Henry James Opposes Wildly Unlikeable Guys

The video made me laugh out loud. Thank you.
I liked the assurance in the chorus that I’m fine.
But then, I suspect that the W.U.G. always thinks he is fine, so maybe that’s me after all?
Anyhow — very funny and fun.

Ha! I’ve not gotten around to reading James, but I’m reading a 1979 critical biography of Natsume Soseki (by Eto Jun), and he mentions James as “a typical escaped American who was unable to be satisified by dilletantism as well as a typical unhappy author who struggled violently between his own particular interests and the barrenness of America of the time who could not be consoled even by being awared an Order of Merit from the British aristocracy.” And also with snarky comments about James only writing about the very rich. (Eto Jun goes on to say that despite the barrenness of the US of James’ time, we need to explain the richness of post-James US lit and the weakness of Japanese lit of the period.)

The snarky comments of James only writing about the very rich seemed relevant here…

Ok, I will confess that until this minute, I was confused between Henry James and Henry Miller.

Tropic of Capricorn guy, lover of Anais Nin? Henry Miller
Turn of the Screw guy? James

Not ben so embarassed as when I was a kid and confused Helen Keller with Christine Keeler.

Ray Vinmad @ 4

First words of Wharton’s “Custom of the Country” (1913):

“Undine Spragg—how can you?”

And, yes, this is ABSOLUTELY, frustratingly, sadly true (from BW’s post):

“If you own your house, then you will have to paint and the colors won’t match even if you saved some of the original paint for this purpose (though, well-played).”

–Rob Chametzky

I read The Wings of the Dove a long time ago and had to look at a plot summary to jog my memory of the story (which James is less concerned with, I think, than the subtleties of his language but put that to one side).

Having jogged my memory, I think it’s probably fair to say that Kate Croy comes off no better than Merton Densher in that novel. I’ve read some of the shorter works, also a long time ago, but after The Wings of the Dove I had no impulse to read any of the other late novels. His sentences are extraordinary and his use of indirection and implication is too, but without rereading the sentences fade, and life is short and there are too many other things to read. James’s humor also tends, I think, to be indirect where it even exists, whereas — to take an equally famous but very different author — there are scenes in Middlemarch that are laugh-out-loud funny.

You had, hanging around the area, a perfectly suitable male character with that rarest of qualities: verisimilitude; who knows what it is to pursue a project to alleviate human suffering, and thus how to support Dorothea in her pursuit of her own ideal endeavours; and you let Dorothea go and choose a bloody hack journalist, straight out of the imagination of a typical girls’ romance novel author, to live her life walking down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

This sentence occurred to me as I was performing my morning rituals, in response, I guess, mainly to LFC’s thoughtful comment, and Belle’s idea that James opposed some wildly unlikeable guys in his imagined world, and to the phrase, “… and she’s not even my person”, some in other people’s imagined worlds. I was imagining James having a chat with George Eliot, gently rebuking her for the ending of Middlemarch, which I thought was a tragedy of missed opportunity. Now, it’s been a long time since I read Middlemarch, and I know James didn’t like Eliot’s matchmaking, maybe for the reasons in my sentence, but if my sentence came from my forgotten reading of James, or if I’ve got anything wrong about what’s in the novel, someone can correct me. I wasn’t going to comment again, but it’s just a possible thought that seemed relevant, whether mine or someone else’s I don’t know.

JPL @11
That’s an interesting take on Middlemarch. It’s also been a long time since I read it, but I think one of the points is that Dorothea doesn’t have any especially good options in a very male-dominated society (the book is set in the early 1830s, around the time of the first Reform Bill). Obviously she can’t run for office or even vote (just to mention one obvious thing among many).

