SIGNET CLASSICSPublished by the Penguin GroupPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,New York, New York 10014, USA

•» r

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, EnglandFor more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library,a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Signet Classics Printing, April 1964First Signet Classics Printing (Simpson Introduction), June 2013

Introduction copyright © Mona Simpson, 2013Afterword copyright © Michael Cunningham, 2004All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distrib-uted in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not partici-pate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author'srights. Purchase only authorized editions.

(£ REGISTERED TRADEMARK —MARCA REGISTRADA

ISBN 978-0-451-41677-3

Printed in the United States of America1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this bookis stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisherand neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this"stripped book."

ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

I N T R O D U C T I O N

It's not incidental that most people read their firstvolume of Henry James as an assignment in college. Chron-ologically wedged between George Eliot and VirginiaWoolf, James can feel like the grandmother of English lit-erature, his concerns tending to the plain girl who has fallenfor a person who says he loves her but really doesn't andthe man who misses life by ardently pursuing a mistake. Hegoes on and on in looping sentences with a melody thatmay be beautiful but is also monotonal enough to tune out,if you don't know how to listen. Henry James is an adulttaste, like coffee, that has to be acquired. It's addictive, butnot flamboyantly so, one of the deep necessary flavors, alittle bitter, always complex, that settles in slowly and forlife.

His whiff of grandmaternal sweetness blunts the edge ofhis modernism and yet he's not cozy, the way George Eliotstill can feel. Only a few of us take Henry James to bed withus when we have the flu.

A nineteenth-century white man of good family (one ofhis aunts married President Van Buren's son), brillianceand education, James started out as expected: lucky, per-haps a little arrogant. His early letters talk lightly about

Washington Squareby Henry James

with an Introductionby Mona Simpson

VI I N T R O D U C T I O N

greatness. "If I keep along here patiently I rather think Ishall become a (sufficiently) great man." Some eight hun-dred ladies came to hear him lecture (on "The Lessons ofBalzac") in Los Angeles. "I have got a good deal of fameand hope some day to get a little money," he wrote to afriend. Daisy Miller—his character—became a cultural icon,on both sides of the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, James' later novels went mostly unappre-ciated, as he described, "really a monument (like Ozyman-dias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justicedone to it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid to it."

When the first royalty statement for his "monument" ar-rived, he was crushed.

"Is there anything for me at all?" he asked.

Washington Square wasn't a particular favorite of itsauthor. Henry James called his short novel "poorish" and,in a letter to his daunting older brother William,* wrotethat "the only good thing in the story is the girl." Near theend of his life, when he selected work to revise for hisculminating New York Edition, he didn't pick WashingtonSquare, dismissing it as one of his "unhappy accidents."

But we pick it, again and again. Among posthumousreaders Washington Square is a pronounced favorite, bothwith James connoisseurs (who don't now often return toDaisy Miller, his most popular book during his lifetime!)and also with a wider public.

* William once referred to Henry (in a letter to the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters no less) as "my younger andshallower and vainer brother."t Flannery O'Connor is the female author most often men-tioned by people who tend to avoid reading fiction written bywomen. Washington Square, "The Beast in the Jungle" andThe Portrait of a Lady are the Henry James titles talked aboutby those who don't read James annually and, like FlanneryO'Connor, they're no less good for this popularity among non-connoisseurs.

•a*I N T R O D U C T I O N Vll

James wrote Washington Square to complete a trilogythat began with Daisy Miller, for Cornhill Magazine, andits blithe accessibility—the clarity of those early Jamessentences—no doubt partially explains why the book is sooften assigned in courses. But I'd venture that it's the pas-sion of James' excavation that sustains our interest. Read-ing this 130-year-old book, we still feel the intensity ofJames circling his obsession: people who are bad at love.James' great and permanent subject—beneath, between andeverywhere around his characters' complicated tricks andliaisons—is the terrible condition of being unable to loveright.

We don't read James for his stories. Despite their formalsymmetries, they feel jerry-rigged. He borrows from melo-drama, but lops off that genre's gratifications, going realiston us at exactly the wrong moment. If Americans want atragedy with a happy ending, Henry James delivers some-thing more like a comedy with a haunting close.

