Friday, August 9, 2013

Henry's Back (F.W. Dupee on Henry James - gorgeous prose on gorgeous prose)


 
 
F.W. Dupee, Henry James, 1951 (Wm Sloan Assoc.), “The Awkward Period”, pp 193 - 196

    His prose is likewise changing in these years, and changing considerably, although the process is gradual. In his effort to make the story self-sufficient, his sentences have always carried an abundance of suggestive detail; they now simply carry more. The urbane and relatively impersonal rhythms of his earlier style become more nervously responsive to the currents of feeling. There are bizarre shifts of pace, unexpected brevities. "Her little world was phantasmagoric -- strange shadows dancing on a sheet." At the same time, as the entire medium becomes denser and tauter, it risks parallelisms of sound and cadence which would formerly have been rejected as too poetic. "There was a general shade in all the lower reaches -- a fine clear dusk in garden and grove." Increasingly the language rejoices in sudden colloquialism, raffish jargon, and a habit of turning abruptly and alarmingly concrete. "Mrs. Wix gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened or the start even of one who hears a bullet whiz at the flag of truce." Above all, the medium begins to put forth remarkable metaphors without fear of violating its prose character. The following, from 'The Portrait of a Lady,' is an easily predictable image, formally introduced and logically developed. "It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated manoeuvres, at the word of command." Compare this with the following from 'The Sacred Fount:' "The last calls of birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again." These self-doomed divers, like Mrs. Wix's whizzing bullet, are entirely original and perfectly irrelevant to the surface facts of the story. Rather, it is by such eruptions, as Stephen Spender has said, that "there arise, as from the depths, the dream images of the unconscious." They also connect James's refined-appearing world with the realm of the physical and the elemental, of latent horror, of "the thing hideously behind."

    There was danger that the verbal abundance of the later style might become an end in itself, overwhelming the story and the characters. This James at his best averted, partly by making the characters themselves more articulate. They have always been eloquent about their concerns; they now talk, besides, about the language itself, evidencing its richness in nuance at the same time that they are furthering the action. The internal structure of dialogue, as well as its relation to the enveloping narrative, undergoes an intense stylization. The theater's influence is felt in monolithic scenes and resounding curtains. Patches of talk are set off from the rest like parks from their adjacent streets, except that the business of the story is mainly done in them. Of business, moreover, there is a definite sum to be accomplished in each area of dialogue, some item of revelation or decision to be added to the whole account. And although the talkers are as a rule vividly individual, they eagerly subordinate themselves to this larger enterprise like the participants in a relay race or a morris dance. However much at variance in other respects, they all "pull together," as James would say, in the interests of a common style. Extremely sociable, they pause in mid-sentence to allow a friend the pleasure of finishing it; or they offer him an irresistible come-on in the form of an equivocation or a floating pronoun.

       "Mrs. Beale furthermore only gave her more to think about in saying that their disappointment was the result of his having got into his head a kind of idea.

        'What kind of idea?'

        'Oh goodness knows!' She spoke with an approach to asperity. 'He's so awfully delicate.'

        'Delicate?' -- that was ambiguous.

        'About what he does, don't you know?' said Mrs. Beale. She fumbled. 'Well, about what we do.'

        Maisie wondered. 'You and me?'

        'Me and him, silly!' cried Mrs. Beale with, this time a real giggle."

    This habit of leading with a doubtful pronoun certainly grew on James's later characters, and like other of his devices for securing internal unity it became customary, part of a large body of conventional usage which, of course, is felt as a strength or an infirmity of his style depending on whether the emotion is itself forceful or weak in the given case. On the whole, for richness, for subtlety, for attention to concords of sense and sound, James later style was the most remarkable style in English since the 17th century. With all its artifices, there is something elemental about it. Unlike the virtuoso styles, admirable though they are, of a Stevenson or a Swinburne, that of James refers us back, not to the eloquence of the author, but to the resources of the language.

http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/2011/11/henrys-back.html

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