In the concluding moments of Henry James’s great novel, The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Osmond, nee’ Archer, has left England and “started for Rome”. She’s resolved, after a last passionate plea from her determined American suitor, Casper Goodwood, and despite – or maybe because of — his kiss that “was like white lightning,” to return to Italy where her “wretched” married life with Gilbert Osmond awaits her.
But Isabel herself is nowhere to be found when we learn this. Her train has literally left the station, leaving us to stand with poor Goodwood on the steps of the London row house where she’s been staying with her friend, Henrietta Stackpole. And it’s here, in this second-hand fashion, that he and we get the stunning news from Henrietta.
Is Isabel’s return an act of simple surrender to “the honor of the thing,” as she’s at one point put it to herself (that thing to honor being marriage, the institution; hardly hers and Osmond’s)? Or is it somehow a statement of her reclaimed independence of mind, which she has felt slip steadily away during her years as Osmond’s wife? There’s rich and ample evidence for either possibility. But all we’re told, seven quick paragraphs from the end when we have a last moment of access to her thinking, is that she’s discovered the “very straight path” she’s sure she must follow. Whatever clarity Isabel has come to, she hasn’t stuck around to explain it to Caspar, or to us.
Or even, in a sense, to the novel itself. In saying this, I’m thinking of the unidentified “I” persona, which periodically intervenes throughout, serving as a kind of interpreter of events, a contextual historian. But that informed authority is likewise absent at the end, when we could use it most, inviting the impression that the narrative intelligence of James’s novel ultimately has no more knowledge than its readers and Isabel’s ardent suitor do.
When a narrative fully engages us, we’re having a conversation with it, reading and hearing it as a voice become personified. We listen and respond to what it’s telling us, talking back to it at crucial points. And when that narrative, in that voice, seems to cut the conversation off prematurely, it’s possible we’ll feel we’ve been treated inconsiderately, even rudely, left with far too little to fend for our interpreting selves.
But if that’s our initial response, we might on reflection recognize that what’s fundamentally at work is not so much inhospitality as the aesthetic responsibility of serious fiction to “compete with life,” as James himself put it in his classic essay, “The Art of Fiction”. We might come to see that fiction can be comprised, as life is, of unanswerable questions, stubborn contradictions, deeply rooted inconsistencies. Which is why the sense of being abruptly stranded, not in the story but by it, describes the endings I most admire.
I’m not speaking merely of some lingering after effect; a crystalline image I can’t let go of; a revelation I should have seen coming, which has me tracing its subtle way from some first hint to its appearance. I have in mind an essential propulsion that’s been building and building with the sequence of events, leading to an earned irresolution of the story, one that gives it, ironically, a depth, a range, an intricacy it wouldn’t have if our engagement with it ended at the moment it did.
Quoting James again, this time from his Notebooks, “The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together”. As I see it, then, his unmet “whole” that “competes with life” is the combination of what reasonably “groups together” in a story, and what continues, untold, beyond it.
No life is simplistic, no matter how simple, and no moment of it makes that clearer than the reverberant silence that sounds when one ends. Analogously, a narrative begins and ends in a kind of temporal fashion. Ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust. Dare we say, then, that the best ones have something like the imaginative equivalent of soul, a vibrancy that lives on after the story is in the narrow sense done?
I think we do dare.
In Chekhov’s “Lady with the Lapdog,” Gurov and Anna are bound at the end by a poignantly committed love. Their affair – the innocent Anna’s first, the cynical Gurov’s most recent of many – has grown to something far beyond the calendrical conveniences of scheduled passion. They have come at the end to love “one another as people who are very close and intimate, as husband and wife, as dear friends love one another.”
But “’How? How?’” Gurov famously asks, “clutching his head” in frustration as he and Anna try “to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting.” How, in other words, can they together find the very life of domestic commitment that Gurov has for years been in flight from? As Chekhov writes, they both feel they “were within an inch of arriving” at a solution. But the only thing they’re sure of, the story’s ending tells us, is that their “end was still far, far away, and . . . the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”
If they do somehow discover how to close that inch of distance and answer Gurov’s “How?” it will happen out of earshot and beyond our view. And it’s fascinating to consider that perhaps the solution escaped Chekhov’s eyes and ears as well; that he himself didn’t know the couple’s future much more certainly than we do. For he wrote three versions of a crucial phrase that comes very near the end. Gurov and Anna, as Chekhov first had it, “felt that this love of theirs had made them both better.” After which he reconsidered, and sent them off with their dilemma, bonded now by a more tempered love, one that had merely “changed them both for the better,” the emphasis mine. But apparently even that modest alteration was finally too transformative for Chekhov. As published in translation, Gurov and Anna only feel that their love has “changed them both.” Not made them better? Not even changed them for the better? After all, they’ve both found devoted and responsible love for the first time in their lives. But no, in the end, something profoundly more ambiguous. For until, or unless, they find some way to live it, how resilient, how supportive, how lasting can that “change” hope to be? And how can we – and, maybe, how could Chekhov – be sure of its permanence when the story’s final moment describes the two of them joined in deep but stupefying affection? It’s on the strength of these uncertainties that the story vividly continues when Chekhov’s allusive prose is done.
