Story: The Figure in the Carpet
Published: 1896
Length: 15,400 words, 37 pages
Genre: artists and their arts
Library of America volume: Complete Stories, 1892-1898
Penguin edition: The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories
Etext: Gutenberg
Published in 1896, this story belongs to the end of Henry James’s “middle period”; more specifically, it was written shortly after Henry’s singular failure in the theater, during which he was booed during curtain calls for Guy Domville, one of his plays. I have chosen to start by looking at this story, before embarking on my chronological reading of Henry’s fiction, because of the subject, which, I think, has particular relevance to my reading project.
Henry wrote about this story in his notebook, in a long entry on October 24, 1895:
“I seem to see a little subject in this idea, that of the author of certain books who is known to hold–and to declare as much, au besoin, to the few with whom he communicates–that his writings contain a very beautiful and valuable, very interesting and remunerative secret, or latent intention, for those who read them with a right intelligence–who see into them, as it were—bring to the perusal of them a certain perceptive sense.
[...]
“His great amusement in life is really to see if anyone will ever see it…”
That, then, is what Henry would call the “germ” of the story. His notebook entry goes on to sketch out the plot that will examine this “figure in the carpet.”
In the story, an unnamed narrator, a minor critic, writes about the latest novel by Hugh Vereker for a publication called The Middle. He finds this author “clever,” and, shortly after the review is published, meets Vereker at a weekend party. A person there has a copy of the publication, and gives it to Vereker to read. He dismisses it as “the usual twaddle,” and says that the author “doesn’t see anything.” As the narrator is heading off to his bedroom, he crosses Vereker who apologizes for his comments, saying that he only just found out that the narrator was the author of the “little notice.” But the two sit down to discuss this, and Vereker’s work in general.
The narrator, it turns out, has missed the “little point” of Vereker’s work.
“By my little point I mean – what shall I call it? – the particular thing I’ve written my books most for. Isn’t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it’s that!”
He goes on:
“I can speak for myself: there’s an idea in my work without which I wouldn’t have given a straw for the whole job. It’s the finest fullest intention of the lot, and the application of it has been, I think, a triumph of patience, of ingenuity. I ought to leave that to somebody else to say; but that nobody does say it is precisely what we’re talking about. It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. So it’s naturally the thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me,” my visitor added, smiling, “even as the thing for the critic to find.”
Then:
“I live almost to see if it will ever be detected.” He looked at me for a jesting challenge; something far within his eyes seemed to peep out. “But I needn’t worry – it won’t!”
So this is the story: how the narrator attempts to find this “particular thing” that was “something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.”
The narrator gave up on finding this secret pretty quickly, but passed the information on to George Corvick, his editor at The Middle, and his fiancé, Gwendolyne Erme. The narrator was “freshly struck with my colleague’s power to excite himself over a question of art. He’d call it letters, he’d call it life, but it was all one thing.” They approached the work with a passion, and claimed that “he had caught whiffs and hints of he didn’t know what, faint wandering notes of a hidden music.”
Some months later, Corvick went off to India on a mission, then, six months after that, sent a telegram to Gwendolyne saying that he had found it. He didn’t say what “it” was, however. But, Gwendoline said,
“He didn’t take a book with him – on purpose; indeed he wouldn’t have needed to – 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. The figure in the carpet came out.”
Corvick went to see Vereker, who was staying in Italy, and confirmed his discovery. He still, however, had not told his friends what it was. But he said he would only tell Gwendolyne when they were married.
The narrator had to leave England, and, in the meantime, Corvick started writing a study of Vereker that would “trace the figure in the carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it in every tint.” But Corvick would not tell the narrator about any of this, leaving him in the dark about what the figure in the carpet was.
Fate interjected soon, as, during Corvick’s and Gwendolyne’s honeymoon, they went out for a drive, and Corvick was killed in an accident. With the loss of the narrator’s friend went his secret; or so it seemed. He had barely begun writing his study. However, when he asked Gwendolyne if she had heard the secret, she replied, “I heard everything, and I mean to keep it to myself!”
