A Plea for Eros: Essays

The Bostonians: Personal andImpersonal Words

“IT IS NOT THAT I HAVE ANYTHING STRANGE OR NEW TO RE-late,” the twenty-eight-year-old Henry James wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in 1872. “In fact when one sits down to sum up Cambridge life plume en main, the strange thing seems its aridity.” In 1913, two weeks before his seventieth birthday, James would use the same word, this time as an adjective, to describe the city in which his family had settled in Massachusetts. By then he had been living in England for many years, and in a letter to his sister-in-law, Alice, he declared a visit to America impossible. He could not, he explained, spend the summer in “utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge.” I am interested in this repetition because, despite the image of desiccation, twelve years after the first letter and twenty-nine years before the second, Henry James devoted an entire novel to that arid part of the world and called it The Bostonians.

Although Henry James, Jr., was born in New York City and spent a good part of his childhood en route from one European city to another, as he, his siblings, and their mother followed the restless Continental wanderings of Henry James, Sr., Boston and Cambridge would become deeply familiar places for the novelist. During the academic year 1862-63, he studied law at Harvard before giving it up for a life of writing. His family moved to Boston in 1864 and shortly thereafter settled permanently in Cambridge at 20 Quincy Street. But long before the family’s relocation, the ideas of New England had been running in Henry Senior’s blood. The James children grew up in an atmosphere of idealism, reform, and new thought. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other Transcendentalists, including Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott, were all friends of the family. Henry Senior was also an ardent advocate of immediate emancipation for the slaves, and he sent his two younger sons, Garth Wilkinson and Robertson, to the Concord Academy, where Thoreau had taught and where three of Emerson’s children were enrolled, as was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian. Under the direction of the abolitionist Franklin Sanborn, a fund-raiser and active conspirator in John Brown’s stand at Harpers Ferry, the school was more than an experiment in coeducation; it was a locus of feverish ideology. Both Wilkie and Bob left school to fight for the Union cause. Wilkie enlisted at seventeen and not long after joined the first regiment of black troops as adjutant to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. On May 28, 1863, accompanied by rousing fanfare, the 54th marched out of Boston. By the end of July that same year, nearly half its men and most of its officers had been killed during the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Bay. Wilkie James was badly injured but survived. After the war, he and Robertson, subsidized by their father, became the owners of a plantation in Florida that employed black laborers. The venture failed, but their effort remains a testament not only to the idealism of the brothers but to the hopes of the world that played a crucial role in shaping them — zealous, high-minded New England.

There were other ideas wafting about the James household — imported ones. A disciple of both Emanuel Swe-denborg, the Swedish natural scientist turned mystic, and Francois-Marie Charles Fourier, the French social philosopher, Henry Senior embraced a miasmic coupling of spiritual enlightenment (Swedenborg believed he had found a key to an angelic reading of the Scriptures) and a Utopian vision of a new society in which human beings freed from repression and inhibition could release their true passionate selves and lead orderly, harmonious lives in communities known as phalanxes.

As in every age, rigorous intellectual ideas mingled with more dubious notions. In both Europe and the United States, a rage for Mesmerism and the occult shook fashionable society and intellectual circles. Seances abounded. The novelist’s brother William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, maintained a belief in spiritualism throughout his life and hoped to continue his researches beyond the grave. He asked his wife to try to contact him after he was dead, and she did try, but in vain. On another occasion, however, without his widow present, William was reported to have spoken from the other side. When Henry received news of the phantom voice, he called it “the most abject and impudent, the hollowest, vulgarest, and basest rubbish.” Then, as now, vegetarianism was in vogue among the forward thinking, but the enlightened fell for other health fads as well. A number of the Transcendentalists became enamored of Fletcherism, an eating practice that encouraged chewing food into a liquid mush before swallowing. Henry Junior took up the cause for a while and masticated with such vigor that William, a nonbe-liever, blamed Fletcherism for Henry’s myriad bowel troubles.

