Early James
A comic one-act play and other things
Pyramus and Thisbe by Henry James
This one-act play is inconsequential. A young woman and a slightly older man (they’re neighbours and share a wall) dislike each other. He smokes and stays up all the night talking. Talking to his annoying bass-voiced friend. She plays the piano, and gives piano lessons: the former at least quite loudly. He arrives at her door one day (and it happens to be her birthday) to deliver flowers that were sent to her but delivered to him. And she has a parcel to give him, handed over to her in error. No doubt both got what the other ought to have received.
In the first instance, they joust a little about their likes and dislikes. She complains about him keeping her up at night with loud, boisterous chatter, and the terrible smell of his tobacco. And he says that, as a writer (and aren’t we all writers, ladies and gentlemen?), his ideas are daily massacred by the violence with which she attacks Chopin and all the rest of them.
I hate music, he says, violently and unstintingly. I hate the piano!
This is a comedy, as you’ll have noticed, and so the outcome is never, never for a second, in doubt. They will, it turns out, decide that actually the other one is not so bad, that he or she has positives as well as faults, that opposites attract, that together they’re a pretty good team, and so on.
And there will be a devious figure in the background to unite the two of them: the landlord who will shortly, in selling the building to someone who wishes to turn the place into shops and offices, turf the two of them out into a cold, cruel world.
There is very little to say here about this play. It’s sometimes, but not often, funny. Funnier than many of Henry James’s other early works, most of which are about courtships that failed, and early death; and one or two of them are about ghosts.
And I ought to say that this (the play that is) foreshadows James’s interest in the theatre, his chasing of success on the stage, the failure of which may or may not have (and this depends on which critics and biographers you read) either cast his head down, never to rise again, or to have made him turn with renewed vibrancy and vitality to his later novels.
But all of that is beyond our compass today.
Let’s talk instead about the early Henry James, the man who wrote the brilliant story “A Landscape Painter” at a very young age. The man who came up with “My Friend Bingham.”
Most early James is about the failed engagements of young men and women, of romantic misunderstandings, of suicides, of early deaths in war or from illnesses that came on with brutal suddenness, when the men or women concerned were razed to the ground emotionally by an innocent, careless remark.
They are sometimes supernatural: “A Romance of Certain Old Clothes” is explicitly ghostly amid all its architectured gothicism, and “De Grey: A Romance” goes further than merely implying the possibility of a supernatural curse afflicting a family for generation after generation, century after century. Instead, we’re to imagine the curse as true, its results as unceasing, with only the strongest possible will capable of diverting (not averting, mark you, just diverting) its terrible course.
We might call early James morbid, and might complain of it. But of course morbidity is a characteristic and perversity of bookish youth.
And we may call early James full of ruins. The old feudal castle lying in picturesque, but hardly safe, pieces at Fosse, perused by our three main characters in “Gabrielle de Bergerac,” for instance; perhaps it is totemic of the whole. We have antiquity; we have danger; we have the invasion of novelty and young people, intent on their own lives. For every generation must perpetuate itself, facing the same problems of survival and replication as other organisms. The same trials of men and women from other families. And every pursuit of marriage is always a danger. Courtships can go wrong. Suits can be rejected, with violent consequences. Brave men might go away to war, their simple loves slowly ceasing to pine for them until they are hurt, badly hurt, by which time, of course, it’s too late.
“A Landscape Painter” is not the best of early James. It’s certainly not the most refined. Other readers might prefer “Osborne’s Revenge” for its moral ambiguity; or admire some of the character studies and the ironic convolutions of plot that make “A Light Man” more than social observation fluff. But I like “A Landscape Painter” best, at least, of what he wrote in the 1860s.
It is a very simple story. A very rich man, an artist, somewhat at a loose end, slums it by going to a fishing settlement, a place where the women are not delicate, where their entertainments are few, where everyone has red raw hands from their exertions and work.
He stays in a house with an old fisherman and his daughter; and no one would say, necessarily, that the daughter is the finest specimen of womanhood. But the building has light enough for the rich man to paint, and he enjoys the company of the older man and the younger woman. They picnic after a little rowing. They read to each other. They sit in the parlour before the fire. And slowly those things that happen in people begin to happen. And they do not have the results that might be imagined at first blush.