Henry James Archives - Mostly About Stories

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 19^th 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.

Sex and Society in Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else

Fräulein Else is a surprising novella of sex and desire that retains its power to shock even now, almost a hundred years after it was published in 1924. Its Austrian-Jewish author, Arthur Schnitzler, was rather notorious in his day for his works’ frank depictions of sexuality, especially – in the case of Fräulein Else – of female sexuality. Taking us inside his characters’ heads, in a stream of consciousness style reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s in Ulysses, Schnitzler in Fräulein Else and elsewhere shows us what, under the respectable veneer of 19^th century literary realism, was lurking all along – real and violent passion.

A painting of a reclining woman. The cover of my edition of Fräulein Else. — William Edward Frost, “Life study of the female figure”, (c) Victoria & Albert Museum. *Fräulein Else* asks us, at least in part, to consider how far the socially conditioned idea of innocent and passive women is actually true by showing us what actually takes place within one such woman’s mind.

Fräulein Else is the story of a young girl whose life falls apart over the course of one evening. A playful and young nature comes against forces she is unable to withstand – forces of power, both masculine and monetary. Else’s story is that of an attempt to live against a world that is unwilling to let her do so, and the results are ultimately fatal.

Setting the Scene – the beginning of Fräulein Else

We are introduced in Fräulein Else to our protagonist in her natural state – at play. She has just finished a round of tennis with her cousin and his lover and she has decided to go back to her hotel. Else is in Italy, in the Trentino resort of San Martino di Castrozza. Whether the action takes place before or after the First World War is hard to make out – the hotel is full of international guests, just as in a Henry James novel – but we have a sense that for the likes of Else, the time doesn’t matter. She plays games, flirts endlessly in her head, imagines herself with many lovers, pictures a wonderful villa by the beach, and obsesses over her naked figure. All is well in the world.

But then a letter comes from home in Vienna. Her father, a lawyer, has fallen on hard times and there is no way for the family to keep itself afloat without Else’s help. Every friend has already lent him money, and there is now no choice but for Else to ask an acquaintance of her father’s at the hotel, Herr Dorsday, whether he would pay off the 30000 Guilder debt within the next two days. Otherwise the debtors’ prison awaits him. Else eventually asks Dorsday for her help, but he sets a condition – Else must show herself to him, naked, at midnight. After all her sexual imaginings, the idea repulses her, and she is sent spiralling into confusion. On the one hand, the demands of her father, of maintaining her social position; on the other, her desire for sexual autonomy.

One moment she seems to condemn her father to either shooting himself or being locked up; the next, she wants it to be herself who dies.

Else herself – a successful free spirit?

Coming from the 19^th century as I more or less do, Else’s clearly articulated sexuality is surprising, if not quite as shocking as it would once have been. Her pleasure in her young and naked body shows the pure desire to live that she embodies:

“Ah, how wonderful it is to walk naked up and down one’s room. Am I really as beautiful as the mirror makes me look? Ah, come a little closer, my young lady. I want to kiss your blood-red lips. I want to press your breasts to mine. What a shame it is, that glass, cold glass, separates the two of us. Oh how good we would be together. Isn’t it so? We need nobody else. Not a single other human being.”

But for all her sexual confidence, the text also reveals a kind of solipsism on Else’s part. Without any love for those in the world, she ultimately turns inward. She is free spirited, imagining herself with hundreds of lovers, but she has no respect for any of them. I liked her because of her wilfulness, not because she is in any way a good person. But this lack of love for others is also, it seems, the result of a lack of love from them too. After dismissing the French and piano lessons she concludes of her upbringing: “But what goes on in my heart and what digs at me and makes me afraid, has anyone ever cared about that?” We have a sense that, even disregarding the stream of consciousness, Else is not only unhappy, she is also terribly alone.

A Woman’s Lot

Thoughts of suicide circle around Else like flies. She has several capsules of Veronal, a popular sleeping pill, and even before the letter arrives she considers taking them all. For all her spiritedness, what stands out about Else is just how unhappy she is. In spite of her attempts to maintain autonomy in this world, it’s clear that she’s trapped in it. Even though she pretends that all is well at the novel’s beginning, the very fact that she has the pills on hand suggests that this is not exactly the case.

