Category: British and Irish Literature

A Gay Old Time? Maurice by E. M. Forster

Perhaps my first feeling, on starting E. M. Forster’s Maurice, was one of excitement. This novel, published only after Forster’s death and taking the sexual development of a gay man as its subject, is so unlike everything else I have ever read that I couldn’t help but be excited about it. But Maurice is not just a novel about a gay man, for there are today many such novels – what makes it stand out, and stick in my memory, is the immediacy of it. There were so few clichés, so few reference points for Forster to have in mind while writing it in the early 20th century, that Maurice has a remarkable freshness to it. Just as the characters are discovering themselves, so too is the novel itself trying to discover a way of doing its story justice. And luckily that’s exactly what Maurice manages to do.

A portrait of E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster, author of Maurice, only showed the novel to a few trusted friends during his lifetime. He hoped that once he was dead it would be possible to publish it; he had his wish.

School Days

Maurice begins with prep school, the first stage of private education in England, which takes boys, and occasionally girls, and raises them from the age of about eight till they are thirteen. It is about as cosy an environment as one could hope for. I remember my own prep school days fondly, and as my school was of the traditional sort, I found in Maurice much to prompt a kind of déjà vu. The first chapter is the only chapter set at prep school, but it sets the foundations for the novel just as such schools set the foundations for the lives of the rich and privileged the world over. Our hero Maurice Hall goes for a walk with one of his teachers, and as he is soon departing into public school, the teacher thinks to do a little explaining of the birds and the bees to him:

“To love a noble woman, to protect and serve her – this, he told the little boy, was the crown of life.”

Maurice is not a hero in the traditional sense, for there is little about him that is heroic. He is average, normal. Nothing about him stands out. He has a “niche that England had prepared for him” ready and waiting. There is only one problem – he is gay. And though he crams himself, as best he can, into the niche, working at his father’s old firm and going to Cambridge, Maurice is the story of how even a little individuality can cause your entire pre-made individuality to collapse, with potentially catastrophic consequences. For Maurice is always being told how things ought to be, whether it’s that love is between a man and a woman, or that he ought to “grow up like your dear father in every way”.

So much isn’t bad, per se. Having our identity imposed on us from outside is fine, provided that that identity is compatible with our internal understanding of ourselves. But as Maurice discovers his sexuality, he learns it goes against his assigned role as head of the family and respectable citizen, and from this thought alone he finds himself turning against the society that had once nourished him.

Clive and Maurice

He finds other sustenance with Clive Durham, a student he meets at Cambridge. Maurice does not know he is gay, but he finds himself at a dinner with a student, Risley, who definitely is. Forster conveys this subtly, rather than openly.  Risley “used strong yet unmanly superlatives” – by expressing himself fully, Risley has fallen out of the niche “man” that is valued by so many. Maurice is curious – he does not understand his own desires – but he decides to go to Risley’s rooms. There he meets another student, Clive Durham, and together they spend time in Durham’s rooms that evening, listening to music. They are not “together”, but Maurice finds himself “strok[ing] Durham’s hair”. A quiet intimacy is forming between them, but as far as Maurice is concerned this is simply manly friendship.

Durham has something else in mind. He gives Maurice Plato to read – a coded action that unfortunately Maurice is too stupid to understand. When Durham finally tells Maurice that he loves him, Maurice falls back on his training: “Durham, you’re an Englishman. I’m another. Don’t talk nonsense”. Englishness, in Maurice, becomes another layer of restrictions upon the full expression of the characters’ desires. But luckily, Maurice comes to realise his mistake. He cries, he goes back to Durham and confesses how he feels. And now the narrator tells us he “became a man”, not in the sense that society puts forward, of starting and ruling a family, but in the sense of becoming master of his destiny. And for a few moments all is well in the world.

