That proud old Sir Philip, and that wonderful Miss Wingrave, Deputy Governor, herself, of the Family Fortress – that they with their immense Military Tradition, and with their particular responsibility to his gallant Father, the Soldier Son, the Soldier Brother sacrificed on an Egyptian battlefield, and whose example – as that of his dead Mother’s, of so warlike a race too – it had been their religion to keep before him; that they should take sudden startling action hard is a fact I indeed understand and appreciate. But – I maintain it to you – I should deny my own intelligence if I didn’t find our young man, at our crisis, and certainly at his, more interesting, perhaps than ever!
Unwillingly we have to condemn the Master for a fault we had previously never suspected the possibility of his possessing – incompetence.
1950
THE DARK BACKWARD: A FOOTNOTE
‘THIS eternal time-question is . . . for the novelist always there and always formidable; always insisting on the effect of the great lapse and passage, of the “dark backward and abysm”. by the terms of truth, and on the effect of compression, of composition and form, by the terms of literary arrangement. It is really a business to terrify all but stout hearts. . . .’ So Henry James in the preface to his first novel, written at the end of his career when he could see all the difficulties.
The moment comes to every writer worth consideration when he faces for the first time something which he knows he cannot do. It is the moment by which he will be judged, the moment when his individual technique will be evolved. For technique is more than anything else a means of evading the personally impossible, of disguising a deficiency. The whole magnificent achievement of James’s prefaces is from this point of view like a confession of failure. He is telling how he hid the traces of the botched line.
The consciousness of what he cannot do – and it is sometimes something so apparently simple that a more popular writer never gives it a thought – is a mark of the good novelist. The second rate novelists never know: nothing is beyond their sublimely foolish confidence as they turn out their great epics of European turmoil or industrial unrest, their family sagas. The Lake novelists, the Severn novelists, the Yorkshire novelists, the Jewish novelists, they stream by, like recruits in the first month of a war, with a folie de grandeur on their march to oblivion. Not for them the plan of campaign, the recognition of impenetrable enemy lines which cannot be taken by direct assault, which must be turned or for which new instruments of war must be invented. And they have their uses as cannon fodder. They are the lives lost in proving the ineffectiveness of the frontal assault. (There is irony, of course, in the fact that the technique an original writer used to cover his personal difficulties will later be taken over by other writers who may not share his difficulties and who believe that his value has lain in his method.)
It is from this point of view that I want to touch on three admirable novelists, whose works I have lately been reading or re-reading: Mr Ford Madox Ford, Miss Elizabeth Bowen, and Mr Calder-Marshall. One cannot in a short essay study all the inabilities which have gone to the making of their methods, but the quotation from James’s preface to Roderick Hudson does indicate one inability they have in common.
I suppose even the popular writer, little given as he usually is to self-criticism, feels that supreme difficulty. We need not be so uncharitable as to believe that he writes long books only because long books pay. He is trying to give significance to the individual story by extending it in time. Mrs Soames Forsyte may not seem significant, nor her little adulterous drama, but if we write as well about Mr Forsyte’s parents and his children, surely, he thinks, we shall get somewhere. Length becomes a substitute for sensitivity, and the long book is the obvious, the frontal assault on the sense of time. The method is invariably dull, but certainly, by its accumulation of trivialities, its digressions, it does achieve an effect, though it is an effect which has more in common with a club bore than with art. The popular novelist rushes in where even the angels. . . . Henry James never wrote a novel which covered a quarter of the period of Mr Brett Young’s White Ladies.
But though we may not want to follow a family’s fortunes through three generations, we are not less faced with time. Our characters have lived outside the story, and even if within the story they have only a month to spend, that month makes demands it is not easy to meet.
I suspect that this ‘time’ problem is one of Mr Calder-Marshall’s main difficulties, for since his first novel when he attempted to convey the passage of time quite conventionally, he has tried to avoid it altogether inside the story and outside the story. One can see very clearly here how the individual writer has been born of his deficiencies. About Levy took place during the few days of a murder trial, At Sea during the twenty-four hours when a young honeymooning couple were adrift in an open boat in the Channel, his novel, Dead Centre, has more than sixty characters belonging to a public school who are each allowed to express themselves for no more than a page or two, to describe an incident, to give a quick impression of their personalities at the moment with hardly any reference at all to the ‘dark backward’. Here Mr Calder-Marshall, by his choice of theme as well as method, has disguised his inability to convey the sense of time. He has made a virtue, the virtue of things seen by a lightning flash vivid and there and gone again, out of a deficiency. But there is weakness if the deficiency continues to dictate the theme as well as the method; that is to make things easy and an individual technique thrives on difficulty.
