La font sagrada

by Henry James, Alfred Sargatal (translator)

Entre els aristocràtics convidats a una mansió en plena natura, ens trobem una dona abans poc agraciada que sembla haver rejovenit d’una manera extraordinària —la qual cosa contrasta amb l’envelliment prematur del seu espòs, molt més jove que ella— i un home realment idiota que sembla haver adquirit, misteriosament, una intel·ligència captivadora. Gràcies a la ploma enginyosa de James, les converses ambigües, les insinuacions, els jocs de mirades i els flirteigs entre els convidats submergeixen el lector en el broll inescrutable de la font sagrada, que és l’única explicació possible d’aquests miracles.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, American, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Historical Fiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1901

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

For the last week or so I've been reading Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones.
By Friday, I'd reached the end of part one which finishes in fine style with the story entitled The Garden of Forking Paths.
Turning the page, I came to Borges's prologue for part two which reminded me I hadn't read the prologue for part one so I retraced my steps and read it. It's quite brief but offered me a few scraps of enlightenment regarding his intentions for the stories, including a possible lead to a better understanding of The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, a story which had proved very difficult to fathom. Borges says there are parallels between that story and The Sacred Fount: The narrator, in James's delicate novel, investigates whether or not B is influenced by A or C; in 'The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim' the narrator...divines though B the extremely remote existence of Z, whom B does not know. Hmm...

So I had a dilemma. Should I continue down the path I was already on and read part two of Ficciones, or follow the fork leading to The Sacred Fount. The very title seemed to indicate that I might gain in wisdom from reading it, and this first encounter with Borges had left me feeling distinctly lacking in wisdom.

Fast forward to Sunday evening: I have now read The Sacred Fount. Just as in The Garden of Forking Paths where a story can have a different outcome depending on which path is taken, the path leading to The Sacred Fount has resulted in me having a completely different experience with Henry James than I've ever had before. While trudging through the novel, I developed a fierce antipathy to his convoluted sentences although previously I had revelled in them. I want to go back in time and recover my previous feelings for Henry James. I want not to have taken this particular fork.

So there you have it. I rarely recommend books but I would never recommend this one. It has the unresolved mystery of The Turn of the Screw, the labyrinthine search for a mysterious lover of The Ambassadors, the gossip-filled, partner-swopping scenarios of What Maisie Knew, plus a narrator who seems like a parody of Henry James himself. If you do feel drawn to the novel in spite of these warnings, read it to see how HJ laughs at himself (at least I hope that was what he was doing). The unnamed middle-aged narrator is proud of his superior psychological insight, his ability to sound people's inner selves and guess at what makes them function. This leads him to follow a great number of paths (including those in the garden surrounding the house where the story takes place) in order to prove the truth of an astounding theory he has concocted about the nature of the relationships between his fellow guests at a weekend house party in the country. In the process, he draws himself and the reader into a truly terrible tangle. Both slink away defeated at the end of the weekend, each wishing they hadn't spent it searching in vain for the sacred fount.
It's with great relief that I return to Borges.

[Tara · Rating 1 out of 5]

"I know - but do you know?"
"I know that you know that she knows."
"But does she KNOW?"
"She knows that you know."
"But DO I know?"
"You do know, if knowing means that SHE..."
"She knows?"
"That I know that you know - but you know what that means..."

[Silvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5⭐ Un'opera veramente ardua da leggere, qui James va aprendosi a forme più moderne di romanzo, con uno stile (volutamente?) elusivo e frustrante. Un senso di ambiguità latente in cui il dialogo sottaciuto conta più di quello esplicito.

