Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Beach in Summer)

“As you recline upon the beach, you may observe Mademoiselle X… the actress of the Palais Royal Theater, whom you have seen and applauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted; but she trips down, surveying her breezy nether limbs. ‘C'est convemable, j'espere, eh?’ says Mademoiselle, and trots up the springboard which projects over the waves with one end uppermost, like a great seesaw. She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial dive, executing on the way the most graceful of somersaults. This performance Mademoiselle X repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie tossing little stones into the water, to ponder the curious and delicate question why a lady may go so far as to put herself into a single scant, clinging garment and take a straight leap, head downward, before 300 spectators, without violation of propriety, leaving the impropriety to begin with her turning over in the air in such a way that for five seconds her head is upward. The logic of the matter is mysterious; white and black are divided by a hair. But the fact remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and vice on the other. There are some days here so still and radiant, however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such an air and such a sea, might be diluted into innocence.” — American expatriate novelist-essayist Henry James (1843-1916), Parisian Sketches: Letters to the “New York Tribune,”1875-1876, edited by Leon Edel (1957)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Psalm 55, With Lines Influencing Henry James)

“I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
    because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they bring[a] trouble upon me,
    and in anger they cherish enmity against me.
 
My heart is in anguish within me,
    the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling come upon me,
    and horror overwhelms me.
And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
yea, I would wander afar,
    I would lodge in the wilderness,
I would haste to find me a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest.’”—Psalm 55:2-8 (Revised Standard Version)

These biblical verses are the source of not one, but two prominent book titles. One phrase gave rise to one of the cornerstones of modern philosophy: Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 title, Fear and Trembling.

The other might not be as recognizable to those who have read a novel whose title echoes another verse here: Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.

Contemporary readers of this work from the mature period of American expatriate novelist will hear the character Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, explicitly likened to a dove because of her innocence, and leave it at that. (James, incidentally, left a clue to the real-life source of the character through the initials “MT”—Minny Temple, a vivacious, innocent cousin who died of tuberculosis at age 24.)

But readers in James’ own time, familiar as they were with the Bible—especially in the King James version—would have heard an echo in Psalm 55’s “wings like a dove,” and would think back to the entire passage—someone beset not just by the “terrors of death,” but also “the noise of the enemy” and “the oppression of the wicked.”

Milly, like the narrator of the psalm—though without knowing it (at least initially)—is at the mercy of conspirators: in this case, the cash-poor lovers Merton Densher and Kate Croy, who hope that, by Merton marrying the soon-to-die Milly, he will inherit her money, freeing him to wed Kate.

James’ personal religious beliefs appear to be unconventional, a byproduct of his father, Henry James Sr., who rejected orthodox Protestantism and became a follower of Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But traditional faith can leave an indelible imprint, and James—Junior, like Senior—would likely hear that phrase “wings like a dove” reverberate in the imagination in contemplating the object of the web spun by Croy and Densher.

Kate and Merton have committed the worst kind of transgression in exploiting the innocence of another human being. That violation will not go unpunished.

In the quest for material possession that justifies and finally undermines the love of Croy and Densher, the novelist might have found an equally apt literary allusion from Psalm 68: “The women at home divide the spoil, though they stay among the sheepfolds—the wings of a dove covered with silver, its pinions with green gold.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, with Alison Elliott as Millie, Linus Roache as Merton, and Helena Bonham Carter as Kate.)

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Fraudulent Medium)