Soon afterwards, Vereker died, followed by his wife. Only Gwendolyne knew the secret. She soon married Drayton Deane, a critic like the narrator, who took to writing about Vereker and others, but never revealing the figure in the carpet. Gwendolyne died during childbirth some time later, and the narrator, meeting Deane in a club, approached the man.
“As an older acquaintance of your late wife’s than even you were,” I began, “you must let me say to you something I have on my mind. I shall be glad to make any terms with you that you see fit to name for the information she must have had from George Corvick – the information you know, that had come to him, poor chap, in one of the happiest hours of his life, straight from Hugh Vereker.”
He looked at me like a dim phrenological bust. “The information – ?”
“Vereker’s secret, my dear man – the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.”
He began to flush – the numbers on his bumps to come out. “Vereker’s books had a general intention?”
I stared in my turn. “You don’t mean to say you don’t know it?” I thought for a moment he was playing with me. “Mrs. Deane knew it; she had it, as I say, straight from Corvick, who had, after infinite search and to Vereker’s own delight, found the very mouth of the cave. Where is the mouth? He told after their marriage – and told alone – the person who, when the circumstances were reproduced, must have told you. Have I been wrong in taking for granted that she admitted you, as one of the highest privileges of the relation in which you stood to her, to the knowledge of which she was after Corvick’s death the sole depositary? All I know is that that knowledge is infinitely precious, and what I want you to understand is that if you’ll in your turn admit me to it you’ll do me a kindness for which I shall be lastingly grateful.”
He had turned at last very red; I dare say he had begun by thinking I had lost my wits. Little by little he followed me; on my own side I stared with a livelier surprise. Then he spoke. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The narrator explained the story to Deane, who knew nothing about any of this. The narrator concluded, “What I saw, though I couldn’t say it, was that his wife hadn’t thought him worth enlightening.” The story ends:
I looked at him well; I hesitated; I considered. “Come and sit down with me here, and I’ll tell you.” I drew him to a sofa, I lighted another cigar and, beginning with the anecdote of Vereker’s one descent from the clouds, I recited to him the extraordinary chain of accidents that had, in spite of the original gleam, kept me till that hour in the dark. I told him in a word just what I’ve written out here. He listened with deepening attention, and I became aware, to my surprise, by his ejaculations, by his questions, that he would have been after all not unworthy to be trusted by his wife. So abrupt an experience of her want of trust had now a disturbing effect on him; but I saw the immediate shock throb away little by little and then gather again into waves of wonder and curiosity – waves that promised, I could perfectly judge, to break in the end with the fury of my own highest tides. I may say that to-day as victims of unappeased desire there isn’t a pin to choose between us. The poor man’s state is almost my consolation; there are really moments when I feel it to be quite my revenge.
You could compare this story to The Aspern Papers, where a critic searches for letters that may or may not exist, that could shed light on the private life of a poet. Henry James muses about the public and the private, the visible and the hidden, and, in a way, taunts the very critics who were writing about his work. When The Figure in the Carpet was published, James was at the peak of his form as a novelist, though he had failed as a playwright. He would, in a few years, reach his summit with his three great novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, and he would start, very soon, writing in his “late style”. But, for now, he seemed to be summing up the life of a writer with this sardonic tale.
This story, as you can now see, bears similarities to my “climbing Mount James” by re-reading all of his fiction. I have read it all once, and have never found the figure in the carpet, but I’m not sure there is one; in any case, I’m not looking for it. To me, the reading is reward enough. The beauty of the prose, and the depth of the stories, is what makes Henry James such a fine author. If, over time, I find a figure in the carpet, all the better. But if I don’t, I’m sure I’ll enjoy the ride.
My guess is that the figure in the carpet is simply that the prose in the last novels is a “mode of enquiry” rather than a conventional narrative, as John Bayley says in his intro to the Penguin edition of Wings. The prose is a “form of poetry” rather than a collection of statements as in every other novel ever published. So in a sense this story anticipates what he would be writing in the next few years rather than what he had written, namely a radical and unprecedented attempt to understand society, personal relations, and consciousness itself by means of a kind of self-questioning on the page itself. This is where the answer is found, in plain sight, in every sentence, which is the string on which the pearls are strung. So in a way the story is a satire on literal-minded journalistic critics too concerned with plot.
