Speaking American

I think I first really became aware of the word “beautiful” when, as a young woman, I lived for a while in New York City. The adjective was everywhere, so it seemed, describing anything from a club to an oyster to a state of mind. “Oh, you’re going to that party? Beautiful.” “You won’t believe what she just said to me. Too beautiful.” It was a word that now had the capacity—the depth and potential—to describe a level of appreciation for a thing, the sheer enjoyment of interaction between subject and object, that I had never known back in London, where I’d come from. Up until then, something was “beautiful”—a summer’s day, say, or an evening dress—and that was that. There was the t in the middle of the three syllables that crisply closed off the vowels on either side of it to create a neat shape for the word that kept the mouth small, the lips pursed, and the utterance light—often with an exclamation mark attached. Out it came in a puff—“Oh how beautiful!”

The new Manhattan pronunciation, though, was of an altogether different order. The word expanded in American English into something sensuous and large. The tidy London t was replaced in New York by a d that gave softness to the adjective and length and languor. “That’s bee-uuuu-diful …” I heard, from the Upper West Side down to Alphabet City, as though the word had sidled up to you on Broadway and was now ready to wrap itself around you and take you into its confidence. “Hey, beautiful …” I would have liked to have been able to pronounce the word like that myself, with its relaxed and expansive American meaning. But you had to be American to say “beautiful” in the American way. Is what I thought then. And still think. Some words really do just need to have an American accent.

I’ve been thinking about all this, about words and their sounds and uses, about American English and how it retains but also spreads away from English English, while reading the novels of Henry James. I started a year ago, looking, I suppose, for a way of avoiding the political and global chaos that has been swirling around since the arrival of the pandemic and carried on. The lockdown was well and truly in place, and I dropped deep into The Golden Bowl, one of the longer novels from James’s “great” late period, according to critics, and regarded by its author as “distinctly the most done of my productions,” and found I didn’t want to come out again.

“I’m so glad you’ve gone back to James,” said Michael Schmidt, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated director of Carcanet Press, who publishes mostly poetry but also a small, select list of highly fashioned and beautifully finished prose, and the poetry magazine PN Review. “That seems to me to be a most sensible thing to do.” Michael Schmidt, with his American and Mexican background, who has lived in Britain for most of his adult life, is a rather Jamesian figure himself. He has beautiful posture and speaks with the kind of measured phrasing and dry wit that resembles the speech of various characters in the novels, and his writing on James, contained within his magisterial 1,172-page The Novel: A Biography, has the print of the same cut-glass diction, which, in Edwardian period films and recordings, signifies the sophisticated and worldly transatlantic type. “Indeed,” he finished, in another email to me once my Henry James adventure had well and truly taken hold. “I am starting to wonder if these strange new times of ours might have their uses after all.”

Certainly, The Golden Bowl had been just the beginning. From there, I’d swept straight onto The Europeans, The Bostonians, and The Awkward Age in a program of reading and re-reading that had taken me back to The Portrait of a Lady, then forward again into The Ambassadors, The Spoils of Poynton, and The Wings of the Dove. I’d started with James’s last novel and found myself finishing with Roderick Hudson, the first. Scholars and aficionados refer to the periods of James the First, Second, and the Old Pretender to mark out the periods when the writer seemed to be developing, in phases, his ideas of the importance of representation and exposition over the more straightforward revelations of plot—a trajectory first defined by biographer Philip Guedalla—but my investigation bore no such fidelity to chronological priorities. I read randomly, uncritically. The shorter novels, the hefty, the lesser known, and the famous, and the filmed. Washington Square and What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw bumped up against The Princess Casamassima and The Tragic Muse and The Reverberator. There was the shelf of Penguin Classics and Oxford paperback editions sitting before me in a row, and I picked them up, one after the other, and read them all. After the nightmare of Trump’s contestation of the American election and the UK’s own political shenanigans and pile of deceptions and fake truths, it couldn’t have been more of a relief to be surrounded instead by the prose of someone who had made it his life’s work to investigate the responsibilities of language, on both sides of the Atlantic, and who, in his novels, was doing everything he could to explore what happened to people when they spoke, who they were then, and who, as a result of the kinds of words they used, they would become.