Nonetheless, Washington Square has inspired many ad-aptations. The Heiress has been revived four times onBroadway, most recently with a cast including Jessica Chas-tain and Dan Stevens (who played the romantic lead of thefirst three seasons of Downton Abbey). The playbill, comi-cally, attributed The Heiress as being "by Ruth and Augus-tus Goetz," the married couple who are also credited, in the" Who's Who in the Cast" notes, with the film version (whichstarred Olivia de Havilland and won her the AcademyAward in 1949). Nowhere in this playbill was it mentionedthat The Heiress—its characters, plot, setting, much of itsdialogue and all of its names—was based on WashingtonSquare. There's a Jamesian irony in this omission; in the1890s, the writer had hoped to revive his reputation andreplenish his income by writing for the theater, but washissed off the stage before giving up and leaving London tofinish his artistic life in Rye, where costs were lower. Thenovel was also the basis for an eponymous 1997 film but aswas true of the screen adaptations of A Portrait of a Lady,

Vlll I N T R O D U C T I O N

Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, these iterations,despite talented collaborators, failed to capture large audi-ences. James' work, despite its eminently liftable dialogue,*fails Hollywood because the stories leave us unsatisfied,the way that life does.

We don't return to James for his characters, either. It'snot quite possible to love them, the way one may love Leo-pold Bloom or Clarissa Dalloway or even Lily Briscoe.They don't feel real, exactly, though they're the opposite ofcardboard—a term suggesting characters made of appear-ances. James' characters are all and only soul. They're closerto ideas than to bodies. We know their sensibilities but nottheir details. One would have a hard time describing whatany of the central characters in Washington Square lookslike, despite how much is made of Catherine's clumsy lackof beauty. James has already strayed from classical realism,which depended on a belief in a materially stable world, inthis seemingly straightforward book. In a narrative verymuch about attraction, looks and charm, those qualities arenever definite. They waver. As internal as the narratives ofUlysses and To the Lighthouse feel, there's no doubt as tothe vibrancy of the characters in those modernist master-pieces of the generation following James. We believe inJoyce's and Woolf's characters MORE than we believe inreal people. In James, we believe in them a little LESS.While you could venture a guess as to what Mrs. Ramsaywould eat for breakfast (a jam sandwich, standing up), onecan hardly imagine John Marcher eating food at all.

We read James not for his stories or for his charactersbut for the one thing that can't be adapted: his mind. Weknow it in its arguments with itself, its endlessly refiningdiscernment, its flickering shifts, and glints of wisdom. Weknow those details, the way we know Bloom's love of organ

* The crackling funny, sexy repartee in "The Beast in the Jun-gle" can be read as screwball comedy.

I N T R O D U C T I O N IX

meats and Mrs. Ramsay's tendency to set off her beautywith haphazard clothes.

No one else has ever given such serious, fine attention topersonal life, not as it's experienced, but as it's thought, thatwave and flutter in consciousness. Our stray wishes, ourabiding hopes, our shame and constant fears—James at-tends to all the component parts of what we loosely calllove, if only to show his characters coming up against theirlimitations.

This novel started for him with an anecdote the veryfamous actress Fanny Kemble* told about her brother.

Mrs. Kemble told me last evening the history of herbrother H.'s engagement to Miss T.H. K. was a youngensign in a marching regiment, very handsome ("beau-tiful") said Mrs K., but very luxurious and selfish, andwithout a penny to his name. Miss T. was a dull, plain,common-place girl, only daughter of the Master ofKing's Coll., Cambridge, who had a handsome privatefortune (£4000 a year). She was very much in lovewith H.K., and was of that slow, sober, dutiful naturethat an impression once made upon her, was made forever. Her father disapproved strongly (and justly) ofthe engagement and informed her that if she marriedyoung K. he would not leave her a penny of his money.It was only in her money that H. was interested; hewanted a rich wife who would enable him to live at hisease and pursue his pleasures. Miss T. was in muchtribulation and she asked Mrs K. what she would ad-vise her to do—Henry K. having taken the groundthat if she would hold on and marry him the old Doc-tor would after a while relent and they should get the

* Fanny Kemble was an actress and also a writer who pub-lished an antislavery memoir called Journal of a Residence ona Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, about her years marriedto an American cotton, tobacco and rice plantation owner.

X I N T R O D U C T I O N

money. (It was in this belief that he was holding on toher.) Mrs K. advised the young girl by no means tomarry her brother. "If your father does relent and youare well off, he will make you a kindly enough hus-band, so long as all goes well. But if he should not, andyou were to be poor, your lot would be miserable.Then my brother would be a very uncomfortablecompanion—then he would visit upon you his disap-pointment and discontent."*

It was this setup that James used. The climax, denoue-ment and meaning are all his own. Fanny Kemble's peoplehave fixed, recognizable identities. HK (though her brother!)is a simple cad courting the plain girl for her money. Let'sconsider what Henry James made of this grim scrap. As ifunsatisfied with the flimsy HK and the dimensions of thefamiliar story, James invented a more powerful villain—afather—and thus provided a more primal tragedy.

When the heroine of Washington Square is still a child,her father imagines her future.

