No series of posts about the ‘Edwardian Era’ would be complete without a reference to Henry James, often regarded as its greatest novelist. I have always admired his short stories. I have read ‘Daisy Miller’ every few years since 1974 (I note from the inside cover) and for sheer profundity would rate it close to Chekhov’s ‘Lady with a Little Dog’. I have also read James’s riveting but over-long story ‘What Maisie Knew’ more times than I can say. In my twenties, however, I could never get into his novels. For these Edwardian posts I decided I must, so I chose the two novels above from Kittie Calderon’s library.
The date and signature beneath the top image come from her copy of The Ambassadors. The Wings of the Dove (which seems not to have been returned to Mudie’s borrowing library!) is dated in her hand ‘1905’.
May 1906 is when George was on his way to Tahiti, returning in October, and Kittie was staying with Lady Corbet at Acton Reynald. We also know that 1905 was for both Calderons a year replete with holidays at country houses. And this is the first thing that strikes me as Edwardian about these novels: you have to have a superfluity of leisure in which to read them (Ambassadors is 458 pages, Wings 576), and you have to want to sink into all that time — to be moved along that slowly. The characters themselves live lives of affluence, comfort and leisure, they ‘flaunt their wealth and mobility more extravagantly than ever’, in Professor Brockliss’s words. (Let us recall George’s comment of 1912: ‘The richer we have got the higher we have put our standard of luxury.’)
I have to confess as well that in these two novels I find it infuriating that not one of the upper class women characters who are prone to present themselves as victims ever hits on the idea of getting a job (despite Brockliss’s observation that, historically, ‘unmarried women of the respectable classes no longer considered paid work beneath them’).
Another feature that strikes me as quintessentially Edwardian about The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove is conveyed by Joseph Conrad’s comment of 1904 that the ‘fine consciences’ of James’s novels ‘ultimately triumph, in their emergence from the circle, through an energetic act of renunciation’. Renunciation was an Edwardian reflex. ‘Every time you violate self by forcing it to do that which it dislikes and which you know to be right, you strengthen your character all round’, wrote Lady Corbet (GC: EG, p. 55). I sometimes feel the Edwardian military even regarded the Somme and Gallipoli as not so much defeats as ‘renounced victories’.
But for me what is most Edwardian about Henry James is his loquacity, or perhaps we should say loquaciousness-ness. I am quite an experienced and determined reader, but to turn over one page in these novels that is a solid wall of words only to discover another wall facing one, is terrifying. Moreover, they are all too often mega-paragraphs of telling — telling us why or what characters think — not showing. It is too ponderous, I think, for the modern sense of time to have patience with, not to mention the sometimes unintelligible ganglia of James’s sentences. Yet James can write superb dialogue. What is really bizarre is the alternation of pages and pages of telling with pages and pages of speech (showing). It’s an unannealed wound in the text; a breakdown of novelistic dialogue in the deeper sense; it seems narratorial incompetence. But the Edwardian era witnessed not only an ‘explosion of middle-class democracy and pluralism’ (GC:EG, p. 319), it experienced an explosion of dialogue and verbiage, particularly on the pages of newspapers. I have only to think of the acres of small print in the Cambridge Daily News reproducing George’s and others’ contributions to a debate about the Coal Strike of 1912. The Edwardians were intoxicated by printed words. They couldn’t get enough of them.
Finally, the presence of the living and breathing human body in these two novels is almost negligible. So little bodily physical detail is given — although plenty about clothes and adornment — that it is nearly impossible to visualise characters. We are told that Merton Densher and Kate Croy, in The Wings of the Dove, are in love, indeed feel passion for each other, and become secretly engaged, but on the page they never even kiss. Outrageously, as the price for his agreeing to fall in with Croy’s plan for fleecing a dying American heiress, Densher insists that she ‘come to him’, i.e. secretly, once, probably in daylight, in his own rooms. Astonishingly, we are told that she did this. But we haven’t a clue what happened. Croy, who is surely intacta, has previously been portrayed as a rigid (James’s word), calculating Edwardian tease and Densher as a vacuous dimwit, so it is hilariously impossible to imagine any sexual intercourse between them. This lacuna, however, is also essentially Edwardian: neither Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), nor Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), which seemingly celebrate women breaking out of Victorian marriage conventions, contains any presentiment of climactic lovemaking.
As Professor Brockliss very wisely says, ‘the Edwardian age was full of contradictions’. James’s fineness of psychology and conscience seems unsurpassable. Leavis even wrote that James’s art ‘has a moral fineness so far beyond the perception of his critics that they can accuse him of the opposite’ — something that also happened to Chekhov. Yet, in these two late novels at least, the lack of human physical existence leaves James looking woefully cerebral and etiolated. He is unquestionably a great writer, but the Edwardian contradictions are there.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
‘No series of posts about the “Edwardian Era” would be complete without a reference to Henry James, often regarded as its greatest novelist.’ Patrick Miles goes on to identify several Jamesian attributes that he regards, in a sense, as particularly Edwardian. Of these, I would take issue with only one: the terrifying nature of James’s loquacity.
