PARTISAN REVIEW
phasize the anguish of estrangement at the expense of the .tender and
intimate satisfactions which are also part of any grand romantic affair.
Writing at Coronado Beach, California, in a moment of discouragement,
he invokes "my familiar demon of patience, who always comes, doesn't
he?, when I call. He is here with me in front of this green Pacific–
he sits close and I feel his soft breath, which cools and steadies and
inspires, on my cheek. Everything sinks in: nothing is lost; everything
abides and fertilizes and renews its golden promise." This is indeed
the very ecstasy of love! And there is his habit of using certain terms
of endearment, "Ah, things swim before me,
caro mio,
and I only need
to sit tight, to keep my place and fix my eyes, to see them float past
me in the current into which I can cast my little net and make my
little haul." And the most sustained of these amorous lyrical outbursts:
"I come back, I come back, as I say, I all throbbingly and yearningly
and passionately, oh,
mon bon,
come back to this way that is clearly
the only one in which I can do anything now.... " In short, it is this
unbroken dramatic tension between art and life, form and experience,
which will make these notations for some people as exciting as any
of his novels.
In particular there is a passage (p. 320), too long to quote, which
bears comparison with the finest in the whole body of his work. Rarely
in his notes does James permit himself to go "to smash on the rock
of autobiography." But, late in life, returning to the Cambridge of his
youth, he pays a visit to the "unspeakable group of graves" in the family
cemetery. To present the emotion, the consequent emotion of this "acci–
dent"-that is, he tells us, what it is to be a
"master."
First of all, the
mise-en-scene:
"It was late, in November; the trees all bare, the dusk
to fall early, the air all still ... with the western sky more and more
turning to that terrible, deadly, pure polar pink that shows behind
American woods.... It was the moment; it was the hour; it was the
blessed flood of emotion that broke out at the touch of one's sudden
vision
and carried me away." Approaching his sister Alice's tomb, with
its lines from Dante, he is so overcome by the
rightness
of the whole
occasion that he is filled with "an anguish of gratitude." "Everything
was there, everything
came;
the recognition, stillness, the strangeness,
the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion
and the divine relief of tears." How is this to be
expressed,
why does
his pen not drop before "the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past?
It does, poor helpless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable ... of
the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life
lived,
on every side"?
Much might be written about this passage. Tracing as it does the
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