Miss Bowen certainly does not let her inability to describe the passage of time dictate the theme. Her novel, The House in Paris, covers a period from before the birth of an illegitimate child until he has reached the age of nine. The popular novelist would have described every one of those years, however dull to the reader the accumulation of trivialities, Miss Bowen has simply left them out with the merest glance backward; we may believe that she has been forced to omit, but she has made of her omissions a completely individual method, she has dramatized ignorance. How with so little known of the ‘backward and abysm’ can she convey her characters with any clearness? It is impossible, but her consciousness of that impossibility proves her great value as a novelist. She makes it the virtue of her characters that they are three parts mystery; the darkness which hides their past makes the cerebrations which we are allowed to follow the more vivid, as vivid as the exchanges of people overheard talking on a platform before a train goes out. It is an exquisite sleight of hand: the egg was in the hat, now it is being removed from the tip of a robust woman’s nose. We must fill in for ourselves what happened between; the burden of that problem is passed to the reader. To the author remains the task of making the characters understand each other without our losing the sense of mystery: they must be able to tell all from a gesture, a whisper, a written sentence: they have to be endowed with an inhuman intuition as James’s characters were endowed with an inhuman intelligence, and no writer since James has proved capable of a more cunning evasion. Unable to convey the passage of time, she has made capital out of the gap in the records; how can we doubt the existence of a past which these characters can so easily convey to each other?
When one finds Mr Ford Madox Ford, the most able of these novelists, devising a technique more complicated than Conrad’s to disguise the same time-problem, one begins to wonder whether any novelist has found it possible to express the passage of time directly. Has every technical trick since the novel became conscious of itself with Tristram Shandy been directed mainly to this end to convey enough of the dark backward for verisimilitude without losing the advantage of compression – compression which will leave in relief the novelist’s best quality: the nervous vibrations and intuitions with which Miss Bowen endows her characters, the contrast in Mr Calder-Marshall’s novels between thought and expression, Mr Ford’s dramatic dialogue? Mr Ford’s novels are novels of dramatic situations, situations of often wildly complicated irony. It would take a long while to record the complicated misunderstandings, goss
iping, and malice which in Some Do Not and the succeeding novels ruin the reputation and career of Christopher Tietjens, a centre point of purity and honour in a hopelessly corrupt society. The novel covers more than ten years; the narrative does not proceed chronologically but leaps back and forth in time with an agility unknown to Conrad. Indeed the reviewers of the Sunday Press have frequently criticized Mr Ford’s method for what they consider its unnecessary complexity. They grant him vividness in his ‘big scenes’; they cannot understand that the vividness owes everything to the method. Mr Ford is unable to write narrative; he is conscious of his inability to write, as it were, along the line of time. How slipshod and perfunctory the joins between his dramatic scenes would seem if they were not put into the minds of the characters and their perfunctory nature ‘naturalized’. The memory is perfunctory: you do not lose verisimilitude by such a bare record as this if you are looking back to events which have become history. The trouble in a novel which follows the chronological sequence is that your events are never history. You are condemned to write of a perpetual present and to convey the shrillness of its emotions.
Poverty invaded them. The police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then her brother went to prison somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances. For three days Mrs Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew better and began to write a new book . . .
Mr Ford does not, like Miss Bowen, simply leave out; he puts in the links in his own good time, but they are properly subordinated to what he can do supremely well, dialogue and the dramatic scene.
And now – if this were more than a footnote – one would have to consider James himself. There would be the most exciting, the most baffling search. What defects was he hiding behind the strict rules he invented for the novel? Undoubtedly they are there, but no novelist has so successfully disguised them with what he called ‘delightful dissimulation’. The completeness of the dissimulation is the measure of his genius; but it remains a pleasantly ironic thought that the magnificent structure of his last novels, the complexity of his ‘points of view’, are arranged to the same end, to evade something which even he could not do, something which may be taken in the easy regardless stride of the latest Book Society choice.
1935
TWO FRIENDS
No smaller distance than that between Samoa and De Vere Gardens, Kensington, you might have guessed, separated these two characters, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. On the one side that great domed brow, that reputable beard which evoked incongruously in the mind of some acquaintances a resemblance to the Prince of Wales, broad shoulders that seemed perpetually a little bent by crouching too long over a precious flame, fanning it one moment, guarding it with protective hand another, never relaxing vigilance whether at a dinner party or at a desk in the small hours: on the other, the man with the hollow nervous face, the thin gangling legs, the over-publicized moustache, splashing through fords at midnight, risking a bullet in parochial politics, endangering his life every day he lived for no apparent purpose except perhaps a desperate desire to prove that he could be something other than a writer. On what was this odd friendship based?
