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A review by fionnualalirsdottir
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
Henry James is funny.
I see already the raised eyebrows inspired by that statement. 'Fun' might well be the last quality that anyone has ever associated with Henry James, but as I read this book, I began to have the impression that the author had a lot of fun writing it. I certainly had fun reading it.
The fun was in the characters, who they were and how they spoke. It was in the shifting points of view, which revealed so many things to the reader and hid just as many more. It was in the constant play between the known and the unknown, the said and the unsaid. It was in the cool acknowledgement that the coincidence at the centre of the plot was the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels. It was in the clever way in which the golden bowl, in a story about collecting beautiful things, becomes a symbol of the failure of the power of purchase. But the best fun for me was in the way the author seemed to insert himself, and the reader alongside him, into the heart of the story.
I could examine all those claims one by one, slowly and carefully, but the examination would very likely take as long as the book itself so I'll just focus on the last point: how I felt Henry James inserted himself and the reader into the novel.
From early on, two characters stood out for me, Mrs Assingham and her husband Bob, otherwise known as Fanny and the Colonel. Fanny and the Colonel are not main characters, the story might easily have been told without them, but I'm choosing to imagine that Henry James created them to inject exactly the element of fun he himself needed while writing, and which he wanted to offer the reader as a kind of bonus.
The book is divided into two parts, the first more or less written from the point of view of a handsome but impoverished Italian called Amerigo who marries an American heiress called Maggie whose father collects art objects of every kind. The second part is mostly from the point of view of Maggie.
In both parts, Fanny Assingham is given special treatment: a chapter every so often in which the narrative centers entirely on her and the Colonel. During these sections, Fanny analyses the thoughts and actions of all the other characters as if she were the author and had created them all and understood all their motives, even the most hidden. Her analysis takes the form of a series of hilarious dialogues with the Colonel in which she mostly speaks and the more humble Colonel mostly listens. In fact Henry James calls her the Sphinx at one point, and the Colonel is some old pilgrim in the desert, camping at the foot of that monument.
As her theories get more and more cryptic, the Colonel reacts like a typical reader, raising an eyebrow here, wincing visibly there, and sometimes showing such an exhausted patience with his wife's circling of the other characters' motives that indulgent despair was generally at the best his note. At other times, he keeps up with the complex logic of her theories remarkably well, this was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel did his best, and he occasionally asks the kind of irritable question we the readers may silently put to the author, "Are you saying that…?”
But the Colonel is mostly patient in spite of the labyrinthine intricacies of Fanny's thought, he’d adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns. So the Colonel reacts exactly like a reader of Henry James; after all, which reader of his longer books has not felt that indulgent despair from time to time.
In spite of all the serious analysis Fanny indulges in, there's still a lot of humour in her exchanges with the Colonel. They are playing a game together which they both enjoy. When she broods about the punishment the other characters may have to endure, he teasingly asks what his own punishment will be. 'Nothing - you're not worthy of any,' she replies, like a magnificent monarch. When she's not being regal, she's being tragic, it had still been their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic, and even if the Colonel pretends to be long-suffering, his cigar invariably gives him away. Many of their exchanges are punctuated by reference to the Colonel's pleasure in smoking his cigar or his pipe as he listens to his wife being tragic.
He paid this the tribute of a long pull on his pipe….
After a long contemplative smoke…
His cigar in short once more alone could express it.…
The Colonel smoked on it.…
'But she wasn't," said the Colonel very smokingly.…
He listened to his companion tonight, while he smoked his last pipe, he watched her through her demonstration, quite as if he had paid a shilling.…
The Colonel's pleasure from smoking is so constantly underlined that I began to see other meanings in it. At one point he is described, on taking his pipe from his mouth, as 'ejaculating' his response, after which, the Colonel sat back at his ease, an ankle resting on the other knee and his eyes attentive to the good appearance of an extremely slender foot which he kept jerking in its neat integument of fine-spun black silk and patent leather. It seemed to confess, this member, to consciousness of military discipline, everything about it being as polished and as perfect, as straight and tight and trim, as a soldier on parade.
Putting all that together, alongside the names Henry James chose for these two characters, Fanny and Assingham, I felt there had to be something salacious in his intentions with regard to the provocative pair. I may be hilariously wrong but I reserve the right to analyze and interpret things in my own way, just as Fanny Assingham does. You are free to raise an eyebrow, and even wince - like the Colonel.
……………………………………………………………
When I finished this book and turned to the Appendix, I found a passage in which Henry James speaks of the pleasure he got from writing the book. Addressing us, the readers, he says, It all comes back to that, to my and your ‘fun’ - if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that of the shade of a cadence, is not richly pertinent...
Just as Fanny relies on the Colonel to listen to her analysis and see her through, Henry James relies on us, and engages to come out at the right end if we will have sufficient patience.
