Anybody who can splatter this much verbiage onto the Web needs to have a favorite writer, and you're reading about him. Henry James has always attracted those interested in sometimes maddening complexity - which also characterizes our beloved Internet.
I was first introduced to James as a fifteen-year-old required to read a collection of American short stories in high school. One of the stories was "The Real Thing," an oft-anthologized HJ parable on the fatal and funny difference between art and life. The story seemed ridiculously better than anything else in the collection, so I started hunting up everything by James I could find. As fellow Jamesians know very well, there's a lot to find in this incredibly prolific author.
Nobody asked but I'll give my six-step program for as painless an introduction to Henry James as possible. This consists of six of the author's novels, since to enjoy this guy's work you've got to have enough patience for a full-length canvas.
RODERICK HUDSON (1876, but should be read in the New York Edition of the early 1900s). Wonderful split-self-portrait of James, showing both his wildly creative side and the brooding conscience overlaying it. Also introduces HJ's most memorable femme fatale - even hackneyed French creeps into any discussion of James - who proved too full of life to kill off.
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881, but should also be read in the New York Edition). My least favorite of HJ's undeniably great novels because Isabel Archer doesn't just seem too proud for this world, but too stupid as well. Maybe that's a little harsh. We can all fall into traps, and this is one of the most gorgeously described entrapments in fiction. Everybody talks about the famous forty-second chapter as a precursor of the modern psychological study. Everybody's right, but there's much more to see.
THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA (1886). Long ago your humble web-page author endured a hopeless and slightly silly identification with the hero of this wildly improbable combination of political melodrama and personal betrayal. James compared this hero to Hamlet and Lear in his New York Edition preface. Others have called him snobbish, wimpy and worse. At any rate, the FF of Roderick Hudson again proves dangerous to know.
WHAT MAISIE KNEW (1897). Coming of age in a degenerate society makes for a lively introduction to the wonders of existence. By the time the little girl of the title grows up, she knows more than she wants to but enough to get by. Terrific technical achievement as we never leave Maisie's gradually maturing point of view.
THE AMBASSADORS (1903 but written before our final step). James' own favorite, this book gets better with (my) age. Maybe I'm starting to resemble Strether too much for my own good. James seemed comfortable writing himself into the character, so maybe I shouldn't mind reading myself into him, either.
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (1902). Recently Hollywoodized with an actress who really looks like Kate Croy. The flick does a decent job of getting the ultimate portrait of innocence betrayed but triumphant onto celluloid. But James did it far better with measly old words.
On the front page I gave a link to James' masterful ghost story, or maybe ghost story, The Friends of the Friends, another link to his early tale, A Landscape Painter, and still another link to several illustrations of James' writings in their original publications. For those who missed them, I'll offer the links again.
The mailing list JAMESF-L offers a forum for often lively opinions on James and his work. The arguments can grow heated; I was once called a "fascist" for failing to see gay subtext in James' brilliant nouvelle, In the Cage. (Fascist moi still fails to see it.)
UPDATE: The gentleman who called me a "fascist" on the list is now working as a propagandist for, of all things, the Saudi royal family. Somehow I doubt that the imans in the desert kingdom are all that keen about alleged gay subtext in James' work or anywhere else.
As an example of the (fascist?) rubbish I clutter the list with, I've reprinted three posts I wrote on various collections of James' voluminous correspondence.
Wed, 2 Jan 2002
The pressing family and career issues that I faced late last year are getting close to resolution, so I've decided to rejoin the list. JAMESF-L had become too much of an admittedly enjoyable time sink, and I had to retrench and attend to more important if less pleasant matters. I want to thank the listmembers who wrote me in private to express their support and thanks for my contributions.
One of my threads which seemed most popular and useful was the series of comments on various collections of Henry James' letters. While I was off the list I didn't stop reading the published sources of HJ's correspondence, which by now number well over a hundred. This post and a couple followups will review six of these sources, with publication dates ranging back over five decades:
Virginia Harlow's biography of Thomas Sergeant Perry, with some eighty letters from James to Perry (1950);
William Roughead's charming tribute to James, with over a dozen of HJ's letters (1956);
Geoffrey Keynes' edition of HJ's letters to three Cambridge undergrads (1967);
Philip Horne's collection of James' letters to literary editor Bruce Richmond (1994);
Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm's complete edition of James' letters to novelist Lucy Clifford (1999); and
Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe's edition of HJ's letters to Hendrik Andersen, Jocelyn Persse, Howard Sturgis and Hugh Walpole (2001), the companion volume to Ms. Gunter's 1999 collection of James' letters to four women.
