The Birthplace E-Book

Henry James

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 203

Beschreibung

Blackport-on-Dwindle - 'all granite, fog and female fiction' - has been the Gedges' dull hometown for some years. They leap, therefore, at the invitation to become the live-in guardians of the birthplace of the nation's literary hero. Anticipating romance and inspiration - all that has been lacking in their lives to date - they find, instead, that the house casts an altogether more sinister spell. In The Birthplace, James displays his eye for character and a wry appreciation of pretension and the absurd. As is famously recorded, James doubted Shakespeare's authorship of the plays ascribed to him and The Birthplace illustrates his cynical attitude towards the cult of the Bard and the visitor industry that it had engendered. The Birthplace is published here alongside The Private Life, another little-known work in which James again considers the relevance of the artist's persona - a theme with continued relevance in literature and the arts.

Leseprobe

The Birthplace

Henry James

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword by Mark Rylance

The Birthplace

The Private Life

Notes

Biographical note

Copyright

FOREWORD

‘The shrine at which he was to preside figured to him as the most sacred known to the steps of men, the early home of the supreme poet, the Mecca of the English-speaking race,’ so muses Morris Gedge. And, once he and his wife, Isabel, are employed as the keepers of that sacred birthplace, ‘He’, whose birthplace it was, becomes ‘their personal friend, their universal light, their final authority and divinity. Where in the world […] would they have been without Him?’

With sublime delight, Henry James establishes in The Birthplace the religious degree of devotion surrounding William Shakespeare and thereby the resonant parallels of humble origin, sacred birthplace, the established church or ‘Body’, and the predicament of orthodox fact and fiction that exist between the heavenly saviour Jesus Christ and the earthly saviour William Shakespeare. Like a devout scholar himself, James never uses the name ‘Shakespeare’, only ‘Him’ or ‘He’, but we know about whom he is writing.

Never have the father, son and holy ghost of letters been so splintered by heretics as in the holy trinity – perhaps the holiest literary trinity – of William Shakespeare: his works, his audience, his life. In most publications of these heretical sceptics, so despised by Academia, you will discover a list of famous men and women who, at one time in their life, expressed a doubt that the man born and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon as William Shakspere wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare in 1623. Featured in that list you will find Henry James and his brother, the pioneering psychologist, William James.

Others: Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Orson Welles, Leslie Howard, Tyrone Guthrie, Charlie Chaplin, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sigmund Freud, Clifton Fadiman, John Galsworthy, Mortimer J. Adler, Paul H. Nitze, Lord Palmerston, william Y. Elliot, Harry A Blackman, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Charles Dickens, walt Whitman, william James and Henry James.*

Contrary to what you may have read about heretics like these, if you are a friend of Shakespeare I think you will be a friend of James, as, certainly in these stories, and throughout Shakespeare, the conversation revolves around the theme of identity; presumed, mistaken, discovered and, like nature herself, full of secrets. The relationship – indeed the trinity – between an author’s creation, an author’s apparent personality and an author’s audience, is the particular topic of conversation for James. As in Shakespeare’s comedies, all is made manifest by love; the love and fascination we have for artists who touch us; the sometimes obsessional desire we have to be intimate with remarkable people. ‘The more we know Him, […] the more we shall love Him,’ prophecies Morris Gedge.

In The Private Life (the companion piece in this volume), this trinity is explored with living characters, including James himself, who relates the tale while also inhabiting it. Inhabiting it intimately, for instance, when he asks, ‘What do they call me?’ and the actress, Blanche Adney, replies, ‘You’re a searcher of hearts – that frivolous thing an observer.’ ‘I wish you’d let an observer write you a play!’ he breaks out. ‘People don’t care for what you write: you’d break any run of luck.’ ‘Well, I see plays all around me,’ he replies, ‘the air is full of them tonight.’

I have read that Henry James longed to be a successful playwright and failed in that ambition. Indeed he records, in his prefaces, a voice that insists sharply to itself, at the moment when the pressure of his frivolous observations can no longer be resisted, ‘Dramatise it! Dramatise it!’ The more I have read and re-read these stories they have seemed like the works of a dramatist. A dramatist, however, who wrote as many stage directions as words to be spoken, for he so adored the intricate complexity of thought possible between people when words fail, or before words are employed. Take for example this surprise meeting, in the upstairs hall of a Swiss chalet, between our author and the wife of the mysterious Lord Mellifont, Lady Mellifont.

