But penance for what? The Awkward Age represents an enigma. Though it intends unquestionably to be a comedy—a social comedy, a comedy of manners (as “The Turn of the Screw” unquestionably sets out to be a ghost story)—some enormous grotesquerie, or some grotesque enormity, insinuates itself into this ultimately mysterious work. Having straitjacketed his tale with the “few grave, rigid laws” of the stage, James resolved not to “go behind” its scenes with all those dozens of canny analyses and asides that are possible for the novel; yet on the whole it is as if proscenium and backdrop, and all the accouterments between them, have melted away, and nothing is left but what is “behind”—a “behind” any ordinary novelistic explication would not be equal to and could not touch. Paradoxically, the decision not to “go behind” put James squarely backstage, in the dark of the wings, in ill-lit and untidy dressing rooms among discarded makeup jars and their sticky filth—in the very place where there can be no explanation of the world on stage, because the world on stage is an invention and an untruth. James descended, in short, into an interior chaos; or to say it otherwise, with the composition of The Awkward Age he became, finally and incontrovertibly, a modernist. Like the modernists, he swept past the outer skin (the theater and its stage, the chatter of counterfeit drawing rooms, the comings and goings of actors and audiences, the coherent conscious machinery of things) to the secret life behind—glimmers of buried truths, the undisclosed drama of hint and inference.
The façade of comedy and the horror behind. And the penalty for “going behind”—while rigging up, via those “few grave, rigid laws,” every obstacle to it—was the impenetrable blackness, the blankness, the nox perpetua, that gathered there, among the ropes and pulleys, where it is inevitable that one “hears, overhears, guesses, follows, takes in, becomes acquainted with, horrors.” (The condition, one might note, of K. in The Castle.) And the horrors themselves? They cannot be named. It is their namelessness that defines them as horrors.
Yet James did give them a name—amorphous, suggestive, darkened by its imperial Roman origins, reminiscent of ancient clerical pageantry, more a riddle than a name: “the sacred terror.” A translation, or, more likely a transmutation, of sacro terrore: the awe one feels in the presence of sacred or exalted personages, pope or emperor, before whom one may not speak; the dread one feels before the divine mysteries, or the head of Medusa. The face of a knowledge that is beyond our knowledge—intimations that cannot be borne. In the Preface to “The Turn of the Screw,” James referred (handling it lightly so as not to be burned) to “the dear old sacred terror” as “the withheld glimpse” of “dreadful matter.” The glimpse is withheld; to be permitted more than the glimpse would be to know too much. The sacred terror is, in fact, the sensation—not simply fright, but a kind of revulsion—that comes when glimpse perilously lengthens into gaze.
II. THE SACRED TERROR
IN 1894, the year before the idea of The Awkward Age materialized in his Notebook, and not long before Guy Domville went into rehearsals, two electrifying personal events brought James close to the sacred terror, far closer than he wished to be. In both instances he stopped at glimpse and contrived to shut himself away from gaze. The first event was the suicide, in Italy, of Constance Fenimore Woolson. A relation of James Fenimore Cooper, Fenimore (as she was called) was an American novelist who settled successively in Florence, Venice, and Rome. Bent on homage, she had first approached James in 1880, in Florence, with a letter of introduction from America. James found her intelligent and moderately engaging, and offered his assistance as an acutely sophisticated guide to Florentine art. But what was a cautious friendship on his part became, on hers, a worshipful love. James could not reciprocate. She was middle-aged, unmarried, deaf in one ear—an admirable companion whom he was learning to be wary of. He worried that she might mistake occasional camaraderie for an encouragement of the affections. The news of her death in 1894, after nearly a decade and a half of correspondence (her letters were very long, his very short) bewildered and initially misled him. He had the impression she had died of “pneumonia supervening on influenza,” and prepared to journey from London to her funeral in Rome. “Poor isolated and fundamentally tragic being!” he summed her up. “She was intrinsically one of the saddest and least happy natures I have ever met; and when I ask myself what I feel about her death the only answer that comes to me is from what I felt about the melancholy, the limitations and the touching loneliness of her life. I was greatly attached to her and valued exceedingly her friendship.” All that, however, was glimpse, not gaze. The moment James learned it was suicide that had removed Fenimore—she had leaped from a second-story window—he retreated quickly and decided against attending her burial. Leon Edel speculates that James felt some responsibility for the hopelessness that had led to what James termed her “suicidal mania.” Whether that is so or not, it is certainly true that James came to rest in a conventional, and distancing, judgment—“fundamentally tragic being!”—and averted his eyes from any connection he might have had with Fenimore’s dread, or her destruction. He would not seek to know too much. He would evade the sacred terror. He would not “go behind”: the preparation for going behind—the horrible hours—had not yet occurred.