The Internet has made obtaining these once out-of-the-way editions as easy as a mouse click. Used book sites like www.abebooks.com help keep the expense quite reasonable. With the complete edition of HJ's correspondence still a somewhat distant dream, these partial editions have served a critically useful purpose in bringing light to the yet mostly unilluminated mass of James' letters. Bit by bit the darkness has been pushed back; about 3,500 of HJ's letters have now been published. For most authors this would amount to complete publication and then some, but we all know how relentlessly the Master drove the epistolary pen. At least seven thousand more missives await their turn in print.
Before discussing the individual collections, I want to thank Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe for their superb Internet database on HJ's correspondence. This proved to be an invaluable resource in locating publications and comparing different versions of individual letters.
Virginia Harlow's 1950 biography of HJ's on-again-off-again friend and literary dilettante Thomas Sergeant Perry offered one of the most important caches of James' letters published between Percy Lubbock's 1920 collection and the various editions assembled by Leon Edel in 1955, 1974-1984 and 1987.
Lubbock had published six of the Perry missives, which all dated from late in James' life, as you might expect from the chronologically unbalanced 1920 edition. Harlow added eighty-one more letters, some of which were later reprinted by Edel and Philip Horne, who also offered several previously unpublished items. All these efforts have made the Perry correspondence one of the more thoroughly ventilated in the entire James canon, with less than a quarter of the letters remaining unpublished. By contrast, almost two-thirds of HJ's letters to Grace Norton have yet to appear in print. (This is captious criticism of a fine book, but I can't help wishing that Grace Norton had been one of the "four women" in Susan Gunter's superb 1999 collection.)
Perry contributed an eloquent reminiscence of HJ's early days to Lubbock's collection. He told of James' first stories, which featured "sophisticated heroines, who seemed to have read all Balzac in the cradle and to be positively dripping with lurid crimes." Sure enough, HJ's first published tale, A Tragedy of Error, featured a heroine who seemed to have read all of you-know-who and positively dripped with you-know-what. James and Perry formed a fast friendship that lasted through the mid-1880s. The two then had an acrimonious quarrel, as HJ rather snippily related in an October 1, 1887 letter to his brother William. Edel (and Robert Gale following him) speculate that Perry became jealous of James' critical success and international reputation.
The two eventually reconciled and resumed their correspondence. Perry and his wife visited Lamb House in 1906, and James dropped by their New Hampshire summer home during his 1910-11 stay in America. Harlow's biography recounts the James-Perry relationship with not so much as a hint that the two ever became estranged. I don't know if she was honestly unaware of their falling-out or simply wanted to avoid controversy with the Perry and James families, who provided access to a treasure trove of letters and other papers. To be harsh, her biography is generally a bore because she's not a scintillating writer and Perry was hardly an important figure. At least she was candid enough to admit that Perry is best remembered for his relationships with Henry and William James, William Dean Howells, and other prominent American writers of the late nineteenth century.
And she was wise enough to allot over a quarter of her book to HJ's letters. In 1950 James' early letters were almost completely unknown because Lubbock had given them such short shrift. Harlow published dozens of letters from James' teen years and early manhood. Their precociousness is startling; the vivid account in a July 18, 1860 letter of HJ's strenuous hike through the Alps will make any reader forget that the author was seventeen years old. James can't resist deliciously morbid humor in his description of the dead kept at the hospice of St. Bernard: "At a little distance from the hospice is the house where the corpses of those found in the snow are placed. As they cannot be buried they are stood around the walls in their shrouds and a grim and ghastly sight it is. They fall into all sorts of hideous positions, with such fiendish grins on their faces."
James also shows his lifelong relish for gossip in a March 27, 1860 missive: "B., Robeson tells us, B. of the flashing eyes and rosy cheeks, B. of untarnished reputation, B. of Bull St. is still worshiped in her own temple and by her own admirers, notably by Wetmore (bless his little heart!) who promised, between ourselves, to KISS HER THE NEXT TIME HE CALLED AT BULL ST.!!" I don't know who B. was or whether she got kissed, but she'll always have a sprightly memorial in HJ's pages. James could even turn serious and allow his mind to be violated by ideas (pace T.S. Eliot). In a November, 1863 letter he launches a long but not dull discussion of human prejudice, though he appears more than a little uncomfortable with such abstract theorizing.