For a moment, as she stood there, we exchanged two or three ideas that were the more singular for being unspoken. We had caught each other hovering and we understood each other; but as I stepped over to her (so that we were separated from the sitting room by the width of the hall), her lips formed the almost soundless entreaty: ‘Don’t!’ I could see in her conscious eyes everything the word expressed – the confession of her own curiosity and the dread of the consequences of mine. ‘Don’t!’ she repeated as I stood before her. From the moment my experiment could strike her as an act of violence I was ready to renounce it; yet I thought I caught from her frightened face a still deeper betrayal – a possibility of disappointment if I should give way. It was as if she had said: ‘I’ll let you do it if you’ll take the responsibility. Yes, with someone else I’d surprise him. But it would never do for him to think it was I.

This is marvellous stuff for an actress and actor to play but perhaps more suited to an intimate, mind-reading close up on the silver screen than the large proscenium theatres of Henry James’s day, still resonating as they were with the eloquent dialogue of Oscar Wilde. Indeed, with The Heiress adapted from Washington Square in 1947, the cinema and modern drama have proved themselves a wonderful medium for James. I wish these two stories were so adapted.

Intimate mental turmoil, an inner dance of holiday manners in The Private Life, becomes, in The Birthplace, the labour pains and consequences of new thought, monstrous conception, a concept that could destroy the world!

‘The whole thing becomes a sort of stiff smug convention, like a dressed-up sacred doll in a Spanish church – which you’re a monster if you touch.’

The remark of an inquisitive American visitor in the birthplace.

‘A monster,’ Gedge assented, meeting his eyes.

The young man smiled, but he thought looking at him a little harder. ‘A blasphemer.’

‘A blasphemer.’

Both stories are spun on the enigma of identity, particularly the identity of writers, though Mr James provides such a vista of what is happening inside the mind, as well as outside in the dialogue, that one is aware of a double-life, to a greater or lesser degree, in all the characters. I like this play of hide and seek. It reminds me that the Shakespeare authorship question is closely related to my own question as to the origin of thoughts and actions in my own psyche and, of course, the proper time and place for the appearance of these inner creations. ‘Dramatise it!’ Who is it within who commands the ‘frivolous observer’ James? Did the fact that he had a first name for a surname, a double name, inspire him from an early age to this idea of a creative partnership, a collaboration, a coalition governing his creative psyche? What’s in a name? I am indulging my fancy, but there is an observer, who remains anonymous, in most artists I know and I read the author Shakespeare to be profoundly sensitive to this in his sonnets and masked characters (Hamlet, Viola, Rosalind).

The private lives of an aristocrat, Lord Melliflont, who disappears, literally disappears, when not in company, and a successful writer, Claire Vawdrey, whose conversation, though plentiful, lacks any hint of the eloquence of his novels, are the fascination of The Private Life. Surprised by a thunderstorm, Vawdrey and James seek refuge in an alpine cowshed. To the narrator’s increasing frustration, Vawdrey watches the Byronesque lightning and thunder show, the ‘grand rage of nature’, all the while regaling his expectant companion with stale anecdotes about the ‘celebrated Lady Ringrose’. The lightning projects a hard truth for James: ‘For personal relations [Claire Vawdrey] thought his second best good enough.’ So, apparently, did gentle Will, endowing to his wife, in the famously uncharacteristic will, his ‘second best bed’. ‘The world was vulgar and stupid,’ James concludes, ‘and the real man would have been a fool to come out for it when he could gossip and dine by deputy.’ Can James have used the term ‘second best’ without being aware of its most famous use?

He admits, through his narrator’s voice, that he wanted Vawdrey to ‘make an exception for me – for me all alone, and all handsomely and tenderly, in the vaste horde of the dull’. And I must admit this is an aspect of the Shakespeare authorship question for me and I suspect for others. A deep longing for Shakespeare to make an exception for me; to allow me nearer to his true self than any other. And James created Vawdrey from direct experience of a personality in his own time whose ‘loud, sound, normal, hearty presence’ was at irreconcilable odds with the rich genius of his creation. Eventually James succumbs to the ‘whimsical theory of two distinct and alternative presences’.

