Misunderstanding

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that among R.S. Thomas’ lesser poems is one titled “Henry James,” from Frequencies (1978):

“It was the eloquence of the unsaid
thing, the nobility of the deed
not performed. They looked sideways
into each other’s eyes, met casually
by intention. It was the significance
of an absence, the deprecation
of what was there, the failure
to prove anything that proved his point.

“Richness is the ability
of poverty to conceal itself.
After the curtains deliberately
kept drawn, his phrases were servants moving
silently about the great house of his prose
letting in sunlight into the empty rooms.”

The poem hinges on James’ supposed over-reliance on paradox, a strategy he seldom employs, at least not with the glibness and predictability Thomas suggests. Especially in his mature work, from at least the 1870s, James was too careful, too appalled by the prospect of satisfying vulgar expectations, to permit mere cleverness, like a cheaply resolved joke, to rule his voice. In an essay titled “Henry James and the Battle of the Sexes,” Wendy Lesser says, “For James, the idea of deciding anything `once and for all’ is forbidding, terrifying, impossible.”

Thomas’ least worthy swipe is that final phrase, “empty rooms.” It’s an old libel against James – that his prose was grand but his themes were disproportionately insubstantial. Perhaps Thomas never read The Golden Bowl, which critic John Bayley has called a profound meditation on “the idea that love—love of art, love of life, love of persons—in the end meant intimacy without knowledge, a taking on trust.” If we know a little about Thomas, his life and works, we can understand why this would be anathema to so bitter an imagination.

Thomas underestimates James and the rigors of his moral imagination. Too bad he probably never read these lines from an essay James wrote about his friend, Ivan Turgenev, the great Russian novelist:

"Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand."

Thomas would have agreed.