Blog 7: The Sacred Fount

7. The Sacred Fount: A Ballet Scenario by Michael Porter, after Henry James

The Interpretation

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Since Henry James’ novel The Sacred Fount has represented a contested area of scholarship and has been an object of interpretive controversy over decades, my ballet scenario is inevitably one interpretation out of the many that the work has prompted from readers. The novel may therefore constitute a refutation to what the balletomane Edward Gorey charged was a lack of mystery in James’ narratives. (Another contradiction would obviously be the claimed ambiguity of James’ famed tale, The Turn of the Screw.) If you have not read The Sacred Fount, please do so before proceeding to my commentary here or to the ballet scenario below. In that way, a fresh response will be possible for the neophyte, a reading uninfluenced by my specific approach. You can thereby compare your interpretation to the one I propose here.

The novel takes place at Newmarch, an immense English country house and its grounds, over a summer weekend. The unnamed first-person narrator, an invited guest, notices that certain fellow guests have altered in social grace (the once dim Gilbert Long is now clever) or appearance (“poor Brissenden” is now prematurely aged). The narrator investigates a theory that Long’s happy alteration is due to the influence of a new mistress, one of the guests who reciprocally may now be marked by diminished wit, just as Brissenden’s evident loss of vitality may be the result of his wife’s physical bloom and social flourish. (These similar effects would imply a vampiristic result from intimate relation.) The novel thus deals with the preponderant Jamesian theme of sacrifice. Its plot concerns the narrator’s attempts to validate his theory, a project that results eventually in the hypothesis’ ultimate collapse when confronted by what appears to be certain new evidence. Throughout much of the novel the narrator is especially interested in the identity of Long’s self-sacrificing mistress among the party.

There are seven characters. The narrator sees himself as a wit and savant, intellectually brilliant and somewhat daunting to others, clearly deserving of a place at the distinguished estate, among its brilliant tribe. Gilbert Long is an attractive fellow guest, of special interest to the ladies. Mrs. Brissenden and her consort “poor Briss” are stalwarts at Newmarch and clearly intend to remain so. Ford Obert, R.A., is a mature and famous artist and the narrator’s confidant. Lady John is a woman of the social world, early suspected as the partner to Long and willing at times to confide in the narrator. And there is May Server, an unattached woman, a still-young and attractive mother, possibly a widow, and also a candidate for identification as Long’s beneficent mistress. James’ narrator moves among these witnesses and executants, building his case and then enduring its demolishment.

Spoiler Alert. I now would like to assume my reader is familiar with the detailed narrative of the novel, and I can proceed to an interpretation. My view of the work has been partially influenced by the writings of Oscar Cargill (The Novels of Henry James) and Jean Frantz Blackall (Jamesian Ambiguity and “The Sacred Fount”), although in my opinion neither goes quite far enough with his or her explication. (There is also a brilliant short satire by Veronica Geng which translates James’ action into Cold War political terms and which more than hints at the interpretation that I follow here.) The central perception that we share is that Mrs. Brissenden uses Lady John and May Server as screens to cover amatory involvements (Mrs. Briss herself with Gilbert Long and “poor Briss,” her infatuated husband, with Server). Thus, Mrs. Briss’ early conversation with the narrator at the train station sets him off on a search for the woman who has “improved” Long, but the proffered candidates for that office serve as red herrings to distract our narrator from the alliances, however brief or fantasized, that are in process. (The term “red herring” is actually used in the novel, possibly as a hint that this ploy may describe an underlying case.) The narrator becomes so involved with finding evidence, primarily for an affair between Long and Server, that he misses the true state of things: Mrs. Briss’ own bond with Long, her husband’s interest in Server (however unreturned), and Server’s evident regard for the narrator.

This is, I believe, the interpretation that William Dean Howells early hinted could be found in the novel’s array of intimate involvements (although he refused to reveal them to his contemporary readers). The genre of the country house narrative often floats on the possibility of such erotic revelations around every corner, from Thomas Love Peacock to Aldous Huxley and beyond (what Northrop Frye called the descendants of Menippean satire), in English and French novels and stage dramas. James’ ploy was to cover his understory with the dissimulations of Mrs. Briss and the fluid theorizing of the narrator, allowing the reader the task of intuiting the true situation at Newmarch. James is thus juggling three layers of potential “evidence” throughout his fiction.