Our delightful inconceivable celebrity was double, constructed in two distinct and watertight compartments – one of these figures by the gentleman who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wrote admirably deep and brave and intricate things; while the gentleman who regularly came forth to sit at a quite different table and substantially and promiscuously and multitudinously dine stood for its companion.

Is this a potential answer to the Shakespeare Authorship question? For many, yes it is. But, can an artist be unlike his art, as Mr Shakspere, in the illiterate records we have of him, stubbornly remains? I will use Shakspere, a frequent spelling of his name, with no disrespect, but only to distinguish now for discussion, the actor from the possible author, Shakespeare. Samuel Schoenbaum, no mere Morris Gedge but a pillar of orthodox Shakespearean biography, despaired ‘of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record’. Few bardographers even attempt a coherent life narrative, unfolding in chronological order, but relate Shakspere’s life by theme, without fair sequence or succession.

Can an artist be unlike his art? Are some of us very different from what we seem? Are all of us? Is the world, the universe in fact, different from what it seems? The great explorers, scientists, innovators in any field are bound to tell us so, from direct experience, or they wouldn’t be innovators. Shakespeare tells us so again and again and again. Seeming and Being, the drum and bass of all his songs. And Henry James joins him ‘here!’, as Morris Gedge would say, stamping his heel into the floorboards of Shakspere’s birthplace.

‘It seemed to them at first, the offer, too good to be true…’ What a beautiful opening to The Birthplace. Almost as good as ‘Who’s there?’ upon the battlements of Elsinore. Now the question becomes clear, for Hamlet and for Morris Gedge alike, should one man reveal another man’s secret? Many artists, from Al Pacino to J.D. Salinger, have guarded their private lives carefully to liberate their art from autobiographical reduction. Is that what Mr Shakspere did? Did he refrain from ever writing a letter and destroy every letter he received? Did he take care to keep no books and make no notes in any books? Leave no evidence of education, no evidence of having been paid for writing, no extant original manuscript, no handwritten inscriptions, receipts, etc. touching on literary matters? Did he convince all who loved his very successful plays to say nothing at all about him the year he died, though his fellow playwright, Francis Beaumont, who dies in the same year, is interred immediately in Westminster Abbey? Did the man from Stratford hide someone else or just himself?*

The mystery continues and the denial of any mystery grows more vehement. I remember well the occasion, a gathering of the Royal Shakespeare Company in The Swan Theatre, circa 1989, arranged by yours truly; a talk on the true identity of the author of Shakespeare. The first such assembly I ever organised. The reaction? Outrage, to my sincere, if naive, surprise. Yes, I know Morris Gedge well.

James doesn’t explore the question which usually follows a discovery such as Gedge’s: the discovery of ‘the man shaped hole, Shakespeare’ (a phrase coined by bardographer Michael Wood): if the facts don’t tally in Stratford-upon-Avon, then, who wrote the works? James doesn’t peep into that prism. He focuses on the internal effect which occurs when a man, Morris Gedge, perceives a truth beneath the surface appearance, ‘the Maya illusion’, to quote another sceptic, walt Whitman. The surface appearance, in this case, being no less than the identity of the inventor of human identity, humanity, to quote Harold Bloom, orthodox bardographer.

The reader, innocent of just what a man-shaped hole exists in the place of the author, may take Gedge for a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown, on the verge of joining the flat earth society (where I and other authorship sceptics belong according to Professor Bloom). He actually joins, if he only knew it, good company.

‘I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.’ – Sigmund Freud

‘Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man was in wide contrast.’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘It is a great comfort… that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up.’ – Charles Dickens

‘Shall I set down the rest of the conjectures which constitute the giant biography of William Shakespeare? It would strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold them. He is a Brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris.’ – Mark Twain

and

Henry James himself: ‘I am… haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world.’

Good company or not, the fears of Isabel and Morris Gedge are not unfounded. The modern day ‘Body’, as James calls them, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, has recently launched an authorship campaign: ‘Shakespeare Bites Back’. The Revd. Dr Paul Edmondson, head of learning and research, writes:

For true Shakespeareans, there is no question that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare; no debate; no issue… Some people take the ultimately untenable view that it does not matter who wrote the plays. It matters exceedingly. To say that it does not is to deny history, to allow intellectual theft (for that is one of the often unspoken moral points within the Authorship discussion), to scorn scholarship, to encourage snobbery (the alternative candidates are mainly aristocrats or university educated) and to support misguided biographical readings of the work.

