What else goes on

Christian Century, March 19, 1997 by Martin E. Marty

I found The Portrait of a Lady good rereading on a recent long flight from Tel Aviv via Paris to Chicago. I picked up the novel in preparation for my annual visit to the movies. The Martys saw our way through the E. M. Forster and Jane Austen cycles, and now it is time to see the (per?)versions of Henry James novels. I had also tucked in a sheaf of Times Literary Supplements, favorite fellow travelers because they weighers because they weigh so little and get so much onto the page. In the batch was a December 6, 1996, issue that included Millicent Bell's review of Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James: The Young Master. The review's subtitle indicated Novick's thesis: "A suggestion of `active love' in Henry James's attachment to men."

Having reviewed all the biographies and raw materials of Jamesiana, Bell delivers the appropriate judgment about Henry's possible expression of quite apparent homosexual tendencies: "No unarguable evidence either way has turned up." Nevertheless, "in the revisionary James biographies at last appearing, the conviction is strong that few closets are really empty." Bell thinks Novick "surrenders to the novelistic urge and produces a mixture of genres that often abandons the biographer's fidelity to the provable." Novick places James in a lover's bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes, future chief justice of the Supreme Court.

"But how does Novick know this? The episode is the biographer's fantasy," Bell convincingly demonstrates.

Whether or not James was celibate is something I don't much care about. This is not to say that it is unimportant to know whether a writer has a certain sexual inclination. It is also important to know whether some biographers are "reading in" fictional elements and stating them as fact.

But today I address another concern, expressed nicely by Bell: "Perhaps the determination to find a love plot has too distractingly obsessed James's modern biographers. So much else goes on in a life" (emphasis mine). That is true of James, who came from a complex family, traveled extensively and wrote prolifically. He might have found reason to enrich his novels with the autobiography of a noncelibate-sexual life, or even presented "arguable" evidence about such a life, and that would have been relevant. But he did not.

So much else does go on in a life. Popular television programs and movies imply that much of the "else" involves blowing up people and places and things. And sexual expression crowds out everything else.

I don't think one needs to be pre-pubescent or senescent to notice that life is enriched when seen as having more than a "love plot" of physically expressed sexuality. That most people in their prime time are involved in some versions of a love plot, with sexuality not always far from its center, is a fact of life that is biologically natural, theologically endorsed, aesthetically ambiguous and seldom uninteresting. But so much else goes on.

Whether the fault for not seeing this belongs to modern biographers, novelists, producers of cinema and television, or is in the eye of beholders and the wallets of those who buy books and pay the advertisers or the ticket takers, I am not sure. But one looks, I hope not always in vain, for the people of talent and genius--Henry James high among them--who beguile us and hold our attention with the "so much else" that other parts of the mind and the heart long have craved.