“[T]he individual who was repairing the tattered flag, turned round, perceived me, and showed me a countenance which could belong only to an ‘infallible waking medium.’ It was not, indeed, that Professor Fargo had the abstracted and emaciated aspect which tradition attributes to prophets and visionaries. On the contrary, the fleshly element in his composition seemed, superficially, to enjoy a luxurious preponderance over the spiritual. He was tall and corpulent, and wore an air of aggressive robustness. A mass of reddish hair was tossed back from his forehead in a leonine fashion, and a lustrous auburn beard diffused itself complacently over an expansive but by no means immaculate shirt front. He was dressed in a black evening suit, of a tarnished elegance, and it was in keeping with the festal pattern of his garments, that on the right forefinger of a large, fat hand, he should wear an immense turquoise ring. His intimate connection with the conjuring class was stamped upon his whole person; but to a superficial glance he might have seemed a representative of its grosser accomplishments. You could have fancied him, in spangled fleshings, looking down the lion's mouth, or cracking the ringmaster's whip at the circus, while Mlle. Josephine jumped through the hoops. It was his eyes, when you fairly met them, that proved him an artist on a higher line. They were eyes which had peeped into stranger places than even lions' mouths. Their pretension, I know, was to pierce the veil of futurity; but if this was founded, I could only say that the vision of Ezekiel and Jeremiah was but another name for consummate Yankee shrewdness. They were, in a single word, the most impudent pair of eyes I ever beheld, and it was the especial sign of their impudence that they seemed somehow to undertake to persuade you of the disinterested benevolence.”—American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist Henry James (1843-1916), “Professor Fargo,” originally printed in Galaxy, August 1874, reprinted in Complete Stories, 1874-1884 (1999)

Though Henry James’ most famous short story might be “Turn of the Screw,” he wrote approximately two dozen tales of the supernatural that gave critical cachet to a genre that could use some at the time.

One of his earliest stories in this vein, “Professor Fargo,” featured more than just characters whose consciousness is profoundly disrupted by horrifying people, events or phenomena. It also involved contention for an innocent soul, and added a theme would preoccupy him for the of rest of his life: the pernicious effect of those who pursue wealth without scruples.

Together with Colonel Gifford, a down-on-his luck inventor now forced into billing as “The Great Mathematical Magician and Lightning Calculator,” Professor Fargo exploits the credulity of the grieving by promising to bring their loved ones back from the afterlife.  

Their “connection,” Gifford confides to the tale’s narrator, implies “no intellectual approval of his [Fargo’s] extraordinary pretensions.” But Gifford becomes even more alarmed by his partner’s growing influence over the colonel’s deaf-and-dumb teenage daughter.

When Gifford vents his disgust, Fargo proposes another “exhibit”: "Allow me to exhibit your daughter for a month, in my own way and according to my own notions, and I assume your debt."

Miss Gifford responds instantly to Fargo’s glance of command: “The poor child fixed her charming eyes on his gross, flushed face, and awaited his commands. She was fascinated; she had no will of her own.”

I don’t know where James came up with the idea for this haunting short story, but he seems to have been fascinated for a long time afterward by the instinct underlying stage hypnosis. After attending a lecture by his friend George du Maurier, he confessed his fascination with mass audiences’ susceptibility to sensation and sound, “the many-headed monster…, mak[ing] the mass (as we know the mass), to vibrate.”

This Day in Literary History (‘Turn of the Screw’ Scares Up Much-Needed Sales for Henry James)

Oct. 13, 1898—As The Turn of the Screw came out in book form following its serialization in Colliers’ earlier in the year, Henry James didn’t bother to hide his disgust with this “abject, down-on-all-fours pot-boiler, pure & simple, that a proud man brought low ever perpetrated.”

Readers, however, differed sharply, making this “ghost story” the novelist’s most successful work of fiction since Daisy Miller over two decades before. In time, James—needing the money from this tale of terror to boost his finances, and its widespread acclaim to soothe his spirit from his recent disastrous foray into the theater—came to feel differently about it, too.

I’m sure he would feel surprised but delighted that even Ivy League English departments today put it on their reading lists for American Lit classes.

What has made the novella so enduringly popular, 125 years after publication? Successive generations have discovered something creepy in this study in ambiguity that has left readers guessing as much as frightened.

In the late Victorian Era when the tale came out, readers would have picked on the fact that the story is being told “on Christmas eve in an old house.” Ghost stories told by the fireside remained an English tradition during the holidays. Already, the atmosphere in the tale is threatening.

Well into the 20^th century, critics offered Freudian interpretations of what transpired. Did the ghosts of past servant Peter Quint and governess Miss Jessel really exist—or did they spring from the imagination of the neurotic new, unnamed governess, the sheltered daughter of a vicar who may have been projecting her own sexual fantasies onto others?

