Adapting to the Stage: Theatre and the Work of Henry James

Theatre and the Work of Henry James

Chris Greenwood

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138718951
• eBook ISBN: 9781351764698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: The American novelist and playwright, Henry James, was drawn to the theatre and the shifting conventions of drama throughout his writing career. This study demonstrates that from the 1890s onwards James concentrated on adapting his novels and stories to and from the stage, and increasingly employed metaphors that spoke of novel-writing in terms of playwriting. Christopher Greenwood argues that these metaphors helped James to conceive himself as an artist who composed characters dramatically and visually, and in doing so sets his novels significantly apart from those of his contemporaries. In the introduction to the first part of the book, Greenwood examines James's career within the context of contemporary European and North American theatre, providing an appraisal of what James gained from contemporary theatre, his position in that milieu, and what he brought to it. Part 2 of the book focuses on two novels: "The Other House" and "The Spoils of Poynton", both of which illustrate the ways in which James used the mechanism of contemporary theatre to communicate a character's personality. Discussion of these two works is used to throw light on similar concerns that develop in James's later writing.

PART I

Two contexts: the Theatre and the Oeuvre

Chapter 1

Psychological Space in ‘The Summersoft Group’ and the Late Plays

Having completed Guy Domville in the summer of 1893, Henry James paused for thought.¹ He had been writing plays for almost exactly four years and had only managed to see one reach the stage. That had occurred with The American, his first attempt within this, his second effort to achieve theatrical success. After writing Guy Domville he went on holiday and in Lucerne placed this entry in his notebook:

I have been worrying at the dramatic, at the unspeakably theatric form for a long time…I should like to dip my pen into the other ink – the sacred fluid of fiction. (CN 77)

In between writing the adaptation of The American in 1889, a project he had begun in 1881 when the play version of Daisy Miller was doing the rounds, and writing Guy Domville in 1893, James had completed four other plays, had conceived of countless play scenarios, turning some into short stories and leaving others to gestate into novels, and had received little in the way of renewed encouragement for his efforts. The period between the summer of 1893 and the summer of 1895 was one of James’s most barren. During this time, a time when he had to face more than one death close to him, he published a couple of short stories, the odd review, had a play catcalled and himself publicly booed.²

In the fiction that comes after this hiatus, in the plays and the short stories as well as the novels, a radical development takes place. Between 1889 and 1893 James had written six plays that all sought to dramatise the heroism of a central figure in the same way. There is always a conclusive dramatic renunciation that proves his or her moral courage. In the summer of 1895 James abandoned this form of characterisation and began to write a one-act play called Summersoft for Ellen Terry, at her request. In that its title refers to a country house, Summersoft marked a change in direction for James’s playwriting. Where before he had written plays about heroes (e.g. Daisy Miller, The American, Tenants, Guy Domville) he now began to write dramas about peoples’ interaction with places. His intention was the same, to dramatise character, but his approach changed. Character, following developments on the European stage as much as developing the implications of his own writing, now became a function of interaction with place or, to be precise, a function of the ability to interact with place – as if James, in re-assessing how to write for the theatre, had realised that he had not fully exploited the communicative values of staged space. Put another way, in the sense that it records a passionate struggle to control a location, Summersoft has more in common with its immediate successors, The Spoils of Poynton and The Other House, than its predecessor, written eighteen months previously, Guy Domville.

Clearly this makes a nonsense of the received history, of a Henry James defeated, flouncing, or even slinking away from the stage owing to the behaviour of less than half a crowd on one night in 1895. It replaces such a story, about creditable as implausible gossip (and about as charitable), with the sense of an artist continuing to explore the medium to which he was attracted.³

Looking at his new drama with a view to how we come to know the characters in the texts (the narratives as well as the plays), we see that it transforms descriptions of consciousness traditional to the novel. Which is to say that, after 1893, James’s writing visibly relocated, on the bodies and in the spaces between the bodies of his characters, the drama previously produced by the fireside reverie of The Portrait of a Lady.

