Sunrise with Seamonsters (58 page)

It is most of all a novel about a small unselfish girl and the ways in which she is passionately victimized by adults. Maisie is a factor in her parents' divorce settlement. Each of her child-hating parents, in an arrangement made out of pure spite, agree to keep her for six months at a time and then toss her back to the other. It is not the keeping but the tossing back that pleases them. Maisie is very young—five when it begins. The parents take lovers; each parent remarries; the new spouses take an interest in their step-daughter and then in each other, and finally, in a sexual tangle that may be unique in English fiction, the separate stepfather and step-mother become lovers. The natural parents have gone on to new attachments. Meanwhile, Maisie watches each move closely. "Her little world was phantasmagoric"—like a magic lantern show—"strange shadows dancing on a sheet." She is at last compelled to choose her future.

The novel is highly patterned and orderly. It has been compared to a stately dance. As if that is not off-putting enough, it has also been compared to a bedroom farce. Yet there are no bedrooms in the James novel—certainly no beds. It makes for a certain archness in this book, fames himself called it an "ugly little comedy." He implies in many places
in the text that Maisie is incorruptible. But she grows, she changes, and in the course of this novel we witness "the death of her childhood."

The idea came to James, as so many others did, at a dinner party, when one of the guests described an unusual divorce settlement. James set it out fully in his notebook: "The court, for some reason, didn't as it might have done, give the child exclusively to either parent, but decreed that it was to spend its time equally with each—that is alternately. Each parent married again, and the child went to them a month, or three months, about—finding with the one a new mother and the other a new father. Might not something be done with the idea ...?" He proceeded to invent complications and consequences, and he finished his synopsis, "with the innocent child in the midst."

It was his innocent-child phase. It was the period of
The Turn of the Screw
(1898), with its pair of terrified tots. There are blameless kiddies in
The Other House
(1896), and one each in
The Pupil
(1890) and
In the Cage
(1898), and the anxious virgins of
An Awkward Age
(1899). James's biographer saw a peculiar symmetry in this: at a harrowing time in his career (his play
Guy Domville
had been a humiliating failure late in 1895), James began to write about childhood, and he depicted all its stages, from roughly the age of four through puberty and adolescence, finishing with the threshold of adulthood, Nanda at eighteen. Professor Edel sees a great deal of James in Maisie: "Maisie's bewilderment and isolation is James's ... but the world's cruelty and hostility are recreated into a comic vision of benign childish curiosity." It is true James is nearly always complimentary in describing the child, and though he says in his Preface that Maisie resembles other small children in being inarticulate, he insists on the numerous perceptions and rich visions of her childhood.

That same highly receptive mind acquires experience through the "immense sensibility" that James attributes to fiction-writers in his essay, "The Art of Fiction." It is not difficult to imagine Maisie (or James himself) in those same terms, with "a kind of huge spider's-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations."

Maisie begins as a parrot, and is entirely innocent of the physical implications of the affairs around her; but she grows in the novel, and though she is still young when the novel ends she has come into flower. I don't think of Maisie as one of James's little lisping waifs, but rather as a girl whom circumstances have forced to behave like a woman. Sir Claude says, near the end, "One would think you were about sixty—" Most critics seem to think of the novel's action taking place over two or three
years. I think it is more, perhaps six or seven, filling out Maisie's body and giving her desires of her own. James wanted time in the book to be fluid. "I must handle freely and handsomely the years," he wrote in his notebooks, "be superior, I mean, on the question of time."

He noted his first idea in 1892. A year later he returned to his notebook and elaborated a bit. He had earlier wondered whether Maisie's parents should die so that Maisie could go her own way with new parents. He now decided that his killing them off would mean evading more interesting consequences; he would let them live, he asserted, for the sake of irony and complication. He had named the parents "Hurter", as unambiguously as if he were labeling a humor, and he thought it would be a story of about five thousand words.