But the very form of the novel itself hints at the need for the reader’s active involvement in uncovering the truth behind its dazzling surface. The Sacred Fount is one of the most formally intricate and haunting of James’ works. Its symmetries lure the reader toward a mirror world behind the composed surface of civilized display. The interactions of the seven characters are “choreographed” by the novelist as they move through Newmarch’s great rooms and traverse the grounds of the estate. When words and actions early and late in the novel echo one another, the reader is sensitized to ambiance and implication even beyond the narrator's evolving theory.

For example, Mrs. Briss’ initial identification of Lady John as Long’s mentor-mistress is repeated insistently by her in her final moments of heated dialogue with the narrator at the novel’s end. There is a kind of discreet retrograde order from that ending wherein key moments in the story’s exposition return in reverse iteration from the start of the weekend. Mrs. Briss’ confusion when the narrator uses the word “front” in their final interview parallels her use of the term “screen” when they early discuss “poor Briss” as providing an alibi for Lady John. The artist Obert assures that there has been a change in May Server; later he retracts his testimony. The narrator’s long interview with the recalcitrant husband leads to Briss’ arrival in the Park looking ten years older. (He has apparently been “dealt with” by his spouse.)

These symmetries are underlined by James’ formal division of his novel into two halves. The story’s initial climax occurs at the end of the Park scene; the fiction then regenerates itself with parallel actions that redefine specifics of the surface plot. For example, the eventual revelations in the Park are mirrored in the final interview (the narrator and Mrs. Briss), which takes up the last three chapters of the narrative.

The first half of the novel (chapters 1-8) contains the evidence for the Theory of the narrator. The second, shorter portion (chapters 9-14) deals with the Terror of possible exposure that Mrs. Briss experiences: she must now work to demolish the conceit that she has prompted in the narrator. The reader can assume that Mrs. Briss is eventually informed by her husband and/or by Long that the narrator is onto something real. She is forced to contradict herself from the fiction’s midway point. The hint by Mrs. Briss that the narrator may himself be in love with May Server is echoed when Obert eventually brings up the possibility. (Even Lady John advances the idea.) Mrs. Briss identifies May Server as the lover of Long (the “lips and cheek” scene) only for Obert eventually to withdraw his corroboration. Briss sympathizes with May Server, just as his wife will claim that the narrator’s theory “sacrifices” May. As I have pointed out, Mrs. Briss’ “screen” becomes the narrator’s later “front”. In the Park tableau, May Server describes the narrator as “kind”; Mrs. Briss’ ultimate word is “crazy”. The narrator tells May in the Park that he thinks Briss is in love with her; Mrs. Briss claims in the final interview that it was May who was the lover, the offering lips rather than the receptive cheek.

James’ novel achieves the light, high altitude of its comedy through an ironic analysis of how the most hypothetical gossip is the engine of the narrator’s fantasies, how they are abetted by Mrs. Briss’ planned or achieved adultery, which leads to erotic speculation, rank hypocrisy, and ruthless calumny in the service of maintained social position. James claimed to have hated fulfilling his novel’s implicative design in its demanding composition and subject. His Mrs. Briss is a manipulative priestess of the lower forms of arrant social sacrifice. By the novel’s end she has drained the narrator himself from the sacred fount. James not only generated a unique vision of masculine intellectual fatuity in his narrator but a portrait of female perfidy almost as extreme as the neurotic depths sounded by the governess of The Turn of the Screw.

The artistic extremity is justified in two ways. First, James’ characters conduct their brilliant dialogues at ironic cross-purposes with one another, those scintillant half-understandings, half-self-exposures that are his gift throughout his fiction but which reach a new level of comic genius here. The release of suppressed fears and desires in these interviews is especially devastating in chapter 7 (the narrator and poor Briss), chapter 8 (the narrator and May Server), and chapter 13 (the narrator and a cornered Mrs. Briss in full attack). If my interpretation is correct, these scenes alone justify any pain that their maker had to suffer in their engineering and represent the novelist braving his dire subject with consummate artistry. Here is achieved Jamesian “theater” on the page.

The second rationale for the lengths James goes to bag his game is the use to which the figure of May Server is put. She is the anti-Mrs. Brissenden. Server is limned with half-tones, with the most refined of strokes, with hints and suggestions, with a tender authorial pity, as though the satirist’s gimlet eye will not subject her to the finalities of judgment that are used upon the narrator and his creator-destroyer, Mrs. Briss. Poor Briss himself testifies to May Server’s pathetic side. This defense redeems him somewhat in the reader’s eyes. The narrator’s ravening intellectual defenses against May Server’s delicacy of approach represent the opposite of redemption. The reader can estimate what that would be. The Jamesian discretion in Server’s portrait creates its own beauty within the novel’s savaging depiction of social malfeasance.

