"Complicated Music at Short Order" in "Fordham Castle"

"Complicated Music at Short Order" in "Fordham Castle" By Kermlt Vanderbilt, San Diego State University The reflections in these pages have had their source in a happy coming-together of three occurrences: enjoying a recent essay by J. Peter Dyson on the neglected "Fordham Castle," considering further musical aspects of James's fiction after my previous article on "Four Meetings," and completing a semester of weekly discussions on James in a seminar of bright students blessed with the faculty which given an inch takes an ell. It is right to say that these weekly meetings, which usually ran beyond three hours, with one grudging intermission, catalyzed the impressions and ideas which flowed from the two other occasions. To that pair of articles and their attendant stories, along with some further pages in James, I turn for the remarks that fol low.1 I Mr. Dyson regards "Fordham Castle" (1904) as one of the dark tales of the final period. The main figure, Abel Taker, can be viewed as a near-tragic cousin to other late characters like John Marcher, Spencer Brydon, and Herbert Dodd. From his initial assumptions, Dyson embarks on a new reading of the story which I believe is open to question almost every step of the way. Yet his Is one of those suggestive essays that is valuable both in itself and as it prompts further re i ηterprêtât ions. Dyson begins outside the story and cites the several notebook entries James made from 1892 to 1899 ostensibly for this tale. Finally, they crystal ¡zed in his conception of two parallel plots. In "Fordham Castle," an American husband (Abel Taker) is relegated to a Swiss pension by his American wife (Sue) so that she can initiate a social career in England apart from her undistinguished mate; and an American woman (Mrs. Magaw) also happens to be relegated to the same pension by a daughter (Mattie) who also hopes to advance in English society apart from her undistinguished mother. To insure her husband's "death," at least for a time, Sue renames Taker "C. P, Addard." Mattie similarly has renamed her mother "Mrs. Vanderplank." Addard soon discovers Mrs. Vander ϕ I ank* s mutual plight, and they resume their original names in a relationship that, on his part, develops into a dependent affair of the heart. At the end, Mattie writes that she is engaged to Lord Dunderton, thanks to the helpful companionship of a widow, Mrs. Sherrington Reeve (Sue), whom she has met at Fordham Castle, Wilts. Mattie now sends for her mother. Abel Taker, twice abandoned, announces his essential demise in the final line of the story, "'Why certainly I'm dead.'" Though "Fordham Castle" has received its scant critical attention as an acerbic little social comedy, Dyson reminds us that in the notebooks James signalled a "deepened perspective" (42) in the comment "I think I see Death and 'Separation.'" Furthermore, there are two entries in the middle Nineties where James imagined the ordeal of "'defeat. . . failure . . . subjection'" for an artistic genius whose spirit dies in an "advantageous marriage," but whose "Dead Self" revives when he renews the company of a loving and understanding woman he had forsaken as a young man. The editors of the Notebooks, Matthiessen and Murdock, did not connect these passages to "Fordham Castle." But Dyson believes that James "almost certainly" had translated this death and rebirth of the artist into the near-parallels of the "sensitive" Abel Taker with the artist, of Sue with the artist's worldly wife, and of Mrs. Magaw with the loving other woman (42, 43). 1. The two articles are J. Peter Dyson, "Death and Separation in 'Fordham Castle,'" Studies in Short Fiction, 56 (1979), 41-47 and Kermit Vanderbilt, "Notes Largely Musical on Henry James's 'Four Meetings,'" Sewanee Review, 81 (1973), 739-52. Dyson's page numbers appear in parentheses in my text. 61 For Dyson, the heart of the story lies in Abe! Taker's deepening meditations on defeat, failure, subjection, separation, and death. His impressions virtually dominate the third-person narration. We learn, with Mrs. Magaw, that his wife Sue is a social climber with a "capacity for callous, relentless action...