The Golden Bowl by Henry James

It’s taken me a very long time to read this very long book. I read the New York edition, in two volumes, nearly eight-hundred pages in total. I excuse myself by noting that during the last two months I’ve been on a hiking trip and pre-occupied with preparing to move apartments, so I wouldn’t have given any novel the attention I normally could have. But it wasn’t my other distractions, nor the length of the novel, necessarily, that made my reading protracted. This is a very difficult book to read. It’s a worthy read but a slog.

I’ve read quite a bit of Henry James, most recently The Turn of the Screw, which I re-read a few months ago after attending a performance in Santa Fe of Benjamin Britten’s opera based on the novella. The Turn of the Screw comes at the end of James’ so-called “middle period” when he turned, for a time, from writing novels, such as the great The Portrait of a Lady, which concludes his early period, to writing shorter fiction and plays. The plays were notoriously unsuccessful and are no longer produced. The short fiction, including The Aspern Papers, is excellent. When James took up novel writing again, he entered his late period and produced The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and this, his final work. I read The Wings of the Dove two years ago and loved its Venice setting. That novel has much in common with this one, both in its prose style, and in its plot, which I’ll get to in a moment. I’ve read The Ambassadors, too, by the way, more than thirty years ago on my first trip to Europe after stopping in a Paris bookstore to find something I could read during the long bus rides between cities.

What distinguishes James’ late style, and what makes The Golden Bowl a difficult read, is the author’s exclusive interest in the interiority of his characters; an elliptical way of telling his story relying on inference and ambiguity, and a near absence of plot. Like The Wings of the Dove, the situation in The Golden Bowl involves a pair of lovers kept apart for lack of money, and a wealthy friend that solves the financial problem but adds romantic complications.

Here’s the plot. In London, Maggie Verver, the daughter of her wealthy, widowed, American father, Adam Verver, marries an Italian Prince, named Amerigo, whom she met in Rome, having been introduced by an older English woman named Fanny Assingham. Charlotte, a long time friend of Maggie’s, arrives from America to attend the wedding, and we learn what Fanny Assingham knows but Maggie does not, that Charlotte and Amerigo had been lovers in Rome, before Amerigo met Maggie, and the two would have married except for the fact that neither of them had money, Amerigo having a royal title, but the family fortune having dissipated over the years.

Maggie, happily in love with her kind, handsome, husband, is also extremely close to her father. But her father worries that his daughter’s attachment to him is preventing her from experiencing the fulness of her life with her new husband. With Charlotte, who has remained in London, Adam Verver sees the possibility of a marriage that would satisfy his own needs, give Charlotte the lifestyle suited to her that she cannot afford, and release Maggie to her husband. So, Maggie’s friend becomes her mother-in-law and the two couples live near each other in London.

But Maggie and her father don’t separate. She spends as much or more time at his home in Eaton Square as she does with her husband at her own home in Portland Place. The baby that Amerigo and Maggie soon have creates another attachment between the two couples as the grandfather dotes on the grandson, always referred to as the Principino.

Then comes a pivotal episode when the two couples and others are invited to a friend’s country home called Matcham. Amerigo and Charlotte accept the invitation but Mr. Verver and Maggie stay home. At the end of the visit, as the guests are leaving, the hostess asks Amerigo and Charlotte to stay on for breakfast as cover for her while she entertains a paramour. Charlotte and Amerigo realize they won’t be missed back in London until that evening and they decide to spend the day together touring the local cathedrals. There’s talk of an “inn” but it seems more likely to be a place for lunch rather than an assignation. In any case, the incident raises Maggie’s notice if not her suspicion.

It’s here, after the episode at Matcham, that James begins Book Four of the six books in the novel, three in the first volume, three in the second. It’s also here, at mid-way, that James switches his focus from telling the first half of the story through the Prince’s experience and perceptions and the second half through Maggie’s, the “Princess.”

