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All Stories Mostly True

Steven Utley

Extracts From A Reader's Diary: How I Finally Finished Proust And Succumbed To Henry James

May 9: My pile of bedside books teeters precariously; it's going to collapse one of these nights, and brain me in my sleep — a good death, I suppose, for anybody who loves reading. It occurs to me that, while there's no telling how many millions of words I've read in my life, I can say with some precision that I've written only a few hundred thousands of words for publication. The process doesn't seem very efficient.

October 25: I am making astonishing progress with The Portrait of a Lady — astonishing because I had expected to find myself mired hopelessly in Henry James' dependent clauses long before now. Nevertheless, my advice to anyone who essays to read Modern Library's "New York Edition" of this novel is: Skip the long (long) preface, or you will find yourself mired.

I've also polished off Kiss Kiss, a 1960 Roald Dahl collection simply abounding in examples of behavior your Henry James sort of character would deem vulgar, not least of which is poisoning people on short acquaintance.

November 5: Last week, I finished both Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales and Henry James' Portrait of a Lady — sooner than I had expected, in the latter instance, and in rather better order, too, than can be said for my first attempt to read James (The Beast in the Jungle, ca. 1977; that was a rout). Finding, however, that I still did not wholly fathom James' appeal to what one encyclopedia entry snootily calls "discriminating readers," and it being by this time Halloween weekend, I took down The Great Short Novels of Henry James [1] (given me by Howard Waldrop, after he'd failed to penetrate its tangles of subordinate clauses) and opened it hopefully to The Turn of the Screw, which enjoys the reputation of a "more accessible" work. I wish I were able to report that it chilled my spine, my blood, or some other portion of my physical self, but, frankly, it only left me cold. Although I don't regard myself as a lazy reader or an undiscriminating one — I may read Thrilling Wonder Stories back to back with Ulysses, I don't confuse the two — I am forced to the conclusion that reading James is like eating chicken wings, a lot of work for little return.

At the same time, I reserve the right to read more of James' work, and there is more of it on my bookshelf, a surprising amount: besides another nine selections in Great Short Novels, great fat volumes titled The Spoils of Poynton and Other Stories and The Golden Bowl. Just because I'm momentarily thwarted doesn't mean I am not determined to crack this particular Brazil nut (eventually) — in major part because writers whose judgment I trust, from Edith Wharton to Lisa Tuttle, do admire James' work.

Just a glutton for punishment, c'est moi.

November 14: I have almost just now finished reading a novella by Henry James, Madame de Mauves, while half-listening to Mozart's piano trios, as performed by the Beaux Arts Trio. If it gets much more refined than this, I'll plotz.

November 25: In less than a week's time, I have polished off Madame de Mauves, Daisy Miller, An International Episode, and The Siege of London in The Great Short Novels of Henry James, which suggests to me that I have blundered upon the secret of reading James: start with the early works, which are models of clarity.

December 11: Sloppy weather in Tennessee today, perfect for reading stories set in the stormswept hinterlands of Old Blighty — in this case, Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. For the time being I have to note that it was Emily and not Charlotte who wrote this and not Jane Eyre, particularly since this edition of WH features two prefatory pieces written by Charlotte two years after Emily's death, in which she (that is, Charlotte) explains how she and her sister (Emily) came to publish their respective famous novels (WH and JE) as Currer Bell and Ellis Bell, respectively. There was also Anne Brontë, who wrote as Acton Bell, and probably plenty of other Brontës who were too busy to write novels, and just as well. It's confusing enough with three authors in the family.

Speaking of confusion, and of speaking, other recent items on my reading list are The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard (Coppard, dead these past 50 years and more, being one of the half-forgotten geniuses of the English short story) and Dorothy L. Sayers' Clouds of Witness (by which I have at last made the acquaintance of the amateur sleuth Peter Wimsey); and Coppard, Sayers, and Brontë (Charlotte, that is) have each in turn given me an eyeful of an earful of rustic English as spoken by English rustics. On finding myself confronted with such statements as "They's nobbut t' missis; and shoo'll nut oppen 't an ye mak yer flaysome dins till neeght," I recall the patent bewilderment of the New England-born Union Army officer portrayed by C. Thomas Howell in the film Gettysburg, at being told by a prisoner from a Tennessee regiment, "Ah'm fightin' for mah rats."

Well, back to Heathcliff and Catherine.

December 29: What with the holidays and all, it has taken me till now to get to the end of Wuthering Heights, which, pound for pound, has more dysfunctional characters than any other 19th-Century British novel I can think of, with the possible exception of The Way of All Flesh. I mean, whew! — talk about folks in serious need of some counseling, an intervention, a good hug at the very least.

My first novel of 2005 will be Jane Eyre, by the other Miss Brontë. If it's nearly as perverse as WH, I'm sending back the Time Cops, or, rather, the Time Social Workers.

