Golden Bowl Research Articles

Ornamental Identity: Commodity Fetishism, Masculinity, and Sexuality in The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl marks a shift in James's account of the relations between the commodity form, sexuality, and gendered identities. Whereas James's earlier fictions develop their interest in the interimplication of consumer and sexual desires through an emphasis on the exchangeability of the female body, in this novel the pre-eminent human commodity is a male, Amerigo. The connections drawn between commodity fetishism and masculinity in the representation of the Prince have implications that call into question the naturalness of heterosexuality and orthodox gender identities.

Martha Nussbaum and The Golden Bowl

Martha Nussbaum and The Golden Bowl

Stasis & Verve: Henry James and the Fictions of Patience

What are the implications of patience's prominence in the final paragraphs of both Roderick Hudson and Portrait of a Lady? How do these patiences differ from each other, and from patience as more ordinarily considered? Such questions provide the frame for a more sustained engagement with patience, as deployed in The Golden Bowl. Patience, in the hands of Maggie Verver and the Prince, becomes luridly preferable to what it otherwise seems to defer; James's treatment of patience, I argue, posits this mode of temporality as inextricable from understandings of knowledge, authority, and (most plangent in The Golden Bowl) from love.

Living the Dream: Benjamin's Arcades Project and The Golden Bowl

Both The Golden Bowl and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project examine the conquest of the epistemologies of history and domestic life by monetary consumer culture. By examining The Golden Bowl in terms of the mass cultural alienation that Benjamin called "dream-sleep" and the related phenomenon of the flâneur, this essay demonstrates a Benjaminian anthropological vision present within James's text. Although demonstrating the ultimate victory of a domestic order exemplifying the cultural alienation that Benjamin described, the novel also provides space for a critique of the overarching cultural conditions that permitted this alienation.

Henry James for Venice

Toibin shows that his own method of merging the deeply personal with the imagined belongs to the main method by which novelists and James work. The importance of the years 1895 to 1900 is that Henry James was building up the images and figures that would constitute his three masterpieces: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl. Small moments, recurring memories, a sudden realization, something half understood, random matters, all of these can make their way into the foreground or background of a novel.

Literature as conduct: speech acts in Henry James

The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this magisterial book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many dimensions of doing things with words in James's fiction.Three modes of speech act occur in James's novels. First, James's writing of his fictions is performative. He puts on paper words that have the power to raise in the reader the phantoms of imaginary persons. Second, James's writing does things with words that do other things in their turn, including conferring on the reader responsibility for further judgment and action: for example, teaching James's novels or writing about them. Finally, the narrators and characters in James's fictions utter speech acts that are forms of doing things with words- promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like. The action of each work by James, he shows, is brought about by its own idiosyncratic repertoire of speech acts.In careful readings of six major examples, The Aspern Papers,The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Sense of the Past, Miller demonstrates the value of speech act theory for reading literature. J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Irvine. One of the most recent many books is Speech Acts in Literature.

Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Life of Middlemarch

Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Life of Middlemarch Rohan Maitzen We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves. George Eliot, Middlemarch I As is well known to readers of this journal, Martha Nussbaum emphasizes in her essays on fiction as moral philosophy that the philosophical significance of novels is found, not in whatever theories or principles they might overtly discuss or dramatize, but in their literary form and their prose style. In particular, she finds in the late novels of Henry James an alternative to the reductive, pseudoscientific prose of contemporary analytic philosophy, which she argues inhibits the range of possible answers to the basic ethical question "How should one live?"1 James's prose shows "attention to particulars, a respect for the emotions, and a tentative and non-dogmatic attitude to the bewildering multiplicities of life" (LK, p. 27), and thus it exemplifies the Aristotelian ethical conception she advocates. In this essay I want to disentangle Nussbaum's theory of the ethical significance of fictional form—which I endorse—from her preoccupation [End Page 190] with James—which I do not. Far from being, as she believes, egalitarian, humane, and morally responsible, the Jamesian consciousness Nussbaum would have us emulate is elitist, exclusionary, and morally inert; further, in its commitment to indeterminacy, mystery, and obscurity, the Jamesian model is in fact profoundly anti-philosophical.2 I propose instead George Eliot's Middlemarch as exemplary of fiction's potential contribution to "the job of moral philosophy" (LK, p. 138). Nussbaum may admire the subtlety and density of The Golden Bowl, but I will argue that in its narrative strategies and its integration of novelistic perception and philosophic reflection, Middlemarch proves a better ethical guide and a better example of literature that is also philosophy. In making this argument, I will rely on the terms set by Nussbaum herself for the ethical evaluation of fiction. Unlike other philosophers who invoke literature only as a "rich source of examples awaiting illumination by philosophy," Nussbaum insists that analysis of a text's literary properties is the essential methodology of ethical criticism.3 Every aspect of form and style "expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not" (LK, p.5). We discover this "sense of life" through close reading; "our engaged experience line by line," as Wayne Booth says, reveals the character of the implied author, the would-be friend urging on us a particular "pattern of desires."4 On Nussbaum's reading, James's prose is ethically exemplary because it is "the prose of Aristotelian perception": It depicts in its cadences the moral effort of straining to see correctly and to come up with the appropriate picture or description; its tensions, obliquities, and circumnavigations express the sheer difficulty of finding the right description or picture for what is there before one. If, as James says, to "put" is to "do," showing this is showing moral activity of a valuable kind. (LK, p. 88) But Nussbaum ends up at James because her alternative moral theory begins there, not because moral philosophy that is literary inevitably sounds like James or supports Aristotle.5 As Nussbaum's gestures towards a more general theory of the role of "the novel" in philosophy indicate, novels may share generic features which complement or correct conventional philosophical discourse, but investigating other novels in this way may also lead us to other, non-Aristotelian, non-Jamesian ethical conceptions. My commentary on Middlemarch presents one such alternative. First, however, I will consider our "engaged experience" of The [End Page 191] Golden Bowl, a key example for Nussbaum, to show more particularly why we ought to be cautious about accepting James's late style as exemplary for moral philosophy, despite Nussbaum's passionate advocacy. What kind of friend do we meet there, in that world full of indeterminacy, obliquity, and circumnavigation? What kind of guidance in practical reasoning do we get from this implied author—what "ought" emerges from the Jamesian "is"? Perhaps because, as Nussbaum admits, her work on fiction as moral philosophy emerged "out of a longstanding love" for The...

The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry by Edward Marx

MLR, I0 I .2, 2006 527 However much memory may circulate around this book, though, itsmain concerns seem to me to be quite different. First, its concentration is powerfully on James as a writer who took both prose and novelistic representation to breaking-point. Righter was clearly motivated by an extensive, admirable, and identifying love of James and this charged relationship animates and motivates all of his work. It spurs on some very insightful commentary on the operation of power in The Golden Bowl as 'made palatable by the subtlety of its application' (p. I40). It also motivates one of the book's most enjoyable, breezy, and discursively adventurous chapters, 'In the Museum', which intriguingly connects The Outcry, how James combined his love forHenrik Andersen with awell-considered disdain forAndersen's projects, and the austere hostility which, for Righter, marks the planned museum culture to which Adam and Charlotte are exiled at the end of The Golden Bowl. Although Ipersonally disagree with Righter's dismissal of the novel version of The Outcry as 'unpalatable' (p. I82), his linkage of it to the Ververs and his decision to quote James writing: 'I live myself in the very intensity of reality and can only conceive of any art-work as producing itself piece by piece and touch by touch' add up to a deeply admirable act of literary and cultural critique and celebration (p. I86). Although Righter's reader might long for more detail, more quotation, and more argumentative solidity, the organization of each part of the book, a structure which invites the reader to revisit the volume's three different foci again and again so that reading American Memory in Henry James becomes an act of continual re-remembering, is structurally appropriate and convincing. But in that structure of remembrance what is returned to is not, Iwould contend, memory but an attributed ambition on James's part to reconcile profoundly formative and utterly antagonistic opposites-Europe and America (at least as both are outlined by Righter), capital and human possibility, senses of community and the sheer eclectic weight of populations. Righter's James tries, in The American Scene, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, not only to negotiate these contradictions but also, first, to represent them and, second, to allow that will to represent to determine the generic features and departures of his own writing. Capturing such a dizzy set of ambitions in the space of a critical book and attempting also to intervene in their execution constitutes, to my mind, the agenda of Righter's work much more than memory, however much memory may-admirably and lovingly-encircle and motivate this book's own life. UNIVERSITYOFLEEDS DENIS FLANNERY The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism inModern Poetry. By EDWARDMARX. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2004. ?32. ISBN o-8020-879-9. Edward Marx's 'Modern' incorporates both the canonical high modernist Americans (Pound, Eliot, Stevens) and several less influential Britons from the early twentieth century (Flecker, Kipling, Brooke) as ameans of thinking about some of the ways in which constructions of modernity were inflected by the colonial and the non western. So we have a series of linked essays devoted to each of these writers in turn, interspersed with considerations of Violet Nicholson, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore, and the work of the Harlem Renaissance, and spread across infusions from Arabia, Afghanistan, India, the Pacific Islands, China, and American nativism (in both itsRed and Black forms) in order to understand modernism's 'cross-culturalism' through the tropes of the exotic and the primitive, negotiated as projections of the irrational and the unconscious. Marx's premiss is the conjunction of formative mo dernism with imperialist ambition, maintaining that 'themost visible link between 528 Reviews poetry and the world of empire may be found in modern poets' fascination with non-western cultures' (p. 4). From this, we might anticipate a thoroughly historicist, even materialist, account, but Marx turns instead to psychoanalysis (to Freud, and to Jung and Lacan in particular) as a favoured critical armoury, casting himself in 'the position of the analyst attempting to discover themeanings of the primitive and exotic as symptoms of repression inmodern poets and their...