‘True Shakespeareans’ can now go to a new digital platform and hear ‘anti-Stratfordians’ mocked and shamed, even psychoanalysed! One such, the first and only professor in England teaching an MA course which considers the Authorship question, has received so much hate mail, he has asked friends to send him a friendly note, just to make a change.

The surprising lack of evidence of a literary life, unlike all other theatre writers of Mr Shakspere’s time, as Morris Gedge discovers, makes it difficult for authorities such as Dr Edmondson to be reasonable in the face of doubt. In fact, it is the authorities who have asserted for decades that it does not matter who wrote the plays, while publishing innumerable biographies that level or leap over all the difficult historical details of their candidate’s life. They have shunned the principles of scholarship by attempting to repress a reasonable doubt with personal attack and misrepresentation and, as for ‘intellectual theft’, are we to expect litigation next? Snobbery, they say. When an author writes with expert authority about a large number of matters indigenous to an aristocratic life and with the level of education and travel only available at that time to an aristocrat (or a remarkable common man such as Christopher Marlowe, whom we know attended university), is it snobbery to consider university educated aristocrats as collaborators or authorship candidates? No, it is natural.

I like James’ focus though: the mind of Morris Gedge as a birthplace itself undergoing a paradigm shift. Often, perhaps always, the authorship question itself seems inconsequential in the face of humanity’s pressing questions. What does it matter? The plays and sonnets exist, delight and escape biographical definition. Rather, their myriad characters and events create a beautiful rainbow of biographical imagination and research. ‘The Show’ that Morris Gedge is hired to sustain creates a mystery. A fine mystery, thought Charles Dickens. Albert Einstein thought the mysterious the most beautiful aspect of nature the human mind could experience. ‘It is the source of all true art and science.’ Here now, as we all face the mystery of so many important shifting paradigms in economics, religion, environment, health, etc., ‘who wrote Shakespeare’ isn’t all that important, but the minds and behaviour of those engaging with, and resisting, the possibility that Shakspere didn’t write Shakespeare, do become instructive on the wider plane of paradigm change.

‘“The play’s the thing.” Let the author alone.’

‘That’s just what They won’t do’, replies Gedge, ‘nor let me do. It’s all I want – to let the author alone. Practically, there is no author; that is for us to deal with. There are all the immortal people – in the work; but there’s nobody else.’

‘Yes. That’s what it comes to. There should really, to clear the matter up, be no such person.’

‘There is no such person.’

‘But wasn’t there –?’

‘There was somebody. But They’ve killed Him. And, dead as He is, They keep it up. They do it over again. They kill him every day.’

‘Then if there’s no author, if there’s nothing to be said but that there isn’t anybody, why in the world should there be a house?’

‘There shouldn’t,’ said Morris Gedge.

And in this little dialogue, which I have reduced to its essence, you have a prophecy of the major contortions of the larger, worldwide ‘Body’, The Orthodox Shakespeare Academy, during the last fifty years; the death of the author; the liberation of innumerable fictions, novels dressed smartly as biography; and now, in James Shapiro’s popular book, Contested Will, the proposition, more or less, that the birthplace, and all its associated ‘fanthistory’ of the author, be pulled down.

It seems to me that the natural movement of any such ‘Body’ would be to embrace the possibility that even if someone else was involved, some other author or authors, they pointed us to Stratford-upon-Avon as a doorway, an entry, for those who are curious about the authorship. Whoever wrote the works, william Shakspere too, they hid themselves and put forth an image of the creator, William Shake-speare, of Stratford upon Avon. Stratford will always be the doorway into the mystery. The portal. This question need not be anti-Stratfordian. So let’s start here and move deeper if we enjoy it.

What a wise and generous move it would be for the ‘Body’, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, if they admitted that the authorship has always been a ‘fine mystery’; from the enormous vocabulary employed in the writing to the early rumours of concealed authorship amongst Shakespeare’s contemporaries: Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, John Marston, Ben Jonson, Gabriel Harvey. What a pleasure it would be to visit Stratford and see a confident exhibition on the Authorship question! Think of all the Elizabethan characters one would learn about and all the eccentric researchers who have, at one time or another, put forward an overly enthusiastic theory. Who knows it might even boost the tourist industry! I can see tour buses setting off from the back of the birthplace to The Earl Oxford’s Hedingham Castle or Francis Bacon’s Gorhambury House or even The Countess of Pembroke’s Wilton House on the banks of the other River Avon in Wiltshire. What an industry it could be! What a killing they could make!