Neither Maggie, nor the reader, ever find out if there actually is an ongoing affair between Charlotte and Amerigo; it seems likely there is not. But Maggie does discover, eventually, the fact of Charlotte and Amerigo’s earlier relationship. Maggie learns the news when she buys a golden bowl as a birthday present for her father, the same golden bowl, the proprietor reveals, that Amerigo and Charlotte had considered buying in the opening pages of the novel as a wedding present for Maggie. They didn’t buy it because its gilt surface concealed a fatal crack in the crystal beneath (symbolism!). So Maggie learns that Amerigo knew Charlotte prior to their wedding and then Fanny Assingham confirms the extent of her husband and friend’s romantic relationship earlier in Rome.

The rest of the novel, then, is Maggie’s work to keep apart the two whom she now calls “lovers” without appearing to do so. She reveals what she knows to Amerigo, but hides her knowledge from Charlotte and her father. At “Fawns” her father’s country home, the two couples and Fanny Assingham and her husband, the colonel, come together. Maggie manipulates the situation so that her father eventually proposes the solution: he will return to America with his wife, leaving Maggie and Amerigo in London, and putting an ocean between Charlotte and Amerigo.

But this solution feels false to me in that it also separates Maggie and her father by the same ocean. James wants us to admire Maggie’s skillfulness in bringing about the ending without revealing her intent or sacrificing anyone’s honor, but Maggie is willing, as a result, to sacrifice her own relationship with her father over what is in all likelihood an entirely unjustified jealousy of her husband and friend. There is much unnecessary suffering in the severing of Amerigo and Charlotte. Father and daughter are separated. Grandfather and grandson are separated. Maggie loses her friend Charlotte. And Amerigo loses his friendship with Maggie’s father. And for what? The real problem the characters might have worked to overcome is everyone’s inability to simply speak to each other honestly and directly. “Yes,” Amerigo might have said at any point in the novel, “Charlotte and I were lovers, but we aren’t any longer. I love you, Maggie. Charlotte loves your father. We’re all good people and good friends. Let’s move on.”

Instead we have 800 pages of dithering and fretting. There is almost no action to speak of. Though there are settings, there aren’t even scenes. Everything happens in James describing the interior thoughts of his characters. There is dialog, which I learned long ago counts as “action” in a novel, but here the dialog almost always has the nature of simply continuing the interior psychologizing, with one character giving voice to their thoughts, and the other character simply reflecting, questioning, and prodding the first speaker to finally get to the point.

Like much of James, it’s all very English, though the characters (like James) are actually American. Adam Verver, and Maggie, and Charlotte, are American, and the Prince, though Italian, is named Amerigo, for goodness sake, and moreover speaks and acts with the exact same stuffy language and controlled manners of all the others.

So this is what makes the novel so difficult to read. There’s so much wary circling with so little at stake. When so little does happen, there’s not much to compel a reader to return to the novel and find out what happens next. It’s inert. Instead the reader is confronted with a gyre of words, ever turning but barely advancing. With his obsession on interior states and psychology, James is clearly pushing the novel toward a modernist style. It’s not stream of consciousness only in that it’s narrated by a third-person rather than directly from the characters, but it’s close. It made me think of early Schoenberg, or other artists and composers working at the same time as James’ novel (1904, revised in 1908 for the New York edition), where the late Romantic style is pushed to its absolute limits: sprawling, thick to the point of opacity, heavy with emotional weight almost (or, in the hands of lesser artists, actually) beyond the ability of the form to bear.

As I was nearing the end of my reading, I had lunch with a friend and described this all to her. She asked, “But do you like it?” And I immediately answered, “I love it.” I surprised myself, but I quickly realized what it was that I did love about it. Despite the novel being not about very much, and very drawn out, and frustratingly indirect in its telling, the novel is an extended meeting with Henry James himself. It’s his language. It’s his personality. James is really the main character, or really the only character as all the others come from his mind and think and speak his language. It’s his story and isn’t every novel really a communion with the storyteller? That’s the true joy of reading, after all, the meeting with another mind. James himself is the fascinating reason to read James, even dispensed with plot, or drama, or scenes, there’s still James to captivate the attention and as long as it takes, make for time well spent.