For this is what Henry James has taught me. That what we say, and how we say it, well, it counts. The words we choose and how we speak them will alter our experience of reality and change us, his books suggest; a body of work that’s not so much a collection of stories as a protracted literary investigation as to the way people describe themselves to themselves and to others. More than plot or character and the imagined turns and travesties of life, James shows us that our talk has consequences, that it generates actions and resolutions, and is built right into both before they become either. Indeed, the “stories” of his novels, “the situation,” as James referred to them, mostly picked up as real-life anecdotes he overheard at lunch and supper parties, are so similar—money, marriage, and who gets what when—that he seems to be making rather a point of it. Story is not really the thing at all. The circumstances of the narratives are only there to provide a way of thinking about a literary approach to them. It’s the “how” not the “why” that he is interested in. So each novel puts out its own probe—testing, say, omniscient narration here, limited point of view there. He tries a dialogue-based drama in one and, in another, depends almost entirely upon exposition. There are stage-managed “scenes” and there are breakout authorial interventions … The list goes on. To read all the books together is to feel the sure stamp of his project, and I can do little else now when I speak to someone or listen to them, other than think about how it’s language, our speaking out of ourselves into the precision of words—not feelings, not emotions, nor various casts of mind—that makes up so much of who we are.

So, we learn from James; one talks about an event or action this way—and lo! That is what it becomes! “The experience here represented,” he wrote in his preface to The American, “is the disconnected and uncontrolled experience—uncontrolled by our general sense of ‘the way things happen,’” “experience liberated, so to speak.” To “push his rendering,” as R. P. Blackmur wrote, introducing the first collected edition of James’s prefaces, “to the most difficult terms possible” is a reading of James that literary critic Tony Tanner unspools as “marking and exploring the hazards and dangers … of, as the author himself put it, ‘the great European banquet of initiation.’” Roderick Hudson, Tanner says, is an example of a novel in which the writer is providing a particular set of motifs—the world of art and beauty—against which the writer can test his imaginative intelligence. The world of the story, sophisticated and complex, must be reflected exactly by the prose itself.

Altogether, throughout James’s work, there is a whole range of different methods—“devices … calculated to command, direct, and limit or frame the reader’s attention,” Blackmur wrote—all geared toward making us think twice about what is being said and why. So vocabulary is chosen to match each subject—it is limited or expanded, words are pronounced this way or that, repeated or not repeated, italicized or pointed with exclamation. What we express and how we express it, James shows—our choice of vocabulary, its stresses of accent or underline, its conveyance as drama or flippancy or ennui—is the very means by which we take our place in society. Through language, “the glimpse became the impression” and “the impression became the experience,” as he himself wrote. Muriel Spark, surely his most obvious successor in English, concurs: “Words are ideas,” she always said.

I might see my shelf of Henry James, then, not so much as a collection of novels as an education in self-consciousness. To read them is to learn how to think more ethically, more knowingly, about the English—whether English English or American English—that comes out of our mouths when we speak the language with which we can otherwise be too familiar, so much so that sometimes in our day-to-day lives we barely seem to think about it at all. Becoming aware of words—that Jamesian vocabulary, the “superincumbent weight” of it, as I learned in The Ambassadors, those double negatives, the piling on of adverbs—changes our relation to them. And to be conscious of sentences (“Ah, those sentences,” murmured a Modernist friend and Virginia Woolf scholar when I told her what I was up to, reminding me that Woolf herself had had some issues with James on that score—“if he were content to say less and suggest more,” she famously remarked) is to be aware of what happens when we read. Having to concentrate on those long, sparsely punctuated phrases that can easily run to a paragraph … To have to follow so attentively the subject of each as he or she winds their way through clause and subclause in order to find out exactly what that same subject means … These are the mind-exercising effects of reading these novels. “Stream of consciousness,” the philosopher and psychologist William James, his brother, described a new form of fiction that had writing about thinking at its core. Well, here was prose doing plenty of that—deliberating, ruminating, reflecting, and talking, talking, talking—all in order to bring the reader deep inside the workings of syntax and sensibility and sense. Thinking takes time, Henry James wants to demonstrate, and the novel is just the place to do it.

