Customer Reviews

The Princess Casamassima

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Princess Casamassima is fascinating for the way it takes James out of his comfort zone to depict the social world of workingmen, dressmakers, shopgirls, pub goers and (most improbably) underground revolutionaries in late Victorian London. I've heard the novel criticized for James's knee-knocking in confronting the 'social question': uneasy about the inequality it was built upon, his privileged world glittered too brightly for James to ever really denounce it.

But in the person of his "little bookbinder" Hyacinth Robinson, he gives it a valiant try, along the way bringing a lot more complexity--if not much documentary accuracy--to social problems than you get in many other writers, then or now, who take on the disadvantaged as their subject. No book's made me understand the British class system more sharply than this one. James's subtle eye reminds you how much was said by the cut of a glove, the smoothness of a hand, or the slight drop of an 'h' in England c. 1885. He's also sensitive to the way charity can be an expression of power (especially to those on the receiving end) and how mixed the motives can be when well-meaning fortunates "take up" the cause of the poor. The idea of the poor itself gets complicated as James delves into the various shades separating bookbinders from theater fiddlers from chemical experts from impoverished but titled aristocrats.

I think James was picking a bone with himself in this novel, since the same question--whether equality (what we'd probably call "social justice" today) should be achieved at the expense of the beauty and grace wealth provides--comes up over and over again. Kind of like the school busing question writ large. I think the frustrating thing about the novel is that James didn't know how to answer, so just kept writing new scenes. In the end, he falls back on the "religion of friendship" I think he calls it somewhere, a determination to see people, whatever their station, as individuals first and put their personalities above abstract theories. But he's also sharp enough to realize the personalities he likes most are the exceptional ones with intelligence and taste, not the "average" that reigns when everybody's equal. It's a muddle, but one that James tackled with his usual love for detail and appreciation for the complexities of human relationships. After the first few chapters, I had trouble putting it down.

This is James's only overtly political novel. Before reading I wondered how a man of his background could write about working class political conspirators. He does so by making his protagonist an exquisitely sensitive young bookbinder who becomes involved in a political movement he only dimly comprehends. The bookbinder, Hyacinth, is befriended by the Princess Casamissima, a charming, completely self-absorbed young beauty who is trying to find herself in radical political activity. The plot is, therefore, more of a fairy tale than a realistic portait of "typical" working class revolutionaries, but on its own terms it is plausible enough. The style is leisurely and fairly complex, but not nearly as convoluted as James's last works.

The great value of this book lies in its nuanced characterizations. All of the characters are wholly rounded and believable, and while they are all flawed in some way, not one of them is wholly unsympathetic. The Princess is the most interesting of all; through her James shows how bored, unsatisfied aristocrats can dabble in radical politics with disasterous results. He does so, however, without reducing her to a caricature.

When Henry James wrote THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA in 1886, he left the polite, drawing room society of effete and erudite snobs pontificating endlessly at one another for the decidedly lower class world of thugs, anarchists, and terrorists. Europe, then, as the Mid East is now, was full of internal dissension, with Marxist anarchists dreaming of plots that would soon reach fruition in Russia in 1917. The intellectual clime was also rife with a sense of deterministic fatalism that suggested that man was a pawn of a cobwebbery of political, social, and economic events totally beyond his control. There was little one could do, its proponents argued, but to meekly go with the flow. It was against this twin background of anarchy and determinism that James wrote this book.

Hyacinth Robinson is a child born of an illicit romance between a French prostitute and an English lord. After his birth, his mother kills his father with a knife and is sentenced to life in prison. At birth, then, Hyacinth is consigned to a lower class existence with his world view eminating from the ground up. He is raised by a good-hearted Miss Pynsent, who senses in the boy a chance to rise above his station in life. As he matures, he finds a female playmate, Millicent Henning, who, later in life, will love him unreservedly, but he, in turn, will reject that love. Hyacinth tries to find his niche in the world, and for one of his low caste, becoming a bookbinder will do well enough.

