The Sacred Fount

The Sacred Fount is a short novel by Henry James, published in 1901. It is the most argued about of all his books. Some readers think it is a small masterpiece of psychological mystery. Others think it is the moment where the late style turns into a labyrinth without an exit. There is no agreement, and that may be part of the point.

The entire novel takes place during a country house weekend at a place called Newmarch. The narrator, who is never named, observes the other guests and develops a theory. He notices that one couple seems to have changed since he last saw them. The older partner has grown younger and brighter, the younger has grown older and duller. He decides that some kind of vital energy must be flowing from one to the other inside the marriage, that one person is drinking from the sacred fount of the other. He looks at other guests and tries to find more pairs that fit the theory.

Nothing actually happens in the novel in the conventional sense. The plot is the narrator’s developing theory and the conversations he has with other guests trying to confirm or deny it. By the end of the weekend his theory has either been confirmed in a way that should be impossible to confirm, or it has collapsed under the weight of its own logic. James gives the reader almost no way to decide which.

It is a frustrating book to read straight through and a fascinating one to think about afterwards. Some readers have called it the first metafiction in English. Others have called it the worst novel James ever wrote. Neither is quite right. If you have already read and enjoyed The Wings of the Dove or The Ambassadors, this is a smaller and weirder companion piece worth attempting. If you are new to late James, start somewhere else and come back to this one only if you are curious about how far he was willing to push his method.