Or was James being prescient but careful in alerting readers to child molestation—a crime that, like many other sexual matters, could not be discussed openly in the repressive late-Victorian age?

Structurally, Turn of the Screw is an “envelope story”—a story within a story, with one narrator hearing the tale from another, who yields it in turn to another. This framing device—influencing, among other cases, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Willa Cather’s My Antonia—seemingly testifies to the credibility of the narrative.

But that very authority is undercut in the prologue by complications of time that are disclosed. Consider:

*It opens in our age (or, for Victorians, their) age;

*The narrator immediately says the events are in the past;

*Douglas’ narration of the tale happens two days after the fireside scene;

*A short time elapses when the narrator transcribes the governess’ manuscript;

*Still further back in time, when Douglas reads the governess’ manuscript, which had been willed to him;

*Earlier still, when the governess writes the manuscript;

*Yet earlier still, when the governess tells Douglas the events;

*Earlier yet, when the events took place.

In short, the events happened 50 years before the tale proper begins. The possibility can’t be ruled out that some of what happens has been misremembered, forgotten, suppressed—or made up.

A few words should also be said about the employer of the governess, “a bachelor in the prime of life…handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind.” Left as guardian of little Flora and Miles through the death of their parents, he has no experience in dealing with children, and neither the time nor the wish to be bothered with them.

So he offers the governess the job, with the provisos that she will have absolute authority over them and he is not to be disturbed by news of them. She accepts, carried away by his looks and manner—and, Douglas relates, “She never saw him again.”

The governess comes to believe not only that Flora and Miles have seen Quint and Miss Jessel, but that they’re somehow in league with the apparitions. But James never reveals what, if anything, happened between the children and the dead house help, leaving the reader to infer the most horrifying possibilities.

As R.W.B. Lewis perceptively notes in his family biography, The Jameses, The Turn of the Screw was written when both Henry and his brother William, the pioneering psychologist- philosopher, had become increasingly concerned with the supernatural.

Though Henry wrote the first of his 10 ghost stories as far back as 1868, they grew in number, length, and psychological complexity in the 1890s, as more family members and friends passed away.

This genre also enabled the novelist to extend, in a realm he never imagined, the dramatic devices and themes he had learned in his brief attempt to conquer the London theater world (culminating in the disastrous play Guy Domville, a fiasco I discussed in this blog post from 15 years ago).

The dramatic possibilities of The Turn of the Screw have been exploited by others in several genres in the 20^th and 21^st centuries:

*As the play The Innocents, written by William Archibald;

*As a 1961 movie by the same name, written by Archibald and Truman Capote and starring Deborah Kerr (shown in the image accompanying this post);

*Several TV adaptations;

*Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw.

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Room as a Stand-In for a Miserable Father)

“She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the 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 the 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 colored glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in 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 a 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 might not add the shame of fear, of individual, 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 for which she had prepared herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be sad, so as not to 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 a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings?” —American expatriate novelist-essayist Henry James (1843-1916), The Wings of the Dove (1902)

James never tells exactly why Kate Croy’s father Lionel has left her so bitter and emotionally—and financially—impoverished. That ambiguity has furnished a free hand to filmmakers. (In the 1997 movie adaptation starring Helena Bonham Carter, Lionel—played by Michael Gambon—is an opium addict who’s stolen from his wife.)

But the carefully chosen adjectives here (e.g., "sallow, shabby," "vulgar") add up to an alliterative pronouncement all the more devastating for being non-specific: “the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour.”

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on Bewilderment and the Tales We Tell)

"It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of bored Olympians, mixed up with them." —American man of letters Henry James (1843-1916), Preface to The Princess Casamassima (1886)

Quote of the Day (Alice James, on a Landmark Year for Her Literary Family)

“Within the last year [Henry] has published The Tragic Muse, brought out The American and written a play, Mrs. Vibert . . . combined with William's Psychology, not a bad show for our family! especially if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all.”—Alice James (1848-1892), entry for June 16, 1891, in The Diary of Alice James, edited by Henry Edel (1964)

Brothers William James and Henry James Jr. became famous in their lifetimes for their powers of observation as respectively, pioneering psychologist-philosopher and fiction writer. It took over 70 years after her death, with the publication of her diaries, for the world to know that their younger sister, Alice James, had her own penetrating vision of the world, albeit one experienced from the bed where she languished as an invalid recluse.