The problem with Hyacinth is that the more he struggles to overcome his humble origins, the determinism that gripped the philosophers of the day sought only to prevent him from climbing out of his rut. Hyacinth, even at an early age, began to intuit that the only way to rise above his station was first to destroy it. Eventually he meets the Princess Casamassima, a lovely but bored wife of a wealthy prince, who is the means by which he can elevate himself and in so doing crush the grubby underside of a society to which he yet belongs. She plays along with him, but to her, Hyacinth is only one whose lowly background matched hers prior to her marriage. For the moment, he occupies her attention. Soon enough, however, she dumps him for Paul Muniment, a revolutionary hustler who does not mind mixing the business of revolution with the pleasure of the bedroom. Muniment entices an all too willing Hyacinth into a presposterous scheme to assassinate an unnamed capitalist. When finally, Hyacinth learns that he has abandoned his former world of drudgery and poverty for the unobtainable world of the now unavailable Princess, he does not belong in either, and in desperation shoots himself.

THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA is not one of Henry James' best books. It is preachy and today's readers do not connect readily with the concept that one's fate is predetermined. Yet, in the fate of Hyacinth Robinson, James starkly depicts a man unhappy with his environment which he determines to alter. The fact that he fails does not negate the intensity of his effort.

I liked this book, but I notice that all the critics seem to hate it. It did take me more than a year of picking at it on and off. I picked it up because Walter Laqueur referred to it in one of his books about terrorism. Written in 1886, it suggests that there is a pan-European anarchist underground, which the protagonist gets mixed up with. It is interesting in its depiction of liberal guilt among the wealthy, who support a political movement that would lead to their own extinction. The prose is wonderful, as is the depiction of the subtleties of the characters' personalities, if you have the taste for that sort of thing. All in all, it was worth reading and it passed the most important test for a novel: I finished it with regret. I had previously read and liked Portrait of a Lady, which is a superior novel. As much as I liked it, I would have to say do not start with Princess as an introduction to James. Incidentally, I have a theory about the omniscient narrator in James' books being a malign demiurge, but I will spare you that theorizing here.

I turned to Henry James having only read one other of his works (Portrait of a Lady) not because I relished a return to a novel of manners and drawing room banter but because I was surprised to learn James had written something dealing with the political upheavals of the late 19th century, a time in terms of radical terror that makes more contemporary aspersions rather pale. Imagine a decade or so where four heads of state were assassinated, two of them from leading democracies. James' day was gripped by fears of social revolution and political upheaval and I was curious to see James perspective.

I do admire James' writing. He has a genious for conversation and the drawing out his characters' complex natures through repartee. This serves him well in slowly unveiling the complex interplay of personalities and emotions that usually leads to tragedy - at least so far as I've ascertained from reading two of his longer works. Reading James is like tracing a broad circle that moves ever inward towards a single point in the center. You arrive eventually at the climax, where action replaces words at last, but only after a long drawn out, fascinating in its way, story sustained only by the badinage of the characters and the occasional changes of scene from country manor to London to Paris, etc.

I was a little surprised by the editorial review of this book, that claims "the London underworld of terrorist conspiracies...comes alive under his pen with a violence that seems, 100 years later, only too familiar." I wonder if the reviewer read the book? There are no real conspiracies here, much less any violence. You read, or at least I did, waiting for one, praying for one, but the only thing approaching one comes at the end, and then only as a plan that leads to the final tragic act. I don't want to be too hard on the Princess Casamassima. It was in its way a brilliant work, in its Jamesian way I suppose. If you relish good conversation (and in this James rivals Oscar Wilde; I think James should have concentrated on plays) and undeniable genius in molding characters and slowly and laboriously, but lovingly, weaving out their fate, then James, and the Princess, is for you. If you're coming looking for some explosions and political intrigue it's not to be found here. James doesn't even really treat the social, economic, or political issues behind this growing rift in the social fabric with any seriousness, but treats of it only through the shifting, vague, often cynical opinions of his characters. But then Henry James is not primarily concerned with "the social problem", and treats of political philosophy and such only in a cursory manner, as dressing to brilliant conversation. And what's life about but good conversation? James, as I said, I take primarily as a novelist of manners, which means of people, individual persons, not "the people". This is not a shortcoming. I think James must have thought social issues rather vulgar. You can only treat with refinement the fine lines of the individual character. You can't make art in the factory or the streets (so I imagine him thinking). The tragedy here then is the tragedy of an individual, Hyacinth Robinson, drawn into something, and ultimately destroyed by his choices, due to the ideosyncracies of his own character and his own past. It's not about the revolutionary or anarchist movement per se, but about the struggles going on within a single human soul. Hyacinth had committed himself to a noble, idealistic, if single-minded, death before he had yet had time to consider the many facets life might take. In the end it is not socialism vs. capitalism, but East End on a winter's day vs. St. Mark's square at dusk, as Hyacinth's youthful, spontaneous, unrefined, and ill-considered radicalism gradually reaches its showdown with his more matured, compromising and balanced outlook. But he has arrived at these new insights too late, or has he?

