The Princess Casamassima

Class conflict, in smudgy smug old London where only glimmers of social turmoil waft across the Channel from France and Germany, is ostentatiously the framework though perhaps not tout á fait sub sigillo the subject of this odd early novel by Henry (America's finest French novelist) James. It all begins in the drab and dingy parlor of a dressmaker's shop in a squalid alley of sub-hygienic London, a scene seemingly transliterated from Dickens's 'Hard Times' or Mrs. Gaskell's 'North and South.' The characters - Pinnie the dressmaker, Mrs. Bowerbank the women's prison warden, old Vetch the theater pit fiddler - are prime Dickens, nay, better than prime Dickens in their plausible caricature. Have no fear, however! Such picturesque ale-and kidney-pie descriptiveness lasts only a few chapters before the narrative sublimates into James's usual cirro-stratus ambiguity and indirection. From that point on, if you choose to treat "The Princess Casamassima" as a mystery novel (and that is as apt a way to treat it as any I could recommend), you'll find it delightfully challenging to formulate any expectations of an outcome or, indeed, to maintain any modest supposition that you grasp what the devil it's really all about. Henry James knew as much, first hand, about the lower classes as I know about camel-breeding. What did Henry James know about, except himself? The man was an exile from normal life as well as from America, a hermetic psychological hermit who dined in and on society 180 days a year. He must have been extraordinarily adept at absorbing impressions from casual conversation. Above all, he was at leisure, and his working-class characters in this novel seem implausible only in their leisurely traversal of time and space. James requires leisure of his readers also. This is a long, diffuse, leisurely novel, and an extremely entertaining one, once you acknowledge its demands: a comfortable armchair, an expanse of idleness, a tolerance for vagaries and syntactical meanderings. There's very little in it that will match the worldview of a 21st Century reader, but then I doubt many readers of 1886 failed to discover that Mr. James was an odd duck. Only when you grasp that unique oddness, when you acknowledge how every item of The Princess Casamassima is cast in an interior fantasy, a kind of science fiction of the sentiments, will you begin to appreciate what a masterpiece this novel is! But you'll need to be as leisurely as the author. The focal character, Hyacinth Robinson, is essentially a 'changeling' in the long European tradition of literary fairy princes. He's the son of a French prostitute and an English lord whom his mother murdered. Raised in abject poverty and lacking any opportunities for 'improvement', he nonetheless has exquisite finesse, an intrinsic gentility, a keen intelligence. One assumes, on literary precedent, that in the end he will come into his own and get his princess. That was surely what James expected us to assume, n'est pa

The Princess Casamassima is fascinating for the way it takes James out of his comfort zone to depict the social world of workingmen, dressmakers, shopgirls, pub goers and (most improbably) underground revolutionaries in late Victorian London. I've heard the novel criticized for James's knee-knocking in confronting the 'social question': uneasy about the inequality it was built upon, his privileged world glittered too brightly for James to ever really denounce it. But in the person of his "little bookbinder" Hyacinth Robinson, he gives it a valiant try, along the way bringing a lot more complexity--if not much documentary accuracy--to social problems than you get in many other writers, then or now, who take on the disadvantaged as their subject. No book's made me understand the British class system more sharply than this one. James's subtle eye reminds you how much was said by the cut of a glove, the smoothness of a hand, or the slight drop of an 'h' in England c. 1885. He's also sensitive to the way charity can be an expression of power (especially to those on the receiving end) and how mixed the motives can be when well-meaning fortunates "take up" the cause of the poor. The idea of the poor itself gets complicated as James delves into the various shades separating bookbinders from theater fiddlers from chemical experts from impoverished but titled aristocrats. I think James was picking a bone with himself in this novel, since the same question--whether equality (what we'd probably call "social justice" today) should be achieved at the expense of the beauty and grace wealth provides--comes up over and over again. Kind of like the school busing question writ large. I think the frustrating thing about the novel is that James didn't know how to answer, so just kept writing new scenes. In the end, he falls back on the "religion of friendship" I think he calls it somewhere, a determination to see people, whatever their station, as individuals first and put their personalities above abstract theories. But he's also sharp enough to realize the personalities he likes most are the exceptional ones with intelligence and taste, not the "average" that reigns when everybody's equal. It's a muddle, but one that James tackled with his usual love for detail and appreciation for the complexities of human relationships. After the first few chapters, I had trouble putting it down.