A story or a novel has two constituencies, the readers of it and the characters in it,
and it seems to me that an ending that continues to resonate, that creates a kind of lyrical half-life as it closes on the page, typically allows one of these constituents to see things more or less clearly, while leaving the other in a state of some bewilderment. Which one is bewildered and which one isn’t doesn’t matter so much as long as a lively tension between clarity and confusion is at work. Isabel Archer discovers, mere paragraphs from the end, that “very straight path” she’s sure she must follow, leaving readers wholly perplexed on learning she’s discovered it. On the other hand, in Chekhov’s story it’s the characters, Gurov and Anna, who search each other’s eyes for answers while the looming problem of their ever more emotionally braided attachment is predictable to readers almost from the start.
But certainly there are stories and novels that do end completely, the tale explicitly finished, its ambiguities resolved on the page. The Austen ending. The Dickens ending, with marriages made and fortunes awarded and all the narrative threads tied in satin bows.
True enough, but what was convention for the Victorian tale doesn’t align so naturally with our contemporary sensibilities, wary as they are and suspicious of the thought that any of life’s episodes can conclude fully, or neatly, never mind happily. To give a contemporary narrative such an ending is to subject its characters to the risk of melodrama, and to the heavy humid air of sentimentality.
Indeed, even the grand sentimentalist, Dickens, perhaps grown suspicious himself by that point in his life of the possibility of life’s happy endings, composed instead one that was remarkably contemporary and virtually astringent of sentiment for his late masterpiece, Great Expectations. Pip, subdued by life’s lessons, living quietly and working hard, his expectations modest, is walking along a London street “when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving, and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.” It is of course Estella, whose cynical gestures toward and withholding of love had for years captured Pip in a kind of frantic mourning. It is she who says to Pip, “I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip.” And then Pip watches her drive away into the teeming London streets. “I was very glad afterwards,” he tells us, “to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”
Unfortunately, Dickens was persuaded by his friend, Edward Bulwer-Litton, to replace that beautifully restrained ending with one in which Pip and Estella coincidentally meet on the grounds of Miss Havisham’s abandoned and crumbling mansion. Here, Pip tells us, that after a brief conversation, “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
It’s an ending more in keeping with the literature of its time. And yet for its time, though not to the bracing degree as the original, Dickens’s prose again plays Pip and Estella’s happiness in a decidedly minor key: the quiet, complicated promise, rather than the celebratory conviction, of the chastened lovers’ reunion.
If the most successful endings carry their narratives into a vibrant afterwards, it follows that there’s an endless (apologies!) variety of what we might think of as the direction that continuation takes. Most often it’s simply straightforward into the impalpable future on a more or less linear path. But there are endings that divide, that fork, and ask us to come along as they head first one way and then another, as John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Womandoes. There are narratives in which the protagonist dies again and again and again, meaning never, as is the case with Ursula Todd (“Darkness fell.”) in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. There are endings whose last moments change the very foundation we’ve had reason to assume the narrative rests on. If this change seems credibly rooted once we learn of it, we’re apt to make a full reversal of direction, back to the beginning to read the story again.
In the opening pages of Hemingway’s “A Canary for One,” we’re offered picturesque paragraphs describing the French countryside, observed by no one in particular from the vantage of a train destined for Paris. Soon enough, we’re introduced to a single character, a middle-aged “American lady” traveling alone except for the canary she’s bought in Palermo and is bringing home for “her little girl” and who can’t sleep as the train hurries through the night because its speed frightens her and she lies awake waiting for a wreck. All of which would seem to require a narrative omniscience that moves freely about in both the physical landscape and the American’s lady’s internal one.
Until, half-way through, we read, “For several minutes I had not listened to the American lady, who was talking to my wife” and we realize who’s been narrating all along, an American man trapped with his wife in their compartment with the lady, who’s telling them how she’s just saved her daughter from what would doubtless have been a disastrous marriage to a Swiss man. She admits that with her intervention she’s broken her daughter’s heart — only temporarily, of that she’s confident — so she’s taking the canary to her as a peace offering.
The lady prattles on with ignorant certainty, saying that “Americans make the best husbands” and that “No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband,” until they arrive at the Gare de Lyons and as they all leave the station the good American husband who’s our narrator tells us that he and his wife will be taking up separate lives in Paris.
And so, knowing now this vital thread in the texture of the telling, we head back to the beginning to read a much-changed story again.
