`That Complication of Discipline and Passion We Call Art'

Monday evening I reread Henry James’ account of his visit to Boston after twenty years away from his native land, Chapter VII of The American Scene (1907), which begins: 

“It sometimes uncomfortably happens for a writer, consulting his remembrance, that he remembers too much and finds himself knowing his subject too well; which is but the case of the bottle too full for the wine to start. There has to be room for the air to circulate between one’s impressions, between the parts of one’s knowledge, since it is the air, or call it the intervals on the sea of one's ignorance, of one's indifference, that sets these floating fragments into motion.” 

The day’s events returned me also to The Princess Casamassima, published in 1886, the same year as The Bostonians. I’ll live again with that novel for several days but I also looked up the novelist Wright Morris’ chapter on James, “Use of the Past,” in The Territory Ahead (1958): 

“His subject, no matter what the object, was consciousness. We may reasonably wonder, on the evidence, if human sensibility ever reached such a pitch of awareness as in the mind of James. It is here we find the root of his style—parenthesis. The mind of James, opening like a flower at the virus of suggestion, gives off and receives a series of vibrations that find their resolution in parenthesis. Nothing is closed. Closure means a loss of consciousness. One thing always leads to another, that in turn to another, and this play of nuances, like ripples lapping on a pond, is the dramatis personae of James, the novelist. His subject was his own ceaselessly expanding consciousness.” 

This seems to me a shrewd insight into James and his evolving prose style. Some readers, including his brother William, find James’ later manner impossibly dense and mannered. A sympathetic reader will find it a strategy appropriate to his subject. The later prose is an articulate stammer, endlessly refining consciousness into words. Morris’ understanding of the parenthesis (literal and otherwise) as a feature of James’ style, a linking of form and content, reminded me of Herbert Morris’ poem about the novelist, “House of Words” (What Was Lost, 2000), a 657-line dramatic monologue set in 1906. James examines proofs of his portrait taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn, the American photographer whose ghostly pictures illustrate the New York Edition. James’ mood ten years before his death is sadly resigned, autumnal, almost self-pitying, though he continues to write. The novelist recalls his meeting with Coburn and says he: 

“…spoke of the vagaries of photographic

portraiture, as he sees them, and to which

the gentleman has not, to hear him tell it,

accustomed himself, wholly made his peace with,

followed by the man’s pained, detailed recital

(admirably restrained, almost reluctant),

albeit cogent, moving, of dilemmas

in willing mere mechanical devices,

lens, timer, shutter, dimmest `apparatus’

(quiescent, mindless until now, awaiting

someone—oneself—to rouse them into life),

to reproduce, as best they can, that vision

one possesses as much as is possessed by—

one’s version of the world, one thinks to call it--,

the problem, too, with words, if I may say so,

dilemmas, in all truth, with which I am not,

nor ever have been, a fine point made finer,

wholly—irredeemably—unfamiliar.” 

In “Fifty-ninth Street” (Peru, 1983), Morris writes: 

“Somewhere, evenings, not far from Fifty-ninth Street,

slowly setting those traps in which the novel

later would find itself for all time snared,

James was advancing on that complication

of discipline and passion we call art,

advancing on the strangeness of the park

which, in the dark, is one’s own strangeness, too,

that wilderness of motives, anguish, vision,

false starts, wrong turns, that dream of the uncleared,

those boundaries of the unnamed, unexplored…”