His novels have all the cheery appeal of the genre, for sure: entertaining and outward facing, freely available. They were written regularly and consistently for a market of avid readers of the journals and magazines in which his books were published, on the whole successfully, in installments. Despite all the thinking and talking, James wanted his work to have popular appeal. The prefaces, written for the republication of his work in 1907 by Charles Scribner, tell us that, along with the novels’ gossipy origins. “Therein lies the secret of the appeal … by the art of figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick, as into the rich density of wedding cake,” he wrote about The Tragic Muse, how he might merge that first idea—the story he’d heard or read about in the society pages of a newspaper—and the “form and compass that will contain and express it.” That form, the way he would need to describe and proscribe the conditions of society and the individual’s place in relation to it, comes across as a fictional priority in preface after preface. “I recognize … a tree that spreads beyond any provision its small germ might on a first handling have appeared likely to make for it,” James wrote about What Maisie Knew, the novel that gives us the term “point of view.” There, that “slice” of society’s cake is revealed not only through a child’s eyes, “the wretched infant” who is “practically disowned, rebounding from racquet to racquet” as her parents fob her off to their own advantage, but in our grown-up reading of their sly phrasing and shifty vocabulary. We know, in a way poor Maisie couldn’t begin to, of the nastiness going on in this story, of the way it will continue. How language is entailed, James shows, to tradition and the status quo. And, in this novel, how it keeps pace, all the talk, with the frantic, pernicious lives fashioned out of habits of bitterness and envy and greed. The more you say you want a thing, the more you want it, What Maisie Knew reminds us. Paul Theroux called it “that novel of thrusting hands.”

And yet, despite habit’s hold and the ensnaring appeal of wealth and position, a free kind of speech is also possible in these books. If we really listen to the sentences that curl and twist and want to keep characters fixed and beholden, we can also learn how they can be managed. Then we might find a way out of this maze of talk. “Nanda Brookenham … had found much to think of,” James writes toward the end of The Awkward Age, a novel concerned with the author’s observation that “in Britain an adolescent girl was often neither free, taught, nor safe” as Ronald Blythe writes in his Penguin Classics introduction. In a story where the words “up” and “down” ring like elevator bells, signifying social ambition and the various floors of a smart London house, Nanda is lifted, in one wide sentence, out of society’s constrictions for a girl of her time and class and whisked “up” to her old nursery quarters, now redefined as an autonomous domain from where she can plan life ahead as an independent woman. “She was now in unusual possession of that chamber of comfort in which so much of her life had lately been passed, the redecorated and rededicated room upstairs,” James writes. Not for her, the world of marriage and maternity. “I shall be one of the people who don’t,” she says. “Her speech, while she went from point to point, completely hushed him.” In her own words, Nanda changes how she lives.

So yes, there is breathing space, after all, in the midst of the thick tablets of prose, and there’s revolution. These novels may be stiff with explanation, with formal conversation and period detail—buttoned silks and gloves (James’s novels generally are busy with the picking up and laying down of gloves as a means of indicating emotional restlessness; points of parasols, dug fiercely into the ground or used to draw patterns, are employed much in the same way), drawing room doors opening and closing upon revelations and privacies—but there’s actually something far more twentieth century going on within those chapters of clotted dialogue and description which mask sexual desire and simple lust for goods.

For there’s that sound again … American. It takes an American, in these novels, to tell us what’s what. While the prose is composed of all that nineteenth-century English novel’s stuff—attenuated romances played out in salons and during gentle walks through the gardens and parks of English country houses—beneath its English heritage and running alongside like an engine within the speeches given in mainly English and European settings, there it is—you can hear it: the annunciation of James’s own modernity. So he turns a sentence, just so, showing differences as well as the similarities between American English and English English and how saying a thing there makes it different from when you say it here. It’s a difference we can surely learn from and put to work in our attitude toward anything from transatlantic diplomacy to discussions about foreign aid and our combined military actions. That the accent we might give to a thing—in describing it, in the particular kind of adjective we choose—might just help us think about it a little bit more carefully, a bit better, a bit more?

