by David Lodge
Whatever the source of his neuroses, they made him ill-fitted to survive alone after the split with Elizabeth Jane Howard. The problem was ingeniously solved, through the mediation of Martin and Philip, when Kingsley set up house with Hilly and her third husband Alastair Boyd, Lord Killmarnock, paying the bills in return for being looked after—a development someone in his circle compared to a twist in an Iris Murdoch novel. The arrangement worked well, but Kingsley was in many ways a sad figure by that time—anxious, overweight, impotent, and either bored or angry when he wasn’t writing. “Not much news . . .,” he wrote to Philip Larkin. “I go to the club and get drunk, or read and get drunk, or watch TV and get drunk.” That was actually in 1979, but his habits didn’t change much in succeeding years. His literary tastes, never very catholic, narrowed still further. He couldn’t get on with the new generation of fashionable British novelists like Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis, and was reduced to re-reading the crime stories of Dick Francis.
In Martin’s view, Kingsley pulled himself out of this slough of despond by writing The Old Devils (1986). It is, Martin thinks, his masterpiece, but
what mattered most to me at the time was that it announced a surrender of intransigence . . . [It] marked the end of his willed solitude. He hadn’t forgiven Jane, and never would, but he had forgiven women, he had forgiven love . . . Kingsley’s snarl of disappointment had finally run out of breath.
The Old Devils deservedly won the Booker Prize that year, the prize Martin is famous for not winning, but the son rejoiced in the father’s success (the Oedipal struggle was over by now); and it seemed to prompt a sudden late spurt of creativity. Several novels followed in quick succession, of varying quality, but always with cherishable and inimitable passages in them. Physically, though, Kingsley went into a steep decline. He began to fall down a lot, and one such fall triggered his final illness.
Martin’s account of that illness, a combination of trauma, stroke, dementia, and pneumonia, does full justice to its pathos, its black comedy, and its moments of almost Conradian horror (“I’m in hell,” he suddenly says from his hospital bed, to the consternation of his sons). In a particularly poignant scene, Martin tries to penetrate his father’s befogged mind by reading to him the wonderfully comic speech of the aphasic stroke victim, George Zeyer, in Ending Up.
—All this, Dad, in the book you wrote.
He is contemplating me with delighted admiration.
—Do you remember?
—No, he said.
There is a sense in which watching and waiting for the death of a parent is the same for everybody. It is one of the fundamental rites of passage, an item on what Martin Amis refers to (borrowing the phrase from his friend Christopher Hitchens) as “the pain schedule” we carry about with us all our lives; and it is one that most of us, on reflection, would rather suffer than avoid. Having lost my own father about seven months before reading Experience, at a much greater age (ninety-three) but in not dissimilar clinical circumstances, I found this part of the book particularly absorbing and moving. It seemed to me that it got the mixed emotions involved exactly right. (The effect was reinforced by a strange coincidence. In a “Postscript” Martin Amis records that three weeks after the death of his father he went on literary business to Poland, to Warsaw and Cracow, and took the opportunity to visit, for the first time, Auschwitz—where, inevitably, he struggled to make emotional and cognitive connections between the small scale of his personal pain schedule and the immense and incomprehensible suffering memorialised there. Four weeks after the death of my father I made exactly the same journey, with similar thoughts and emotions.)
In concentrating on those parts of Experience that are most relevant to Kingsley Amis’s Letters, I have hardly done justice to its thematic range and complexity. Some readers will be surprised by the personality of the author it reveals: tender, affectionate, even sentimental at times; a doting father, racked with guilt for breaking up his first marriage, thus visiting on his own sons the misery that he and his brother suffered when their parents separated; deeply disturbed by the foul murder of his cousin; sincerely delighted by his reunion with his long-lost daughter. I remember somebody in the media seriously suggesting to me at the time that the discovery of Delilah had been engineered as a publicity stunt to help sales of The Information. Martin Amis would probably be neither shocked nor surprised to hear that. He has a theory that the journalistic spite he attracts has something to do with the fact that his attackers are in the writing game too. “Valued reader, it is not for me to say that this is envy. It is for you to say that it is envy.”
I have another theory, not entirely frivolous. Could it be that he acquired his reputation for arrogance because for twenty-five years (as he tells us) he never smiled in public for fear of revealing his teeth? This seems to have been one of the penalties of dynastic succession, like the Hapsburg nose. Kingsley too, we learn, had bad teeth—hence the rather supercilious smirk in the photos of him as a handsome young man, and the tight-lipped jowly stare of the later portraits. And embedded in Experience is a wonderful mini-essay about the dental deficiencies of the two literary precursors Martin most admires, James Joyce and Nabokov. “I claim peership with these masters in only one area,” he writes. “Not in the art and not in the life. Just in the teeth.” The book is full of such delectable humour at the author’s own expense, by which he avoids the danger that this kind of writing always courts, of seeming narcissistic, self-justifying, and egocentric. The simultaneous publication of these two richly rewarding and intimately connected books, Letters and Experience, was a major literary event.
chapter seven
HENRY JAMES & THE MOVIES
THE HEROINE OF the hit romantic comedy of 1999, Notting Hill, is an American movie star who comes to England to make a film. That this film-within-a-film is an adaptation of an (unspecified) novel by Henry James shows how shrewdly Notting Hill fingered the pulse of cultural fashion and taste at the end of the twentieth century. Four major motion pictures based on James’s novels have been released in recent years—The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Washington Square and The Wings of the Dove (both 1997), and The Golden Bowl (2000).
