How to Read Henry James

I had two colleagues in the English Department who love James, so I decided to run an experiment. I wrote them both, told them I was trying to learn to appreciate James and asked them both to suggest one of his books. The suggestions. The Portrait of a Lady and “The Aspern Papers.”

After reading The Portrait of a Lady, here was my summary:

A Henry James novel is like an exquisitely crafted object, something made so perfectly that you can look at the object and admire the craftsmanship because the craftsmanship is so perfectly visible and obvious no matter how you look at the object. But, the object itself, though perfectly, and I mean perfectly, crafted, is not Beautiful. At all. There is nothing in the object which would attract a second glance unless one likes to look at craftsmanship for the sake of craftsmanship.

It is perfectly put together, perfectly written. Every character is perfectly described. The plot twists are perfectly foreshadowed and revealed. The characters act perfectly in accordance with their perfectly crafted natures. There are a perfect number of main characters and secondary characters. The novel has a perfect ending, which is only ambiguous if you haven’t been paying enough attention to the perfectly crafted characters, but if you realize that all these clockwork characters will continue to function like perfect timepieces, then you know exactly what comes next. And in the midst of all that perfection, the story is terribly dull. The characters have no blood in them. There is never a moment when the novel grabs you by the lapel and forces you to care. It is a perfectly detached novel. It is there, it is perfect, and yet it is lifeless.

I sent those remarks along to my two colleagues; the subsequent discussion was intriguing. Neither of them agreed that the novel is detached or bloodless. They pointed to examples in the book of momentous decisions. I agreed there were decisions, but the whole novel was akin to working through a geometry proof. Perhaps Henry James and Euclid belong on the same shelf?

One of them mentioned T.S. Eliot remark about James: “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” I had heard that remark before, and always assumed it was a funny insult, but suddenly I realized it was meant as high praise.

After ruminating a bit, I discovered that I was reading Henry James all wrong. I read him looking for ideas to set my mind wandering. I was looking for meaning. But, there are no ideas in Henry James. There is, instead, description. Minute description. Perfect description.

Then, I realized the timing of Henry James in the historical sweep of Western Civilization was exactly right. Back in the late 17th century, Newton revolutionized thought by showing how the entire universe operated on precise mathematical formulas. Gravity and the motions of the planets in the solar system followed the same mathematical rules.

A century later, along came Adam Smith who starts describing societal interactions in ways that society too looked like it might be following mathematical rules. Society is far more organized than it appears. The realization comes not from one person planning out how everything will act. It is like there are these underlying rules that govern how we all interact with one another. Economics and the Social Sciences develop, bringing something like mathematical rigor to the study of human interaction.

Then along comes Darwin and the development of species suddenly also looked like it was following some underlying structure. Species evolve in a system which follows a set of rules.

So now we have the universe, society, and even biology looking like they are mechanical processes. Compare that world to the world of a thousand years earlier where everything is mysterious and magical. We have turned the entire physical world, everything we can see, into a giant machine.

Fortunately our minds are still free, right? Along comes Henry James. In novels so perfect, so exquisitely fine-tuned, we find characters so perfectly crafted that we could never distinguish them from real people. And those perfect characters act in ways that are so perfectly ordained. These characters could never act in any other way. Obviously she marries him; she never really could have done otherwise.

The genius of Henry James, the thing that makes his novels enjoyable and well worth reading, is the very perfection I originally thought was so bloodless. The fact that everyone acts like they too are just machines is the idea. It is not an idea that arises somewhere in the course of the story; it is the idea that precedes the writing of it, that gives the story its purpose. The whole novel is working out that idea in a world so perfectly crafted that it is indistinguishable from reality. Why does this particular person act in this particular way?

Henry James is showing us that we are all particular people acting in particular ways. We are machines and we are carried along by our natures to act in the ways we act. You can step back and admire the machine that is you, but you cannot change the machine that is you. Consider your reaction to that last sentence. Could you have had a different reaction?

Figuring out whether Henry James is right or not is another entry in the long discussion over the nature of Free Will.

The occasion for writing this up was that a couple of former students formed an online reading group and read The Portrait of a Lady. I sent them the above to see what they thought. They both thought that it wasn’t quite right. The characters were not perfectly realistic, and they both actually cared about the heroine, Isabel, at the outset of the novel.

As we were discussing all this, one of them remarked, “He’s actively trying to make fiction into art.” Coming from her, that was not a compliment. It actually turned out to be a better way of expressing what I was groping for above.

Think of a Henry James novel like a painting. James cares a lot about the craft of writing a novel; he has great skill in using the tools of his trade. He is creating a work of art designed to be admired by all. He does this by crafting these characters that are actually smaller than life.

What makes them smaller is that he takes their interior lives and warps them so that they can be spread out across the page. But, people are more complicated than that. James is trying to craft the magic lantern which will throw the nerves in patterns on a screen. (The Eliot reference is not mine—it came up in the discussion.) If it is impossible to pull off that feat, if it is impossible to actually captre what goes on in our heads, then James necessarily fails.

So, is The Portrait of a Lady a Great Book? Neither of my former students think so. But they are both convinced that Great Books are in a different category, a higher category, than Great Paintings.

Maybe I am just in a charitable mood (I often get accused of that), but I think it has a legitimate claim to Greatness for exactly the reason that it ultimately fails to achieve its aim. The attempt to turn the novel into a painting is certainly an idea worth considering, and James does a better job of that than anyone. It is thus a really interesting vehicle to ask questions about things like whether we have free will or whether our interior monologues can be translated into a linear narrative. You can step back and admire the artistry, and then ask whether the artistry itself teaches us something about life.

However, much of the question of James’ greatness hinges on whether or not a great painting belongs in the same discussion as a Great Book. Can we say that the Mona Lisa is as Great as Oliver Twist? Or does the latter have more Greatness  simply because it is a book? A question for another day.

Related Posts:
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw “Faith and Uncertainty”
Glaspey, Terry 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know “Places to Go”