57. High Signs: Henry James and Buster Keaton, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
The Louise Ebersdorf Reading Group held a meeting last week, and this time the chosen volume for discussion was Henry James’ The Princess Cassamassima. All members were in attendance (without my beloved pet Murr keeping us company this time). I gave my report on the novel (the text of which I am offering to my readers here), but immediately the other group members expressed their admiration for the achievement of James’ fiction. Madame Sesostris found the novel to be a work far ahead of its time in its vision of political terrorism. Belle was devastated by Hyacinth Robinson’s fate. (“He deserved better” was her sentiment.) Our dear Louise found much to admire in the Princess Cassamassima’s revolt against her brutal husband. And I am interested in how James may have planted a hidden message having to do with sexual awakening, alongside his protagonist’s discoveries involving both the civilized arts and underground revolutionary cells. Combining such elements in a unified fiction is something of a triumph. James is often characterized today as a closeted gay writer, and there is evidence of a homosexual subtext in Princess. (That thematic seam is the core of my report.)
The Princess Cassamassima is the story of Hyacinth Robinson, an impecunious young bookbinder in the slums of nineteenth-century London. He is the product of a brief liaison between an English aristocrat and a French-born seamstress, who ultimately stabbed her lover to death and ended her life in prison. Hyacinth was subsequently raised by a dressmaker who was a friend of Hyacinth’s mother. When he is older, Hyacinth is told by his foster parent about his origins, and he assumes that he carries genes that give him a touch of the upper class and the poetic. He is a “sensitive” young man surrounded by squalor. Unfortunately, he falls in with the wrong crowd in London.
At a performance at a popular theater, Hyacinth is introduced to the beautiful Princess Cassamassima, a wealthy sometime philanthropist, who asks him to become her guide to the local lower depths, whose denizens fascinate her. Simultaneously, in the back room of a pub, Hyacinth meets Paul Muniment, a rising member of a covert group of revolutionaries dedicated to overthrowing the political status quo and forcing a redistribution of wealth among the poor. Paul takes Hyacinth to a secret meeting with a mysterious anarchist leader where, in a moment of youthful zeal, our hero pledges himself to an act of violence. Hyacinth becomes vulnerable to use as a terrorist, even to an act of assassination which would undoubtedly lead to his arrest and execution.
While awaiting the call to murderous action, Hyacinth is invited by the charismatic Princess to visit her at her lavish country estate, where the young man discovers his love of civilized leisure and the fine arts. (When the Princess learns of his dedication to political mayhem, she is touched but does not attempt to dissuade him from his mission.) Hyacinth is subsequently able to use a modest inheritance to visit Paris and Venice, and in doing so the young man is moved to doubt his own impulse to overthrow civilized institutions and those products of artistic genius sponsored by them. James turns the screws on the contrast between his protagonist’s aborning sense of reactionary leanings and his need to define himself as an anarchic firebrand in the eyes of both the Princess and Paul.
The Princess Cassamassima (published in serial form 1885-86 and in book form in 1886) is a long novel in which James has the space to present a wide survey of English and European characters, as though turning human artifacts this way and that beneath his authorial gaze. Throughout the narrative, Hyacinth is often referred to as “little” because he is only one element in the narrative machinery and in the plotting of the revolutionaries. The novel primarily focuses upon the relationship of the three main characters: Hyacinth, the Princess, and Paul.
Like James’ Isabel Archer, the Princess (a somewhat older Christina Light from James’ 1875 novel Roderick Hudson) has married into European aristocracy. Her husband is indelicate in his treatment of her. She turns to underground activities not only in reaction to her consequent hatred for the upper class but because otherwise her life is empty of purpose. She is a self-dramatizing tourist among the impoverished of London. Hyacinth comes to realize the superficial purpose and private motivation of her philanthropy, including her flirtation with anarchists. By novel’s end, the Princess will pass from Hyacinth to Paul for guided tours to underground meetings.
Paul Muniment claims to believe in achieving a future democratic state for the benefit of the poor, but he has no illusions of how “deserving” the People may be. Muniment distrusts and dislikes women, but he is willing to approach the Princess if she has money for subvention of revolutionary plots, like the immediate plan in which Hyacinth will assassinate an English duke. As a result, Paul is revealed by the end of the novel as a manipulator of underground politics. He is a practical anarchist alert to the main chance and eager to recruit. Hyacinth is his current candidate because the young man possesses the manners and mien to mingle unsuspected with members of the upper class.
