Henry James, alias the Master, alias the Old Pretender
Several people had told me, and on the basis of personal experience, that modern cataract surgery can seem nearly miraculous in its results, but as they say—Seeing is believing! My right eye now sees objects with a sharpness of definition and colors with a vivacity of gradations that over the years I had quite honestly forgotten. Dining among many vases of bright Easter flowers was a thrilling experience. This leaves my left eye (formerly regarded as the “good” one) to remind me of the general effect of viewing the world through dirty dishwater, but it too will be taken care of eventually when, in the horrible word of the ophthalmologist, its own cataract is ripe.
I
had been in various modes of denial, one of which was the pseudo-conviction
that it was as a matter of rational choice that I was doing less and less
recreational reading. Now I knew
better. I began celebrating my
revision as soon as possible with some Henry James short stories. James always requires a certain
attentiveness of reading, and since few of his short stories are actually all
that short, he requires some ocular stamina too.
I
read three of the stories from his earliest period, from the first of the five
volumes of James’s Complete Stories
in the Library of America. The
three were “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” “A Most Extraordinary Case,”
and “The Last of the Valerii.” I picked
them at random, though with an eye to their relative
brevity. I had never read any
of them before, and indeed could not recall so much as having encountered the
titles of the first and the third of them.
Those
two surprised me when they turned out to be what I would have to call “horror
stories”. Most people probably
know “The Turn of the Screw” and perhaps also “The Jolly Corner”, but James was
toying with the supernatural and the uncanny right from the start. The
seemingly innocently named
“Romance of Certain Old Clothes” deals with a dark side of life in
pre-revolutionary New England, and would not be out of place in the Tales from the Crypt Annual, should
there be one. It has at
least a textile link to The Scarlet
Letter. James was an admirer
of Hawthorne, and wrote a fine monograph about him in the English Men of Letters series.
It
is “The Last of the Valerii,” however, that made the greatest impression on
me. This story is so very—well, so
very Jamesian. In the first place you don’t know who
the narrator is, only that you are probably going to be on his side even though
he sort of gets on your nerves. He
is an American in Europe—in this instance, in Rome—implicitly middle-aged and
presumably a man whose leisurely and amateur artistic pursuits are enabled by
unspecified wealth. He is the
god-father and implicitly (but only implicitly) the guardian of a beautiful
young American girl named Martha, who falls in love with and marries a young
Italian aristocrat, the Conte Valerio.
So you have various motifs of the “American theme” as James will develop
them in his masterpiece, The Portrait of
a Lady.
Count
Valerio is a pretty boy with some of the necessary accoutrements of good
breeding, and he is in possession of the requisite picturesque, decaying family
villa. But he is not the brightest
taper in the candelabra, and his ethical foundation seems to consist of little
more than a family tradition of perfunctory and unenthusiastic Catholicism. The narrator is pretty uneasy about him
right from the start, and with pretty good reason, as it turns out. For when an exercise of amateur
archaeology turns up an ancient statue of Juno buried in the south forty, the
Count seems to lose all interest in his beautiful American bride in his rapid
descent into iconophilia.
Juno Sospita (Vatican Museum)
James
is playing off the Pygmalion theme.
His treatment of it is not quite so kinky as that of Jean de Meun in the
Roman de la Rose, but its tenor is
(perhaps strangely) of a similar moral drift. There is nothing positive or uplifting in the Count’s behavior. On the contrary it is sinister and
benighted. I had not
thought of James as a medieval Christian writer before, but very much like Jean
de Meun in the thirteenth century he is clearly alluding to an Ovidian subject
matter to make an indictment of pagan idolatry. By the end of the story one grasps the point adumbrated by
the odd Latin plural of James’s title.
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Third-degree iconophilia: Pygmalion, in the Valencia MS of the Roman de la Rose
“The
Last of the Valerii” has a happy ending—that is, if you are on the American
side. For me, with my new right
eye, it was also a happy new beginning.
Jacobus Sospes (bust by F. D. Wood, Boston Public Library)
