finishing the bostonians

plus what i'm reading

Hello friends—

Tonight, I teach the last of my seminars for The Bostonians. Twice a week for the last six or so weeks, I have logged into Zoom to discuss Henry James, history, the tension between the personal and the political, and of course, the messy drama of relationships. The last couple of sessions, we have paid particular attention to the change in focus of the novel as James’s emphasis shifts from the dramatic conflict to the philosophical.

In the first half of the novel, the drama turns around specific events: Olive and Verena meet, Olive takes Verena under her wing and begins to prepare her for a public career but first must overcome Verena’s parents and later the half-hearted challenge of other would-be suitors both romantic and otherwise. The drama unfolds at parties and salons, in reading rooms and at dining tables, but the dramatic context is always present. The question seems so much to be, as E.M. Forster describes in Aspects of a Novel when describing novels of situation: what will happen next?

The second half of the novel, but mostly, the middle 2/3, I would say, detach from this question of what will happen next? The characters enter a period of dramatic stasis, and the events, the happenings, migrate inward. What I mean is that the novel becomes much less about what will happen next and much more about what does it mean? The operating question shifts in focus as the novel shifts in focus. James alights upon the theme of what kind of life is a life worth living—the public life or the private life? The Third Book opens on Chapter Thirty-Five, when Basil arrives in Cape Cod, in pursuit of Verena and Olive. From that moment until Chapter Forty, the novel eddies in place dramatically. Very little changes in effect, on the surface. Basil and Verena go on several walks over the course of these weeks. Basil makes his obvious play for Verena, which Verena then divulges to Olive, and all three enter a holding pattern of misery. But the novel is mining their misery—Verena’s wavering, chiefly—for an answer to a question that is not, to my satisfaction, material. The question is almost entirely philosophical. Verena is worried, deeply worried, about the meaning, the content, of her decision to marry and what it will mean to Olive or to Basil or to herself to womankind itself.

From Chapter Forty, the novel achieves something that is beautiful and magnificent in James’s art: the synthesis of the material and the philosophical into the symbolic, or what O’Connor calls the anagogic. That is, Verena’s material choice between Basil or Olive is sublimated into the choice to take the stage or not to take the stage in Boston. James has given this all the symbolic trappings of a wedding: it takes place in the great secular cathedral of the music all, with all and sundry invited to witness the fusing of this young woman with the public life. Throughout the novel, Verena has been described as virginal, as pure, as the maiden of the revolution, and one might imagine her to be a kind of secular bride of Christ, except the universal church is the cause of women’s emancipation. Will she take to the stage and give her speech—will she speak her sacred, binding vow and in doing so renounce the world of the flesh and marriage, forsaking Basil?

Or will she give up the stage and enter the life of the private, stepping away from the consecrating light of the secular cathedral, down and down into the dark, kept by Basil as he has so promised to do?

Of course James has sort of turned the usual imagery upside-down. The arranged marriage here is a kind of un-marriage, a swearing off of marriage, forsaking the traditional norms for the sake of a brilliant and dazzling public career for a great cause, perhaps the best cause. And what is shadow and darkness is entering into the traditional marriage plot. Basil smuggles Verena out of this not-church under a cloak.

By this point in the novel, James has successfully managed to fuse the dramatic question of will Verena give her speech with the question of what sort of life is a true life? And while some of the seams show, I found it very effective and moving. One might like to imagine that Verena Tarrant would have better options today, that she wouldn’t have to choose between Basil and Olive, the public and the private.

I think on some level this is true and that there are many such cases of women marrying the hot guy with troublesome politics and having a career as a public figure for women’s issues. In fact, I think that the novel is shockingly prescient on a number of themes regarding the commodification via identity of activism, liberatory discourses, and intellectual activity. I think some people read the novel (to varying degrees of correctness) as a scathing critique of the women activists who were agitating for greater emancipation for women. I don’t disagree that they are subjects of critique in the novel. However, I think the broader satirical aim of The Bostonians is the commodification of the intellectual and the political, and that the female activists provide the milieu in which James’s satire unfolds.

The people who James serves up with the sharpest, cruelest portraits are, to my mind, the writers, the promoters, the scam artists, and the entire cultural apparatus of the intellectual and media elite. James seems most skeptical of the burgeoning commercial world of newspapers and magazines and their somewhat deleterious effect on aesthetic judgement and thought. Again and again, he sets Basil and Olive against their time, assessing that time, the contemporary, as vulgar, as disgusting, as facile, as lacking depth and the capacity judgement. Yes, Basil judges the female activists poorly, mainly by way of Verena. He thinks women shouldn’t have thoughts in public. And also, perhaps, they shouldn’t have thoughts in private. What he hears in Verena’s speeches is a beautiful vacuousness, a gorgeous sound, and he is astonished that people take it seriously. But he rebounds this judgement onto the culture.

There is, of course, the rather unsympathetic view of Olive Chancellor taken by the novel. Yes, of course, but I don’t know. Sometimes people are annoying and do bad things. Certainly, I believe Olive deserves happiness, and it’s true, I don’t think this book has the capacity to imagine Olive’s happiness. However, she did buy a girl and then seek to alienate her from her parents and everyone around her. There’s a moment in the novel, when we get a description of Olive’s love and how it might consume everything, including Olive herself, but it could never consume the object of her love. Which is, on the one hand, beautiful, but on the other hand, not really love, that’s obsession.

