The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)

By way of admission, I now recognize more formally (this is my first James) that my writing style is 'Jamesian'. Should I be ashamed? I certainly echo him in being quite happy to chase down refinements of meaning with qualifying elaboration, 'till the cows come home'. Sometimes that works exhilaratingly, and one ventures way out onto a promontory of meaning, feeling like beautiful and heady precision is being approached. Sometimes, of course, one gets dumped in a bog on the isthmus, and can only clamber out and slug home, mud-spattered and shamefaced! I'm not sure how I feel about this recognition, mainly because of how I responded to this book. It was quite grasping of my attention, but not so much because of the writing style of the author, which varied between his much-vaunted old womanishness and a kind of somewhat gothic sensuous straightforwardness. It is a book which pleases without thrilling in its first few hundred pages - there is a sense, via Isabel Archer, the youthful main character, of a life embarked upon with spirit, having dark patches well sketched but not casting enough shadow to overcome her. Then comes the time when she marries, and it falls into a slough of despond, not because of the subject matter (her marriage going wrong, psychologically) but because the book itself droops. There's always the temptation to say that it feels this way because of the subject matter. I've said this before, but it's so apt here it needs saying again: there's a difference between detailing boredom or negativity in an involving way, and not doing so. James here falls into the latter grouping. The typical first year uni student yelp of "It's supposed to feel that way!" misses the point hugely. No reader should be bored reading about boredom, or feel drab reading about drabness. My guess is that this is where this book loses the majority of those who give up on it. It is a good three hundred pages where it wilts significantly. I will concede that it does, if you stick with it, figure the airless and blocked atmosphere with some fidelity. But it really does drag upon one's patience, becoming a disinspiration. When Isabel leaves Rome to see her cousin Ralph at the end, some of that fog lifts a little. I'm sure that, like many others, I'd have been well tempted to drop this once I reached Isabel's marriage and its aftermath, apart from a strange thing which kept it going, not of itself. For some reason, I think probably trying to imagine Nicole Kidman as Isabel in Campion's film (not having seen it), and registering the wither of her inappropriateness for the part, I began a process of 'recasting'. No idea why, but this soon metamorphosed into a full-fledged scenario. My version was filmed in 1952, with the actress who, at that time, was made for the role: Elizabeth Taylor. It was probably directed by someone quite controlling and intense - Otto Preminger, Orson Welles? Every time Ralph Touchett spoke, I could hear Cary Grant. Mrs Touchett would have been categorically filled out by Katharine Hepburn. Madame Merle would have been a film-stealing revelation of a performance by Greer Garson, as would that of a toxic Hurd Hatfield as Gilbert Osmond. And so on. Imagining this interpretation took on a lot of the life of the reading process, especially when the going got tough. Thinking about how an early 50s version would look, the stillness and formality of the conversations and the stiff silence in which they took place, the carefully undercurrent sexuality, the occasional touches of humour, the highly pushy orchestral score, the echoey metallic tonal element in all the sounds and colours, all added to the prodigality. And of course the camera loving Taylor at her most luxurious and sensual in her youthful glow. Would it have been a notorious shoot? Would it have been a troubled production? Would someone have missed out on an Oscar they ought to have won? All good fun, anyway, and not something that has ever taken on such hyper-reality before in a reading experience. Why? Was my mind providing savourful interest where I could subconsciously sense it was lacking? Maybe - I will say that I don't particularly look forward to another full-length James, looking at this one without the film scenario. Now his many, many novellas - maybe they are where he won't have an opportunity to fall into a hole?