The Beast in the Jungle

This is not a normal blog post for me. I'm not going to attempt to be funny or wrestle my demons or complain about my kids. My husband took our kids on a trip this weekend to give me space and time alone. You'd think I'd be sitting in front of the television snarfing ice cream, but my brain decided it won't allow me to rest until I do this. The only thing I can think about is my favorite book of all time, "The Beast in the Jungle". The sentences run on forever. Sometimes, the story feels like it’s going nowhere. Like any relationship, you can’t see the truth of it until the end. 

I’ve had lots of people tell me they started to read it due to my love for it, but then for some reason or the other didn’t finish it. So today I’m going to summarize it in quotes from the book itself (with an occasional parenthetical explanation.) It will be longer than my usual blog post. But this isn’t a post. It’s a book I dearly love and I hope I don't do it a grave injustice. My apologies to Henry James, who would probably roll over in his grave and shoot me for this. But every quote, every word, says something to me that both tells the story and stands on its own.

The Beast in the Jungle

by Henry James

*** (It begins upon their meeting for the second time)

He (John Marcher) really didn’t remember the least thing about her. They looked at each other with the feeling of an occasion missed.

“You know you told me something I’ve never forgotten and that again and again has made me think of you since.” (May Bartram) “You had the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.”

 (This is the crux of the story. He feels he is meant for some undefinable life experience and is waiting for it. He confided this secret in her once long ago.)

She was the only other person in the world then who would have it, and she had had it all these years, while the fact of his having breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him. He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and lo he wasn’t alone a bit.

“Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation – or at any rate the send of danger, familiar to so many people – of falling in love?” (May)

“Of course, what’s in store for me may be no more than that.” (John)

“You’ve been in love and it hasn’t meant such a cataclysm, hasn’t proved the great affair?”

“Here I am, you see. It hasn’t been overwhelming.”

“Then it hasn’t been love.”

For a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity; it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together. They were literally afloat together. That the right person should know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine. He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world.

*** (They spend time, years, as friends)

All this naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. The thing be, with the one person who knew, was easy and natural – to make the reference rather than be seeming to avoid it. He knew there was no moment at which it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifully indulging for that of still more beautifully believing him. He had a screw loose for her but she liked him in spite of it. Above all she was in the secret of the difference between the forms he went through – and the detachment that reigned beneath them.

There was but one account of her that would have been true all the while and that she could give straight to nobody, least of all to John Marcher.

They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent. “What saves us is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that of the man and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit – or almost – as to be at last indispensable. I’m your dull woman, a part of the daily breads for which  you pray at church.”

“Only doesn’t it sometimes come to you as time goes on that your curiosity (in waiting for his life experience with him) isn’t being particularly repaid?” (John)

“I’m more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but too well repaid.” (May) “Living with it so long and so closely, you’ve lost your sense of it.”

“You know something I don’t.” Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little. “You know what’s to happen.  It’s so bad that you’re afraid I’ll find out. What is it that saves you?”

“You’ll never find out. If you’ve had your woman, I’ve had my man. I don’t pretend it exactly shows that I’m not living for you.”

“How shall I ever repay you?”

“By going on as you are.”

She had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn’t dare to express. She knew something and that what she knew was bad – too bad to tell him.

***(May falls ill)

He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe. What if she should have to die before knowing, before seeing-? Her original adoption of his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life.

If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him. That she, at all events, might be recorded as having waited in vain – this affected him sharply, and all the more because of his at first having done little more than amuse himself with the idea. What did everything mean – what, that is, did she mean, she and her vain waiting and her probably death and the soundless admonition of it all – unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late? It was a failure not to be anything. As he waked up to the sense of no longer being young… The sense of being stale…. The sense of being weak… The possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale. Her work was over and it made him feel strangely abandoned.

There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head. "I appear to myself to have spent most of my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things. A great many of them I’ve at different times named to you, but there were others I couldn’t name. We had looked most things in the face."

“Including each other?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You can’t hide it. You’ve done. You’ve had your experience. You leave me to my fate.”

“It would be the worst,” she finally let herself say. “I mean, the thing I’ve never said.”

“You abandon me.”

“No, no!” she repeated. “I’m with you – don’t you see? – still. I haven’t forsaken you.”

“Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer.”

She promptly shook her head. “Never.”

“It isn’t that its all a mistake?
“A mistake?” she pityingly echoed. That possibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous.

“The door isn’t shut. The door’s open,” said May Bartram. “It’s never too late.”

She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited. It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had something more to give him.

“Do you know now?”

“I know nothing. What has happened?”

“What was to,” she said.

She was dying and his life would end.

“I’m not sure you understood.  You’ve nothing to wait for more. It has come. Your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. So utterly without you knowing it. It’s enough if I know it.”

“I can’t begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me, is past; nothing will pass until I pass myself.”

“You take your ‘feelings’ for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it. I would live for you still – if I could. But I can’t.”

*** (May dies)

The things he saw couldn’t help being common when he had become common to look at them. They indeed had been wondrous for others while he was but wondrous for himself. It was because he had been separated so long from the part of himself that alone he now valued. This garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. He once had lived. As one of the cemetery walks passed near him, he caught the shock of the face. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?

Something that he, John Marcher, hadn’t. She was what he had missed. The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. He had never though of her but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use. This horror of waking – this was knowledge.