it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on The Golden Bowl by Henry James:
The novel is no longer a serious art form and has not been for a great many years. What is called a novel today is seldom more than a reader’s excuse for wasting time, a few hundred pages of mindless violence or insipid romance filled with characters who cannot speak in more than single sentences and, if they think at all, think only of themselves, what they want, what they have to have. We were warned this would happen. In 1936, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was forty, he wrote about why the novel - the serious novel - had begun to fall from favor, and why the situation would become even worse:Visit D.W. Buffa's website.I saw the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanized and communal art that…was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of subordination. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures.This was not the first time someone insisted that the novel was in serious danger. Fitzgerald’s complaint that literature was losing its influence, that the motion picture was on its way to replacing the novel in the estimation of even the reading public, had been made years before the first motion picture. In 1891, Henry James was certain that the novel faced no greater danger than the magazines and newspapers, the mass publications to which the reading public had become more or less addicted. These were the publications in which the practice of literary criticism had reached a new low. It flowed “through the periodical press like a river that has burst its dikes.” It was a catastrophe; nothing less than “the failure of distinction, the failure of style, the failure of knowledge, the failure of thought.” Literature, which lives “upon example, upon perfection wrought,” he thought might not survive it. Books in great numbers were being sold, stories of all kinds, but, as he put it eight years later in 1899, “The sort of taste that used to be called ‘good’ has nothing to do with the matter: we are so demonstrably in presence of millions for whom taste is but an obscure, confused, immediate instinct. In the flare of railway bookstalls, in the shop-fronts of most book-sellers, especially the provincial, in the advertisements of the weekly newspapers, and in fifty places besides, this testimony to the general preference triumphs….”
Faced with the obvious preference of the reading public for novels that told stories that were quick to read and easy to understand, novels full of of the kind of action the appeals to what he considered the vulgarity of the crowd, Henry James proceeded to attempt instead, as Gore Vidal described it, “to create something that no writer in English had ever thought possible to do with a form as inherently loose and malleable as the novel: He would aim at perfection. While James’s critics were complaining that he was no longer American and could never be English, James was writing The Portrait of a Lady, as nearly perfect a work as a novel can be.” This was no temporary, single book achievement. “From 1881, James was the master of the novel in English in a way no one had ever been before; or has ever been since.”
Henry James wrote The Portrait of a Lady, and then, in 1904, wrote The Golden Bowl, the last novel he would complete, and with that novel came even closer to perfection than he had before. Like The Europeans, a novel James wrote at the beginning of his long career, The Golden Bowl is about the mutual attraction of American money and European titles of nobility. Without the means to support themselves and their ancient properties and positions any longer, the Europeans looked to American women - wealthy American women - to change their fortunes. Americans with more money than they could count, looked to marriage with European nobility to convince themselves, if no one else, that they were worth more than their money. This, in the latter part of the 19th century, had become a fairly common practice. One of the first such exchanges, and the one that was without doubt the most fortunate, not just for themselves, but their respective countries, was the marriage between the extremely wealthy Jenny Jerome of New York and a rising British politician by the name of Randolph Churchill, the future parents of Winston Churchill.
There are four principal characters in The Golden Bowl, three of them American, two of them, Adam Verver, an American millionaire, and his daughter Maggie. Adam’s wife, Maggie’s mother, had died some years earlier, and Maggie had done everything she could to fill the void in her father’s life. One of the things they do together is travel through Europe buying everything of value they can find. Anyone who has something to sell, whether a priceless painting by a famous French artist, or a centuries old statue by a Florentine sculptor, is always grateful when Adam Verver comes to look. When Henry James tells us that Adam Verver is an American millionaire who spends his time buying priceless works of art, he assumes we will understand that the wealth of Adam Verver was nothing less than the kind of wealth possessed at the turn of the century by, for example, the Vanderbilts, one of whom - William K. Vanderbilt - had a home on Long Island with 110 rooms, 45 bathrooms, and a garage for 100 cars; or that of George Vanderbilt whose home on 203 square miles in Asheville, North Carolina had forty master bedrooms and a library of no less than 250,000 volumes, several of which he might actually have read. Adam Verver, in other words, was one of the richest men in the world.
Adam Verver and his daughter take a house in London, and almost immediately become the objects of great attention. But something happened before they came to Europe, something that will change their lives forever, something that is the central element of the story. How do we know this, how do we, the readers, know anything that has happened? Someone has to tell us; someone has to tell the story. There are, generally speaking, two ways in which a story gets told, two different voices we have ourselves listened to when we read a novel. One way - perhaps the most common - is the voice of the impersonal, and omniscient, narrator who tells us everything - what the characters say, what they think, what they do. It is a voice without identity, and, because of that, without perspective. The other way to tell the story is to have it told by someone with an identity of their own, someone who brings their own perspective to what they describe. Joseph Conrad, for example, would often have a sea captain - Marlowe - tell the story of what happened, what really happened, when confronted with a rumor someone had heard.