Deploying just this image, of the protagonist gazing thoughtfully into the fire, W. B. Yeats, writing of this type of drama in his essay ‘Discoveries’, dismissed ‘The Play of Modern Manners’ because it could only provide thought as an image, it could give no direct access to its protagonists’ interiors in the manner the old theatrical saw, the soliloquy, which for Yeats was a vehicle for poetic accounts of the ‘language of the soul’:⁴

The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form of play to be slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing anything but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or now and then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture, a man holding a woman’s hand or sitting with his head in his hands in dim light by the red glow of a fire… The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a permanent form because, having the power of psychological description, it can follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.

Henry Arthur Jones, Sydney Grundy, Arthur Wing Pinero, and others are the type, the ‘happiest writers’, referred to here. Their superficial drama fitted this description of the form. James, desiring their immediacy, wanting a faithfulness to the everyday so as to express what he felt to be the drama of consciousness that was to him present in the everyday, followed their manner while hoping that his superior writerly abilities would bring ‘the power of psychological description’ into the form.

Yeats, again, writing in an essay on Synge:

Modern drama… which accepts the tightness of the classic plot, while expressing life directly, has been driven to make indirect its expression of the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some commonplace sentence or gesture as we infer it in ordinary life.⁵

While this might have been a criticism of the stage’s powers for the poet, for James’s project it was the medium’s boon. Writing to Mrs Ward in 1899 he argued for ‘that magnificent and masterly indirectness which means the only dramatic straightness and intensity’.⁶ Denying himself access to the interior of his characters wherever possible, describing the space and the gestures of the stage, taking a painterly attitude to writing, James composed confrontations and attitudes that aimed to achieve the maximum of visual communication. He approached psychology indirectly. A consequence of this, and it is important to understand that it is a consequence rather than an aim, is that his storytelling became a matter of gesture, posture and location, a question of empiricism and its attendant materialism; in short, a matter of composition in a medium that appeals, in the main, to the senses. Psychology becomes an implied, rather than an explicit, dimension. It seems that, despite his protestations to the contrary, he did not have Yeats’s understanding of the well-made play’s limitations. Or, perhaps, he willed them out of mind.

Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer ‘looking into the grate’, is the novel’s equivalent of the stage melancholic’s soliloquy and, following the thinking of the avant-garde playwrights of his generation, James began to abandon what is at the soliloquy’s heart: the freedom to unpack the mental baggage of the protagonist. Clearly, this was a radical step. One of the novel’s, as a literary form, most easily recognisable, and indeed, identifying marks is its ability to give an account, willy-nilly, of its protagonists’ thoughts. The novels which give us the thoughts of Christopher Newman, Winterbourne and Isabel Archer all locate themselves, at one time or another, inside the heads of their protagonists. The novels which give us Fleda Vetch, Rose Armiger and Fernanda Brookenham (The Spoils of Poynton, The Other House and The Awkward Age, respectively) by contrast, treat the internal monologue warily, preferring to tell us what it is like to see the operation of psychology externally–by shifting their emphasis away from privileged access to thought, so as to adopt (not exclusively but more and more so) the disciplines of late nineteenth-century acting (naturalist acting, a style of acting that still dominates the stage and the screen). Thought and emotion in these texts are more and more communicated through the gestures, through the clothing, through the speech and through the physical attitudes that these characters take towards their confederates. Rather than tell us what these figures think, incidentally, as part of an ongoing plot, James’s novels apply themselves to the project of restating psychology as a material constituent among others, all of which contribute to the description of a human action. With this awareness the treasures of the The Spoils of Poynton become more valuable still, including as they must the finely calculated deeds of their primary representative, Fleda Vetch.

Hence psychology becomes at least partly constituted of material and is portrayed through the gestural relations protagonists strike up with each other within a controlled, communicative space. This is not to repeat the showing-versus-telling debate that has coloured studies of James, rather it is to argue that psychology became a renewed dimension of interest immediately he conceived of a new, indirect means of representation that left his audience/readership to detect the action as a physically delimited dimension. He found that incongruous gestures directly contributing to the description of action could suggest, indirectly, through mystery, powerful and monstrous psychologies. He was a man who in everyday intercourse was consistently confronted with an awareness that such psychologies were implied by his interlocutors. The group of plays that I refer to as ‘The Summersoft Group’ provides a remarkable indication of how James looked to the theatre to help himself develop a means of representing just how dramatic his confrontations with such psychology were.