The diary entry above conveys her pride in her two older brothers’ literary achievement in the prior year, as well as a gallows sense of humor bordering on stoicism in the face of the declining health that finally claimed her life a year later.

Alice was the youngest child of Henry James Sr., a wealthy, one-legged philosopher whose eccentricities affected, for good and ill, the lives of his five children—perhaps none more so than his daughter.

"In our family group, girls seem scarcely to have had a chance," Henry Jr. wrote. Irritated and uncomfortable because their father felt that women were mere appendages of men, Alice fell ill or sometimes pretended to be ill, with fainting spells or headaches. Some doctors diagnosed the underlying ailment as suppressed gout, others as “wandering womb.”

But the one applied most commonly to her (a particular favorite of male doctors of the time) was known as “neurasthenia,” a form of what European doctors saw as “hysteria.” We know recognize what she had as a depression so devastating that Alice became suicidal. “A hoop skirt is a death trap,” she would observe.

Oddly enough, perhaps because Alice finally felt she could be useful, the one period of her life when these conditions abated was when she had to care for her father when his health started to decline. But with his death in 1882, her condition worsened again.

Even confined to her bed, Alice missed little. The diary entries she began writing in 1889 (dictated to her longtime companion, Katherine Loring) were sometimes sharp, often funny, and usually unconventional.

Anglophilic Henry Jr., for instance, was astonished to discover, when Loring presented to him a copy of the diary after Alice’s death, that his sister “was really an Irishwoman.” It wasn’t simply because she ardently believed in Home Rule, but that she had assessed Britain’s role in fostering the conditions for this rising movement—and found their disclaimers of blame all too wanting:

“The behaviour of the Unionist and Tory is simply the bete carried to its supreme expression. It is truly a great misfortune for a people to be so destitute of inspiration, and so completely without honour, as to be left absolutely naked to itself. If you could read, too, the chorus going up to heaven on all sides over the love of manliness and fairness in the Briton's bosom! — those qualities of which they are always assuring the rest of the world they hold the monopoly. The Englishman, however, should not be held accountable for being mentally so abject before the Irishman; he is helpless, for there is absolutely nothing in his organization wherewith he can conceive of him, and his self-respect naturally has no other refuge save in loathing and despising him. He has no wings to his mind to bear him whither his leaden feet are inapt for carrying him; so that it is only now, at the end of seven centuries, that he is beginning faintly to divine that in Ireland, above all other lands, there are impalpable spiritualities which rise triumphant and imperishable before brutalities.”

Alice James died in 1892 of breast cancer. Although her brothers sensed her keen intellect, even they must have wondered at times what to make of her. We may be only coming to terms with her now.

This Day in Literary History (O’Hara Returns to Short Fiction in ‘Sermons and Soda-Water’)

Nov. 24, 1960—Eleven years after angrily abandoning short fiction after a negative review in the principal outlet for his work, The New Yorker, John O’Hara marked his return to the form that was his strength (and to the magazine’s fold) with a boxed set of three novellas, Sermons and Soda-Water.

From his first (and usually considered best) novel, Appointment in Samarra, in 1934, O’Hara had brought an excellent ear for dialogue and an encyclopedic knowledge of his characters that helped him depict class distinctions with pinpoint accuracy. But a decade’s departure from the short story brought with it new strengths: a renewed commitment to “get it all down on paper while I can,” a greater desire to depict the social circumstances of his time for a new generation, and an empathy enhanced by the losses and misfortunes of friends.

The collection’s title, derived from Lord Byron’s Don Juan ("Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, / Sermons and soda-water the day after"), suggests its subject: the journey of O’Hara and his generation from their riotous youthful excess in Prohibition through the cataclysms that brought them up short: the Depression and World War II.

Though I consider O’Hara’s novels in his last two decades to be, at a basic level, pleasurable, they were not always consistent, and many critics regard them far more skeptically, as loose, baggy monsters.