The Gentry Under Threat – Durham and Penge

But it cannot last. I feel Durham’s character and story is actually the most one interesting in Maurice. Born as the local squire, he has an estate, Penge, that since his father’s death he now owns. Compared with Maurice, who is simply a well-off middle-class fellow from the suburbs, Durham is under a far greater pressure to conform. His estate will be lost if he does not marry and have offspring, and his respectability in the village will be lost if he has any whiff of non-conformity, sexual or otherwise, about him. For a man who wants to go into politics, this pressure is doubled.

And so one day suddenly Durham turns on Maurice. He declares that he is not gay any longer – their relationship was never physical, only intellectual, so it seems possible – and marries “Lady Anne Woods”. In other words, he marries well. And since the girl has no sexual education, because the 1910s were not a good time for women either, Durham’s own sexual problems can be brushed under the carpet safely, and a sensible marriage concluded. His house and lands are both “marked, not indeed with decay, but with the immobility that precedes it”. But through the marriage, disaster is temporarily averted. Maurice gains extra poignancy when we know what Forster could not – that the First World War is just around the corner, and even Durham’s best efforts may turn out to be for naught.

It’s not clear whether Durham is actually not gay, or whether he’s forced himself to believe he isn’t. In either case, he attempts to help an unwilling Maurice with his own condition. When we compare the two men, it’s hard not to find things to envy about Durham. While Maurice eventually rejects his niche, Durham steps proudly into it, and though seen from the outside it is filled with snobbery and “the worldliness that they combined with complete ignorance of the World”, nonetheless, he seems to be happy.

Durham’s story is interesting in part because it cannot have been unique, and it is a great loss that the subject was not touched by the great writers of the 19th century. But it’s also interesting because unfortunately it remains relevant to this day. A few of my own friends within my class face similar problems to Durham. Though my own generation is much more tolerant, many of our parents (aged between fifty and sixty) and grandparents are still unwilling to countenance the idea that we might not fit perfectly into the niches they have prepared us. I have watched my own friends and acquaintances pretend, lie, and run away from the truth, hoping for a better season. And though progress is there, I can already see that not all of us will have a happy ending.

Not So Classy – Maurice the Man

Maurice is engaging in part because Maurice is decidedly normal, and thus relatable. He is not intelligent, and when faced with his “condition” he is unable to find some justification or solution through thought alone. He cries out, after asking the family doctor for help:

“What is it? Am I diseased? If I am, I want to be cured, I can’t put up with the loneliness any more”

His situation is tragic because he is not strong enough to fight it. He goes to another doctor and suffers hypnosis, but without any success. Not only has he internalised the homophobia of his time, he has also internalised a great deal besides. He is a classist pig, and a misogynist. I’m not sure I would like to drink tea with him if he came round for dinner. Reading Maurice is in some way also, therefore, an antidote to the occasional suggestion these days that one part of our identity, such as our sexuality or skin colour or class, can somehow override all others and smooth over our failures.

Love at Last? Alec

Maurice is, however, forced to confront at least a few of these prejudices when he meets Alec Scudder, a groundsman at Durham’s estate. At first class prejudices keep them apart, but eventually Maurice is overtaken by lust, and the two spend the night together. Their relationship is fraught with difficulties, because Alec can blackmail Maurice – an accusation of homophobia would destroy his reputation – and because Maurice himself resents him for it: “the police always back my sort against yours”. But eventually, they find a path that works for them, and in doing so they turn their back on society. A game of cricket provides the particularly English metaphor. We are told that when “two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph”.

That is the hopeful message that Maurice chooses to end with. And for its hope the book became unpublishable, as Forster writes in the “Terminal Note” at the end. By not punishing his heroes with suicide or unhappiness, he condones their deviance. Honestly, I was surprised to be faced with such an ending. Perhaps it’s just my experience of 19th century social novels (Anna Karenina, Anything by Fontane, even Henry James), but I’ve come to expect unhappiness to be inevitable when someone goes against society. In a way it’s heartening to be reminded that there are other possibilities too.

