Ideas and the Novel: Henry James and some others

Letters

Vol. 2 No. 8 · 1 May 1980

From Bernard Richards

SIR: I am writing to protest about the curiously obtuse article by Mary McCarthy, ‘Ideas and the Novel: Henry James and some others’ (LRB, Vol.2, No 6). On James a constant lack of critical finesse and even simple accuracy is revealed. To take a few simple examples, we are told that characters in late James are ‘never seen reading’. Yet in Chapter 36 of The Golden Bowl Maggie is seen reading a French periodical. Admittedly, she soon turns from ‘those refinements of the higher criticism’ of literature to more engaging encounters with her social circle, but we are made to feel that a considerable part of her behaviour, for better or worse, has its origins in an intellectual climate of ideas. We are told that the characters never ‘prefer one artist to another’, but it is quite clear in The Golden Blow that Adam Verver has a very definite set of tastes, constituting a matrix that we have come to call the Burlingtonian vision. That he likes Luini summons up a whole Paterian world, and in him ‘the aesthetic principle’ burns ‘with a cold, still flame’. One has no difficulty in imagining him as a sort of composite of Berenson (who was a disciple of Pater) and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Miss McCarthy regrets that Adam does not express himself on contemporary matters. It is not difficult to imagine what he might say about bi-metallism, for instance, and Miss McCarthy expects that he could only utter ‘banalities’. In this novel even if he spake with the tongues of angels or Moreton Frewen (an acquaintance of James and a leading bi-metallist of the 1890s), such views would still sound banal. It is the strength of James, not the weakness, that this should be so.

Miss McCarthy describes The Spoils of Poynton as ‘Balzacian’. This is precisely what it is not, and the choice of epithet is symptomatic of her capacity for misreading. This novel is not even Balzac manqué. When James began composition he thought that he might have to meet the challenge posed by Balzac: ‘something would have to be done for [the spoils] not too ignobly unlike the great array in which Balzac, say, would have marshalled them.’ But once he began his interest drifted away from Mrs Gereth and the spoils to Fleda and a moral concern precisely of a kind that Miss McCarthy denies to James. In an essay on Balzac of December 1875 James thought that, unlike George Sand, George Eliot and Turgenev, Balzac lacked a moral sense, however alive and alert his other senses might have been. Balzac would have devoted twenty pages to Waterbath and thirty to Poynton. James does not, not because he could not, but because such descriptive investment would make us more interested in the objects than we should be. Their shadowiness is, finally, a virtue, since it enables them to live where objects have a tendency most vividly to live in James’s novels: in the minds of characters. And what better place? James, much as he admired Balzac, is in effect writing an anti-Balzacian novel. He is importing into a world apparently Balzacian a moral sense derived from George Eliot and similar novelists. Typical of Miss McCarthy’s carelessness and haste is that she describes the one object that is specified at Poynton, the ‘Maltese cross’, ‘the gem of the collection’, as ‘Spanish’.

Miss McCarthy is making a plea against the sorts of things that great novels need to survive: selectivity, economy, functionality of elements. Surely her argument is at the intellectual level of a fifth-former who is disturbed that Jane Austen doesn’t wheel on a guillotine or Austerlitz? Indeed, thinking of Jane Austen’s rigorous marshalling of data reminds one that the Jamesian novel was not invented by James, but by Fielding and Jane Austen.

Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford

Vol. 2 No. 9 · 15 May 1980

From Mary McCarthy

SIR: The ‘Maltese cross’ in The Spoils of Poynton is described so by Mrs Gereth because she and her husband discovered this treasure during a stay in Malta. It was her pet name for the Spanish piece. When I wrote that The Spoils of Poynton is ‘a Balzacian drama done with the merest hints of props and stage setting’, the suggestion was that Balzac would certainly have supplied them. In other words, James’s work was non- or even anti-Balzacian despite the basic plot elements in common. Your correspondent (LRB, Vol.2, No 8) is labouring a point already set forth in my text.

Mary McCarthy
Paris