As the correspondence stretches into the 1880s, James turns more to a mature evaluation of the literary talent in the room. He defends Emile Zola's seriousness of purpose, for example, while humorously deprecating his tic-like propensity for the sordid ("merde au naturel" is his label for one of Zola's productions). His opinion of Turgenev remains ever enthusiastic, though he sighs in an April 18, 1877 letter that Virgin Soil is "the weakest of his long stories." A November 25, 1883 letter dismisses Trollope's autobiography as "one of the most curious & amazing books in all literature, for its density, blockishness & general thickness & soddenness. Not a voice has been lifted to say so. But I must do it, sometime & somewhere."
James gives affectionate and reserved praise to Perry's own efforts, but the lukewarm temperature is unmistakable. HJ was tiring of Perry's increasingly dogmatic view that literature should serve the cause of political democracy, as a June, 1883 letter makes clear. "I can imagine no coterie-literature more coterie than a class of novel devoted to the portrayal of the professional democrat," James argues. Harlow, again apparently trying to avoid controversy, didn't publish this letter but it eventually appeared in Horne's epistolary biography. The two finally broke completely over a harsh personal letter from Perry to James. In the previously mentioned letter to his brother, HJ denounced Perry as a "singularly poor creature" and a "hopeless mediocrity." I don't know if Harlow was aware of this letter (of course, Lubbock hadn't published it because Perry was still alive) but she probably wouldn't have used it, anyway.
After a break of twenty years the correspondence resumed in 1906 with all the courtliness, humor and affection of James' late epistolary style. In a May 20, 1908 letter James wishes Perry well on a trip to Russia: "How thrilling to drive in a droshky & to drink vodkha & to dine with a barina & to be served by a moujik & to exercise on a steppe - & in short to do all the intimate and Turgeneffian things!" A July 28, 1909 letter reveals James' affection for and scarcely veiled envy of his old friend William Dean Howells: "His critical opinions grow more beautifully ingenuous, or less & less sophisticated as he grows older - & his 'output' in the magazines more & more prodigious in amount. His health, his animation, his production & his fidelity to his old standards & serenities of judgment are wonderful at his age - & it has all, I infer, made him RICH beyond the dreams of avarice."
The later letters are particularly valuable as documents on James' autobiographical books, A Small Boy and Others, and Notes of a Son and Brother. Letters of September 17, 1913 and October 12, 1913 request Perry's help in authenticating various dates and facts about James' lost relatives: "It's among ghosts, isn't it, that I invite you to walk, Thomas?" HJ didn't much care for the American reviews of his autobiography, though. An August 13, 1913 letter about the notices of A Small Boy sighs: "I felt it [the book] could only be AMERICANLY understood; but it doesn't, chez nous, seem to have been Americanly understood in the least, or anything but Americanly & illiterately & childishly derided & abused. The mere MANNERS of that 'press' to an old & venerable literary party, of great dignity of record, who has grown grey & bald & fat and unrewarded in - so to speak - its service!" The letters section concludes with a simple but affecting February 2, 1916 missive from William James' son Henry to Perry about HJ's deteriorating condition after his series of strokes.
Harlow definitely does not over-edit the letters; footnotes are very rare, HJ's frequent French goes blithely untranslated, and no headnotes set the scene. Admittedly, there are some references to the letters in the main body of the biography, which clarify certain points. On the whole I prefer James' letters with a minimum of scholarly apparatus, but a few more annotations might have helped here. Harlow does print the letters entire, with ellipses used only when the text is illegible. She doesn't flinch even when James uses a variant of the n-word in a January 23, 1882 letter to describe Washington, D.C.
Irrelevant personal aside: whenever I see that word in print, I can't help thinking of an old Sports Illustrated story about baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson. Seems that one day in the locker room Jackson couldn't find a comb for his afro, so he implored his teammates: "How come, with all the niggers on this team, I got no pick?" Oh well, maybe even Reggie Jackson is more careful about his language nowadays. Even more irrelevant personal aside: James once used the word "dago" in his essay, The Question of Our Speech. Immediately I thought of Roger Kahn quoting Brooklyn rightfielder Carl Furillo in The Boys of Summer: "If that son of a bitch Maglie throws at my head again, I'll break my bat across his fucking dago head." Perhaps James might have handled locker room conversation better than one may have anticipated.