I recall being told years ago by, I think, Lisa Tuttle that those Brontë girls (Emily, Charlotte, Anne) and the Brontë boy (Monty? Joe Bob?) did not have an entirely healthy homelife. But, then, I often get a real sense, when reading 19th-Century novels, that neuroses and psychoses were just rampant.

January 14: Thus far in the new year, I have read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Alice Walker's By the Light of My Father's Smile; currently, I'm reading Kafka's The Trial and a non-fiction work by Gabriel García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping. I liked Jane Eyre a good deal more than Wuthering Heights, one reason being that I liked Jane Eyre herself more than I liked Catherine, Cathy, or anybody else in WH; despite a hardscrabble childhood worthy of a Dickens character, Charlotte's heroine manifests none of the symptoms of severe dysfunction so pervasive in Sister Emily's novel. I initially gave Isabella in WH credit for some astuteness when she observed, "Catherine had an awfully perverted taste to esteem [Heathcliff] so dearly, knowing him so well" — but then Isabella went and married Heathcliff. Mr. Rochester is a distinct improvement over Heathcliff in the man department.

January 19: I finished The Trial and News of a Kidnapping in good order, and have begun reading, or, rather, re-reading, The Scarlet Letter. I didn't care for it at all in college, but now it engrosses me and makes me want to run right out and rent the movie adaptation starring Demi Moore. I also amuse myself by wondering what the novel might be like had it been written not by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but by W. Somerset Maugham.

February 3: I have interrupted my progress through Willa Cather's Selected Short Stories (though it remains at my bedside) to take up the December 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which features Ogden's Strange Story, a "racial memory" tale by Edison Marshall; to polish off three more selections in The Great Short Novels of Henry James — Lady Barberina, The Author of Beltraffio, and The Aspern Papers; to plunge into The Captive, "La Prisonniere," Book 5 of Marcel Proust's gigantic masterpiece; and to read some old Superman comics.

At last I find myself not merely appreciating nor simply admiring but actually enjoying James' work. The Aspern Papers benefits, I think, from its narrator's being an atypical James protagonist: a bounder, or, in the words of the Widow Aspern, "a publishing scoundrel." So, it is true, what James' friend Edith Wharton said of his sense of humor. He had one.

February 17: During the past week or so, I've finished reading Proust's The Captive — in which Marcel ("Marcel," rather) discusses his unhealthy relationship with Albertine at such length that you can only heave a great sigh of relief when at last she flees the scene — and The Confidential Agent, "An Entertainment" by Graham Greene, and begun William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses.

March 10: Early in the 1990s I set myself the task, anticipated to be a pleasant one, of reading Charles Dickens' works in chronological order; early this week, I finished Great Expectations, which puts me very near the end of the canon. This is probably my favorite, despite the author's characteristic reliance on astonishing coincidences to tie up all plot threads, and especially despite his having changed the novel's original, downbeat ending for a happier one at the urging of Edward Bulwer-Lytton — ol' It Was A Dark And Stormy Night his own self. As one who, back when, often received the same infuriating advice from certain science-fiction editors, I can only wish that Dickens had stuck to his guns and told Lord Lytton to take a flying leap at the moon.

"Happier" is really the wrong adjective to apply to Dickens' second ending to Great Expectations — hooking up with the heartless Estella sure wouldn't be my idea of a good time. Lord Lytton's argument seems to have been that a proper Victorian novel, with a proper happy ending, ended properly and happily at the altar.

March 16: Today I started Edna Ferber's So Big, which, despite its title, is not a porn novel.

March 19: Yesterday, I finished both Willa Cather's Selected Short Stories and Edna Ferber's So Big, the rightness of which tandem reading will be appreciated by anyone here who's familiar with their work and the common theme that recurred in their work: the persistence of the human need for beauty in uncongenial surroundings. Now I am launched into Henry James' Washington Square, though when nobody's looking I also take up the November 1945 issue of a pulp magazine called Adventure.

March 21: Not too very long ago I would not have imagined myself ever using the words "page-turner" and "Henry James" in the same sentence, but that author's seriocomic novel Washington Square kept me up plumb past my bedtime: I had to know how things turn out with James' well-intentioned but graceless heroine and her formidable father, meddlesome aunt, and fortune-seeking suitor.

March 25: What do you suppose the odds are that the first two books I should take up after finishing Washington Square contain references to that novel's author, Henry James?

In "Deaths of Distant Friends," included in the story collection Trust Me, John Updike writes of "Miss Amy Merrymount, ninety-one," who had

always seemed ancient; she was one of those New Englanders, one of the last, who spoke of Henry James as if he had just left the room. She possessed letters, folded and unfolded almost into pieces, from James to her parents, in which she was mentioned, not only as a little girl but as a young lady "coming into her 'own,' into a liveliness fully rounded."

In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy L. Sayers, the following exchange occurs as Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Charles Parker examine the contents of a murder suspect's bookshelf:

"... H'm! Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with 'em, and then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"That's a fact," said Parker. "I've got rows of school-boy stuff at home — never touch it now, of course. And W. J. Locke — read everything he wrote once upon a time. And Le Queux, and Conan Doyle, and all that stuff."

