The Portable Henry James Read Online Free PDF Page A

orthodoxies of traditionalism, Anglo-Catholicism, and the Christian state. Yet his praise of James still seems sincere, even if his declaration hints at something ambiguous and troubling, perhaps that although “be one of the people on whom nothing is lost” may be a noble call, it sounds out a heartless rule, one impossible to fulfill and potentially paralyzing—politically, socially, even morally.
    The purely modern intellect of Prince Hamlet discovered that the radically examined and interiorized life is not without grave risks, for the more one thinks about things, the harder action can become, and, yes, of course, there can be few philosopher kings. Dr. Watson, that most decent Polonius, never really gets it, but he moves easily about town and he seems happy, while it is Holmes, with his magnificent teeming brain, who settles in for the night and mainlines cocaine. Eliot suggests such psychological strain for the highly exercised intelligence when he says that James “makes the reader, as well as the personae, uneasily the victim of a merciless clairvoyance.” Authorial omniscience once sounded godlike and smug, but if merciless clairvoyance is what guides the creative intelligence through the age of anxiety, the heightened consciousness will know more than it bargained for, more than it wanted to know. What it was to learn, especially about itself, would be terrifying.
    James Agate said The Turn of the Screw could freeze the scalp of a man reading it on a sunny afternoon at the seaside with the band playing Gilbert and Sullivan. Years before that James had dismissed it as a “bogey-tale” and an “amusette,” and for decades most readers took him at his word, at least until 1924 and 1934 when Edna Kenton and then Edmund Wilson questioned the perceptions of a woman on whom nothing is lost—and not the vibration of a hair seems lost on the governess at Bly. In his 1884 “The Art of Fiction,” James had offered the apotheosis that “impressions are experience,” but almost fifteen years had passed when a young woman, one who admitted to a “terrible liability to impressions,” was to see, or sense, the presence of two ghosts who, she is sure, wish to possess the children. What she discovers is cataclysmic, although her own homespun Dr. Watson—that most trustworthy housekeeper, Mrs. Grose—has never noticed a thing.
    It is in fact a serious tale with broad implications. When it is understood that the ghosts may not be real, but instead that a clergyman’s daughter may project the entire ghastly parade, then the grandeur of human perception and human intelligence gets thrown into grave doubt. Although The Turn of the Screw was written before Freud would up the sexual ante and finally annul any Enlightenment claim for a purely rational intelligence, back in 1873 Pater had already guessed what was coming: “Experience,” he had written, “already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by the thick wall of personality. . . . Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.”
    With The Turn of the Screw it is hard to say what is the truth, and the tale does not say. Perhaps a sensitive and intelligent young woman saves an imperiled soul, or perhaps a very unstable young lady merely squints out from a chamber of consciousness that is just a fetid little room. And that room might be heaped with sexual repression and jammed to the rafters with all the lurid and unlovely things a person trails behind from the moment of birth. It is an extreme case here, but in principle it is a general one—that the idea of objectivity may be absurd, for although we may sincerely believe that demons walk the path, the truth may be that the only place they inhabit is the psychic landscape within. Then the little boy would have died for nothing, except to show how in 1898 a fresh psychology was