It may have been imprudent to spend yesterday afternoon on the balcony, reading. I wore a stout cardigan — but I was aware of needing one. I awoke this morning with a touch of sore throat. In view of the Remicade infusion that’s scheduled for Tuesday, I thought it best to stay home. Spending this afternoon on the balcony was not a temptation; although just as sparkling clear, it has been not nearly so balmy today. Instead of tootling down to the Angelika to see What Maisie Knew, which opened today, I finished re-reading the book instead, in the bedroom.

Kathleen saw the movie the other night and quite liked it. (She signed up for a course of previews, not one of which I’ve seen, having been no more willing to go to the movies than to do anything else out of the house.) I understand that the new adaptation, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose treatment of Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Deep End I admire greatly, takes at least one major liberty with Henry James’s text, aside from relocating it in today’s New York: the figure of the poor old governess, Mrs Wix, has been eliminated. This must simplify the story greatly. I gather, too, that the actress who plays Maisie, Onata Aprile, is a remarkable six years old throughout; the novel’s Maisie grows up a bit. I shall try to see the movie next week, while the novel is clear in my mind.

Not that What Maisie Knew is as clear to me as I should like. I’ve read it twice before, once so early in life that I could make no more of it than Maisie herself, and once, much more recently but without the patience that James’s novels of this period require. This time, I found the novel somewhat protracted. From the moment that Sir Claude whisked Maisie off to Folkestone, and then to Boulogne, James seemed to me to be lingering, almost loitering, over Sir Claude’s genial lack of moral backbone— as, of course, perceived by Maisie herself. It was asking too much of a Twenty-First Century reader to be disturbed by the “irregularity” of Sir Claude’s relationship with Mrs Beale, and I preferred to suppose that Maisie turns her back on her stepfather simply because he can’t make up his mind to what he acknowledges to be the right thing. It was difficult to decide whether Mrs Wix was hysterical or monomaniac, but the excessiveness of her outbursts went a long way toward suggesting the reasons for James’s failure as a playwright.

My sense that the book went on for too long owed a great deal to the power of the exit interviews, so to speak, that Maisie has with her parents. Both scenes are very grand, and dramatic without histrionics. The first scene takes place in a beautifully appointed room — the nicest that Maisie has ever seen — belonging to a “deplorable” American woman. This person takes a while to follow Beale and Maisie from the shocking encounter of too  many closely-related personages at the Earl’s Court, and while they wait for her in the dim opulence Beale makes an appeal to Maisie that she has the sense to interpret as the negative of everything that her father actually says: the irony is formidable, and Beale Farange stands before us as both dangerous and pathetic at the same time. The second scene occurs in the hotel garden at Folkestone. Ida wants to say goodbye, too, but she wants to present herself to her daughter, finally, as good and beautifully loving. In this she is thwarted by Maisie’s enthusiastic and unprecedented attempt to demonstrate her own reasons for coddling the same image, in tghe course of which she mentions a nice man whom Ida would have preferred to forget. The awful mother’s false self-portrait is smashed to bits by her own abraded vanity. Neither parent can satisfy Maisie’s longing to express sincere filial esteem, especially if she can do so at a distance, and the utter failure of each to grasp the child’s sympathetic acuity completes the excitement. These scenes make What Maisie Knew well worth reading.

But James’s writing at the time was crabbed by his cleverness; he was not yet capable of presenting a puzzle as fluently and straightforwardly as he would do in The Golden Bowl. The contrast between Maisie’s simple consciousness and the florid notation of everything that passes before her eyes is often confounding, so that there are moments when it is difficult to make sense of the text without imputing James’s deep understanding to his little heroine. There is also a certain dandy decadence of style, as if James were trying to “do” Oscar Wilde, but in his own terms. What seems intended to look carefree is, at time, simply confusing. I cannot for the life of me satisfactorily parse the antecedent of “such lucidities” in the final paragraph of James’s New York Preface to the novel, or comprehend the sentence that follows:

The only thing to say of such lucidities is that, however one may have “discounted” in advance, and as once for all, their general radiance, one is disappointed if the hour for them, in the particular connection, doesn’t strike — they keep before us elements with which even the most sedate philosopher must always reckon.

Do the “lucidities” have to do with Maisie’s familiarity with the corruption around her, or with those critics who find such familiarity too disgusting for artistic purposes? The cadence suggests the latter, but I’m pretty sure that James means, somehow, the former. But it is rather like working out hieroglyphics. The novel itself is rarely so obscure, and it is also devoid of the clammy self-congratulation that deforms the Prefaces generally.

***

Before spreading out my books and accoutrements on the balcony yesterday, I fetched the remaining journals from the storage unit. Now I must organize them. Happily, I am far too ill today for such hard and unpleasant work. The foreseeable bad reaction that set in after I glanced at one of the volumes last week has not abated; my opinion of myself and of my abilities is awfully low. It’s little wonder that I’ve diverted my attention to the close reading of literary masterpieces. I’ve been reading Austen and Fitzgerald and James with all the sharp attentiveness that I dread having to devote to the fossil record of an old but insufficiently extinct self.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2013 at 5:51 pm.