Two years before Fenimore’s death, James’s sister Alice died in London. The cause was breast cancer, but she had been strangely invalided since girlhood, and was in the care of a young woman companion, Katharine Loring. Alice had followed James to London, or had at least followed his inclination to extract himself from America. Hers was an activist temperament (she interested herself in the hot politics of Irish Home Rule) that had chosen, for reasons neither her physicians nor her family could fathom, to go to bed for life. An 1889 photograph of her lodgings at Leamington—a health resort outside of London—survives: a capacious sick-room, high-ceilinged, with a single vast window, curtained and draperied; pictures dropped on long wires from the wainscoting; a chandelier sprouting fat globes; a tall carved mirror over a black fireplace; a round table with lamp, vase, flowers, books, magnifying glass. The effect is of Victorian swathing—layers of cloth over every flat and vertical surface: the mantel hung with cloth, the table, the back of a chair. Lamps, jugs, flowers, photos parade across the mantel. The Persian hearthrug smothers still another carpet, splotched with large flowers. Alice James herself seems swathed, almost swaddled, half-erect on a kind of sofa muffled in voluminously sprawling bedclothes, pillows propping her shoulder and neck. Next to her, nearer the window, holding a book, sits Miss Loring, her throat and bosom lost in a flurry of scarves. Both women are severely buttoned to the chin. It is a photograph that incites the lungs to gulp air; if it were possible to step into this scene, though the looking glass is polished and clear, one might feel choked by too many flower-patterns, the mistiness of light incarcerated, the stale smells of unrelieved enclosure.
William James, in his farewell letter to his sister, wrote that “if the tumor should turn out to be cancerous,… then goodbye to neurasthenia and neuralgia and headache, and weariness and palpitation and disgust all at one stroke.” To this physician brother, Alice had all along suffered from “the inscrutable and mysterious character of the doom of nervous weakness which has chained you down for all these years.” Alice’s illness, in short, was—until the advent of cancer—what we nowadays call “psychological.” The genius sister of two genius brothers, she was self-imprisoned, self-restricted. Engulfed by cushions and shawls and wrappings at Leamington, in 1889 she began a diary: “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather what doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me.”
She had had a history of terrors and nightmares. At twenty she had her first nervous breakdown (if that is what it was), at thirty her second, whereupon she was launched into an infinite series of undiagnosable ailments and their dubious, sometimes bizarre, remedies. She talked of suicide, and kept lists of contemporary suicides. She str
uggled for intellectual autonomy in an age when young women submitted, through marriage or otherwise, to the limitations of the domestic. Invalidism was, obliquely, one manner of solution: it yielded up an escape from ordinary female roles and contexts. At rest on her sofa, surrounded by heaps of books on every table-top, Alice lived in her head.
In her head she fought for Irish liberation; in her head she fought for her own. A famous sentence in her diary records a passionate revolution, in fantasy, of body and soul against a ruling class of one: “As I used to sit immovable reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly invading my muscles, taking some one of their myriad forms such as throwing myself out of the window or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table, it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and straitjacket upon me too.”
