Riffing on Henry James
For Writers
Recently I read fellow-Amarilloan Taylor Moore’s latest spy-thriller Cold Trail. I was struck that in the midst of these fast-paced action stories, Taylor is able to make us care for his characters by exposing us to their inner thoughts, even as bullets whiz by their heads. Taylor is a skilled craftsman utilizing the tools of fiction, but Henry James conceived many of those tools. Maybe you’ve never read Henry James, but if you’ve read fiction written in the 20th- or 21st-Centuries, then you’ve read people who learned from James. He’s considered to be a father of the modern novel, especially the narration of a character’s interior thoughts.
For example, having direct access to a character’s thoughts and emotions is still one of the advantages reading fiction has over other story-telling media like television and movies. A movie can make you feel, but well written fiction can help you narrate the emotion into a thought. Emotions are fleeting and vaporous responses to an event. A well-rendered sentence can memorialize the emotion and the event that caused it.
Believe it or not, James’ story-telling tools weren’t always available to writers, and more importantly, to readers. The novel as a story-telling technology is only a few hundred years old, and James did a lot of work in developing how those inner thoughts are communicated in grammar. As you’re probably aware, a lot of drama can happen between your ears. Most of us never take the time to figure out the subject of that drama, or more importantly, we never try to lay it out on the table, mechanically in sentences so that we can understand the drama that is causing us so much anguish (or joy). It probably wouldn’t hurt any of us to see the inner thoughts of another person as a model for making our own inner thoughts more clear.
For those of you interested in writing, my friend Katy Carl (
) has written the forward to an edition of Henry James’ essays about writing fiction that is currently on sale over at Wiseblood Books.For those of you who are just interested in reading a story, you can read Henry James’ short story The Beast in the Jungle to see how he gets inside of someone’s head. Sometimes that person’s head can be a little maddening though.
Below, I wrote a short riff on that story.
The Excavation at Pompeii
A Riff on Henry James by Seth Wieck
May Bartram conveyed her mother and brother to see the concrete reliefs of ancient Pompeians caught by volcanic ash. The famous tombs of families frozen, as if Bernini in a vulgar fancy, chiseled common people in the mundane commotion of dying adjacent to a chamber pot. Professor Giuseppe Fiorelli, a new archeologist in charge, having convinced local authorities to properly excavate Pompeii, expelled the local tomb raiders and trinket merchants from the archaeological site, and devised a system of cataloguing the artifacts.
What a predicament, May thought, humans are subjected to: knowing that we will die. Not like the other animals, those mere beasts in the jungle, not even something so fierce as a tiger—though they no doubt only foresaw their death as an instinct; no she imagined some silly creature like a tapir whose ridiculous snout is forever foraging in the underbrush. Tapirs cannot see their death coming; there are no tapir myths or religious rites that prepare them for the sudden predator that leaps upon them, claws protracted, to rip their throats. We see the distant approach of death, but still—still—it leaps upon us out of the dark. She resolved then that she would live like a tapir, without the long dread of approaching death. When it came—and it would come—she would have lived a pleasurable life.
About lunchtime, her party was joined by another group traveling from England, the Boyers, whom she had visited as a girl. She had not cared for their son, Henry (or was it James?) then because he seemed such a dull boy. She was pleased to find that he had not traveled with his family, but rather stayed behind in Rome, having been overcome by the heat, the family claimed, although she ascertained from the glances between the Boyers that his ailment had likely been from being too much in the night. In his stead, a young man, with brown eyes set deeply under a heavy brow, lurked curiously in every corner the guides would allow him to search. While most members of the conjoined parties gladly chatted in the morbid setting, he peeked behind beds and ran his fingers along the petrified doorposts. She discreetly inquired the man’s identity from the Lady Boyer, and the woman divulged that he was John Marcher, whose father, the Duke Marcher, had died in a hunting accident, killed, so it goes, by a lion, or some other exotic feline. Young Marcher had inherited the estate and his father’s capable managers, and had become an investor in Professor Fiorelli’s archaeological enterprise.
When the table for luncheon had been made in the remains of one ancient house, Mr. Marcher proved to be a student of archaeology, being rather inquisitive of the good professor. Seated next to her brother, William, who could not be impressed by any feats, ancient or modern, except his own, May watched the deeply set eyes of Mr. Marcher widen with every question. His curiosity and interest in the ancient plight of this ruined civilization were driven, she perceived, by what applications might be made to our own civic safeties. Perspiration grew upon his heavy brow, and occasionally he’d swipe the glistening moisture back into his hair to replace a forelock which had come loose in his excitement. The conversations around her grew tedious and she leaned closer to hear the exchange between the archaeologist and the young, new duke.
The guides had set the table in the dugout remains so that the expedition might be able to experience a meal like the ancients had, but the effect under the high sun was that the ruined house became an unbearable oven, and the party drank several bottles of the Lacryma Christi indigenous to the Campanian vineyards before fleeing the meal altogether to attain a breeze above the dig.
Here the guests saw for the first time the summer storm which had swelled around Pompeii while they’d held repast. It was distant yet and the guides began to hurry them to see further parts of the dig; these agitations were useless on Lady Boyer, who was positively drunk (she had been nipping from a flask), and May’s mother simply could not take one more step in the heat, so William, waited with her until a coach could be arranged for her.
For that matter of drunkenness, May had grown a bit inebriated as well in the heat, but she hadn’t noticed her lightheadedness because her attention had been so wholly devoted to Marcher’s inquisition. Ah, this was the sort of bright mind she could attach herself to—so unlike dull Henry or James Boyer— and with such concern for our modern civilization. All of the elements seemed to swirl in her: his intelligence; those deep, brooding eyes; her resolution to enjoy what pleasures life may bring her; why, she could see him being part of the parliament some day, doling out laws to benefit the whole of the British empire. She walked closely next to him, and by-and-by, introduced herself. As the clouds grew overhead, she listened as he explained that only some two-thousand of the thirty-thousand Pompeiians were killed; those with whom they had dined earlier were only a small percentage of the casualties. Their ambulation took them to the outskirts of the site and this is where the storm burst upon them. She laughed as he took her hand, so concerned was he with her safety, and they sought refuge in the remains of a building which had recently been discovered, its roof mostly intact.
In the house, as water ran off the broken roof in torrents, and thunder broke from Vesuvius, she shivered in her wet dress. He stood at the edge of the room, peering into the storm, as if some predator crouched there, or the volcano might suddenly awaken from its dormancy in a black mood. She announced to him that she was cold. His attention, she noticed, lingered on her eyes for the first time that whole day, and she felt herself finally more than a mere member of the party, but one who had impressed a relief in his considerable mind. He left his post and began shaking out canvas from the dig supplies and forming a makeshift blanket under which they could warm themselves.
As the storm let up, he returned to explaining the plight of the Pompeiians. A few of those who died, he said, had escaped the city and were running—maybe left family behind in those homes—when they were overwhelmed with falling ash.
“Can you imagine,” he said, “believing that you had somehow escaped the catastrophe only to be caught by it later, alone?”
Now I want to watch the rest of the movie!