"When Catherine is about seventeen," he said tohimself, "Lavinia [her aunt] will try and persuade herthat some young man with a moustache is in lovewith her. It will be quite untrue; no young man, witha moustache or without, will ever be in love withCatherine."

This idle prescience, which appears on p. 8, has the qual-ity of a cast spell. As in the fairy tale, when the witch (whois also a fairy) dooms Sleeping Beauty to prick herself witha spindle and die when she turns sixteen, the story that un-

* Adrian Poole quotes this extract from James' diary in his es-say on Washington Square in the Oxford World Classics edi-tion of the novel.

I N T R O D U C T I O N XI

folds shows us how the curse does and does not come true.But the fairy was angry because she hadn't been invited tothe baby's christening party. Why would Dr. Sloper conjuresuch a fate for his only living child? Once upon a time, be-fore our story began, Dr. Sloper had married for love,which in his lucky case, came along with "ten thousand dol-lars of income and the most charming eyes' in the island ofManhattan." He lived in happiness for five enchanted years.Then he lost everything; his son died when he was onlythree and his wife two years later, while giving birth to adaughter. Though still young, the doctor never consideredremarriage, idealizing his late wife as "a bright exception"to the benighted women he found himself living among.Not only did this conviction curtail his romantic viability;most crucially, it left him unable to love his daughter. Not"graceful, accomplished, [or] elegant" as he rememberedhis wife, he found her "commonplace" and drew "satisfac-tion in the thought that his wife had not lived to find herout." Dr. Sloper's is a morbid loyalty. Washington Squarepresents a case for the warping qualities of great love.

James turns the sister from the actress's anecdote intoan aunt. Lavinia Penniman lives in Washington Square withher brother to help raise Catherine. Though only thirty-three when her husband died, she never considered datingeither. Instead, she wore black for twenty years. So both theparental figures in Washington Square are bereaved. Dr.Sloper, a bitter cynic, rears Catherine with duty, not love,while Lavinia assuages her own cravings for melodramaticromance by meddling dangerously in Catherine's first rela-tionship. (Of Catherine's suitor she thinks, "That's the sortof husband I should have had!") Catherine's other aunt,married and* less romantic, loves her sound-heartedly, butunfortunately she lives farther uptown and has nine chil-dren of her own.

Like most narrators of first-person stories, Fanny Kem-

! One is tempted to insert "thus'.'

Xll I N T R O D U C T I O N

ble comes off well; she sounds not only virtuous but alsoall-knowing, dispensing adjectives with the certainty ofnineteenth-century omniscience. Most of us still sound thisway in casual conversation.

But James' narrator approaches Catherine ("the onlygood thing in the story") more gingerly, as a good modern-ist should, first telling us what the community says aboutthe girl, in a kind of chorus.

"The most that had ever been said for her was thatshe had a 'nice' face."

"A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorouscritics—a quiet, ladylike girl, by those of the moreimaginative sort...."

"People who expressed themselves roughly calledher stolid. But she was irresponsive because she wasshy, uncomfortably, painfully shy."

James uses Mrs. Kemble's modifiers ("dull," "plain," "slow,""dutiful," "commonplace") but adds alternate interpretations;Catherine may have been quiet, rather than dull, ladylike in-stead of plain, not stolid or irresponsive, only painfully shy.

His bid for the reader's sympathy consists of telling usthat she loves cream cakes and that she spends too muchmoney on clothes. (For a long time, she admired and thenfinally bought a red gown, with gold fringe.)

Catherine's father is her harshest critic. (His response tothe new dress: "It made him fairly grimace, in private, tothink that a child of his should be both ugly and over-dressed.")

James' narrator eventually tells us that Catherine "some-times produced an impression of insensibility. In reality, shewas the softest creature in the world."

The softest creature in the world!

Fanny Kemble told a plain story about a woman without theusual attractions, entranced by a man who wanted her money.

I N T R O D U C T I O N Kill

From that, James wrought a starker problem. What are thepossibilities for a girl raised by people who can't love her?

Can someone else?This is the tragedy already in motion, before Morris

Townsend even meets Catherine, wearing that red dresswith the gold fringe.

James lifts another of the actress's adject ves for Morris.Like Miss T., Catherine finds her first love "beautiful."James slips in the adverb "so," and with two letters in-creases the hush of ardor.

James plots the romance in Washington Square as sym-metrically as a dance. Dr. Sloper suspects the worst. WhenMorris asks, "Is it possible to offer more than the most ten-der affection and a lifelong devotion?" He answers, "A life-long devotion is measured after the fact; and meanwhile itis usual in these cases to give a few material securities."