Miss Janet Adam Smith, the author of the most perceptive life of Stevenson, has put us further in her debt by compiling this record of friendship.*2 Most of the letters printed here are known to us already, though in the case of Stevenson in garbled Colvin versions, but how seldom it is that we can read both sides of a correspondence together. A letter gains by its reply: the mirror in De Vere Gardens gains in depth when we see the answering flash from Samoa. Miss Adam Smith sees in the friendship the aesthetic appeal to James of Stevenson’s situation:
The man living under the daily threat of a fatal haemorrhage, yet with such an appetite for the active life; the novelist who could only gain the health and energy for writing at the risk of dissipating them on other ends; the writer who had to spur his talent to earn more and more money to pay for the life of action that kept him alive; the continual tug between the claims of life and literature – here was a situation not unlike those which had provided James with the germ of a novel or story.
This is understandable; Stevenson’s friendship for James is perhaps more unexpected. The literary character is not noted for generosity and Stevenson was well aware that James was the superior artist. In the public controversy on the art of the novel with which this collection and their friendship open, Stevenson scored some good debating points against James in the argument whether or not art could ‘compete’ with life, and the readers of Longman’s Magazine preferred, no doubt, his cleverly varied cadences and sudden metaphors to the weighty seriousness of the older writer. ‘These phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay’; ‘catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet’. The first metaphor startles, like a handful of pebbles flung against a window; the other imperceptibly, invincibly, flows like a sea.
At this period James was selling less and less and Stevenson more and more – a difficult period for the more successful man. ‘There must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular” – the doomed Calvinistic conscience directed at his own work saved Stevenson from self-justification as well as from pride. ‘What the public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely executed; so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little dim and knotless, the dear public likes it; it should (if possible) be a little dull into the bargain.’ He was never deceived by acclamation – not even by the acclamation of Gosse or Colvin, for he had learned in childhood that salvation is always for the other man. In the years of adolescence he had rebelled, but he had never regarded himself as innocent and his father as guilty. So now perhaps it was easier for him than it would have been for a less scrupulous character to maintain his devotion to a greater man. Criticism from James never came amiss. He would defend, but he would never resent.
The only thing I miss in the book is the note of visibility – it subjects my visual sense, my seeing imagination, to an almost painful underfeeding. The hearing imagination, as it were, is nourished like an alderman, and the loud audibility seems a slight the more on the baffled lust of the eyes –
So James on Catriona and Stevenson replies:
Your jubilation over Catriona did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving of the visual sense of that book. Tis true, and unless I make the greater effort – and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity – it will be more true I fear in the future. I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction, My two aims may be described as –
1st. War to the adjective.
2nd. Death to the optic nerve.
Admitted we live in an age of the optic nerve in literature. For how many centuries did literature get along without a sign of it?
This book will appeal to all interested in the technique of the novelist, and it should do much to raise Stevenson’s unjustly fallen reputation. Who today can afford to patronize a novelist to whom James wrote with a copy of The Tragic Muse that he was the sole and single Anglo-Saxon capable of perceiving . . . how well it is written’? James was capable of oriental courtesy to his inferiors, but the praise he gives to Stevenson has the directness and warmth of equality. ‘He lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination.’
1948
FROM FEATHERS TO IRON
STEVENSON’S reputation has suffered perhaps more from his early death than from any other cause. He was only forty-four when he died, and he left behind him what mainly amounts to a mass of Juvenilia. Gay, bright, and perennially attractive though much of his work may be, it has a spurious maturity wh
ich hides the fact that, like other men, he was developing. Indeed it was only in the last six years of his life – the Samoan years – that his fine dandified talent began to shed its disguising graces, the granite to show through. And how rich those last years were; The Wrong Box, The Master of Ballantrae, The Island Nights’ Entertainments, The Ebb Tide, and Weir of Hermiston. Could he have kept it up? Henry James wondered of the last unfinished book and added with gracious pessimism,
the reason for which he didn’t reads itself back into his text as a kind of beautiful rash divination in him that he mightn’t have to. Among prose fragments it stands quite alone, with the particular grace and sanctity of mutilation worn by the marble morsels of masterwork in another art.