Quests in the Golden Bowl

an essay in Meliora

I am delighted to have contributed an essay to the 2026 edition of Meliora—A Hopeful Journal of the Western Tradition, not least because they let me write about The Golden Bowl. Here is the opening.

Most people aren’t going to read The Golden Bowl. Henry James’s last completed novel is long and difficult, exemplifying his late style, in which his sentences can become discombobulatingly convoluted. It is the sort of thing that gets James a bad name as a stultified hippopotamus of a writer, expounding and confounding his readers with sentences that seem as impenetrable and interminable as the rambling conversation of a dull and supercilious old man. Earlier James novels and stories—such as, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and The Portrait of a Lady—are more focussed on action and events, and are written in a plainer, more “readable,” style. Next to these, The Golden Bowl can feel like it was written by a different person—, a more pompous, irascible writer.

So why am I writing about The Golden Bowl? Because Literature is read in the spirit of ambition, not acceptance. And The Golden Bowl, is quite simply one of the best novels written in English. It is, as Gore Vidal says, “ambitiously divine.” It is about as close an examination of the psychology and inner lives of four people as it is possible for a novel to make. The action is not so much greater than that of an ordinary novel, but the amount of unfolding of the characters’ inner lives is very much greater. One of the characters in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You called it a “juicy” book, which is exactly right. The Golden Bowl provides us with an extraordinary amount of information about what everyone thinks and feels, consciously and unconsciously, about the events of the book.

There is a strange and splendid beauty to James’s difficult prose. Ezra Pound was right to say that James’s late, elaborate style was in fact concise. James’s closeness to his characters, and the great precision of his style means, as Pound says, that he says more in a page than many other more “direct” writers would get into a chapter. It is frequently marvellous what James can make a sentence do. One must read The Golden Bowl slowly.

All of this means that James can turn a simple story of love and betrayal,—a story of how rich people who collect nice objects have a distorted view of human relationships, which is a theme he had handled many times before—into an odyssean story, a great quest of the psychological and romantic lives of four ordinary people. The Golden Bowl is full of questing references, from the Golden Isles (the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology) to people who are looking for each other at a moment of high tension being described as going in quest of each other.

It might seem flatly obtuse to call the The Golden Bowl a quest. These people walk the park and stroll the grounds and pace the drawing room. But The Golden Bowl has the quality of a High Romance, in which his coiled prose creates a shimmering effect, as if we are reading a novel that aims not at verisimilitude, but a marvellous tale.

The rest is not online yet but will be quite soon (I think), or you can order an issue for $7.95.