I very much feel he did in this book, and that I did too.
I see already the raised eyebrows inspired by that statement. 'Fun' might well be the last quality that anyone has ever associated with Henry James, but as I read this book, I began to have the impression that the author had a lot of fun writing it. I certainly had fun reading it.
The fun was in the characters, who they were and how they spoke. It was in the shifting points of view, which revealed so many things to the reader and hid just as many more. It was in the constant play between the known and the unknown, the said and the unsaid. It was in the cool acknowledgement that the coincidence at the centre of the plot was the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels. It was in the clever way in which the golden bowl, in a story about collecting beautiful things, becomes a symbol of the failure of the power of purchase. But the best fun for me was in the way the author seemed to insert himself, and the reader alongside him, into the heart of the story.
I could examine all those claims one by one, slowly and carefully, but the examination would very likely take as long as the book itself so I'll just focus on the last point: how I felt Henry James inserted himself and the reader into the novel.
From early on, two characters stood out for me, Mrs Assingham and her husband Bob, otherwise known as Fanny and the Colonel. Fanny and the Colonel are not main characters, the story might easily have been told without them, but I'm choosing to imagine that Henry James created them to inject exactly the element of fun he himself needed while writing, and which he wanted to offer the reader as a kind of bonus.
The book is divided into two parts, the first more or less written from the point of view of a handsome but impoverished Italian called Amerigo who marries an American heiress called Maggie whose father collects art objects of every kind. The second part is mostly from the point of view of Maggie.
In both parts, Fanny Assingham is given special treatment: a chapter every so often in which the narrative centers entirely on her and the Colonel. During these sections, Fanny analyses the thoughts and actions of all the other characters as if she were the author and had created them all and understood all their motives, even the most hidden. Her analysis takes the form of a series of hilarious dialogues with the Colonel in which she mostly speaks and the more humble Colonel mostly listens. In fact Henry James calls her the Sphinx at one point, and the Colonel is some old pilgrim in the desert, camping at the foot of that monument.
As her theories get more and more cryptic, the Colonel reacts like a typical reader, raising an eyebrow here, wincing visibly there, and sometimes showing such an exhausted patience with his wife's circling of the other characters' motives that indulgent despair was generally at the best his note. At other times, he keeps up with the complex logic of her theories remarkably well, this was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel did his best, and he occasionally asks the kind of irritable question we the readers may silently put to the author, "Are you saying that…?”
But the Colonel is mostly patient in spite of the labyrinthine intricacies of Fanny's thought, he’d adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns. So the Colonel reacts exactly like a reader of Henry James; after all, which reader of his longer books has not felt that indulgent despair from time to time.
In spite of all the serious analysis Fanny indulges in, there's still a lot of humour in her exchanges with the Colonel. They are playing a game together which they both enjoy. When she broods about the punishment the other characters may have to endure, he teasingly asks what his own punishment will be. 'Nothing - you're not worthy of any,' she replies, like a magnificent monarch. When she's not being regal, she's being tragic, it had still been their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic, and even if the Colonel pretends to be long-suffering, his cigar invariably gives him away. Many of their exchanges are punctuated by reference to the Colonel's pleasure in smoking his cigar or his pipe as he listens to his wife being tragic.
He paid this the tribute of a long pull on his pipe….
After a long contemplative smoke…
His cigar in short once more alone could express it.…
The Colonel smoked on it.…
'But she wasn't," said the Colonel very smokingly.…
He listened to his companion tonight, while he smoked his last pipe, he watched her through her demonstration, quite as if he had paid a shilling.…
The Colonel's pleasure from smoking is so constantly underlined that I began to see other meanings in it. At one point he is described, on taking his pipe from his mouth, as 'ejaculating' his response, after which, the Colonel sat back at his ease, an ankle resting on the other knee and his eyes attentive to the good appearance of an extremely slender foot which he kept jerking in its neat integument of fine-spun black silk and patent leather. It seemed to confess, this member, to consciousness of military discipline, everything about it being as polished and as perfect, as straight and tight and trim, as a soldier on parade.
Putting all that together, alongside the names Henry James chose for these two characters, Fanny and Assingham, I felt there had to be something salacious in his intentions with regard to the provocative pair. I may be hilariously wrong but I reserve the right to analyze and interpret things in my own way, just as Fanny Assingham does. You are free to raise an eyebrow, and even wince - like the Colonel.
……………………………………………………………
When I finished this book and turned to the Appendix, I found a passage in which Henry James speaks of the pleasure he got from writing the book. Addressing us, the readers, he says, It all comes back to that, to my and your ‘fun’ - if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that of the shade of a cadence, is not richly pertinent...
Just as Fanny relies on the Colonel to listen to her analysis and see her through, Henry James relies on us, and engages to come out at the right end if we will have sufficient patience.
I very much feel he did in this book, and that I did too.