From my lack of posting, I obviously got a little bogged down with The Bostonians. This is a long, social novel with a relatively straightforward plot. Set in the 1870s, the novel is about a group of women, formerly abolitionists, who are now suffragists who go around Boston making stump speeches. One of them, a youngish old maid named Olive Chancellor, takes an interest in a teenage girl named Verena, who has brilliant powers of oratory and whom Olive believes will do much for women’s rights. (There is also a fair amount of what modern readers would interpret as lesbian attraction on Olive’s part.)

The complication is that Olive’s cousin, an unreconstructed Mississippi lawyer living in New York, visits and also takes an interest in Verena. The cousin, Basil Ransom, shares none of Olive’s attitudes toward women’s rights or reform, so the majority of the novel is a battle over Verena’s affections. Verena herself is somewhat shadowy. She has been molded by her parents, and Olive ostensibly is liberating her from her upbringing. Unfortunately, Olive too is another influence. Basil reaches Verena by pointing out that she is a puppet with no original thoughts. It strikes a nerve with Verena, and her choice is to give up being a public puppet to being a private wife, and neither choice offers her true independence.

Critics view The Bostonians as a fine example of James’s middle period, in which he wrote long, social novels, but it’s also viewed as something of an aberration for taking on themes of social reform. I’d argue the novel is actually in line with James’s true project, in that the novel is really about the way characters don’t know themselves, or aren’t honest with themselves. It’s about power, manipulation, and emotional abuse, all of which I think of as “Jamesian.” Verena doesn’t know herself, and she isn’t honest with Olive about her feelings toward Basil. Basil and Olive are both manipulating and emotionally abusing Verena, though they might not realize it.

As far as James’s attitudes toward reform or women’s rights, I’d point to this characterization of Olive: “The world was full of evil, but she was glad to have been born before it had been swept away, while it was still there to face, to give one a task and a reward.” Olive believes in her mission, but James shows us the psychological subtext of zealotry, which is personal rather than political. I think that’s rather astute, and apt for our times as well.

Can you even express amazement at Alice Munro anymore? It’s such a cliché, but I think I’ve been cast under her spell. What triggered it was a series of craft essays by Michael Byers, which you can check out at his University of Michigan faculty page. (If he were to flesh these essays out, they’d rank right up there with craft books by Charles Baxter, James Wood, or John Gardner – seriously, that good.)

Byers’s reading of Munro is that her stories express a sense of unknowing. Words such as “seems,” “appeared,” and “perhaps” qualify the narrative so that the stories become a search for understanding. In a college poetry class, my professor talked about doubt being related to the heart of a poem. The example I remember most vividly is Bishop’s “Under the Window,” a poem in tercets about a narrator observing a town water pump in Brazil. At the end of the poem, we get:

[Oil] flashes or looks upward brokenly,
like bits of mirror – no, more blue than that:
like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

With that dash, the self-assured narrator stumbles, tries to become more precise. That doubt entering an otherwise confident voice is the heart of the poem, because it raises all kinds of questions without answering them.

Munro’s stories seem to work the same way. Byers explicates “The Beggar Maid,” “Lichen,” and “Material,” all good stories. Here I’ll apply Byers’s reading to a different story, “The Ottawa Valley,” which is about a narrator remembering a trip she took with her mother and sister to visit the mother’s old home in the Ottawa valley. The narrative is retrospective; the narrator is now around 40, which was her mother’s age at the time of the trip. Back then, her mother was just beginning to develop a tremor which would eventually turn into Parkinson’s disease.

We get a sense of unknowing in the very first line: “I think of my m other sometimes in department stores. I don’t know why…” After a retrospective, ruminative paragraph the main story begins with the train ride out to the valley. Early on, we get a description of the aunt: “A man’s hat without a crown was shoved – for what purpose? – on her head.” Again, not knowing. Later, another relative is described: “Aunt Lena was stiff all the time with what I now recognize as terror.” That’s one of the few places where we get explicit retrospection, which shows the narrator now knows more than she did then. Part of the story’s project is a movement from unknowing into knowing.

In one memorable scene, as they arrive at the old home church, the narrator’s underwear snaps, and she asks her mother for a safety pin. Her mother objects, but eventually gives her the safety pin holding up her own slip. The narrator is in a state of not knowing: “Turning my back – and not saying thank you, because I was too deep in my own misfortune and too sure of my own rights.” But she moves into a state of knowing: “I could see that [my mother’s] gray slip had slid down half an inch and was showing in a slovenly way at one side.”