In contrast to these dark recollections, Alice’s diary offers a mellow view of Henry James, who often came to divert her and Miss Loring, bringing catty news and speculative gossip from his broader social world. “I have given him endless care and anxiety but notwithstanding this and the fantastic nature of my troubles I have never seen an impatient look upon his face or heard an unsympathetic or misunderstanding sound cross his lips. He comes at my slightest sign,” she wrote, and spoke of a “pitch of brotherly devotion never before approached by the race.” After Alice’s death in 1892, Katharine Loring took away with her to Boston an urn containing Alice’s ashes, and two thick notebooks; the latter were the pages of the diary. Two years later—in 1894, the year of Fenimore’s suicide—Miss Loring arranged for the diary to be privately printed, and dispatched one copy to Henry, and another to William. Both brothers were impressed. Henry described his sister’s literary claim—he recognized that the diary was a literary work—as “heroic in its individuality, its independence—its face-to-face with the universe for and by herself,” and praised the “beauty and eloquence,” the “rich irony and humor,” of Alice’s pen. William’s own high pleasure—“a leaf in the family laurel crown”—was tempered by a graver evaluation: “personal power venting itself on no opportunity,” he concluded.
But it was Henry who backed away from the diary—much as he had had second thoughts about going to Fenimore’s funeral. To begin with, he insisted that the diary not be published in his lifetime; and then he burned his copy—motivated, he said, by Alice’s habit of setting down his sometimes unseemly accounts of friends and acquaintances. (Years later he made a bonfire of all the thousands of letters in his possession, obliterating the revelations of decades.) Amusement had become, in his sister’s hands, document. James found himself shaken by “so many names, personalities, hearsays (usually, on Alice’s part, through me!)”; he informed William that Alice’s exposures made him “intensely nervous and almost sick with terror about possible publicity, possible accidents, reverberation etc.,” and that he “used to say everything to Alice (on system) that could égayer [entertain] her bedside and many things in confidence. I didn’t dream she wrote them down.… It is a ‘surprise’ that is too much of a surprise.” There was more for James to grapple with, though, than the mortification of stumbling on his own remarks. It might be disconcerting that Alice had mentioned a certain essayist’s “self-satisfied smirk.” Yet something else lay coiled at the bottom of his sister’s diary, and James was unequipped to live with it.
He met there, in fact—side by side with the bits of raillery and the vehement Irish nationalism—terrifying resonances and reminiscent apparitions. After the death of the James paterfamilias at home in Massachusetts, the diary disclosed, Alice, desolate in an empty house, was assaulted by the vibrations of a voice: “In those ghastly days, when I was by myself in the little house on Mt. Vernon Street, how I longed to flee … and escape from the ‘Alone, Alone!’ that echoed thro’ the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered from the walls, and confronted me, like a material presence, as I sat waiting, counting the moments.” James himself, five years after the undoing of Guy Domville, grieved over “the essential loneliness of my life” (the emphasis is his own). “This loneliness,” he put it, “what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper, about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.”
Alice James’s “Alone!” and Henry James’s “deepest thing” had their antecedents in a phantasmagorical visitation endured by their father fifty years before. It was a vision, or a phantom, or an omen, so paralyzing to the spirit, so shocking in its horror, that Henry James Senior was compelled to give it a name (seemingly a fusion of “devastation,” “visitation,” “vast”) out of Swedenborgian metaphysics: vastation. One spring day after dinner, he testified, “feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion,” he was all at once flooded by panic: “To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck; that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy.” And another time he described himself as “inwardly shriveled to a cinder,” altered to a “literal nest of hell within my own entrails.”
The younger Henry James had turned away from Fenimore’s suicide. In nearly the same moment he had turned away from his sister’s diary. The suicide intimated influences fatal to life from a fetid personality. The diary was fundamentally a portrait of infantile helplessness, a shriveled soul, hell within the entrails. The elder James, with his damnèd shape; Fenimore, flinging herself to the pavement; Alice, listening to the ghostly susurrations of her abandonment—each had dared to look into the abyss of knowing-too-much; James would not look with them. It was not until he had himself succumbed to his own vastation—eye to eye with the sacred terror on the stage of the St. James Theater in 1895—that he was ready to exchange glimpse for gaze. The brawling pandemonium (it continued, in fact, for fifteen minutes) had not lasted ten seconds before he felt himself a wreck, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, sovereign artistry to one of almost helpless infancy. Everything he had thought himself to be—a personage of majestic achievement—disintegrated in an instant. He could not go on as he had. Simply, he lost his nerve.