Yes, I think that Henry was having a go at critics in that story. I don’t have the Penguin Wings, but I’m not sure I can agree with that about Henry’s seeing into the future. My feeling is that Henry’s “late” style is strongly influenced by technology: by the fact that he started dictating, and that he developed a spoken style that, while elaborate and different from “normal” spoken English, made a new form of prose that straddled the line between spoken and written.
I’m a big fan of Proust – whose writing is relatively similar to James’s late style – and when listening to an audio recording of La Recherche in French, it seems to flow much better than when I read it on the page. I think there are types of writing that are more spoken than others, and dictating naturally leads in that direction.
Of course, “seeing into the future” is precisely what writers of fiction do. (At least when it comes to their own writing!)
There is a remark in Figure about what is “on the page” (or something like that); well, the late novels are an experiment in rendering consciousness itself “on the page” instead of just events subsumed and contained by plot. The reader in turn, through careful (and slow) reading, can explore, on the page, the consciousness of the characters (and the narrator) without worrying too much about where the scene or the plot as a whole is supposed to be going in conventional terms. (This is why, as you say, reading Proust on the page is important; Proust on tape does sound a little bizarre.) The reader must be a collaborator with the author (kinda like Deadheads?). In 1895, Henry was anticipating this experiment. Why wouldn’t he be? It actually seems strange that a story like this would be written as late as this; it’s melodramatic and even a little turgid. I would guess that Henry was trying to send a message; it’s too bad that not many, then or now, would get it, although he was saying it as plainly as he could. I have to confess I never really thought about this before; I think I regarded the story as both cryptic and unreadable, and the Figure was some kind of mystical thing. But Henry strikes me as not a mystic but someone who, as Bayley says, saw his own knowledge and wisdom about society, and how people use and abuse each other, as a gift that was important to share with the world (Proust too).
I’m enjoying your blog.
A few points:
Henry wrote this in 1896, shortly after his debacle in the theater. He was, in a way, getting back into writing fiction at this time; he had stopped for a few years to write for the theater. So the timing doesn’t surprise me; quite the contrary, this would have been an ideal time to question the role of the author, and, perhaps, the critic.
Re Proust: it actually fits more in audio than on the page; not that it sounds better or worse, and certainly not bizarre. The cadence of his sentences are surprisingly optimal when read aloud, even the very long sentences.
I still can’t agree, however, that Henry “knew” his style was going to change. I’m convinced – as are most critics – that the later style came in part because of dictation, which he started in 1897, when he was writing What Maisie Knew. I’m not sure exactly when he started reflecting on using dictation, when his “writer’s cramp” began to get serious enough for him to take that step, but I would not think that he had already planned to change his style. He did, of course, plan his deeper examinations of consciousness, and some critics suggest that it was his failure in the theater that led him in that direction. Maisie was begun before he started dictating; I’m not sure which chapter it was when he began using dictation, but it was during that book that he made the shift.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the blog! Thanks!
I did listen once to an audio reading of The Golden Bowl and likewise enjoyed it for the rhythms of the sentences. Proust was a lot more anecdotal and reader-friendly than James, and that works orally. However, the speed of the James being read aloud was necessarily just too fast to really comprehend, given the density of the sentences.
The funny story about Henry’s dictation to the “type-writer” (that is, a typist) is that he got so accustomed to the clatter of the machine that when the typist had to quit, and the new one only took shorthand, he couldn’t concentrate well enough to sustain the flow of his thoughts and had to find another typist!
Yes, the timing of the Figure in the Carpet is just right; my comment was about the style. But again, the proof is in the story itself, not the biography. Re-read the passages that describe the “figure in the carpet” with the idea of the novel as a “mode of enquiry”. Try it and see. If it doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t. After all, that’s why we are still reading Henry James.
The salient point about the dictation maybe is that it led to excesses in style, not so much in sentence length but in obscurity. However, as in many writers, their flaws are of a piece with their virtues. William famously disapproved of the vagueness and embellishments of The Golden Bowl, which led to a breakdown in communication between the brothers. This suggests that a lot more was going on wth Henry than just the stylistic excesses encouraged by the “technology”.
