For more information about Garth Greenwell’s series of online classes on Henry James, please click here.
The following thoughts have two sources. First, obviously I have been deep in Henry James, and especially in Portrait, getting ready for class later this month. Second, I’ve been trying to get started on a new novel. It always takes me a long time to get started; who was it—Trollope, I think?—who finished one novel and started another in the same breath? I can’t imagine. When I finish a book I feel completely depleted, empty, a sack turned inside out; it takes a long time to feel like I have anything to say again. I’ve been ok with not writing fiction, especially since I’ve been occupied with so many other things, like the book of essays I just turned in, finally, far too late; but the pressure is getting unbearable, I’m starting to feel desperate to be at work on a novel again. Which means I’ve been thinking about the problem of first lines, the search for a great one; I can feel myself starting to tense up with the anxiety of it.
Which has made the opening of Portrait of a Lady just the best company. It’s one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, there’s no question; but surely no one would claim it has one of the great first sentences. It’s a really bad first sentence, actually—and so maybe all of us psyching ourselves out over our all-important unwritten openings should just settle down already. We’ll talk about a lot more than sentences in the James classes, but James really did write the best sentences in English, and we’ll try to always keep them in view. So I thought it might be fun to look at a few from the first paragraph of Portrait, to offer a taste of one of the kinds of reading we’ll do in class, and also to see how James warms himself up at the start his great novel.
Once things get underway the book will strike a distinctly modern sound, and even in this first chapter the dialogue, once we get to it, has a Bloomsbury ring. (James was friends with Leslie Stephen and first met Stephen’s daughter, the future Virginia Woolf, when she was a babe in her cradle.) There are even touches of a dandyish wit that sounds like Wilde, though Wilde was just emerging in the early 1880s. And if the opening scene seems at first as though it couldn’t be more traditional—afternoon tea on the lawn of a country estate, a “peculiarly English picture,” James tells us—tradition is quickly affronted, peculiarity wins out. The house is owned by a dying, rich American and will be inherited by his dying, aesthete, Europeanized son; the object of their hospitality is an English lord. The world is changing, European tradition has been shaken up; and the nature of those changes—the rise of American power, the confusions that ensue when the new world revisits the old—will be one of James’s great subjects.
But the novelistic machinery, here at the start, is decidedly old-fashioned. Forget the Victorians—as far as this first sentence is concerned, James reaches generations back. It sounds, to my ear, like deflated Jane Austen:
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
The vagueness (“certain circumstances”), the loftiness (“in life”), the pompousness (“The ceremony known as”): never has a great novel made its entrance in such inept great novel drag. James was in his mid-thirties when he wrote Portrait, and he had three novels already under his belt: one best forgotten (Watch and Ward), one fun (The American), one actually quite good(Roderick Hudson, which features characters who reappear in The Princess Casamassima and The Ambassadors). But none of those earlier books comes anywhere near the greatness of Portrait. As I’ve said several times, much of the fun of reading Portrait of a Lady comes from seeing James step into his novelistic power. It’s like that scene in The Incredibles where Dash discovers he can run across water; one imagines James writing whole scenes of the book with a Look-what-I-can-do grin.
What’s bad about the sentence, what’s least Jamesian, is its construction; there’s none of the tightly knitted elegance of James’s mature style. Pick it up at any point and it dissolves to crumbs. There’s only one conjugated verb, all of this is a single clause (“there are few hours” is the germ), and still it manages to have a monstrous number of joints: four prepositions (“under,” “in,” “to,” “as”), even five if you count “than,” and two participles (“dedicated” and “known”). It branches in every direction: “Under certain circumstances” is a left-branching construction; “in life” comes mid-branchingly between the subject1 (“few hours”) and its modifier (“more agreeable”); and then there’s a whole glut of right-branches. Not to mention the entirely unnecessary impersonal cast to the whole sentence, “there are few hours” when “Few hours are” would be much more graceful. It’s so awkward, so inelegant, it’s trying so hard; it’s like somebody playing it fancy at the opera and fumbling his lorgnette.
It sounds like any number of opening sentences from any number of forgettable books. What makes it lovable is that this book is so great. The whole first half of the first paragraph consists of laborious throat-clearing; it isn’t until the sixth sentence that James starts to limber up:
Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf.
