This long Henry James story, as much bantering comedy as ghost tale, almost counts as classic weird in a way, with a pair of cerebral concepts that are a bit didactic and somehow a bit rational too, which undercuts. James never was comfortable with the irrational, which is one reason his ghost stories tend not to be that good. It’s also from the period in his career when James was becoming ever more prolix and abstruse by the year (partly related to dictating his drafts and fussing with the typescripts). On the one hand, here, we have a genial upper-class nobleman, who is a model of poise and charming manners, the popular man who attracts everyone. Then there is the novelist, who maintains two identities: the one facing his friends and the public, and the one facing the blank page. In this story the nobleman disappears when no one is with him, in his solitude, like the unheard tree falling in the woods. And there are two novelists: one who chats it up with everyone, and the other laboring at his manuscript in the dark. I like that detail about working in the dark. Still, overall, the story feels more awkward and heavy-handed than anything. The high concept is not delivered with a lot of clarity and it takes a while to get there. James mocks those at ease in the world as vacuous, hollow, empty, and he lionizes the brooding novelist. No self-interest there (let alone self-pity). So, while taken literally, both apparitions may qualify as weird and also uncanny and maybe other adjectives (strange, mysterious, etc.), they are not really meant to be taken literally. It’s poetic and metaphorical about society and art and stuff like that. If James really wanted to make it weird, really wanted to write a ghost story, he would have had to take out a certain amount of verbiage. It’s about 40 pages as it stands—can you get it down to 15, H.J.? I read somewhere that James was envious of Sheridan Le Fanu and tried to write his ghost stories on approximately that model. Le Fanu could go on and on himself, but the main distinction is that James can’t commit in the clinch to something he obviously feels is ridiculous and beneath him. I like some of his ideas, like the ones here. I just wish James had liked them more.
“interlocutor” count = 1 / 40 pages (“interlocutress”)
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Ha, Jeff, I began reading your review of "The Private Life" almost holding my breath, hoping that you hadn't abandoned your practice of citing how often Henry James had used the dread "interlocutor" in each of his writings, and then I scrolled down far enough, and there it was again! The term always sounded terminally Victorian-clunky to me, I couldn't believe how many noted writers had ignored that piece of dross while admiring James's prose style. And the inevitable presence of an "interlocutor" character in the blackface minstrel shows of our nation's past has hopefully banished the term from general usage.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, right before I saw your C.E., I'd just finished reading "High Achievers" in the April 24/May 1, 2023 New Yorker, a review of a book surveying the beginnings of drug use as a form of mind expansion, by writers and artists in the 19th Century, graced with an apparent photo of Henry's year-elder brother (dressed as though he's planning to audition for the Allman Brothers), with the caption, "Long before the sixties, the philosopher William James used drugs to map the mind." Yes! Irrationality welcome here!
Onward,
Richard Riegel