[Simona · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cent'anni dalla morte di Henry James (morì nel 1916), nel 2016 Neri Pozza riedita questo romanzo.
Ritorno a leggere James dopo molto tempo e quello che provo è una sensazione di straniamento, come se non fossi riuscita a capirlo fino in fondo.
La fonte sacra gioca sul non detto, sulle illazioni, sulle frasi lasciate a metà. Per la prima volta, come racconta anche Agamben nella prefazione, l'autore si serve di un narratore che racconta i fatti in prima persona. È proprio grazie a questo narratore che entriamo in contatto con i personaggi, entriamo nel loro mondo, nella loro vita. Il narratore ci racconta la vita di quattro personaggi, di due coppie facendoci conoscere la frivola nobiltà di quel periodo.
"La fonte sacra è considerato "l'esperimento supremo dell' arte di James". Un romanzo in cui la bellezza della storia si fonde con gli scenari e i palazzi della nobiltà.
La fonte sacra non è altro che l'ispirazione dalla quale attingere, mentre i personaggi sprofondano lentamente nell'ombra lasciando dietro di loro un velo di malinconia.

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

The key to "The Sacred Fount" is to remember that Henry James loved a good ghost story. An unreliable-seeming narrator describing a supernatural occurrence that, in the end, nobody else has actually seen, with a rather ambiguous conclusion, is much more "The Turn of the Screw" then, say, "What Maisie Knew", even if "The Sacred Fount" is not at all scary. The story begins with our anonymous narrator off for a weekend in the country: he ends up taking the train in the company of a fellow member of the house-party, one Gilbert Long, whom he remembers as being dull to the point of idiocy but now finds intelligent and well-spoken. Combining this with a previous observation that another member of the house-party, Mrs. Brissenden, appears much younger than her younger husband, our narrator leaps to the conclusion that it is possible for one member of a couple to steal, vampire-like, some quality from the other, and that Long's improvement must be due to a similar process. Since Long is not married, the woman who is giving him her intelligence (the titular "sacred fount") must be a mistress, and with a further leap of logic the narrator decides that she must be a member of the house party as well and begins to search for her. By this point the reader's skepticism has undoubtedly been aroused. Not only is the narrator's theory kind of crazy-sounding, nobody else ever really corroborates his observations, and his tendency to build amazingly complex deductions on the basis of rather scanty evidence (a tendency which only gets worse as the book goes on) undermines his credibility. As does the rather feverish mode of his narration, which suggests almost an obsession with both Mrs. Brissenden and the woman he first fiercely decides cannot be Long's mistress and then just as fiercely determines must be, Mrs. Server. It also does not escape the reader's notice that the minor, and even major, occurrences the narrator pounces on as evidence for his theory are easily susceptible to alternative explanations: e.g., if Mrs. Server is reluctant to talk to him, it may not be because her ability to do so with intelligence has been donated to Gilbert Long, but simply because the narrator is, to be honest, a total weirdo who has been following her around all day and is starting to creep her out. When Mrs. Brissenden starts the book's climactic scene by telling the narrator that he's crazy, the reader is likely to find him or herself in full agreement. But since this is a ghost story, James never resolves anything definitively. Is the narrator's over-stimulated imagination simply constructing stories out of, essentially, whole cloth, or is there something deeper going on, some sort of supernatural process in which a sufficiently strong romantic connection can transfer youth or intelligence from one partner to the other? It's left up to the reader to decide. In the meantime, he or she will undoubtedly enjoy this book: the narrator in particular is a masterpiece, and the way he endows meaning to even the most trivial of incidents ensures the reader is never bored, even though, to be honest, nothing much actually happens.

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure whether I was supposed to find this book funny and delightful or not, but I did. The plot of the novel is a bit hard to figure. Its narrator is a leisured society man who notices some unexpected changes in a few of the guests on a weekend social engagement: a dull, middle-aged bachelor is suddenly sparkling with witty conversation; a 40-something matron seems remarkably younger than she ought to seem. The unnamed narrator spends the rest of his weekend trying to discover their fount of youth and social brilliance. His detective methods are based entirely on a subtle analysis of social dynamics, with the faith that an observation of public interactions can uncover depths of emotional truth.
This is a book in which nothing really happens except conversations, and it's a little unclear what's discovered in the end. I think the book is a satire of sorts, but I'm not quite sure--I've never read a book quite like it.
Anyway, it made me want to read more Henry James, and to be a little more socially observant.

