The Ivory Tower

by Henry James, Ezra Pound (Afterword), Alan Hollinghurst (Introduction)

In 1914, Henry James began work on a major novel about the immense new fortunes of America’s Gilded Age. After an absence of more than twenty years, James had returned for a visit to his native country; what he found there filled him with profound dismay. In The Ivory Tower, his last book, the characteristic pattern underlying so much of his fiction—in which American “innocence” is transformed by its encounter with European “experience”—receives a new twist: raised abroad, the hero comes home to America to confront, as James puts it, “the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.”

James died in 1916 with the first three books of The Ivory Tower completed. He also left behind a “treatment,” in which he charted the further progress of his story. This fascinating scenario, one of only two to survive among James’s papers, is also published here together with a striking critical essay by Ezra Pound.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction, American, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, 1917

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ivory Tower – Published in 1917, the year following the great author’s death, this unfinished Henry James novel breaks off in the middle of Chapter Two of Book Four after about two hundred pages. Henry James left extensive notes citing how he intended his novel to continue for another four or five hundred pages.

So the question becomes: Is this unfinished novel worth the time? By my reading, the answer is a rousing “yes.” Alan Hollinghurst, who wrote the Introduction for this New York Review Books edition, would wholeheartedly concur. In point of fact, Hollinghurst, himself one of England’s top living literary novelists, urges us to read The Ivory Tower out loud to better catch the tone and rhythm of James’ language.

In addition to taking Alan Hollinghurst up on his suggestion to read the novel aloud, I also listened to the book on audio cassette narrated by Flo Gibson. Magnificent literary experience. And this NYRB edition also contains a Preface by Percy Lubbock, Henry James’ extensive Notes for The Ivory Tower (Henry would routinely compile such notes in preparation for writing a novel and destroy them after completion) and Ezra Pound's informative and entertaining essay - On “Notes for The Ivory Tower." Most definitely this is the publication for either scholar, Henry James lover or general reader.

Rather than addressing the giants of American industry in the context of a comedy as he did with The Outcry, a three-act play subsequently converted into a novel, with The Ivory Tower, Henry James launches a direct full frontal assault on a society denigrated by titanic masses of money stockpiled by ruthless robber barons. On the first few pages we meet one such captain of industry, old Abel Gaw, now retired, a man as cruel, brutal, cold-blooded, hard-hearted, callous, merciless and pitiless as one human being could possibly ever be.

James presents Abel Gaw with remarkable and eerie force, describing him as a man who turned every minute of his waking life so completely to business calculations that his mind in retirement has become an intensification of those calculations, the old man forever perched in his low basket-chair “like a ruffled hawk, motionless but for his single tremor, with his beak, which had pecked so many hearts out, visibly sharper than ever, yet only his talons, nervous; not that he at last cared a straw, really, but that he was incapable of thought save in sublimities of arithmetic.”

James goes on to say how the ruffled hawk (Gaw! Gaw! Gaw! Gaw!) would brood for hours over the swindle his former business partner, Frank Betterman, pulled on him, a brooding “after the fashion of a philosopher tangled in some maze of metaphysics.” What I've noted here is but a tiny sample, since, when it comes to Abel Gaw, the author’s every single word is another knife slice into his repugnant lack of character.

Such slicing includes Gaw’s relationship with his one and only child, daughter Rosanna. Perhaps Henry extracted a degree of revenge on behalf of beauty and refinement by making Rosanna massive to the point of ridiculousness, a great disappointment for this lord of finance to have such a huge, unattractive, ton-of-fun daughter who couldn’t move around in a room without knocking over an expensive light or some rare table-ornament.

Although Abel Gaw and Frank Betterman are both soon dead and the story’s focus shifts to the next generation, the great wealth amassed by these two business titans permeates the very air like a penetrating, noxious poison. The younger men and women breath it in. Henry James finely portrays four major players in the unfolding drama. Here they are, along with photos that, to my eye, accurately depict each:



An American raised in Europe, thirty-two-year-old Graham ("Gray") Fielder returns to the resort of Newport, Rhode Island to visit Frank Betterman, his rich dying uncle. The old business tycoon is delighted beyond measure to see his nephew is a thoroughly decent, multilingual, cultured gentleman. When he questions Graham on his business and financial experience, his nephew replies: “But I allow there’s nothing I understand so little and like so little as the mystery of the ‘market’ and the hustle of any sort.” To which, the dying man says: “You utterly loathe and abhor the hustle! That’s what I blissfully want of you.” Such a wonderfully refined youth, just the opposite of what he might have become had he been raised in American – another one of those all too many money hungry swindlers. Thus Frank Betterman wills his fortune to Graham Fielder. But will such an honest European-bred soul be able to fend off swarming American sharks?



Rosanna Gaw reflects: "She knew how of old her inexplicable, her almost ridiculous type had disconcerted and disappointed him (her father, Abel Gaw); but with this, at a given moment, it had come to him that she represented quantity and mass, that there was a great deal of her, so that she would have pressed down even a balance appointed to weigh bullion; and as there was nothing he was fonder of than such attestations of value he had really ended by drawing closer to her, as who should say, and by finding countenance in the breadth of personal and social shadow that she projected." Abel Gaw leaves all of his fabulous fortune to thirty-four-year-old Rosanna. Not question she'll attract the men - but will they love her for what she is?



