The Madness of Art: Henry James's "The Middle Years"

This strange, parable-like tale of 1893, written in James’s fiftieth year, belongs to that species of fiction by James that suggests dream or myth; fiction on the brink of dissolving into abstraction. It can hardly be read in “realistic” terms except as the dreamily fractured landscapes of Cézanne can be read against the “real” landscapes of Aix-en-Provence that evoked them.

Clearly, “The Middle Years” is a confession of the artist’s anxiety over the worth of his art and the terrifying aloneness to which the demands of his art have brought him. James’s own lament over the “essential loneliness of my life,” in a letter of 1900, echoes here: “This aloneness—what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper, about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.” The novelist-protagonist of “The Middle Years” yearns for a second chance at his art; yet more passionately for an audience, the “sympathy of the community” of which I’ve spoken. Not commercial success and a wide readership so much as someone who will understand, somebody to care.

The setting is Bournemouth “as a health resort.” The time is an April day of softness and brightness. Poor Dencombe, as James speaks of him, mysteriously ill, fatigued by a brief walk from his hotel to a sea cliff bench, sits and opens, with no eagerness, a copy of his new, just-published novel The Middle Years. Dencombe is a writer of difficult, exquisite texts, never commercially successful, prone to an eloquent melancholy. “The infinite of life was gone . . .” he thinks, contemplating the sea, “It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep.” Exhausted, burnt-out, Dencombe awaits redemption passively, like so many of James’s male, middle-aged artists or “sensitive” men; unless perhaps it is already too late? He dare not speculate into the future, out of a terror of what he might envision. “It was indeed general views that were terrible; short ones . . . were the remedy.”

Henry James presents as mordant comedy the predicament of a distinctly Jamesian novelist so exhausted by the effort of his art—“It had taken too much of his life to produce too little”—that, confronted with his latest and perhaps last novel, not only is he incapable of feeling the mildest tinge of enthusiasm for it, but he seems to have forgotten it entirely. “Utter blankness” has intervened. Not a single page, not a single sentence comes to him. Yet, as he reads, sitting on his bench above the sea cliff, he finds that The Middle Years is, even by the harsh measure of its author’s judgment, “extraordinarily good.” Note the powerful, even mystical language in which James describes this awakening of the author by way of becoming his own reader: “He dived once more into his story and was drawn down, as by a siren’s hand, to where, in the dim underworld of fiction, the great glazed tank of art, strange silent subjects float.” This analogue of fiction with the boundless and unchartable imagination at the point at which it is identical with the unconscious might strike the casual reader of Henry James as radically antithetical to the “Jamesian style”—the “Jamesian” mode of a finely calibrated and inexhaustibly contemplated fiction. It suggests, on the contrary, the tremendous pressure of the unconscious; its unknowability. The processes of art yield, and in a way are lost in, the product of the artist’s effort—the aesthetic object. We can infer the mysterious potency of the former by the evidence of the latter, but this is a mere inference, a glimmering of something vast, rich, deep, unchartable. Excited by the discovery that his novel is so much finer than he’d expected, Dencombe wonders if he might have a second life, after all. “Ah for another go, ah for a better chance!”

As if this murmured wish were a command, Dencombe is immediately...