PARTISAN REVIEW
119
interesting character. But her nuance inflects nothing; though there is
the sound of sensibility, I find that it lacks the sense - not because of
a preference for subtlety of feeling to scope and power, but because
there isn't much feeling to begin with.
This is in a way unfair, because the novel intends to
be
about a
kind of barrenness. Its heroine, Jenny, recognizes herself as one of those
young English girls she describes so well, over whom "hung an im–
manence, a pale expectancy, as if their youth were yet to come to them.
What passion they possessed for change had, in getting them to Naples,
expended itself; once there, they relapsed into their natural obligingness."
Like other English heroines, Miss Hazzard's finds in Italy a profusion
of the emotional life which her own puritanical climate has not allowed
to bloom. "Here," Jenny says at the end, "... I had come to my senses."
But in this as in many other things she doesn't tell the novel's
truth. We see no awakening in the flesh; only a discovery of the human
capacity for betrayal. The streets of Naples are paved with lava and
Mount Vesuvius looms over the novel as a reminder that disaster minds
no mood or weather. Yet Jenny's is a hollow echo of the disaster of
Milly Theale's similar discovery in
The Wings of the Dove.
The
in–
nocence of James's heroine partook of a fullness of the imagination, not
a lack of it, and her capacity for tragedy was an expression of her
very real generosity, her capacity for love. Jenny reveals the smallness
of her spirit and the inconsequence of its journey in the story when
she remarks, "I had ceased to be acoommodating. I suppose that is
what is known as the loss of innocence."
Unfortunately the novel is stuck where Jenny is. Passion is named,
but never created; mood goes nowhere, illumines nothing;
claim
is made
to nostalgia, but this too is not justified by anything we are shown.
"Though one cannot always remember exactly why one has been happy,
there is no forgetting that one was," Miss Hazzard quotes from Auden
at the beginning. But what follows is a cool story of a young woman
who lives only in the reflections of the lives of others, and knows that
she does. Is this the happy time? We have no reason either to take the
novel's word for it that Jenny was in love with her brother (a sexless
menage
a
trois
to which she became no longer useful and which ac–
counts for her move from England to Italy); nor Jenny's word-as
the narrator she recalls not only the period in Naples which forms the
novel's substance but its significance to her later- that Justin, a young
Scotsman whom she meets in Naples and "loses" to her friend Gia–
conda, really means something to her. And finally we are given no
reason to believe that her stay in Naples has been, as the novel suggests,
some kind of momentous crossing toward self-recognition.
