A Gentleman Never Lies
1Let us begin with a joke which we expect will slightly sweeten the truth of the bitter fruit from “The Tree of Knowledge” (James 1945, 185-220) one of best short stories ever written, and the saddest to boot. We thought up the joke when reading a story by Henry James and we write it down here, a little embarrassed, but without feeling it to be out of place. This is because we know (as we learnt from James) that telling jokes is an effective defence against depression; we escape for a while from the sad truth we cannot help but discover in the end.
2A gentleman should not love a woman, or at no cost should he let her find out that he does. Women are curious by nature. When one tells a woman that he loves her we can bet our life that this woman will sooner or later enquire: why? And then, soon enough, one needs to stop being a gentleman: either by lying to the woman that he has some knowledge about love worthy of revealing, or by telling the truth that he has no clue and risks being rude. A gentleman has an exceptionally important reason for concealing his love. No wonder we know so little about gentlemen’s love.
3In the reasoning above there is of course a fault or at least some opacity in that it suggests women are naïve or spiteful. Asking “Why do you love me?”, a woman would not be aware that this question is unanswerable or would be aware that there is no answer and torment her lover with feigned curiosity. But women are neither so naïve nor so spiteful. They are, however, ambitious. The question “Why do you love me?” expresses a woman’s desire to make her man an artist—as only artists can answer such a question.
4Unsurprisingly, we have heard quite a big deal about the artists’ love.
5Peter Brench is to all intents and purposes a gentleman. He loves Mrs Mallow “without breathing it”. Mrs Mallow’s happy husband is Morgan Mallow, an artist, a sculptor. Is it possible that our humorous reasoning could really explain the peculiar triangle that James used to illustrate his intuition regarding the mystery of one love?
6Of course it is not. After all Morgan Mallow is a bad sculptor, Mrs Mallow is not ambitious, and Mr Brench is too much of a human being to keep up the gentleman’s mask.
Situation
7Morgan Mallow is a bad sculptor but unaware of that. Psychologically speaking, he is a master: it is enough for him to know that what he does is art. His belief in himself knows no bounds.
8Mrs Mallow loves her husband although she knows that he is a bad sculptor, that his art is valueless to everybody except himself. But she reveals nothing: she loves her master as he is and for this very reason she has to lie that she believes in him too.
9Peter Brench loves Mrs Mallow. But we are no longer sure if “love” means what it meant in the previous sections; and it does not, not only because Mrs Mallow’s love is overt, whilst Peter’s a mystery. It does not, not because, perhaps, a woman’s love is different from a man’s love. The difference we have in mind can be put in the formula “A loves B” being transformed into “A is in love with B”.
10“He had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years”—in this way Peter’s love is described at the beginning of the story. It can have a larger import than a reader infers.1
11Peter Brench is successful, victorious, honourable, triumphant (adjectives used to describe him in the first paragraph of “The Tree of Knowledge”). It seems that we deal with somebody completely happy in a common and “normal” sense of happiness as satisfied self-love. Yet Brench’s reasons for such smugness are quite bizarre: he loves a woman and simultaneously renounces ever being requited (he “had judged himself once for all”), he lives in a world surrounded by annoying objects (Morgan’s works), and never complains about it. Is La Rochefoucauld right suspecting self-love to be omnipresent? The self-love would find its shape in giving up, in resignation, in liberating in the protagonist’s mind a sterling sophist genius. It would make for a perfect, almost Platonic self-love (rejecting all external objects and using them only negatively—by abstaining from them). Peter Brench is close to fulfilling this paradoxical ideal: his unbounded egoism is used to victimise him and his desires.
12Someone, who would think that we demonise the Mallows’ amiable friend, would be right insofar as the case of Peter Brench is not only about self-love, which constitutes just a moment in the protagonist’s internal evolution. (Not until we read the ending of the story, do we know what kind of moment it really is.) James only seems to be continuing the tradition of moralist vivisection of feelings—feelings as something originating in “I” and coming down to servile fulfilling “I’s” desires. For James “I” is not a ruthless point of origin for all things; it becomes something relative, the very moment in a process one might banally name a human’s lot.
13But let us not get ahead of our reading. Let us rather pause for a second and ponder over the described situation and try to see it from a more joyful side.
14Peter Brench has made something truly extraordinary; he skilfully blocked one of the most effective literary machines—ménage à trois. The dramatis personae include: a beautiful woman, her proud husband, and Peter, the third one, a patient friend of the family, in love with the other’s beautiful wife. …And nothing really happens, everybody acts “properly”, the ménage à trois stays motionless (no conflicts, no identity crises, no scenes, no decisions, no denials, nothing).
15Because of Peter, what happened is a reformulation of a literary problem, a shift in rules underlying a plot convention in which a starting point for a story is a trio of people and a desire to love. We could speak at length about these rules so, to put it briefly, these rules are the rules of provoking conflicts: legal conflict (between a legitimate and illegitimate owner of a woman), moral (in a myriad of ways), cognitive (the game of truth and illusion), psychological (identity crisis, split, paradoxes of rivalry) and the like, with the caveat that these conflicts are rarely pure and rather interweave with each other.
