No Moral to It — Henry James’s Washington Square
“We don’t read James for his stories. Despite their formal symmetries, they feel jerry-rigged. He borrows from melodrama, but lops off that genre’s gratifications, going realist on us at exactly the wrong moment. If Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending, Henry James delivers something more like a comedy with a haunting close.” From the 1964 Signet Classics introduction by Mona Simpson
Hard to argue fiction hasn’t changed since Henry James wrote Washington Square. Styles and tastes have changed, the country’s changed — more than once — and today technology refers to something very different from fast steamships and telegraph messages. They began laying telegraph cables across the Atlantic in the mid-1800s — nowadays bouncing social media off satellites is the rage. Though whether it seems so today, the Gilded Age was the start of the American century and the modern world.
Granting changes in writing styles, however, Henry James (1843–1916) was a strange writer. Idiosyncratic to the extreme. He is to early modern novels as Wallace Stevens is to modern poetry — dense and cleverly obscure. Few outside MFA candidates read Henry James in the present day. A single page of his might take the whole day to parse. Washington Square was an early novel in any case, and it seems he was still working on his chops.
This isn’t a too laudatory essay — more an opinion that James’s multi-coloured coat had moth holes in it.
Narrators as protagonists can add an effective voice to a story. Otherwise, they should be like a doorman discretely delivering notes on a silver platter to the drawing room. I’d like a doorman, except he’d probably want potty breaks and health insurance, and my wife would kill for a live-in chef.
Novels starting with a narrator’s voice is still an acceptable notion. Here’s the problem: James’s narrator has no face to speak of, and James uses his narrator so sparingly in Washington Square, it’s puzzling why he bothered. More like an affectation confusing the novel’s point of view.
Right from the start, the novel’s narrator swears that Catherine Sloper — the young, available daughter of a wealthy, upper crust medical doctor living in the very best part of New York City at the turn of the last century — she is the story’s heroine. Unlike heroines who are either beautiful or clever — or with an amazing sexual appetite — James’s heroine is none of those. That last bit is the 50 Shades of best sellers rule.
Imagine a general practitioner with a mansion in today’s Manhattan — even in a rent-controlled apartment. But beyond making him a doctor, James didn’t bother developing that vein further. He might as well have been a stockbroker — giving a nod to New York’s primary contribution to world culture.
Catherine is something of an experiment in writing in James’s hand — he goes out of his way to stress how ordinary and uninteresting she is. She has neither physical nor intellectual beauty and yet she is his heroine. Then you meet her procreator, daddy Sloper, and he’s no shining example of a deep thinker.
“The most that had ever been said for her was that she had ‘a nice face.’
“A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorous critics — a quiet, ladylike girl, by those of the more imaginative sort…
“People who expressed themselves roughly called her stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was shy, uncomfortably, painfully shy.” From Washington Square by Henry James.
If the narrator doesn’t have sympathy for Catherine — who can we cheer for? Maybe this is a B. F. Skinner experiment describing the procreation of simple-minded creatures? Getting into Age-appropriate jargon, let’s grant the narrator is a starched shirt — but was the author as well? James simply forgets to give his readers a reason to read the story.
Henry James was born in NYC — thus handicapped from the start. He gives his readers a very narrow window on the lives of 20th century, upper crusty New Yorkers. Henry’s own brother, William, was a late philosopher / early psychologist and their old man was a theologian coming from wealth. Acorns adorned the old man’s lawn, so to speak. I don’t expect James starched and ironed his own shirts. But I like the image.
James is known for odd writing tics. Instead of an actual description, James applied private analogies he doesn’t chose to explain:
“She kept her pretty eyes, which were illumed by a sort of modesty.” From Washington Square by Henry James.
See? Wallace Stevens! I rest my case.
Catherine’s father, the good doctor, is a fool, though he’s nothing as humorous as to be worth knowing.
If her father practices medicine as capriciously as he conducts his affairs with his daughter, one has doubts — doesn’t a medical person require a modicum of skill reading their patients — and wouldn’t a skosh of it be applied to his offspring, his now-departed beloved’s only child? James stretches his readers’ credulity, if not their patience.
The plot revolves around an ordinary story: Catherine has a suitor. Not a lover, just a suitor — evidently they had suitors in those days. And woe of woes, Catherine’s suitor is a handsome cad, who, her father’s convinced, is chasing her inheritance. Money is a subject that juices Henry James big time, being from New York City. In the good old days, money measured one’s status. Oh wait — it still does.
And it’s exhausting how the story revolves — dizzyingly — an excellent adverb to describe the novel — around a question of fiduciary obligations and how that might demonstrate a person’s moral compass. But in New York City? The original den of thieves? Are you f — ing kidding? Sorry — so, so sorry to offend — but have all the Russian oligarchs sold their NYC condos yet?
The cad boy, Morris by name, is a broke young lad. Handsome as the devil — like the devil was ever broke. Morris might well be a cad, but he’s as stale a character as Catherine’s father. So like cardboard he barely stands on the page — like in a morality play — or in a sex scene with no happy bodies.
Yank her damn bodice down, boy, and give us all something to hope for!
And the good doctor’s sister, who lives with them in the Manhattan mansion, is a silly goose. She’s as batty a belfry as you could want. James had a decent cast to work with, if he didn’t quite know what to do with them. The book reads as if James was attempting a clinical observation instead of a novel.
The dance of these characters runs the length of the novel — like the slowest tennis match: Catherine moves from her father to her cad boy, her father counters, declaring he’ll cut her out of his will, hauls her to Europe for some reason, but she refuses to yield, and hearing of it, the cad boy gives up, and Catherine becomes a spinster. QED?