She is not talented. She admits as much. “I’m not made for a bourgeois life. I possess no talent”. She speaks several languages and plays the piano, but in the end, there’s nothing she can do with her life except waft about hotels. Her choice is either a sensible marriage, or a “nurse or telephone operator”. For a woman at the time, there were few other choices. When she tries to assert herself, her only option is to be a “Luden” – a slut, as opposed to the whore Dorsday wants her to be, or a passive wife. But even this assertion is imperilled by her dependence on Dorsday’s money. In the end, she can barely assert herself at all.

Else hatches an insane plan involving going to Dorsday, who is listening to music, naked but for a coat and shoes. She is successful, but the intensity of the moment leads to her fainting and being carried back to her room by her cousin and her aunt while they wait for a doctor. Here again we have a sense of Else’s powerlessness as a woman. Her problems and mental state are immediately dismissed as hysteria and – what is more – her aunt thinks the best course of action is simply to lock Else away in an institution. Even among women, the pressure to conform is paralysing, and the punishments for non-conformity are terrifying. Else, who has shown her sexuality in public via her nakedness, now must be hidden away.

Decline and Fall: Money and Society

But the greatest pressures on Else are financial. One key tension of Fräulein Else lies between one’s place in society, and where one ought to be. As Else remarks, she’s not fit for the bourgeois life. Alongside her own thoughts of suicide, she mentions that her father’s brother killed himself when he was young too. Her father is desperately, and failingly, trying to maintain his position in society through money that he doesn’t have. Else herself can only enjoy the hotel because of the good graces of her aunt, who is paying for her stay. Wherever she looks, she is dependent on others because she has no money for herself. Dorsday can control her because he has money, and because he is an older man. Even if Else were to go against him Dorsday can dismiss her as being hysterical. She is doubly trapped.

Stream of Consciousness, Loss of Consciousness

In fact, the very form and style of Fräulein Else plays into its suggestions about female sexuality and suffocating society. Else is free – to flirt, to imagine a beautiful future – but only within her own mind. Whenever she comes into contact with external forces, whether they be a telegram from Vienna or a chance encounter with friends, she is unable to control herself – social and familial obligations suddenly take over. At the novella’s end, when Else lies dying after a sudden faint, the situation is particularly acute. She is conscious – she hears what others are saying all around her – but she is unable to get up to act or speak for herself. In dying, she has become even more fully the object, open to the control of others, than she ever was before. The sense of being locked in is only the culmination of an entire novella’s worth of powerlessness.

Conclusion

I liked Fräulein Else. Else herself, with her divided nature and conflicting loyalties, is described well – I really felt she was alive, and though I knew what was coming it was awful to watch it happening through her eyes. I really had a sense of how much she wanted to live, and yet how hard it was for her to do so in the society she lived in. But all the same, and as much as I liked the stream of consciousness style, I felt a sense of relief when I finished the story. A feeling of claustrophobia from the style suits the plot, but it’s not something I would want to see extended into a novel-length project. Fräulein Else is good because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Any longer and we might lose our patience with our young and foolish protagonist, or the tragedy might be blunted.

Fräulein Else is the first thing I’ve read by Schnitzler and will probably not be the last – if for no other reason than my edition also contains his “Lieutenant Gustl”, and because the German was surprisingly easy to read. For more Austro-Hungarian tales of declines and falls, Hofmannsthal, Márai, and Zweig are your “friends”.

Have I completely misread Else? Why not leave a comment below?

Fate and Control in Stefan Zweig’s The Fowler Snared (Sommernovellette)

The Fowler Snared is a short story by the German-language writer Stefan Zweig. Though it is short, it nonetheless reflects a lot of the key preoccupations of the German “Novelle” form while putting its own spin on them. There is a tension in this short tale between our desire for power and control, and our ability to achieve that same control. As in a work of tragic drama the characters of The Fowler Snared discover that there are forces – luck, fate, whatever – that act upon them even as they try to give order to their own world.