If contemporary readers find these beliefs and ideas remote, I ask them to pause and reconsider. We live in an age of religious sects and mad militias, of gurus scattered about the country from California to New York, an age of channeling, colonics, crystals, and raw food crazes. In the United States, Utopian quests for purity, perfection, and self-improvement, no matter how wacky, have always found fertile ground in which to flourish. The question remains, however: Why did Henry James describe the lively intellectual climate (with its admittedly nutty fringes) of Boston and its environs as “arid” and “vacuous”? James felt that American culture was simply too young and too thin to sustain him as an artist. He was continually pulled by the lure of Europe, by its old and visible history — its architecture, painting, ruins, and, of course, its literature.

For James, the single most important American writer was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He read and loved Hawthorne’s books as a youth, and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two writers would never be dissolved. Hawthorne, a sublime storyteller who criticized both American Puritanism and utopianism in his fiction, became the American literary precedent for James. When he woke up on May 19, 1864, to the news that the great American novelist was dead, the young Henry James sat on his bed and wept. Like most literary sons, however, he was critical of the father, and when writing about Hawthorne lie articulates his ambivalence about American fiction:

But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has widely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of transatlantic growth are the sum of what the world usually recognizes, and in this modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance.

However shallow James may have found American literary soil, he acknowledged that Hawthorne sprouted from it, and The Bostonians owes a debt to the older writer’s work, The Blithedale Romance in particular, which was inspired by Hawthorne’s brief discontented stay at Brook Farm: Margaret Fuller’s Transcendentalist-Fourierist experiment in communal living. In his essay “Brook Farm and Concord,” James quotes the words of the skeptic, Coverdale, from Hawthorne’s Utopian romance: “No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from the old standpoint.” It is a sentence that speaks directly to The Bostonians, not to any particular character but to the effect of the narrative as a whole, which unearths its truths through the continual push and pull of people and ideas that find themselves in rigid opposition.

In the novel, two ideologies and two people are pitted against one another. In its simplest terms, the book presents us with a conflict between a reformer and a reactionary, between a triumphant North and a defeated South, between a woman and a man. The Bostonians is a novel of ideas, but the ideas articulated by James’s two battling characters, who are also distant cousins, Olive Chancellor, a Boston spinster and champion of women’s rights, and Basil Ransom, a bitter arch-conservative from Mississippi, are not the ideas the book probes. Indeed, both characters are guilty of mouthing sentimental or cliched tripe, and I don’t think their creator was terribly interested in their beliefs per se. He was drawn by something infinitely more complex than a conflict between two hardened ideological positions. Like all of James’s novels, The Bostonians is an investigation of what happens between and among people, and how that arena of interaction can take on a life of its own and determine the fates of those involved.

Miss Chancellor and Mr. Ransom are ferocious rivals in what becomes a love triangle. Both want possession of Verena Tarrant, the pretty, weak, and very charming product of a Cambridge quack healer and the daughter of an abolitionist. The innocent Verena, who has a “gift” for inspirational speaking, is nothing if not a child of the new ideas. “She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and had been passed from hand to hand by trance speakers; she was familiar with every kind of ‘cure’ and had grown up among lady editors advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the marriage-tie.” Through this tug-of-war over a person, Verena, who is also the creature of a particular New England subculture, James explores the psychological implications of belief — how a climate of ideas can invade, affect, mingle with, and be used, both consciously and unconsciously, by a person in the throes of passion.

