Evil and malice at the tea table

What is violence, and what constitutes a moral response to it? Few look to Henry James, master observer of the tea table and the drawing room, for answers to such questions. But, in fact, violence -- violence committed against innocents and innocence -- is a constant preoccupation of James’ work, from the “Roman fever” that attacks Daisy Miller to the malice surrounding Isabel Archer, to the anarchist underworld of “The Princess Casamassima,” in which the protagonist can renounce the terrorist plot he has set in motion only by killing himself. The preoccupation becomes a major theme in James’ later years, particularly in the novels written between 1896 and 1899, which are concerned with children and childhood: “The Other House,” “The Spoils of Poynton,” “What Maisie Knew” and “The Awkward Age.” These are the novels that Leon Edel, James’ biographer, once described as “the most curious ... James devised in his entire career as a writer: a terrible world of blighted houses and of blighted childhoods -- of little girls -- and a strange world of female adolescence.” One of them, “The Other House,” is the only novel James ever wrote in which murder is committed.

Unlike his two younger brothers, who fought in the Civil War, James -- an American who spent much of his life living in England and ultimately became a British citizen -- never saw combat. But in the manner of his famous father, Henry James Sr. -- whose terrifying “vastation,” or mental breakdown, deeply affected his children’s lives -- and his older brother William, who suffered from depression, Henry survived his own emotional catastrophes: recurrent feelings of worthlessness and failure, along with a withering experience of rejection in the theater that inspired an intense fictional investigation of vulnerability in his subsequent work.

That rejection -- sustained during the traumatic moments he spent on stage at London’s St. James’s Theatre on the opening night of his play, “Guy Domville,” on Jan. 5, 1895, buffeted by the jeers and catcalls of the audience -- stayed with him for the rest of his life. The audience, he wrote in letters to family and friends, was “like

It seems tragicomic now. Author of “The American” and “The Portrait of a Lady” -- brilliant explorations of the inner life and the moral evolution of human character -- James may have been the least likely writer in literary history to produce lively stage plays, especially given his famous syntactical intricacy. Yet he yearned for the recognition and fantastic financial returns offered by the theater, returns that had eluded him, despite the early success of “Daisy Miller.” He pinned his hopes on a three-act costume drama about an 18th century Venetian nobleman who leaves the priesthood to marry, only to reject the woman he loves to enter a monastery. Not a crowd pleaser.

But for James, public humiliation was anything but comic. It represented the nadir of several depressing years of professional frustration and the serial deaths of friends and family members. With his annual income from fiction diminishing and magazine editors beginning to reject his work, James had spent the first half of the 1890s mistakenly convinced that there was a “kingdom to conquer” in playwriting. He had witnessed from her bedside his sister Alice’s “recurring pain & disintegration” from breast cancer before she died in the spring of 1892. He had received the emotional shock of his life when he learned, in January 1894, of the suicide of his close friend, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, with whom he had once shared a villa in Florence. “It was as much of a love affair with a woman as he was ever to have,” writes biographer Fred Kaplan, of the homoerotic but sexually abstemious James. The news that Woolson had thrown herself from a third-floor window in Venice -- “the dreadful image” -- so haunted James that he was unable to travel to Italy for her funeral. And in December 1894, only days before the premiere of “Guy Domville,” he had learned of the death, in Samoa, of his beloved friend Robert Louis Stevenson. “It’s all a torment,” he wrote, on hearing of Stevenson’s death, a torment that could only have rendered his play’s reception more surreal.

Such a series of personal and professional disasters might have crushed a lesser artist, but James moved on: “I take up my own old pen again -- the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.... It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.... I have only to face my problems.” On Jan. 12, 1895, a week after the disastrous premiere, James wrote in his notebook the inspiration for his grim ghost story “The Turn of the Screw” (published in 1898 and included in the Library of America’s “Complete Stories 1892-1898”), in which a naive young governess battles -- depending on how you read it -- either demonic ghouls or her own delusional fantasies for the possession of her pupils’ souls.

The following year, he wrote “The Spoils of Poynton,” a novel inspired by a true story of a Scottish woman -- collector of antiques and objets d’art -- driven from her husband’s estate by her son and late husband’s heir, who assumed control of the ancestral home -- and her collections -- on his marriage. In James’ version, the widow, Mrs. Gereth, fastens on Fleda Vetch, a young woman with tastes equal to her own but without fortune, who she hopes will supplant the gauche “frump” whom her son plans to marry and install at her exquisite home, Poynton. Fleda falls in love with the son, and the son, belatedly -- after his betrothal to the frump -- falls in love with her. But much to Mrs. Gereth’s dismay, Fleda’s fine taste in decor extends to her moral sense as well; she refuses to take possession of her man unless he is “free,” renounced by his fiancee. The son marries the frump and, at the climax of the story, Poynton burns to the ground. The novel, like every other in this volume and much of James’ work, concerns the violence of possession: the moral, emotional and occasionally physical violence that people commit in attempting to possess others. In “Spoils,” only Fleda renounces the possessive ethos, but her life is nonetheless consumed by it: “She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will.”

A more literal struggle for possession occurs in “The Other House,” originally written as a scenario for a play, then recast as a serial for the Illustrated London News in 1896. Edel called it “One of James’s most unpleasant novels ... an outburst of primitive rage that seems irrational and uncontrolled.” James might have concurred: He excluded it from the New York edition of his work. But Edel’s assessment is too harsh. Unearthed and placed in its rightful chronological order, “The Other House” serves as one of James’ most visceral portrayals of ungovernable human need and as a key to his later work. Years later, James wrote in his notebook: “Oh, blest ‘Other House,’ which gives me thus at every step a precedent, a support, a divine little light to walk by.”

