In her newest book, Her Scant State, poet and visual artist Barbara Tomash presents an erasure of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady which, through its inventive formal procedure, illuminates asyntactical, nonlinear, almost stray activations by which we gain meaning. Tomash lifts the voices, ideas, and violences which animated James’ 1881 novel in order to explore how marriage, competing visions of the American union, and capital inhabit our most sacred inner lives.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a generous and lovely if naive young woman who aspires to something great—a destiny proportional to her spirit—but who is ultimately brought down, despite gaining independent wealth, when she enters into marriage with an objectifying art collector and faux-asthete. As a pioneer of psychological realism, James evinces loyalty to his characters’ thoughts and actions as he explores essential American-ness and the intercultural connections therein. Tomash pulls at his threads, finding glimmering phrases and words which speak to the many ideological conflicts in the American project. Voices negotiate a union. Is it national, or marital? Tomash challenges us to navigate close, competing streams of political thought and tease apart folds where feminist counterpoint, the language of value, and national identity collide:
being an American crimes of violence rustled, shimmered
a beautiful subject the alienated woman
If Tomash’s poetic line is a chronological string of James’ words, that thread is put through a whole loom of Tomash’s own invention. On the top half of the page, words from the first half of James’ novel are assembled in free verse of a looser density. About two thirds down the page, under a full horizontal line, Tomash assembles from the second half of the novel. These grounded, “under-” poems use more prose structures as well as left and right alignment alluding to speech or dialogue. These feel more internal, like truths scribbled in a diary or whispered behind a room divider. The effect is one of constant motion between a larger, free form, “public” arena and a tighter, more intimate inner space. We navigate multiple streams of information at once, as each page connects two unique points in the novel’s chronological progression. One feels as if they are circulating through different rooms of a house, or as if the top poem is a question or statement, and the sub-poem its furtive response.
Mistakes around money—how it twists the real value of things and creates grave misapprehensions—are primary drivers of both artistic works. By joining James’ concrete imagery and abstract idea words together in threads, Tomash sublimates the discourse within. It must be teased out, re-read, a path chosen:
Words should make mistakes and want no breakfast and live on air, quietly, coldly.
All sorts of ordinary things—paper, lampshades, roses, fire, fibs, family—had designs on you. Writing you. You in the strongest terms. You if you can stand it.
Little by little, an accumulation of good wife. Proof of nothing, no theory, no path, no perfect little pearl of letting go. That operation drew her needle through her eyes. At the fire. Looking at the fire. He looked at the fire like herself. Transferred her eyes.
In collapse—this notion of layers, compressed and forever dislocated—somehow we emerge from grief and reckoning with a space to reimagine. Tomash amalgamates from James’ textual layers, turning them over, sometimes to hear James’ way of telling with his full phrasing, sometimes to create her own link using individual words. The opening paragraph from Chapter 5 of James’ work describes a wealthy American patriarch, Daniel Touchett, whose immigration to England complicates the national identity of his English-born son:
Daniel Touchett saw before him a life-long residence in his adopted country, of which, from the first, he took a simple, sane and accommodating view. But, as he said to himself, he had no intention of disamericanising, nor had he a desire to teach his only son any such subtle art. It had been for himself so very soluble a problem to live in England assimilated yet unconverted that it seemed to him equally simple his lawful heir should after his death carry on the grey old bank in the white American light.
[…]
[Daniel’s son] was not only fond of his father, he admired him—he enjoyed the opportunity of observing him. Daniel Touchett, to his perception, was a man of genius, and though he himself had no aptitude for the banking mystery he made a point of learning enough of it to measure the great figure his father had played. It was not this, however, he mainly relished; it was the fine ivory surface, polished as by the English air, that the old man had opposed to possibilities of penetration. Daniel Touchett had been neither at Harvard nor at Oxford, and it was his own fault if he had placed in his son’s hands the key to modern criticism.
[Emphasis added]
From this passage (with the first line coming from a previous chapter), Tomash assembles the following lines:
nevertheless, he knocked absented, watery
disamericanising desire so very soluble a problem
in the white American light “the banking mystery”
fine ivory surface polished his own fault
Is the first phrase a callback to the censure-turned-feminist slogan first uttered by Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell about Elizabeth Warren, “Nevertheless, she persisted”? Then there is James’ curious word, disamericanising, which calls to mind a kind of spiritual deportation, an exorcism of traits. The upholding of the gender binary and the “white American light” of white supremacist individualism are big forces working upon our inner lives, our personal languages. These are terrifying, constricting pressures, and their collapse, as it is imagined by many and fought for by some, offers a vital, opening release. We may not know what’s next, but we can sense, somehow, a collective reckoning:
She went to study the pause she had opened.
As we navigate these divided pages, one has a sense of participating in the work, using all of one’s faculties to derive meaning, which is itself a form of freedom. Awareness—of others’ inner lives, of the histories which penetrate identity, of paradoxes in the lived experience—is absolutely political; the codification of this awareness may be the great social challenge of our time. Her Scant State details a union’s collapse under the weight of its prime mover, Money, with a reminder that hope and dissolution are part of every union’s life cycle:
For what. Do. You. Take me.
All climates die. Continue, resume, insist. Winter was to imitate a woman. In trouble.
Prove it a crime, her marriage, her scant state. Finger this smoothest bead.
Her Scant State, by Barbara Tomash. Apogee Press, March 2023. 68 pages. $18.95, paper.
Amy K. Bell is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Book of Sibyl (The Gorilla Press). Her short stories, essays, and translations have appeared in Hyphen Magazine, Paperbark, Midnight Breakfast, The Margins, and The Forge, among others. She is an early childhood educator and mother of two living on Ohlone land in Oakland, CA. Website: amykbell.com.
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