pleasant and undemanding read, then both of these novels are fine. But what they showed to me is that it’s better to be freer with your material than either Trollope or McDermid felt they could be. Longbourn by Jo Baker, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (not the film!) and Bride and Prejudice are all more successful works; they don’t seek merely to replicate but to winkle out aspects of Pride and Prejudice that can be used in interesting ways to create something similar but fresh.

Do you know of any good Austen adaptations?

Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy

So, this is the novel which you, dear readers, voted that I should read...

I had seen some good reviews of Hot Milk, which is the second of Deborah Levy’s novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, so I was very pleased when I found a copy in the English-language section of my local library. It did not disappoint.

The book is narrated by twenty-five-year-old Sofia Papastergiadis, former PhD candidate in anthropology, current waitress and coffee-maker in a West London café, who has accompanied her mother Rose to Almería in a last-ditch attempt to find a cure for Rose’s mysterious partial paralysis. Nestled between the barren hills and the poisoned sea is the clinic of Mr Gómez, built of veined white marble and shaped like a breast. As Rose submits to Gómez’s unorthodox treatments, Sofia ministers to her, swims in the sea and embarks on sexual relationships with Juan in the beach injury hut and Ingrid, the German seamstress.

Very subtly, the novel explores femininity. Sofia (‘wisdom’) perceives her world in terms of symbols, symbols that for the most part she chooses not to pin down with a specific, single interpretation but leave open, to accumulate layers of meaning. (And perhaps she is afraid of misreading them, as she misreads the word Ingrid embroiders on her silk top.) An example is the image of Medusa, enmeshed in ideas about female bodies and what they ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ to do. Stung by ‘medusa’ jellyfish, Sofia identifies herself several times as a monster, despising her body as failing to match contemporary ideals of slenderness. Ingrid also self-identifies as a monster, perhaps because of what she did to her sister, perhaps because of her desire for Sofia. Sofia, however, usually perceives Ingrid as a hero figure, like Perseus rather than Medusa: Ingrid wears silver sandals laced up her calves, she has a bow and arrow to shoot lizards and is interested in decapitation. This is made very explicit near the end of the novel, when she rides a horse at Sofia, ‘in her helmet and boots. High in the dizzying sky an eagle spread its wings and circled the horse’. Rose is also associated with monstrousness, craving amputation like the beheaded Medusa, like the jellyfish ‘in limbo, like something cut loose’. Sofia experiences that desire of her mother’s to cut off her feet as being a desire to cut herself off from Sofia (‘Her legs are my legs. Her pain is my pain’).

In their different ways, Rose and Sofia are trying to reject what one might call the ideals of womanhood. Sofia destroys some images of females; she crushes a doll (already broken) under the wheel of her car and later hurls a vase to the floor. The vase is a ‘fake’, a copy of an Ancient Greek black figure vase, showing seven slave women fetching water. Its destruction inspires Sofia to visit her father in Greece, meeting him for the first time in fourteen years. It may also be part of her attempt to reject her current rôle as handmaiden to her mother. She does, however, purchase an air-freshener from the market in the shape of a woman with ‘massive belly and heavy breasts’, a form closer to her image of herself.

Rose, meanwhile, is withdrawing from the traditional definition of motherhood. Conventional mothers include Alexandra, the very young second wife of Sofia’s father, who devotes her time to breastfeeding her new baby in an atmosphere of stifling solicitousness, and – bathetically – Jodo the cat, who gives birth to kittens in the breast-shaped clinic. Jodo is also described suckling her kittens. Rose does not want to be nurturing and nourishing in this way any longer. Instead, she reverses things. She demands that her daughter tend to her, and bring her endless glasses of water (in place of milk?), water that is never the right water. The novel is set against the Greek government-debt crisis, and Greece seems to figure as a sort of cultural parental figure. What debts do Sofia, her father and Rose owe each other? Can and should they be repaid?

Sofia is content with this but also not content. She wants a bigger life, but her passivity and diffidence paralyse her. At the novel’s opening the screen of her laptop splinters, which she takes as a metaphor for herself: ‘My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I.’ From breakage may come rebirth: Sofia crushes the doll and smashes the vase, she visits her father, she starts laying plans to escape to the US and continue her PhD. The end of the novel, however, makes it seem unlikely  that she will succeed.

(Deborah Levy, 2013, photographed for the Observer)