Hildegarde

A few years ago, I reread a lot of Henry James’s novels–I’m a big James fan, and I still think The Princess Cassamassima is the best tourist-at-the-revolution portrait I’ve seen yet–and I got a little shock in the middle of The Bostonians. 

For those of you who haven’t read James–and that seems to be mostly everybody lately–The Bostonians is the story of the rivalry of two people for the love and loyalty of a very beautiful young girl.  The rivalry has as much to do with the rivals’ philosophies of life as it does with ordinary sexual love.  One of the rivals is a down-at-heels Southern aristocrat with very traditional ideas about the relationships between men and women and the position of women in society.  The other is a high-born Boston woman and ardent suffragist whose bookish, pinched and censorious nature make her a bad political campaigner.  She hopes to turn the young woman into a fiery and effective crusader for women’s rights.

James being James, the Southerner, and the primeval urges for sex and procreation, win in the end, but the scene that always sticks in my mind is of the little band of women’s rights activists spending the Fourth of July at a house on Cape Cod, where they parade with candles and sparklers to celebrate “the Glorious Fourth.”    They’re absolutely ecstatic.  They love everything about the Fourth.  They think it’s the most important day in human history.   And they show no signs of the niggling, pinched, resentful anti-Americanism that characteried a lot of later American radicals.

I trust James for observations like this.   He’s good at them, and he had absolutely no patience with the kind of preening self-satisfied distaste for one’s own society that he found running rampant in radical circles in England, for instance, at the time. 

I find all this interesting, because it means that there are no necessary connections between the two branches of thought–that there is no reason why, if you’re the kind of person who wants significant chane, you must also feel that your own society is so thoroughly and irretrievably corrupt that it must be either worthless, or at least worth less than that of anybody else’s society anywhere.

Never mind.  I really love Henry James.  I think it was The Portrait of a Lady that gave me my first glimpse of what I would later feel to be the best way to live, and that in spite of the fact that Isabel Archer largely makes a mess of it.  Well, no, actually not.  Maybe the thing is that she makes a success of it in spite of having made a choice so catastrophically wrong it should have destroyed her.

I also think it’s interesting that James should have been the person to have focussed so much attention on the tourist-at-the-revoution business, and to have had so little sympathy for people who rejected and denigrated their American (or British, when it came to that) heritage. 

He lived most of his adult life outside the United States, largely because he was uncomfortable here.  He came from what Jonathan Franzen would later call “the high art tradition” with a vengeance.   He was the distinguished son of a distinguished and highly intellectual  Boston family.  He knew his bluestocking feminists at first hand.  He was homosexual at a time when there was not much room for it in New England.  He was naturally and by conviction an elitist in both the good and the bad sense, and this was a country that had just defeated its only even close to aristocratic tradition.  

Still, I’ll take James over any of the other nineteenth century novelists writing in  English.  I think he’s better than Dickens or  Trollopse and certainly better than Hawthorne or Melville, even the Melville of Moby Dick. 

There’s very little overarching philosophy in  James and a lot of careful attention to the details of everyday social ritual, or the lack of it.   His people, and especially his women, are among the most highly realized characters in all of prose fiction. 

He can be difficult to read, and he was not terribly commercially successful when he was alive.  He was one of those writers whom later writers needed to love or hate.  Edith Wharton made him not only her mentor (which he was, for a time), but her ideal.  Hemingway defined  his entire career in opposition to everything he thought James stood for.

I have a tendency to think of “American Literature” in the New England  Renaissance mode, as that body of work that includes both Hawthorne and Melville but also Whitman, literature about plain people in a plain country.   Even the New York of Bartleby the Scrivener–another of my favorite American stories, come to think of it, and the only Melville I think is nearly as good as even mediocre James–but even the New York in that story is a place with not very many people in it and not very much else, either. 

I know I’m not making much sense here.  I’m trying to describe something that is literally visual in my head, rather than verbal, and I don’t seem to be very good at it.  But it’s there in Emily  Dickinson, too, and in Winesburg, Ohio, and in Hemingway’s early stories about Michigan.  

And it’s even there in F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was consciously trying to write about the intricate web of social interactions, but who produced mostly stories about people behaving archly in a largely uninhabited landscape.  

James does something different, and so does his protegee, Edith Wharton. 

If you’ve got access to interlibrary loan or the kind of library that carries esoteric and not very popular books, try getting hold of an essay by George Steiner called “Archives of Eden.”  It’s a very long esay.  It could h ave been pulished on its own as a small paperback without too many complaints.  It’s basically an argument that says that America can never have truly great art because truly great art cannot be produced in a democratic society.   Truly great art, Steiner says, requires elitism to exist at all.

Well, James seems to have managed.  And although he was uncomfortable living in democracy, he had neither hatred nor disdain for it. 

And I’ve got no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

Back to hardwiring and moral codes–especially since Lymaree seems to have misunderstood me–tomorrow.

Let me just note that I have NEVER said that human beings were hardwired for any particular moral code or moral precepts.

I have said instead that:

1) human beings are hardwired for a lot of things, including the ability to think in moral categories and the drive to do so (just as we’re hardwire to be able to form languages and then to do it) AND

2) that by looking into all the things we are hardwired for, it is possible to apply our capacity to formulate moral codes to discover (in our hardwiring about things OTHER THAN moral codes, in our hardwired emotional and behavioral responses to certain stimuli) what those moral codes should be  AND

3) that there’s nothing odd about this.   We’re hardwired for curiosity about the world.  We’re hardwired to be capable of logical thought (if we weren’t, we couldn’t think that wasy).  Put these things together, and we discover lots of things about the world, and eventually invent the sciences.  But the fact that we’re not already hardwired to k now that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice versa doesn’t mean that when we discover that, it’s just a “social construct” that’s all about cultural influences.

4) the facts of morality are out there for us to find–but they’re out there, they’re not something we make up

5) we aren’t hardwired with the facts of morality any more than we’re hardwired to speak French rather than German,  BUT

6) we ARE  hardwired to need to find this information, and to invent it if we can’t find it, and to go looking for it until we come up with something that at least seeems to work.

And, like I said, I’ll get back to that later.

I have to cook.