[Ignacio Senao f · Rating 1 out of 5]

El título sonaba bien, el autor aún más y la portada provocaba babeos en mí. Lo leo nada más adquirirlo, me daba igual dejar una lectura a medias. Mediante avanzo poco a poco se va el gas, y a las 50 páginas uno se da cuenta que esto es un SOBERANO ABURRIMIENTO.

A nuestro amigo Henry se le fue la cabeza con esta novela. Esta escrita en primera persona y todo transcurre en una mansión que no se describe, bueno, no se describe físicamente nada. Todo es sentimental. Una lucha interna que tiene nuestro personaje con quien es más listo y el más viejo. Y emperrado está en que esto es transmitido por la amada/o hacia el otro. Esto se convierte en un círculo vicioso repetitivo, una puta serpiente de uroboros, comentando y reiterando con una amigo.

Es algo insufrible este relato. Lo mejor es el final, que acaba él saliendo corriendo espantado de pronto y FIN. Se te queda una cara de imbécil…

Simplemente NO LO LEAS.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The worst Henry James is the best Henry James, FIGHT ME

[Δημήτριος Καραγιάννης · Rating 3 out of 5]

James is a brilliant writer that doesn't quite know when to stop, take a look back, and try to piece together all the elements of his narration into a cohesive whole. I enjoyed reading this book, I have not read anything of the sort before, but at times I was completely befuddled by its narrative. Would recommend though :)

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading The Sacred Fount is a lot of work but a worthwhile endeavor for the veteran James reader. The short novel stands out among James' work for its use of a first-person narrator (this is unique among James' novels) and, loosely, the structure and lingo of a detective story. James' narrator goes so far as to identify the situation that captures his prodigious attention as a "case" and a "conspiracy" and even allows himself to be momentarily distracted by a "red herring."

There is great fun to be had in reading portions of this as though it were a bizarrely reflective piece of hard-boiled pulp-fiction. The "detective" here muses on the prospect of lunching on knuckle-sandwich:

"It would have been simple of course (for the suspect) to desire to knock me down, but that was barred by its being simple to excess. It wouldn't even have been enough for him merely to ground it on a sudden fancy. It fitted, in fine, with my cogitations that it was so significant for him to wish to speak to me that I didn't envy him his attempt at the particular shade of assurance required for carrying the thing off. He would have learned from (his accomplice) that I was not, as regarded them, at all as others were; and thus his idea, the fruit of that stimulation, could only be either to fathom, to felicitate, or - as it were - to destroy me." (117).

It was a mistake to attempt this book at a time when other responsibilities were competing for my attention because it requires a lot of attentive power on the part of the reader. If I felt free to do so, I would probably be back on the train approaching Newmarch (I mean back at the beginning of the novel) at this very moment. The four-star rating is prophecy. I anticipate that a second-reading - when I get around to it - will be a four-star experience at least. A first reading of James is never very rewarding, especially when you're distracted by the question of "whodunnit."

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, my theory is that if this novel, from 1901, had been written in France in, say, 1965, it would have seamlessly fit into the nouveau roman category. Is this the real kick-off of 20th century novels? The firs avant-garde work of the avant-garde century? Maybe--I'm too lazy this sunny July morning to do the research. Finally James moves into the subjective first person to create a character (I may be wrong, but assume this is the author's only first person novel, although he did use the voice for many short stories), a kind of social Sherlock Holmes, who's hot on the trail of a weird, nearly supernatural theory (that in a love affair one person fills, at their own expense, a deficiency of their partner in a kind of symbiotic vampirism of qualities. This is fabulous as we're both tested, as readers, as to how much we accept/believe this radically interesting, but also kind of absurd, premise, as well as the reliability of our narrator to actually view and define such a thing--then his search for the secret lover who's made a wit out of an idiot. I loved the set up. Who ever doubts Holmes's famous deductions? Here we have to and all of their uncertainty is laid bare in a most interesting and gloriously ambiguous way.

This may be where modernism begins, well before WWI, with a first salvo in the war against the sacred paradigms of the 19th century, objective reality, history, journalism, political certainty, even science. Knowledge itself appears a shifting, temporary state at best.

