Henry James: a retrospective
In 1896, Henry James began work on a new novel, The Transatlantic Political Marriage. The work was abandoned by James the following year, but the MS survived and, along with other of his extant notes and correspondences, was published in a volume of collected miscellany a few years after his death. The Post-Newt has been able to gain access to the unfinished MS, via a complicated network of cellars and subterranean passages, and is proud to give its readers an exclusive glimpse of the period at which, Leavis argues, James was ‘sweeping the cobwebs from the dustiest corners of his craft, hoovering up the discarded chocolate wrappers from the filthiest recesses of his mind.’ The passage below is also an eminent example of James’s famous gradually-closing manhole conceit.
The evening sun crept elegantly over the cobbled promenade. Emerald Castor had, by an artfulness of prevision not entirely unbecoming – were one to venture the least little bit activating the closely knitted brow of received feminine charm – in a lady of her aspect, though not altogether sensible of consequences as yet unremittingly hidden from her perfect scrutiny in all such matters, chosen, as she thought most felicitous at the present time, to screen her polished waxen calves from the albeit gentlemanly assault of the eventide rays by means of an antique printed Japanese parasol which had been left, sometime idle, to languish in an old armoire of her London apartments.
As she sortied the jeweller and stepped out onto the pavement, Jasper Stein, his plain boot-heels negotiating the cobbles underfoot, danced, beaming, into her path. For a dull moment as the evening drifted into silence, each stood motionless; his spats creased mischievously, delighting in a not unwholesome impartiality towards his interlocutress; her feline ankles wrinkled not indelicately as in subtle but rapturous reception of the intensity of her beholder’s gaze.
‘I could not think, Miss Castor,’ came a voice from somewhere locally but somehow loftily displaced, addressing, as it is to be presumed, the small velvet brooch-box displayed not inconspicuously in her left palm, ‘that such ephemera could command your attention long.’
‘Oh would you call it ephemera?’ our heroine wonderfully laughed, her white soles flinching penitently. ‘I had better thought it might outlive both you and I, dear Mr Stein.’
Darkness descended, though voices could still be discerned to ring out above and around; and it was a darkness at once so dreadful and exquisite that one could but know, in the full knowledge such darkness invites, that sight and sound and all appreciable experience would, finally, at last, here at the end of things, be incommunicable in the vast heart of that crushing dark.
The evening sun crept elegantly over the cobbled promenade. Emerald Castor had, by an artfulness of prevision not entirely unbecoming – were one to venture the least little bit activating the closely knitted brow of received feminine charm – in a lady of her aspect, though not altogether sensible of consequences as yet unremittingly hidden from her perfect scrutiny in all such matters, chosen, as she thought most felicitous at the present time, to screen her polished waxen calves from the albeit gentlemanly assault of the eventide rays by means of an antique printed Japanese parasol which had been left, sometime idle, to languish in an old armoire of her London apartments.
As she sortied the jeweller and stepped out onto the pavement, Jasper Stein, his plain boot-heels negotiating the cobbles underfoot, danced, beaming, into her path. For a dull moment as the evening drifted into silence, each stood motionless; his spats creased mischievously, delighting in a not unwholesome impartiality towards his interlocutress; her feline ankles wrinkled not indelicately as in subtle but rapturous reception of the intensity of her beholder’s gaze.
‘I could not think, Miss Castor,’ came a voice from somewhere locally but somehow loftily displaced, addressing, as it is to be presumed, the small velvet brooch-box displayed not inconspicuously in her left palm, ‘that such ephemera could command your attention long.’
‘Oh would you call it ephemera?’ our heroine wonderfully laughed, her white soles flinching penitently. ‘I had better thought it might outlive both you and I, dear Mr Stein.’
Darkness descended, though voices could still be discerned to ring out above and around; and it was a darkness at once so dreadful and exquisite that one could but know, in the full knowledge such darkness invites, that sight and sound and all appreciable experience would, finally, at last, here at the end of things, be incommunicable in the vast heart of that crushing dark.
