Henry James’ The Figure In The Carpet — figured out!

HENRY JAMES: The Figure in the Carpet

I

“I had done a few things and earned a few pence –“

The Jamesian-textured prose narrator is asked by a friend George Corvick, to review a book by the celebrated Hugh Vereker, whom the narrator is to meet later. To write this review for The Middle instead of Corvick because the latter is called to rescue some woman or other in Paris.
The narrator’s chance to shine. Mine, too? In fact, I did once real-time review a HJ, if not HV, book, i.e. the impossible ‘The Sacred Fount’ HERE!
And I actually once read ‘The Golden Bowl’!

II

“We had found out at last how clever he was, and he had had to make the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly tempted, as I walked beside him, to let him know how much of that unveiling was my act; and there was a moment when I probably should have done so had not one of the ladies of our party, snatching a place at his other elbow,…”

I shall take on the narrator’s role, from now on, in my review….
I don’t think Corvick liked my review.
Social gathering described in HJ’s matchless and tentacular prose. Lady Jane in a conversation that I overheard praises my review of Vereker’s book. Vereker himself does not realise I am the reviewer; once he read my review he says what I wrote is twaddle, i.e. that the reviewer knows nothing.
Later when told by Lady J that the reviewer was me, he accosts me in the corridor before bed and comes in to explain himself as rapprochement. The subtleties of our somewhat satisfying chat, by motive of mercy and/or regret, or by constructive cross-purposes, will defeat your crude misunderstanding of HJ’s obliquity of sophistication, and of mine, too. Perhaps you will understand more of what I mean when you read on to the next chapter below, in due course.
But I doubt it.

III

“…the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion,…”

A story, it seems, that was simply made to be gestalt real-time reviewed by me! Concerning a hidden treasure of gestalt, or esoteric message, or intention, like something he does with, say, the letter P — the sort of preternatural tricks embodied in fiction truth that I deal with every day of my week, but such a Henry James work IS hidden treasure. It is the story I have been waiting for. No pale fire, this.

“I had a pause. ‘Don’t you think you ought – just a trifle – to assist the critic?’
‘Assist him? What else have I done with every stroke of my pen? I’ve shouted my intention in his great blank face!’”

“Besides, the critic just isn’t a plain man: if he were, pray, what would he be doing in his neighbour’s garden? You’re anything but a plain man yourself, and the very raison d’être of you all is that you’re little demons of subtlety.”

So, yes, Vereker, as he speaks to me late at night in my bedroom, is the truth-giver, oh yeh! 

“‘I live almost to see if it will ever be detected.’”
…he says. A sort of tempting of fate, the final writer-critic duel, by the revelation of such a writer’s gestalt. We’ll see!
I may be even mis-interpreting the whole thing! He may be right when he said ‘twaddle’. But I doubt it.

“‘This extraordinary “general intention”, as you call it – for that’s the most vivid description I can induce you to make of it – is then, generally, a sort of buried treasure?’”

Well, how ironic that I have always believed in Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy, unbeknownst to him! I would have spent the night looking for the treasure in his books, but my co-narrator couldn’t find any Vereker books in the house!

IV & V

“I’m sure that person will by this time have told somebody else! It’s a woman, into the bargain.”

I told Corvick about my meeting with Vereker in my bedroom at Lady Jane’s but then he told his fiancée, a literary woman, as it happened, who actually lived italics and capitals it seems, so she is made party to Vereker’s ‘secret’ bait to search his books. But as this loving couple’s shadowy third, I triangulate with them together (like three people playing chess against each other on one board), triangulate the coordinates of what the hidden treasure might be, although Vereker himself had turned indifferent, even with the Persian carpet conceit that I myself gave him to plagiarise as a string to hangs his pearls of wisdom on, I now infer!!

“They would scarce have got so wound up, I think, if they hadn’t been in love: poor Vereker’s inner meaning gave them endless occasion to put and to keep their young heads together.”

But I claimed Corvick was pretentious, even though I was, at heart, even more so!

“He was like nothing, I told him, but the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic character of Shakespeare. […] Corvick would at last probably come out somewhere. He made, in defence of his credulity, a great point of the fact that from of old, in his study of this genius, he had caught whiffs and hints of he didn’t know what, faint wandering notes of a hidden music. That was just the rarity, that was the charm: it fitted so perfectly into what I reported.”

The honour of T. H. White’s werewolf chase with rifle! That’s the way I also seek the literary gestalt embodied with the work of all us fictioneers!
Music to hunt leitmotifs with!

Yet, I now try to avoid Vereker, even at Lady Jane’s — but has he gone off, anyway, to aid an ailing wife?

“Not only had I lost the books, but I had lost the man himself: they and their author had been alike spoiled for me. I knew too which was the loss I most regretted. I had taken to the man still more than I had ever taken to the books.”

VI – XI

“Eureka. Immense.”

“…he knows every page, as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasn’t thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right combination.”

I am astonished I genuinely have not read this work until now, and I don’t think I have even heard of it before! And can you imagine a Henry James novella that is extremely suspenseful, compelling, page-turning in this second half of it? I need to get down my thoughts quickly in this passion of the reading moment — a significant work outdoing all others? — before I, too, die, leaving the only character left alive the reviewer himself.
I must be careful of spoilers, though.

The relationship of Corvick and Gwendolen, with a blurred engagement of affiancement, he goes abroad to Bombay and has the epiphany of Vereker’s literary gestalt with that Eureka and Immense! —

“The buried treasure was all gold and gems. […] It was great, yet so simple, was simple, yet so great, and the final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart.”

And, later, it is almost as if Corvick then needs to marry Gwendolen and consummate by sexual union before he can pass on the secret of the Vereker gestalt to her, and this is perhaps the key to such a revelation passing on to another husband following the dog cart accident, beyond or towards her third novel. Until I reach the end of it all while trying to marry her myself for the same reason, but still without the literary orgasm I seek, as she marries Drayton Deane another reviewer! The novella may end with nothing, and never! And so may I.
Vereker, you see, dies without the secret being known. I read his last book and also Gwendolen’s novels for clues… and was it indeed something to do with the eponymous carpet as given as a clue by the title above?

So I am doomed to perpetual tantalisation… and whether they gave a ‘dose’ to Gwendolen’s mother to keep her quiet? So much more here I haven’t told you. At least I got my revenge on Drayton Deane. If not on the Velazquez and Vandyke within Vereker.

“I was shut up in my obsession for ever – my gaolers had gone off with the key.”

***
‘The last ghost of a chance’? — ‘the idol unveiled’?
I, the mere reviewer, can solve it in one fell swoop perhaps, but who has heard of a reviewer writing his or her own novel? Well, I wrote one at the beginning of this century, first published in 2011 and now out of print, entitled ‘Nemonymous Night’, and its first chapter happens to be all about the eponymous carpet! The answer’s there. I say this at least half-seriously, because if one believes in the Jungian literary gestalt, that is not too far fetched, is it?

***

Full context of this review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/04/26/penguin-books-of-british-short-stories-2/

EDIT: The Carpet syndrome is throughout NN the novel, not just the first chapter.