My whole body relaxes with this sentence, as I think it’s meant to; finally we have some sense data, and, more importantly, finally a sentence that moves like a living body, not one of those self-destructing machines at the robot Olympics. It’s still idiosyncratic: there’s no call for that semi-colon, for one thing, which doubles up on the coordinating conjunction. No call but movement, that is, but energy and music. An uninterrupted forward gesture, stating a clear fact; then a pause, a gathering of forces, which subsequently, slowly, ebb out. James slips in a casual, unremarkable metaphor, summer light like water, with patterns like tides; and then the movement of the sentence enacts it in those three clauses, different lengths but identical constructions. How beautiful the final clause is, and much of its beauty comes from an effect we don’t really have vocabulary for in English, but one you’ll remember if you’ve ever studied Latin poetry: the quantity of the vowels, their length, especially the drawn out, languorous “smooth” before the doubled stress of “dense turf.”
Another bit of throat-clearing follows, and then, still in the first paragraph, comes the real first sentence, I mean the first sentence that seems to me wonderful:
From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.
The delight of this is delicious, a feather up the spine. How is it the same writer? It’s still old-fashioned, it could almost have been written by Austen; but there’s nothing deflated about it this time. It’s built on repetition, of words (“occasion,” “eternity”), but also of syntactical structure: prepositional phrase (“From five o’clock to eight” / “on such an occasion as this”) + a form of the verb to be (“is” / “could be”) + a predicate nominative phrase featuring “eternity.” But it’s less the pattern that gives pleasure than how James varies it. The second clause seems at once to condense the first and expand it: it’s literally longer, sixteen words instead of twelve; but it has only one prepositional phrase, whereas the first clause has two (“from five o’clock to eight,” which functions as the subject, and “on certain occasions”). The length is gained in elaboration, the way the repeated words are garnished: “on certain occasions” becomes “on such an occasion as this”; “a little eternity” (and note how wonderful that oxymoron is, the slight glitch it sparks in the brain, pleasurable as a sneeze) becomes “an eternity of pleasure,” the phrase intensified by the adverb: “could be only an eternity of pleasure.” Again there’s a not-strictly-called-for semi-colon before “but,” and again it’s exactly right, allowing the sentence to perch in perfect balance.
It’s just marvelous; only now do I feel sure I’m in an excellent writer’s hands. Finally the paragraph gets around to narrative, with the next sentence introducing the people in the scene, though it will be several pages before we get their names. There’s an old man sitting, taking his tea; and two younger men strolling nearby. The first chapter of Portrait does important work: we learn who the Touchetts are, and a little bit about the mysterious young niece set to arrive from America; we get to know the elder Mr. Touchett, still staunchly American after his 30 years abroad, but also proudly claiming possession of his estate’s august history, and his young son, Ralph, one of James’s most wonderful creations. And James sounds the notes of his “International theme,” especially the problem and the delight of young American women, more unruly, less mindful of all sorts of proprieties than their European counterparts. (Kate Croy, a heroine of Wings of the Dove—unless she’s a villain—might beg to differ.) James’s readers would be eager for this; his first big popular success (he would never have a bigger one), Daisy Miller, which we’ll read in the second class of the James sequence, had been the story of just such a woman.
It’s with Isabel Archer, that unruly American, that we get our first taste of the novel’s greatness. Her entrance comes at start of the second chapter; she steals onto the scene James has just sketched for us, that all-male tea party, unobserved. That seems to me a statement on James’s part: his heroine, for all the novel is her “portrait,” is not first an object to be gazed on, but a subject doing the gazing. Ralph’s little dog, Bunchie, also male, is the first to notice her, and he goes running up to investigate, “with a little volley of shrill barks.” More important than a novel’s first line, maybe, is its protagonist’s first gesture. Here’s how James writes it:
The person in question was a young lady, who seemed immediately to interpret the greeting of the little terrier. He advanced with great rapidity, and stood at her feet, looking up and barking hard; whereupon, without hesitation, she stooped and caught him in her hands, holding him face to face while he continued his joyous demonstration.
Impossible to imagine anything more marvelous, any gesture more packed with revelation: accosted by a little dog, Isabel sweeps him up and puts his yapping face against her own. “Is this your little dog, sir?” she asks Ralph, who tells her that in fact the creature seems now to belong to her. We’ll learn a great deal more about Isabel Archer, but it seems to me the essentials are already clear. She’s fearless, she’s loving, and she snatches hearts. Most of all my own.
I’m so excited to read this novel with you. Please join us on September 19th. You can read more about the class and register here.
As always, thanks for reading—
This essay was originally published at the Substack “To a Green Thought.”