[Jean Ra · Rating 1 out of 5]

Una pesadilla recurrente me acosa estas últimas noches: abro un libro cualquiera, nunca es el mismo, empiezo a leerlo y sin darme cuenta el texto se ha convertido en la Fontana Sagrada, en sus interminables líneas de no sucesos y sus fatuas conspiraciones entre burgueses aburridos y desocupados. Lógicamente, me despierto entre alaridos de pánico. Si hay infierno, en su biblioteca solo figura este libro.

Ghastly grim and ancient James wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on The Sacred Fount's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth Henry James, `Nevermore.'

[Clete · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of an interesting examination into James’s style as a precursor to literary modernism than a typical Jamesian tale. I find it oddly pleasing that from beginning to end...nothing much happens.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This turn-of-the-century novel by James is a surprising throwback to the kind of story he is best known for today: an ambiguous tale told by an unreliable narrator a la _The Turn of the Screw_. The basic idea, that couples come more and more to resemble each other the longer they are associated, is commonplace, but James turns it into a rather remarkable (and very, very paranoid) tale of mystery and intrigue that I found highly entertaining (plus, I devotee as I am of weird fiction, this kind of thing is right up my literary alley). When, late in the book, one of the characters tells the narrator as plainly as possible, "You are crazy!" it's very satisfying (and fun) to see how the narrator tries to twist and turn that statement around to fit his own version of "the truth." A minor classic, but definitely a book that bears further study.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my money, the best late James, exploring the liminal space between his late tales and his late novels. Discursive, elusive, perverse, obtuse, opaque, unlimited.

Read it in conversation with Bataille and Daniel Paul Schreber for a great time wrestling with the violence of epistemology, or something, OR SOMETHING. Anyway, I could also probably argue that this, out of all of James' 'novels' is most in synch with William's work. There's a book by Bruce Posnock on the subject I'd like to read, but, ah, what can you do.

[Des Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel is the perfect pointlessness. I can give it no greater praise, and I thank those who conspired to get me into it. I hope I have given it a new lease of life to outlast me. Even if I got it all wrong. Reviewer and Narrator alike.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere in the past under my name is too long to post here.
Above is its conclusion.

Today - the Goodreads star system does not really work for a book like this, as it does not really work for Finnegans Wake. And the Boke of the Divill.
I love and hate these books.

[Nikolai Nikiforov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Гипнотически-бессмысленная книга, прототип нового романа, прозы Гертруды Стайн, фильмов "В прошлом году в Мариенбаде" и "Персона", жанра мистического детектива и многого другого. Чем решительнее она настаивает на том, чтобы быть ни о чем, тем увлекательнее ее читать.

[Micheal Rumore · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrator's extravagant theorizing--let's be honest--initially had me going for the Advil, but the last three furious chapters redeemed all the head pain. Damn.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exasperating, but I loved the idea of it and how James depicts the narrator’s utter lack of self-awareness. That’s the problem with gossip. Or finding that you’ve been gossiped about. The narratives the gossip drags you into are both wrong and embarrassingly stupid.
I wish he’d had written from the POV the other people at the party. It would’ve been so much more fun to see them bickering amongst themselves as they scrambled to avoid that weirdo.
“Dude! He think she’s an energy vampire. YOU talk to him!”
“Are you kidding? He thinks I’m having an affair with YOU.”

[Jill · Rating 1 out of 5]

I cannot believe I'm giving a Henry James 1*, but this was so unbelievably painful. I nearly quit it so many times. 200 pages, and nothing ever actually happens. It's a house party, and the entire book is the narrator speculating about possible affairs. There's more to it than that, but if I told any more, it'd tell the entire book. It could have and should have been told in less than 1/3 the space it took. I felt vindicated when I read the introduction (after I read the book, because when I began the intro, it felt like it was ruining the book) and noted that James had intended it to be 10,000 words. That would have been more than enough. The afterword was very helpful in making a bit more sense of the story, since it provided a lot of explanation. It'll be awhile before I pick up another James. This one was trying at best. I'm now in desperate need of a very light read!