16The situation between Peter and the Mallows is a triangle of avoiding conflicts. The loving couple and the friend of the family live together in an idyllic harmony: in line with the law in its comfortably moral, cognitive, and psychological sense. Why is the “whole situation […] verily a marvel” (according to the narrator)?
17The narrator’s statement is ironic in that it begins with “verily a marvel” and turns into “the soft declivity of Hampstead”. It does a trick familiar to the best humorous English prose. Yet we would have made a mistake to decide that our triangle can no longer be admired. In fact it is by no means pointless although not because of the narrator’s suggested reason. It is not that “these good people” make a triangle, immobilising it with their “goodness”, sacrificing fantasies for fear of losing order and safety. It is a triangle that makes good people. The word “good” becomes a doubtful word, tricky, in need of a new denotation. What “these good people” means will be the question of further reading.
18What do we know by now (we still remain in the first two pages of the text)? We know that a good man (Peter) combines modesty and humility with pride while his relations with the others (the Mallows) are characterised by reservation and trust.
Protagonist
19Peter Brench is the protagonist of “The Tree of Knowledge” (criterion: he is always at the “stage of events” that are told directly and, without exceptions, the first listener of tales about events he did not participate in; in other words, the whole story is narrated from Peter’s “point of view”). Yet he is not a real protagonist: the one that acts. He remains passive, we read about his sufferings. Lancelot (who makes others suffer), the Mallows’ son (and Peter’s godson), is the real actor; he is about to cross the threshold of maturity.
20Lancelot’s actions can be described as somehow ambivalent, combining two forms in which his name is used. The full form, ostentatiously pertaining to the figure of the legendary knight, can symbolise the character’s task: initiation, a passage that he must go through before becoming mature. The short form, Lance, by means of connotations with a common object (lance, spear, or lancet), symbolises his role with respect to Peter and that what we could describe as the motionless triangle.
21Lancelot’s initiation is, it can be said, completely modern, entirely in keeping with norms abiding in the middle class. It is about knowing who you are and simultaneously becoming this someone. We become mature by testing a hypothesis about who (or rather what) we are.
22It all sounds quite pompous but in truth it is about a profession that provides a mature position in life: profession as role, thanks to which a human being is capable of identification and self-realisation. Lancelot decides to become an artist, like his father, but a painter, unlike his father. The initiation will be knowledge (self-knowledge), an attempt at self-acceptance in the chosen role (or rejection thereof).
23Lancelot, analogously to many of his peers, cannot accept himself in the chosen role. This role overwhelms him; he cannot identify himself with it. We even do not know if he is going to paint or try something different.
24There is nothing original about it, of course. Dissatisfaction is a component of modern initiation, which, in contrast to the old, religion-related one, is connected with giving the lie to faith and shattering illusions. Lancelot enters the adult world in an entirely normal fashion.
25“The Tree of Knowledge” is, however, a story about something else. Lancelot’s initiation facilitates Brench’s transformation. The youth, like a young knight fulfilling a task set by an old king, wins for Peter what Peter could not have found by himself. Lancelot functions as a helper in the main task the protagonist must fulfil.
She knows, too
26The protagonist does not know (does not want to know) his task. He has done everything to never face it. And now, with unexpected (although foreseen) help, Peter endeavours to discourage the helper from the mission that he is intent on accomplishing for him.
27Peter’s task is universal (every human faces it): to know thyself. We could say that Peter, a fifty-odd-year-old man, firmly ensconced in life, should have realised that task a long time before. Peter himself thinks that way: he is certain that he knows who he is. He confirms his belief by constructing some sort of excess of knowledge that allows him to know about himself more than others do (his feelings about Mrs Mallow and contempt for Mr Mallow’s works are good cases in point). Peter does not desire knowledge. In possession of an excess of it (“I know too much”, he tells Lancelot in their first conversation), he thinks that that excludes a possibility of turning out to be ignorant. By deluding himself that having secrets gives omniscience, he is far from original: it is one of the universal mechanisms of faith (especially faith in oneself).
28In the short story Peter is his own opponent because he defends his own illusions. This fight against oneself differs from the traditional psychomachia, which occurs in a man’s soul in the full light of his consciousness. Constructing the character of Peter, James let us deeply feel the meaning of an unconscious element in a man’s life. Peter desires to buttress his success that consisted of repressing a part of truth about himself, about what has determined his lot. Peter’s illusions and secrets are, so to speak, a dam protecting him from the return of the contents he had removed from his consciousness.
29When Lancelot grows up Peter feels in danger: he is afraid of his secrets being revealed. “He’ll know,” says Mrs Mallow. For Peter this must have sounded like a threat. He wants Lancelot to remain ignorant. That is why he tries to keep him in Cambridge that, we can admire James’s sense of humour once again, is treated as a place guaranteeing ignorance.
30What is Peter afraid of? What does Cambridge protect Lancelot from?
31Peter is afraid of spreading knowledge about the master, about Morgan Mallow, which, as indicated above, can have serious consequences on the harmony between Peter and the Mallows. When Mrs Mallow doubts the master’s genius, the value of Peter’s secret will have decreased. Mrs Mallow will find out about everything: having guessed the nature of Peter’s secrecy about the “work”, she will also find out about its reason—love.