TOLL-erating cardiac hypertrophy following pressure overload

See article by Ha et al. [4] (pages 224–234) in this issue. Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!–a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; …And I!–to-night my heart is light!–no dirge will I upraise, But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days! –Excerpted from “Lenore”, by Edgar Allen Poe (1831) Sensing and defeating microbial infections are essential to the survival of metazoan species and contingent upon the reliable detection of pathogens, which are characterized by rapid evolution and molecular heterogeneity. Multicellular species have developed two overall strategies to kill and remove parasites, to send them “ floating on the Stygian river ” (after the river Styx in Hades , the underworld, in Greek mythology), as alluded to in the poem “ Lenore ” from Edgar Allen Poe: an innate versus an adaptive immune recognition system. The first line of defense (the innate system) is limited to the recognition of evolutionarily conserved pathogen motifs, molecular patterns that are unique to the microbial world and invariable among classes of pathogens. In contrast, the adaptive system involves dynamic adaptation (e.g. antibody generation) to unique epitopes on pathogens in the environment. Induction of the innate immune system is fast (usual within hours) and depends upon targets of pattern recognition, p athogen- a ssociated m olecular p atterns or PAMPs that are recognized by p attern r ecognition r eceptors (PRRs) [1]. The Toll-like receptor (TLR) family is … *Corresponding author. Email address: dewindt{at}niob.knaw.nl

Reading Knowledge: Curiosity in The Golden Bowl

This essay argues that showing us what things are—and particularly what they cost—is an especial violation of The Golden Bowl. The Golden Bowl stages the fatal encounter between two curious subjects: a woman who wants to know and a bowl that wants to tell. Between them, they enact the central enigma of the realist novel: is the heroine curious because she wants to know or because everyone (including the reader) wants to know about her? How does the novel, by making a spectacle of its taciturn realist object, both feed and toy with the reader's curiosity? And what, for the heroine and for the reader, is the price of female curiosity?

Seated alone with a book....

This article explores representations of reading and books in James's novels (specifically, The Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age and The Golden Bowl). It begins by suggesting connections between Isabel Archer's reading and reading in Jane Eyre; it goes on to suggest that in the later novels James avoids direct representation of imaginative absorption in reading, and uses books rather more as signs and counters in social and cultural performances. Finally, it examines an account of James's own reading of Flaubert, and finishes by suggesting the presence of the writing room hidden behind the reading rooms in all the texts.

An “Empirical Science” of Literature

In this article the outlines are sketched of an empirical science of literature as close as possible to the model of the natural sciences. This raises the question of what the standards of an empirical science in the strictest sense should generally be. Practical relevance of its results soon turns up as the fundamental condition for an explanatory empirical science, if the ideology of nearing an empirical truth is no longer accepted and a mere pragmatic justification rejected as its insufficient substitute. As a consequence the logical priority of scientific explanation over scientific description is considered irrefutable. The so-called “sciences of understanding” – among them a “science of literature” – are confronted with a special difficulty, if they want to become explanatory empirical sciences. Their practical problems to be solved are related to linguistically or semiotically coded facts. To empirically describe these problematic facts causes this difficulty, which the author tries to overcome with recourse to ideas from Wittgenstein. And the practical relevance, which may be achieved with the help of nomological explanations, here doesn’t consist in predictions for better practical production of means, direct or indirect, for survival, but in the provision of rational understanding for better practical teaching or criticism. This practical relevance is shown in the explanation of valuing acts of readers of The Golden Bowl by Henry James. The meaning of a literary text is no longer taken as a possible object of scientific empirical explanation, nor its rational justification as a scientific goal that might be practically relevant.