Conclusion

But simply going against convention does not make Maurice good, just like writing about gays doesn’t make it ipso facto interesting. Unfortunately, I found the latter part of the novel to be the weakest part. Honestly, I had the impression that Maurice and Alec were together because they both wanted to pursue a sexual relationship, and not because of any real human compatibility – and this struck me as not a good sign for their future beyond the pages of the book. And actually, that thought, which I can’t be alone among readers in having, probably undermines the book’s very message – that it is possible to go forth alone, so long as you have any-old partner.

In the “Terminal Note”, written in the early 1960s, Forster mentions “a change in the public attitude [to homosexuality]… from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt”. I am glad that the attitude has changed yet again since then, at least on the whole, and for the better. But we should not forget that many people, even today, deal with similar pressures to Durham, to conform according to the expectations of their families. Not all of us have an estate to inherit, but all of us have parents who have an idea for what they’d like us to be like, and not all of them are as flexible as perhaps they should be.

Anyway, I liked Maurice. Give it a read if you’re looking for something different from the usual early 20th century fare.

Style of the Times: Sally Rooney’s Normal People

I wrote about the Irish writer Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, at the beginning of this year. I didn’t think it was a bad book, but I wasn’t sure how far I agreed with the treatment of politics in it, either. I’ve now finished Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, which has recently been made into a TV show, and as before I’m left pretty unsure of what to make of it. Rooney has a huge amount of talent, especially for realistic dialogue and the little details that make life in the 2010s life in the 2010s. But I’m struggling to escape the feeling that all these little details don’t actually add up to a cohesive, worthwhile, package. I’m a little worried that Normal People is like a grand façade on an ancient building that a tourist excitedly enters, only to discover there is nothing inside but dust.

Below I want to explain what I mean.

The title card of the first episode of the Normal People TV show. I haven’t seen it, but I’d like to.

Hero and Heroine: Connell and Marianne

The first thing I noticed about Normal People is that we have two point-of-view characters, rather than the one of Conversations with Friends. Connell is from a working-class background – he doesn’t know his father, and his mother works as a cleaner at the house of the second character, Marianne. Marianne is our heroine, the daughter of two solicitors, and at the top of the socio-economic pecking order in the small village in West Ireland where Marianne and Connell go to school. The arrangement is effective, in part because Rooney draws both characters well.

By having a working class main character Normal People positions itself to go for a class critique, but by also having Marianne as a representative of a higher class Rooney can dispel, within the context of the novel, certain extreme views that a class-based viewpoint can tend to create. For example, Normal People takes pains to show that though Marianne has money, that doesn’t mean her life is smooth sailing – and not only because she’s weird and non-conforming, but also because of factors outside of her control, like a violent brother and a violent (though dead) father.

The plot of Normal People takes us from the end of the two’s time at school, right up to the end of their time at university. During that time they grow as people, both apart and together. At times they are in a relationship, at times they are barely speaking. Normal People is the record of their changing fortunes, faced with a world that doesn’t see either of them as normal, and of their attempts to fit in.

Class and Language

Normal People is a book that has a lot to say about language in it, just as Conversations with Friends did. Rooney has a great ear for subtleties. On the first page, when we meet Connell, who is the best in their group at school, his simple comment that “Marianne did pretty good too” is already enough to tell us that he is not on the same level in terms of class, however clever they both are. Another time where language serves to convey differences in position is when the two of them discuss how Marianne’s mother employs Connell’s mother, Lorraine. “I don’t think she pays Lorraine very well”, says Marianne. “No, she pays her fuck all”. Even though the language is simple, Rooney does a good job of showing resentment within it. Marianne is only intellectually affected by her mother’s decisions; Connell is directly, financially, touched by them.

Unlike Conversations with Friends, Normal People does not rely too much on text messages and emails. I think this is a good decision, not because we don’t communicate by them, but because they do reduce the immediacy of things that can be done in person – after all, it’s the job of the author to arrange their characters in such a way as to make the story lively. Too much veracity is always a bad thing. At one point, Connell thinks of writing a novel using only emails, but dismisses the idea. He decides, quite rightly, that it would probably be too gimmicky. Unfortunately we don’t use emails like we once used letters, and trying to pretend otherwise would be foolish.

