The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb Book

The Madonna of the Future is a longish short story whose resonance right now is audible, at the least. The story is an account of an American who has fallen in love with Florence and haunts it as he studies its art--notably Raphael's Madonna of the Chair in the Uffizi Gallery--and prepares himself to paint his own madonna, using a woman whose image as a young woman lingers with him even as she ages...and he cannot bring himself to paint her.



Years pass, and he talks about his intentions with visiting Americans as he guides them around Florence, but no one has ever seen his work...until our narrator makes an especially close connection with him and he is introduced to the aging woman, a handsome enough lady, and ultimately is able to see that she puts up with Theobald, as the artist is called, even though the only thing he has produced is a quick, lovely sketch of a child she lost long ago. The actual canvas upon which he intends to paint what James refers to as the Madonna of the Future is primed but unpainted; it bears not a single brushstroke.

Theobald claims he's been preparing himself diligently; he's been studying; and well...perhaps he is only half a genius, the kind who at least thinks even if he cannot act, but thinks well, thinks brillliantly, and has a response in mind that will match the Raphael that so enchants him.

What's the resonance today? The resonance, it seems to me, is that this is another one James's stories focused on Americans in Europe who have arrived only to be confronted by old Europe's staggering glories...which neither Europeans nor Americans can now match. The one continent is too old, the other too young.

And these last few years in particular have placed a lot of tension on the trans-Atlantic relationship for similar reasons. We are each other's closest friends and kin, but neither of us knows exactly what to do about it. Unfortunately Britain leaped into Iraq with the U.S., and just as unfortunately, all of NATO embroiled itself in the long war in Afghanistan. Tragic misadventures. Now we hear talk of a free trade agreement between the U.S. and the E.U. Well, how can there not be such a thing already? Because our cultures don't quite match up: because there are French fears we'll flood their movie market (more than we have?); and because there are little countries that could see whole industries wiped out if U.S. goods were cheaply available.

So we pivot to Asia? I'm all for Asia, but having lived in Europe for many years, I find James's image of an unpainted canvas to be a painful symbol of what we don't seem to be able to do with the civilization that gave us birth. It's beyond our imagination...and perhaps weighs down Europe's imagination, too.

Mixing Henry James in with free trade and Iraq makes for an odd cocktail, I'll admit, but his perplexity and sense of diminished capacity in the trans-Atlantic sense remains apposite. We're crippled in a two-sided political paralysis and Europe is fragmented ten times more than that.

James wasn't the kind of literary artist who, confronted with today's dilemmas, would deal with them broadly, but in this odd little story, he's got it about right: after all these years, and wars, and tourism, and talk, talk, talk... the madonna lingers beyond the horizon of the future.

For more of my comments on classic and contemporary fiction, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).