What Maisie Knew

Henry James won't leave me alone this semester. One of my students is reading The Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew is set for one subject, and one of the novels for another English subject is The Line of Beauty, which is heavy on the Jamesian influence. As stalker authors go James ain't so bad, it would really suck, for example, to be stalked by D.H Lawrence, whose books I would like to fling out the window of a swiftly moving train, and who I'm sure is super creepy in person.

There are aspects of James' writing style which I thoroughly detested in reading Portrait, not least the characterisation of Isabel Archer, who I found insufferable (mostly, anyway). But another thing is his endless explication of stuff you would prefer to be shown through action, dialogue, connotation, etc. I find it disconcerting to be continually told, for example, that Gilbert Osmond's mind is like a shadowy room from which she cannot escape, and on the other hand to not have any idea what's just happened in their conversations, which often result in one party being grossly offended by some imputation when it seemed to you like they were talking about somebody else's hairstyle.

In Maisie, I found this style less visible, and more natural. Since we're taking our perspective from the point of view of a child it seems reasonable to be confused by the adult conversations, and the descriptive passages have a uniform aesthetic reference which I thought balanced the novel nicely. Before I found James’ constant comparisons of people and states to furniture, houses and rooms frustrating and repetitive, like in Portrait, but in Maisie they worked. Maisie’s mind in the opening chapter is “a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable... the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn’t yet big enough to play”, in chapter two she is “the little feathered shuttlecock”, and the messages she carries drop “into her memory with the dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box.” They all reminded me of the ways my childhood memories seem to me now, and how they're always revealing new things you didn't realise you knew.

There are exterior aspects too, like the "white and gold salon" in France, which is all hope and clean brightness, everything they want to gain by running away from their problems, although it doesn't have the same positive effect on them that the Countess' drawing room has on Beale. It is “the drawing room of a lady... whose things were as much prettier than mama’s as it had always had to be confessed that mamma’s were prettier than Mrs. Beale’s.” The room is like a flattering mirror for Maisie’s father, who is “presented to her as quite advantageously and even grandly at home... and himself by so much the more separated from scenes inferior to it”.

I like things with a focus on surroundings, I think, because it helps me sink into a book in that way you do. You know that way. You only notice it afterwards, when you come out of all the golden sunlight and autumn breezes and twisty mind holes and it's like waking up all over again. I can't say I ever expected to feel that way about Henry James. There's that old creative writing advice, 'show don't tell', which I always thought James shamelessly ignored, but after reading Maisie I can see that really he does it so well you don't even notice.