"The Mirror with a Memory": Tracking Consciousness in the Preface to The Golden Bowl

James's preface to The Golden Bowl presents the reader with a mirror of his consciousness. In the preface, James discusses his desire to "track" himself through the revised terms of the New York Edition, what he calls "lights of experience." He also addresses his "hunt" for the photographic frontispieces, omitting their hidden autobiographical meaning. Ultimately, however, it is the preface itself that becomes a "living" photograph of consciousness: striated with quotes and associations for the reader to track, it examines and exemplifies how reading raises ghostly images. The preface enshrines and activates the trace as a way to sustain what James calls "'connexions.'"

Amerigo's Miraculous Metamorphosis: or, the Logic of Ethnic Caricature in The Golden Bowl

The leading American comic papers and illustrated literary magazines of James's era tended to represent ethnicity as an unresolvable paradox: the ethnic identity of the Irishman, the Jew, the Indian, or the African-American was easily conveyed by an exaggerated physical stigma, a permanent mark that denoted a set of culturally agreed upon social pathologies, such as intemperance, avarice, savagery, or laziness. Yet the very form of ethnic caricature—its exaggerated emphasis on the subject's purported deviation from physical and social norms—made such markers ridiculous and thus inherently unstable, such that ethnic identities were often represented as arbitrarily interchangeable. In this essay I argue that James's engagement with the discourse of American ethnic caricature runs far deeper than his dismissive comments about "the slangy illustrated magazines" might lead us to believe. In fact, James's representation of ethnicity in The Golden Bowl and elsewhere is surprisingly in tune with the popular discourse of ethnic caricature in the "coon era."

The Counterfeit Symbol in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

Although critically freighted with all the significance of a symbol, the golden bowl in James's last completed novel fails to achieve conventional symbolic status. Fanny Assingham's decision to smash the bowl enacts a challenge to its physical integrity matched, at the level of discourse, by the competing meanings that have sought the bowl as the vehicle for their expression but which proliferate only in the bowl's absence. The gold standard debates which form the historical context for the novel highlight its dramatization of anxieties over monetary and linguistic value, expressed through the figure of the counterfeit symbol.

American Memory in Henry James: Void and Value (review)