The book’s intellectual vigor, then, is not located in what the characters say they believe, in their dogmatic positions, but rather in a dialectical tension between the “personal” and the “impersonal,” the “private” and the “public,” the “particular” and the “general.” These words in their various forms occur so often in the novel that they become a conspicuous and pointed refrain. What they mean, however, is another, far more complicated problem. Because The Bostonians skips from one person’s point of view to another’s, the narrator gives us access to the thoughts of all his major characters and to each one’s idiosyncratic uses of these words, a fact that further complicates their meaning. When Basil first meets his cousin Olive, he notes the bourgeois opulence of her house and feels that he has never found himself “in the presence of so much organized privacy.” This is exactly the realm in which he hopes to place Verena. He emphatically believes that she is “meant for privacy, for him, for love.” On the other hand, the narrator tells us that Mrs. Farrinder, formidable spokeswoman for the Emancipation of Women, has “something public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet…” The foggy, attenuated Miss Birdseye, relic of an earlier abolitionist age, is also a being of generalities, a person who, though rumored to have had a Hungarian lover in her youth, could never, the narrator tells us, “have entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those days, only with causes.” Dr. Prance, on the other hand, devoted physician and living proof of female competence in a profession usually reserved for men. has no use for causes: “She looked about her with a kind of near-sighted deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should not be expected to generalize in any way….” The society matron Mrs. Burrage, only marginally involved in causes, is also a woman whose “favours” are “general not particular.” Selah Tarrant stresses that his daughters success as a speaker is “thoroughly impersonal,” and Verena herself insists that when she addresses an audience “it is not me ….” In sharp contrast, Ransom, as he watches Verenas performance, thinks to himself that what he is witnessing is “an intensely personal exhibition.” And while Olive Chancellor hopes and believes that she will never be like her frivolous sister, Mrs. Luna, who is “so personal, so narrow,” Basil Ransom finds Olive to be “intensely, fearfully, a person.” Verena, too, discovers “how peculiarly her friend” Olive is “constituted, how nervous and serious, how personal, how exclusive ….” The words slip according to each character’s perceptions, blind spots, and feelings, and only through their interplay can we begin to make sense of James’s meaning.

In a letter to his friend Grace Norton, who was going through a difficult time in her life, James gave this advice: “Only don’t I beseech you generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses — remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can.” On the other hand, when Hugh Walpole, novelist and friend of James, quoted “The Master” in his diary, the sentiment expressed appears to be quite different: “I’ve had one great passion in my life — the intellectual passion … Make it your rule to encourage the impersonal interest as against the personal — but remember also that they are interdependent.” The two passages dramatize what I would call the focused ambiguity of James’s language. He begged Grace not to “generalize” or “melt” but rather to encourage in herself the particular, the personal, the fixed, and he advised Hugh to encourage the opposite, “the impersonal interest,” with the important caveat that he remember the impersonal and the personal are always connected.

The apparent contradiction reveals Jamesian semantics. In each case, he is speaking to a particular friend, and his imparted wisdom reflects his understanding of each person’s psychological needs. James must have felt that Grace’s abstract effusions needed taming. On the other hand, he was giving Hugh paternal literary advice. In the world of James, there are no absolutes, no final truths, no static realities. The solidity he urges on Grace Norton is only a relative one. Language, after all, is impersonal and personal, particular and general, both inside us and outside us, and James writes with a profound awareness of this fact. Words are where the public and private intersect. In The Bostonians, Henry James turns the public and private inside out, and the engines behind that reversal are external and internal — a particular cultural atmosphere and sexual passion.

In terms of setting, the novel moves away from the “organized privacy” of Olive’s rooms at the beginning of the novel to a public building at its very end: Boston’s Music Hall, where Verena is scheduled to speak and where the story reaches its piercing crescendo. In between are scenes that take place in private, semi-private, and semi-public places. The second environment is Miss Peabody’s dim, drab, and “featureless” apartment, where Mrs. Farrinder is supposed to address a gathering of the sympathetic. The reader’s introduction to Miss Birdseye (a character all of New England took as a swipe at Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne’s sister and sister-in-law of the novelist) has a comic pathos that well illustrates the novel’s worried strain between the general and the particular: “The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details.” Even poor Miss Birdseye’s face has become impersonal and unfocused, as empty and unfurnished as the rooms she occupies, an interior that causes the bourgeois Olive a pang and makes “her wonder whether an absence of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm for humanity.” As the novel’s most extreme altruist, Miss Peabody suffers from a loss of self.