32Lancelot leaves for Paris to study painting. There is no possibility of his not acquiring knowledge that will reveal the weaknesses of his father’s sculptures. The point is, then, that Lancelot is required to keep this knowledge to himself and never to share it with his mother. Peter’s destiny (the future of his illusion) is in Lancelot’s hands.
33If Lancelot had repeated the master’s psychological feat (acquiring faith in himself that ensures an unproblematic productivity), nothing might have ever happened. But Lancelot cannot paint; he is hampered by his own harsh self-criticism. He thus risks facing his father’s accusations—accusations difficult to refute without revealing the knowledge about the weaknesses of the master’s works.
34Yet the cataclysm takes place earlier. It turns out that Mrs Mallow also asks her son not to reveal his knowledge about the master. She knows, too.
35The final sentence damages Peter’s meticulous construction. Peter faces the reality he has been denying until now.
A contribution to the psychology of love
36Peter did not know that Mrs Mallow knew what the real value of the master’s “works” really was. And now he learns that she “has always known, always known”. I think we must naïvely ask what follows from it and try to answer this question.
37It is not that Peter unmasks hypocrisy in his beloved woman, what he never suspected in her. It is not that Peter’s secrets lose their sense because their sole condition was Mrs Mallow’s non-knowledge. The truth reached by Peter is more profound. It is the truth not about Mrs Mallow but about himself.
38Let us try for a moment to be of a different view and say that it was all about Mrs Mallow. What happens needs to be understood as Peter’s loss of hope, hope he had rejected himself previously. This sounds somewhat bizarre but this, albeit bizarre, is the logic of “The Tree of Knowledge”. When he finds out that Mrs Mallow loves her husband despite his being a bad artist, Peter loses his beloved for the second time. For the second time because he lost her when he “once for all” had hidden his love. Between the first and the second loss (or the versions of the loss) there is a significant difference. The first arises from Peter’s decision. Peter loses Mrs Mallow but he does not lose his autonomy. The second occurs despite Peter, beyond Peter. He deals with the first (version of) loss perfectly well but to the second one he reacts with acute pain. Or maybe, in fact, the blow came to his self-love, to the fact that we decide for ourselves whom we love. Or maybe Peter was thinking before that he controlled the situation, and now he realises that there is nothing he can do (so nothing he can conceal). Is Peter’s pain a pain of somebody who has found out that he is nothing to the other person? Or is it about a (fatal) wound inflicted to his self-love?
39Yes, and no.
40On the one hand, Peter does need to say farewell to his proud “I”, to his illusion of success that he enjoyed at the outset of the story. But Peter’s drama fails to terminate with the necessary act of humility. It seems Peter has comprehended more.
41In the story we notice the sign of understanding whose content remains suspended, understated: “Peter was silent a long time; during which his companion might have heard him gently breathe, and on touching him might have felt within him the vibration of a long low sound suppressed. By the time he spoke at last he had taken everything in”. This sign of understanding the reader of the story must decipher alone. At the same time, it is not about the reader being merely perceptive or creative. The cipher that permits to finish Peter’s soundless thought can only be the entire story, its entire action, whose meaning focuses on the moment of a silent understanding.
42Peter Brench understood what his love to Mrs Mallow was. He loves about her “the one beautiful reason he had never married”. He loves her because he can love only her. She is the only person that meets the requirements of a possible object for his love, requirements that need the object to be close and beyond reach, desired and simultaneously forbidden. To put it briefly, Peter loves Mrs Mallow as an image of his mother; he is still a child loving his mother but resigning from having her and accepting the relationship between her and his father. Peter relentlessly repeats his feat: his own version of the Oedipal complex. In this version the child is the master of the mother-father relationship. It could destroy it if it only wanted to undermine the mother’s faith in the father. But it will not do it because it loves its mother too much. However, when an adult repeats the child’s feat, the order of causes and effects undergoes a reversal. Peter does not resign from Mrs Mallow because he loves her too much; Peter loves her because he must resign from her; he loves the resignation, this rejection of woman.
43Peter Brench understood that he, despite being fifty, is still a child, that this has been the role he has played at the Mallows’ (it is here where he relocated his family situation; the triangle he had mastered as a child in order to experience the situation over and over again till death, in order to die without having made a move).
44Now Peter will not be able to innocently treat the Mallows’ house as his own with clear conscience. In some sense he has been expelled from it. Lancelot, as a modern archangel, prevents him from returning to the paradise of the unconscious.
- 1 I skip here Grajewski’s discussion on the Polish translation of the phrase as “kochać się” or, in its full form, “kochać siebie w kimś”, which means “to love oneself in another”. This nuance of the Polish expression (used in the translation of “Tree of Knowledge”) leads Grajewski to make references to “self-love” [miłość własna] dating back to La Rochefoucauld and 17 th-century moralistic writing, and to interpret Peter Brench’s love as being, at least partly, egotistic and narcissistic. This meaning in the English phrase, however, is absent. [Translator’s note]