Her Scant State
Barbara Tomash. Apogee Press 2023
If, as has been said, Henry James’s late works can be compared to impressionist painting, then Barbara Tomash’s Her Scant State is, conceptually, much like the work of contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread. Whiteread’s resin, concrete and plaster casts of the negative space inside of doors, windows, rooms and buildings “show...something that is not, and can never be quite palpable” (Glover, Michael) and like Tomash’s experimental text “requires a constant reorientation of perception.” One of Whiteread’s first pieces, “House,” for which she received both the Turner Prize and the “K Foundation art award for the worst British artist,” (Walker, John) was a concrete cast of the interior of a soon-to-be-demolished Victorian building. Although the piece was demolished along with the building, the idea of an interior negative space made exterior, like a secret exposed, was a new departure in art.
Tomash, too, takes Henry James’s essentially Victorian house and makes us see it anew. Taking as her text Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and in particular, his character Isabel (“I had doubts and Isabel” says Tomash) the living (and invisible) negative space where we think, speak and breathe is enclosed in form, but imagined to freely move… Isabel herself moves within and beyond the time period and becomes contemporary. And, through the device of upper and lower divisions of each page, as well as the arrangement of white space on the page, there is also allowance for what Whiteread has called: “...not…a space to be filled, but…an absence to be acknowledged.” Readers have acknowledged the literal absence of Isabel’s emotional side in James’s novel (New Statesman) but the subtractive process of erasure adds emotional depth to the “absence” of James’s Isabel. In Tomash’s brilliant visioning, erasure becomes a construction, not just of an absence, but of an inverse and vast intellectual and emotional space.
The Portrait of a Lady was written in 1881 and was an immediate success. It tells the story of a young and independent American girl visiting in England who comes into wealth via a generous cousin (also American). Having come away from her country to explore freedom and partially to escape a suitor who she fears might damage her independence, Isabel’s desire is to do good, or at least as she says, to have the choice to do good. But through the machinations of yet another American expatriate, she ends up married, not to the struggling artist and sensitive person she was hoping to help, but to the shallow and rather cruel man he shows himself to be. As well as being a “portrait” of a young and idealistic woman, James’s Isabel as a character explores the place of woman, the idea of freedom for a woman, and its very real limitations.
Whether or not one is familiar with James’s work, or this book in particular, Her Scant State and the emotions and questions it evokes are very much contemporary. Even the cover of the book, “The Fragment of a Queen’s Face,” (from a sculpture ca. 1390-1336 B.C.) hints both that the form inside will be experimental, broken or fragmented (as an erasure will be) and that the concerns of women it addresses extend both backwards and forwards in time.
As introduction, Tomash has begun with “Note” (an erasure of “Note on the Text” in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel) and “Face” (taken from James’s 1908 preface to his New York Edition ) plus a delightful epigraph which hints at her philosophical and structural approach to Her Scant State: “As far as the limits of the room allow, I have asked permission, with a piano and with flowers, with phrases and gradations in speech, for a lapse in continuity.”
Tomash also gives a clear picture of her process/structure in the Source Notes at the end of the book: “Her Scant State is an erasure of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I kept strictly to word order but allowed myself free rein with punctuation and form on the page. The first half of the novel runs across the top of each page of Her Scant State. The second half of the novel runs across the bottom of each page.” The design of the book can work as a read-through of the first half or the second half, alone, but also works as a top-to-bottom reading of each page. The interplay between top and bottom also permits a fascinating contrast to, or alternatively, a corroboration of the reading above. Because of this generous arrangement, I have sometimes chosen to cite only one half of the text on a page.