As for Casaubon, he’s a boring pedant concerned to defend his inflated reputation as a scholar against challenges, and unable to finish his (grandiosely titled) book. As best I can recall, there is zero evidence that he’s a repressed homosexual. He’s decades older than Dorothea, who marries him because she mistakenly thinks he’s a towering intellect engaged in a work of great importance.

stevem johnson @12, LFC @13:

As Kamala might say, “Just to be clear”, the phrase “perfectly suitable male character” in 11 above was meant to refer not to Casaubon, another “wildly unlikeable guy” (who James probably also opposed, and whose unlikability probably has more in common with that of Chris Fleming’s character), but to Lydgate, the doctor, whose name I couldn’t remember at the time. “Hack journalist” (maybe I could have said “ordinary”) refers to Ladislaw, whose name I also didn’t remember, who Dorothea marries in the end. I was talking about “the ending of Middlemarch”. The way “Casaubon” is mentioned in the above two comments (although the mention in LFC’s second paragraph may be responding only to the comment in 12) made me think y’all thought I was talking about Casaubon; I wasn’t. In any case, the sentence in 11 does reflect my initial reaction on finishing the book; James and others may have had similar reactions.

This post caused me to look up the BBC cover of Middlemarch and discover it’s streaming free.

But though James hates the guy who tries to break up the lesbians in The Bostonians, and Ormond (the Casaubon-like character) in TPoaL, that novel ends with his approval of Isabel’s embrace of the life of the body (and presumed rejection of Europe and art) in the form of her Marlborough-man suitor.

Yet another for “novels by Victorian men who have strange ideas about which men are good catches and which would destroy you.”

It is common nowadays for the more elevated strata to treat religion as a personal hobby. Stans might be condescended to, in the name of good taste? At any rate, I think it is misreading modern ideas into a nineteenth century novel to assume The Key to All Mythologies is just the ego of a contemptible loser: It was a major apologetic project, not a fraud. Casaubon’s inability to finish the project is not the proof of his personal inadequacy. Instead it is an inevitable result of a clash with truth. If it were just Casaubon strutting, he could have faked it. His real failure was the impossibility of accepting his own discoveries refuted his Christian premises. He’s blamed for not anticipating German higher criticism.

I also think it diminishes Dorothea to ignore her enlightenment. Rejecting Casaubon’s project is not about a beautiful woman rejecting servitude to an unattractive inferior, it’s a significant intellectual achievement of her own. Dorothea was all about service, rejecting service to Casaubon’s failed project was not about her dignity, it was about, as she saw it, truth. Middlemarch is a historical novel, set in a period before Eliot’s own. And like all historical novels (and SF by the way) it’s always a contemporary novel. And her contemporary was very much German higher criticism. (Yes, I also read Felix Holt as about her contemporary politics, sorry.) Her oppression is not Casaubon personally, it’s that she couldn’t engage in the academy and the elevated public discussion.

I understand that being a confirmed bachelor in early Victorian times, when marriage was the expected, is commonly read as evidence of nothing. Today of course, it may be evidence of a distaste for community property laws. Married women not having children is very common with today’s reproductive medicine. Overall, I don’t think it a good idea to assume these things were true for Dorothea.

LFC @20:

Good textual evidence. Further on:

“But do you care about them?” was always Dorothea’s question. (WRT “the strangely impressive objects around them ” in Rome.)
(And all she gets is,) “They are, I believe, highly esteemed. [….] Such at least I have gathered to be the opinion of cognoscenti.”

Eliot’s description in this chapter of the aspirational undercurrents of Dorothea’s experience of disillusionment and disenchantment with her husband is way beyond what even Dorothea could have provided in her memoir (if she had tried to write one), but at least it makes the enchantment and the alienation understandable. But Casaubon’s wild unlikability is more like that of Chris Fleming’s character than Osmond, in that it’s a case of “what you see is what you get”: “… no man was more incapable of flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself.” So maybe a longer engagement would have done the trick (although Eliot indicates that a marriage ceremony is a boundary-crossing event). But James’s criticism that I mentioned was about the ending of the book, when Casaubon was no longer on the scene.