‘The receipts. It appears, speak –?’ [Gedge] was nursing his effect; Isabel intently watched him and the others hung on his lips. ‘Yes, speak –?’

‘Well, volumes. They tell the truth.’

At this Mr Hayes laughed again. ‘Oh they at least do?’

I don’t have direct evidence of Henry James taking a tour to Stratford, but I assume he did. His brother, william, writes of a visit in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 2nd May 1902.

We [William, and perhaps Henry] went to Stratford for the first time. The absolute extermination and obliteration of every record of Shakespeare save a few sordid material details, and the general suggestion of narrowness and niggardliness which ancient Stratford makes, taken in comparison with the way in which the spiritual quantity ‘Shakespeare’ has mingled into the soul of the world, was most uncanny, and I feel ready to believe in almost any mythical story of the authorship. In fact a visit to Stratford now seems to me the strongest appeal a Baconian can make.

Nature abhors a vacuum and Henry James relishes the effect on Gedge after he has been purged of his heretic behaviour by his employer, Mr Grant-Jackson, he of the broad well-fitted back, the back of a banker and a patriot. Morris Gedge, like so many bardographers since, becomes truly ‘great’ when he fills the void with his fantasy. Gedge’s show, his hearthside chat, within the hallowed walls of the birthplace, is a creative masterpiece; giving away nothing, summoning up an intimate presence of little Will Shakespeare and then slipping in the customary plasterer’s stepladder of bardolatry, the suggestion that there might have been, could have have been, would have been, was, some such ‘rudely bound volume of chronicles’, no doubt by Holinshed, ‘we may be sure, in His father’s window seat’. And instantly a glove maker’s abode becomes the cradle of human consciousness in the western world and the window seat looks out on the history of Britain, France, Italy, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome, rather than the pile of dung that was all we know for certain. Genius.

Morris himself has become the genius he could not find at the birthplace. His genius has been acknowledged by his charming American guests, Mr and Mrs Hayes of New York City. ‘Of course you’re tremendously talked about. You’ve gone round the world.’ ‘They rave about you.’ Many men and women have become ‘great’ by stepping into the man-shaped hole. Is this why the question still upsets people so? Are the heretics actually not robbing Shakspere of his greatness, but rather the bardographers of their assumed and inhabited greatness?

The show goes on and on and on and even raises a fresh anxiety that an excess of enthusiasm for the show might appear heretic. ‘Don’t they want then any truth – none even for the mere look of it?’ asks Mrs Hayes standing in the hallowed birthplace. ‘The look of it,’ said Morris Gedge, ‘is what I give!’ Henry James originally imagined, and recorded in his notebooks, an ending for Morris Gedge that is different from the one he eventually employed, but I must desist and let you discover the truth behind the devastating ending. ‘The very echoes of the Birthplace were themselves, for the instant, hushed,’ James imagines, as he gives the last word to Morris Gedge, ‘And there you are!’ And here we are right now, with James, behind the broad well-fitted back of Mr Grant-Jackson, the back of a banker and a patriot, the back of the ‘Body’, the back of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, reading what they would brand heresy.

Henry James discovers two men ‘constructed in two distinct and watertight compartments’ in The Private Life and makes Stratford-upon-Avon a psychological birthplace for Morris and Isabel Gedge, never actually naming the town or its famous son. Stratford has the same power for me. As a teenager, I fell in love with Shakespeare there. As a young RSC actor I wandered along the river in an imagined intimacy with Will. I rollerskated through the empty shopping streets late at night in the same reverie and gradually woke, while there, to the artifice of it all, the market town, the tourism, the beautiful face of it all and the mystery behind that face.

In the Hopi nation of indigenous tribal people, when a young man discovered that the Katchinas, the gods who danced into town and commended or criticised them during childhood, were actually just adult members of the tribe in beautiful masks and costumes, this discovery was a birth; a rite of passage like Orlando’s, or Orsino’s, or nearly all the characters in Cymbeline or The Tempest. There was no shame or tearing down of the Katchinas. No, the unmasking was a vital part of growing up. An awakening to the energy, the spirit, the life, the mysterious, what you will, within the apparent