It’s a bit like Sally Rooney’s Normal People in that it keeps circling the same thin plot. In Rooney’s, it’s a nicely worded story about the lost young bloods of her modern Ireland who end up where they start. In Washington Square it’s the misinterpretations between people who should know better — educated people, if frustrating — like Rooney’s. I run like the devil when I meet these people.
No plebeians existed in Henry James’s universe. He used none for main characters. And he didn’t employ much humor. Which are serious handicaps in a writer. Always scrambling and running scared, tenement folk have more to offer in a story, having so much to lose. They make up nine-tenths of the population, and James wasn’t going to write about them? Didn’t he read his Dickens?
if you’re James Merrill, scion of Merrill Lynch, you can write gorgeous poems about a life very few have ever lived. His stories of Greece — I started with these. But all the rest of us need to keep dreaming. Even malcontent Irish young bloods.
This serious lack of an interesting protagonist leaves James’s story unleavened — a good literary word. Perhaps there’s something about living in the Big Apple that makes people insanely greedy, makes them name buildings after themselves, have multiple wives and cheat on their taxes.
Though, even in Henry James’s life, commoners were successful — otherwise we wouldn’t know about them.
These days, we can’t tell the difference. Your parents don’t count anymore, nor do their parents, unless they left you bags of gold, in which case, congrats. But we’re talking about common folk being everywhere — even computer nerds — anyone clever enough to capture a paying audience are striding like giants across the world. Rock and roll ladies like Taylor Swift can go anywhere they chose — though in her case, deservedly.
Consider the writing opportunities: you have your poor folk, working class folk, immigrants and dreaming folk — what an array of characters to work with — except in James’s story.
You can find the Victorian wealthy in Dickens’s work — a goodly number of villains and dithering sorts. Evidently, unlike Dickens, Henry James viewed poverty as a moral weakness. James was a Calvinist of the first order — a man’s position in the world was a reflection of his soul. If a touch heartless, it is a very upper class American tradition.
The medieval French nobles insisted that certain fashions and colors were only for the privileged. Otherwise who could tell? Some nobles were downright ugly and others married too close, and the unwashed smelled for an (obvious) reason. So did the nobles — et voilà the perfume industry.
Washington Square was adapted into a play, The Heiress, which in turn spawned revivals and an “Academy Award-winning film starring Olivia de Havilland in the title role.” From Wikipedia article on the novel.
I’ve not seen the movie — before my time — but Hollywood people liked the story. Does Catherine Sloper of the novel get a more sympathetic treatment in the movie? Is there a real tragedy in the movie to help pass the time eating popcorn? I do know Olivia was Hollywood royalty in her day.
Catherine Sloper should have slapped her father into the next room and ordered her suitor to go pound sand. Then found a lover, cad or not — and ordered some good Earl Gray tea from her house maid — they still had those in the Gilded Age. Contrawise, if Morris the cad was an outstanding performer in the sack, where might that have led?
In his later novel, On the Wings of a Dove, James had grown into a more complicated writer. Faulkner couldn’t twist a descriptive scene any better than what opens this book. Reading it, I was sure my tequila had kicked into overdrive. Brain fog ensued, and I barely made it to the end of the first paragraph. Nearly the entire first chapter is an interior dialog, even if the author buries his character with minutia and overwrought exposition.
“She waited, Kate Cory, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, [missing a word?] and there were moments when she showed herself, in the glass over the mantle, a face positively pale with irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once — she had tried it — the sense of slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting to freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all from time to time taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to the standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room — the hundred like it or worse — in the street. Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really in a manner that she mightn’t add the shame of fear, of individual, of personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small salutary sense at least of neither shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet — as including in particular the interview to which she had braced herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be sad so as to not be angry, but it made her angry that she couldn’t be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a ‘lot’ at the common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean stale feelings?” from Henry James’ On the Wings of a Dove
I haven’t researched what scholars have said, but that’s a gutsy opening paragraph. In his own good time, James lands the paragraph with the closing sentence. And throughout, readers are hearing Kate Cory’s tumbling thoughts — no narrator necessary — very unlike his Catherine Sloper from Washington Square.
Also unlike in his Washington Square novel, Kate Cory is alive and can see clearly how her father works to get his way above all else — you get that all in the first chapter. James delivers the thesis and defends it. Even the name — Kate instead of Catherine — maybe by then James stopped wearing starched collars.
I ought to go back to finish On the Wings of a Dove. If I’d read Washington Square first and then moved to On the Wings of a Dove, I’d have appreciated how much better developed James’s characters became. The title, On the Wings of a Dove, is also evident that Henry James composed better book titles as he got on.
CODA
If you’ve ever studied the cave paintings in Avignon, wondering who those people were, curiosity about earlier times would seem familiar. Past is prelude — a pretty symmetry, though often as untrue as not. Still, where else can we look with any kind of clarity? We study the past because we can’t see the future.
My suspicion is this need to write is like scratching on stone — as basic as ‘Kilroy was here’, or as outrageous a writer as Henry James — it comes from our long past on this rock. Maybe dogs, when they scratch the dirt where they just peed, get to the point with far less embellishment. When done, they get on with their lives, where we keep chiseling our stones.
Is it unkind to criticize earlier writer who can no longer defend themselves? Henry James spent a lifetime writing, and he’s noted in anthologies to this day, so who’s the fool?
Writing is wrestling words instead of wild boars, and neither match is for the faint hearted. Those cave painters had a fervency equal to the best in any time — their descendants carved gargoyles at Chartres, and their distant cousins wrote poems praising Allah — and created the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra.