Late in 1895 he told the editor of the
Yellow Book
to expect a story of about ten thousand words. The "Hurters" were now the "Faranges". (He got many of his characters' names from the social pages of
The Times,
where the weddings, births and deaths are announced.) In his notebook entry for December, 1895, he set out the structure of the story in detail—his notebooks are full of
Maisie
ruminations, and as a result we know more about its composition than any of his other novels. He began to see how symmetrical a story it was; he was determined to make it subtle, to blur its edges. He became interested in the possibilities of the governesses, particularly Mrs Wix, whom he calls "the frumpy governess." He saw the core of the drama as "the strange, fatal, complicating action of the child's lovability," and considering the powerful material and the steamy incidents he made another bold decision: everything—every important action or word in the novel—would take place in the child's presence. He said, "That is the essence of the thing."

He got going on the actual writing of the story in the summer of 1896, roughly four years after he had heard the divorce story over dinner. All that time he had been puzzling out the details in his notebook. He was a great rehearser of his novels and he used his notebooks to remind himself of what he knew and to correct his impressions. In October 1896 he told himself, "I have brought this little matter of Maisie to a point at which a really detailed scenario of the rest is indispensable for a straight and sure advance to the end." He proceeded for a number of pages to summarize the plot and he prefaced his summary with a remark on the form he wanted the book to have. He saw the symmetries, the parallel lives and reduplicated actions and he warned himself not to slacken in his "deep observance of this strong and beneficent method—this intensely structural, intensely hinged and jointed preliminary frame."

He was the man who said that many great novels were "loose and baggy monsters," but
Maisie
is anything but that. It is a most precise novel; it is finely balanced and four-square with a recurring situation that
might be summed up in the sentence, "What are
you
doing here?" It is clear from the notebooks that James was certain he was onto something and that the elements of his story, if they were treated artfully, would yield him a fascinating novel. He pondered the matter, but always pleasurably and with confidence:
Maisie
was a novel made out of calculation and conscious decisions. It contains some of his best comedy and some of his most melancholy insights. Nearly every critic has seen it—James saw it himself—as a pivotal book. It shows the onset, the sudden dappled shadow, of his later manner. It is the book in which, at Chapter Seventeen, I think—though the matter is open to dispute—he got writer's cramp and began to dictate to a secretary, and the purification of that eloquent hemming and hawing is for most readers the essential Henry James. Though it is less a novel than an enlarged story, and it is in many senses an in-between book,
Maisie
embodies everything that James excelled at in fiction.

Whatever love, warmth, brightness, or humanity is in the book is due to the presence of Maisie; she is the whole point. And it is not really that she is a sweet child with the function of triggering a mechanism to soften our hearts. In most respects she is shrewder and more clear-sighted than the adults around her. What is most curious—it is certainly one of the sticking-points in the book for me—is her angelic nature, which is in complete contrast to her parents' nastiness. How can two such utterly empty people have been responsible for bringing this lovely child into the world? There is a great deal of name-calling in this novel: "abominable little horror," "horrid pig," "fiend," and so forth, but where these severe names are used to describe Beale or Ida Farange the reader can only agree that pig and fiend are about right.

Maisie is said (by Sir Claude) to have a "fatal gift of beauty." We know where this comes from, for, if nothing else, she has inherited physical beauty. Her parents, ugly in every other way, are physically striking. (The ugliest characters in the novel, Mr Perriam and the Countess—the former Ida's lover, the latter Beale's—are also the wealthiest.) Beale is tall, luxuriously bearded, and has a habit of showing his large glittering teeth. He is boisterous, vulgar, showy, priapic and materialistic. He cannot tell the truth. He has dreadful friends who, in the context of this book, seem like child-molesters. We are given to understand that Beale is intensely clubbable and probably a gambler. He is certainly a liar. He is a failed diplomat, hollow at the core, and like many spineless people rather prickly and devious.

This novel is full of counterparts—balancing scenes and perfect echoes.
Ida Farange is so similar to Beale she is almost shocking—but she has more lovers. We are told explicitly about her bosom, which becomes one of the landmarks of the novel, like a familiar headland, heaving one minute, cushioning Maisie's head the next, with its "wilderness of trinkets." On the question of her cleavage James tells us that she wears her dresses cut "remarkably low" and there is explicit salacity in "the lower the bosom was cut the more it was to be gathered she was wanted elsewhere." She has the talkative person's moodiness and bad temper, but she has a compensating charm. Like her ex-husband, she is flashy (she "bristled with monograms"), very tall, vindictive and has awful friends. Seven of her lovers are named in the book; we see quite a bit of three of them, and she is said to have "quantities of others."