But it is hard to find fault with his short stories of the 1960s, which, for breadth of characters and depth of social observation, is virtually unrivaled in American literature.

In a post from nine years ago, on O’Hara’s 1961 story collection, Assembly, I discussed how more fully the nature of this achievement, as well as the nasty Brendan Gill review that precipitated his break from The New Yorker and editor William Maxwell’s shrewd judgment in securing his services again.

The story that convinced Maxwell that the notoriously touchy O’Hara was worth dealing with again was one of the novellas from Sermons and Soda-Water, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” a kind of American “Scenes From a Marriage.” A union begun as an act of spite (sexy Bobbie Hammersmith weds possibly the least desirable member of her circle, Pete McCrea, to get back at a former beau) is followed by mutual infidelity, arguments and straitened circumstances. Yet against all odds, after 30 years, the couple arrive at not merely accommodation but respect and even affection for each other.

As I discussed in this post from 12 years ago about Robert Montgomery, O’Hara missed out on a chance to have that talented writer-director adapt “Imagine Kissing Pete” because of a boorishness that often alienated many admirers.

The other two novellas in the trilogy, "The Girl on the Baggage Truck" and “We’re Friends Again,” though not as superb as “Imagine Kissing Pete,” are similarly distinguished by an elegiac tone and compassion for how his characters dealt with fate that was missing from his earlier short stories.

Typical in this regard is the conclusion of “We’re Friends Again,” in which the narrator ponders what he has learned about his best friend and the latter’s wife:

“I realized that until then I had not known him at all. It was not a discovery to cause me dismay. What did he know about me? What, really, can any of us know about any of us, and why must we make such a thing of loneliness when it is the final condition of us all? And where would love be without it?”

The linked trilogy also marked a return of O’Hara’s alter ego, Jim Malloy, a hard-drinking young writer who had appeared in the 1934 coming-of-age novella “The Doctor’s Son” and the novels BUtterfield 8 (1935) and Hope of Heaven (1938). He is not unlike Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman—a reappearing literary stand-in for the author who, having experienced his own reverses (controversial books, failed relationships, brushes with mortality), functions as a moved observer of friends over time.

The comparison might seem surprising at first, but the turn that O’Hara took in his short fiction in his fifties resembles in some ways that of Henry James:

*Both were writers of manners who, in the fifties, began to write longer fiction as their literary ambitions expanded;

*Both used their disappointing attempts to break into the world of entertainment (James, on the London stage; O’Hara, on Broadway and in Hollywood) as fodder for character creation; and

*Both, terribly saddened by the deaths of loved ones (O’Hara, second wife Belle and close friends Robert Benchley, James Forrestal and Philip Barry; James, sister Alice and brother Willkie), increasingly considered mortality in their work; and,

*Both found the novella an artistically satisfying vehicle.

 Good introductions to both writers can, in fact, be found in such collections (Great Short Novels of Henry James and The Novellas of John O'Hara). They allow for extended treatment of character and theme without the elaborate plot requirements of a longer novel. Above all, they exhibit his sense of verisimilitude, the sense of authority and honesty conveyed by what he called “special knowledge” of social customs.

This Day in Literary History (William Dean Howells, Near-Forgotten ‘Dean of American Letters,’ Dies)

May 11, 1920-- William Dean Howells, dubbed “Dean of American Letters” for his exploration of multiple genres and his influence as a critic and editor on the nation’s literature, died in his sleep in New York City at age 83.

The prior decade had seen the passing of Howells’ two great but very dissimilar friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. At the peak of his influence and popularity, Howells’ fiction had been ranked alongside theirs as exemplars of a realistic school decidedly at odds with the romantic novels more favored by American publishers in the early post-Civil War period.

But the century since his death has been kinder to the two writers that Howells championed than to the editor-novelist himself. While Twain continues to be studied for introducing native vernacular to American literature and James is celebrated for his pioneering psychological insights into characters’ motivations, Howells is seen as conventional, even something of an old fogy.

