This is by Henry James (1843-1916). It was published in book form in 1897, after appearing as a serial (entitled The Old Things) in The Atlantic Monthly the previous year, and it's my first James since The Turn of the Screw, which was over a year ago.

My audio-version was really nicely read by Maureen O'Brien.



In brief, the story is this:

Mrs Adela Gereth, widow, has spent a lifetime collecting the beautiful things that adorn her "exquisite" Jacobean house at Poynton. Problem No. 1: The house, under the terms of her late husband's will, now belongs to Owen, her son, and when he marries, she'll need a new home. Problem No. 2: The young lady Owen is proposing to marry, Mona Brigstock, gives not a fig for fine things, but very definitely regards them as part of the marriage deal, and will not be willing to give them up.

The improbably named Fleda Vetch IS a lover of fine things, and Mrs Gereth not only adopts her as a kind of confidante, but also invites her to Poynton, where she shows a sensitive appreciation of Mrs G.'s collection. Mrs G. would therefore MUCH prefer Fleda as a daughter-in-law, and makes this very plain to her son. Fleda, who has actually become rather fond of the harum-scarum, happy-go-lucky Owen, finds this manoeuvre excruciatingly embarrassing, and does her best to hide her growing feelings for the young man.

Owen duly gets engaged to Mona, and arranges for his mother to move to Ricks, a much smaller family property. He's happy for her to take with her a few of her favourite things from Poynton. Ah, but inches and miles... Mrs G. pretty much ransacks Poynton, and sandwiches all the spoils into Ricks.

She goes to visit Mrs G., is horrified by the despoliation of Poynton, and kind of begins to side with Owen. That scion might not be particularly horrified on his own account -- he doesn't really seem to care that much -- but Mona has told him she won't marry him until the stuff is returned, so he finds himself forced to threaten his mother with the law.

Meanwhile, he has taken a little more of a fancy to Fleda than might be considered proper for a man who's engaged to someone else.


Baba Nyonya Museum, Melaka, Malaysia, 2014. The world over, humans love beautiful things...

Now, this is where everything could have been sorted out. Fleda is keen on Owen; Owen is keen on Fleda; and Mrs G. would be rapt if Fleda and Owen married. OK, this would all be a little tough on Mona, but she's obviously not that sold on Owen for his own sake, and she'll get over it.

But of course, this is NOT what happens.

Owen visits Fleda in London, where she lives with her utterly uncaring father. He admits that if he'd met Fleda first, she's the one he'd have proposed to -- would have saved all this bother with the things, don't you know? (He doesn't quite say that, but Owen is very much the kind of guy who'll follow the path of least resistance.) Their little tete-a-tete is interrupted, however, by none other than Mona's mother, who is clearly suspicious when she finds these two together.

When Owen later asks Fleda to marry him, she says she'll accept only if Mona herself calls off the previous engagement. At this point, Mrs G. totally jumps the gun. She is so sure that the Fleda-Owen marriage is a done deal that she returns all the loot to Poynton. Oh no... There's a bargaining chip gone... And Fleda hasn't heard from Owen for days... He's gone to ground.

And where do you think he is? With Mona's family... So it's scarcely surprising, now that all the Brigstock claws are back out, ready, and vigilant, when a telegram turns up at Ricks to say Owen is married to Mona (who gave the green light after finding out about the return of the haul).

Later, Fleda visits Mrs G. at Ricks, and admires the way she has kitted the house out. She obviously really does have a talent for this kind of thing. Owen and Mona, meanwhile, spent most of their time abroad.

Eventually, Owen writes to Fleda, suggesting she take a keepsake from Poynton. Anything she likes. Maybe the Maltese Cross? She heads over there, only to find that Poynton is on fire, and the building and its contents will soon be nothing but ashes...



***

Reactions:

1.

It's as though James is looking into a large terrarium, minutely cataloguing the behaviour of its inmates. I imagine him as a debonair vivisectionist, holding up one example of convoluted motivation after another, and paring it to its core.

2.

Mrs Gereth is ridiculous, but her passion for her objets d'art is not. It reminded me of the aestheticism described for us in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here, for example, are Fleda's first impressions of Poynton:

"Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the record of a life. It was written in great syllables of color and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you looked out of old windows -- it was England that was the wide embrace. While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and refined on nature, Mrs Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian velvets just held in a loving palm, to hand over cases of enamels and pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures -- the panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the great wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck Fleda most in it was the high pride of her friend's taste, a fine arrogance, a sense of style which, however amused and amusing, never compromised nor stooped."

And, indeed, there's quite a knot of scholars (eg, Gary Totten, Andrew Eastham, Daniel K. Hannah, Jan Mackal...) who have investigated James's connections with the work of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, et al.



3.

Did Fleda do the right thing...?

Good question. Her conscientious scruples would seem on the face of it to have resulted in no good anywhere: Owen has married someone he doesn't really love; Fleda is left single and homeless; there's still a breach between mother and son; Mrs Gereth cedes control of her precious things; and then EVERYONE loses the things.