A photo showing Stefan Zweig, a handsome young man with glasses dressed formally. — Stefan Zweig, Austrian and Jewish German writer. The photo shows him at about the age he was when he wrote *The Fowler Snared*.

Zweig’s story, taking place on the banks of Lake Como in Northern Italy and detailing something akin to a failed romance, is typical of the highly cosmopolitan writer that Zweig was. Indeed, its setting and language reminded me somewhat of the opening of Henry James’s Daisy Miller, another work from a transnational talent. Born in Vienna 1881 to a family of wealthy but nonreligious Jews, Zweig was a pacifist and internationalist. Following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany Zweig fled first to the UK, then the United States, and finally Brazil. There, overwhelmed by Hitler’s early successes in the Second World War, he and his wife jointly committed suicide in 1942.

The Fowler Snared is from 1906 and contains none of that fear or anxiety about the world that Zweig’s later works, such as The Royal Game/Chess Story/Schachnovelle do, even though the story does acknowledge some of the darker sides of human character. But anyway, to the story.

Introduction: Plot and Form in The Fowler Snared

What’s in a story? I’ve spoken about the Novelle form in my piece on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, and also in my thoughts on Theodor Storm’s “Aquis Submersus”. Generally we have a frame narrative, a small cast of characters, leitmotifs or recurring symbols, and a moment of crisis around the middle or else a twist. The Fowler Snared has all of these. The story begins in Cadenabbia, a place of “white villas” and “dark trees” on the banks of Lake Como. A place that is full of potential romance. But already something is slightly off, because it is August, and the narrator finds his hotel almost empty – those people looking for crowds, for adventure, would have been better off coming in the spring.

But still there are guests. The narrator singles one out, an elderly gentleman, and approaches him in search of a story. “Why, I wondered, did he not go away to some seaside resort?” the narrator asks himself. In approaching him the narrator makes us aware of the artificiality of stories, the way that they often need to be constructed out of forced experience that may often prove unrewarding. The man, however, rewards the narrator’s curiosity with a story just as he had hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Experience and Memory

The old man, who had “never had either a fixed occupation or a fixed place of abode”, is always described in pairs of adjectives to indicate his lack of stable existence. The narrator remarks that with the end of his life his accumulated experiences would be scattered and lost. “I have no interest in memories. Experience is experienced once for all; then it is over and done with” is the man’s reply, but he agrees to tell his story all the same. And here, as we enter the second narrative layer, we first encounter the tension that will be the man’s undoing – the tension between what he says and what, ultimately, he does.

The Old Man’s Story: The Girl

A year ago the old man was staying at the same hotel, and there he came to be aware of certain guests – a family of Germans. He is intrigued by the youngest of them, a plain girl of about sixteen or seventeen. He sits watching her, unable to work out why he finds her interesting. He admits to himself that she is nothing more than a teenager, “gazing dreamily across the lake”. And already there comes a natural impulse for control – he begins to imagine her personality, where he can only see her outward appearance. “She must be dreaming”, he thinks, of romantic tales.

A photo of Lake Como, where A Fowler Snared is set. — A photo of Lake Como, looking lovely. Resorts are always useful in the literature of this period. They let characters relax and forget a little the social rules that would bind them otherwise, thanks to the fact that all acquaintances here are by default fleeting and temporary. Chekhov’s “Lady With a Little Dog” is another classic resort-town romance. Photo by Stan Shebs CC BY-SA

And so he decides to create such a tale for her and be the author of her own story – “I made up my mind to find her a lover”. He writes her a love letter without signing it, leaves it for her to find the next morning. He does not consider the risk – he has a low opinion of women and thinks the girl is much too meek and quiet to tell anybody about the letter. There is certainly a sense that the man is living out a masculine power fantasy by controlling her.