Ironically, Hyacinth has drawn the Princess and Paul together by the end of James’ novel. (A romantic or sexual affair between them is implied.) From the beginning, Hyacinth is fascinated with the glamorous Princess, an awe which makes her unapproachable except in friendship. Throughout the novel, he admires and loves young Paul for his cool dedication to the international cause. Inevitably, as soon as we encounter the term “love”, today’s readers wonder if there is fire as well as smoke. After all, The Princess Cassamassima was written following The Bostonians, a novel in which James treated a relationship between two women that suggested a “Boston marriage” (see my earlier report, “Sacrifice”, in Blog 41). Is it possible that James is hinting at a same-gender sexual element in Hyacinth’s feelings for Paul?
The name that James has given to his protagonist, Hyacinth, refers to the Greek myth in which Apollo is enamored of a beautiful young man and accidentally kills him when a gust of wind blows his discus off course, striking the beloved. One version of the myth explains the accident by giving Apollo a jealous rival for Hyacinth in Zephorus. In James’ narrative, Paul would be the Apollo in Hyacinth’s eyes, and the Princess would fit the role of Zephorus. It is the Princess who provides the glimpse of upper-class life that distracts Hyacinth from his terroristic vow. She is regularly changeable, like the wind. We follow the Princess through three homes in England: first, a London apartment, then her leased country villa, and finally a down-market residence among the poor of the city. In the meantime, Paul never really changes. This steadiness may be one of his attractions to Hyacinth: Paul is logically objective and emotionally unresponsive.
At one point, Hyacinth and Paul take a penny steamer trip to Greenwich and stroll about the grounds. It becomes evident there that Paul has no aesthetic response to the natural sights, architecture, and artistic holdings of the Royal Naval College. James presents the men’s tour in terms that could pass for a lover’s outing seen from a distance. Hyacinth may love his companion, but Paul has no capacity for the “religion of friendship”. The Greenwich chapter closes with the narrator commenting that the preponderance of fellow feeling is all on Hyacinth’s side. An American reader may ask, “Why Greenwich?”
A central architectural feature of the Greenwich grounds is the Queen’s House, built by James I (1566-1625) for his wife, Anne of Denmark. (The architect was Inigo Jones.) The royal marriage produced three surviving children. King James also became known for his favorites: Esme Stewart (the Duke of Lennox), Robert Carr (the Earl of Somerset), and George Villiers (the Duke of Buckingham). In a later period, Queen Anne (1665-1714), the daughter of James II, became known for same-sex relationships. Her court favorite was Sarah Churchill (the Duchess of Marlborough), and there was another possible female lover in Abigail Masham. Thus, the Greenwich locale possessed associations that James may have wished to have linger across the afternoon that Hyacinth and Paul spend together. James does not mention the Queen’s House by name, but he refers to those “pompous colonnades” that connect the central building to the complex on each side. In The Sacred Fount, James managed to bring up the mad Ludwig of Bavaria in similar fashion, with the simple phrase “the exclusive king with his Wagner opera”. In these novels, allusion tells.
My third piece of evidence for Hyacinth’s possibly homosexual personality is his vision of the Princess herself. Their relationship would best be described as an aestheticized romantic one, absent any sexual tension. Hyacinth so idealizes the Princess in her brilliance and beauty that he turns her into a kind of gay idol. The type of figure that I have in mind is the one that Luchino Visconti in the film Ludwig portrays the King envisioning in his young cousin, Duchess Elisabeth of Bavaria (“Sissy”). Visconti’s extraordinary movie shows the youthful, closeted Ludwig idealizing the future royal, played by Romy Schneider. (Elisabeth became Empress of Austria and ended her life as the victim of an assassination.) Anyone familiar with the New York arts scene knows certain gay men who idolize theater actresses, film stars, singers and ballerinas. Note, for example, in the poetry of Frank O’Hara the references to dancers such as Maria Tallchief, Diana Adams, and Allegra Kent. They represent the “gay divas” of their age. I am suggesting that in his novel, James has allowed Hyacinth’s vision of the Princess to limn such a version of psychological idol-making in the performing arts. Hyacinth meets the Princess at the theater. (She emerges from behind curtains in her box.) And both Hyacinth and Paul witness the Princess at her most histrionic in various intimate encounters. She creates “scenes” for them. We can contrast this portrait of a social “actress” with the training of a real one for the stage in James’ subsequent fiction, The Tragic Muse.
What happens to Hyacinth’s friends after The Princess Cassamassima ends? Undoubtedly, the Princess will be forced to return to her husband in France under threat of having funds denied to her. But perhaps she can thereby funnel monies to Paul who, as her revolutionary lover, will be able to conscript yet another young Hyacinth for violent acts. But will the next young man be a proto-artist like “little” Hyacinth? In this work, James indicates his ideas about the relationship of the artist to society. (For its equivalent in short story form, see James’ “The Real Thing”, where you have to decide if the artist-narrator is reliable: whether he is first- or second-rate.) Thanks to his novelistic subtlety, James’ Hyacinth was perhaps not so “little” after all, and James is not as sexless as sometimes charged by his critics. His fictional art is complex because his view of the potentials in his characters – artistic, sexual -- is alive and unpredictable.
