On the Bench, Part 2

What is the significance for Henry James of a bench? How is a bench different from a chair, a couch or a tree stump? Why does James return so often to what is, after all, a mere piece of furniture? Part of the answer, surely, is practical and realistic. Most often, a bench is a public place where people, especially couples, could in his day meet without drawing attention or censure. It was safe, neutral, even genteel.

But James’ literary tic seems too obsessive, even predictable, for its significance to be exhausted by literal-minded explanation, and his aesthetic strategies are never the result of inadvertence. On a symbolic level, benches suggest leisure time, the freedom to drift without purpose. Somehow, people seated seem more vulnerable than those who stand. Benches serve as the resting place of choice for people of a contemplative cast of mind; in James’ case, often invalids of various sorts (physical, emotional). They are built for spectators, not participants, and James’s work filled with people who observe life rather than dive into its messy swelter. Ironically, as detailed above, they often provide the setting for some of James’ most emotionally wrenching scenes.

Poor Herbert Dodd, the subject of “The Bench of Desolation”, James’ penultimate story. All he wishes is to marry well, preferably to a woman of means and refinement. Instead, Kate Cookham, with the ferocity of a “vindictive barmaid,” threatens to sue him for breach of contract when he breaks their engagement. Each party suspects the other, wrongly, of infidelity, though one can hardly imagine Herbert Dodd, whose very name echoes “dud” and “dead,” in the role of philandering lady’s man.

“The Bench of Desolation” is unusual in several ways. The setting is lower middle class, a shabby-genteel English world of clerkships and patched trousers. James had seldom visited this scene, the likelier purview of George Gissing or Arnold Bennett among his contemporaries, since writing “In the Cage.” In this milieu, closer to the “lower” than the “middle” end of the class ladder, money is important not merely for the sake of social appearances or self-esteem. It means survival, as Dodd painfully learns.

In addition, Dodd is frightened of women, easily cowed by them, but he has no male friends or associates. The homoerotic element, for once in James’ work, is absent. Dodd seems sexless, almost a neuter. He is a man too timid and malleable to feel much of anything but a passive, masochistic ache he has learned to savor: “Thus, from as far back as he could remember, there had been things all round him that he suffered from when other people didn’t; and he had kept most of his suffering to himself – which had taught him, in a manner, how to suffer, and how almost to like it.”

Dodd owns a marginally solvent second-hand bookshop inherited from an uncle. Rather than risk a scene in open court, he agrees to pay Cookham (“cook ’im?”) 500 pounds to settle her claim. He considers the arrangement blackmail but never seeks an attorney’s counsel: “He shouldn’t get out without losing a limb. The only question was which of his limbs it should be.”

In widely spaced increments, Dodd scavenges 270 pounds for Cookham before he gives up paying her. He loses his bookshop and accepts a “squalid clerkship” at the Gas Works. He marries “the penniless Nan Drury,” who dies along with their two young daughters. James coolly dispatches them all in a sentence and suggests that Cookham is an accessory to their murder.

Years later, seated on the seaside “bench of desolation” where he retires to brood on the setting sun, Dodd is horrified to see Cookham approaching his solitary perch. Ever shrewd to evidence of wealth and social distinction, he perceives she has become “a real lady: a middle-aged person, of good appearance and of the best condition…So this mature, qualified, important person stood and looked at the limp, undistinguished – oh his values of aspect now! – shabby man on the bench.”

Confused, he accepts her invitation to tea at her hotel the following day. There, in posh surroundings, Cookham reveals that she has never stopped loving Dodd and would never have taken him to court. In fact, she invested the 270 pounds he had paid her so many years before and turned this modest sum into 1,260 pounds. “I’d have loved you and helped you and guarded you, and you’d have had no trouble, no bad blighting ruin, in all you easy, yes, just your quite jolly and comfortable life,” she says, offering him the windfall.

Typically, though tempted by the money (“It’s enough!” Dodd tells her), he meets her two more times before he makes a decision: “He began to look his extraordinary fortune a bit straighter in the face and see it confess itself at once a fairy-tale and a nightmare.” Dodd accepts Cookham’s generous offer but no weddings bells sound, as they might at a comparable moment in Austen or Dickens. The ending, not a happy one, is grim comedy tempered by the memory of all those wasted years: “He leaned forward, dropping his elbows to his knees and pressing his head on his hands. So he stayed, saying nothing; only, with the sense of her own sustained, renewed and wonderful action, knowing that an arm had passed round him and he was held. She was beside him on the bench of desolation.”

Dodd, like Dencombe, is finally touched by another, in this case a woman, but James subverts the potential pathos of the moment, even with his grammar. The passive voice emphasizes Dodd’s helpless, child-like quality. This is not mature love between a man and a woman, but morbid dependency. This final scene is oddly reminiscent of similar unequal pairings in the work of Samuel Beckett. Dodd is unlikely to find lasting relief from the tedium and squalor of his life.

Part of my devotion to James’ work is rooted in its faithfulness to the human tangle. No thought or impulse is simple. We are forever deceiving ourselves, especially when most convinced of the acuity of our self-knowledge. For all these reasons, my attraction to James’ poor, sensitive gentlemen troubles me.