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Dramatic Scene and the Awkward Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Eben Bass
Eben Bass*
Affiliation:
Geneva College Beaver Falls, Penn.
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Extract

The “Cabalistic” diagram of The Awkward Age (1899) whereby James explained the novel to its original publisher (Harper's Weekly) comprised “the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance about a central object. The central object was my situation, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title, and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the function of each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.” Each of the “lamps” was a “single social occasion” in which James proceeded to exhaust, as he says, the scenic possibilities; the “occasions” corresponded, he continues, to “Acts of a Play,” and his purpose in using them as a basis of form was to achieve “objectivity” that required no “going behind” scenes to explain, as fiction so often does, and as drama does not. “To make the presented occasion tell all its story itself” was then his purpose (AN, p. 111). The careful arrangements of The Awkward Age are only slightly suggested, however, by James's diagram of circles. The following analysis will attempt to describe the mutual relationships of the order of the “circles” (the books or “acts” of the novel, each of which is named for a different character). Each of the “acts” is divided into numbered units which we may, for convenience, call “scenes.” There are thirty-eight such “scenes” rather evenly distributed among the ten character-named books of the novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 148 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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References

1 The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, Introduction by R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), p. 110; hereafter cited in text as AN.

2 The dialogues of Gyp and Lavedan are immediate sources for the “form” of The Awkward Age, as James's Preface to this novel shows, but certainly the experience of the dramatic years is also evident in the choice of form.

3 Even Captain Dent-Douglas, who is ready at any moment to elope with Lady Fanny Cashmore, is given a specific London address, despite the fact that he is mentioned only once and never actually appears in the novel.

4 Mrs. Brook's exemplary insight is typified by the way she lets the Duchess know she is onto the Duchess' love affair with Petherton. Offering the Duchess some dainties from her tea table, she says, “There's one thing I mustn't forget—don't let us eat them all. I believe they're what Lord Petherton really comes for.” (What he really comes for is, of course, the Duchess.) Mrs. Brook repeats the innuendo, which the Duchess continues to dodge, by saying, “We mustn't, between us, lick the platter clean” (The Awkward Age, New York, 1958, p. 38; hereafter cited in text as AA). When Mrs. Brook implies a bit more openly that she knows something (p. 40), the Duchess counters with an allusion to Vanderbank, Mrs. Brook's protégé. The Duchess is a formidable adversary, as Mrs. Brook well knows, but Mrs. Brook is her superior. She says to Nanda, speaking of clothes, “I never stick in a pin without thinking of your cousin Jane [the Duchess]. . . . ‘Our antagonist is our helper—he prevents our being superficial‘” (p. 214).

5 The Duchess frankly proposes at this time that Longdon dower Nanda's marriage to Vanderbank. Soon after, Longdon announces such an offer to Van.

6 In a letter to Mrs. W. K. Clifford (1901) about a play of hers just published in Nineteenth Century James remarks, “I don't think it a scenic subject at all; I think it bears all the mark of a subject selected for a tale and done as a play as an after-thought. I don't see, that is, what the scenic form does, or can do, for it, that the narrative couldn't do better—or what it, in turn, does for the scenic form. The inwardness is a kind of inwardness that doesn't become an outwardness—effectively—theatrically; and the part played in the whole by the painting of the portrait seems to me the kind of thing for which the play is a non-conductor” (The Selected Letters of Henry James, edited with an Introduction by Leon Edel, New York, 1960, pp. 148–149; hereafter cited as SL).

7 Mrs. Brook sees the Duchess as an opponent, and with some reason, if we observe the course of their rivalry over which girl, Nanda or Aggie, is to marry Mitchy. In her own Book v the Duchess is plotting against Mrs. Brook in this respect, and though she does so for Nanda's “good,” she is really working for her niece Aggie's interest, as is later confirmed at Tishy's dinner party (AA, p. 269). See n. 4 for more points of friction between these women.

8 See The Complete Plays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel (Philadelphia, 1949), p. 101, comment by Edel. About his problems in dramatizing The American James observes in a letter to George W. Smalley (1891), “But I shall never again move in the straight-jacket of a novel originally conceived from a point wholly non-scenic, containing a damnable element (the machinery by which the denouement is brought about) which I had long ago outlived, and forcing one into the corner of at once keeping to it ... at every step, to make it an organism—the drama—utterly distinct from the story-form” (SL, p. 114).

9 A convenient collection of James's essays on drama is Henry James: The Scenic Art, edited with an Introduction and Notes, by Alan Wade (New York, 1957).

10 Writing to Mrs. Everard Cotes in 1900, James remarks on her novel His Honor and a Lady, “I think your drama lacks, a little, line—bony structure and palpable, as it were, tense cord—on which to string the pearls of detail. It's the frequent fault of women's work—and I like a rope (the rope of the direction and march of the subject, the action) pulled, like a taut cable between a steamer and a tug, from beginning to end. It lapses and lapses along a trifle too liquidly—and is too much conceived (I think) in dialogue—I mean considering that it isn't conceived like a play” (SL, pp. 206–207). In a similar vein, James wrote to Hugh Walpole (1910) concerning the latter's Maradick at Forty, “The whole thing is a monument to the abuse of voluminous dialogue, the absence of a plan of composition, alternation, distribution, structure, and other phases of presentation than the dialogue—so that line (the only thing I value in a fiction etc.) is replaced by a vast formless featherbediness—billows in which one sinks and is lost” (SL, p. 158).

11 See AA, pp. 110, 119, 131, 135.

12 The Protean career of The Other House helps to account for its unsatisfactory state as fiction. A play with an Ibsen-type heroine (Rose Armiger, a role probably intended for James's American actress friend Elizabeth Robins), a thriller-type serial in a London illustrated newspaper, and a long short story are the various shapes it took. See The Other House, Introduction by Leon Edel (London, 1947). In this same light, consider James's letter to H. G. Wells (1898) concerning “Covering End,” a short story rewritten from a one-act play he wrote for Ellen Terry. “The B[ritish] P[ublic] won't read a play with the mere names of the speakers—so I simply paraphrased these and added such indications as might be the equivalent of decent acting—a history and an evolution that seem to me moreover explicatively and sufficiently smeared all over the thing. The moral is of course Don't write one-act plays” (SL, p. 147). The fiction “done over” from James's plays is little admired. I think The Outcry is his best adaptation, but even it is spoiled by a trivial stage ending. James's thorough competence in stage mechanics, despite his failure to write a play that really succeeded on stage, contributed in a major way to the form of his fiction after the “dramatic years.” His imaginative adaptation of dramatic technique to novels planned as novels is the invaluable result of his experience in the theatre.

13 She puts the “blame” on him by implying that he will not have the initiative ever to propose to Nanda. At the end of Scene xxi, Book vi, she thrice utters, “You won't do it,” as if in some sort of incantation.

14 She thus initiates a disagreement with her traditional rival the Duchess, who has already exclaimed how “cozy” the circle is, and that someone should lock the door. The circle in this scene, “circle” to describe the habitués at Mrs. Brook's tea table, and James's own use of “circle” in his “cabalistic” diagram of The Awkward Age for Harper's, suggest the dominant schematic arrangement of the novel. Mrs. Brook even describes her feats as a hostess in terms of a circus ring.

15 See AA, p. 271, where the Duchess tells Longdon she believes that Van and Mrs. Brook have not actually done anything “wrong.” The intimacy between Van and Mrs. Brook is not so blatant as that which exists between the Duchess and Petherton, but Edward Brookenham looks upon it with vulgar acceptance.

16 Her asking Longdon for Nanda's return is her immediate aim; her ultimate one, of course, is to demonstrate forcibly to Longdon how “depraved” Nanda's environment is. She calculates, rightly, on his “rescuing” the girl forever (by a good endowment) from imminent corruption.

17 Oscar Cargill, in The Novels of Henry James (New York, 1961, p. 270), sees the Petherton-Mitchy relationship as having overtones of that between Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde; Cargill believes Nanda is aware of its nature, hence her eagerness to “save” Mitchy.

18 To establish his heroine's moral superiority, James has Mitchy say of Nanda's unreturned love for Van, “Any passion so great, so complete . . . is—satisfied or unsatisfied—a life” (AA, p. 326). I say “moral superiority” in view of James's own view of morality as the fullest, most intense perception of life. Note, among many possible examples, his comment on George Eliot's characters (AN, p. 70).

19 Mrs. Brook's circus metaphor appears on p. 126, AA.