When Mrs. Briss calls the narrator on the carpet in the novel’s final three chapters, her “reductionist” version of the situation (like the final comic sequence in Kurosawa’s Rashomon) brings the process of dismantling the narrator’s vampiristic hypothesis to completion. We have come full round. The reader is asked to compare Mrs. Briss’ version of Newmarch’s reality with the narrator’s elaborated theory and then to compare both to the uncovered specifics of the interpretation I propose here.

Perhaps the only way to know this novel is to keep all these possibilities in mind throughout subsequent readings, so that the versions of amatory intrigue play off one another simultaneously. I am thinking of John J. Enck’s suggestion in his essay “The Turn of the Screw and the Turn of the Century” that James requires in that tale that the reader see the governess as both warrior against evil and as disturbed psyche, simultaneously. There is also Northrop Frye’s description of the late Jamesian prose style as itself revealing “not a linear process of thought but a simultaneous comprehension.” Blackall describes Fount as carrying the author’s “scenic” method (as in The Awkward Age) to a new height of perspectival complexity.

We are invited by James to see his narrator’s aborning and revising consciousness from within, move by move, hour by hour. It is as though the design of this novel can only be known in all of its relations of facet to facet through an interior survey, the immediate act of reading, a building up of what Frye calls an “accumulation” of insight different from an exterior critical summation, one all too reminiscent of the narrator’s tendency toward generalizing theory. A prefiguring postmodern artwork (like Ariadne auf Naxos, Last Year at Marienbad, Pale Fire) holds this alternative before us, present praxis privileged over summative judgment.

My ballet scenario takes these aspects of James’ novel as guides to its patterning. I have removed Ford Obert from the ballet’s cast of characters – he is not needed as one more confidant. I have given the narrator a name – Stuart – reminiscent of “steward” since he is proudly protective of the exclusivity of his Newmarch and his place among its elect. More than a spectacle of pastoral erotic possibility, more than a simple explanation of a weekend misalliance (Stuart and May), The Sacred Fount maintains its mysteries, and I have exploited only a few of them for my purposes.

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The Ballet Scenario

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Setting: The characters are Edwardian in dress. They are found on a terrace outside Newmarch, an immense seventeenth century country house. The depicted facade contains a doorway and the windows of a hallway leading to great rooms. A second scene shows a portion of the vast Park of the estate, with a stone bench downstage left, the great pile visible in the distance. It is high English summer, mid-afternoon. By the end of the ballet the terrace is seen again in darkest night, but lighted brilliantly from within. And we return to the moonlit Park briefly for an apotheosis.

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Cast of characters:

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Stuart – relative newcomer to Newmarch festivities, a savant, a Londoner, aged 35

Mrs. Brissenden – a mature society lady, aged 42, a beauty

Brissenden – her husband, short, stooped, a pendant to his wife, aged 29

Gilbert Long – a handsome man about town, aged 32

Lady John – a woman of the world, social stalwart, approximately aged 45

May Server – an unattached guest, possibly a widow, a mother, aged 35

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Note: The action is continuous except for a blackout following the Park scene. We move from the terrace at midday to the Park in late afternoon, to the terrace again later that night, and finally to the Park once again near midnight.

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Part One

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1. The Terrace, midday. Stuart alone, in possession of the estate. But Lady John and Gilbert Long enter from stage left enjoying the full light of summer. They dance. Stuart watches them.

2. Mrs. Brissenden enters from stage right, followed by her husband, Briss. They greet Stuart, while the pas de deux of Lady John and Long continues. Mrs. Briss gestures to the dancing couple.

3. Lady John sees the Brisses, breaks off from Long and greets the trio. (Long lights a cigarette.) Mrs. Briss dismisses her husband, who exits stage right, and then she joins Long. Lady John hails Stuart and demands his attention. They dance. Mrs. Briss and Long watch them. Lady John breaks from Stuart to join Mrs. Briss. Stuart joins Long, admiring his ability to amuse the ladies.

4. The two women welcome May Server onto the terrace. They take her to the two men, and Stuart is formally introduced to her. Stuart and May dance a brief minuet of greeting. Mrs. Briss watches as her two couples – May and Stuart, Lady John and Long – begin a round dance. Partners are switched, a circle is formed, and Mrs. Briss is invited to join. She does so. Suddenly, it is apparent that Briss, her husband, has magically joined the circle from within the house. The couples become Stuart and Lady John, Long and Mrs. Briss, with Briss joining May Server. Mrs. Briss claps her hands and the dance ends. She sends her husband away again, and he meekly exits stage right.