The far more complex Olive Chancellor wishes with her whole being to emulate the selflessness of the aging abolitionist, lo escape the pains, rigors, and tormented confinement of her own body. For Olive, however, the Emancipation of Women is far more than another good cause to support; it is a deeply personal echo of her own psychological and sexual imprisonment. Even before she lays eyes on Verena, the reader knows that Miss Chancellor has dreamed that she might “know intimately some very poor girl.” The shopgirls she approaches, however, are wary and confused by her attentions, and inevitably mixed up with some young “Charlie,” an impediment Olive comes to “dislike … extremely.” Olive Chancellor is clearly in love, and her love for Verena conveys the hunger of sexual longing, but it would be a serious misreading of the novel to suppose either that Olive and Verena are “doing it” behind the scenes or that Olive has fully admitted to herself that the desperation she feels about Verena is connected to her desire for physical love.

Despite the fact that nineteenth-century mores, particularly in the United States, were far more repressive of homosexuality than those of our own time, there was nevertheless a greater tolerance and far less suspicion of intimate friendships between women that included physical signs of affection. The word crush was often used to describe the feelings of girls in school who fell for other girls, for example, and the term was used without the “taint” of homosexuality. Although relatively more open to same-sex unions, contemporary American culture nevertheless bristles with a need to categorize human eroticism, a force that by its very nature resists definition and plays a role in most relations between people of either and both sexes, whether it is acted upon or not. In other words, when The Bostonians was published, James’s lesbian portraits were subject to greater ambiguity than they are now, and in certain passages James plays on the vagaries of sexual identity, the shifting, indefinable motion between the masculine and the feminine: “It was true that if she had been a boy she would have borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear none whatever.” In hot pursuit of Verena Tarrant, Basil Ransom fantasizes an end to her involvement with the cause: “… but in the presence of a man she should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor’s sex (what sex was it, great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to the land of vapours, of dead phrases.”

But Ransom has misunderstood the power of “vapours” and “dead phrases,” which play a transforming role in the novel, both in public and in private. Like a contagious fog over a city, these enunciations, no matter how hackneyed, are invested with the power to seduce and cast a spell over an audience — be it hundreds of people or just one. The dead phrases of both sides — the reactionary utterances of Mr. Ransom and the radical declarations of Boston’s feminists — are animated by the human voice, to which the story assigns an almost magical power. For the bulk of the narrative, the most compelling voice belongs to Verena. She is the enchantress whose speeches hold her listeners “under the charm,” as she delivers addresses that are more akin to musical performance than lecture. Like a sorceress in a fairy tale, Verena is “spinning vocal sounds to a silver thread.” She also entrances Ransom. When he seeks her out in Cambridge, he understands that he is falling in love with her, and his vision of her is marked by the heightened brilliance that illuminates a beloved. He compares her to a nymph, and she makes him think of “unworldly places.” Olive similarly imagines that her new friend’s wonderful qualities have “dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents.” Verena Tarrant shines, but the source of that luminosity, her bewitching hold over audiences, over Basil Ransom and over Olive Chancellor, is connected less to the presence of particular qualities in her personality than to their absence. The girl lacks self-consciousness and, like Miss Peabody, she has no grounded, no defined self. When she repeats to Ransom a phrase she has spoken twice before during the course of the novel, “Oh, it isn’t me, you know. It’s something outside!” she is both repeating what her prompters have told her and telling a truth about herself. James is getting at something I have always felt — that the public person inevitably slides into the third person, away from I and into he or she. The Bostonians explores an early incarnation of what will eventually become American celebrity culture. James saw it coming, and the novel anticipates the moment when human beings would be emptied of all inner human qualities and turned into images, commodities to be bought and sold on the open market for profit, a time when celebrities would fall into the curious but fitting habit of referring to themselves in the third person.