Mustachioed Horton (‘Haughty’) Vint was a friend of Graham Fielder years ago when he visited Europe; he actually rescued Graham when they were together in the Alps. He shows up in Newport following the deaths of the old men. Horton Vint is something of a city slicker who just so happens to be in desperate need of money.



Cissy Foy is one of the wealthy crowd but she would dearly love her very own pile of gold. Of course, now there's Graham Fielder. But Horton Vint with his great mustache - ah, there's a man who would be a real catch. If only Haughty were rich.

During an interview, asked about his favorite novelist, Colm Tóibín replied: "Henry James, for the range of his sympathy and the quality of his prose. For the way in which he dramatizes moral issues while all the time attending to sensuous and stylish questions. For his seriousness about form in his fiction and the way in which he refuses to allow the reader to make easy judgments, for his insisting on nuance, half-light and suggestion, and for his deep understanding of the strangeness and the wavering nature of motive and feeling in human relationships."

Every single point Colm Tóibín makes is manifest in The Ivory Tower. Even unfinished, an extraordinary novel and I feel privileged to have written the first detailed review on Goodreads.

My reviews are now also on my new blog: https://glenncolerussell.blogspot.com/

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg

I made the proofing of this book for Free Literature and Project Gutenberg will publish it.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best unfinished Henry James novel ever!

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both James's and Dickens' last novels (this and Drood) were unfinished, and I wrote my best short essay (8pp) on them as a Jr at college, in a wonderful seminar taught by G Armour Craig, future interim prez of Amherst College. Mine began: "Both offer a critical exercise on the genesis and form of art in novels. These two novels will always be dramatically in process of becoming; but also, they are in another sense finished. ..The endings of these novels could not be written by the authors as we know them; or, these books end the authors' careers by hinting at radical newness.
In the Ivory Tower, James writes about back home, only to find that the moral bankruptcy he discloses is his own, insofar as his morality is his art. ..James's essential problem is to reconcile his art--his extremely subtle, refined and sensitive art--with American society, which his Mr Betterman describes, 'Money is their life'(111)." In his "Notes for the Ivory Tower," HJ admits he literally cannot talk of money--"in my total absence of business initiation."

[Perry Whitford · Rating 2 out of 5]

My word, James didn't half go on.

And I say that despite the fact that The Ivory Tower, left unfinished at his death, is merely a third of the novel he intended (nigh on a hundred pages of notes tell the rest of the story).

Graham Fielder becomes the unlikely heir to a fortune left to him when his rich uncle dies. Brought up in Europe, he becomes prey to a pair of typically American fortune hunters, Horton Vint and Cissy Foy.

At least he would have done, if james hadn't abandoned the project at the outbreak of WWI and then died a few years later. In his notes he makes reference to the 'compactness' of his story, but he surely had no idea of the meaning of the word.

He spends three pages over a stare! A pregnant stare certainly, but hardly deserving the minuet yet barely expressed attention. How can anyone this forensic have been at the same time this obtuse?

At one stage Horton Vint says to Graham Fielder, "m I to understand that you positively cultivate vagueness and water it with your tears?" and I could have said the same to James.

Better still, later on in the same conversation, Vint hits the nail even cleaner on the head:

"Here have I been with you half an hour without your practically telling me anything!"

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well I read it for completeness of James oeuvre. But it really is dense prose, and very slow, takes 3 books for the old man to die, and then the manuscript ends as James followed his own storyline and died himself before getting any further, and we don’t know what happened, I guess Haughty looks after the money for Gray and loses it. Then Gray marries Rosanna, who has her dad’s millions and they live happily ever after.

Well you can’t have a spoiler alert on this….

Not one of James’s classics, I won’t be re-reading this one.

[David Dunlap · Rating 2 out of 5]

