Henry James

W. Somerset Maugham, in his novel Cakes and Ale, said of Henry James that he had “turned his back on one of the great events of the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea-parties in English country houses…Poor Henry, he’s spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over, and they’re having tea just too far away for him to hear what the countess is saying. “

This expresses much of my feelings. While I don’t have quite the level of contempt for him that Maugham appears to, still, he indubitably frustrates me, for the following reason; one cannot be intimate with Henry James – the reader comes to know the author through his/her characters, and James throws a thin but impenetrable glass screen around each of his main characters, preventing us from quite understanding and empathizing with them. I can think of no better example than Isabel Archer, the American heiress in his famous The Portrait of a Lady, whose independence and character we admire and see, but whose soul and personality is always just out of reach – she is, fittingly, more like the portrait of a woman than a human being we can empathize with. James gives her character the sense of an outline, a single glimpse of a woman, detailed and vivid but completely unable to convey the deeps of being that form her and the fire that motivates her – the nuances that give her actions sense and meaning. We may understand her to some extent, but we cannot touch her. I spent the novel – both times that I read it – chasing a ghost. A haunting, riveting ghost about whom I wish I knew more about – but I don’t. I do not believe that James deliberately creates the sense of isolation with which he envelops his characters – rather that it comes from him naturally. Perhaps, in the end, he is unable to freely and fully proffer us a character – because it would be too great a proffering of himself, a trust he is unwilling or afraid to give. This does not necessarily detract from his novels – his genius is such that his works have thrived in spite of his characters being always half-hidden around corners, but for me at least it gives the act of reading his novels a feeling similar to that of being surrounded by a great body of still, reflective, impenetrable water. Hence comes my frustration with him as an author, quite apart from the formality which runs through all his books in spite of his often frank and intimate subject matter and what appears to me to be his fundamental misunderstanding of feminine psychology.