Given that The Portrait of a Lady is the base for Tomash’s book, what does “Her Scant State” refer to? Certainly not a correspondence to James’s dense and detailed descriptions of clothing, rooms, buildings, landscapes and physical attributes, which by no means fit the definition of the word “scant." Part of the charm of his writing lies in his elaborate detail and description. “Dogskin gloves” and “brown velvet jacket” for example, are for the modern reader, evocative of time period, class and wealth. Tomash selects certain of these descriptions, but as with Whiteread’s works, there is a “reorientation of perception” in which we find ourselves in both the past and the present as if in a flickering light, candle to LED and back. The omniscient narrator in James’s work may see the characters’ blind spots but he does not and cannot capture the nuances of thought, almost proto-thought, of a human being. Rather than an imposed narrative, the ephemerality of thought in the fragmented selection of text and the feeling that is engendered from these fragments, are the basis of Tomash’s poetic project. Shifts in perception occur as the iteration of the process of thought itself as the reader moves from one persona to another, one reading to another, and the poetry of this is both diaphanous and powerful. Although “scant,” in this case the text itself, or the actual physical space left bare on the page, communicates a mental and emotional “state,” the “scant” erasure imagines a larger (more open) interior; an “absence” that allows “absence” and silence, pause and imagination.
Tomash’s story ( as opposed to the novel) is “scant” and the reader must interpret—as Isabel, or herself or Everywoman—(I have chosen to read as all three, yet it seems not a choice so much as a natural way of reading the text). It’s also possible to think of her “scant” state as being a state of mind not completely realized, or limited in some way, as surely Isabel is limited, at first by her own youth and ideals, and then by the manipulations of others.
James’s portrait centers very much on the theme of marriage; its great importance in Victorian society as a marker of wealth and class, as well as its limitations, particularly for women, a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation, but particularly damned if you don’t. Here Tomash brings her response to the institution of marriage and its “scant state”; if we take scant to mean the opposite of full or complete, expectations unfulfilled, generosity taken for granted, small cruelties of withholding, or the fear of being subsumed. In James’s book, the marriages are all precarious; all are marked by loss; there is “no perfect little pearl of letting go” but more a case of “made her drop her biography.” Tomash’s Isabel acknowledges these feelings.
In Tomash’s writing, the scant state continues even to the intimation of abuse; emotional certainly, and though not mentioned directly in James, implied physical abuse that unfortunately transcends time periods.
Isabel’s marriage is not the only scant state in Tomash’s evocative book. Henry James was preoccupied by the idea of being an American. The country was barely a hundred years old when he began writing, and he, along with others, seemed to believe that certain nations had certain characteristics. Perhaps almost as a point of pride, James seems to endow Americans with generosity, as seen in both Isabel and her cousin Ralph, for example. But many of the characters in The Portrait of a Lady contain American “types”. A quote by Madame Merle (an American, and one of the more unsavory characters) gives a brief metonym of another supposedly American trait: “the breezy freedom of the stars and stripes” (184 TPL). Tomash, too, selects the word “American” from her source, but her text implies a much less favorable perception, reflecting our own time in which we have come to a dismaying, if not horrifying, realization of a quite different meaning to the word.
In contrast with James’s ideal of America, class, wealth, and property appear as in The Portrait of a Lady, but in a more inflected version in Her Scant State. We recognize that many Americans have been raised in what in other times and in other places (and is still true today) is considered great wealth, to the detriment of most people in the world. In Her Scant State, a politically awakened and modernized Isabel takes notice.
Isabel’s considerations, angry and ironic (in Tomash’s book) are our own considerations. In our America, a scant “state” exists, with meager consideration for the poor, the oppressed, the mentally and physically ill.
There is much to touch us in Her Scant State, but another beauty of the book is that the experimental structure allows us also to read some of the work as a poet’s notes on poetry. Here, the poet herself becomes a persona. While it can be surmised that James as author is very much manipulating the writing of the story itself (this is the definition of a novel isn’t it?) and the narrator in The Portrait of a Lady allows his own thoughts to be discerned from time to time, in complement and contrast Tomash writes beautifully lyrical poetry, never more so than in this poet’s manifesto:
And in another poem that can also be read as a subtle commentary on writing, the wit of the division of syllables both calls to mind the measure of a waltz, and satirizes that romantic vision. The word “romantic” is broken and “nothing could exceed/this perfect”— the poet herself, perhaps, saying “Putting a thing into word pictures an essential need.” But there is also the necessity for “…so many pretty banishments.”