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not James's best, but the idea behind it is fascinating. I read this a few years ago in a Modernist literature class for grad school; I was the only person who liked it, which I guess is owing to the fact that everyone else was obsessed with Fitzgerald and Faulkner.

I enjoyed his language and found some passages downright funny. That said, this book is very difficult to read mostly because the ideas in the book are so complicated and it is somewhat lacking in plot structure. Overall, The Sacred Fount is worth reading if you are interested in James or his time period; but, if you really hate stories revolving around weekend dinner parties, it really won't appeal to you.

[Graychin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really love Henry James’s short stories and novellas, but I seem to read all the wrong Henry James novels. The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove I have never managed to finish. The Sacred Fount is shorter and therefore easier, but I consider it almost unreadable. The claustrophobic narrative, the thin-sliced psychologizing, the over-obsession with social minutiae – it’s too much for me. After a hundred pages with no "payoff," I want to throw a sandwich in my backpack and climb a mountain, just to get away from humanity. I probably need to return to the early James novels they made us read in college.

[Lynne-marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

James being one of my favorite authors, I must be circumspect about how I rhapsodize about this work. Let me just say that the current crop of vampire enthusiasts could learn a lot about subtlety and horror for The Master. To say more would give away more than I have already done, but I can say that this is an intricately crafted book that rewards the reader's patience in following its intricate twists and turns. The main character runs for his life and sanity in the end as would we in his place.

[Etienne Mahieux · Rating 3 out of 5]

James pousse jusqu'au délire sa propension à l'analyse psychologique abstraite. Il se peut qu'il y ait une "image dans le tapis" (qui échappe manifestement au narrateur) mais il se peut aussi que le roman ait pour but de frapper de vanité la recherche de tout secret. Je songe aux frères Coen qui se plaignaient avec humour que les critiques ne respectent pas assez les "ambiguïtés délibérées" de leurs livres...

[Shayda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lines up interestingly with some of James's later fiction and with The Turn of the Screw. We have a narrator who may or may not see correctly and who sets himself to deduce the relationships of others during a long country weekend. Is there something in it? Is there nothing in it? The nonverbal communication may be entirely created in the mind of the narrator.

[Carolynn]

This is a brilliant brittle book which perfectly captures the atmosphere of an Edwardian weekend house party whilst constructing and deconstructing theories of vampirism in relationships and the way couples grow alike. Dec 1998.

[Liza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally crazy like murder mystery with no murder.