"And now you read theology. And what else?"

"Well, I read Hardy a good bit. And when I'm not too tired, I have a go at Henry James."

"The refined self-examinations of the infinitely-sophisticated...."

Henry James is absent from The Black Sun, by Jack Williamson, but, at least, not too conspicuously so. This novel (published in 1997) opens with a faster-than-light quantum-wave hop to a nearly dead solar system in an unknown galaxy, then applies itself to probing the intertwined mysteries of cyclopean ruins, alien artifacts, unearthly fossils, indecipherable messages, and other creepy phenomena that recall some encountered in works Williamson presumably knew of old, H. P. Lovecraft's and John Taine's tales of lost places and damned things.

April 22: Yesterday evening, I reached the end of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which I had first taken up in 2001. Obviously, I got enough out of the experience to sustain me through 2000-plus densely printed pages, but don't ask me, "Enough of what?" because I can't say as yet. Remembrance may take me as long to digest as it took to read, especially if all the pertinent critical writing is no more conducive to digestion than Georges Cattaui's 1967 work (translated by Ruth Hill), on page 69 of which I am told that

hylemorphism

melodic field

all the comparisons made

a structure which is both undulatory and granular

harmonic resonance

My command of French is just about nonexistent, but I believe a useful term in this context is merde à l'hausse.

For my own part, on the one hand, I think Proust's accomplishment is real, and on the other I sympathize with D. H. Lawrence, who likened Proust to a man trying to till a field with knitting needles.

April 23: I am taking a break from a Marcel Proust centennial anthology[2] to refresh the mental palate (or something) with Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Memphis Slim. Which is not at all to say that this batch of critical writing is insufferable stuff like the previously mentioned work by Georges Cattaui; Elizabeth Bowen and the other essayists demonstrate that it is possible to discuss Proust without being pretentious and obscurantist.

April 27: Following Proustorama, I decided to refresh the mental palate with some pulp fiction. "As I tasted the crumb of madeleine which I had dipped into limeflower tea, a roscoe barked in the night." Well, I am reading myself to sleep of an evening with Ray Cummings' Tarrano the Conqueror (1930), the dedication of which reads: "To Hugo Gernsback, scientist, author and publisher, whose constant efforts in behalf of scientific fiction have contributed so largely to its present popularity ...."

This week, I have also read a story collection, The Lost Face, by the Czech sf writer Josef Nesvadba, and Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot, whose eponymous character is almost as deluded as King Lear, and suffers almost as much through the ingratitude of his daughters. This is my introduction to Balzac's Human Comedy (unless you count a Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Cousin Bette in the early 1970s), and it leaves me wanting to read more.

June 12: And at long last, I have come to the end of The Great Short Novels of Henry James, and to the story that defeated me years ago, The Beast in the Jungle — which story certainly fits Peter Wimsey's description above. Still, I am man enough to concede that the problem, the first time I took a crack at Beast, may have been that, in consequence of having read all the Tarzan books at an impressionable age, I was misled by James' title and simply expected a different sort of story than the one he tells about John Marcher. John Marcher has expectations of his own, which he discusses endlessly, and obliquely, with May Bartram.

They had long periods ... during which, when they were together, a stranger might have listened to them without in the least pricking up his ears; on the other hand, the real truth was equally liable at any moment to rise to the surface, and the auditor would then have wondered indeed what they were talking about.

That certainly does pretty adequately sum up my whole experience with Beast. As for Miss Bartram, I can't help suspecting that the whole while she is listening to John Marcher, she's thinking, "Shut up and kiss me, you idiot!" or else "Get a life!" or maybe just, "Can I go now?" My suspicion is based on the fact that she dies as soon as she decently can, which isn't soon enough for either of us.

June 13: Casting about for something completely different, I latch on to The Black Signal, by Max Brand, best-known pen name of the super-prolific pulp-fictioneer Frederick Faust, though the material originally appeared as by another of Faust's pseudonymous selves in Western Story Magazine during the 1920s. Pulp westerns adhered to formulae as rigid as kabuki yet abounding with opportunities for protagonists who — unlike poor John Marcher, waiting and waiting and waiting for the stroke of fate that will define his life — resolve their existential dilemmas chiefly by riding horses and slapping leather against owlhoots.

Footnotes

[1] Edited by Philip Rahv. New York: Dial Press Inc., 1944. back

[2] Marcel Proust, 1871–1922: A Centennial Volume, edited by Peter Quinnell. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. back

Steven Utley describes himself as an "internationally unknown writer". To this end he has published a great deal of short fiction, which has been collected in Ghost Seas (Ticonderoga, 1997), The Beasts of Love (Wheatland Press, 2004) and the forthcoming Where or When (PS Publishing). He lives in Tennesee, where he reads Proust, because "somebody here in Tennesee has to."