Reading Henry James at 40

[Sorry this is so long; I tried to break it in two, but it didn't work.]

I remember a friend of my mother’s once saying that you couldn’t really understand Middlemarch* until you were middle-aged.

I read Middlemarch for the first time when I was 25, in India. I was staying in Assam with an Indian friend and her parents. Her father was the deputy chief of police for Assam, so her parents lived in a civil service bungalow with houseboys and cooks. We had mosquito netting looped over our beds, and when we wanted to take a bath, a houseboy would heat up a big basin of water and bring it to us in the bathroom. When we wanted to go sightseeing or shopping, a driver took us in a big black car. My friend hadn’t been home in a while and I was the treasured guest from America, so we were taken around to visit all her parents’ friends who fed us and cooed about how fair I was and asked if I wanted to marry their sons.

I lay in bed under my mosquito netting and read Middlemarch and felt like the whole world had gone Victorian, for perhaps the one remaining bastion of Victorian Britain is upper-class India and especially the Indian civil service--at least it was back then. I went to India when Coke and multinationals were still banned, but India has since changed dramatically, and I would guess the Victorian vestiges are vanishing.

I understood why my mother’s friend had said that Middlemarch was for the middle-aged: the book is essentially about giving up your dreams and facing reality, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Still, I was mesmerized by its depiction of intense desire and impacted community, even at 25, with my dreams fairly intact.

I’ve always felt like a philistine for finding Henry James unreadable. Not the short ones. Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, even The Spoils of Poynton were ok. But they were short and (relatively) action-packed. The Portrait of a Lady, on the other hand, was long and slow. Really long. And really slow. The first time I tried to read it, soon after my Middlemarch success, I ground to a halt on page 230 (I know this for a fact because that’s where the book mark was when I picked up the book again a few weeks ago).

I felt bad about my inability to read Henry James, at least the important Henry James, because so many people I know love him. I did wonder if some of them were faking it, in that David Lodge kind of way (in his novel Changing Places, a bunch of English professors play a game called Humiliation in which they confess the famous books they haven’t read, and then one guy admits he hasn’t read Hamlet and doesn’t get tenure). But my in-laws are two of the greatest James fans around, and they would never fake it. So I decided that I just wasn’t old enough to read Henry James, and that was my line for about 15 years.

Last summer I read Alan Hollinghurst’s brilliant Booker-prize winning novel, The Line of Beauty, which is about 80s Thatcherite London and social climbing and AIDS and desire and aesthetics…and Henry James. And while I haven’t read any of the recent novels about Henry James, I’ve noticed them and wondered if I should, especially given how much I loved The Line of Beauty. But no, I decided, first I should try again with James himself. After all, I’m 40 now, and though I try not to think of myself as middle-aged (K is 50, for goodness sake, and if she’s not middle-aged, I can’t possibly be), I’m definitely older, maybe even old enough for James.

So I did it: I read The Portrait of a Lady. All the way to page 230 and beyond, through the long slow passages where I wondered why the hell I was putting myself through this agony, to the end where I raced along, blown away by the genius of this insane book. Not much happens in The Portrait of a Lady. Isabel Archer goes to Europe, inherits some money, turns down some proposals, accepts a proposal, and suffers the consequences. There’s a dashing English lord and a dogged American industrialist and a lovely cousin wasting away from consumption (I assume--it’s never named as such, but that’s what they tended to waste away from back then), all of whom love Isabel. There’s a nasty woman and a funny woman and an automaton of a girl/woman, all of whom are variously attached to Isabel, or at least pretend to be. There is Italy, lots of Italy, and there are houses and the beautiful objects that fill them. There are endless paragraphs of description and circumlocution and reconsideration, paragraphs that just made me want to scream in frustration. But then there is psychological complexity and ambiguity and you can’t figure out if you want to take Isabel home with you or wring her neck, and that pretty much worked for me.

I wouldn’t say I’m a Henry James convert. But I’m definitely ready to try another one so I can figure out whether I really am old enough. The Golden Bowl, anyone?

*I went Amazon on my links here, despite my basic anti-Amazonism, because they do have so much more content on their pages than Powells.