Deep mysteries

Christian Century, Sept 27, 2000 by Ralph C. Wood

James acknowledges that there was something delusory about this ostensibly unified culture. Its deceit was evident, she admits, in the detective fiction it produced. The world of Agatha Christie and even Dorothy L. Sayers is altogether too cozy. In their novels virtue is the rule, crime the exception, murderers are monsters, and peace and order are always restored in the end. James creates a fictional realm, by contrast, that is rife with the horror and blood and grief largely absent from her predecessors. Yet the terror and panic endemic to James's novels are never gratuitous. Her Augustinian estimate of human nature enables her to discern that our worst temptations arise not from raw hatred but from disordered love. She makes us sympathize even with her murderers. Like us, they seek--albeit horribly--to protect or to avenge someone they love.

The ability to view the world with such compassionate detachment, she insists, is the key to good art. It unites a disinterested and ironic gaze with a sympathizing regard for the deepest pain and joy. While these are indeed the ingredients for fine crime fiction, they are also the requirements of a good life. They save James from a dismissive scorn for all things contemporary, even if she must sometimes scold the noisy nonsense of our age. She is adamant, for example, in her insistence that crime is not chiefly the result of malign environmental influences. Human nature is too drastically disordered, James believes, to be righted merely by the betterment of our social circumstances.

James is also astonished at the now regnant notion that the world owes us bliss. For her, by contrast, a quiet and often stoical endurance is the chief requisite for both faith and life. She salutes our forebears who stoically endured their unblissful marriages, assured that they too had their rewards:

   Those [unhappy couples] who were able to survive the more turbulent years
   of youth and middle age often found in each other a reassuring and
   comforting companionship in old age. They had a far smaller expectation of
   happiness, admittedly, and a far lesser tendency to regard happiness as a
   right. All our brightly minted social reforms, the sexual liberation since
   the war, the guilt-free divorce, the ending of the stigma of illegitimacy,
   have had their shadow side. Today we have a generation of children more
   disturbed, more unhappy, more criminal, indeed more suicidal than in any
   previous era. The sexual liberation of adults has been bought at a high
   price and it is not the adults who have paid it.

James's candor enables her to acknowledge that the apparently tranquil world of her past carried its own hidden turmoil. Her mother was repeatedly hospitalized for recurrent depression, and her physician husband returned from World War II in a state of permanent shell shock. He died an early death in 1964. It was as if the outward fear and trembling inherent in the century of mass death had taken inward hold within James's own family. An immense suffering can be discerned, and not too obliquely, in James's description of the miserable marriage that linked Britain's future poet laureate Ted Hughes and his eventually suicidal wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. "No one who has never had to live with a partner who is mentally ill can possibly understand," James observes, how it involves "two people [dwelling] ... in separate hells, but each intensifies the other."