No. 8. IF HENRY JAMES HAD WRITTEN THE CHURCH CATECHISM
Reading edition
Q. What is your name?
A. It may possibly be conceived as standing in a relation of contiguity to a certain—shall we say?—somewhat complicatedly rectilinear design—to put it colloquially, a symbol—employed by such of the races of mankind as follow the Roman usage to denote a sort of suppressed explosion, or, rather, a confused hum “produced” when the upper and the nether lip are brought with some firmness—or even, as one might phrase it, “snap”—together, and a continuous sound is compelled for egress to flow through a less harmonious though undeniably more prominent organ. Or, on the other hand, its relation to that so interesting figure may be something even closer than one of mere contiguity, however proximate, something in the nature of coincidence, of body and soul identity even: in a word, it may be, or, more exactly, may be represented by, that symbol itself.
Q. Who gave you that name?
A. Which?
Q. Oh no, not the other one, the quite inevitably discursive family “label.”
A. You mean my....
Q. Well yes, not that all so shared, and as it were almost—if one may forgivably say it—may one?—“vulgarized”—your, as they call it, “surname.”
A. Oh, not that one?
Q. No....
A. The other?
Q. Yes—that other—that more exquisitely personal, the more (dare one?) appropriated, the one of which, I had thought, we touched, even grasped, the skirts when our interlocution, or to put it quite brutally, when we began our conversation.
A. You refer....
Q. I am, dear lady, all ears.
A. To, in fact, my—since we are both to be so frank—Christian name?
Q. Oh, but you are great!
A. Not great, not, I mean, really, in the sense that you mean....
Q. I mean?
A. The other sense, you know.
Q. Yes, I apprehend you, but it wasn’t that one I meant.
A. Then what in the world was it?
Q. Take it from another point of view, wasn’t frankness to be, always, our splendid object?
A. Explicitly,
Q. Wasn’t it?
A. Oh no, I wouldn’t doubt it; I wouldn’t, really wouldn’t, let you down.
Q. Not even gently?
A. The other way, I meant.
Q. Divine clarity! And who gave it you?
A. The Deluge!
Q. He was it, or she?
A. Oh, never he, as he would himself say, never on your life.
Q. And she?
A. She would, as she always will, bet her boots not!
Q. Not, surely it wasn’t, they?
A. They!
Q. They!
A. Oh, certainly they! Who could have stopped them. Not miserable I, so pitifully, so hopelessly, so microscopically, futilely small! They were all there, and there was I. And they did it, oh, quite finally did it.
Q. Who?
Etc.