I think Henry certainly _liked_ his late style, but I still contend that dictation created it. When you dictate, you don’t see the beginning of your sentence, so it’s much easier to keep going on and make longer sentences, with more commas, semi-colons, and dashes. But when Henry saw the results, he was certainly amenable to them, and continued this style.
In any case, we’ll be able to discuss that late style when we get there. :-)
The dictation thing is fascinating but more interesting to me in terms of it indicating Henry James’ capacity for performing his work and as such linking him as a story teller to the oral tradition. He literally was able just to spout this stuff out; did he alter his voice as he created the various characters?, I wonder.
As for ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, I think we have to view the central idea as that of the classical Jamesian MacGuffin, the unspecfied secret that drives the plot. (MacGuffin was term Hitchcock used in describing the driving engines of his plot; the motiveless attacks of the birds, for example). The ‘Figure’ is simply a blank space, like the telegram in ‘In the Cage’, into which we can throw any interpretation we like. None of them are wrong, as such none of them are right. James almost certainly didn’t have a single idea of the ‘Figure’ himself. You could read Vereker’s secret as an autobiographical pre-amble to James’ late style, or as I guess a contemporary ‘literary theorist’ would, something about veiled (homo)sexuality. One thing that’s important to remember though is that all three of the people who know the secret die. The other important detail is that a couple in love, are seen by Vereker as having a better chance of grasping the secret. That, I would presume, is intended to push us to the idea of Vereker’s ‘Figure’ being something about human relations: a plausible interpretation would be that his entire work was a memorial to a particular woman, perhaps his wife, or the like.
I am a huge fan of Henry James, to whom only Shakespeare (I grudgingly admit) seems to me a superior writer in the English language. As such I am most excited about your blog. I wonder if you might be so good as to tell us what you intend to read next as you get through it, allowing us to look it ourselves before you post your thoughts.
James, I hadn’t actually thought of trying to enlist others in my reading. I’ll be reading in chronological order, starting with the early stories, before hitting Watch and Ward, the first novel. I’m planning on posting a page with the stories and novels in chronological order, so I guess you could follow that way. I was actually hoping to start – following the preamble of The Figure in the Carpet – right away, but some work has kept me from reading the first story, A Tragedy of Error.
You can see the stories for now in the Library of America edition (click through their ad in the right column, then follow to the info about the first volume of stories). I’d be delighted if others want to read along with me, but I can’t take on the responsibility of really organizing a group reading.
One comment: I agree with you that James is second only to Shakespeare, my other favorite writer in English. And he’s just a bit ahead of Proust, my favorite writer in French (my other language).
I’ll think, however, about posting something before reading and commenting on each work. I need to get better organized for now.
Thanks for your comments Kirk. German is my second language (I live in Berlin) and the novelists I’ve read in German who I’d put on the same level of intensity as James and Shakespeare are Kafka and Goethe. However, as I’m sure you’re aware, the magic of reading these people is to read them in their original language.
Yes, as both being bilingual and being a translator, I’ve pretty much given up reading fiction in translation. Alas, I don’t know more than a smattering of German. if I had time, that would be the next language I learn, in part because of my love of Schubert’s lieder, but also because it’s the European country, after the UK and France, with the richest literary tradition.
Reading A figure in the carpet I’m reminded of something Gertrude Stein said, summing up Western Literature: you cannot serve God and Mammon*. You said the magic word in the last sentence of your blog, Kirk–”enjoy”.
If I had a persian carpet, I’d tack it up on a big blank space in the living room and use it for Show and Tell.
* I’m not sure about her exact words, and I haven’t been to find it.
I am not an erudite scholar of the literary persuasion, nor am I a particularly avid fan of Henry James. I read for pleasure and I am pleased to occasionally find myself up against some conundrum which an author poses to challenge my wits. I, like many before me I’m sure, found myself fascinated by ‘the secret’ Vereker intimates to the narrator and was quite crestfallen at first to discover that the story did not provide the reader with the solution to the mystery. In my quest to examine the interpretations of other readers I have often found myself in rather deep waters whose towering seas encompass everything from James’ relationships with other authors to his sexual preferences, but nothing I have found so far has led me to believe that anything tangential to James’ own, personal-life biography solves the riddle of his intent by leaving the secret unexplained.