Trinity College in Dublin, the most prestigious Irish university. It is not Connell’s natural environment, not by a long shot. But for Marianne, who’s been brought up in a world of privilege, it’s easy for her to fit in.

The Lads and Sex

Normal People also has a lot to say about sex and violence. That’s probably good, because these things are rather important. One thing I liked is that Rooney does a lot to show that men can suffer from sexual violence, just as women can. Early on in Normal People we hear about a schoolteacher, Ms Neary, who has kept Connell back after class a few times, and once touched his tie. Connell feels he can’t talk about it with anybody, though, because “people will think he’s trying to brag”. Just as women often can’t talk about sexual assault for fear of their concerns being dismissed, so too can men struggle to be taken seriously. Connell later meets Ms Neary again, after his graduation, and she attempts to sleep with him. He manages to escape, but it’s a horrific moment in part because we know how alone he is against her.

Connell is part of a group of lads his home village and it puts him in an awkward position, especially once he starts meeting more intellectual people in Dublin, where he and Marianne both go to university. At one point a friend is showing him naked photos of someone they both know without her consent. Connell is forced into awkward silence, and when he doesn’t actively approve of his friend’s action the friend attacks him for it, saying “you’ve gotten awfully fucking gay about things lately”. Among the lads, of course, a misogynistic view of women is normal, and the response shows how much pressure someone like Connell is under to accept it – the alternative is being cast out. But again, things are more complicated than “boys just being boys”, because the same lad, Rob, dies later on, an apparent suicide.

There’s no defending his sexism. But as with elsewhere in Normal People we’re reminded that our outward expressions can be ways of hiding uncomfortable truths about ourselves. I remember at school when it occasionally turned out that the people who insulted others as “gay” the most were those most in danger of turning out to be so themselves. I don’t mean to say that Rob was gay. Rather, even though he wasn’t portrayed a good person, all the same we should understand that he would have had depths we could not see.

Violence and Humiliation

Rooney’s pared-down, numb style is particularly good at dealing with violence, thanks to its directness. When Marianne’s brother grabs her arm, there are no flowery metaphors to get in the way of the sheer unpleasantness of it. But far worse than that is when Marianne is assaulted at a bar:

Let me get you a drink, the man says. What are you having?

No, thanks, says Marianne.

The man slips an arm around her shoulders then.

The man eventually squeezes her breast, in public, without her permission. It’s a difficult thing to read because its easy to imagine how it was.

Marianne eventually ends up in a few equally nasty relationships involving humiliating sexual acts. The first is to a rich kid, Jamie. I was pretty disappointed with him, because unlike Connell and Marianne, Rooney’s depiction of the confident right-wing student was cliché-packed and depthless. Concerning a man who robs Connell, Jamie says:

“He was probably stealing to buy drugs, by the way, that’s what most of them do”.

Being someone from the same background as Jamie, I know plenty of people like him. I know plenty of people who think like him, but I do not know anyone who talks like him. In a sea of well-written characters, he sticks out as being a lazy caricature.

Marianne also has a sexual relationship with a Swede while she is on an exchange. This relationship also involves him humiliating her. Both of these relationships are the result of Marianne’s idea that she is a bad person and therefore deserves to be punished. Her sex with Connell is notable because of the absence, at least from his end, of any desire for violence to be involved. He is aware of the violence he, as a man, could wield against her, but the thought causes him disquiet rather than pleasure.

Time and Style

Normal People has a particular structure to it, one that I came to appreciate by the time that I finished it. Each chapter begins with a moment setting the stage for some event. For example, Connell is interrailing and he knows he will soon arrive at the place where Marianne is staying. Then we go back into the past, for a kind of flashback. These flashbacks all serve to add tension to the moments, to set the stakes. For example, why is their meeting likely to be awkward?