Four writers—a novelist and three critics— might be said to have interred Howells’ reputation. The first, biographer Van Wyck Brooks, did not wait even a year before his death before criticizing him (and Twain’s wife Libby) in The Ordeal of Mark Twain for reining in his rude, ribald genius with their own puritanism and prudery. 

H.L. Mencken picked up on this theme, inveighing against Howells, with characteristic invective, for churning out "a long row of uninspired and hollow books" and acting like a “somewhat kittenish old maid."

Many listeners in 1930 might have been mistakenly heard the voice of Mencken in that of the Nobel Literature laureate that year, Sinclair Lewis, who picked up Mencken’s rhetorical tropes and fairly ran with them. The rise of Howells, Lewis charged in his lecture, had represented for American literature “something like a standard, and a very bad standard it was”:

“Mr. Howells was one of the gentlest, sweetest, and most honest of men, but he had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage. He abhorred not only profanity and obscenity but all of what H. G. Wells has called ‘the jolly coarsenesses of life.’ In his fantastic vision of life, which he innocently conceived to be realistic, farmers, and seamen and factory hands might exist, but the farmer must never be covered with muck, the seaman must never roll out bawdy chanteys, the factory hand must be thankful to his good kind employer, and all of them must long for the opportunity to visit Florence and smile gently at the quaintness of the beggars.”

The evisceration of Howells was effectively completed a generation later in 27-year-old Alfred Kazin’s sweeping study of American prose from the 1890s through 1940, On Native Grounds. The opening chapter uses Howell as the central figure against which virtually an entire new genre, the naturalists and their successors: “he was a monumental example of the antiquated nineteenth-century conscience upon which a new order of society had placed an intolerable burden.”

Literary reputation is a fleeting thing—and ironically, even the four men who did so much to take down Howells do not stand up so well as they once did. At the same time, if Howells has not reacquired his once-exalted status, a more respectful tone has crept into evaluations of his work. 

Historian Richard White, for instance, used Howells as a voice to try to make sense of the squalling Industrial Age in his book, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865‒1896. His Howells is less prudish than ambivalent, an observer too thoughtful to miss in his novels and magazine columns the injustices of his time but too perplexed by them all to offer a corrective to them. 

The best way to ensure a writer is read is to make sure he is assigned to students. Though Howells’ most influential novels (from 1875 through 1888) can be found in a two-volume Library of America series, I doubt if more than a few students have gone beyond even one: The Rise of Silas Lapham. But if you have to start somewhere with him, it might as well be here. 

Less buffoonish than Lewis’ George Babbitt, less brutal than Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood, Lapham is also more thoroughly recognizable and human. Proud, boastful, eager to maintain his place in society, this businessman lets his greed get the better of him. The “rise” in the title is actually ironic: His realization of his folly and determination to live for others following the collapse of his fortunes produces a moral, rather than financial, elevation.

This Day in Film History (‘The Heiress,’ Classic Wyler Adaptation of James, Opens)

Oct. 6, 1949—The Heiress, a costume drama that demonstrated the big-screen potential of the psychological fiction of Henry James, premiered in New York City. Though not a box-office success, it scored with critics, and it stands today as a model for screen adaptations of novels and plays.

My headline understated the process by which the word-heavy James came into focus in image-heavy Hollywood. The dramatic promise latent in “The Master,” largely unrealized in his own lifetime (see my prior post on his London stage disaster, Guy Domville), was first manifested by Ruth and Augustus Goetz in their hit 1947 adaptation of Washington Square, The Heiress.

That same year, Hollywood might have been forgiven for tiptoeing around James after the critical and box-office drubbing given The Lost Moment, an adaptation of The Aspern Papers starring Robert Cummings and Susan Hayward. 

But after watching The Heiress on Broadway, Olivia de Havilland was so convinced it would work on film that she persuaded William Wyler to take on the project, and the Oscar-winning director meshed so well with the Goetzes on fashioning the screenplay that Paramount Pictures generously bankrolled the production.

But the raw material in the hands of Wyler and the Goetzes was more than a bit challenging. James’ attitude towards his characters was frequently ironic; inferences about motives were largely between the lines; and he refused to provide a happy ending for his heroine.