That “divine little light” is shed by a murder, which may have served as a kind of model for the many psychological or emotional murders that are enacted in James’ later works. (Think, for example, of the murder-by-betrayal of Milly Theale in “The Wings of the Dove”). Like “The Spoils of Poynton,” “The Other House” concerns four main characters and two houses, Eastmead and Bounds, separated by Eastmead’s garden and a stream that runs between the properties. The “almost prehistoric” Mrs. Beever, widow of the town banker, presides over Eastmead and hopes to marry her stolid son to a vividly charming young woman, Jean Martle. The “other house,” Bounds, belongs to the nouveau riche Tony Bream: “His house was new -- he had on his marriage, at a vast expense, made it quite violently so.” Tony himself possesses “a certain quality of passive excess which ... began with his neckties and ended with his intonations.... His dress was just too fine, his colour just too high, his moustache just too long, his voice just too loud, his smile just too gay.” As the novel opens, Tony and his wife have furnished their home with a new infant daughter, but his wife -- victimized in her childhood by a “detestable” stepmother -- is convinced that she will die of childbirth complications. Also at Bounds is the fourth fateful character, Rose Armiger, a troubled and impoverished young woman raised with Tony’s wife, who suffered the same stepmother, whose eyes appear to Jean Martle, on first meeting, “so strange as to be ugly,” an impression erased by “a flash of small square white teeth.”

Tony’s wife extracts from him a promise that he will never -- so long as their daughter lives -- marry again. He promises; she dies. All the central figures witness his vow, and one of its immediate consequences is Rose’s abrupt dismissal of her fiance: She has set her sights on the soon-to-be-widowed Tony.

Several years pass. Effie, Tony’s daughter -- about to turn 4 at a garden party hosted by Mrs. Beever -- provides the occasion for the return of the original principals. As the characters revolve among the tea things, we learn -- when Jean refuses Paul Beever’s proposal of marriage -- that Rose and Jean both love Tony. When the two women are left alone with the child, there ensues one of the strangest, most fearsome scenes in all of James, as Jean -- who has become a special friend and protector of Effie’s -- confronts Rose over who will take the child home. Rose has literally taken possession of the child -- “she seized her almost with violence” -- and refuses to relinquish her until Jean admits her desire for Tony and renounces it:

” ’... deny to me on the spot that you’ve but one feeling in your soul....[D]on’t look as if you didn’t know what feeling I mean! Renounce it -- repudiate it, and I’ll never touch her again!’ ”

Jean admits her feelings:

“ ‘I “deny,” I “renounce,” I “repudiate” as little as I hope, as I dream.... It’s because of that that I want her!’

“ ‘Because you adore him -- and she’s his?’

“Jean faltered, but she was launched. ‘Because I adore him -- and she’s his.’ ”

The description of Rose’s response -- replete with possessive pronouns -- is Shakespearean in its evocation of the poison of jealousy:

“ ‘I want her for another reason,’ Rose declared. ‘I adored her poor mother -- and she’s hers. That’s my ground, that’s my love, that’s my faith.’ She caught Effie up again; she held her in two strong arms and dealt her a kiss that was a long consecration. ‘It’s as your dear dead mother’s, my own, my sweet, that -- if it’s time -- I shall carry you to bed!’ She passed swiftly down the slope with her burden and took the turn which led her out of sight. Jean stood watching her till she disappeared and then waited till she had emerged for the usual minute on the rise in the middle of the bridge. She saw her stop again there, she saw her again, as if in the triumph -- a great open-air insolence -- of possession, press her face to the little girl’s.”

Rose does not take the child home. The demonic predecessor of the deranged governess in “The Turn of the Screw,” Rose drowns Effie in the stream and attempts to pin the murder on her rival. She is ultimately frustrated and found out, but the vow wrested from Tony by his dying wife -- a vow intended to save the child’s life -- has led instead to her death. Possession, in James, is murder, but he was to find, after following this tale’s “divine little light,” subtler means of exploring the notion that emotional violence can be every bit as killing as its coarser counterparts.

Those subtler means prevail in both “What Maisie Knew” -- about a child whose moral sense of right and wrong is forged during her parents’ vicious custody battle -- and “The Awkward Age,” a searing indictment of the hypocrisies of English society and the ways in which it stripped innocence from its young, focusing on the coming-of-age of two very different girls:

“The girls ... [were] as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood.”

James would go on, of course, to produce his late, great novels that delineate the psychological warfare we wage in attempting to control and possess the objects of our desire. He remained appalled by violence in all its forms, deploring, at the outbreak of World War I, “the plunge of civilization ... into this abyss of blood & darkness.” He spent his last years -- he died in 1916 -- visiting the wounded in hospital wards and working for Belgian refugees, housing some at his home in Rye. In 1914, he wrote to a friend:

“It has all come as by the leap of some awful monster out of his lair -- he is upon us, he is upon all of us here, before we have had time to turn round. It fills me with anguish & dismay & makes me ask myself if this then is what I have grown old for, if this is what all the ostensibly or comparatively serene, all the supposedly bettering past, of our century, has meant & led up to. It gives away everything one has believed in & lived for -- & I envy those of our generation who haven’t lived on for it. It’s as if the dreadful nations couldn’t not suddenly pull up in a convulsion of horror & shame.”