I think this has a particular advantage over a linear chronology. In a linear chronology we usually either have to wait to get to moments of great friction, or we end up reading a work that strains credulity through a clockwork use of scenes of scandal. Generally, our lives just go on smoothly. Representing this in a realistic novel would lead to a boring work. But by jumping forwards to a moment of crisis and then going back to explain why it is significant Rooney makes every chapter feel useful.

Except, this only goes so far. Eventually you’re left feeling dislocated, like you’re being jerked backwards and forwards on a broken-down train that’s trying to start running again. Rooney’s habit of making the time between chapters huge is also not something I like. It’s hard to feel close to people when we meet them once every three months. And it also kind of undermines the overall structure of the book. A bit like Nabokov’s Pnin, each chapter of Normal People feels more like a short story than a continuation of a novel. Connell’s relationship with Marianne is also so on-off that it feels you could mess up the order of the chapters and still get a workable novel out of it at the end. Perhaps that says something about modern relationships, though. Whatever the case, it doesn’t make for a particularly enjoyable reading experience.

And that’s in part why I haven’t spoken about the plot, because there isn’t really one. Connell dates a nice girl called Helen, but they fall out and break up (off the page! – another thing I don’t like is that Rooney uses time-skips as an alternative to actually writing important moments). Connell gets depression. Marianne goes to Sweden. Marianne has a fight with Jamie. Connell writes a story. People drink a lot and sleep around. The order isn’t quite right, but who cares. It’s not particularly interesting, and the fact of the time shifts means even serious topics, like depression, feel kind of temporary, something that we’ll forget about as soon as the chapter ends.

Conclusion

I get it. Normal People is the zeitgeist. People who are cool and I like have recommended me the same books that Rooney namedrops here – The Golden Notebook, The Fire Next Time. Normal People is also extremely difficult to criticise because a lot of the criticisms can be reasonably attributed not to the book, but to us. The jerky sense of time, the vapid content, all reflect a kind of modern condition. The book wouldn’t be popular if this hadn’t touched a real nerve.

But we need to move beyond describing our problems, and think about their solutions. Rooney’s language, I think, gets in the way of finding them. It is singularly incompatible with any kind of higher feeling. When we’re told, in a football match that,

Everyone screamed, even Marianne, and Karen threw her arm around Marianne’s waist and squeezed it. They were cheering together, they had seen something magical which had dissolved the ordinary social relations between them.

This is telling, not showing. The style doesn’t leave “showing” as a possibility. Real emotion, from the characters rather than us, demands either longform or dialogue. Rooney’s dialogue is fantastic, but not every experience can be spoken. Some can only be felt. The style is extremely limiting in this regard.

In the end, I suppose I liked Normal People, just like I suppose I liked Conversations with Friends. But I was left wanting something more. People need something more. I hope one day Sally Rooney will write a novel which will provide just that.

The Life of a Sculpture: Roderick Hudson by Henry James

Henry James is one of those authors who it is far more enjoyable to think about reading than actually to read. His reputation precedes him. He is perhaps the greatest sentence writer in the history of the English language. His novels are subtle explorations of the differences between the Old World and the New, and filled with moral murkiness. Who is not attracted by such a description? For anyone interested in writing, how can you justify not studying the sentences of a master?

When you actually read Henry James, though, it’s another story entirely. His sentences are long, and they are certainly complex. In a way, they are terribly beautiful too. But I cannot get pleasure out of reading them. In the same way, his stories, with their endless subtleties, often seem to be missing a soul to be subtle about. There are few writers who so successfully send my gaze away from the page and out towards the window.

A sculpture of a man looking at the ground
The Dying Gaul, one of the many sculptures that Roderick encounters during his time in Rome. Capitoline Museums / CC BY

Roderick Hudson is the story of a talented, perhaps even genius, American sculptor, the eponymous Hudson, who is taken to Europe by a wealthy patron, Rowland Mallet, to learn from the masters of that continent and their legacies. But Europe, specifically Rome, teaches young Roderick far more than simply how to sculpt brilliantly. In Europe Roderick encounters Christina Light, a young woman of great vitality and changeability, who makes a vivid contrast to the dreary Puritans of Roderick’s New England homeland. Roderick has left in America a fiancée, Mary Garland. Can there really be a danger in his acquaintance with Miss Light?