Each year at holiday season I reward myself by watching as many Buster Keaton movies as I can find in my video collection and on the internet. Last night I watched “The High Sign”, a twenty-minute comedy which was the first film Keaton made when he became an independent producer, although it was the second film he released on his own. (It is available without charge on the internet.) Here is the great Buster’s birthing in all its mayhem and logic. In “The High Sign”, co-directed with Eddie Cline, our hero drifts into a city where he is hired by an underground organization (“The Blinking Buzzards”) to assassinate the town’s miser. (You see how this fits in with the James novel.) It just so happens that he has previously been hired by the skinflint’s daughter to be her father’s bodyguard. So Buster is caught in a dilemma, as Hyacinth Robinson eventually finds himself bewildered before the requirements of political assassination versus the fruits of advanced civilization.
“The High Sign” is early Keaton, but already it points to the distinguishing marks of his genius. I will mention two. Keaton uses many exquisite mime touches throughout. Note, for example, the way he tends to his porkpie hat. At one point, Buster finds no hat rack in a shooting gallery, so he paints a hook on the wall and hangs his chapeau there. Later, when visiting the home of the miser, he casually tosses his hat across the room to hang it on a rack. That trick is so fleet, so “throwaway”, you could miss it on first viewing. Details of this sort are to be found throughout the film. The other sign that we are in a fully formed Buster universe is the way comic action is allowed extended variation. There is a running gag with a banana that climaxes with an anti-Chaplin refusal to slip on its peel. But the real achievement in comic continuity comes at the end of the movie, where Keaton is chased by the Buzzards throughout the rooms of a cutaway view of the miser’s house, an architecture which has been fitted out with escape hatches to evade any killer. The last eight minutes of “Sign” are virtuoso in using Keaton’s gymnastic skills and sense of timing. His comic gesture is architectonic in its reach. The effect is hilarious and breath-taking.
What a paradoxical creature our Buster is! Charles Chaplin always comes across as a nature spirit in tat. Keaton is like a personification of the Greek concept of the parergon, a philosophical idea that questions the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the play of framing in life and in works of art. Jacques Derrida turned to the term (out of Kant) for another example of what he called the “supplement”. For Derrida, the existence of the parergon indicates that there is an absence – something missing – that calls a frame or hor d’oeuvre into service. In aesthetic terms, a parergon can be compared to the columns of a temple or palace: the columns participate in both the physical mysteries within the building and the face which the structure presents to the world. The parergon is thus both inside and outside simultaneously.
When in “The High Sign” Buster arrives in the city, he is tossed off a moving train. His immediate urban action is to find a newspaper and look up the want ads for a job. Buster is characterized as both far outsider and provisional insider. It is fascinating how in film after film Keaton maintains this poetic stance in regard to the stark environments he passes through. Buster regularly encounters resistance and blunt antagonism from his milieux, but once he responds with his pratfall, he participates in the situation. As a comic, he exploits its potential.
In “The High Sign” Buster finds a job in a shooting gallery. If the bell in the shooting range must ring, he supplies a Rube Goldberg rig rather than a true marksman’s skill. Having demonstrated his “mastery”, he becomes a member of the Buzzards’ gang. If a miser must be assassinated, he agrees to pull the trigger. If the miser must have a bodyguard, Buster will sign on. (Here’s the inside-outside paradox.) And if the miser’s house is mined with trap doors and booby-hatches, he will test them all. Buster becomes one with the building: his bullet-like traversal through its graphic cross section becomes part of the building’s traced architecture. Buster will not necessarily marry the heroine in a happy ending, for the parergon always has an escape clause. Thus, the typical Keaton twist of an ending. Buster will miraculously reappear in his next movie short, ready for more attempts at integration into a world not only lacking his ready genius but which almost seems to call him into being.
Keaton may initially be a victim of each universe encountered (his pratfalls are ceaseless), but he is always ready to merge with the physical laws that affront him. He is thus magical, a god in a drifter’s disguise. We watch him move from being victim of such laws to sometime victor over them, and his failures and successes are the source of a metaphysical poetry. He is a conduit for its energies. He becomes the film comedian who was not only a great performer but a path-breaking visual artist.
Of course, the magical Buster that we watch in the movies may have chosen to be a parergon in the lyric universe of the Keaton films. In The Princess Cassamassima, Hyacinth Robinson allows himself to be used as anarchistic parergon toward infiltration and murder. Hyacinth agrees to enter from outside in order to undo the empowered inside. But in so doing, James may reveal a side of Hyacinth otherwise hidden. In novel and film, all will out.
Nescit vox missa reverti.
P.H.
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