Sometimes an ending suddenly lifts off, rising and expanding for a celestial overview. James Joyce’s great story, “The Dead,” climbs and climbs until it reaches an altitude that allows it to see the snow falling obliquely, falling softly, falling faintly, “faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Joyce’s prose here has the definitive meter of emphatic poetry. The narrative eye sees all the living, and sees as well the inventory of the dead in its entirety; it sees, that is, all souls through eternity.
Surely, then, there’s nothing more to see, nothing that goes wordlessly untold. And yet I read Joyce’s ending as ongoing. How could it not be forever in flux to meet the challenge of a cosmic surveillance?
I spoke of the story’s concluding “altitude,” and it’s a concept that’s also keenly relevant to Flannery O’Connor’s inimitable fiction. From her earliest work to the end of her tragically brief life in 1964 at the age of 39, O’Connor conceived her stories and novels according to a strict thematic scheme shaped by her conservative, almost Biblically literal Catholicism. Reading her letters collected in the invaluable volume, The Habit of Being, one understands that her faith was something animate and readily accessible to her, a belief she embraced with a kind of cerebral fervor. That in essence it explained for her why the world and every living thing in it behave with what most frequently seems a deep, abiding mystery; often cruelly; at least as often violently.
Repeatedly, her stories turn on the active presence of God’s grace in the world and the unlikely, apparently undeserving characters who receive it. And as her letters make clear, she grew ever more frustrated over the years when her efforts to dramatize that action were, as she saw it, misinterpreted, when more secular critics and scholars viewed her simply as a writer of the Southern Grotesque school. In a letter to an anonymous friend, “A,” a year before she died, she says she’s been “battling this problem all my writing days.” And in another she describes the advice she receives from an intimate and mentor, the novelist, Caroline Gordon, who “is always telling me that the endings are too flat and that at the end I must gain some altitude and get a larger view.”
It’s fascinating, then, that in several of O’Connor’s late and most celebrated stories, the visions, the spectacles, the instructive parables of the King James Bible, come forward quite specifically at the end. Knowing her frustration, I can’t help but see these more directly referential endings as her at-wit’s-end decision to make her stories’ meanings almost remedially explicit, hoping in this way that they’ll achieve that altitude, gain that “larger view.”
In “Revelation,” which she wrote by hand in a hospital bed over the last weeks of her life, her protagonist, Mrs. Turpin, a proud, self-satisfied, racist woman who congratulates herself that the Christian life she’s leading guarantees her salvation, has had a terrible day. In the waiting room of her doctor’s office, she’s been physically assaulted and called “a wart hog from hell” by a young girl driven suddenly to violence by Mrs. Turpin’s unbearably inane chatter.
Now, back home on the farm and thoroughly shaken, she confronts God in imagined conversation, demanding to know “What did you send me a message like that for?” And “Why me?” And in a “final surge of fury,” “Who do you think you are?” Moments later, “A visionary light settled in her eyes” and made “a purple streak in the sky,” like “a swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire,” upon which “she saw a vast horde of souls rumbling towards heaven.” There were “whole companies of white trash”; there were “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” And bringing up the rear, “she recognized at once [people] like herself,” required to pass first through the burning fires of purgatory as they await their Final Judgement. And it’s here, in this vision, that she sees what she’s been blind to all her life. That indeed, like all of us, she’s led a life of sin. Her recognition is her redemption.
But if this is O’Connor’s impatient attempt to convey her stories’ meaning, to give them altitude and provide the larger view, there’s an eschatological precision here that I feel does the opposite. The ending of “Revelation” and others like it in her last stories — “Judgement Day” for another good example — reads to me as unfortunately anchored to the narrative ground by the weighty clarity of their Old Testament verdicts, offering none of the artful obliqueness I’ve been advocating throughout.
I think, in comparison, of the shocking brilliance of the ending of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s most famous story, when the deranged escaped prisoner, The Misfit, having murdered a husband, a wife and their three children, springs back from the touch of the Grandmother, the only one of the family still alive, as she reaches out to him as “one of my own children” and shoots her three times in the chest. And we are visceral witnesses to it all, sharing with O’Connor’s characters the lethally intimate space in a ditch in the Georgia countryside, taking in the terror of an ending that is horrifying, mesmerizing, and anything but flat. Wishing for altitude would be akin to fleeing the scene.
And so, a story ends. It ends with blunt force, with impact. It ends with something more ethereal, a wafting trail of mood and moment. It ends on a tangent. It ends with a kind of rhetorical gasp. Whatever the pattern, the direction – straight ahead or reversing or forked, ascending or a metrically repeating death and return — we find ourselves as readers being asked, or rather asking ourselves, to take charge at the end so that we can, in James’s phrase, tell ourselves what is “never told”. We are readers become authors in our desire to complete the Jamesian whole. We are grateful for all that the story has given us explicitly.
And aren’t we at least as grateful, maybe more, for what it hasn’t?