In the Palatial Chamber of the Mind: Comparative Essays on Henry James (review)

Maurizio Ascari. In the Palatial Chamber of the Mind: Comparative Essays on Henry James. Pescara, Italy: Edizioni Tracce, 1997. 233 pp. $12.

We constantly find things to delight us in Maurizio Ascari's book, like a passage describing the campaign of those who promote the morality of literature against those who promote its sexual explicitness: "There are marchionesses, countesses, banker's wives on whose face a gentleman cannot spit only because his spit would fall in a place which is too indecent" (40). Ascari draws this salvo from a battle of Italian critics over Gabriele D'Annuzio's novels. It is one of many translations that he provides to give us a unique perspective on matters that concerned Henry James. The quotation, for instance, adumbrates James's essay on Mathilde Serao, whom he found "above all things the signal 'case'" (FW 959). "Who are these people [. . .] who love indeed with fury--though for the most part with astonishing brevity--but who are so without any suggested situation in life that they can only strike us as loving for nothing and in the void, to no gain of experience and no effect of a felt medium or a breathed air" (965). This is James's ground zero, which he articulated definitively in his essay on Turgenev: "We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness" (998). When a writer's preoccupation with sex leaves out consciousness of a larger life, James can only ask in wonderment, "My poor lady, do you call that corner of a pig-sty in which you happen to live, the world?" (866).

Although this passage from James's review of Zola's L'Assommoir does not occur in Ascari's consideration of James and Serao, many others do. He takes us on a broad-ranging discussion of "convention" vs. "passione" (21). He leads us from England to Italy by way of Pater's Renaissance and allows us to see anew a story like "The Author of Beltraffio." Furthermore, he invokes James's dislike for Oscar Wilde and his friendship with John Addington Symonds, both of whom favored Italy over England, suggesting, as Ascari writes, "the opposite ends of an axis whose moral coordinates decrease toward the South" (36).

Such a decrease is evident to James as he presents D'Annunzio as a "case" of the aesthetic--of "beauty at any price"--finding its full realization in the depiction of sexual passion. Consequently, James finds that the "esthetic" becomes "vulgar" when sexual passion no longer has "something finely contributive" about it--when it is all there is. Thus he finds "erotomaniacs" no more interesting than "the boots and shoes that we see, in the corridors of promiscuous hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms" (41). Ascari shows that James presented erotomaniacs like Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen in "In the Cage"--a story quite possibly inspired by Serao's "Il romanzo della fanciulla" of 1886--as finely illustrative (50). The telegraphist, who has fed her imagination on romances, runs directly into a sordid affair, helps it along in crisis, but prefers to end her own love story in Chalk Farm with Mr. Mudge, not in Mayfair with Captain Everard. Setting "In the Cage" in the dramatic development of telegraphic services as well as among Italian stories about telegraphists, Ascari shows James representing sexual passion differently from Serao and D'Annunzio, who limited it, as James lamented, by making it "the totality of their consciousness."

More tellingly, James's understanding of D'Annunzio as "the most developed taste in the world" (132) finds its meaning--its connection to a larger life--in the aesthete-villain, Gilbert Osmond, who imprisons Isabel Archer in his...