* * *

In 1895 Henry James adapted a location from The Lesson of the Master (1888) into Summersoft, a one-act play for Ellen Terry’s upcoming American tour. In 1898 he adapted the play into Covering End, the story that accompanied The Turn of the Screw in the volume entitled The Two Magics. In 1907 this story was itself adapted into a three-act play, The High Bid. At the core of all of these works lies the value of a location, a country house. In all of them a central character recognises the value of Summersoft (renamed Covering End in 1898 and 1907), and becomes involved with it, intimately, as a result.

In The Lesson of the Master Paul Overt’s sense that he can communicate with the location represents the action of achieved intimacy:

It all went together and spoke in one voice – a rich English voice of the early part of the Eighteenth century. (CT VII 214)

He is seemingly alone in hearing this voice – the weekend party-goers that he accompanies are largely taken up with matters of fashion and pay little attention to aesthetic appreciation of their surroundings. He, on the other hand, is an aesthete who prefers to commune with the beautiful scene:

When Paul Overt perceived that the people under the trees were noticing him he turned back through the open doors into the great gallery which was the pride of the place. (CT VII 214)

The two plays and the tale that follow on from The Lesson of the Master dramatise Paul Overt’s intimate sense of the house as their central subject, although in them Paul is replaced by a different character, Mrs Gracedew. The works show how her love of the place leads to her becoming a part of it. Superficially she takes possession of the house by buying up the mortgages and marrying its impoverished landlord. However, that possession is shown most explicitly to be rather more than a material benefit. Well before Mrs Gracedew marries Captain Yule, Summersoft’s hereditary owner, she is seen to be in a reciprocal, loving relationship with the house:

PRODMORE. (In high elation.) A most striking tribute to Summersoft! -You do, Madam, bring it out!

A VISITOR. (To another.) Doesn’t she indeed, Jane, bring it out!

MRS. GRACEDEW. (Staring, laughing.) But who in the world wants to keep it in? It ain’t a secret – or a mean government! (With a free indication of the fine arch, the noble spring, of the roof.) Just look at those lovely lines! […] Just look at the tone of that glass!–and the cutting of that oak–and the dear old flags of the very floor. To look, in this place, is to love!(Summersoft, CP 534)

The laughter in Mrs Gracedew’s voice and the freedom she has to appreciate openly and loudly ‘the noble spring of the roof’ describe a person benefiting from love. The fact that she appreciates the place causes her to belong there. At the conclusion of the revised version of the play some twelve years later the visitors (in Summersoft ‘simple, awestruck, provincial folk’) become an exemplary audience of tasteful, knowledgeable American tourists who witness Mrs Gracedew’s testaments to the house’s value. They

consider unreservedly the beautiful unperturbed lady, her person and her wonderful clothes, very much as if she’s part of the Show, one of the highly interesting Features. (The High Bid, CP 602)

By extolling the place’s virtues Mrs Gracedew so enthusiastically enters into a relationship with it as to become a part of it. Her marriage to Captain Yule, or rather their arm-in-arm announcement that they are married (even though they are not), is merely a figure for the same thing, a visual emblem confirming that in loving the place Mrs Gracedew has become intimately related to it, or vice versa.

A logical consequence of this argument, that Mrs Gracedew becomes a part of the aesthetic tradition which the house represents through loving it, is that Captain Yule is reduced to the level of an ornament: he is another of the beautiful things that Gracedew appreciates. Or rather, the house and Yule are extensions of each other. Together, on-stage, for an audience, they physically represent the value of English history. As in a successful painting the scene and the character are in a strong relationship.

The drama common to all of the works in this group springs from the fact that, initially, this rule has been broken, this relationship is under threat of eternal dissolution: Yule and Summersoft have become divided. At the beginning of the story he is a radical MP in the East End of London and his country house is mortgaged to a gaudy capitalist named Prodmore (a character as badly dressed as Mitchy of The Awkward Age). It takes the loving appreciations of Gracedew, the American widow, to effect the conservative conclusion and comic restoration of the play. With her thousands, for thus is the house’s beauty and history underpinned by a financial valuation, she rescues the old order of the En...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Abandoning the Soliloquy/Staging the Narrator
• Part I Two Contexts: the Theatre and the Oeuvre
• Part II ‘The Theatrical Straitjacket’: The Other House and The Spoils of Poynton
• Bibliography
• Index