James Poems: Notes of an Industrious Apprentice, or What the Master Knew

From the London Diary of Hugh Walpole, April 1911

For Robert Gottlieb, In at the Beginning and at the Culmination of These Mutual Concerns

Thursday Evening

My first impression, the poor aftermath of a bewildering minute, was that our hostess—I had never been her guest before this afternoon—was overdressed for the occasion; by the time I left I realized it was the rest of us who had failed to dress appropriately . . .

“I’ve called you here in order to confessour utter failure—how unfortunateyet unavoidable that I must be obligedto bring this sorry news to valued friendswho have so long and loyally sustainedmy little scheme to secure for Mr. Jamesthe proper honor of a Nobel Prize” . . .

These words were spoken not an hour ago so all the “valued friends” might realize how disappointed Mrs. Wharton was by our “utter failure” to consummate her “little scheme,” as she was pleased to call the tangled web of testimonials ranging from Sir Edmund Gosse (who else

so likely to switch on the Northern Lights?) to “dull Dean Howells, the one safeAmerican luminary—most of us” (Mrs. Wharton summed up her countrymen) “so unrestrained, so dubious, so odd,” and from her quite nonplussed Ambassador in Stockholm to Our Man in Downing Street

(perhaps not her man at all, considering the tack needful to pocket a Prix Nobel: if most MPs tell their wives Secrets of State, Asquith tells them to other people’s wives). Yet even here Mrs. Wharton had devised and antidote to any subterfuge that might be taken as louche or untoward:

“Such a cunning letter Paul Bourgetwrote for us to the Committee—it gavethose people (who knows who they are?Swedes, of course, but how do such Swedes read?)precisely the right pan-European touchto win the only homage worthy ofthe only Master, our own Henry James!”

Yet now she stood before us, gravely gowned, announcing to our mutual dismay that all these infallible tools had “utterly failed,” and all we could do, apparently, was drink a little more of her very good champagne as she described in tortuous detail the shameful rationale of “our defeat.”

The Wharton spies had reported that it was “problems with English” (the English of Henry James) which led the Swedes “to groom a candidatewhose artless French enjoys a flashy vogue” —our hostess warming to her poignant theme— “in theaters from Paris to Petersburgand all points west; a so-called ‘Symboliste’

whose Oiseau bleu, sufficiently inanefor a Christmas panto, opens this very weekin the West End—no more! The wretched choiceis made and must not be divulged untilthe Academy is ready to announceits honors in other fields. My sorry newsis that Henry James has been passed over

for the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literaturein favor of a writer known (in Belgium) asthe Belgian Shakespeare, Maurice Maeterlinck.” Tableau!—conceive our hostess, half in tears and half in high contempt, suggestive of Satan amid his downcast followers, many wondering who the bugger was.

I knew, of course—why didn’t she?—about the Master’s fond allusion to Maeterlinck (herewith chapter and verse from Wings of the Dove): “Such the twilight that gathers about them nowlike some dim scene in a Maeterlinck play.We have the image, in the delicate dusk,of personages coalesced yet so opposed”

—it’s the moment Millie sees through Kate at last— “the angular pale Princess, ostrich-plumed,black-robed and hung about with amulets,quite still against the slowly circling Ladyof her Court who must exchange with her,across black water streaked with evening gleams,fitful questions and answers.” What a gaffe—

an insult, really—to take no notice of the Master’s wonderful citation. How could a serious devotee have missed oh, not the point (she never misses points, angles, anything acute), but a mirage of life with all the blur of Being on it . . . Mr. James had seen it distinctly enough

to take the Maeterlinck...