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April 15, 2006

The Remains of the Beast

In one of my favorite novels, The Remains of the Day, a cold-hearted butler in a great house spurns the quiet offering of love by the housekeeper. Eventually Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton part ways, but meet just once again years later, in the West Country, where Mr. Stevens has gone on holiday. Miss Kenton has capitulated to a nondescript marriage; she wistfully looks forward to having grandchildren. When she asks what the future holds for Mr. Stevens, he coolly replies, "...there's work, work and more work" -- as if work will guard his emotional oblivion into perpetuity. This is the portrait of a heartless man set in the landscape of a wasted life.

I once hankered after a similar sort of person; I tried to paint him to capture his likeness, if not his love. But his image was just as elusive as the man. Repeatedly I scrubbed out the face, leaving a bruise-gray ghostly smudge like Branwell Bronte’s famous eradicated self-portrait. Was the struggle a subconscious ploy to keep my subject simultaneously at large and at bay? What resulted was a study not of a man but of a relationship: the tracking of small advances and large retreats, the momentary gleams amid the obfuscations. It was an obsession that had sprung from delusion. Perhaps I’d conflated disparity into congruence, as when I failed to realize that while he was private but not secretive, I was secretive but not private. Multiply the misperception a hundred times.

In the midst of this struggle I reread “The Beast in the Jungle.� With baroque subterfuge, Henry James’s language drives the terror and tragedy of a theme that Kazuo Ishiguro would use 85 years later in Remains of the Day. In “Beast,� another woman stands by, also a kind of psychosexual lady-in-waiting. She too is silently devoted to a self-absorbed man who’s both proximate to and distant from her life. In "Beast," John Marcher’s sole interest in May Bartram is that she faithfully watches with him, year after year, as he avidly waits for the Beast to spring—the Beast being whatever prodigious thing he’s certain he’s being kept for. She knows what it is but neither can tell him nor save him from himself. Of course the “thing� would have been to love her. It would have been, as James says, “the chance to baffle his doom,� just as the arid Stevens might have been saved (read humanized) by Miss Kenton'a love. In the end, Marcher’s fatal oversight (or undersight) does spring at him, but too late, and he throws himself, in the horror of his realization, upon May Bartram’s grave.

In trying to paint that portrait, I wrestled with my own bête noire of vain longing. With Jamesian irony the remains, the wash-out, the obscured effigy became a kind of inverse portrait. The thing that was to have emerged did emerge, the subject effaced, the erasure more telling than the image pursued. Like John Marcher I had kept a futile vigil. What finally sprang at me was the real subject, which I saw with a Jamesian shock-of-recognition: assumptions spawned by blind egoism.

As for John Marcher, Mr. Stevens and my erstwhile friend, an apt epitaph for them all might be a caution from Seneca, who said, “Man’s fear of his fate is often his fate. Leaping to avoid it, he meets it.�

Posted by Jane on April 15, 2006 10:12 AM

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