But he found, in the next work he put his hand to, not only a new way of imagining himself, but a new world of art. By paring away narrative rumination and exposition—by treating the novel as if it were as stark as a play-script—he uncovered (or invented) a host of labyrinthine depths and devices that have since been signally associated with literary modernism. For one thing, representation, while seeming to keep to its accustomed forms, took on a surreal quality, inscrutably off-center. For another, intent, or reason, gave way to the inchoate, the inexpressible. The narrative no longer sought to make a case for its characterizations; indirection, deduction, detection, inference proliferated. An unaccountable presence, wholly unseen, was at last let in, even if kept in the tale’s dark cellar: the damnèd shape, the sacred terror. The tale began to know more than the teller, the dream more than the dreamer; and Henry James began his approach to the Kafkan. In those “most horrible hours of my life” after his inward collapse on the stage of the St. James, the curtain was being raised for The Awkward Age.
III. The Awkward Age
The Awkward Age is, ostensibly, a comedy of manners, and resembles its populous class in that it concerns itself with the marriage-ability of a young woman. Nearly a hundred years after James wrote, no theme may appear so moribund, so obsolete, as the notion of “marrying off” a daughter. Contemporary daughters (and contemporary wives) enter the professions or have jobs, and do not sit o
n sofas, month after month, to be inspected by possibly suitable young men who are themselves to be inspected for their incomes. The difference between late-Victorian mores and our own lies in female opportunity and female initiative, with freedom of dress and education not far behind. Yet the similarities may be stronger than the differences. It is still true that the term of marital eligibility for young women is restricted to a clearly specified span of years; it is still true that a now-or-never mentality prevails, and that young women (and often their mothers) continue to be stung by the risks of time. The gloves, parasols, boas, corsets, feathered hats, and floor-sweeping hems have vanished; the anxiety remains. A century ago, getting one’s daughter appropriately married was a central social preoccupation, and, though marriage is nowadays not a young woman’s only prescribed course in life, it is as much a gnawing preoccupation as it ever was. In this respect, no one can call the conditions of The Awkward Age dated.
In respect of sexual activity, those conditions are equally “modern.” If sexual activity, in habit and prospect, defines manners, then—as a comedy of manners—The Awkward Age is plainly not a period piece. To be sure, society no longer pretends, as the Victorians did, to an ideal of young virgins kept from all normal understanding until the postnuptial deflowering; but in The Awkward Age, which depicts a public standard of ineffable purity not our own, that standard is mocked with bawdy zest. (Henry James bawdy? Consider the scuffle during which little Aggie sets her bottom firmly down upon a salacious French novel.) The Awkward Age, as a matter of fact, teems with adultery and emblems of incest; what appears to be wholesome finally suggests the soiled and the despoiled.
Still, it is not sexual standards and their flouting that move this novel from its opening lightness toward the shadowed distortions that are its destination. Rather, it is the unpredictable allegiances of probity. Probity arrives in the shape of Mr. Longdon, who “would never again see fifty-five” but is rendered as an aged, even antediluvian, gentleman, complete with pince-nez, old-fashioned reticences, and touchy memories of his prime. In his prime, in a moral atmosphere he judges to be superior to that of the present, he (long ago) loved and lost Lady Julia. He has never married, and for years has lived away from London, in the country, in a house poignantly similar to James’s own Lamb House in Rye. He is a meticulous watcher and silent critic, sensitive, upright, certainly elderly in his perception of himself; a man of the past. One might imagine at first that Mr. Longdon (he is always called “Mr.”) is yet another incarnation of James’s eager old gentlemen—the life-seeker Strether who, in The Ambassadors, opens himself to the seductions of Paris, or the thrill-thirsty John Marcher of “The Beast in the Jungle,” who waits for some grand sensation or happening to befall him. Mr. Longdon, by contrast, is a backward-looker. Lady Julia was his Eden, and the world will never again be so bright or so right. “The more one thinks of it,” he remarks, “the more one seems to see that society … can never have been anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of time—and I belong, you see, to the twilight—it had made out much less how vulgar it could be.”
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