Before movies, radio, and television, publicity meant newspapers. In terms of the narrative, it is apt that Verena has sprung from a paternal seed that has no individual, no private character. Selah Tarrant isn’t only a humbug; he is a humbug obsessed with the idea of public recognition and the money to be made from it. Like a shuddering moth near a lamp, Terrant is irresistibly drawn to the glare of publicity. He haunts newspaper offices and printing rooms, hoping against hope that he will somehow be noticed. The most fervent wish of Setah Tarrant’s tawdry, corrupt little heart is to be interviewed by some newspaperman. There is an active journalist in The Bostonians, someone whose very name is an apology — Mathias Pardon. He hovers at the edges of the story throughout, showing up first at Miss Peabody’s and finally at the Music Hall, with appearances in between. An embodiment of the unconscious smarminess of the press, Pardon has scruples only in his patronymic. He is wholly unaware that his questions might be indelicate or intrusive, and he plows merrily ahead with his vapid articles. Although Pardon is a comic character, his vulgarity has sinister undertones; the man is morally vacant. “His faith, again, was the faith of Selah Tarrant — that being in the newspapers is a condition of bliss, and that it would be fastidious to question the terms of that privilege.” It is hard to read this sentence without feeling its prescience. It is a faith that would eventually lead to the grotesque national spectacle of contemporary American life in which countless people humiliate and debase themselves in public for the dubious glory of being “on TV.”

The paradox of publicity is that it enacts a reversal between the private and public. The press, especially the part of the press that reports on culture, continually converts what is meant for public consumption — art-into mere gossip about peoples private lives: “For this ingenuous son of the age [Pardon] all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for the newsboys, and everything and every one were every one’s business.” Pardon lurks on the sidelines of Verena’s rise to stardom, hungry to scoop the story. The afternoon before the event at the Music Hall, the journalist searches high and low for Olive and Verena without success and finally insinuates himself into the family house, where he hammers Olive’s sister with demands for “any little personal items” she might provide about either the speaker or her coach. The public, Pardon says, is almost as interested in Miss Chancellor as in Miss Tarrant. Under the banner of the public and publicity, the grand cause to emancipate women, a cause Olive champions as a force for “human progress,” is transformed into vulgar prattle about domestic arrangements.

Although both Basil and Olive regard Verena as an otherworldly presence, she is decidedly not. Verena has lived her entire young life on the public stage, a life that has robbed her of all inner fixity, all knowledge of her own desires, and it is precisely this floating, externalized quality that makes her exceedingly vulnerable. The girl who can sway the great public will be brutally manipulated in her private life. It is to James’s great credit that a malleable character like Verena, a person who is rather like an empty vessel filled over time with the “dead phrases” of others — first her father’s, then Olive’s, and finally Basil’s — is nevertheless a fully believable human being. Her friendship with and loyalty to Olive Chancellor, her attraction to Basil Ransom, and her sweet, confused desire to please them both has all the poignancy of a child trapped in a custody battle. Verenas dawning awareness that she has an inner life and personal desires turns on a secret she keeps from Olive. She does not tell her friend that she has seen Basil Ransom in Cambridge. This, the narrator writes, is “the only secret she had in the world — the only thing that was all her own.” Understandably, she is reluctant to give it up.

There is nothing more private than a secret, and a secret is of course silent. Silence belongs to solitude, the voice to the outside world. Unlike the voluble Verena, Olive is afflicted by silence. Nervous in the extreme, she sometimes finds herself dumbstruck and must struggle through her fits of muteness before she can find her voice. Despite a passionate desire to speak in public, she suffers from a nature so private it has become a debility. There is an aspect of the ventriloquist in James’s spinster. She speaks through Verena, finds her voice in another body. It is Olive, Verena tells Ransom, who writes the speeches: “She tells me what to say — the real things, the strong things. It’s Miss Chancellor as much as me!” This is intimate territory, the occupation of one person by another, and there is violence in it — the grasping, feverish desire not only to commingle with the beloved but to take total possession of her. Words assume the place of sexual penetration in The Bostonians. Words enter Verena, and words cause her destruction. The most powerful words, however, belong not to Olive Chancellor but to Basil Ransom.