For as much as Olive accuses the world of objectifying Verena, she participates in that very same objectification, and indeed, in Olive’s focalization, that objectification attains an aura of the sacred. Is that an Olive thing or a Henry James thing? I don’t know, I am not an expert.

But back to the book’s eerie present resonances. It is of course not the first novel to deal so frankly with the matter of public reputation. One might argue that public reputation is the driving force of much early 18^th and 19^th century literature. And what we sometimes take for the first dregs of psychological realism might be understood as the internalization or sublimation of public reputation. However, there is something to the treatment of public reputation in this novel, the way it’s mediated via papers and the media itself, that feels arrestingly, shockingly close to home.

It is not merely the writer or the great singer who is a subject for the papers, but individuals themselves. And that one wants, as in the case of Verena’s father Mr. Tarrant, not merely to be rich but to be known by as people as possible. It makes me think of The Seagull, of course, when Nina says that what she wants is fame. Adoration from the masses mediated by favorable notices in papers and magazines.

In that way, every character in this novel is a kind of Lily Bart before the fall, checking the paper for some reference no matter how oblique to them and their actions. Verena’s fake choice between influencer and trad-wife is somewhat funny now given the ascension of the trad-wife influencer as archetype. I think this archetype is only possible because capitalism has so incorporated and fused antithetical discourses which are robbed of their revolutionary potential and made purely individualist. That is, I am showing agency by choosing to give my power away to my husband because I am choosing to live by this set of values that mean something to me, etc.

What feels most urgent about Verena’s choice though and about the novel to me at this particular moment in time has to do with something I feel every day. That is, how much of me is me and how much of me is me mediated back to myself via the internet and via people’s responses to me. This of course is the mimetic groove. But it is something that people who are consumed by others must contend with each day. You have to figure out where the meat of content stops and where the rind of your soul is because otherwise, you end up giving everything away and fusing totally with whatever public persona you’ve had to create.

Is this the first novel about being an influencer? About having to negotiate the mass-mediated public and the choices we must make about how much of ourselves to fuse with the persona we make to send into the world in our place? I don’t know. But it feels very resonant to me on the subject today.

 When Verena finally forsakes Olive and makes for the hills with her broke trad husband and his reactionary politics, she is kind of forsaking the world to come. She is giving up the cause. But also, she is giving up a kind of objectification that would have calcified her. It was a world in which she would have been fused forever and always with the public persona she created as a young girl, giving speeches about things she kind of didn’t understand. Many such cases! One recognizes in the choice the fate of certain forever-girls who populate our music charts and bestseller lists.

Does she choose the superior fate? That of the private? Withdrawing from the brilliant, searing light of the public imagination? The narrator at the end of the novel imagines her tears and says that they won’t be the last she sheds. They probably won’t be. The novel is very clear that she is about to enter a life of no money and no resources, with only Basil to depend on, and we know he kind of hates her politics and presumes, actually, that she has no politics. So is that superior? I don’t know. I do think that the narrator of the novel is compromised because it imagines that the superior fate is one lived under its gaze, that is the gaze of the public. The narrator resents the choice to withdraw, and so are those real tears or just sour grapes?

I am going to miss this novel. I am going to miss going over Henry James’s sentences and his language. I will miss the way it grapples with the notion of the political and also what our notions of the political tell us about ourselves. I will miss its humor and wit, and those gorgeous setpieces he erects whenever he gets into a jam. When in doubt, throw a party. It’s been fun, having these book to read and discussing it twice a week with a group. I’ll miss it.

In the meantime, I have been reading contemporary books. I finished Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, and I really loved it. I think what he does with time in that book is very interesting and remarkable. I also found parts of it very funny. But the thing I found most impressive is the way he illustrates that repetition is a sacrament of attention and that attention, when pressurized sufficiently, turns to Grace. There are passages that almost glow with the presence of Grace, and I think he is one of the very best writers of attention and its potency. Many reviews focus on the way he writes about pain. I think that reviewers and critics tend to focus on the wrong things in Garth’s work. With his previous books, they write about sex in his novels and you’d think that he were doing early Hollinghurst or something even when there’s not nearly as much sex as Hollinghurst. With this book, it’s the pain, of which there is a first, potent dose, and then not very much. The pain runs as its shadow self through the narrator and through the novel, but it opens interior vistas of experience. But in the body of the text itself, the pain is reconfigured and redirected, as attention, elsewhere. I don’t know, I’m getting annoyed again. I just think people focus on the wrong stuff sometimes.

I also read and finished Seán Hewitt’s Open, Heaven, which is a novel very much about longing in a small village. Another novel from an Irish writer that further highlights the fact that American novels take place in social vacuums because it follows an intensely lonely young man after he’s just come out in his very small, very insular community, and so much of the plot is about how he has no friends. And yet, for that to work, one needs the sense of the community, which Hewitt conjures with his typically elegant writing. The novel only works because Hewitt creates such a rich social texture in which James’s loneliness shifts and changes and takes on new hues. Incredibly atmospheric. Very God’s Own Country meets Heartstopper. I think people will love it.

Right now, I am reading Flesh by David Szalay, and I love it very much so far. But I have a long way to go so I won’t say too much. But so far, very amazed.

Also, if you are in New York on Tuesday, we are launching Smith and Taylor Classics at The Strand. We will have copies of all our books available. Please come out!

b