On Thursday, an unusual congregation gathered in London. The place was Chelsea Old Church, not far from the banks of the Thames. Even by London standards, the place is heavy with history; Queen Elizabeth I came to pray within its walls. What was remembered on Thursday was a no less solemn occasion: the funeral service of Henry James, which had been held, in the same spot, precisely one hundred years before. The weather, on March 3, 1916, had been bitter and wet; a century on, the sun thought it proper to shine, as a token of early spring, in keeping with the celebratory mood.
Not that the event bore a wholly festive air. One of its organizers, Philip Horne, of University College London, took to the pulpit to guide us through the sad decline of James’s final months. (Professor Horne edited James’s autobiographical writings, published in January by the Library of America and reviewed admiringly, in this magazine, by my colleague Adam Gopnik.) In July, 1915, with the war in full spate, the novelist had taken British citizenship, in support of the land where he had spent so much of his life. This momentous deed was shaded with disappointment at America’s failure to join the cause, and the implied renunciation had distressed some of his American friends. Meanwhile, James’s health was failing; “the past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my knell had rung.” On the evening of December 1, 1915, he closed a letter with the cry, “The pen drops from my hand!” The next day, he suffered a stroke.
Henceforth, his mobility was impaired. According to his sister-in-law Alice, “sometimes his hand moves over the counterpane as if writing.” No impairment, however, could check the restive motions of his mind. He wondered how it was that his trusted valet could have gone out on an errand when the two of them were on board a ship, at sea. He continued to dictate to his amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, and what she noted down in that twilit period has long been a source of fascination to Jamesians, and to any connoisseurs of deathbed speech. He slipped into Bonapartist fantasies, devoting one missive to “the decorations of certain apartments of the palaces, here, of the Louvre and the Tuileries,” and signing it “Napoléone.” It seems remarkable that James, of all people, who thought it atrocious for one person to assume command over the body and soul of another, should imagine himself as an emperor with half a continent under his sway, yet it may be that the novelist was planning one last work, and there is also a strange, if slender, link with his early life. As he tells us in the memoir of his boyhood, he had once, in a youthful nightmare, confronted an “awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was,” and pursued him, to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning, down a gleaming gallery of the Louvre.
James was much possessed by death. “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing,” he is said to have uttered, after that initial stroke. (Other attacks were to come. The knell rang, at last, on February 28, 1916.) On Thursday, we were treated to the extraordinary passage from his notebooks in which he describes the pilgrimage, during a trip to his homeland, in 1904, that he made to the grave of his sister, Alice, in Cambridge, “the western sky more and more turning to that terrible, deadly, pure polar pink that shows behind American winter woods.” In vain, he had tried to persuade his brother Robertson, or Bob, to join him: “The Dead we cannot have, but I feel as if they would be, will be, a little less dead if we three living can only for a week or two close in together here.” Next, with the chill barely lifted, there was a recitation from “The Portrait of a Lady”—from the near-unbearable scene in which Isabel Archer, the ruinously married heroine, comes to the bedside of Ralph Touchett, her dying kinsman, to offer consolation. He, in reply, unveils a still startling truth: “There’s nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die.” Can that be true at a distance, too? Can we be quickened, restored to what James called “the unspeakable adventure of being alive,” by the revisiting of another’s death?
There was certainly something bracing and vivifying in the service of commemoration, thanks in part to the readers: the actors Simon Paisley Day, Olivia Williams, and Miriam Margolyes, whom Whartonians will recall as Mrs. Mingott in Martin Scorsese’s film of “The Age of Innocence” (1993), and whose elocution remains as ringingly clear as one could hope for—and, it must be said, as James’s prose requires. Indeed, the happy surprise was to learn how fluent he sounds in the reading, or rather in the reading out. Little is more frightening, to the innocent student of literature, than the first sight of a page of “The Golden Bowl,” with those unhurried sentences rolling away into the middle distance like the tributaries of some great, untraceable river. Spoken in public, though, and propelled by the onward pressure of the voice, they make more immediate and more graspable sense. Given that James, bewilderingly, dictated the novel in the first place, you could argue that to hear it aloud is somehow to restore the text to its original form, and to follow the river to its source. Either way, if Margolyes were hired by Harvard to declaim the book, at the start of every course in twentieth-century fiction, the numbers signing up for James would quadruple on the spot.
Another reader in the church was the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, who gave us the opening pages of “What Maisie Knew.” He did so with melodious care, yet there were discernible flinches, and a couple of indrawn breaths, as we listened, because of the lacerating manner in which James chooses to launch his tale. Follow his observations on the little girl of the title, caught as she is between her battling mother and father, and split between them, after the fracas of the divorce courts, like a spoil of war:
This alone is enough to dispel any lingering contention, among detractors of James, that he turned his face from life; that he neglected the issues of his day or the murkier and messier sides of common experience. Those acids will never cease to bite. Divorce and custody are the issues of any day, more so now than ever, and a trained eye would have picked out, in the pews, those churchgoers who had either toiled though the breaking of a marriage or staggered away, as children, from the rubble.
On the other hand, this was a day of and for Henry James, and it would have been wrong, and indecorous, if our respects had not been paid to his comic gift—to the fun that he can have, on the page, whenever decorum is under threat, or when good-hearted, wrongheaded folk fret their hour upon the stage. So it was that Margolyes introduced us to Miss Birdseye, in “The Bostonians,” whose unstinting philanthropy, the sincerity of which James does not doubt, has worn her away to a semi-spectre, the vision of which affords him a series of gentle smiles. After that, Margolyes switched without effort to the persona of a small American kid, in “Daisy Miller,” cracking sugar lumps between his teeth and doing his best to exasperate Winterbourne, the well-bred gentleman who stands before him. No figure in James ever gives another a kick in the pants, though several characters invite it; nothing but the power of good manners—plus, in this case, Winterbourne’s wish to ingratiate himself with Daisy, the boy’s older sister—keeps violence at bay, although if you are Gilbert Osmond, Isabel Archer’s husband, manners themselves grow so venomously smooth as to constitute a violation of her rights.
Back by the Thames, after the mourning, after the mortal terrors, after the laughs, it was time—by way of a finale, modestly grand—to be chastened. The last reading was from a letter that James wrote in 1915, aggrieved but defiant, to H. G. Wells, who had, it was widely and correctly assumed, mocked him in a recent (and now forgotten) novel. James’s whole creative enterprise had been held up for ridicule, and, rather than retreating into offended silence, he came back fighting, not for a moment mislaying his perennial politeness but rising, nonetheless, to a famous declaration of intent. Wells had insisted on the usefulness of literature; it was to be deployed, he claimed, as a means to an ethical or a political end. That was heresy to James. So far from literature, he wrote,
It took courage, (a courage verging on folly), to issue such a statement, even between private acquaintances, in the midst of a world war. A hundred years later, James’s call to arms will still strike many people as esoteric, vague, and lofty to a fault—an intellectual luxury that most of us can ill afford. Is this not an election year, in both of his homes, native and adopted? (The United Kingdom will vote, on June 23rd, on whether to stay in the European Union.) Who cares if art makes life, whatever that may mean? Yet the act of commemoration, in Chelsea Old Church, had the desired effect: it mounted a case for the defense—not simply summoning the dauntless emotional reach and the sheer verbal stamina of the man we had come to honor but leaving us with the disconcerting impression that, hang it all, he might be right. Literary reports upon life, from the front lines as well as the backwaters, must be filed, with all the industrious grace that can be mustered, because, who knows, those are the reports that could endure. As of Thursday, Henry James became, as he would say, “a little less dead.” The pen does not drop from the hand.