Like Olive, Basil longs to find a public forum where his ideas might be heard. His effort is stymied, not by pathological shyness but by the simple fact that his ideas are too unpopular, at least in the North, to find much of an audience. Although he has written several essays and submitted them to publishers, they have been turned down. The narrator informs us that in one of these rejection letters an editor suggested to Ransom that three hundred years earlier he might easily have found a journal willing to print his thoughts. He has simply come too late. As an unpublished author, Ransom is rendered voiceless in the public sphere where he longs to speak. His frustration mirrors Olive’s, and his motives for chasing Verena are equally intricate, despite the fact that his end desire is the opposite of Olive’s. He wants to render Verena mute in public. To borrow the words of Mrs. Burrage, he intends to “shut her up altogether.” We know Ransom has elaborate arguments for this position and that, like his feminist opponent, he is sincere. Neither Mr. Ransom nor Miss Chancellor is guilty of cant, but the Mississippian is also the indigent but proud survivor of a ruined South, where his mother and sisters still live in the penurious circumstances of defeat, Olive, too, lost her only two brothers in the war (an echo of James’s soldier siblings), but despite their deaths, as a Northerner, she didn’t lose a way of life. Ransom’s family lost everything but its gentility, and early in the novel, as he sits in Olive Chancellor’s parlor and waits for her to make her first appearance, the reader is introduced to the tinge of resentment that colors his experience: “He ground his teeth a little as he thought of the contrasts of the human lot; this cushioned feminine nest made him feel unhoused and underfed.” Ransom is a man whose every move and word is affected by the memory of suffering, and like Olive he has clutched at ideas that reflect his feelings of personal injury and an unrecognized, but nevertheless evident, hunger for vengeance.

Once Ransom’s attraction to Verena has become conscious love, his pursuit of her is increasingly described in terms of force. “In playing with the subject this way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a man’s brutality — of being pushed by an impulse to test her good nature, which seemed to have no limit.” Later he understands that his relentless pressure has made her “tremendously open to attack ….,” that he is engaged in a “siege.” By the end of the novel, Verena is in a state of “surrender” and he has “by muscular force, wrenched her away,…” from Olive and the waiting public. The war imagery is obvious, James is pointing to a second, far more personal version of the North/South conflict, but Mr. Ransom’s victory over Miss Chancellor, his conquest of Verena and her future in domestic bondage, isn’t achieved by “muscular force” but by talk.

It is interesting to note that Ransom’s decision to chase Verena in earnest, despite his poverty and dim prospects, is fueled by the rather flimsy justification that one of his essays has at last found a publisher. A single publication does not change Ransoms financial future, but he seizes upon it as a sign of a new public voice, which invigorates him in his quest to silence Verena’s. The newly acquired stature as public speaker gives credence to Ransom’s private utterance, a marriage proposal, just as his anti-feminist ideas justify his very personal advance on Verena. The eloquent phrases describing the pathos of female oppression, which Olive feeds to Verena, can’t contend with Basil’s verbal seduction. His most potent phrase turns out to be his accusation that Miss Tarrant isn’t real. He tells her that in her desire to please others she has come to resemble “a preposterous little puppet” commandeered from behind the scenes, and the suitor turns his love object’s own phrase against her: “It isn’t you; the least in the world.” What she originally believed was selfless devotion to a cause, a belief that allowed her to proclaim with pride, “It isn’t me,” is transformed through Ransom’s steady rhetorical assault into an accusation of fraud: “, … these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them and that was the alteration, the transformation.” Sentence by sentence, Ransom enters the inner sanctum of her doubts. Although he has touched on a truth and offers Verena the hope of “standing forth in … freedom,” his is finally a promise of continued captivity under another name. Verena’s fate is sad, but she is too wobbly and empty a character to be tragic, and Basil Ransom’s hunger for Verena Tarrant is augmented by the stature of his adversary, Olive Chancellor, who, unlike Verena, is truly his equal. In terms of the book’s politics, this irony creates a final and terrible resonance. It also redeems James from the charge that The Bostonians is somehow against women. It is a book uncomfortable with causes but deeply, intimately comfortable with women.