I find myself in the camp of those who point out the natural animosity between writers and critics as a starting point in my quest to pursue this question and I am reminded of my first inclinations as I finished the story – the book still warm in my hands. I think Vereker’s first words were right on the mark: he considered the writings of critics, and in all probability the critics themselves … “twaddle”. A writer’s creation is his child, and who among us has the patience to suffer their children to be manhandled by unfeeling strangers? Now, one would suppose Vereker was being truly sincere when he apologized to the narrator … but was he?
My first interpretation is the one which I hold to, that Vereker was playing a mildly malicious trick on the critic-narrator having first intuited that the narrator would spend enormous amounts of time and impatience to unravel the ‘secret’. One may assume that any critic who would be able to publicly get an affirmation from Vereker that he had found some underlying motif to his entire canon of work would be a made man in his profession, and therein lies the bait. It is suggestive, if this train of inquiry is valid, that Vereker would not want to inconvenience other innocent stander’s-by, thus, his request that their conversation be kept in strict secrecy. It is my contention that Corvick actually figured out what Vereker was up to and confronted him with his theory. Vereker, holding to to the dictates of honor, admits to Corvick that he is correct and now Corvick decides to have a bit of a go with the narrator as well by leaving him in suspense. Corvick dies but passes on ‘the secret’ to Gwendolyne, who was not particularly fond of the narrator as I recall, and she keeps the secret of the ploy to herself.
James is teasing us. The nineteenth century teemed not only with interested in new awakenings, but also with religious thinking about the patterns of the bible; people sought patterns in the tropes and symbols that appeared to link the writers of the new and old testaments, hoping to feel renewed conviction. James had religion in the blood, given his father’s Swedenborgian conversion and given his brother William’s interest in spirituality and religion. The figure in the carpet is made upon a ground: perhaps James is playing us. It is the ground we should be studying, not particularly the figure. Like Shakespeare, his is a Christian world, but not a religious world. If anything, the ground of James’s work is the study of perception – of ourselves, of others, of relationships, of networks of relationships. To be precise, though, it is the study of our misperceptions and our occasional and hard won access to the truth – which is, of course, altered at every moment. Imagination appears to be the string that holds together our disparate pearls of perception – imagination, which as he writes in Mora Montravers, is the source of our greatest pain and greatest awe, being as it is how we see truth and its veils.
Hmm, I’m not sure that I agree with any religious element in this story. It’s fair to say that the 19th century saw the beginnings of textual criticism, which began early in the century in Germany, and which Henry was no doubt familiar with. But Henry was not a religious man, and I’m sure he’s looking here at the types of questions that are often discussed around literature, and which were certainly asked of him at the time.
I agree. It is the lack of religious thinking that is part of James’ ground. In its place is the interest in perception. Perhaps that was not clear.
I love the remark about the ‘ground’ being Christian but not religious. I’m not sure what it means, but it sounds very cool. Does it mean a belief in “immanence” is behind all the fiction, that Henry absorbed the Swedenborgian belief that there is a mystical element not just to human consciousness (perception, imagination)– but went further to apply the idea to all social interaction? Is that fair to say?
John Bayley, in his introductory essay to Wings of the Dove, which I mentioned above, –and can be found on Google Books, — argues that Henry’s subject is consciousness (or “conscience”) itself, the incalculable and “deepest processes” of thought, and as such he was writing “a kind of poetry”. I would say that this is the figure, the ‘key’ that dots every “i” and places every comma — especially in the late fiction.
And an aside — does the banter of the socialites in Mora Montravers remind anyone else of Noel Coward? I need to read the story again, but that is a first impression. Another of Bayley’s points is to emphasize Henry’s use of dramatic/stage techniques in the late fiction.
I’d be happy to discuss these ideas with anyone — I’m at busirane at gmail.