Reviewed by: American Memory in Henry James: Void and Value Martin Warner American Memory in Henry James: Void and Value, by William Righter , edited by Rosemary Righter ; xi & 220 pp. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004. $79.95. The perennial debate about what Arnold termed "culture and anarchy" was both enriched and rendered more subtle by the work of Henry James. The late William Righter's fine and discriminating intelligence helps us to think this through. This is no standard monograph on Henry James. While well-aware of the critical traditions of Jamesian scholarship (and the knowledgeable will be able to detect in his sensitive and often enlightening readings of the texts his engagement with those traditions), Righter sits lightly to this scholarship, ploughing his own furrow, using the later work of Henry James as a lens to question "void and value" in twentieth-century and, by extension, contemporary culture. American Memory in Henry James is elegantly, and indeed sometimes elusively, written, as befits a work on a man whose own stylistic stringency is, alas, so often not emulated by academic writings on his work. The flipside of this, of course, is that a reasonably educated background, including some acquaintance with James's texts, is assumed. Righter is concerned to explore the capacity of the novel form as represented by James to apprehend, through formal arrangement, the apparent incommensurability of the forces that drive history, culture, and human psychology on the one hand, and the frameworks of intelligibility and value within which we seek to live and by means of which we seek to exercise some control over them, on the other. James is apt for this purpose since he focuses on cultural dislocations, between America and Europe, and between past and present. America, for James, represents the overcoming of a late nineteenth-century tradition of civility (primarily, in his case, transcendentalist and Unitarian) by big business and the criteria of capitalism. This precipitates a split between "wasp" culture and an alienated, urban culture, both in danger of losing touch with their roots. Europe, of course, stands for continuity, in this specifically cultural sense, rather than rupture, and the project of importing European culture into America through museums (The Golden Bowl is very much in point here) is one of the ambiguities to which the text recurs. The first part, "America Deconstructed," sets the stage, using James's The [End Page 447] American Scene to analyze his notions of historical change and progression, and their implications for a sense of stable American identity. How is a society so committed to change and progress to honor its past creatively? Part two, "The Note of Europe," engages with The Ambassadors, seeing the victory of Wollett as an indication of the insubstantiality of a certain type of expatriate community, of Americans seeking to take on European culture. The main weight of the text is taken by the engagement with The Golden Bowl, to which the next two parts are dedicated. "Amerigo in American Nowhere" explores the way in which the central characters operate in a sort of void, with social context stripped away to reveal the dynamics of their failed equilibrium. In this, "America" and "England" have become virtually typological symbols. In the light of this reading of the text, Part four, "A Dark Fable of Love and Power," explores the implications for our shaping intelligence, especially ethical intelligence. In suggestive dialogue with Putnam and Nussbaum, Righter points to the difficulty of seeing the relevance of anything like the Categorical Imperative to The Golden Bowl. Rather, in this novel "the language of morality has been examined, picked up, turned over, taken to pieces. But this very process has in the end indicated its unsuitability as an ultimate explanatory scheme." He argues that James poses the possibility that the novel "adds up to a total story which is intelligible beyond the possibilities of a conceptual sorting out" (pp. 154-55). But this raises the question of what the criteria for intelligibility could be in such a case, if beyond the conceptual lies the imaginative. The final part, "Form and Contingency," engages with this issue. James's difficulty here, it is argued with respect to the late...

Ricordo, Gift, Golden Bowl

In Henry James's The Golden Bowl, the precluded hunt for the titular gift subverts Prince Amerigo's fantasy of a break with the past by allegorizing its critical liveliness even, or especially, in present efforts to make it nothing, to obscure its records, and to deny its eruptive traces. James plays with the value of "nothing," associating it with Amerigo's dreamt-of liberation from the burden of denying past contingencies and making it a lively allusion to the Prince and Charlotte's forestalled romance. The unbought, fissured bowl figures the impossible realization of the promise of "nothing" in all its competing resistances to sense.

Paternalism incorporated: fables of American fatherhood, 1865-1940

Between the Civil War and World War I, David Leverenz maintains, the corporate transformation of American work created widespread desire for upward mobility along with widening class divisions. In his view, several significant narrative constructs, notably the s girl and the s emerge at the intersection between paternalist practices and more democratic possibilities for self-advancement. From Mark Twain s Laura Hawkins in The Gilded Age to the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser s Sister Carrie and Willa Cather s Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, Leverenz finds that the image of the s girl constrains the emerging threat of the career woman even as it articulates the lure of upward mobility for women. In surveying the figure of the daddy s boy, Leverenz examines tensions between young men s desires for upward mobility and older men s desires for paternal control. Paternalism Incorporated also addresses yearnings for individualism and paternalism in various critiques of the emerging corporation. Another chapter links honor and shaming to race in the philanthropic practices of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, framed with narratives by William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, and Jane Addams. After showing how a s girl becomes a paternalist in Henry James s The Golden Bowl, Leverenz considers F. Scott Fitzgerald s Tender is the Night as paternalism s elegy, contrasted with the Shirley Temple film The Little Colonel.

Vindication Against Misreading in The Golden Bowl, The American Scene , and the New York Edition