Therefore, in James, we see how a domestic incident common enough in Europe becomes a scandal when reported in an American magazine in The Reverberator; how “Englishness” is unduly rated in Lady Barbarina, misinterpreted by her American husband as a quality that might stand for all that is good and worthwhile, when in fact snobbishness would be a better word—but is it one an American would use? In his slips of terminology, the shift from one register to another, old world to new—“His companion, as if to look at him with a due appreciation, stopped swinging the nippers and put them on. ‘You people here have a pleasant way—’” (in The Awkward Age)—James is training our ear to listen out for the implications. Words. Expressions. Conversations. Chat. It all matters. How you say something can enliven a formal conversation or run off with your daughter—is how Mr. Wentworth (he is always Mr. Wentworth) in The Europeans, might put it, after a pair of charming but acquisitive distant relatives have come over from Europe to stay, and one of them has talked his youngest child into marriage. In Wentworth’s New England, vocabulary needs a close eye kept upon it at all times; idle words can lead to all kinds of craziness: “Are we very sure that we need a foreign house?” he asks his family, who’ve been dazzled by European ways. Then he disengages from the conversational gambit that is set on securing his fortune. He retires to his library and from there, behind a newspaper, hangs on to his money.

Characters often maintain integrity and power in a James novel by not talking—or not talking much—and Wentworth’s quiet reading is not so different from Colonel Assingham’s preference for smoking a cigar rather than engaging with his wife’s marriage brokering in The Golden Bowl. In that novel, she’s the one, American born, who has the fancy syntax and wants, wants, wants—social outcomes, diversions, entertainments. Her husband, by contrast, is the traditionally reserved Englishman perfectly satisfied with his lot. Both men are protected by their own intelligence from the questionable machinations of plot, generated by too much talk of the getting and having of people and stuff … Language has its worldly way; it succeeds. So one must be aware, hyperaware, James is suggesting, of what it can do. Ask: Where are these words headed? Ask: what do they want to achieve?

It’s true, the grand houses in his books, all those bibelots and golden bowls within them, become a form of metaphor, the means by which James can trade old world values for new world ambition and wealth. Again, his fiction is making us think afresh about American language: the power of rhetoric around acquisition. Misunderstand that, as Fleda Vetch does in The Spoils of Poynton, and whatever kind of stash you are after—a fortune or a person or a combination of the two—you’ll lose the lot. The new world, in that novel, speaks out in the voice of a very British American; Mrs. Gereth’s bossiness and clipped diction, though authoritatively English, reflects a mind taken up by little more than the tallying of goods. Caught between her brisk opinions and the insistent demands of the freshly, hugely wealthy Brigstocks, Fleda has nowhere to go. When Mona Brigstock tosses a tarty magazine into the doorway of the grand house of Poynton, a gauntlet is being flung down. It’s everyone for themself. Only Fleda’s old fashioned manners prevent her from being able to fully to compete for the spoils; she simply can’t talk about possessions and people the way they all do.

The terrifying Christina Light in Roderick Hudson—even though she becomes a fully blown member of the Italian aristocracy by the end of that novel and in the subsequent The Princess Casamassima, where her character reappears—has even more about her shock of the new. Unlike other Europeanized ex-pats whom we meet across the Henry James shelf—such as Mrs. Gereth, or Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady, or Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors, where naked volition has been dressed by European charm and quantities of smoothly attractive talk—boy, don’t that Christina talk a fast game! Her kind of American is both a sign of and disguise for her honest appraisal of herself. Wrapped up as it is, though, in a toxic combination of sexual allure and emotional privation, hers is an idiom that’s closed off to others. “By nature she eludes possession,” writes Tony Tanner. That is her power. Christina doesn’t have conversations but talks as though only to herself. And, as is the case for all kinds of people who do that, politicians and princesses alike, she is a monster for it.