His first letter is a success and he writes another, and another. The “sport” and “game” of his “imaginary passion” brings him an immense pleasure. But it also brings the girl pleasure. She “seemed to dance as she walked”, and her previous plainness disappears now that she pays attention to her appearance. For the moment all is well, “the marionette danced, and I pulled the strings skilfully”. But our control over the world is not so permanent as the old man might have hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Control’s Failure

There are two mistakes, two things that the old man doesn’t anticipate. In his letters, to avoid the possibility that the girl might realise it is him who is writing them, he now suggests that he comes from another resort each morning to look at her. The girl begins to sit watching the steamer. And one morning, a “handsome young fellow arrives”. Their eyes meet, and although they do not know each other they both succumb to the illusion that they were destined to meet. For the old man, this comes as a shock. “He had almost caught up with her, and I was feeling in my alarm that the edifice I had been building was about to be shattered”. At the final moment, however, the girl’s mother arrives and the two are unable to meet. But this has already revealed the fragility of the man’s overall control.

The next morning the second instance of the man’s inability to control fate is revealed. He comes across the girl in “disorder”. “The charming restlessness had been replaced by an incomprehensible misery”. He only understands when he sees that the family’s table is not laid – they have left the resort. She has been unable to meet her imagined lover. Not only that, but the man’s manipulation, which at first had brought her pleasure, is now the cause of her despair. The moral aspect of the story grows harder to avoid.

Two Moments of Conflict

The old man’s story ends. But as the narrator points out, this is not a good story. The novella form itself demands neatness, a tying up that is absent here. “A story needs an ending”, he says. And so he himself takes a more active role again, asking questions and leading the conversation. He says how he imagines the story ends: the old man was incapable of feigning passion like that forever. In the end, the passion became real. He came back to the same place a year later, hoping to find the girl and declare his love.

And here the man interrupts him with a denial that is as good as a confession. A novella often has a moment of crisis as its high point. This crisis, where the old man’s secret is revealed, is two-parted. There is of course the revelation of his secret, but more importantly there is also his failure. The girl is not here. He returned, “wooing fortune’s favour only to find fortune pitiless”. In a sense, the crisis has already taken place before the story begins. And that makes its impact, the sense of the old man’s powerlessness before fate, all the greater. He tried to control the girl, only to find another force, a more powerful force, controlling him. It is a pleasant irony and gives a nice symmetry to the story.

Stories and the Language of Control

I read The Fowler Snared in an English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul, and the translation seems to be a fine one. It didn’t get in the way of the story, and most importantly it was clear, letting the uncertainties of Zweig’s own dialogues and descriptions come to the forefront. For after all, alongside the controlling impulse of the man himself towards the girl, the act of speaking and telling a story is also one that involves giving order and control to something that is essentially boundless and untransferable – personal experience.

First, we have story itself. It is created when the narrator approaches the old man at the beginning of The Fowler Snared, then is given an ending when the narrator pressures the old man to explain his return to the resort. Even the old man himself is aware of the ways that stories are constructed. “The old fellows… would rather talk of their successes than of their failures”. He makes us aware of the inevitable gap between what we hear and what could be said. He was comfortable ending the story without acknowledging that although he had successfully manipulated the girl, he had failed to meet her this time. In the same way, it’s hard to avoid considering that the girl herself never gets a chance to speak in The Fowler Snared. Language and form control her throughout. Even the letter itself is language, weaponised as a tool for power.

Stories are a way of controlling the past. The old man, so long as he himself is speaking, is calm. But when the narrator guesses his secret, he is forced to shout over him and deny the truth. Once he has taken control again, to finish the story, he once again tries to control what we as readers learn. He quotes Balzac to describe his predicament, distancing himself by means of literature from his reality. But ultimately we are left with the knowledge that language is a double-edged sword. The very language he uses to avoid his fate is the language that got him into it. The passionate letters lead to his own ruin just as much as they lead to the girl’s.

Conclusion

I really liked The Fowler Snared. Though it is short, I felt that the way it combined its form and content was interesting. As with many novellas it presents the conflict between order and disorder, but here it shows how we humans are responsible for creating both sides of that coin, first building up systems of control, and then watching as they collapse. Really though, I liked it because it was clearly written, short enough to get through in an evening, and will be good for answering essays on. What more could I possibly want?

For more writers of this period, there’s Hofmannsthal, Trakl, and Sandor Marai to consider.