I heard Washington Square (1880) once described wittily (and more or less accurately) “the James book for those who hate James.” Written two decades before the rococo style of his “later period” in the early 1900s (The American, The Golden Bowl), this was simple in comparison.

The content, however, is anything but, focusing on a struggle for autonomy, as Catherine Sloper—the shy “heiress” of the play and film title—is scorned by her father for ungainliness (an ironic reminder of the beautiful mother who died while giving birth to her), pursued by a fortune hunter, and undermined by an insipid aunt. She must not only negotiate the path to adulthood without honest, practical advice from any responsible adult, but do so in the face of a trio with no real regard for her feelings.

When imagining how to reconceive a play for the screen, most directors think in terms of “opening it up” with exterior shots. But Wyler did not see this as appropriate for this drawing-room drama. 

Washington Square was preeminently an interior mental drama, marked by the multiple obstacles to happiness in the way of the painfully self-conscious Catherine. As a visual counterpart to her mental state, then, Wyler emphasized the interior architecture of the Sloper home.

The quickest the camera moves, then, is in the crucial dance scene, not only because of the bodies waltzing around the floor but because of Catherine’s giddiness when the charming cad Morris Townsend passes unexpected attention to her. 

Otherwise, the stillness of the camera throughout most of the rest of the movie underscores Catherine's growing agony as her father, justifiably suspicious of Townsend’s intentions, threatens to disinherit her and a disappointed Townsend abandons their plans to elope.

It is Catherine’s understanding of this last development that allows Wyler to capitalize on the Sloper home’s interiors. In the play, she gave full vent to her sorrow in a long monologue. Wyler dispensed with just about all the lines penned by the Goetzes, choosing instead to have de Havilland trudge wearily up the staircase.

Director Martin Scorsese later described to critic Roger Ebert the impact of The Heiress on his budding movie consciousness:

“When I was nine or 10, my father took me to see ‘The Heiress,’ which was the first costume piece that had a powerful impact on me. I didn't understand every detail, but I knew that something terrible had happened, a breach of trust and love - and everybody was dressed so nicely and they had such nice drawing rooms. I didn't understand how a father could talk that way to his daughter, explaining that the man was after her for her money, 'Because you're not clever and you're quite plain.' That's quite a scene.”

Other scenes, equally memorable, owe much less to the novella. In the book, several years after jilting Catherine, Morris returns, having lost most of his hair in the interim. (It is as if he left looking like Rob Lowe and came back looking like Wallace Shawn.) In the film, Clift’s sunny confidence is gone but not his looks.

Most of all, Catherine’s response to Morris’ desperate plea to marry him for real this time is the exact opposite of James’ quiet fadeout. It is the logical consequence of her fierce answer when her Aunt Pennyman asks if she can really be so cruel. Yes she can, Catherine answers: “I have been taught by masters.”

And so, Catherine, after seemingly consenting to go away with the supposedly chastened Morris, locks him out when they are supposed to meet, leaving him pounding the door in helpless frustration. It is only partly an audience-pleasing act of revenge, for it also involves Catherine’s emotional imprisonment as a lifelong spinster in a house that has never meant happiness for her.

No two ways about it: this material was grim. After agreeing to back the film, Paramount evidently sense the nature of the proposal it had accepted, and pressed Wyler to make Morris sympathetic. In the end, Wyler only softened the character without changing his essential nature, and that only heightened the suspense through much of the film about whether he would in fact go ahead with his plan to wed Catherine.

As would occur with Carrie (1952), Wyler’s adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the director’s refusal to make more than minimal nods toward audience expectations of a happy ending cost Paramount dearly at the box office for The Heiress. But Hollywood honored the film with eight Oscar nominations; de Havilland ended up winning her second Best Actress Oscar for the role; and the movie is now studied by cineastes such as Scorsese as a sensitive and spot-on literary adaptation.

Perhaps the only inexplicable misstep in the production involved the score by Aaron Copland, which was, in the words of this fine post on the blog “Words of Note,” “chopped to bits, poorly dubbed, and rescored without his approval” by Wyler. Though the composer won an Oscar for the score, Copland—who had been contributing music for movies for the last decade—created only one more film score for the rest of his life.