Roderick Hudson, Genius?

The character of Roderick Hudson is presented through the eyes of his friend Rowland. Though Roderick Hudson uses a narrator, he hangs behind Rowland’s eyes for the course of the novel. Where he comes in is to warn us of events to come, something which happens with some regularity. From early in the book we have a sense of coming tragedy, but what exactly will happen is left only as vague hints about future tears.

Roderick is a young man when we meet him. He is training to work in the legal profession, something one character wittily describes as “reading law, at the rate of a page a day”. The work is not for him. Rowland, who is not old himself and has plenty of money, decides, after seeing an example of Roderick’s work, to take him under his wing and go to Europe. His mother and cousin (soon, fiancée) are at first sceptical, but Rowland assures them that Roderick has real talent, and eventually they relent.

He does have real talent, and we are repeatedly told he is “genius”. But unfortunately, being a genius is not quite enough to be a great sculptor. What one also needs is discipline and hard work. Roderick, perhaps, is capable of these things. But Roderick Hudson is the record of his drifting away from them as other pleasures and other desires occlude his passion for work. For Roderick is a young man from a boring, Puritanical, New England world. It is a far cry from Rome, from unrestraint and luxury and excitement. Rowland worries, as he takes Roderick away, that perhaps he is making a mistake. The world they leave behind is one of “kindness, comfort, safety, the warning voice of duty, the perfect hush of temptation”. The one they enter turns out to be anything but.

Rowland and his Responsibility

Rowland is not a particularly forceful character. He has more money than he has ideas, and no talent whatsoever, which forces him to look to Roderick for anything like success or achievement in this world. Instead of trying to get a job, he goes to a place – Europe – where it does not matter whether he has a job or not. He falls in love with Roderick’s fiancée but spends the novel trying to prevent Roderick and Mary from breaking their engagement. He takes care of Roderick, but more financially than morally. Rowland seems to have an instinctive fear of involvement, of danger, of conflict. So he watches Roderick’s decline without stopping it. It is hard not to dislike him for this, for his unwillingness to get either his own life in order, or that of Roderick. I certainly was ambivalent towards him.

Unless you are Emily Dickinson, it is hard to be a great artist without some degree of experience, of mobility. Rowland is right to take Roderick away, to give him a chance. But he is wrong to think that Europe can only offer positive developments. At the end of the first chapter in Europe, Roderick declares he wants to go off on his own, and Rowland, who bankrolls everything, lets him. The next time we meet our hero, he’s already gravely in debt. “Experience” turns out to be women and gambling. “I possess an almost unlimited susceptibility to the influence of a beautiful woman,” Roderick declares. Rowland, who forgives his protégé everything, does not admit to himself the danger of the words. Instead, he thinks that Roderick’s engagement to his cousin, Mary Garland, is a sufficient guarantee of good behaviour. How wrong he is.

The Coloseum painted.
The Colosseum, and Rome in general, form the backdrop of Roderick Hudson. Europe is dangerous, but also alluring to young Roderick. Unfortunately he is unable to resist its charms.

Christina Light

Christina Light is the woman who provides the danger at the heart of Roderick Hudson. She is an American, but has lived her twenty years of life on the Continent. Compared to the Puritans that Roderick leaves behind, Christina is a breath of fresh air. But even Roderick perceives, at least vaguely, that she might prove a problem. If “Beauty is immoral”, he says upon first seeing her, echoing the views of his family back home, then Christina is “the incarnation of evil”. He does not seem to realise that in the words of the New Englanders there may be more than just a grain of truth.