In the novel, only Olive Chancellor achieves tragic dimensions, and it is because of all the characters in the book she feels most, and feeling is the domain where Henry James is transcendent. The painfully private Olive Chancellor will in the end suffer the horror of public exposure and failure as well as the loss of the person whom she loves most passionately in the world, and it is a fate she has brought upon herself. Her culpability, however, doesn’t in the least diminish the depth or reality of her pain or this reader’s immense pity for her. Stiff, humorless, prejudiced, and half-blind to the reasons for her actions, the little Boston spinster becomes in her profound sorrow and humiliation heroic.

…. as soon as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him forever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was.

“In the arts,” James wrote, “feeling is always meaning.” For me, these words illuminate not only the novelist’s ars po-etica but also James’s great strength as a writer. His experience of the world and his empathy for other people produced a body of work that adamantly refused ready categories, received ideas, and preordained notions of all kinds in favor of the difficult, strange, tender, and always multifarious arena of human relations and emotions. I think James felt that every attempt to reduce life to a system of beliefs — religious, political, or philosophical — must inevitably become a form of lying.

Late in his life, he tried to explain his wariness of systems to two politically engaged writers: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. As a member of the committee that had rejected a play by James, Shaw told its author in a letter, “People don’t want works of art from you. They want help, they want above all encouragement.” In his response, James argued: “… all direct ‘encouragement’—the thing you enjoin me on— encouragement of the short cut and say ‘artless’ order, is really more likely than not to be shallow and misleading …” Wells had hurt James by publishing a cruel attack on the older writer in a satirical book called Boon, The Mind of the Race, in which he had, among other things, criticized his “view of life and literature.” To Wells, James wrote, “I have no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner.” And later in the letter, he elaborated further, “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” James believed in the power of art, not because he thought it would change the world or because he imagined it could be a mirror of life. Art, he explains to Wells, is “for the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift.”

James was probably too subtle for his correspondents, but the idea of “extension” makes sense to me because art and the world can’t be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other, and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art it creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means. I have lived with James’s characters and stories for many years, and they do not leave me. They have become part of who I am, and I can’t help but feel that their creator, who worried over his paltry sales and lack of popularity with the reading public, would have been very happy to know how I feel. He would have been glad to know that his work has lasted and grown in importance and that I am only one of many people who have been permanently altered by his books.

In its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, The Bostonians is an embodiment of James’s nonprescriptive idea about what a novel should be. Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced, precise, and sensitive prose in opposition to the dead phrases that stream from lecture halls, line the pages of newspapers, and float from one speaker to another in that arid climate that was Boston. That city has changed and the United States has changed since James wrote his American novel, but dead phrases, empty rhetoric, clichéd thought, as well as ready-made opinions and just plain nonsense proffered to the public by the press show no sign of abating anytime soon.

I believe it’s impossible to read The Bostonians without at least wondering about the ways we use language or language uses us. Moribund and idiotic political statements continue to influence and sway us because of the manner in which they are spoken or written. Even the most sincere declaration of devotion to a noble cause may be born from private venom or personal misery. There is always a gap between what we feel and what we say. Henry James knew that it was heartbreak-ingly difficult to capture the flux of experience in words, to articulate the riddle of human feelings and actions, but this was precisely his ambition, and I, as one of his faithful readers, love him for it.

2004