Page after page, the sound of talking goes on, accents and rhythms enclosed within a language intensely aware of both its old and New World usage. The novels show us, again and again, how one kind of speaking might have an advantage over another—or not. Here are descriptions of life in voices batted back and forth between America and Europe, picking up meanings and dropping them as they go, enlarging or disabling words as they run away from their traditional English origins and take on new life and new ethical, social responsibilities—repeating themselves (“bribable,” “bribability,” in The Princess Casamassima), being underlined (“Toddle? Yes, I’ll toddle off,” in The Ambassadors), getting overwritten with adverbs (“said Isabel, femininely,” in The Portrait of a Lady), interrupted (“Madame Grandoni had foretold the truth,” in Roderick Hudson) and—a word James loves to use—“ejaculating” (see all the novels). The sentences any of this vocabulary has been built into were surely never meant simply to deliver some parable about wealth or to describe the rut and shift of character—in the way novels with sentences much shorter than James’s do. And nor can they be passed off as reflecting taste—for American patriotism or Anglophilia or both. They want to have us listen, instead, to the echoes and reverberations of both our cultures in them. To have us think twice. It was an interesting enough thing for James to be doing back at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when the old world and the new were meeting fully and socially for the first time on a grand scale. But how much more interesting now, in 2022, when our shared language, through social media and the galloping consequences of our British and American pasts, has never been more scrutinized, more closely watched and checked for traces of a toxic imperialism and patriarchal suppression of freedoms. We have to watch out, James is showing us. We have to check that we’re not telling lies when we think we are being true.

In The Bostonians, he is exposing, in the severe pronouncements of a woman who regards herself as a feminist, someone who actually doesn’t think for herself. Olive Chancellor has simply embraced a cause and so is spoken over quite easily, silenced, by the drawl of her cousin, a “Mississippian”—“It is not in my power to reproduce by any combination of characters this charming dialect,” the narrator informs us early on. “The initiated reader will have no difficulty invoking the sound.” Olive is undone by that sound, as later, her friend and protegee, Verena Tarrant, is. Basil Ransome’s voice “was guilty of elisions and interpretations … his discourse pervaded by something sultry and vast.” His “prolonged consonants” end up dominating that novel, undercutting, with his lazy assertion of an old-world patriarchy, his cousin’s sense of Yankee purpose. It’s all in the sound. Not listening, the lack of an “ear,” is the very subject of The Tragic Muse, in which a young woman who has no sense of poetry’s rhythm, or for words altogether, becomes a famous actress by sheer will. And there are the punctuating Americanisms in The Ambassadors, “as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety match,” when the Pococks come to Paris to rescue a wayward son from the kind of life that speaking French might bring about.

This acute awareness, spanning continents, of the different ways of speaking English says, for my money, more about American sense and sensibility than any number of movies or Westerns or novels by William Dean Howells, James’s firmly American rival who was always taking him to task for being too European and not new world enough in his books. There’s Mrs. Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady, in her mackintosh for all seasons, heir to a groaning fortune and acre upon acre of Elizabethan real estate, with brisk clarity dispelling at once any idea that she’s been seduced by the leisure and traditions of the world she has adopted. She may live in Europe—in her apartments in Florence and Rome—but her voice is not at home there. “I never did anything in life to anyone’s imagination,” she says. “Why in the world should I?”

In that novel it is made most obvious, perhaps, how the separation from America can form part of a moral trajectory—a theme James worries at all the way through his books. Is a certain way of talking—and therefore thinking—bad for you? The passionless phrasing of another American, willingly become European and wilily overcast with sophistication, stifles the clear, heartfelt cries of Isabel Archer and suffocates her completely. Speaking out can make you a heroine—The Portrait of a Lady is still given out as a core text in many secondary school and undergraduate courses and is beloved by young women in particular for its depiction of a girl’s free spirited individualism. So you must continue to have a voice, the novel says, in order to have influence and to know joy and pleasure. By the time the syntax of Gilbert Osmond has finished with her, Isabel’s kind of English is useless. She was once fluent in speaking her mind, but her words are no good for the world she has found herself trapped in.

Yet remember Isabel Archer, though. Before her unhappiness—“fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak” at the beginning of that novel. There she is, stepping out of the doorway, newly arrived from Albany and with all of old England before her, her cousin’s little pet dog leaping up into her arms—“The girl spoke to Ralph smiling, while she held up the terrier, ‘Is this your little dog, sir? … Couldn’t we share him? … He’s such a perfect little darling.’” No wonder, reading Henry James, my New York years came rushing back! That voice, that cry—to paraphrase Wallace Stevens—of its own occasion! That cadence, “little darling” … The rhythm of it. So English, yet not English at all. Isabel’s voice holds the key to who she is and who, always, she will be.