Class conflict, in smudgy smug old London where only glimmers of social turmoil waft across the Channel from France and Germany, is ostentatiously the framework though perhaps not tout á fait sub sigillo the subject of this odd early novel by Henry (America's finest French novelist) James. It all begins in the drab and dingy parlor of a dressmaker's shop in a squalid alley of sub-hygienic London, a scene seemingly transliterated from Dickens's 'Hard Times' or Mrs. Gaskell's 'North and South.' The characters - Pinnie the dressmaker, Mrs. Bowerbank the women's prison warden, old Vetch the theater pit fiddler - are prime Dickens, nay, better than prime Dickens in their plausible caricature. Have no fear, however! Such picturesque ale-and kidney-pie descriptiveness lasts only a few chapters before the narrative sublimates into James's usual cirro-stratus ambiguity and indirection. From that point on, if you choose to treat "The Princess Casamassima" as a mystery novel (and that is as apt a way to treat it as any I could recommend), you'll find it delightfully challenging to formulate any expectations of an outcome or, indeed, to maintain any modest supposition that you grasp what the devil it's really all about.

Henry James knew as much, first hand, about the lower classes as I know about camel-breeding. What did Henry James know about, except himself? The man was an exile from normal life as well as from America, a hermetic psychological hermit who dined in and on society 180 days a year. He must have been extraordinarily adept at absorbing impressions from casual conversation. Above all, he was at leisure, and his working-class characters in this novel seem implausible only in their leisurely traversal of time and space. James requires leisure of his readers also. This is a long, diffuse, leisurely novel, and an extremely entertaining one, once you acknowledge its demands: a comfortable armchair, an expanse of idleness, a tolerance for vagaries and syntactical meanderings. There's very little in it that will match the worldview of a 21st Century reader, but then I doubt many readers of 1886 failed to discover that Mr. James was an odd duck. Only when you grasp that unique oddness, when you acknowledge how every item of The Princess Casamassima is cast in an interior fantasy, a kind of science fiction of the sentiments, will you begin to appreciate what a masterpiece this novel is! But you'll need to be as leisurely as the author.

The focal character, Hyacinth Robinson, is essentially a 'changeling' in the long European tradition of literary fairy princes. He's the son of a French prostitute and an English lord whom his mother murdered. Raised in abject poverty and lacking any opportunities for 'improvement', he nonetheless has exquisite finesse, an intrinsic gentility, a keen intelligence. One assumes, on literary precedent, that in the end he will come into his own and get his princess. That was surely what James expected us to assume, n'est pas? and the sly subversion of those assumptions will be part of the fun. The Princess, whose title and whose support come from her estranged Italian husband, can't fail to remind us of fairy tale prototypes also -- ineffably beautiful and ethereal, perversely willful, fond of posing riddles, as it were, of which her own motivation is the deepest riddle of all. And there's the buxom "daughter of the city" - Millicent - whom James portrays with a certain air of hankering after such a one. Do NOT, however, expect the minorest mention of explicit sexuality in James, even when the entire tissue of emotional probability depends on it! Biographers have speculated ad nauseam about James's sexual identity; the consensus seems to be that he had none, and yet Hyacinth's attentions to his Princess and his childhood playmate Millicent are redolent with concupiscence.

It's interesting to compare this novel about 'revolutionaries' with the two novels by Joseph Conrad about the same milieu, "The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes." James had a significant influence on Conrad. People who find one hard to read, usually because of discomfort with elaborate syntax, generally resist the other as well. Conrad was closer to events, far more a man of the whole world, a far more prophetic writer, and his conclusions were far less reactionary, but James was unmatched in his penetration into the human psyche, even when the only psyche he probed was his own. My advice? Don't deprive yourself of either Conrad or James! Find that armchair and let the language flow!