Christina is extremely beautiful, but capricious. Her mother tries to control her, with partial success, and Christina makes use of scandal and flirtation as her one source of freedom. Roderick appeals to her, and they begin a long will-they-or-won’t-they that runs the length of Roderick Hudson. Roderick thinks of the young woman as his Muse, but it doesn’t take long for his feelings of jealousy and frustration to turn his Muse into the opposite, and for his inspiration’s flow to run dry. Christina’s mother is obsessed with finding a rich prince for her daughter, and Roderick is neither of noble blood nor in possession of a positive balance at the bank. But he is unable to see the impossibility of the situation, or that in some way Christina might be using him for her own ends. Alas, his love leaves him blind to the truth.

A Backdrop of Stability: the Artists and Puritans of Roderick Hudson

Roderick and Christina have stormy emotions but also a great deal of vitality. Roderick Hudson, however, by its end seems to pronounce judgement on their style of living, and that judgement is not a positive one. In our search for positive characters we must look at the Puritans of the novel, and the artists of Rowland’s circle. Mary Garland, Roderick’s fiancée, is the main representative of the former group. She is intelligent, which we see by her constant reading and questioning, and she is also natural and unaffected in style. This is in contrast to Christina, who is always described as playing a role or being “dramatic”. Mary is honest too, which leaves her less vulnerable to her imagination. She faces the world, instead of trying to flee it like her fiancé.

Of the artists, a group made of Rowland’s friends in Rome, Sam Singleton stands out as a heroic figure. He is a painter of small talent, but of hard work. We know that he does not produce masterpieces, but whenever we see him, he is training, learning, and active. Instead of waiting idly for inspiration to come as does Roderick, Singleton goes out to hone his skills to be ready for it when it does. Roderick describes him as “a watch that never runs down. If one listens hard one hears you always – tic-tic, tic-tic.” We know that if Roderick had even an ounce of Singleton’s work ethic, he would be a far better sculptor, but it is also true that he would be a better person.

Singleton is happy, calm, at peace, where Roderick is prey to the full force of his emotions. A great artist is the one who can master their emotions and set them upon the page or marble, not simply experience them. Singleton’s weakness is a lack of torrential emotions, but it is an artistic weakness, not a human one. By the end of Roderick Hudson it was clear which of the two artists I would prefer to be, however boring my choice is.

A photo of Henry James, author of Roderick Hudson
It is somewhat hard to believe that Henry James was in his early thirties when he wrote Roderick Hudson. Like everything he wrote it seems to be written by a serious old man, and is just as exciting.

Conclusion

I confess that by about the half-way point I was rather keen to get Roderick Hudson over and done with. That’s not to say that I didn’t like the book – it was thoroughly okay – but there are many other books, waiting on my shelf, which I’m quite certain I will enjoy more. By the end, reading Roderick Hudson felt like a kind of penance, a sign of deference to the Master, but certainly not an act of love or pleasure. There are various reasons for this, and in his preface James notes several of them for us.

For one, the story is rather too determined by “developments”, events that seem rather forced. The novel’s final section, in Switzerland, is particularly weak in this regard – suddenly all the characters from Rome meet again, and James simply expects us to take this on faith. When James has his characters exclaim “it’s like something in a novel” this is no excuse. In fact, this spoils the impression still further. Rather than drawing our attention to the artificiality of the structure, the structure itself ought to have been altered.

I’m also not a great fan of the characters. Perhaps the women of the late 19th century were all as flighty as Christina Light or as sombre and serious as Mary Garland, but I struggle to believe that people were that simple. Being changeable does not make for a great or believable character. And beauty is not a character trait – it is laziness. The men come off only slightly better, but overall, I found myself disliking most of the characters, which made it hard to care about any of them or their fates. Rowland is ineffectual; Roderick is just an idiot.

Roderick Hudson was James’s first serious novel. Though he revised it later, it still bears the marks of his youth. Whatever technical genius he already displays here – and there are some awe-inspiring sentences – his feeling for people still has a way to go. I had planned to read all of James’s novels one-after-another as a kind of project. Unfortunately, for now I feel like I’d rather just think about reading them all instead.