Watch and Ward [Paperback]

In later years, Henry James rejected his first novel. After he had still made corrections for a new edition some years after the first one of 1871, he would later not include it in collected editions and would call the next novel, Roderick Hudson, his first.
I can see why he would do that. This one is a little embarrassing, sometimes.

The plot is melodrama without depth: Boston gentleman `adopts' 12 y old orphan girl after her father's suicide and hopes that she will develop into a suitable young woman for him to marry. He finally marries her after fighting off some competition. That has an ugly smell to it. It is not a very funny comedy either.

One wonders, from today's perspective and with our broad exposure to publicized abuse cases, about the darker implications: a single man of 30 adopts a 12 y old girl, not even related to him by family? How does this work legally? Apparently there is no legal status at all here. In other words, the sultan raises his concubine for his harem, or, from the other angle, total dependence or total freedom, whichever way you look at it. Were laws at the times (1860s or so) that lax? The fact that the sultan is more of a Professor Higgins and that the harem is monogamous does not really change everything, does it?

The man starts telling people fairly soon that he plans to marry the girl later. That starts when she is 14 or so. (Isn't there a famous film director who discarded his wife to marry her adopted daughter?)
The man even considers telling her early on that he expects eventual payback for his goodness. Isn't that disgusting, even if he has enough sense, at least, to shut up? James finds it in him to tell us that the girl develops a `passion for gratitude'. Yikes, what is that?
When she has grown to be an 18 y old beauty, men look at her and think in terms of `Roger's investment', or `Roger's property'.

In defense of James one has to admit that he was quite aware of this minefield and that he brought it to the forefront of the man Roger's hesitations and uncertainties. In a way, this is the main theme of the whole short novel, not just a subject that remains in nether regions of awareness, for us to dig out.

When you add to the odd plot and the slow comedy a fairly conventional narrative technique (all-knowing 3rd party), you see that there is no claim for greatness here. There are fortunately also some strengths: I see them in the male portraits. The main male, as well as his rivals, are all delightful little psychograms, while Nora, the corpus delicti, remains rather bland. So you do get some entertainment out of this, but at least as much irritation. I think the least that James could have done to save us and himself some embarrassment would have been to marry Nora to somebody else and avoid the `happy end' from Roger's perspective.

"Watch and Ward" was the first novel of Henry James Jr, published in The Atlantic Monthly 1n 1871. "Junior" was 28 years old. "Watch and Ward" did not catapult him to literary fame, and has never been regarded as one of his masterworks, nothing more than a 'good start' toward "Portrait of a Lady". His masterpieces were not to be written until he was solidly middle-aged. James Junior, to put it bluntly, was not especially precocious. "Watch and Ward" is a brief, well-crafted but slightly bland novel -- a 'romance' actually, in the specific sense of that genre as practiced by New England writers of the generation of Henry James Senior. It's interesting to note that Junior had paid an extended visit to the elderly Seer of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, around the time when he was working on "Watch and Ward". Neither Henry, Senior or Junior, was any sort of consistent transcendentalist, but their literary manners were learned at the knee of Emerson, so to speak. The style and the narrative of Junior's early stories and this first novel come straight from Brook Farm. I haven't encountered any scholarly criticism of Henry James that perceives the influence on him of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Luisa Alcott, but I'd say such an influence is obvious in "Watch and Ward", both in the syntax and the themes. W&W is even a "Twice-Told Tale", patently inspired by the Hellenic myth of Pygmalion. And it's both a "moral romance", close to Hawthorne's short story "Doctor Rappucini's Garden", and a Love Romance which readers of "Little Women" would have approved. Why, it has what might be called a 'happy ending' -- certainly the sort of resolution that James would never repeat.

The plot concerns a fastidious, well-intentioned, somewhat priggish Boston gentleman who finds himself maturing in years and wealth without encountering a woman whom he can imagine as a wife. One day a desperate stranger, a 'westerner' of dubious character, approaches him begging for monetary aid, which he refuses. When the stranger later commits suicide, our gentleman rescues his scrawny, grimy, illiterate 12-year-old daughter and, without legally adopting her, launches into a fantasy life-plan of raising such a girl to become a model wife. James Junior was NOT yet the psychological novelist or the razor-edge dissector of human relationships of his later works; "Watch and Ward" is utterly naive from a post-Freudian perspective. So, of course, were most of the great novels of Victorian England that James must have aspired to match.

"Watch and Ward" is not a novel that you can't live without reading. If James Junior had written another dozen such novels, he'd have filled a niche as a regionalist comparable to Sarah Orne Jewett or Sherwood Anderson. Instead, it's astonishing to follow his evolution: "Daisy Miller" in 1878, "Washington Square" in 1880, "Portrait of a Lady" serialized in '80-'81, "The Bostonians" and "Princess Casamassima" in 1885 ...

Henry James Jr has long been adored by critics and scholars as perhaps America's greatest novelist, yet his later novels -- complex, turgid, elusive -- have daunted and discouraged altogether too many readers. If you're a reader hesitating to give Junior a second chance, I recommend starting where he himself started, with his mellow New England romances. "Watch and Ward" is included in the Library or America volume of 'Novels 1871-1880', together with "Roderick Hudson", "The American", "The Europeans", and "Confidence". I've already reviewed the first three of that list.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars