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James Corrects Poe: The Appropriation of Pym in The Golden Bowl
Adeline R. Tintner
James's citing of the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in The Golden Bowl is well-known and Burton Pollin has traced in detail Henry James's changing and developing attitudes to his predecessor.(1) However, any analysis of the impact of Poe's narrative on his successor's imagination must take into account the very special way in which James reworked it in the fabric of his own fiction.
James's literary relations with Poe are characterized by the same mixture of indebtedness and critical correction which also appears in his rewriting of the works of other writers, a tendency which later in his 1ife he freely admitted. “I take liberties with the greatest,” he wrote in 1902 to Mrs. Cadwalader Jones.(2) Poe, the great enchanter of his childhood, “our ill-starred magician,” seems to have furnished James with the basic patterns for “Glasses,” a story heavily indebted to “The Spectacles”(3) as well as with other icons widely scattered throughout the rest of his work. James's stories depend heavily for many of their structures upon the work of other great story tellers, from Hawthorne to H.G. Wells. But Poe is the only writer whose work is put by title and author directly into the mind of a character and it occurs in James's most highly developed novel, The Golden Bowl. This incorporation is at once a supreme compliment paid to Poe's novel and an attempt by James to improve on it. “If a work of imagination, of fiction, interests me at all (and very few, alas, do!),” he wrote in the above letter to Mrs. Jones, “I always want to write it over in my own way, handle the subject from my own sense of it. That I always find a pleasure in. ...”(4)
In his preface to that volume of his New York Edition which deals with stories of the “beatific and the “horrific,” James tells us that to attempt the reportage of “strange encounters,” “the prodigy, the appeal to mystification, in itself” is a mistake. “We want it clear, goodness knows, but also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it.” These “prodigies” can
keep all their character, on the other hand, by looming through some other history — the indispensable history of somebody's normal relation to something. It's in such connexions as these that they most interest, for what we are then mainly concerned with is their imputed and borrowed dignity. Intrinsic values they have none — as we feel for instance in such a matter [page 88:] as the would-be portentous climax of Edgar Poe's “Arthur Gordon Pym” where the indispensable history is absent, where the phenomena evoked, the moving accidents, coming straight, as I say, are immediate and flat, and the attempt is all at the horrific in itself. The result is that, to my sense, the climax fails — fails because it stops short, and stops short for want of connexions. There are no connexions; not only, I mean, in the sense of further statement, but of our own further relation to the elements, which hang in the void; whereby we see the effect Tost, the imaginative effort wasted.(5)
When James wrote this preface between 1907-8, he had already corrected The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in The Golden Bowl (1904). He shows in the novel how the climax in the Poe story which he has criticized in the above passage could be made really “portentous” by being involved with a person's consciousness. He has chosen Prince Amerigo, the noble fiancé of Maggie Verver, to embody that consciousness. James has used “the imaginative effect” of the “blind white fog” which constitutes the climax of Poe's Narrative (rather than “wasted” it) by incorporating it analogically and metaphorically within the consciousness of the Prince. He has converted what he considered its failure into a success by making it a part of the reaction of the Prince to his dilemmas. By transforming Poe's fantasy into a metaphor, James has clarified Amerigo's problem for the reader. This is an example of James's use of the fantasies of others to create his own and to keep his feet safely on the ground while appropriating the imaginative flight of another. The reality, however, for James is the fictional invention of his own; the fantasy borrowed from another is the instrument of clarification. This borrowed imaginative structure operates as a torch which James called “the torch of analogy” in The Sacred Fount, his book devoted to elucidation and obfuscation. It is the 1ight of that torch which penetrates the opaque matter of the human problem presented.
The incorporation of Poe's Pym occurs in The Golden Bowl in Book One, the Prince's book, and represents the “impenetrable” aspects of Mrs. Assingham's motives in arranging the Prince's marriage to Maggie Verver, the American heiress.
These things, the motives of such people, were obscure — a little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune. He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife's countryman — which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have: the story of the ship-wrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole — or was it the South? — than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness — but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises, the surprises were apt to be shocks.
Shocks, however, from these quite different depths, were not what he saw reason to apprehend; what he rather seemed to himself not yet to have measured was something that, seeking a name for it, he would have called the quantity of confidence reposed in him.(6) [page 89:]
Since Pym's unfinished narrative ends at the point the Prince describes, we can see that James has attempted to make it more meaningful. He does so by giving it the only meaning which he thinks possible to derive from such a vision. Since in his Preface he wrote that the climax failed “because it stops short, and stops short for want of connection,” James here in The Golden Bowl connects it to the interpretation the Prince makes of the mysterious and unexplained elements that exist in the contract between the Ververs and himself for the hand of Maggie. It stands for the mysteries that surround the undeclared value that he has for them as a marital acquisition. What James recognizes as “the appeal to mystification” in the “prodigy” of the great imaginative vision that Poe gives us in Pym, comes across now as “clear” and “thick,” through “the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it,” that of the Prince. The “wonderful tale” read by the Italian nobleman and James himself as a boy is filtered through Prince Amerigo's “normal relation” to it as it serves as an analogue for the mystery of his relations with his in-laws.
But it is even more specific than that. What Amerigo feels is hidden behind the curtain is “the quantity of confidence reposed in him”(7) or what the Ververs expected of him, “a large bland blank assumption of merits almost beyond notation.” He sees himself as “some old embossed coin” not to be exchanged; “he was to constitute a possession” but “never to be tried or tested” (XXIII, 23) and the Ververs wouldn’t know “how many pounds, shillings and pence he had to give.” He was well aware that “sooner or later, say what they might,” the Ververs “would put him to the practical proof” (XXIII, 24). He comes to the conclusion that “what was fair exchange for a billion,” the amount he received by marrying Maggie, “was the shrouded object.” Chapter One of the Prince's book ends where Amerigo “promised himself virtually to give the latter [the shroud] a twitch” (XXIII, 24).
Since everything in The Golden Bowl must be resolved, the next to the last page in the novel takes up again the figure initiated by the analogy occurring to the Prince from Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Amerigo now by his behavior has justified the confidence the Ververs placed in him. The image he had invoked, in Book I, of the currency he would pay back to the Ververs as the test of his worth, is transferred to the Princess's consciousness. We are told that “she had an instant of the terror that, when there had been suspense, always precedes, on the part of the creature to be paid, the certification of the amount. Amerigo knew it, the amount” and “So far as seeing that she was ‘paid’ went he might have been holding out the money-bag for her to come and take it” (XXIV, 368). The veil had been lifted and although the figure from Pym has not been repeated, the simile dependent on that reference, the figure of money which expresses Amerigo's having passed the Verver's test [“only what were these things in the fact, ... when tested” (XXIV, 367)], should remind the ideally vigilant reader of the analogy the Prince had [page 90:] made seven hundred pages earlier between the “state of mind of his new friends” and the “great white curtain,” when he had then thought, “What would this mean but that practically he was never to be tried or tested?” (XXIII, 22).
It is significant that the vision of “the thickness of white air” comes at the beginning of the Prince's book, just as the parallel figure of a pagoda playing the same role in the Princess's mind comes at the beginning of her book. Each image expresses the independent predicament of both husband and wife and each image comes from the realm of art. Maggie's predicament is made palpable by being centered in an image of an architectural “folly,” the kind of garden art common to the large English estates frequented by James on his week-end visits. The Prince's predicament, on the other hand, is consciously borrowed from literature, from the novel by Poe, so perhaps the very notion of “predicament” has also been borrowed from another Poe story, “A Predicament,” from Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). It is interesting in its connection with The Golden Bowl that “A Predicament” had appeared in the same volume of Poe stories as “Mystification,” the very title of which James suggested to himself for The Golden Bowl when he first began to think about the novel, and which he later discarded.(8)
This is not the first time James used a structure from another literary work to analogize a state of feeling or to clarify a conception in his work. It happened in The Princess Casamassima, where an Octave Feuillet heroine from the Revue des Deux Mondes replaces the Princess herself.(9) He did it in The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Archer reads Ampére's book on Rome which carries with it associations of that lover of superior women, of Mme. de Staël and Mme. Recamier, just when Osmond is about to propose to Isabel.(10) James introduced it into The Tragic Muse, where the young men compare Balzac's Valérie Marneffe to the heroine of L’Aventuriére at that point in the novel when Miriam Rooth's role is to be clearly defined in relation to four young men, in a kind of recollection-through-reversal of the Balzac villainess from La Cousine Bette. “The Impressions of a Cousin,” is an attempt by James to rewrite The Marble Faun, for he openly compares his characters to those of the Hawthorne novel.(11) In the examples just cited, however, he had been rewriting the stories his own way. In The Golden Bowl, James leaves intact, incorporates and completes the unfinished narrative of Pym. He does it by placing the climax within the consciousness of the Prince through which we readers apprehend it indirectly but amplified, as it were, by the Prince's intelligence and sensibility.
Whatever James's reservations were about Baudelaire's Poe in 1875, his own appropriation of Pym in The Golden Bowl was a measure of his appreciation, even though it manifested itself as a form of criticism. For James, however, the function of criticism was to value the work of the author under scrutiny. He wrote in the Preface to What Maisie Knew: “To criticise is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation-with the criticised [page 91:] thing and make it one's own. The large intellectual appetite projects itself thus on many things.”(12) Poe's “wonderful tale” has been appropriated by the consciousness of Prince Amerigo which is evidence of the “large intellectual appetite” of his creator. By taking over Poe's vision of the impenetrable white fog and using it as a metaphor for the Prince's awareness of the inexplicable elements in his relations with the Ververs, James has expanded the limits of his own imaginative world through Poe's genius, and standing on his predecessor's shoulders has given himself added stature, a debt he freely acknowledged. One must not forget, however, that James thought his 1ifting of “the would-be portentous climax” of Pym made for its success, for he felt he had improved it through “somebody's normal relation” to it.
New York City
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1 Burton R. Pollin, “Poe and Henry James: A Changing Relationship,” Yearbook of English Studies (1973), pp. 232-242.
2 The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York: Scribner's, 1920) I, 397.
3 Adeline R. Tintner, “Poe's ‘The Spectacles’ and James's ‘Glasses,’” Poe Studies, 9 (December 1976), 53-54.
4 The Letters of Henry James, p. 396.
5 Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner's, 1934), pp. 256-257.
6 The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribner's, 1909), XXIII, 22-23. Further references to this edition are indicated in text.
7 The Novels and Tales of Henry James, XXIV, 367. Further references to this edition are indicated in text.
8 The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 194.
9 Adeline R. Tintner, “Octave Feuillet, La Petite Comtesse, and Henry James,” Revue de Littérature Comparée, 48 (1974), 218-232.
10 Adeline R. Tintner, “Isabel's Carriage-image and Emma's Day Dream,” Modern Fiction Studies, 22 (Summer 1976), 227-231.
11 Adeline R. Tintner, “Henry James's The Marble Faun: “The Impressions of a Cousin” (Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal), in press.
12 Henry James, The Art of the Novel, 155.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - ATQ78, 1975] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Studies in Poe's Pym (Adeline R. Tintner) (James Corrects Poe: The Appropriation of Pym in The Golden Bowl)