Henry James and the Late Style: How The Golden Bowl Works

There is a standard way of reading Henry James’s late style. You admire it from a distance, decide that the difficulty is an obstacle, and reach for the plot. Garth Greenwell, in Episode Eleven of his Rebind commentary on The Golden Bowl, does something else. He takes five passages and describes, at the level of the clause, what James is actually doing. His argument, the thesis of the episode, is that James’s difficulty isn’t an obstacle at all. It’s the engine. And the eros of the prose, he adds, is the eros James never lived.

James did not write his late novels. He dictated them to a secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, who was devoted to him and who served as his transcriptionist for the last decade of his life. The syntax of the late style is the syntax of a man composing orally, in the air of a room. This matters for a second reason. James made a deliberate, explicit decision never to marry. What this means for the prose is that the extraordinary erotic passages in The Golden Bowl were written by someone who had almost certainly never experienced what he was describing. The eros in the sentences is the eros that had nowhere else to go.

Device One: The Load-Bearing Adverb

James’s most important stylistic device is also his most overlooked: the single adverb that inverts the meaning of everything around it.

In Book One, Chapter Two, Fanny Assingham tells the Prince that something has happened. “But it isn’t anything that properly concerns you.” The Prince throws back his head immediately: “What do you mean by ‘properly’? I somehow see volumes in it.”

Greenwell reads this as James commenting on his own style. “By saying it doesn’t properly concern you, the Prince understands that what she’s saying is actually it concerns him a lot.” The word properly does not mean properly. “It’s the way people put a thing when they put it, well, wrong,” Greenwell says. The adverb is load-bearing because it carries the real meaning of the sentence against the grain of its apparent meaning.

Device Two: Mid-Branching Syntax

In Book One, Chapter One, James gives the Prince this sentence:

“He found it convenient, oddly, even for his relation with himself — though not unmindful that there might still, as time went on, be others, including a more intimate degree of that one, that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger or the finer issue — which was it? — of the vernacular.”

Greenwell counts four parentheticals stacked into the trunk of a single sentence, plus three different kinds of “that” in rapid succession. “That use of a kind of parenthetical mid-branching construction — as I experience it, it supercharges subjectivity,” he says. “It brings us really close to the Prince’s consciousness.” This is James developing what his brother William James, the philosopher and psychologist, would later theorize as stream of consciousness.

Device Three: The Spring Being Pressed

In Book One, Chapter Six, the Prince tells Charlotte she must marry. Charlotte responds. But James introduces her response in a way that arrests attention: “she took it from him, but it determined in her the only words she was to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if a spring had been pressed.”

“It’s a mechanical image,” Greenwell says. “It suggests something happening without intention, something happening faster than intention. It suggests a kind of authenticity or sincerity that these spoken words are absolutely not manipulation or deceit or engineered in any way, that they are automatic.” Every time this image recurs (and it recurs at crucial moments) James is signaling that what has just been said escaped the speaker’s control.

Device Four: Chiasmus

Book Three, Chapter Five. The Prince and Charlotte seal their vow with a kiss:

“Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge.”

Greenwell names the figure: chiasmus, from the Greek word for crossing, an A-B-B-A reversal structure. “Their pressure, their response, and their response, their pressure. I think it’s functioning here to show the kind of absolute perfect reciprocity between these two people.” The sentence enacts physically the experience it is describing. This is, Greenwell says, “one of the most passionate, if not the most passionate moment in all of James.” Written by a man who, as far as we know, never kissed anyone.

Device Five: Radical Reflexivity

Near the end of the novel, Maggie explains to Fanny how she has won. James gives her one sentence: “They thought of everything but that I might think.”

Greenwell reaches for the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s concept of radical reflexivity: thinking that takes thinking as its object, first developed by Augustine in the Confessions. “What Taylor means by radical reflexivity is something he thinks was first invented by St. Augustine — a kind of thinking about thinking. A radical turn inward.” James creates this structurally in the novel, and in this final sentence the device becomes a weapon. The variable Charlotte and the Prince had not accounted for was Maggie’s intelligence. “Maggie is just as deep, that she is deeper than the Prince and Charlotte.” They had taken her for an object. She had been thinking the whole time.

The Difficulty Is the Work

Greenwell’s conclusion, after five devices and a life, is the same as his opening argument: “James’s difficulty isn’t an obstacle, it’s the engine.” Every device he identifies (the load-bearing adverb, the mid-branching parenthetical, the spring, the chiasmus, the reflexive turn) is doing something that simpler prose cannot do. Making consciousness happen on the page rather than describing it from outside.

“James’s style, which I think is one of the extraordinary accomplishments of Western literature,” Greenwell says, “is an attempt to find a way that can be adequate to his sense of how slippery human beings are and human meaning is.” The sentences are hard because the subject is hard.