The Jamesian Story

Analyzing Adam Haslett's "Devotion"

As a middle-aged fiction writer in America, I suspect I was among the last generation trained in a certain approach to literature — an English major whose professors came out of the pre-theory, close-reading era of criticism and an MFA graduate from a program operating in the shadow of the Iowa Writers Workshop and The New Yorker fiction.

This lineage — “New Criticism” and mid-century realism — is itself a product of Henry James, whose fiction and literary theory experienced a resurgence and towered over academia in the 1950s. For a concrete example of what I’m talking about, take a look at Philip Roth’s first novel, Letting Go, published in 1962.

Known as “The Master,” James transformed fiction into a high art form in the second half of the 19^th century. Until then, the novel had been a form of middle-class entertainment, along the lines of TV sitcoms and soap operas. Then James—urbane, educated, elite—came along and said, No, no, we can elevate fiction to the highest of art forms. Through careful design and precise details, the novel can express the subtle intricacies of human nature.

His climaxes tend to hinge on a character’s developing consciousness. For example, A Portrait of a Lady is about a woman trying to select a suitor. At the encouragement of a friend, Madame Merle, Isabel Archer selects Gilbert Osmond as her husband, only later to discover Merle and Osmond likely conspired to arrange this marriage for her money.

The novel’s peak drama occurs when she walks into a room and sees Osmond sitting in the presence of Mme. Merle (a social taboo). It all becomes clear to her, and she reflects on what she has learned while sitting in front of a fire. She realizes she has made a critical error and is trapped.

That’s Jamesian: The development of individual consciousness within a society of manners.

Since James, American fiction can be divided on a couple of axes, including highbrow vs. lowbrow, urban vs. rural, and the novel of manners vs. the novel of action. As manners have disappeared, so too has the novel of manners — and with it, the “Jamesian” approach to fiction. Just as critical theory usurped close reading, the novel of identity seems to have filled the gap for the novel of manners.

Adam Haslett’s “Devotion”

Which brings me to Adam Haslett’s great story “Devotion,” which comes toward the end of the Granta Anthology of American Short Fiction. Published in the 1990s, it is the paradigm of a Jamesian story, a rarity even in a 750-page collection of fiction in the Iowa Workshop / New Yorker school.

Set in England, the story is about a middle-aged brother and sister, Owen and Hillary, who live together in their parents’ old estate. They are getting the house ready for a visit from an old American friend named Ben, who recently got in touch after many years and will be joining them for dinner.

They’re both slightly nervous, and we soon learn why. Owen is gay, though he has not dated in many years, since the AIDS scare of the 1980s, and all his old friends died. Ben was the last man in his life, but after a short flirtation, Ben fell in with Hillary, leaving Owen with the green-eyed monster: “What a paltry aid literature turned out to be when the feelings were yours and not others’.”

Then Ben had been transferred back to America. He wrote several letters to Hillary professing his love, but Owen intercepted them and stowed them in a shoebox in his closet. He knew it was wrong, but his sister was the only one left in his life. In fact, when they were children, they’d found their mother’s body hanging from a tree, and she’d shielded him from the sight — and has been metaphorically protecting him ever since.

Now, Ben is coming for a visit. While Hillary busies herself with the good silverware, Owen is anxious about what might come out or what might happen in the future. Then Ben calls to say he cannot make it after all. Brother and sister brush it off, but later in the evening he hears her crying and faces something he’s long known:

He had ruined her life. He knew that now in a way he’d always tried not to know it — with certainty. For years he’d allowed himself to imagine she had forgotten Ben, or at least stopped remembering. He stood up from the table and crossed the room but stopped at the entrance to the hall. What consolation could he give her now?

He ruminates on this and then pulls the shoebox from his closet and sets Ben’s old letters, the ones he’d hidden, on Hillary’s bed. Then the story shifts to Hillary’s perspective. She goes upstairs and discovers the stack of letters.

Except! We learn she discovered the letters long ago: “Her anger had lasted a season or two but she had held her tongue, remembering the chances Owen had to leave her and how he never had.”

Rather than feeling surprise and anger at this new revelation, she is instead glad that Owen has let them go, believing they can now move forward. They will continue to live together, and life, with any luck, will go on as usual.

Psychology and Irony

What makes this story “Jamesian”? To start, it’s a realist story that shows rather than tells. We might think of this as the default mode for fiction today, but the 19^th century included a lot of “telling” as well as fantastical elements or exotic settings.

In realism, you need some kind of drama, and often the drama arises from irony (external) or psychology (internal). On the page in “Devotion,” not much actually happens. They make dinner. Owen talks to the neighbor. He answers a phone call. He rereads a letter.

The drama is interior: the secrets Owen and Hillary have kept from each other. The secrets are dramatized through irony — both dramatic and situational. The dramatic irony is that the reader, like Owen, knows the secret of the letters he’s kept from Hillary. When they talk, we believe we know something Hillary doesn’t know, and that secret creates tension: Will she figure it out? And then what will happen?

The situational irony comes at the end. Owen leaves the letters on Hillary’s bed, and we expect her to read them and get mad. Instead — surprise! — we learn she already knew about them, which reframes the entire story. In all those conversations where we thought Owen held the secret, Hillary knew. The tension of the secret coming out was imaginary.

This emerging realization is a classic Henry James move. His novel, The American, for instance, is about a man named Christopher who wants to marry a European aristocrat named Claire. Claire’s family believes Christopher is too grubby to marry, and they eventually orchestrate a break in the engagement. Christopher discovers a dark family secret that might serve as blackmail to be allowed to marry Claire, but, wrung out from his experiences, he lets it go and returns to America, whereas Claire becomes a nun.

The irony of The American is that Claire’s family is beneath him. They are aristocratic but venal and broken people. We expect him to take advantage of the secret, but his decision not to is somewhat confounding. His psychology drives the situational irony at the end — we expect one thing but get another.

Another classic James move is pitting the innocent American against the wise and corrupt ways of Europe. James’s European characters are always orchestrating psychological damage against his Americans. Haslett’s brother and sister are English, whereas Ben is the innocent American — the victim of Owen’s machinations. He wanted to continue his courtship of Hillary but was intercepted.

What keeps this from being a nasty story, however, is the sympathy (or empathy) Haslett extends. Brother and sister experienced real trauma when they discovered their mother hanging from a tree. Owen is spiritually stunted:

When they were little they’d gone to the village on Sundays to hear the minister talk […] Owen could remember wanting to believe something about it all, if not the words of the Book perhaps the sorrow he heard in the music, the longing of people’s song. He hadn’t been in a church since his mother’s funeral. Over the years, views from the train or the sight of this common in evening had become his religion, absorbing the impulse to imagine larger things.

And Hillary, too, is forever marked by their mother’s death. The final paragraph is:

Putting the letters aside, she undressed. When she’d climbed into bed, she reached up and turned the switch of her bedside lamp. For an instant, lying in the sudden darkness, she felt herself there again in the woods, covering her brother’s eyes as she gazed up into the giant oak.

Oof. There’s not much else to say, except to wish these characters well.

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