'A Magnetism, an Ardor, a Refusal to Be False'

In “The Madonna of the Future,” an 1873 story by Henry James, an American painter in Florence tells the narrator, “If you but knew the rapture of observation! I gather with every glance some hint for light, for color or relief!  When I get home, I pour out my treasures into the lap of my Madonna. O, I’m not idle!” 

Neither was James, who remained throughout his career a tirelessly Balzacian writer in every form but poetry. When his painter rhapsodizes over “the rapture of observation!” he speaks for his creator. Never had a writer so scrupulously recorded his observations of the material and social worlds, and of consciousness itself. In The American Scene (1906), James characterizes himself as “the lone observer” and “the restless analyst,” who “vibrate[s] with more curiosity” than a mere tourist.

 

The most Jamesian of subsequent writers, who learned the most from the Master, internalized it and shared the results with readers, is not a novelist but a poet, Marianne Moore. Some of her poems, with line breaks removed, might pass for James’ prose. In her essay of 1934, “Henry James As a Characteristic American,” Moore quotes the phrase cited above: “There was in him ‘the rapture of observation,’ but more unequivocally even than that, affection for family and country.” She goes on:

 

“Things for Henry James glow, flush, glimmer, vibrate, shine, hum, bristle, reverberate. Joy, bliss, ecstasies, intoxication, a sense of trembling in every limb, a shattering first glimpse,” and so on for another sixty-nine words in that same sentence, about a third of them James’. Moore is one of literature’s inveterate allusionists, rivalling Montaigne and Burton. In her poems and prose, references to James abound. In an early bit of light verse titled “To a Cantankerous Poet Ignoring his Compeers—Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Henry James,” she refers to “James’s odysseys / of intricate outlook.” In “Picking and Choosing,” which begins “Literature is a phase of life,” she takes on James and Hardy again, but Edmund Burke gets the best lines: “And / Burke is a / psychologist—of acute, raccoon- / like curiosity.” Which is also true of James.

 

But beyond allusions, Moore possesses a James-like appetite for the world. She celebrates it in a manner never fatuously rah-rah. In 1966, in a letter to Writer’s Digest, she quotes John Cheever with approval: “I have an impulse to bring glad tidings. My sense of literature is one of giving, not diminishing.” Take these lines from “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing”: “the mind / feeling its way as though blind, / walks along with its eyes on the ground. / It has memory’s ear / that can hear without / having to hear.” Consider the foreword Moore wrote for Predilections, her first prose collection, published in 1955. Here it is in its entirety:

 

“Silence is more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one’s admiration and one is tempted to write about it; if it is in a language other than one’s own, perhaps to translate it – or try to; one feels that what holds one’s attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait – a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false, to which the following pages attempt to testify.”

 

Sounds like Henry James in one of his more rhapsodic moments. Moore was born on this date, November 15, in 1887 and died in 1972 at age eighty-four.

 

[The James essay and other prose cited here is collected in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]