This novel from James' middle period in the 1880s is no yellow press report on the state of the nobility. The title might suggest a visit to European princes, but it is rather misleading, as James descends into working class and political environments. He lets us observe some simple people. He visits people of the revolutionary ilk and sees an abundant supply of conviction and prophecy -- but he doesn't let us share the abundance. The man is outside his element.

The title heroine has crossed our path before, in one of the early novels. Her real name is Christina Light. In Roderick Hudson she was a beauty with a destructive effect on men, and the need for a good marriage. She married into the right to be called a princess. Now we meet her again in a story of political intrigue and terrorism. What has the good princess got to do with such horrors? She finds the rebels more interesting than her stupid boring prince. She is a social tourist. Her curiosity is obscene and qualifies her as an agent provocatrice. There is the usual sex-free sexual tension as well. A treasure trove for a shrink! We wonder about her. Is she destined to be an impresaria of world revolution? Or will she drop out as bored as she was with her husband? Or does she have the will to self-destruction, as could certainly be envisaged? The possibility that she might get caught and might be hanged seems rather appealing to her. Masochism?

James presents himself as a link between Dickens and Conrad. Some passages, like chapter 3 with the little boy's visit to his dying mother in jail, are straight out of Dickens. The terrorist intrigues and complications anticipate Conrad's Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. The meetings of the political group in their smoke filled pub room are reminiscent of Zola's similar group in The Belly.
Some of the humor anticipates Woody Allen. Imagine that!

But it is still a James story: Hyacinth, the Hamletian hero (to kill or not to kill?), in his divided loyalty and indecision, is the focus. The man has committed himself to play the game, and when he loses conviction due to other attractions of life, he realizes: there is no way back, no emergency exit. He had joined the group of political sectarians from a need to belong, somewhere. He longed for a long time to be admitted to the secrets, the inner circle.. When he is there, he is not sure any more.
He has grown up with the dream that a place among the ruling class would be his proper due, while he realizes at the same time that his actual status is such that he would not marry any one who would marry him.
(I had not realized that this joke is from the 19th century. I learned it first from Woody Allen)

While the novel is entertaining in a Jamesian way, it is also irritating. Condescension is one thing. We feel that the patronizing voyeurism of the princess is rather shared by the master. He didn't really bother to look much into the poor classes.
Another weak point: the political and historical background is painted only vaguely. We have a reference to the Paris Commune, to the International, to socialism, to unemployment and poverty, to Darwin and Spencer (not to Marx though), but we have no exposure to ideology, no attempt at diving into the thoughts of the rebels.
No ideas enter HJ's mind, as somebody said.
The strength of the novel is in its central character Hyacinth and in his indecision.
As often with James, I would have wished the novel to be shorter. But then, isn't it better to spend more time than planned with James, even if not unflawed, than wasting it entirely?

Can a person love the fine creations of culture while reviling the class disparities that make such luxuries possible? How can one decide which side to choose when you are beguiled by fine things and easy living but repulsed by the inaccessibility of this lifestyle to the greater populace (including yourself)? These are the questions faced by our young hero Hyacinth, a poor but talented man with unfortunately good taste. Not unexpectedly for a young man, these ideals become entangled in Hyacinth's love affairs with a low-class but entertaining working girl and the beautiful title character, who has forsaken her fortune and her husband and embraced the liberation of the masses. James has perfectly portrayed the hypocrisy in which most educated people still live today, and the near futility of trying to absolve that hypocrisy. (As a side note, I was fascinated by his descriptions of the art of book binding, and would love to learn more about it.)

