Ironies of Loss in The Finer Grain

Ironies of Loss in The Finer Grain by Richard S. Lyons, University of Massachusetts, Boston In one of Henry James's last stories, "Mora Montravers," the main character, having suffered a series of reversals of his hopes, expectations, and situation, reflects on his excess, of imagination and the "deep holes" into which it gets him and concludes by thinking, "didn't it at the same time . . . give him all to himself a life, exquisite, occult, dangerous and sacred, to which everything ministered and which nothing could take away" (CT 331-32). The private and equivocal glories of the imagination is a longstanding theme in James; what is especially characteristic of the mood of the stories in his final collection, The Finer Grain, is captured in the phrase "which nothing could take away." These stories, as Dorothea Krook has noted, are preoccupied with loss, feared or actual, with deprivation, with being dispossessed (336). The forms of loss are many: loss of fortune, of friends and loved ones, of youth, of the signs and values of the past, even of dreams and illusions. Attendant on these losses are feelings of disillusionment, loneliness, personal failure, even despair. The stories are not all lugubrious; James often exploits the ironic, even comic, possibilities in his dramatic situations, but there is a satiric edge to the comedy, a bittersweet flavor, even in the lighter pieces. Both Dorothea Krook and Leon Edel have commented on the close connection between the mood and themes of these last stories and James's personal situation at the time of their writing: his fears about his own health and his brother's; his incipient nervous collapse; the simple fact of growing old for one who had written in his notebooks that "youth" was the most beautiful word in the language; and, perhaps above all, the crashing blow of the failure of the New York Edition.1 Intertwining with and compounding the sense of personal loss were the ravages of history forced upon James's awareness by his trip to America in 19041905 . America was an appalling case of the reckless destruction, in the name of progress, of the landmarks, values, forms of manners, and even morals of the past. If America is an extreme case, however, and if Europe is a convenient foil to America's modernity in James's New York stories, we should still recognize that James had been increasingly aware of a deep current of historical change, of a pervasive and increasingly blatant commercialism, the ubiquitous money passion, in Europe, or at least in England, as well. Premonitions of this change go back to the corrupt social worlds of What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age and to the Lancaster Gate circle in The Wings of the Dove, and it gets full The Henry James Review 11 (1990) : 202-12 ©1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Ironies of Loss in The Finer Grain 203 expression in some of the late satiric stories such as "Fordham Castle," as well as in some of the stories collected in The Finer Grain. It is not with the possible biographical sources of this preoccupation with loss in The Finer Grain that this essay is concerned, however, but with the complexities of tone and attitude with which the various forms of loss are treated and with the way this theme is linked to the rewards, temptations, vulnerabilities, and limitations of the peculiarly Jamesian imaginative sensibility—what James called in his prefatory note to the volume the "sentient, perceptive, reflective" protagonist or what he characterized in his notes to The Ivory Tower as "another exposed and assaulted, active and passive 'mind' engaged in an adventure and interesting in itself by so being" (CN 577, 494). Of course, as the whole body of James's work shows, to be so sentient and so reflective is to be exposed as much to the ironies of the author as to the circumstances of one's fate. The Finer Grain consists of five stories: "The Velvet Glove," "Mora Montravers ," "Crapy Cornelia," "The Bench of Desolation," and "A Round of Visits." They are linked not only by themes of loss and their "sensitive" protagonists but also, as we...