Henry Before He Was Henry

In his affectionate profile of Henry James written four years after the novelist’s death, the poet and critic Edmund Gosse, who had also worked as the librarian for the House of Lords, told a story dating from 1905 (collected in Aspects and Impressions): “What really did thrill him was looking down from one of the windows of the Library on the Terrace, crowded with its motley afternoon crew of Members of both Houses and their guests of both sexes. He liked that better than to mingle with the throng itself.”

Gosse is not a subtle psychologist, and he draws no insights from the anecdote except to wish that James had “written a superb page” describing the scene. And yet, it’s an arresting image, one that remained with Gosse after 15 years and that remains with seasoned readers of James: the novelist invisibly observing the human swarm below him. Temperamentally, James was no mingler, in a throng or on the page. Even at dinner parties, where he habitually collected gossip for enjoyment and source material for his work, one always senses in James a reticence, a cool, analytical reserve. For such a sensibility, one many of us share, there is comfort and power (godlike, Flaubertian) in distance, as a scene composed by James more than 30 years before Gosse’s vignette suggests.

For newcomers to James, intimidated and disoriented by his reputation and sprawling body of work, a good place to start is the novella “Madame de Mauves,” which I have just reread. Its centrality to James' work was first suggested to me by the novelist Steven Millhauser. James wrote it in 1873, in his 30th year, and it appeared in his first published volume, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales. Like the better-known “Daisy Miller,” “Madame de Mauves” concerns a young American man, prosperous and free in Europe. In both cases, the title character is female but the consciousness through whom the narrative is largely filtered is a young American man simultaneously attracted to this woman and suspicious of his attraction. Longmore, in “Madame de Mauves,” is aptly named, for seldom has a character spent more time longing for what he does not and finally cannot have. He lives in a perpetual state of baffled anticipation.

Characteristically, the novella opens with a spectator and a view. Longmore is seated on a terrace in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, surveying the “dusky vastness” of the city below him, his eyes “fixed in idle wistfulness on the mighty human hive before him.” The positioning of spectator and scene strikingly recalls Gosse’s recollection of the mature James at the library window. In the ninth sentence of “Madame de Mauves,” still in the first paragraph, we are told: “Though not in the least a cynic, he was what might be called a disappointed observer; and he never chose the right-hand road without beginning to suspect after an hour’s wayfaring that the left would have been the interesting one.”

On that same terrace, Longmore meets a young American woman, Euphemia de Mauves, nee Cleve – a delightfully ridiculous name for such a sad figure (among his other distinctions, James must be the champion namer in all of fiction). She is the wife of a dissolute French baron, Richard de Mauves, a faded epigone of the nobility. Cold-bloodedly, he has married the naïvely romantic Euphemia, who is heir to her father’s timber fortune. The Baron seeks her ample inheritance in order to pay off his creditors – he is a gambler -- and live the life of a libertine. What follows is social comedy, Balzacian melodrama and an early statement of themes and style that James will return to and perfect over the next 40 years and more. I will give away nothing further. Please read this wonderful story with your full compliment of emotions at the ready.