I remember when I was in college attending a screening of an old black and white version of "The Turn of the Screw" and was completely enraptured. That movie based on a James short story is the closest I have ever seen a film capture the supernatural, but not so much by what happens as by what is left unsaid. This is a writer I should check out someday, I told myself.
Over the course of the years I tried to skim several of James novels but they could only elicit a mild interest. Only recently when I turned 40 and became rather bored with most what is out there, especially the contemporary writings which seemed to me as nothing more than a dispassionate rehash of the same old same old did I accidentally encounter a review by a professor and was intrigued by the fact that the man had, in the wake of the September 11 bombing, hastily replaced his habitual Henry James entry in his Classics course with this novel.
I have finished only the first half of this book and feel passionate enough to announce, even if the rest of the novel turns out to be absolute gibberish, that I have to include it with my erstwhile collection of livres extraordinaires; Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Star Rover, The Trial, Journey to
the End of the Night, Laughter in the Dark etc. These are books that actually change your state of consciousness; i.e. reading these books may be dangerous to your complacency about the state of the world. Be warned then, this is one of those books that may leave you a tormented soul, your mind like the waves of a stormy ocean. But then again perhaps it may be necessary to achieve such turbulence before the 'peace that passes all understanding'. And if Nirvana never comes then at least one lived to one's human capacity. But I digress, back to the Princess; if you want categorization then you could say that this is a Political Novel, A Love Story, A Study of the Human Condition but that would be less meaningful than to say that every page, nay every line of this story is as pleasurable to me as the most delicious Swiss chocolate or glass of wine, more so.
That this story is highly personal for James wherein the protagonist, Hyacinth, embodies the writer's innermost yearnings both conscious and unconscious lends it a certain authenticity which is rare indeed and the remarkably sympathy displayed for every character however lowly is sometimes heartbreaking in its incisiveness. Most remarkable, given James patrician background, is the realistic depiction of poor sans patronizing. One could very well read this novel in the context of recent terrorist events as an insightful study of what makes an otherwise sane young man take the aforementioned path. And while the creed and doctrines of the novel's protagonist are certainly quite different from his contemporary peers, there is the same idealism, the discontent and the quest for glory that ends dismally but which has its roots not in some spontaneous mutation of the soul but its organic evolvement from circumstance and day to day, even mundane encounters.
In a world that offers on the one hand the slow death of the submission to the status quo and on the end the quick violence of lopsided revolutions, and where the very human soul (Or if you are Buddhist, the authentic self), which is diminutive to begin with, is daily diminished in its encounters with the loveless, the possibility of earthly happiness may be only available in one's complete absorption in something genuinely artistic. It would not be to far-fetched to say that in his heart of heart, James too wanted to wanted to blow up a building.
But he chooses to be an artist instead...

Published in 1886, the same year as The Bostonians, this novel is not as interesting or intriguing as The Bostonians.

Though the preface indicates that this novel's setting is "lush and opulent, in fin-de-siecle surroundings, taking the reader from London to Paris, and then to Venice and back again," this novel actually is set (about 80 percent of it) in the squalid London slums, the home of the hero, Hyacinth Robinson.

The story, I admit, has a fine array of minor characters, all quirky and finely portrayed. Millicent Henning, the cockney hoyden, is one of my favorite Jamesian minor characters thus far.

The plot deals with social unrest in 1880's London, with Hyacinth taking on the role (or the modern equivalent) of the suicide bomber. This illegitimate son of a French prostitute (another Dickensian touch, along with the setting) is eventually torn between his love for "the people" and democracy and his love for the finer things in life as held by the aristocracy. The question is: can Hyacinth overcome his desire to preserve forever the fruits of artistry (in the form of magnificent architecture, sumptuous furniture, etc...) and follow through with his assasination assignment, knowing that if "the people" win, the lovely objets d'art that he passionately admires may be lost forever in the coming holocaust?

Christina Light, introduced in James's novel Roderick Hudson, is as always exasperating yet strangely charismatic. She is not quite a minor character; she is actually the catalyst for much of Hyacinth's actions. She's a marvelous creation.

The underground movement into which Hyacinth is drawn never quite achieves credibility, as it is always described in shadowy terms. James's style has not quite ripened into his difficult "later style" by the time this novel was written, so it is not a difficult read. Yet, it is not a page turner like The Bostonians, or like his greatest novel by far, Portrait of a Lady.

Some stretches are tedious, as James is intent on letting every single character interact with each other before letting the plot take its course. It didn't seem necessary, though, to do this. As a result, much of what is on the printed page is often extraneous.

A must for James fanatics, but as I said earlier, if you want to delve into James's middle period, try The Bostonians.