THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE:
'Tis better to have loved and lost'
When
I first read Henry James' 'The Beast in the Jungle' over forty years ago
on MI Kuruvilla's recommendation, I thought it the greatest short story
I had ever read. On re-reading I find myself of the same opinion, though
I realise that its more accurate description is as a nouvelle since it
is nearly thirty pages long and is divided into chapters.
James was particularly attached to this form, calling it "the dear,
the blessed nouvelle." He evidently appreciated its conduciveness to the
development of a single theme with minimal plot, interplay of characters
and social context; in short, its facilitating a more poetical treatment
of a subject. "The Beast in the Jungle' might well be called a prose
poem. Yet, it is poetry such as could only have been achieved through
the medium of prose.
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Henry James |
John Marcher, in his mid or later thirties and visiting a country
house with friends, comes across a woman a few years his junior, who
seems to be a dependant of the chatelaine and whom he believes he has
met before. May Bartram confirms their having met ten years earlier in
Europe and reminds him that he had confided in her his belief that
something momentous was going to happen to him. He confesses that it has
not yet happened and is grateful to her for her assurance that she will
watch with him for whatever is meant to happen to him.
The death of her patroness enables Miss Bartram to move into a modest
apartment in London, where they continue to meet. Realising that she has
given him a new sense of purpose, he wonders whether marrying her would
be appropriate, but puts it out of his mind as something that would
hinder his quest. "Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the
twists and turns of the months and years, like a crouching Beast in the
Jungle...The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature;
and the definite lesson of that was that a man of feeling didn't cause
himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt."
Thus, they grow older together, visiting places of interest and
dining together. He continues to draw her out on his prospects, but she
says he must find out for himself. When she suddenly suffers a decline
in health, he is seized with a sense of dread that the "thing" which is
to happen to him is round the corner. He presses her to disclose his
fate but she declines on the grounds that it is too bad to communicate.
Soon she is too ill to leave home, even her chair. He becomes aware that
he himself is aging and that time may be running out for him too. When
the end seems nigh he renews his efforts to get his secret out of her.
After letting him know that what is to happen to him is the worst that
could happen, she struggles to her feet and approaches him with all the
strength she has left:
'The door isn't shut. The door's open,' said May Bartram. 'Then
something's to come?' She waited once again, always with her cold sweet
eyes on him. 'It's never too late.' She had, with her gliding step,
diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close
to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken. Her movement
might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once
hesitating and deciding to say...Something else took place instead,
which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. She
gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder, and though he
remained staring - though he stared in fact but the harder - turned off
and regained her chair. It was the end of what she had been
intending....He showed once more his mystification. 'What then has
happened?' She was once more, with her companion's (maid's) help, on her
feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his
hat and gloves and reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. 'What
WAS to', she said."
When she sees is able to receive him for the last time she repeats
that what was to happen to him has happened; and that, as it is now
behind him, it is best that he remain ignorant of it since the suffering
caused by such knowledge would be too great.
At her funeral he realises that, since he has established no more
than an informal relationship with her, he cannot even enjoy the status
of the bereaved.
Following the funeral he senses that not only has the beast
disappeared from his life but so has the jungle. He travels abroad to
regain a meaning to his life, but fails to find any and is drawn back
irresistibly to her grave.
"That had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance,
his one witness of a past glory....What it all amounted to, oddly
enough, was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death
gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most
live...Thus in short he settled to live - feeding all on the sense that
he once HAD lived, and dependent on it not alone for a support but for
an identity."
This could be seen as a satisfactory ending to the tale. And here a
lesser author may well have concluded. But the final chapter continues,
and after a year of haunting her grave Marcher observes one of the
regular mourners at a nearby grave. "This face, one grey afternoon, when
the leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher's own, at the
cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade....Marcher knew him
at once for one of the deeply stricken....The stranger passed, but the
raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder..What has the
man HAD, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live? Something
that HE, John Marcher, hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John
Marcher's arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what
passion meant...He had seen OUTSIDE of his life, not learned it within,
the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself.....The
name on the table smote him, as the passage of his neighbor had done,
and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had
missed....Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed;
leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The
fate he had been marked for had met him with a vengeance. He had been
the man of his time, THE man, to whom nothing on earth was to have
happened.
"The escape would have been to love her, THEN he would have lived.
SHE had lived - who could now say with what passion - since she had
loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it
hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of
her use...He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then,
while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and
hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened-it was
close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination to avoid it, he
flung himself, face down, on the tomb."
I have summarised and excerpted the story at some length to convey
something of the dramatic intensity and mounting suspense with which
James develops it despite the lack of any significant action or
dialogue. Also to provide an example of James' style. It is that of his
late period, highly wrought and convoluted, and of his own favourite
novel of the same year (1903), 'The Ambassadors'. In the latter this
style has failed to impress most critics including Leavis and Kuruvilla.
But here it is the ideal medium for the psychological thriller and the
poetic drama that this nouvelle proves to be. There is no more
terrifying and tragic artistic demonstration of the Tennysonian axiom:
"'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all." |