The usual explanation for this phenomenon is that James is the new Jane Austen—that the vogue for his novels in the movie world was triggered by the success of Sense and Sensibility and Emma. But there were several earlier movie adaptations of James’s fiction. In 1974 there was Daisy Miller, directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The Merchant-Ivory team made The Europeans in 1979 and The Bostonians in 1984. There have been three film versions of The Turn of the Screw, most recently one in 1992 which updates the action to the 1960s. And going even further back, there was a film of Washington Square made by William Wyler in 1949 called The Heiress and based on the stage adaptation of that name. Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar for her performance in it.
Over the same period there were several television adaptations of James’s books, especially in England in the 1970s, when there must have been a fan of James high up in the BBC’s drama department. The BBC produced serial versions of The Portrait of a Lady in 1968, The Spoils of Poynton in 1970, The Golden Bowl in 1972, The Ambassadors in 1977, and The Wings of the Dove in 1979. A new adaptation of The Turn of the Screw was broadcast by the BBC in 2000. Television is arguably a more suitable medium than feature films for the adaptation of James’s novels. The small screen lends itself to James’s concentration on character and dialogue rather than action and spectacle. Serial form allows the adaptation to move at something like the leisurely pace of the original novels, most of which were in fact written for serial publication in magazines before they were published as books. For these and other reasons television adaptations of James’s novels are more likely to be faithful to the original novels, and therefore more likely to please those who have read the novels, than movie versions. I am not going to discuss TV adaptations of James here, however, mainly because they are not available for viewing. (For the same reas
on I omit discussion of the Merchant-Ivory feature film of The Europeans, which was not available as a video in Britain when I was writing this essay.)
That Henry James’s novels should be so popular with modern filmmakers is both ironic and paradoxical. It is ironic because throughout his literary career James hankered after a great popular and commercial success, and never achieved it. His novels never sold in great quantities, and his effort to become a stage dramatist ended in disaster after a few attempts, when he was booed by the gallery on the first night of Guy Domville in 1895, the most humiliating event of his literary career. In his lifetime he was revered by other writers and the more discriminating critics, but was never a best-seller, or anything like one. In recent times, however, his work has reached millions of people all around the world through the medium of the most popular and democratic art form of the twentieth century—the cinema.
James was an uncompromisingly highbrow writer, an innovator in form, whose works, particularly the later ones, are difficult and demanding even for well-educated readers. He was one of the founding fathers of the modern or modernist novel, which is characterised by obscurity, ambiguity, and the presentation of experience as perceived by characters whose vision is limited or unreliable. These are not the usual ingredients of best-selling fiction—and they are equally alien to the cinema. This is why the popularity of James’s books with modern filmmakers is paradoxical as well as ironic.
Henry James was supremely a novelist of consciousness. Consciousness was his subject: how individuals privately interpret the world, and often get it wrong; how the minds of sensitive, intelligent individuals are forever analysing, interpreting, anticipating, suspecting, and questioning their own motives and those of others. And consciousness of this kind, which is self-consciousness, is precisely what film as a medium finds most difficult to represent, because it is not visible. If you make the characters put their thoughts into speech, you destroy the essential feature of consciousness in James’s world-picture—its private, secret nature; if you have the characters articulate their thoughts in voice-over monologue, you go against the grain of the medium and produce an artificial, intrusive effect. Facial expression, body language, visual imagery, and music can all be powerfully expressive, but they lack precision and discrimination. They deal in broad basic emotions: fear, desire, joy. James’s fiction, by contrast, is full of the finest, subtlest psychological discriminations.
An example: in chapter 41 of The Portrait of a Lady, Gilbert Osmond is discussing with his wife, Isabel, Lord Warburton’s interest in his young daughter, Pansy. Relations between Isabel and her husband are already bad by this point in the story. Osmond says:
“My daughter has only to sit perfectly quiet to become Lady Warburton.”