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In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel shows her intention, and James gives us a hint of her downfall, in the following passage :
“ I shall always tell you” her aunt answered, “whenever I see you taking too much liberty.”
“Pray do; but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just.”
“Very likely not. You are too fond of your liberty.”
“Yes, I think I am very fond of it. But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.”
“So as to do them?” asked her aunt.
“So as to choose,” said Isabel.
(70 TPL)
This passage is significant to both the process and the content of Her Scant State. In James’s novel, Isabel’s “choices” are not hers, although she thinks they are until almost the end of the book. Isabel is weighed down by her stubbornness and her youth, as well as her idealism, so that at almost every step the reader is imploring her to consider and to be truthful with herself, to let herself feel what she feels instead of directing her life. There is also the weight of inherited wealth within the story, the weight of being American (and the expectation of how Americans should resemble America) . This is the intended weight of James’s story but there is also the unintended, as Isabel is manipulated both by the story line and by James as author and male in the time in which he lived. In Her Scant State, we see and we are a different Isabel. Scattered through Her Scant State are the possibilities for her and for us, the openings for the “choices” for Isabel/woman that are not possible in James. This Isabel, in Tomash’s new language, thinks and feels differently, expansively. This is both a function of the erasure itself, and the process Tomash has set for herself, as well as the respect and love Tomash has for both author and character. It’s like arguing with a mentor, but in a beautiful and complex language forever unknown to them, and inconceivable.
Tomash has employed James’s novel as a plinth, a translucent one (like Rachel Whiteread’s “Monument”) that creates the support for a new and poetic response: an airy structure that lets in the sky and its weathers, with the absences of loss and betrayal acknowledged through time. The hope that may or may not be predicated in the end of The Portrait of a Lady is, in Tomash, very present. Isabel, you, I, have a sense of being able to speak our thoughts and emotions, and to feel them honestly in ourselves. The writing itself lets in air. The sense of possibility is voluminous.
Works:
Henry James. Wikipedia. 8 May 23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_James
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Penguin Classics. Ed. Intro and notes Phillip Horne. 2011
Appendix II: Henry James’s Preface to the New York Edition of The Portrait of a Lady. (1908).
Cohen, Alina.”Rachel Whiteread’s “House” was Unlivable, Controversial and Unforgettable.” Artsy. Sept. 24 2018 https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rachel-whitereads-house-unlivable-controversial-unforgettable
Glover, Michael. “Rachel Whiteread’s White Blight.” Hyperallergic. May 15, 2021. Hyperallergic.com
Rachel Whiteread. Luhring Augustine Gallery. luhringaugustine.com/art https://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/rachel-whiteread#tab:thumbnails “a constant reorientation of perception.”
Rachel Whiteread. Untitled Monument. Commissioned by Cass Sculpture Foundation; displayed on the Fourth Plinth, 2001. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/monument-310254
Rachel Whiteread. Wikipedia. Denny, Ned. New Statesman. 9 July 2001 "It's a simple trick, but an effective one, and the associations it conjures – heaviness and lightness, earth and heaven, death and life – are thought-provoking and manifold [...] Whiteread's Monument, as light and gleaming as the plinth is dark and squat, is the only one of the four commissioned pieces to allude directly to the plinth's defining emptiness. She sees it not as a space to be filled, but as an absence to be acknowledged, and she does it well."
Rachel Whiteread. Wikipedia. Walker, John A. (1999) The house that no longer was a home, excerpt from Art and Outrage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Whiteread#cite_note-25
Tomash, Barbara. Her Scant State. Apogee Press 2023.
Wilson, John. Interview with Rachel Whiteread. This Cultural Life podcast. Sounds BBC. Released 04 Feb 2023 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hws2
Carol Ciavonne’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Interim, and New American Writing, among other journals. Essays and reviews can be found in Interim, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, Entropy, and Pleiades. She is the author of Birdhouse Dialogues (LaFi 2013) (with artist Susana Amundaraín) and a collection, Azimuth (Jaded Ibis Press 2014). Ciavonne is an editor of the online journal Posit.
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