[David M · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the weirdest novels ever written.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m more sympathetic to James’s experiment here than repulsed, though Grace Brissenden is right to call the narrator “crazy.” James retrospectively dismissed The Sacred Fount as a joke, and there’s a lot in that. But if it’s a joke it’s a morbid and haunting joke with a hideous moral at the bottom.
The narrator is “à plus forte raison,” a man whose habits of minute observation and analysis, and, above all, imaginative speculation, mark him as the emblematic writer and critic. On a weekend trip to an English country house, he is astonished to discover among his fellow guests a couple of his acquaintance, Guy and Grace Brissenden, that appear to have changed dramatically since he last saw them: although Grace is ten years older than her husband Guy (who used to have a “baby face”), she now appears uncannily young (about twenty) while her husband appears uncannily old (about sixty). To account for this seemingly reciprocal change, the narrator develops a theory that Grace is feeding off her husband, that she is drinking from the Sacred Fount of his personal resources, draining him of his life and all the while growing in youth and vivacity. The Sacred Fount is metaphorized as the sacrificial fixture through which one member in a relation gains energy from a second member at the second person’s expense. The person benefited by this exchange shines at such moment; they become “sublime.” The equation is summed up here by none other than Grace herself:
“‘Whenever two persons are so much mixed up … one of them always gets more out of it than the other. One of them—you know the saying—gives the lips, the other the cheek.’
‘It’s the deepest of all truths. Yet the cheek profits, too,’ I more prudently argued.
‘It profits most. It takes and keeps and uses all the lips give.’”
According to the synecdoche logic of Grace’s formulation, the lips are the more invested person in a relation, and therefore the most vulnerable and most willing to give. The cheek is the less invested person, who has the privilege of making use of the lips’ resources. In this way, Grace is rejuvenated by Guy’s youth, and Guy is aged in proportion. The narrator observes a similarly radical transformation in his fellow guest Gilbert Long, who, once a stupid Adonis, is now impressively clever, and becomes convinced that he is feeding off one of the women in the company’s cleverness in the way Grace is “feeding” of Guy’s youth. And here we have our mystery, the question which preoccupies our narrator for two-hundred pages of painstaking analysis: which of the women among the party is sacrificing her cleverness for Long’s sake? Who is Long’s sacred fount? The narrator exhausts unimaginable stores of ingenuity trying to ascertain who it might be, based exclusively on “psychologic evidence.” At times it becomes simply a game, an elaborate intellectual exercise based on the airiest data. In the end, the narrator manages to construct a “perfect palace of thought,” fitting everyone into his theory of reciprocal relationality, but Grace “spoils” it by revealing that Long is having an affair with Lady John, not May Server. Lady John isn’t at all “drained,” so this newly introduced evidence demolished the narrator’s extravagant theory.
As Blackmur notes and Follett before him, the novel becomes a parable for the maddening predicament of the writer and intellectual, who exhausts endless resources trying to capture reality as accurately as possible and is left, in the end, with designs that inevitably fail to capture something so intricate, ambiguous, and elusive. Like James, the narrator speculates ad nauseum about who is in possession of the real thing (love and sexual communion) because he himself, tragically, lacks it.

[Ronald Wendling · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Inept Detective”: A Review of The Sacred Fount (1901) by Henry James

This novel is maddeningly difficult to read and, I believe, purposefully so. By the time it was published James, who had long since moved to England, had also completed a series of what might be called “English country house” novels, all of them about living in an age of transition that had given up on certainties—moral, religious, even scientific. There were no longer any generally recognized absolutes, statements we can with confidence call truthful.

Appropriately “The Sacred Fount” takes place in a house called Newmarch, where another of James’s upper crust social “sets” is staying for the weekend. An unnamed first person narrator conjectures that this or that guest is “in love with” or “making love to” or, as we might more frankly say, “sleeping with” this or that other guest. But we readers get no supporting evidence for any of the narrator’s guesses, nor are any of them ever verified. It’s as though the conventional detective, who as the story comes to a close gathers all the suspects together to identify the culprit, simply cannot do so. James forces us not just to live in an entirely uncertain fictional world, but to become aware of its unsatisfying effects if it were real.

The principal object of the narrator’s guessing game is one Gilbert Long. Gilbert now has a spring in his step and a civility in his conversation that the narrator has never seen or heard before. He concludes that a woman must be responsible for this rejuvenation, but who is it? The cultivated but rough edged Lady John? The newly stormy Mrs. May Server who may be making advances to a painter named Ford Obert, or so that gentleman believes. Or is it Grace Brissenden, the wife of a much younger Guy Brissenden (“poor Briss”) who has recently become astonishingly aged and unhappy?

From all this speculation the voyeuristic narrator derives a theory that is shaky to say the least: when a married couple is widely different in age, the older partner, like a vampire, feeds off the vitality of the younger while the energy of the younger is drained away.

The “sacred fount” of James’s title is on this assumption equated with one partner’s sexual juices. But James, a repeated visitor to Rome, Florence and Venice and a connoisseur of Italian painting, knew all about the death and rebirth significance of waters once regarded as literally “sacred”: those in the blessed baptismal fonts of Italian churches, for example, and in all the fountains of European art and architecture. In the “he said, she said” world of this novel, by contrast, the suspected exchange of bedrooms has become the scene of a new and more risky kind of sacredness.

If you wonder why James would deliberately set out to irritate his reader, I think it was because his reputation as a novel writer was by now secure and, arrogantly or not, he could do what he liked. He was on the verge of writing his greatest fiction and becoming “the master” he would soon be known to be.