“Should you like that?” Isabel asked with a simplicity which was not so affected as it may appear. She was resolved to assume nothing, for Osmond had a way of unexpectedly turning her assumptions against her. The intensity with which he would like his daughter to become Lady Warburton had been the very basis of her own recent reflections. But that was for herself; she would recognize nothing until Osmond should have put it into words; she would not take for granted with him that he thought Lord Warburton a prize worth an amount of effort that was unusual among the Osmonds. It was Gilbert’s constant intimation that for him nothing in life was a prize; that he treated as from equal to equal with the most distinguished people in the world, and that his daughter had only to look about her to pick out a prince. It cost him therefore a lapse from consistency to say explicitly that he yearned for Lord Warburton and that if this nobleman should escape his equivalent might not be found; with which moreover it was another of his customary implications that he was never inconsistent. He would have liked his wife to glide over the point. But strangely enough, now that she was face to face with him and although an hour before she had almost invented a scheme for pleasing him, Isabel was not accommodating, would not glide. And yet she knew exactly the effect on his mind of her question: it would operate as an humiliation. Never mind; he was terribly capable of humiliating her—all the more so that he was also capable of waiting for great opportunities and of showing sometimes an almost unaccountable indifference to small ones. Isabel perhaps took a small opportunity because she would not have availed herself of a great one.
Osmond at present acquitted himself very honourably. “I should like it extremely; it would be a great marriage.”
The corresponding passage in the screenplay of the 1996 film reads simply:
OSMOND: You see, I believe my daughter only has to sit perfectly quiet to become Lady Warburton.
ISABEL: Should you like that?
OSMOND: I should like it extremely.1
The long paragraph interpolated between Isabel’s question and Osmond’s answer in the novel is an extraordinarily subtle analysis of the games unhappily married people play when they talk to each other. Isabel pretends not to know how intensely Osmond desires the match in order to make him admit it and thus expose his own pretence of being aloof from such social vanities. This, we are reminded, is only one episode in the long war of attrition, of move and countermove, that their marriage has become. And although Isabel is the weaker party in this struggle, we see that she has learned, as it were, to fight dirty; she has learned how to dissemble for the sake of a small conversational advantage. Osmond, however, escapes by an unusual and graceful display of honesty: “I should like it extremely.” James’s dialogue is faithfully reproduced in the film, but there is absolutely no way the actors in the film could convey the content of Isabel’s unvoiced thoughts or those she imputes to Gilbert Osmond in the text.
Here is a second example, this time from Merchant-lvory’s The Bostonians, one of the most faithful feature film adaptations of a James novel. The story concerns the women’s movement in late nineteenth-century America. The heroine is a young girl, Verena Tarrant, with a charismatic gift for public speaking, who is befriended by the dedicated feminist—and, by implication, temperamentally lesbian—Olive Chancellor. Verena meets Olive’s cousin Basil Ransom, a handsome young man of traditional views from the Deep South, who falls in love with her and courts her, but insists that she must give up her public career in the women’s movement if she marries him. The story charts the tug-of-war between Olive and Basil for Verena’s allegiance, and between her own divided loyalties. In chapter 39 Basil pursues Verena to a small seaside village where the two women are staying, and calls on her. Verena, who has just reaffirmed her devotion to Olive, tries to dismiss him, but he persuades her to take a walk. Later, Olive receives a message from Verena that they have gone out to sea in a boat. In the novel the sequel is told entirely from Olive’s point of view, and represents a kind of dark night of the soul for her. She wanders the shore for hours thinking that Verena has betrayed her, that Verena never cared for her as she has for Verena, and she even doubts the point of her own feminist mission:
She knew, again, how noble and beautiful her scheme had been, but how it had all rested on an illusion, of which the very thought made her feel faint and sick.
Then these feelings are overtaken by fears for Verena’s safety. Olive hurries back to the house and finds Verena returned, huddled on the sofa.
She didn’t know what to make of her manner; she had never been like that before. She was unwilling to speak; she seemed crushed and humbled. This was the worst—if anything could be worse than what had gone before; and Olive took her hand with an irresistible impulse of compassion and reassurance. From the way it lay in her own she guessed her whole feeling—saw it was a kind of shame, shame for her weakness, her swift surrender, the insane gyration, in the morning. Verena expressed it by no protest and no explanation; she appeared not even to wish to hear the sound of her own voice. Her silence itself was an appeal—an appeal to Olive to ask no questions (she could trust her to inflict no spoken reproach); only to wait till she could lift up her head again. Olive understood, or thought she understood, and the woef
ulness of it all only seemed the deeper. She would just sit there and hold her hand; that was all she could do; they were beyond each other’s help in any other way now. Verena leaned her head back and closed her eyes, and for an hour, as nightfall settled in the room, neither of the young women spoke. Distinctly, it was a kind of shame. After a while the parlour-maid, very casual, . . . appeared on the threshold with a lamp; but Olive motioned her frantically away. She wished to keep the darkness. It was a kind of shame.
In the film we have no way of knowing exactly what either woman is thinking at this or any other point in the whole sequence, which is almost entirely silent, without dialogue, interior monologue, or even music. Olive’s behaviour as she wanders along the shore expresses only anxiety about what has happened to Verena (she has a vision of the young girl’s body being washed ashore which makes the point, perhaps over-emphatically). We have no way of knowing that she is suffering bitter disillusionment, with women in general and with Verena in particular. Then when Olive returns home to find Verena there, her behaviour in the film expresses only relief, and a sudden release of sexual passion when she embraces Verena. The gesture of waving away the maidservant with the lamp is retained, but we have no way of knowing that this is to conceal Verena’s “shame.”