So is Fleda selfless and noble, or immature and bigoted? Is James holding her up as someone to admire, or does he, as James W. Gargano puts it, "regard her as a victim of misguided moral enthusiasm"? Scholars have come down on both sides. Gargano himself argues that we shouldn't see her act of renunciation as an isolated act, but as "the culmination of a series of acts defined by a social situation".

Sarah Hamilton writes very perceptively on this subject: "[This is] a society in which men have every right but the right of breaking their word to a woman. In this society the only thing that protects women from being completely exploited as Fleda is afraid of being exploited is the code of honor that forces men to behave like gentlemen. She is afraid that breaking his engagement to Mona will be a proof of his inconstancy, and Fleda has even more to lose from involving herself with an inconstant man than Mona... Characters in James have a simultaneous responsibility to acknowledge the limitations of their own perspectives and constantly to attempt to transcend them. An unfortunate though understandable (and perhaps willful) blindness to her own limitations ties Fleda to a notion of honor that even contemporary readers found 'an over-sensitive perversity.' Had she questioned the motivations behind her fidelity to this ideal she might have valued it less highly and given other considerations more weight. Her conviction of the sacredness of engagements (and property rights) might have given way to awareness that, like most so-called 'moral absolutes,' these were political constructs that served the interests of a patriarchal and hierarchical civilization, constructs that enforced her marginalization."



4.

Should we understand The Spoils of Poynton as farce?

Rhoda B. Nathan thinks so... She sees it as a transitional book, marking the point between the end of James's unsuccessful flirtation with writing for the stage and the subsequent period of "great novels [which] were to be imprinted with stage techniques". In accordance with its essentially farcical nature, then, Spoils is notable for its exaggeration and "low comedy".

And it's true that it's very funny in parts, and Mrs Gereth is a wonderfully comedic character. For example, there's this wonderful passage where Mona and her mother visit Poynton, bringing -- heaven help them -- "a 'lady's magazine' purchased at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars". On their departure, Mrs Brigstock magnanimously intends to leave it behind for Mrs Gereth to peruse. Mrs G. is having nothing to do with this horror, however, and lobs the offending publication towards the carriage the party is about to board. "Mona, from the force of habit, the reflex action of the custom of sport, had popped out, with a little spring, a long arm and intercepted the missile as easily as she would have caused a tennis-ball to rebound from a racket. 'Good catch!' Owen had cried, so genuinely pleased that practically no notice was taken of his mother's impressive remarks. It was to the accompaniment of romping laughter, as Mrs. Gereth afterwards said, that the carriage had rolled away."

Then, Nathan argues, the comedy fades: "When Fleda emerges as the vehicle of James's moral vision, the story takes on a melodramatic tone, which alternates with the comic mood and then supplants it. From then on the book slides more steeply into melodrama, finally to terminate in an unsatisfactory and even incredible conclusion."

I'm not sure that's wholly fair...



5. Finally, I just need to note the connections with Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which I read last year. Nick, that book's protagonist, is a Henry James fan. He's writing a thesis on style and beauty in James's work, and he's keen to make a film of The Spoils of Poynton. Here he is, talking to Monique, mother of Nick's boss and lover, Wani, and Martine, Wani's long-suffering fiancee:

"'I think it could be rather marvellous, don’t you. You know Ezra Pound said it was just a novel about furniture, meaning to dismiss it of course, but that was really what made me like the sound of it!'
"Monique sipped at her gin-and-tonic and looked at him with vague concern, and then, as if searching for the point, glanced about at the tables and chairs. Of course she had no idea what he was talking about.
"Martine said, 'So you want to make a film about furniture?'"

Later, trying to sell his film idea to Brad Craft and Treat Rush, he again butts up against incomprehension:

"Brad hesitated... 'It's just the problem of the story where the guy doesn't get the girl, and then the stuff they're all fighting over -- the Spoils, right? -- goes up in flames. It kinda sucks.'...
"'Does it...?' said Nick...'It's about someone who loves things more than people. And who ends up with nothing, of course. I know it's bleak, but then I think it's probably a very bleak book, even though it's essentially a comedy.'
"Yeah, I haven't read the book,' said Treat... 'Fleda Vetch... What sort of a name is that? Doesn't she sound like the ugliest girl in the school?'...
"'I don't care overly what she's called,' said Brad. 'But Owen and Fleda -- we need to see them together more. We need some -- passion!'"



Nils Langum teases out a number of characteristics that Nick and Fleda share: They're both middle-class people invited into an upper-class world as visitors; they both love beautiful things, and are knowledgeable about them; they're both let down by those around them, and end up alone; and they both see their aesthetic projects (whether literally or figuratively) crashing and burning.

But Nick faces an additional problem, which Fleda didn't have to worry about: "Nick’s misfortunes come from thinking that he can make the world see how great his aesthetic knowledge is -- and the world does not care."

***

The Spoils of Poynton is not one of James's most highly regarded books, but I enjoyed it, and it has reminded me to get on with my James project, which actually started with Tan Twan Eng's House of Doors in 2023...


Henry James in 1912