The Ivory Tower (New York Review Books Classics 2004) Review

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(More customer reviews)Set in a fabulously wealthy neighborhood in Newport, Rhode Island--in August of, say, 1911--the novel opens with Rosanna Gaw walking from her house to another nearby, where the wealthy Frank Betterman lies dying. Both Mr. Betterman and Rosanna are awaiting the arrival from Europe of the dying man's nephew, Graham Fielder, "Gray" to his intimates. As Rosanna anticipates Gray's arrival, it is intimated that Gray will inherit a colossal sum of money. All of Henry James' novels are about the effects of money--or the lack of it--on people, however, The Ivory Tower, barely half-finished, would have given us more: a long reflection on the getting and keeping and accumulating of money at the expense of others. It would seem that James intended a novel--told largely through Gray Fielder--about the vulgarity of capitalist accumulation, but he left it unfinished at his death in 1916. And what a paradox! The world of drawing room manners that he analyzed would come crashing down before World War I was over. (Reprinted at the end of the book is an indispensable essay on James' craft of writing by none other than the poet Ezra Pound.)
Somewhere in his career, James remarked that he wanted to be a person on whom "nothing is lost," a person so perceptive that the subtlest movement of others would not pass him by, and here, Gray Fielder seems to be James' alter ego, the man on whom nothing is lost. Fielder is the kind of character James meant in his Preface to The Princess Casamassima: "the person capable of feeling in the given case more than another of what is to be felt for it [the subject of the novel], and so serving in the highest degree to record it dramatically ... is the only sort of person on whom we can count not to betray ... the value and beauty of the thing" (p. 67 in The Art of the Novel). Fielder has inherited such a huge sum of money that he has much to feel about it; he almost feels immoral. And, of course, some experienced money-maker will surely enter the novel to take the money off Gray's hands. Here--I must say--that James' prose is so densely-packed (some would say 'overwritten') that I lost track of the action (what little there was). Page after page is written from inside the mind of Fielder that there seems to be nothing left "to be felt for it."
Had he lived, I think Henry James would have realized that his prose was too fine for his purpose: a different kind of writer would be needed to show that wealthy people appear "civilized" only because someone else does the vulgar labor, and that, indeed, a lot of swindling goes on behind the most genteel.

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In 1914, Henry James began work on a major novel about the immense new fortunes of America's Gilded Age. After an absence of more than twenty years, James had returned for a visit to his native country; what he found there filled him with profound dismay. In The Ivory Tower, his last book, the characteristic pattern underlying so much of his fiction—in which American "innocence" is transformed by its encounter with European "experience"—receives a new twist: raised abroad, the hero comes home to America to confront, as James puts it, "the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions." James died in 1916 with the first three books of The Ivory Tower completed. He also left behind a "treatment," in which he charted the further progress of his story. This fascinating scenario, one of only two to survive among James's papers, is also published here together with a striking critical essay by Ezra Pound.

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