Straight to the point

It begins with a house. It is as though there cannot easily be a book unless there is first a house. It was the house that seemed to come before the word. And if the house is lost or gone, if it is sold off or knocked down, then its image and its afterglow become all the more powerful.

Henry James saw fiction itself as a house. “The house of fiction,” he wrote, “has in short not one window, but a million.” There is a peculiar intensity in how he described the New York houses that he knew as a child in his memoir of his first 14 years, A Small Boy and Others, written in 1911, when James was 68. “I have lost nothing of what I saw,” he wrote, “and… though I can’t now quite divide the total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for me.”

It was as though old New York, as he experienced it between the ages of five and 12, had remained still and frozen and perfect in his memory. It was the ground which formed him; he was never to have a place again which would belong to him so fundamentally.

He would not, in fact, possess another house until, when, aged 54, he signed the lease on Lamb House in Rye in England. The year before he purchased the lease he wrote his novel The Spoils of Poynton, a drama about owning and losing a treasured house. Having signed the lease, he wrote The Turn of the Screw about a lone figure attempting to make a home in a house already possessed.

New York, once James began to travel in Europe, became the site of his dreams. One of this site’s most hallowed quarters was Number 58 West 14th Street, first seen during “an afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue. It was ‘our’ house, just acquired by us… the place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of anchorage of the spirit.”

James’s other anchor was his maternal grandmother’s house in Washington Square. This was the house he gave to Dr Sloper and his daughter Catherine in the novel, Washington Square, that he began to serialise in 1879. A year later, in The Portrait of a Lady, he would allow his heroine Isabel Archer to live in his other grandmother’s house in Albany in upstate New York.

In Chapter Two of Washington Square, James inserted a passage about the square and its environs which strikes the reader as strange, almost clumsy:

“It was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursemaid with unequal step… It was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observation and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.”

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James was prepared to disrupt the sacred seamlessness of his fiction to evoke this square as belonging to his memory, his primary sense of himself which could be brought back now only in words. He was claiming Washington Square for himself as much as for his fiction.

What he was doing also was registering the complexity of change. The house in memory, the house that has been demolished or erased, was not merely a vehicle for soft recall, easy nostalgia. Using an old house in a novel, naming it even, taking back what had been lost, was, for him, a process whereby rooms, once familiar, once full, become alive or almost so. These rooms were handed to characters who had themselves come to claim them.

Henry James’s New York, the city of his childhood, “the small warm dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century”, was situated between Fifth and Sixth Avenues down to Washington Square, and up eastwards to Union Square, which was, in his day, surrounded by a high railing. Close by were members of James’s extended family, including his mother’s cousin Helen. “I see in her strong simplicity,” he wrote, “that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs.” James saw that “her goodness somehow testifies for the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies”.

As James grew older, he was allowed to wander farther. He and his brother ventured up and down Broadway “like perfect little men of the world; we must have been let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming… Broadway must have been then as one of the alleys of Eden.”

Towards the end of the 1870s, when Henry James published his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which he set out the limits of America as a place where serious novels could be written, he was attacked by critics in both New York and Boston (“the clucking of a brood of prairie hens,” he called them), including his friend William Dean Howells, who wrote: “We foresee, without any powerful prophetic lens, that Mr James will be in some quarters promptly attainted of high treason.”

James was unrepentant in a letter he wrote to Howells. In that same letter James mentioned a forthcoming serialisation in The Cornhill Magazine of “a poorish story in three numbers — a tale purely American, the writing of which made me feel acutely the want of the ‘paraphernalia’”.

The “poorish story” was Washington Square. And the paraphernalia in question were, James had written earlier in the letter, the “manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured and established that a novelist lives — they are the very stuff his work is made of”.

While it is clear that James was being modest when he mentioned the book to Howells (and his general tendency in referring to his own work was to be self-deprecating), he was, in fact, underestimating a book that is certainly his best short novel. James’s portrait of the vulnerable and sensitive and unassertive Catherine Sloper is one of the most sustained and convincing of his career. The novel was the first of his books to be serialised simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.

The value of Washington Square also lies in the lack of “paraphernalia”, the lack of a social and political hinterland in the narrative, thus forcing James to intensify the psychology, to draw the father and daughter with greater subtlety and care because he, at the apex of his social power in London at the time of writing, did not know enough about the city and the society in which he had set the novel. However, he knew about the interior of the houses where he had been a small boy. Even though his knowledge of the wider context was patchy, he could concentrate on familiar rooms.

He placed the events of Washington Square in the very years when he and his family had lived in the city. The original story was told to him by the actress Fanny Kemble whose brother had jilted an heiress when he discovered that her father intended to disinherit her. James moved this story to his own lost territory, to the site which belonged not merely to his memories, and not only to the Old New York whose contours he knew from childhood, but to a very particular house he could now re-build and re-people for his novel.

Thirty years later, James would also re-build another set of New York rooms for his story The Jolly Corner, his last great piece of fiction. He would allow these rooms to haunt his protagonist Spencer Brydon, who has returned to New York after many years in Europe. Brydon begins to prowl at night in the New York apartment that he has kept empty all the years. Slowly, he realises that his double, his alter ego, the part of him that has remained at home, is also to be found in these old rooms at night. He too is prowling. As the two men do battle, the ghost overpowers the visitor with “a rage of personality before which his own collapsed”. The apartment in The Jolly Corner is where Spencer “had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died”. The scarce light in these interior spaces, the grey light, the crepuscular light, are essential elements in the atmosphere that becomes increasingly ominous and uncanny.

It seems as though Brydon is haunting his own house, or that the atmosphere is so filled with echoes of the dead that he experiences its density as a kind of eeriness. He feels “in his hand… the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead.”

In Washington Square, James used echoes of the past to animate the lives of the next generation who were all too ready to eschew social history for the blight, as James saw it, of newness. Dr Sloper’s niece Marian, for example, is about to marry a young man called Arthur Townsend, who speaks in the novel about his new house: “It’s only for three or four years. At the end of three or four years we’ll move. That’s the way to live in New York — to move every three or four years. Then you always get the last thing. It’s because the city is growing so quick — you’ve got to keep up with it. It’s going straight up town — that’s where New York’s going… I guess we’ll move up little by little; when we get tired of one street we’ll go higher. So you see we’ll always have a new house; it’s a great advantage to have a new house; you get all the latest improvements. They invent everything all over again every five years, and it’s a great thing to keep up with the new things.”

It is easy to feel James’s rage and exasperation at the new ethos of easy and quick change which has eaten up his city of old values, and destroyed the few buildings and streets with many rich old associations for him. His ghosts have given way to images of newness, glibness and quick profit. It is as though the solid world, exemplified and embodied by old rooms in old houses, has dissolved, and the purpose of Washington Square is to rekindle the power of what has been lost, build the square again, word by word, until it and all its associations, the old familiarities, have been restored.

***

This is the introduction to a new edition of Washington Square, reprinted by Manderley Press.

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