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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This article situates Henry James's 1891 short story 'Brooksmith' among the practices and insights of work on James that has grown out of queer theory. In so doing it focuses on the role of devotion both in the story and in the collection of which it originally formed a part. It argues for a number of conceptual linkages between devotion and the queer, and further situates the story in traditions of writing, some dating back to the eighteenth century, that explore different senses of devotion as passionate adherence, readerly failing, and fatedness to destruction.
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In the recent wave of fiction wrapped up in Henry James there is a powerful sense that to know James one must first know his servants, particularly butlers. This is true, for example, of Nick Guest, the James-loving hero of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. On his arrival at a country house, Guest's beloved author is transformed from a worshipped textual entity to a more sensual and social being about whom he can have more immediate and unofficial knowledge. This more intimate encounter with a more immediate James is heralded by the appearance, almost from a phantom world, of 'Fales, a real butler in striped morning trousers (who) materialized to meet them'. (1) The materializing butler prefigures the more material author, soon seen looking 'rather crafty' in an unpublished 1903 photograph among a host of social celebrities (p. 55). James's vulnerability to and (sometimes reciprocal) love of servants in Colm Toibin's The Master presents itself throughout that melancholy novel as continually verging on the uncovering of some form of erotic truth about the great writer. (2) David Lodge, in Author, Author, achieves his intimate sense of James the man through focusing on his servants and assistants, just as he conveys what is distinctive about James the writer through an extraordinary and problematic passage in which a housemaid reads and struggles to come to terms with 'The Beast in the Jungle'. (3) For writers of recent fiction a Henry James 'reality effect' is therefore noticeably dependent on the presence and perceptions of those in service.
Perhaps inevitably, a story by James prefigures and critiques this belief--and much else. That story is Brooksmith, which was first published in magazine form in 1891 and in book form in the collection The Lesson of the Master in 1892. (4) One of James's best stories, it is a concise, delicate, potent, and complex instance of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick referred to as James's 'outrageous gift'. (5) In this article I suggest that Brooksmith is readable in terms instigated by Sedgwick and expanded on by subsequent critics--Wendy Graham, John Bradley, John Fletcher, Hugh Stevens, Terry Castle, and, more recently, Eric Haralson. (6) Like 'The Beast in the Jungle', The Bostonians, and James's late ghostly tales, Brooksmith is a text that is readable in the terms afforded by the 'queer theory' with which these writers are richly and variously affiliated and which is also a force in the recent fictional representations and appropriations of him. More importantly, Brooksmith foregrounds a key undercurrent in contemporary--1890s contemporary--literary representations of same-sex desire and polemical writings in defence of it, and that undercurrent is devotion, the very quality to which the narrator of the story pays such shadowy tribute when he writes in praise of the butler Brooksmith, its diminutive, devoted protagonist.
Devotion has an interesting relationship to queer culture and theory. As I will show, polemical defences of same-sex desire contemporary with James's story targeted the assumption that such desire was a sign of deficient devotion to approved entities and practices--nation, business, and family. Yet it is also the case that certain forms of religious devotion--Roman Catholicism in particular--were crucial to gay culture in the 1880s and 1890s. (7) We might think of the still ongoing importance of icons and objects of devotion--Henry James included--to gay and queer cultures. In both instances forms of devotion can function as individual indicators of queer possibilities and as social adhesive. And both instances entail, as Richard Rambuss's work has demonstrated, lengthy literary and divine histories (dating back, at the very least, to the seventeenth century) in which religious devotion, relations of service, and erotic pleasure between men interact in open, carnal, and inspiring ways. Despite the interest of Rambuss's study and despite his deployment of a new word--'homodevotion'--to designate a tradition of religiously charged, same-sex desire ranging from the metaphysical poets to contemporary cinema, drama, art, and pornography, he gives no attention to the inherent ambiguity in (or etymology of) 'devotion' as a word. (8)
The word 'devotion' often appears in literary contexts with which James was familiar, and, as I will show later, its usage and history make it queer in a broader conceptual sense. Elsewhere I have argued that as a concept and a way of thought 'queer' is marked by a will to reverse the injurious power of a word and to take reversal as one of many modes of action. Queer is about impact, the interrogation of the relationship between persons and categories and, relatedly, critique. (9) Over time I have become aware of the importance of the ordinary, the everyday (as opposed to theoretical favourites like 'the transgressive' and 'the subversive' by which much critical writing sets such store), and the banal to queer culture and thought. So the figure of the devoted servant (which has a remarkable lineage in representations of same-sex desire) is of particular interest in queer terms, not simply because of the peculiar places of intimacy, knowledge, and erotic potential occupied by servants and celebrated in literary texts from Defoe to Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca to The Maids of Jean Genet to Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, but because of the powerful relationship the servant has to the quotidian and the banal. Devotion also maps onto the qualities of queer that I have outlined above. If queer culture is marked by reversal, action, impact, the questioning of category, the practice of critique, and saturation in the everyday, then the demands made, the indifferences shown, and the occasional rewards proffered by objects of devotion are also, I think, similarly and tellingly marked. And if my title echoes Civilization and its Discontents, that is because devotion seems to me to be a prime site where 'the struggle between Eros and death, between the life drive and the drive for destruction' not only takes place in Freud's dramatic outline of 'the meaning of the development of civilization', but where the distinctions between the big protagonists of Freud's drama become provocatively difficult to make. (10)
Like many of James's great stories such as The Aspern Papers (1888) or 'The Real Thing' (1893), Brooksmith is a first-person narration by an unnamed male figure, on one level external to and on another integral to the events he narrates. It is a deeply retrospective story, and the bare bones of its plot, when summarized, run like this. Brooksmith is the butler of a retired bachelor diplomat, Mr Offord, living in London. Key to both Mr Offord's household and life, Brooksmith is represented by the narrator as both silently running and silently participating in the urbane, civilized, literate, and, above all, happy conversation that takes place under his employer's roof. When Mr Offord falls ill and eventually dies, Brooksmith is obliged to leave his distinguished (though not utterly distinguished) employer's house. On the day of his departure Brooksmith's silence breaks and he makes an astounding speech (the details of which I shall discuss later), evidencing his utter devotion to his deceased employer. After several unsuccessful attempts to gain further employment--unsuccessful either because it is assumed that he has been somehow 'spoiled' (a key word in this story and, quite literally, its last word), or because he has worked in an entirely male household--Brooksmith falls ill. The narrator visits him at his aunt's house, a milieu as far away as possible in terms of gender, class, and aesthetics from Mr Offord's. Subsequently, he is sighted, by an embarrassed narrator, working as a waiter for hire at a dinner party. Over the months the narrator sees less and less of Brooksmith. Three years later he learns from the aunt that her nephew has disappeared. In two directly opposed yet commonly evasive ways, both the aunt and the narrator assume that Brooksmith, whose spirit has increasingly become a haunting vision, has committed suicide:
His aged relative had promptly, as she said, guessed the worst. Somehow and somewhere he had got out of the way altogether, and now I trust that, with characteristic deliberation, he is changing the plates of the immortal gods. As my depressing visitant also said, he never had got his spirits up. I was fortunately able to dismiss her with her own somewhat improved. But the dim ghost of Brooksmith is one of those...
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