So, to finish up, I guess—sounding American enough myself, I suppose, for an American magazine—through James’s attention to both language and its pronunciation, to the order of words in a sentence and their usage, to the importance of the vocabulary and its representation on both sides of the Atlantic, I am brought by now to a mighty awareness of how saying the things we say has traction and consequence in this old world. I notice, as I feel I’ve never noticed before, in public life and in private, in the political stories that are aired on the radio and TV, along with the domestic requests and conversations of everyone from my husband and daughters, to friends, neighbors, and people in the street, how sentences might shift and alter us as they travel, embedding meanings within both cultures we need to be conscious of and fully read. Phrases, terms—“trigger,” “cancel culture,” “fat shaming,” “cut,” “bad”—what do we really mean when we pick up a word and repurpose it? Or reuse it; “great” this, “great” that—whether it’s Brexit’s Britain or the Neo Cons’ America—over and over again? Are we aware of what happens then? When we grab adjectives just because we always have—and don’t think that for “great” we might read instead “inflated” or “proud” or “pompous”? Or use a noun before thinking it through—so, say, putting in the place of a complicated ethical and personal matrix a word that describes the instigation of a gun’s killing action? Are we aware how our experience changes as a result? How we might close down the possibilities for nuance and gradations of thinking? So there’s not room then for considering, say, that “inclusivity,” might echo patronage and entitlement—for who is including whom? Or that “inappropriate” contains within it appropriacy, the very notion of a thing that can’t be shifted because tradition and all the proprieties that go with it have fixed it so. Where is the space, then, between such fixities, for debate and shift and conversation, for that thinking twice that James’s work encourages? Where is the complexity of language so required for the complexity of the concepts it serves? I can hear now, through reading these novels by an American who lived in and wrote about England and Europe, became a Londoner who wrote about America, and who was born in the United States but died a British citizen, how it bears chaos as well as order, this shared English language of ours. How, more so now than ever, when our shared pasts have caught up with us and we are trying to make account, make good, make better, it must be treated with grave seriousness, this business of saying the things we say.

From the moment I’d started The Golden Bowl, I could pick up how Americanness in that novel might be both a fabulously energizing force in society and also threatening to it. Through the rigid and socially constricted world of London and the Home Counties, a place where language is petrified by tradition and only reinstates old orders, roams the great, suede-clad figure of Charlotte Stant. Fresh over from the Midwest and let loose again on her old Italian boyfriend, Stant uses all the language she can muster—American ease and English class consciousness—to get exactly what she wants. Next to the other Americans in the story, the gentle and self-effacing Maggie Verver and her father, she is a sort of wild animal: “The splendid shining supple creature … out of the cage.” Though her ends are not, finally, satisfied by her means, one is taught in The Golden Bowl to look out for the Charlotte Stants of this world. There is no telling, James is saying, who a person is until they open their mouth and start to speak.

Then how we should pay attention. Isn’t our language worth that? James asks of his British and American readers both. That we may learn how intention, as it is spoken, becomes a fact and then a “truth.” After political turmoil and disorder, bungled expressions and the reduction of meaning to idiocies, tweets, and soundbites, the work of Henry James, with its phrasing and syntax that’s been increasingly missing from our public life, has re-attuned my hearing.

With the shelf of novels behind me, I realize I’ve learned to stop and listen, and listen again in the way I used to during my New York years and that I’d rather forgotten about since. “Beautiful” says just about everybody in The Awkward Age, the novel that, according to scholar Ronald Blythe, dramatically employs the word as a way of showing characters reacting to change and uncertainty. Well, so this reading lesson of mine has been. I can’t hear anything now in the way I used to—whether it’s the language of the everyday, with its generosities and kindnesses, or the barked repetitions of political life or the nouns and adjectives compounded in their millions by social media or the reiteration of personal opinion and prejudice that pretends to be discussion or the kind of syntax generated by the relentless accretion of advertising and the entertainment industry. It’s been unsettling for sure, all this Henry James. But yes, without a doubt, beautiful.