VINDICATION AGAINST MISREADING IN THE GOLDEN BOWL, THE AMERICAN SCENE, AND THE NEW YORK EDITION Molly Vaux The City University of New York In the letter he wrote to Scribner's in 1905 proposing that he "furnish " each volume of his forthcoming deluxe edition with a preface, Henry James portrayed his novels and stories as disenfranchised beings patiently awaiting a "chance" for their cause to be righted. James would be their advocate and the prefaces the texts with which he would demonstrate his novels' worth.1 In this essay I will argue that the writing of The Golden Bowland The American Scene were essential precedents and complements to this project of self-vindication. Reading The Golden Bowl through its preface shows that beneath the narratives of familial and marital relations in the novel run stories of a writer's contention with a misapprehending audience—the same struggles out ofwhich James spun creative autobiography and a theory of fiction in the prefaces to the New York Edition. Through his indirect critique ofhis readership in The Golden Bowland the fierce challenges he delivered to his compatriots in The American Scene James laid essential groundwork for the lessons in reading and creative production he would later offer in the New York Edition. Paul Armstrong has argued that James's prefaces require the same "doubled reading" his novels require, that while the reader is absorbing James's account of his writing experience and his theory of writing , the reader is also responding to James as a centering consciousness whose "interpretive attitudes . . . are as much on display and as much an object forthe reader's scrutiny as the impressions ofa Lambert Strether or a Maggie Verver."2 As comparable centering consciousnesses, James the preface-writer and his heroine Maggie Verver do make common assertions. Both figures demonstrate the power of the creative deed. Paralleling James's affirmations about "doing" in the preface to The Golden Bowl is Maggie's discovery in the novel of her own brilliant capacity for action. After the assignation ofthe Prince with Charlotte in Gloucester, Maggie begins "to doubt of her wonderful little judgement of her wonderful little world."3 She begins to "put" things both to herselfand the people around her. She contrives gestures to effect a change in her "practically unattackable" situation (327). The terms James uses to describe Maggie's campaign to rebalance familial and marital relations are the same terms he uses in his notebooks and pref- 50Molly Vaux aces when he celebrates the capacity to let oneself go with writing: "Ah, just to let oneselfgo—at least," he writes in his notebook in 1895, "to surrender one's self to what through all the long years one has (quite heroically, I think) hoped for and waited for—the mere potential , and relative, increase of quantity in the material act—act of application and production."4 Likewise, in the preface to Roderick Hudson, James celebrates the tendency of the writer's canvas "to lead on and on."5 In her lively interrogations about the Matcham houseparty and the Gloucester sightseeing Maggie lets herself go in a similar way: Maggie went, she went—she felt herself going; she reminded herselfofan actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. . . . Preparation and practice had come but a short way; her part opened out and she invented from moment to moment what to say and to do. She had but one rule of art—to keep within bounds and not lose her head; certainly she might see for a week how far that would take her. (348) In this passage Maggie becomes James, inventing her role as she goes, while also inventing the rules for invention. The labor is hard but exhilarating. It works invisibly, by a charm, "touch by touch" (348) without her audience suspecting how much she understands. She is a reservoir of "ideas" and she rejoices in her sudden capacity to translate them into action (348). Maggie's creative exhilaration builds during the dinner party with the Matcham group: "Oh she was going, she was going...

Forum: Responses to Carolyn G. Heilbrun's Guest Column

ONE OF MY LOVING QUIBBLES WITH CAROLYN, WITH WHOM I walked in the park every week for something like twentysix years, concerned her almost constant reference, from what seemed to me an early date, to her old age. I know, of course, how she was ready for it, and wanted us to be so: the readiness in Hamlet and the ripeness in Lear were important to her. She had changed her reading, yes. For the last few years, on our weekly walks, she would talk-as enthusiastically as she always had about poetry-about science, scientists, and their lives. I would listen: what do I know about science? But her enthusiasm was continual, pressing, and, I hoped, catching. Only it wasn't. What I loved was her love of it all. Perhaps she wasn't writing, or at least lately she said she wasn't, but she was reading and talking about what she read. Science and philosophy held the greatest interest for her, these last times we walked.We had gone through a period of discussing mostly art. Some paintings she found endlessly mystifying, like Edouard Manet's painting Gare Saint-Lazare, with the little girl gazing out through the bars onto the tracks, her face turned away from us. What was the story? she would ask. We had half planned to do together a compilation of essays about radically different ways of reading art and its stories. She liked walking with me, she said, because my mind was so different from hers, my readings different, my attitudes different. You like the complex, she would say; I like the straightforward. But reading her straightforwardness was never an easy affair, as we have so recently learned, to our deepest sorrow. If her schedules did not change or the things she liked to look at in the parkthose tall buildings across the green or brown expanse, every dog she saw (my friend, she would say of me to whomever passed, only likes fuzzy-haired dogs), the ducks on the boat pond-her readings did. We often got on the topic of Henry James, whose Ambassadors she loved as much as I do The Golden Bowl. Perhaps not needless to say, The Wings of the