The Beautiful Incentive

“Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang, the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified.  The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him in these conditions the greatest the case permits of.” — Henry James

Been reading the Prefaces of  Henry James and finding deep inspiration in his struggles with locating the commanding centers of his novels, stubbornly refusing to locate themselves in the middle, sometimes showing up around the knees:

“. . . again and again, perversely, incurably, the centre of my structure would insist on placing itself not, so to speak, in the middle . . . the terminational terror was none the less certain to break in and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an active figure condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much too short, for its body. I urge myself to the candid confession that in very few of my productions to my eye, has the organic centre succeeded in getting into proper position. . . . The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the second half, and I have in general given so much space to making the theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely unequal.”

I am both charmed and encouraged by this. Returning again and again to the conundrum of Chapter Twenty, I believe the universe has dropped these clues in my lap. Up the ante on the danger Anna Jane must brave. Make it a deeper danger. And I love the idea of the first half as the stage for the second half. Get her up a tree, throw rocks at her, get her down again, dead or alive.

Now, if only I could locate the commanding center in the Jamesian sense of it. All I can say on my own behalf is that I am not giving up. Should have called this post the terminational terror.