In choosing Maisie's parents, James invented a couple who are both handsome and extraordinarily unpleasant, and his artful touch was to make them unpleasant in exactly the same ways. In one respect Ida is different from Beale: she is physically violent and given to sudden lunges—at least where Maisie is concerned. We are told that Ida is addicted to extremes—either she is silent or else wildly gesturing. Usually we see her in motion—"she surged about." The verb is perfect for this amazing woman. I spoke earlier about this being a novel of thrusting hands. One thinks of all the hands in all the plackets. But it is also Ida's thrustings. Maisie is "hurled," "tossed," "snatched," "thrust," "dashed," and "ejected" by her mother at various points in the novel; most of all she is pushed. Ida is a tremendous pusher—and why should she not be? After all, she is a champion billiard player.

This is one of the brightest touches—Ida the billiard champ. It was "her great accomplishment" and we are told of her "celebrated stroke." One of her infidelities is disguised as a match she is playing abroad, and in an aside James—unconsciously of course—makes one of the clearest statements of her sexual character and leaves us with a bewitching image of "other balls that Ida's cue used to send flying."

One could easily overwork this pretty motif, but it seems apparent that the billiard cue is a potent example of Ida's masculinity, and virtually all we need to know of her virile ambition and her competitive instincts. It is as if James is determined to make her identical to Beale, for the billiard cue is not just a convenient phallicism but also a weapon and a career.

Billiards is also the perfect game to illustrate the typical movement in the novel. The three balls—one red and two white—represent both the characters and the action. It is a novel of threes—three characters battling at any one time (and Maisie is always one of them), three parks (Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Kensington Gardens), three settings (London, Folkestone, Boulogne). Ida will have had three husbands and Beale three wives; and Maisie comes under the protection of three men—her father,
the Captain and Sir Claude; and three women—her mother, Mrs Beale and Mrs Wix. If one were to search for a word to describe the way in which Maisie passes from person to person, colliding and rebounding, the best term would come from the game of billiards: she does not simply go—she caroms.

How Maisie manages to be so bright and brave—so sensible without being prissy or pious—is a question we cannot answer on the evidence provided. We know about her spotless soul and her kindly nature. But James in describing the slam-bang of her upbringing has given us every reason for her turning out crazy, vengeful or anti-social. As it is, she never puts a foot wrong. She is stimulated by the bustle of these sinners, and she has a child's fearful thrill at the prospect of change. I don't think the reader is ever really worried that she will be spoiled or harmed: this could be the single weakness in the novel. Even when she is described repeatedly as a "pet," a "poor little monkey," a shuttlecock or a football, we see her as fully human, putting on a courageous smile and offering reassurance or advice: "You're both very lovely," "You're free," "Don't do it for just a little ... Do it always." Often, she is no more than parroting another character's words, but her detachment and her directness ("Mamma doesn't care for me") and her good sense give her a confident aura of independence.

We know Maisie is a child, and James is artful in conveying her childish perceptions in appropriate imagery: the adult faces in close-up with eyebrows like skipping ropes (Miss Overmore) or eyebrows like moustaches (Mr Perriam) or her being in Boulogne "among the barelegged fishwives and the red-legged soldiers"—a shy and not very tall girl would naturally notice the legs of foreigners rather than their faces. For the others Maisie's sensitivities are pretty much ignored. True, if they were taken into account and pandered to there would be no novel; but they say such wild things to her! It is bad enough that, for example, she sees her mother flirting with the odious millionaire, Mr Perriam (James portrays his Jewishness like a particularly nasty vice) but the rest is stated too: he is "in and out of the upper rooms." Maisie is told everything, often very bluntly, and the fact that many of the crude accusations are distortions or plain lies only makes matters worse. But Maisie continues to gaze on this disorder and noise with understanding eyes and peacemaking instincts.