The serpentine sentences require patience, to be sure, but after a while, like the clues to a cryptic crossword puzzle, they open to reveal their meaning — and become (for some of us at least) utterly addictive. The Golden Bowl (1905), for instance, described by Ismail Merchant, the producer of its twenty-first century movie adaptation, as ‘a sort of whodunit’, undoubtedly contains page after page each of which could be characterised as a ‘solid wall of words’, but from time to time, it should be noted, the author deftly inserts some stiletto observation or line of dialogue (a chink in that wall letting in a shaft of light) which turns the plot or a character’s perception in a new direction. To experience such moments, as a reader, is to experience, one might say, the shock of the new.
One significant aspect of Henry James’s greatness is, however, his frequent lack of loquacity — in his many short stories and in such brief compact novels as The Europeans (1878) or The Aspern Papers (1888). New readers could do no better than to start with these two books. Not least, perhaps, because the latter contains one of the purest examples of James’s prose, a description of the equestrian statue in Venice of the fifteenth-century strong-man Colleoni and its complex effect on the story’s nameless somewhat ineffective narrator. Once read, never forgotten.
‘Often regarded as its greatest novelist.’ That phrase pulled me up. How precisely did the Edwardians — the writers of that period, the men and women of the arts — themselves regard Henry James? And if one can suggest an answer, what does that tell us about the Edwardians and their sensibilities?
In April 1913, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, two hundred and seventy ‘Friends’ from both sides of the Atlantic wrote to Henry James offering him their greeting, and the gift of a Golden Bowl. They hoped, too, that he would agree to sit for a portrait by one of their number. James chose John Singer Sargent as the portrait painter but stipulated that his Friends ‘remain the guardians of the result of his labour’.
‘Dear Henry James,’ the letter begins, ‘We unite to send you our greeting, because we wish to-day to give a single expression to a single feeling. You will see when you read our names, that we represent many different degrees of association with you. We are old friends and new; we are friends attached to you by long-standing intimacy and affection; we are friends whose regard for you, not less real, is a later and younger tie. We share with you old memories, of which our names will speak to you, as yours to us; we are newer alliances, slighter relations, names which belong to the further edge of your circle. But we all, at whatever distance from you, however close to you, have this in common, that we love and honour you, and we welcome the opportunity of telling you so with one voice. This is our real birthday present to you, and we believe it is one you will care to possess.’
To read these words today, nearly a hundred and ten years on, is to re-experience their almost palpable intensity, the depth of that collective feeling. And this intensity of feeling, addressed to the master of the unsaid, of suppressed feeling, could not perhaps be decently spoken out loud. It had to be expressed in writing. The love and honour these distinguished upper- and middle-class literary and artistic Edwardians and late Victorians felt for James was one they believe he will care to possess. They can read his mind as surely as he can read theirs. They accepted him whole. The literary carping at his work and reputation would come later. The scraping of the mice at the cathedral door.
I will not quote James’s reply, beginning ‘Dear Friends All’, dated six days after he had received the letter of greeting and the gift of his ‘inestimable’ bowl — it can be found on p. 322 in Volume II of the first collection of The Letters of Henry James (Macmillan, 1920) and it overflows with ‘an emotion too deep for stammering words’. It is composed in one long, considered, carefully crafted wall-of-words paragraph that … takes your breath away.
‘You are the writer,’ his Friends had written, ‘the master of rare and beautiful art, in whose work creation and criticism meet as they have never before met in our language. Our sense of the genius by which a power so original is brought under the ancient discipline of art, is expressed in the proffered symbol of the GOLDEN BOWL, and it is as a symbol that we ask you to receive it.’
Too OTT…? — as we might Tweet today. Well, yes, just possibly. But the united tone of the two-hundred-and-seventy rings true and clear. And as James knew, the world turns and fashions change.
Henry James ends his letter of thanks to his Friends with his signature — and then adds a seven-word postscript, a deceptive, characteristic throwaway: ‘And let me say over your names.’ (A lesser writer today, or a too-hasty sub-editor, might have struck out the word ‘over’.) Among the names — I pick at random — J.M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Rupert Brooke, Erskine Childers, Gerald Du Maurier, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Anstey Guthrie, Rudyard Kipling, Desmond MacCarthy, Edward Marsh, Alice Meynell, Henry Newbolt, Arthur Pinero, John S. Sargent, Logan Pearsall Smith, Ellen Terry, Henry Tonks, G.M. Trevelyan, Hugh Walpole, H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf.
In this list, which the Master said over, on a spring day in London at No. 12 Carlyle Mansions, in Cheyne Walk, S.W., the Edwardian era — and on its heels our modern world — rises up to greet us.
I am most grateful to our stalwart follower John Pym for this partial defence of Henry James, delivered, if I may say so, with Jamesian elegance.
One can certainly be pulled up after a wall of words in a James novel by ‘some stiletto observation or line of dialogue’. But might this not be the exception that proves the rule? For me, at least, these pithy observations are as little articulated with the rest of the text as James’s walls of words are with his pages of unrelieved dialogue. I submit that he has a fundamental problem with cohesion and over-writing. However, as I said in my post, the short stories excel.
I gather that James was concerned about the size of his readership, but what a roll-call of eminent contemporaries signed the 1913 letter of congratulations that John Pym quotes! They are all Edwardians to the core.