Henry James does not choose between these two methods; he uses them both. He tells the story, describes what happens, the omniscient novelist; but he tells the story by telling how the characters themselves see and understand from their own unique, that is to say their own restricted, point of view, what the other characters are like, and what they think they are doing. In the preface to The Golden Bowl, written some years after the novel was first published, he explains:
The “whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters. The Prince, in the first half of the book, virtually sees and knows and makes out, virtually represents to himself everything that concerns us - very nearly (though he doesn’t speak in the first person) after the fashion of other reporters and critics of other situations.” The Princess does the same thing in the second half. The “thing abides rigidly by its law of showing Maggie Verver at first through her suitor’s and her husband’s exhibitory vision of her, and of then showing the Prince, with at least an equal intensity, through his wife’s…”
The Prince James refers to is an Italian nobleman, a prince named strangely, if appropriately enough, Amerigo. He had fallen in love with a young American woman, Charlotte Stant, and she had fallen in love with him; but as Fanny Assingham, who likes to arrange things for other people, tells her husband, they had “the courage to look the facts in the face.” The Prince’s family, ancient but impoverished, needs him to marry well, which meant, as we have seen, marry a rich American. Charlotte is an American, and, though sufficiently well-off to visit Europe, would not bring the fortune needed to restore the Prince and his family to their former glory and position. Charlotte and the Prince were in love, but, Mrs. Assingham insists, they did not become lovers - “there was not enough time.” Her husband, no fool, asks the obvious question, the question that will go unanswered through much of the story, “Does it take so much time?”
A year later, Mrs. Assingham, who has an instinct for what other people need, an instinct she does nothing to control, introduces the Prince to Maggie Verver. Though still in love with Charlotte, the Prince discovers in Maggie everything he requires, and Maggie discovers in him everything she loves. They become engaged. Maggie knows nothing of his former relationship with Charlotte and is thrilled when Charlotte, who, as it turns out, is her closest friend, sends word that she is coming back from America to attend the wedding. Mrs. Assingham, who of course does know about Charlotte’s former relationship with the Prince, thinks she is doing this to be “magnificent.” Charlotte’s real reason, as she tells the Prince, is to have “one hour alone with you.” This is achieved when the two of them go in search of a wedding gift, something Charlotte can give Maggie. They find themselves in a little shop in Bloomsbury where the shopkeeper shows Charlotte a golden bowl. Charlotte suspects that at the price he is asking there must be something wrong with it, a flaw that makes it imperfect. The shopkeeper suggests that, “if it is something you can’t find out isn’t that as good as if it was nothing?”The flaw in the golden bowl is a flaw that, as the shopkeeper explains, might cause it to split into parts but will never cause it to shatter like glass.
The golden bowl tells the story of Maggie’s marriage. The marriage, which seems a success, meant that Adam Verver was now alone. Without a daughter beside him, he needed a wife. Not only was he one of the world’s richest men, he was only forty-seven. The possibilities were endless. The always eager Fanny Assingham had the perfect candidate. Who better than a woman Adam Verver had known for years, his daughter’s great good friend Charlotte Stant? Adam Verver is quite taken with the idea, and, of equal importance, his daughter very much approves. Charlotte Stant becomes Charlotte Verver, the mother-in-law of Maggie, and the very good friend of her husband’s son-in-law, the Prince. It is all very convenient, especially, as it seems, for Maggie. Having become “so intensely married,” she has felt the need to make up for all the time she has spent with her husband by now spending more time with her father. She does this by “allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path - by installments, as it were - in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side.” The Prince seems not to mind.
No one has written as well as Henry James about the ways in which men and women began to sense a change in their relationship. One of the happiest aspects of Maggie’s marriage was “the fact of its have practically given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend.” But while the Prince and Adam Verver have grown close, Maggie has begun to feel “very much alone.” Mrs. Assingham, who, unlike Maggie and her father, knows that the Prince and Charlotte had not only known each other, but been in love, begins to suspect that Maggie now “knows there is something between them.” This is not the same thing, however, as knowing what it is. Maggie, she explains, can’t bring herself, she won’t allow herself, to think there is something intimate between them. She “hasn’t ‘arrived’ at it, as you say, at all; that’s exactly what she hasn’t done, what she so steadily and intensely refuses to do.” But it is what she fears.
Fear brings clarity, not about what has happened between Charlotte and her husband, but what she is in position to do about it. She understands the relation, the very precise relation, she occupies as her father’s daughter, and what this means in relation to her father’s wife. James describes it in terms of royal power: “It hung there above them like a canopy of state, a reminder that though the lady-in-waiting was an established favorite, secure in her position, a little queen, however good-natured, was always a little queen and might with small warning remember it.” And remember it she does.
When Maggie can no longer deny her own knowledge that her marriage is in danger, that the golden bowl has been broken, that the flaw can no longer be concealed, that it has split into three parts, she acts now to discover how, with her as the stem of the bowl, the parts can be put back together again. She decides that her father has to go back to America to take up again the business he has built. His wife will of course go with him. It is neat and clean and utterly ruthless.
Maggie has won, but it is not the kind of victory we might normally expect. Henry James understands, as few other writers have, the sometimes subtle nature of human beings, the absence of sharp lines of differentiation, the way emotions can crowd in on each other, how the meaning of things can change. The Prince was in love with Charlotte, and may always be in love with Charlotte; but that does not mean that he cannot, or will not, fall in love with Maggie. When they watch Adam and Charlotte drive away, Maggie starts to tell him about the need to see things as they are, but he stops her and tells her that he only sees her. And that, as Henry James would put, is how it all ends, “as it were.”
The novel is no longer a serious art form, but it was once, years ago, and Henry James is still there, waiting to be read by anyone who wants to know what perfect writing was, and still might be.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams; Talleyrand.
--Marshal Zeringue
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