The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, March 2, 2025

Storytime: In a May 2015 essay in Novel, A Forum on Fiction (a Duke University publication), the writer Matthew Sussman (now a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney) published an essay called “Henry James and Stupidity.” After letting his disclaimer of an introduction go to Jamesian lengths to establish James’s intelligence (quoting obituaries or critics who called him “the most intelligent man of his generation” etc.) he writes: “In this essay I neither assert that James lacks intelligence nor deny that intelligence plays a crucial role in the creation and reception of his work. However, I do argue that an overly narrow celebration of Jamesian intelligence has eclipsed the meaningfulness and centrality of stupidity and related concepts, such as ignorance and density, within his fiction.” It’s not an original thesis: a lot of James is written from such heights that as the words drop, so does a condensation of disdain that drenches those beyond the pale of James’s pantheon, his sensibilities, his manners, his idea of what must a human being, and certainly what an American, be. He did not always like Americans. His patience for women was limited, his respect for them even more so. A not-too-small book could be bound of the passages that diminish women–“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” is a story stupendous for its sexism– or on occasion make them look like dumbasses (though not nearly as much as Dickens does with his cardboard-cutout women). Then there’s this: Sussman doesn’t mention “The Third Person,” from The Soft Side, James’s 1900 collection. (I couldn’t find it online.) It’s about two old maids (James’s words), second cousins to each other who’d never met until a house is left to them in a will to sell so they could benefit from the proceeds. The story’s introduction paints the two women, Susan and Amy, one 10 years older than the other (the fact seems irrelevant to the plot), essentially as losers who “had drunk deep of the cup of singleness and found it prevailingly bitter.” In other words, they were defined by their singleness, as if no woman in James’s universe would have an identity separate from a man. “The Third Person” will make the point again, though it’s still a very funny ghost story that spoofs James’s own conventions of the genre, making its less attractive flaws more bearable. One other detail: there’s mention on the first page of Tauchnitz novels. It’s no longer a reference anyone would recognize. I had no idea what Tauchnitz novels were. Tauchnitz was a German publisher of English-language novels before the days of copyrights who, nevertheless, paid his English authors for the rights, agreeing never to market the books in England. But people loved to smuggle them in, and did. The two women decide to keep the house even at the cost of having to live with each other. They discover that a man executed by hanging for smuggling (that was back when they hung anyone for “a trifle,” as a local priest tells the women) is haunting the place. They each see him in turn, standing in their room, his head bent where the rope snapped it. They’re not frightened in the least. They develop an attachment, then get jealous when he spends more time with one over the other, and give James the chance to drop his inanities: “They say, you know, that when women do quarrel it’s usually about a man.” At least James has the skills to make fun of his own cliches: “Well then, let there first be one,” Amy tells Susan as  the jealousies corrode their living arrangement. They decide it may be time to give the ghost his freedom, his “absolution.” Susan donates a sum of money to  the Chancellor of the Exchequer for “conscience,” hoping it’ll clear the ghost’s conscience and he can be on his way. It doesn’t work. He’s not looking for absolution. He’s looking for one last fling–one last smuggle. Amy figures that out somehow, disappears to Paris for ten days, then smuggles back–what? a Tauchnitz novel. That does the trick. The ghost departs, and James has the last laugh. It’s a long way to go for the smuggle of a far-fetched punchline. Maybe the women weren’t so stupid after all, except for believing in what they saw leering at them. But so do we.

—P.T.

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

FlaglerLive News Service, Palm Coast (@flaglerlive) • Instagram photos and videos

“Was there ever anything like the avidity of these dreadful girls?” said Mrs. Mason to the Doctor. “They’ll let a man swoon at their feet sooner than abridge a tête-à-tête that amuses them. Then they’ll have up another. Look at little Miss McCarthy, yonder, with Ferdinand and George Stapleton before her. She’s got them contradicting each other, and she looks like a Roman fast lady at the circus. What does she care so long as she makes her evening? They like a man to look as if he were going to die, it’s interesting.”

–From Henry James’s “A Most Extraordinary Case” (1868).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.