A more serious movement into knowing is the way the narrator becomes aware of her mother’s shaking arm, and what that means about her future health. Nevertheless, the story is not a mere coming-of-age, coming-into-awareness story. Munro ends on a note of complexity: “If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it [at a moment of awareness]…I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could.” The story itself is a process of digging, and though the narrator as a child has grown into the awareness of an adult, there is still the sense of doubt pervading the whole piece. Like Bishop’s “No, more blue than that,” you can see Munro refining her vision, again and again, but not arriving at an answer.

I read this in college and skimmed it for a class in graduate school, so in the interest of making it through James’s canon I’m going to skip it this time around. Plus, as I was looking through it, the story was still quite clear to me, and I like to reread books after some of the details have faded. Nevertheless, since I’m working my way through James, I wanted to pause and add a few comments about the novel here.

Now might be a good time to mention the New York edition of James’s work. He wrote and wrote and wrote a ton of material in the late 1800s, and toward the end of his life he gathered much of it in what is known as the New York edition. There he wrote his famous prefaces, which were gathered in The Art  of the Novel, and he also revised some of his early work. I haven’t done an extensive study of his revisions, but I’m told — and personal experience backs this up — that you should always read the original version of his earlier work. That’s what I’m reading now, the originals, which were used in the Library of America volumes. If you’ve read later James, you know he gets verbose, and he injected some of that verbosity into his early works. As an example, take the last paragraph of Portrait. The last line as he originally wrote it was a single sentence: “On which he looked up at her.” But when he revised, he came up with:

On which he looked up at her — but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.

James didn’t add that much to the entire novel, thank goodness, but something to keep in mind because most modern editions of the book use the New York revision (with the preface).

Regarding Portrait, two things. First, while I groused that I didn’t understand Washington Square and James’s “middle period,” he does make a leap with Portrait, which is noticeable. The writing becomes richer and more metaphoric. I hated it as an undergraduate, but flipping through it now, I’m really tempted to reread because the whole atmosphere of this book is quite rich, and those extended metaphors can take your breath away. One, which I can’t find the exact context for right now, is about the difference between a hawk falling from the sky in the mountains, and how that hawk is still flying higher than a hawk soaring at sea level on the coasts.

A second thing of note with Portrait is that the preface is one of James’s manifestos about the art of fiction. He talks about the house of fiction having many windows, which I think has to do with choosing a perspective. This writer might look at a scene from this vantage, whereas this writer will have a different vantage. He also talks about the architecture of a novel, how he came to construct Portrait, brick by brick, from a single character. The plot took a backseat to character, and everything was a process of discovery. This preface is essentially the core pedagogy in a lot of creative writing workshops today, and a lot of writers, when discussing process, have echoed James, be it Stephen King comparing the novel-writing process to uncovering a fossil, or William Gay saying he starts with a character in a landscape, or Cormac McCarthy starting with the image of fires burning on a hillside outside El Paso at night. Of course, I’m not sure King or Gay or McCarthy is a fan of James, but when he writes about art James is difficult to argue with.

Washington Square is considered the beginning of James’s middle period, though I’m not sure what that means. I’ve also seen it called his Balzac period, but I’ve not read any Balzac. I always thought it was because his early stuff was melodramatic, and then his middle period was more serious, and his later period experimental. But Roderick Hudson and The American are serious efforts, more so than Washington Square, I’d argue. According to Wikipedia, readers like this one, but James apparently did not, or at least did not think highly enough of it to include it in the New York edition of his work late in life. Not having a preface that expresses his judgment, I can only guess, but I can see why James might not have liked Washington Square. It isn’t particularly elegant, in terms of point of view or perspective, and most of the characters fall on a spectrum between stupid and despicable.

The novel is about a widower, Dr. Sloper, his sister, Mrs. Pennimon, and a marriage drama about his daughter, Catherine. The doctor doesn’t think his daughter is notably beautiful or intelligent, and he suspects a young suitor will come calling in an effort to get at her inheritance. Sure enough, the mercenary idler Morris Townsend comes along, aided in his pursuit by the daft busybody Mrs. Pennimon. The doctor disapproves of the courtship and threatens to disinherit Catherine if she marries Morris, calculating Morris will abandon her, which after 100+ pages of back and forth, he eventually does.

First, the good. Washington Square, to affect a Jamesian commentary, is not without its merits. The quiet presentation of life in old New York is charming, and the plot — marriage plans gone awry — will appeal to those who love a good Victorian romance but who don’t mind an unhappy ending. Nevertheless, the characters are difficult to stomach. The doctor is especially cruel. We understand Morris as a villain, and James doesn’t let us into his head enough to care if he’s fairly stock, but the way the doctor analyzes his daughter eventually ruins her. Never mind that he’s right about Morris’s intentions. The doctor watches eagerly, like a clinician, to see if Catherine will “stick” by Morris, and Catherine comes to understand her father’s feelings toward her. That acts as a double blow — first she is jilted by her suitor, and then she comes to an unreconcilable understanding of her father.