This is my favorite book over 500 pages. I haven't finished it yet, but when I do, I think I'll like it even more than I do now. Hyacinth is funny. He gets to ride around with rich people all day and work for the anarchists when he wants to. I think it's sad that he had to be given up because his parents were in trouble with the law. If he had the right upbringing, he probably wouldn't have gotten into the trouble he gets into. I think that James wants readers to realize how important it is to have a good family. Without proper parents, you might end up in trouble like Hyacinth. Also, the Princess is beautiful.

I remember when I was in college attending a screening of an old black and white version of "The Turn of the Screw" and was completely enraptured. That movie based on a James short story is the closest I have ever seen a film capture the supernatural, but not so much by what happens as by what is left unsaid. This is a writer I should check out someday, I told myself. Over the course of the years I tried to skim several of James novels but they could only elicit a mild interest. Only recently when I turned 40 and became rather bored with most what is out there, especially the contemporary writings which seemed to me as nothing more than a dispassionate rehash of the same old same old did I accidentally encounter a review by a professor and was intrigued by the fact that the man had, in the wake of the September 11 bombing, hastily replaced his habitual Henry James entry in his Classics course with this novel.I have finished only the first half of this book and feel passionate enough to announce, even if the rest of the novel turns out to be absolute gibberish, that I have to include it with my erstwhile collection of livres extraordinaires; Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Star Rover, The Trial, Journey to the End of the Night, Laughter in the Dark etc. These are books that actually change your state of consciousness; i.e. reading these books may be dangerous to your complacency about the state of the world. Be warned then, this is one of those books that may leave you a tormented soul, your mind like the waves of a stormy ocean. But then again perhaps it may be necessary to achieve such turbulence before the 'peace that passes all understanding'. And if Nirvana never comes then at least one lived to one's human capacity. But I digress, back to the Princess; if you want categorization then you could say that this is a Political Novel, A Love Story, A Study of the Human Condition but that would be less meaningful than to say that every page, nay every line of this story is as pleasurable to me as the most delicious Swiss chocolate or glass of wine, more so.That this story is highly personal for James wherein the protagonist, Hyacinth, embodies the writer's innermost yearnings both conscious and unconscious lends it a certain authenticity which is rare indeed and the remarkably sympathy displayed for every character however lowly is sometimes heartbreaking in its incisiveness. Most remarkable, given James patrician background, is the realistic depiction of poor sans patronizing. One could very well read this novel in the context of recent terrorist events as an insightful study of what makes an otherwise sane young man take the aforementioned path. And while the creed and doctrines of the novel's protagonist are certainly quite different from his contemporary peers, there is the same idealism, the discontent and the quest for glory that ends dismally but which has its roots not in some spontaneous mutation of the soul but its organic evolvement

This is James's only overtly political novel. Before reading I wondered how a man of his background could write about working class political conspirators. He does so by making his protagonist an exquisitely sensitive young bookbinder who becomes involved in a political movement he only dimly comprehends. The bookbinder, Hyacinth, is befriended by the Princess Casamissima, a charming, completely self-absorbed young beauty who is trying to find herself in radical political activity. The plot is, therefore, more of a fairy tale than a realistic portait of "typical" working class revolutionaries, but on its own terms it is plausible enough. The style is leisurely and fairly complex, but not nearly as convoluted as James's last works. The great value of this book lies in its nuanced characterizations. All of the characters are wholly rounded and believable, and while they are all flawed in some way, not one of them is wholly unsympathetic. The Princess is the most interesting of all; through her James shows how bored, unsatisfied aristocrats can dabble in radical politics with disasterous results. He does so, however, without reducing her to a caricature.