On the Bench, Part 1

I returned to college in 2002, almost 30 years after dropping out at the end of my junior year. I was 50 years old and ready, I hoped, to read Henry James systematically, without distraction. Besides independent study in James, my only other class was Human Genetics. For six months, except for a genetics text I read nothing but James and some of his biographers and critics.

I have always been an energetic, self-centered, pleasure-seeking reader. I follow my taste, and in fact I had already read most of James on my own, starting when I was a teenager, but my grasp of his work more closely resembled an album of photographs than the sequential sweep of a movie. I knew a writer who claimed to have read all of Shakespeare and Melville chronologically, without interruption, as though he were taking an antibiotic and feared compromising its potency. I don’t mind a little fever if my reading keeps me happy.

For a thesis, I was unenthusiastically considering a look at James’ “Americanness,” largely based on my regard for The American Scene (Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order”). After several weeks, however, I found myself drawn to a class of characters James himself identified – in a mock-apologetic tone, I think -- as “poor sensitive gentlemen.” They are life’s spectators, too timid or passive to do other than live an unlived life. James is the supreme anatomist of human unhappiness, of the manifold ways we devise to make ourselves and others miserable, and with few exceptions James’ gentlemen have sabotaged any hope of pleasure or contentment. In Cynthia Ozick’s words, in one of her lovely essays on James, they endure “a life of mishap and mistake and misconceiving.”

Given my exclusive immersion in his work, I also began to notice the peculiar regularity with which benches appear in his novels and stories, often as a refuge for his poor, sensitive gentlemen. This sounds like thesis-fodder, I know, but I make no grand claims for my discovery.

Madame de Mauves, in her eponymous story, occupies a bench on the terrace at Saint-Germaine-en-Laye when she is introduced to Longmore. Frederick Winterbourne is seated on a bench outside the hotel at Vevey when he first meets Daisy Miller. Isabel Archer takes her place on a bench at Gardencourt during her final, wrenching scene with Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady. For their only meeting outside her workplace, the unnamed heroine of “In the Cage” sits with Captain Everard on a park bench in London and announces her secret, unacknowledged devotion. Dencombe, the doomed, doubt-wracked novelist in “The Middle Years,” faints and comes under the care of Dr. Hugh while on a bench at the seaside. Stransom suffers his apparently fatal attack on a chapel bench in front of his altar at the conclusion of “The Altar of the Dead.”

John Marcher twice takes his seat on a bench in “The Beast in the Jungle,” James’ greatest story. The first time, the scene is a London park at the Jamesian hour of twilight, in the Jamesian month of April. The day before, his friend May Bartram has told him he has already suffered his fate. His long wait is over and yet he is oblivious to its arrival. Bartram is too ill for a visit. In the park, on his solitary bench, Marcher concludes that her impending death and his subsequent solitude are his great fate. But the horror of this realization has not yet pierced Marcher’s egotism. After May’s death and Marcher’s yearlong trip through Asia, he returns to her grave and sits on the “low stone table that bore May Bartram’s name.” The sight of another mourner -- “one of the deeply stricken” – awakens Marcher to his own “arid end.” Alone on his stone bench, Marcher perceives “the sounded void of his life.” He has not loved, unlike the other mourner with “the deep ravage” so visible on his face. Marcher’s twin insights, both made while seated – nearly prostrated – on a bench, come too late. Like many of James’ protagonists, Marcher has failed to live, and as Dencombe says on his death bed, “A second chance – that’s the delusion.”

(More tomorrow)