It hurts for me to give Henry James, of all people, a two-star rating, but, let's face it: late James makes for tough reading. (The sentences are dense, labyrinthine, and elephantine. What a nightmare they would be to diagram!) And 'The Ivory Tower' is as late at it gets: James had only written the first chapter of Book Fourth (it seems, from his notes, that ten books were intended) when his death, in February, 1916, intervened. -- The novel posits an interesting situation: Years before the narrative begins, two business associates (Abel Gaw and Frank Betterman) had a serious falling out, which ruptured their relationship and led to great animosity between the two men. While in Europe, Gaw's daughter Rosanna and her mother encounter Betterman's half-sister and his nephew Graham Fielder; Graham's mother had been cut off by Betterman for making what he considered an inappropriate marriage, but, as she is pondering a second marriage to an Englishman (who genuinely likes Graham), Betterman offers to take her son and raise him, with the expectation that he will become his heir when the time comes. Rosanna counsels Graham to refuse the offer (because she has adopted the views of her father toward Betterman), but, afterwards, comes to think that she has wronged him. Terribly. -- As the novel opens, the Gaws and Betterman are both in Newport, where the old antagonists are both near death. Rosanna has approached Betterman and persuaded him to send for his nephew Graham (Gray) and restore him to favor. Both men die. Rosanna becomes a fabulously rich woman, while Graham becomes 'merely' wealthy. Enter two new characters: Cecilia (Cissy) Foy, who had met and been charmed by Graham's stepfather while in Europe some years before, and Horton (Haughty) Vint, an old friend of Graham's from his time in Europe. (There is some connection or understanding between Cissy and Vint, but it is not spelled out in the novel torso that we have.) There are also the Bradhams, Augusta (Gussie) and Davey, who have Cissy (and Vint?) staying with them, and who act as catalysts for some of the action that follows. -- That's about all we have of the novel itself. In this edition, however, we are provided a fascinating look into Henry James's writing methodology and plans for his complete book: the notes he invariably wrote himself before he embarked on a new work, but destroyed when the book was finished and sent to the publisher. These notes, truth be told, are not much clearer in style than the book itself: there are suggestions there that Cissy (not Rosanna) is the 'heroine' of the piece, and that Vint, charged by the unworldly Graham with managing his finances, is guilty of malfeasance in handling them. The novel's setting shifts to New York City/Lenox at some point in the narrative. -- The book is interesting for its American setting (something James had not used since 'The Bostonians,' some 30 years earlier). This reader, at least, was sorry that Rosanna and Gray did not seem destined to be with each other (although she was slightly older, she comes across as more noble and disinterested than Cissy). Recommended for James completists (like myself), and that cautiously. Probably not for the general reader.

[Mary L · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a shame that Henry James never finished The Ivory Tower because it was shaping up to be a fantastic story.

After good-natured yet naive Mr. Graham Fielder reconciles with his uncle on his uncle’s deathbed, he inherits his uncle’s fortune. This reconciliation was orchestrated by none other than Graham’s childhood friend, Miss Rosanna Gaw who, though intensely good and sincere, is somewhat of an outsider in New York high society. Catching the irresistible whiff of money and pegging Graham as an impressionable and inexperienced deep pocket, Mr. Horton Vint, another one of Graham’s childhood friends, and Miss Cecilia Foy, who is only indirectly connected to Graham, attempt to hustle Graham together. Although Cecilia and Horton seem to be meant for each other, Cecilia tries her hand at catching Graham’s eye while Horton worms his way into Graham’s confidence to become manager of Graham’s finances. Meanwhile, Rosanna still remembers Graham as a treasured childhood friend, and, it turns out, was instrumental in his past and present good fortune. Will Graham and Rosanna end up together, or will Graham become a victim of the treasure hunters surrounding him?

I feel like Henry James’ writing style is particularly convoluted here, but I appreciate his ability to vividly portray the feeling of overthinking. There are scenes in which the characters are barely doing anything, but James is able to stretch the scenes out as characters tediously analyze various details in their surroundings.

My favorite part of this copy of the book is Henry James’ manuscript notes. I got to peel back the curtain on James’ writing process. I am surprised that James seems quite taken by the characters he creates. He is absolutely bursting at the seams at the prospect of his characters interacting with each other.

Interesting, to be sure, but since The Ivory Tower is an unfinished work, I can only give it three stars.

[John Ferreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been awhile since I read a Henry James work. I had forgotten how hard it was to start to read him. Took me about twenty pages before I got his rhythm back. The story that was told before it ended was interesting enough. I seem to remember enjoying "The Sense of the Past", the other uncompleted novel by James. I wished that in the Notes, I would have found out what was in the letter Gaw wrote to Gray! I have a feeling that what we get was still a rough draft.

I did enjoy reading the Notes. It gives me a way to get started on a one act play I've been thinking about. I should also read "The Art of Fiction" I'm sure.

[Mary Holderby · Rating 2 out of 5]

James' writing style remains as ponderous as ever. For me, his notes of plans for this novel were more interesting. I was amused at his thoughts on naming his characters, even keeping track of how many syllables for each. But his notes showed a great deal of thought behind the craft. I felt there was some repetition from previous works, here a necklace but previously a golden bowl. But in terms of what he had planned his story to contain - which seem to me to be totally obscured in the small portion that he succeeded in writing - it is the reader's loss that he didn't live to achieve it.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Omygosh Henry James is so verbose in this book. More so than even usual. The prose sinks under its own weight. I found myself reading sentences 3 and 4 times because they were just so self consciously convoluted. Its an unfinished novel thank God- no way I would have made it to the end. But I sure wanted to know what was in that letter.

[Nasus]

Unfinished novel, and it shows. Too wordy and very hard to follow, even the dialogue. The edition I had (from 1917) contained James' notes of how he wanted the novel to play out, which was very interesting to read.

[Sinclair Spratley]

DNF b/c this is the first Henry James novel that I’ve tried to read and I think I need to start with one that he actually finished and was involved in the editing process for before I can tackle this one, oops!!

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the conversations are tedious and banal; the characters can be much too self-important. The style however is very engaging, especially as this is the first Henry James novel I've read.

[Emme — · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three stars for the material, one for Ezra Pound's synopsis of how to build a James novel. If he'd finished it I suspect ten stars would have been about right.