Catherine is an engaging character her, and her development is reminiscent of Christopher Newman in The American, and it foreshadows Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. Unlike with Catherine, James does let us fully into Isabel’s world and gives her the space to develop fully.

This novel is about Christopher Newman, an American businessman who has made his fortune and has now taken a long trip to Paris. Through the narrative’s limited omniscience, we see he is not particularly cultured, from the old-world perspective. He buys a lot of bad paintings and generally doesn’t see how others perceive him. That doesn’t stop him from declaring his intention to marry, though, and a friend’s wife suggests he marry Claire de Cintre. Unfortunately, Claire is part of the house of Bellegard, and the Bellegards don’t approve of Newman, eventually forcing Claire to break off the engagement. Newman tries to negotiate with Madame Bellegard and Claire’s brother Urbaine, but the only Bellegard he has on his side is the younger brother, Valentine. When Valentine dies in a duel, he hints at a family secret — that Mme. Bellegard and Urbaine killed the father because he didn’t approve of the first marriage Mme. B. arranged for her daughter. The last third of the novel is a potboiler, where Newman tries to blackmail the Bellegards into approving of the marriage. They don’t budge, and Claire steals away to a nunnery. Newman, ultimately, is to good-hearted to try to ruin them in their social circle.

The novel — early Henry James — is a romance, a marriage plot gone awry with elements of old-Europe gothic. James, in his 1913 preface, says the Bellegards would in life have married Claire off for Newman’s money, and for that assault on verisimilitude James is quite critical of the novel. Myself, I didn’t mind. The novel came out in 1868, and the more than 140 years since have erased the social verisimilitude (or lack thereof). What remains is a truth about human nature, that we’re a bumbling species and don’t always get what we want. The novel does fall into melodrama, which the later James might consider vulgar, but it’s nothing compared to the garbage we’re presented with today. I will say this: I liked Newman, in the end. In the beginning he was too square, too boneheaded, but his pluck and determination eventually earned my sympathies, thought it could have been that the villains were so stark that I couldn’t help but sympathize.

Since I seem to be working my way through James’s canon, my thoughts about this novel are that it’s another interesting study in POV. Whereas Roderick Hudson is told through a focalizing outside character, Newman is presented through a limited omniscience, which allows us to know more about the situation than Newman himself. The secondary character is unneeded, and would likely have impeded the narrative. I think I read somewhere, though, that The American is a very similar plot to RH, in that both novels are about Americans trying to marry into a very different social scene in Europe, and both men meet with failure. I’m not sure that’s limited to just America/Europe, but rather a good study of social class period, especially for America because we do have this idea that you can rise up in class. In a way, James is telling the same story as Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

I’m reading Henry James this week, slowly, so no new books to write about. But I was wracked with indecision over the use of a comma this afternoon, which is worth sharing. As I was doing laundry, I noticed a set of towels sitting on the dryer. I couldn’t tell if they were clean or dirty, so I was going to send my wife a text message: “Do the towels on the dryer need to be washed or folded?” But then I couldn’t decide whether to insert a comma: “Do the towels on the dryer need to be washed, or folded?”

It seems like the sentence has two completely different meanings based on that comma. Without the comma, it seems like I’m asking: “Do you want me to do anything with the towels on the dryer? If so, what?” Whereas, with the comma, it seems like I’m asking: “I’m going to do something with the towels on the dryer. Which should I do, wash or fold?” In the first case, without the comma, I’m asking if I need to do anything, yes or no. In the second case, with the comma, I’m saying that I’m going to act, and am asking which action to take.

I spent a few minutes reading through the Chicago Manual of Style, and the only answer I can come up with, beyond the fact that I might need to get a life, is that the second case, with the comma, is an elision: “Do the towels on the dryer need to be washed, or [do the towels on the dryer need to be] folded?” In this case, it’s a compound sentence, separated by a comma and the conjunction “or,” with the bracketed words omitted for the elision.

I think about the comma quite frequently, and I think it might be the most important piece of punctuation in that it can create the most nuance in a piece of writing. A period unambiguously ends a sentence or marks an abbreviation. A semicolon is used in place of a comma to strip away nuance and add clarity. But whether to use the comma or not is one of the toughest nuts-and-bolts editing decisions you make.