'The Bare Perfume of Things'

A reader chose The Ambassadors (1903) as the first book by Henry James she would read. That may have been a mistake. I admire her spirit but understand her inability to finish reading it. She didn’t even make it to James’ Greatest Hit in Book V, Chap. 2, when Lambert Strether exhorts “little Bilham” in Gloriani’s garden to “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” Late James rightly gets a lot of readerly and critical attention and praise, but his rhythms, narrative indirection, syntax and other stylistic convolutions can challenge even the most attentive readers. Auden had good reason to call him “Master of nuance and scruple” – hardly qualities prized by many readers.

 

James is a writer perhaps best read in roughly chronological order. The earlier novels – Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), for instance – pose few technical problems. Or try some of his early stories, especially “Madame de Mauves” (1878). All are accessible, emotionally powerful and entertaining. Even James’ beloved brother William, after reading The Golden Bowl (1904), urged Henry to “sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style.” William wanted Henry not to be Henry, at least in print.

 

Henry published The American Scene in 1907, based on his 1904-05 visit to the United States, his first in twenty years. On May 4, 1907, in a letter to his brother, William described the book as “in its peculiar way . . . supremely great.” Then he gets down to business:

 

“In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can’t skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: ‘Say it out, for God’s sake,’ they cry, ‘and have done with it.’ And so I say now, give us one thing in your older directer manner, just to show that, in spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, you can still write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and then continue like the ‘curiosity of literature’ which you have become. For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are unapproachable, but the core of literature is solid. Give it to us once again! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum.”

William, of course, speaks for many readers, though Henry stayed the course and never gave up on “the bare perfume of things.”