5. Mrs. Briss leads Stuart downstage apart from the group, she his teacher, he her pupil. Upstage, Long is attended by Lady John and May Server. Stuart continues to watch the trio as Mrs. Briss explains the possible relations he has witnessed.

6. Long lifts Lady John and places her near the wings where she exits stage left. He does the same for May Server who exits stage right. He then walks to where Mrs. Briss and Stuart are gossiping and, taking her away from Stuart, dances with this third partner. They exult in the happiness of their day. Long lifts Mrs. Briss so that she exits stage left. Saluting Stuart, Long himself exits, taking out another cigarette.

7. Stuart solo. He dances his continuing joy in being at Newmarch and his curiosity at what he has witnessed in the social ties of his fellow guests. As he dances, the scene changes to deep in the Park of Newmarch. The great house is seen in the far distance. Stuart is now downstage.

8. Upstage, Long enters slowly, strolls and basks in the afternoon sun. Mid-stage, Briss enters, perhaps looking for someone. Both men pause, unaware of one another, like garden statuary. Downstage, Stuart has seen both and stands and watches them. Tableau: three men, aslant. Suddenly, May Server enters upstage, running. She first approaches Long, and they dance with a suggestion of intimacy; then she runs to Briss, who is very pleased to see her. They dance briefly. Then she runs downstage to Stuart. He is so lost in thought he barely takes notice of her, although her focused interest in him is apparent. He gestures to the trees and the air, while May has eyes only for Stuart. Briss, watching and disappointed, exits. Long sees Server unattached, comes to her and takes her away, the two walking slowly upstage left to exit.

9. Stuart again solo. He continues his pas seul, more meditative, in search of an explanation for the social panorama he has witnessed, a vision that might secure him a place in the milieu.

10. Stuart seats himself on the stone bench downstage left. The afternoon light fades. From upstage right May Server enters and walks shyly to the bench, where Stuart rises to welcome her. They sit together unspeaking and regard the summer twilight. Also from upstage right, Briss slowly enters and repeats May’s path to the bench. Stuart rises, welcomes him and insists he sit next to May. He does so. Stuart then bids the couple good afternoon and exits, reversing the path that the two have taken. May and Briss sit silently on the bench, not looking at one another. Slow blackout.

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Part Two

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1. The Terrace of Newmarch, night. The doorway and windows are ablaze with light. Stuart takes the evening air. Lady John enters from the door and the two perform a pas de deux – Lady John excited by the civil carnival to be found within, Stuart her eager pupil. Lady John, taking no precautions at being overheard, whispers a secret to him. She returns reluctantly to the festivities inside. Stuart sees someone about to exit the manse and hides stage left.

2. Mrs. Briss enters the terrace, followed by Long. They dance passionately in the supposed privacy of the space. Pas de deux. Mrs. Briss requires Long to stay on the terrace while she returns to the party alone and in advance. She exits. Long takes out a cigarette as Stuart reenters from stage left. Long assumes Stuart has seen his encounter with Mrs. Briss and nervously exits through the door. Stuart has indeed seen. Stuart alone and fascinated.

3. May Server enters. Once again, she waits on Stuart to respond to her. She demands he dance with her, but Stuart drifts, lost in his reflections. Their half-achieved pas de deux indicates a misalliance. May runs into the night, exiting stage right.

4. Mrs. Briss enters and Stuart demands from her an explanation. Mrs. Briss calls her husband from within. He arrives. Then she calls Long from within, and he joins her as well. The threesome stand exposed to Stuart in their ménage. Adagio pas de trois, performed for Stuart alone. At its end the two men on each side of Mrs. Briss sink to their knees. Ritually, proudly, Mrs. Briss walks toward Stuart. She looms as though saying, “You see too much.” She turns and walks back to her two attendants. She raises Long from his knees, and he goes to the doorway and opens the portal. She raises Briss as well, and then she walks to the door, Briss following her. The three exit, Mrs. Briss, Long, and finally poor Briss. The door to Newmarch is slowly and finally closed. All of the lights behind the Newmarch façade are extinguished as one. Spotlit, Stuart falls upon his knees, facing the facade.

5. The scene changes to the Park. Stuart rises awkwardly and walks with difficulty to the same downstage bench. He sits heavily and stares ahead, unseeing. Far upstage, we see May Server’s spotlit figure rushing from one invisible, imaginary consort to another in the moonlight, under the great trees. Newmarch persists as a heavy shadow in the distance. May Server’s dance memorializes lost opportunity. Stuart, aware that he is now an outcast, continues staring before him. Curtain.

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M.P.

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