"THE BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER DONE":
HENRY JAMES AND THE ORIGINS OF THE GOLDEN BOWL

The symbols in Henry James's writing have the quality of a Cheshire Cat: just when you think you've figured him out and the thing is plain in front of you, when you're confident that you're onto his game and that it is a simple one -- just then the meaning is pulled out and the thing disappears. You are all at once aware that the whole business is more complicated than you'd originally bargained for. You are puzzled, then pleased, and in the end you have a newfound respect for the cat.

The central symbols in the later writings of James, particularly in the late novels The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, have this incontainable quality. Rich in allusion and endless in invention, James creates things that are never simply one thing: they are something, then something else, they are many things all at once, yet, like the cat, they are also nothing. Particularly in the latter novel, since the bowl is such a central image of the work and such a crucial object in the story, at first look we might be tempted to accuse James of heavy-handed allegory: yet we must remember that James -- whose body of work spanned nearly fifty years and several periods -- is always doing more than one thing at once, ever deft, always surprising us. Ultimately there is no particular meaning that we can assign to that imperfect object that gives The Golden Bowl its title: as always in James, the purpose of the symbol is not to ask us to draw conclusions, but to make us look closer at the world of the novel, and then look closer at the world itself.

We might venture, still, to look at some of the sources to which James was alluding when he recorded this "golden bowl" image that recurs throughout his novel. The first was in James's life: in December of 1902, the novelist had occasion to view, in a bank vault in Rye, a golden bowl that had been presented by King George I as a gift to the Lamb family (James had bought their ancestral home Lamb House, where he would later dictate the novel). James, whose circle included some of the great connoisseurs of the nineteenth century, was deeply impressed. He recorded the experience and wrote to one of the Lamb family that the bowl was an "admirable and venerable object" with "a beautiful colour -- the tone of old gold -- as well as a grand style and capacity."

James's virtuosic biographer Leon Edel finds at least two additional sources for the bowl that come not from life but from literature, each with its own set of meanings and images. There is a famous golden bowl in the Book of Ecclesiastes (12: 6-7): as the Biblical writer speaks of innocence and the days of youth, he gives a fire-and-brimstone warning of the time when "the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken." The other apparent source is William Blake, the great poet of innocence and experience, whose mythological Book of Thel begins with the motto:

The poet then goes on to tell a beautiful, terrible, thoroughly Blakean tale of loss. Whatever the sources, and whatever allusions the novelist intended, James certainly thought, as he wrote his novel, that the narrative surrounding his beautiful object of old gold was his masterwork. He wrote to his agent and publisher that it was "the best book I have ever done." "[T]he most composed and constructed and completed," he would later write to his American publisher. He seems to have beheld the book in much the way that he beheld the bowl itself in that Sussex bank vault: "I hold the thing the solidest, as yet, of all my fictions."

'MASTER OF NUANCE' AT WORK
HENRY JAMES AND THE WRITING OF THE GOLDEN BOWL

It has been said that in Henry James's novels, commas fall with the precision of blades in knife-throwing acts – not a clause or dependent clause out of place, not a word or a syllable unconsidered, not an accidental breath. That the blades in The Golden Bowl found their marks we might well thank a certain Miss Mary Weld, surely one of the untrumpeted heroines of the twentieth-century novel. Miss Weld was Henry James's typist during the dictation of The Golden Bowl: as the novelist paced the floorboards of Lamb House – the Garden Room or the Green Room, depending on the weather – and the sentences of the novel came in quick bursts or after long silences, it fell upon Miss Weld to see to it that the words of the master marksman reached their intended targets on paper.

We must take care not to think of Miss Weld as a Dorothea Casaubon, sitting quietly in the shadows while the master's work was done internally: by all accounts, the Jamesian compositional process was kinetic, dynamic -- James was continuously reconsidering, deleting, inserting, ever changing, ever ready to throw a new blade. "(H)e could never let his phrases alone," the novelist Ford Madox Ford later said of Henry James's writing process. "How often when waiting for him to go for a walk haven't I heard him say whilst dictating the finish of a phrase: 'No, No, Miss Dash...--that is not clear ... Insert before ... Let me see ...Yes ... no ...' "

Miss Weld liked to think of her amanuensistic role with a metaphor more genteel than that of knife-throwing. She chose music. (Mary Weld, as was fortunately the habit of Jamesian secretaries, kept a diary throughout her employment). "He dictated beautifully. He had a melodious voice," she wrote of the man W.H. Auden would later call the "master of nuance." Typewriting was for him exactly like accompanying a singer on the piano." Her metaphor, by other accounts, is not ill-chosen: James's words were so inextricably bound to the rhythm of the typewriter keys that he said he found it nearly impossible to dictate to the sound of an Oliver make of typewriter when Remington was being repaired. It is the telling reminder of a nuance of James's dialogue: here was a man with an ear so attuned to subtlety that he could distinguish between typewriter keys. How much more acute, then, his attention to the sound of spoken words.

Such talk of knives and notes flying about should not suggest that there were not significant and sententious lulls in James's writing process. There were often long, tense caesurae between dictations, during which his typists were asked to occupy themselves in some fashion while James smoked, and thought. The typists were asked to keep busy mostly in order to avert awkward discomfort on the part of the novelist himself. His first typist, William MacAlpine, took up smoking to fill the time. After a dilemma in deciding upon appropriate employment for a lady during such intervals, it was agreed that Miss Weld would crochet. One is left to wonder what manner of afghan or mittens would have emerged in the minutes between the more psycologically charged scenes in The Golden Bowl.