With the enthusiastic intercessions of Lavinia, the court-ship proceeds. James teases the reader, who swings betweenskepticism and hope, between—one might say—Dr. Sloperand Mrs. Penniman, as Catherine's attachment grows.

"The girl was very happy . . . the present had suddenlygrown rich and solemn." James writes about this tenderly, aflame protected by his cupping hand.

The love troubles in Washington Square feel modern be-cause the threats are not external—even Dr. Sloper is noShakespearean obstacle. Unlike the girl seduced by the ac-tress's brother, James gives Catherine her own income, tenthousand dollars a year.* So while Catherine agonizes

* Adrian Poole has helpfully parsed the inflation and cost ofliving increases to determine that "$20,000 in 1820 would ac-cording to some calculations be worth c. $380,000 [in 2009],but in terms of real buying power the equivalent figure wouldbe very much higher." So we presume that if Catherine inher-ited Dr. Sloper's money, she would have an income of morethan half a million dollars a year, but with her mother's inheri-tance alone, it would be closer to two hundred thousand.

Xiv I N T R O D U C T I O N

about displeasing her father and Morris cogitates on thedifference between a livable income and a luxurious future,the reader keeps trying to fit two halves together, their ex-crescences and indentations clashing. We have our at leastpartially tainted suitor and our heroine, who has not yetapprehended the central fact of her life, which is her fa-ther's contempt for her.

The situation raises a number of questions:Can one love and also seek to gain?If we doubt the existence of pure motives, what admix-

ture tips into bad faith in such an overdetermined state aslove?

We all wish to be loved for only ourselves and nothingextrinsic, but what exactly is a self, and is that entity suffi-ciently unalloyed to elicit love alone? Does the attractionto money differ in the apparatus of limerence from the awea person feels in the presence of accomplishment or thecalm an orderly person can bestow upon someone congen-i tally anxious?

The most cogent attack on the platonic ideal of roman-tic love appears in Janet Malcolm's first book-length essay,On Psychoanalysis. She claims that "the most precious andinviolate of entities" is in fact:

"a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best anuneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy sys-tems . . . we cannot know each other."

Of the two centuries his life straddled, James belongsmore to the atheistic era he died in than to the one in which

-- he set Washington Square,* and so the question of Can shebe loved? inevitably twists out of its passive construction toCan she love! For us, a young woman falling in love with a

* Intriguingly, he sets Washington Square in his parents' gen-eration, not his own. (He only writes backward this way inWashington Square and in The Europeans.)

I N T R O D U C T I O N XV

cad isn't necessarily tragic; it's only that if her internal fila-ment for attachment proves too fragile for her to recoverand love someone else.

But nobody gets over anybody in Washington Square.Not Dr. Sloper. Not Lavinia. And not getting over someoneis a way of not having to love. As Adam Phillips once said,"The obstacle is a way of not letting something else hap-pen." In the most predictable of turns, Catherine doesn'tlisten to what her father says, but rather imitates what hedoes, which is live in loyalty to a shrine; in her case, to ashrine not of an idealized dead spouse, but to a mistake.(James once described an artist's career as "a sort of beau-tiful sacrifice to a noble mistake.")

In a surprising flourish, Henry James extends his story be-yond the end of Fanny Kemble's account and gives Cathe-rine two more suitors, one a widower with children, theother an eligible younger lawyer who "might have his'pick'" of pretty girls but fell "seriously in love with her/'Though they're both dispatched in one paragraph, this ad-dendum reveals that Catherine's lures were not as impov-erished as her father believed. The two suitors prove thatbeauty, charm and attraction are not fixed but mutable and,as Janet Malcolm reading Freud would have it, matters ofperception.

James gives still one more surprise in this small master-piece and his heroine one last chance for a sexual life. Mor-ris returns, years later, alone and failed. Mrs. Penniman,now elderly, but still given to assignations, arranges theirencounter.

If Catherine couldn't find feelings for the objectivelybetter young lawyer, some readers inevitably think, thentake Morris. He's flawed but probably not dangerous, not atforty-five. Yet while Catherine's ending disappoints thosereaders, as it no doubt disappoints her aunt Lavinia, writersunderstand the beauties and consolation of a life in a chairdoing "fancywork."

XVI INTRODUCTION

Washington Square, a book about misprision, was itselfundervalued by its contemporary critics and even by its au-thor. James believed he deepened the themes and got themright in Portrait of a Lady. But there's something homelierand more intimate about Washington Square. And just asthe widower and the young lawyer see more in Catherinethan Dr. Sloper could, we find depths and pleasures in thisbook. Our affection, though—casting back over a centuryas it must—can't feel quite right as an ending, or at least asthe kind of ending Lavinia Penniman could love.

—Mona Simpson