James' language is all sweetness and light in his delightful letters to crime writer William Roughead. Readers of James' letters know how harshly critical he could become of his correspondents' artistic efforts. We'll see all too much evidence in the Demoor/Chisholm and Gunter/Jobe books. But his posts to Roughead convey nothing but deep and sensitive appreciation for the lawyer's eloquent accounts of famous English and Scottish trials.
William Roughead has been called "the Henry James of crime." That's not my phrase; you can read an essay with the title at:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13822
The two writers certainly formed a mutual admiration society. After Roughead's death in 1952 his son published selected editions of his father's voluminous work. The second, Tales of the Criminous, appeared in 1956 and featured Roughead's graceful thanks for HJ's enthusiasm: "This appreciation of gore was surprisingly shared by Henry James, the most urbane, most delicate and most fastidious of men of letters. From the time of my first book in 1913 until the end of his days he read all my essays in crime, and was wont to write to me of their modest merits in terms of gracious appreciation, very heartening to an unknown contemporary, who was thus all generously encouraged to proceed upon his nefarious course."
This snippet of Roughead's prose should reveal why he and James were such kindred spirits. The subtle humor, teasing sentence structure, and precise phrasing remind the reader of, say, James' style in the late 1880s. Come to think of it, The Aspern Papers is a crime story of a sort, and one that reads as if Roughead recorded it.
Lubbock had printed four of HJ's letters to Roughead, and Edel would add another. But Tales of the Criminous offers another nine letters, and there are apparently a couple others still unpublished (including one written just a few days before James' first stroke in 1915.) As Roughead testifies - legal term - James always offered praise and encouragement. A typical grace note begins an August 9, 1913 letter: "Dear Mr. Roughead, I like your writing me again - you write so well! Don't think me patronizing if I say that this fact, so apparent in your volume, is also testified to [legal term again - ed.] by your letters. And don't remark either that I may most naturally think you write well when honeyed words to my address form so large a part of that writing. The purpose of these few words at any rate is just to express my pleasure in your keeping up the good work as you tell me."
An interesting feature of HJ's letters to Roughead is his preference for accounts of more recent crimes. This relates to a discussion on the list a while back, when James' delight in a "palpable imaginable VISITABLE past" was contrasted to his uncertainty in dealing with more ancient times. The August 9, 1913 letter continues: "I'm not sure that I can enter into such matters best when they are VERY archaic or remote from our familiarities, for then the testimony [again! - ed.] to manners and morals is rather blurred for me by the WHOLE barbarism. But I can more or less swallow a couple centuries."
James praises a number of Roughead's individual works, and he offers professional sympathy in a January 22, 1915 letter when Roughead was dropped by a magazine called The Juridical Review: "Had I not been long ago quite supremely enlightened as to editorial ineptitude in general the illustration of it given me by your news of the Juridical's failure to follow the course of its indicated highest interest would be more vividly illuminating. But I have from far back observed the ways of the tribe at large and could have guaranteed that just at the very juncture when your admirable light hand would MOST relievingly and contrastingly officiate that active member would be brushed aside for the sweet sake of a more consistent ponderosity." James had battled editors more than a few times himself.
The Roughead correspondence is by no means one of the most important in the James canon, but there are none more entertaining. And the rest of Tales of the Criminous provides delicious reading.
Next week, it's the turn of the Keynes and Horne books.
Wed, 9 Jan 2002
I'll skip ahead in the discussion of HJ letter collections to a couple of significant recent publications: the complete edition of James' letters to Lucy Clifford (1999), and the selected edition of his letters to four younger men (2001). We'll double back later to pick up the slim volumes published by Keynes in 1967 and Horne in 1994, along with the Edel-Powers 1957 edition of HJ's letters to Elizabeth Jordan, the editor of Harper's Bazar.
Fate has been rather cruel to Lucy Clifford, who is now chiefly remembered for her marriage to a brilliant mathematician and her friendship with a brilliant novelist. Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm, the editors of the James-Clifford letters, make the best case possible for the fiction of "Dearest Lucy C.", but only a couple of her children's stories have recently seen print. Born in 1846, Lucy Lane married geometer W.K. Clifford in 1875 and was quickly widowed by Clifford's all too untimely death in 1879. In the quirky but highly enjoyable Men of Mathematics (couldn't get away with that title nowadays) E.T. Bell applies Newton's assessment of Cotes to Clifford: "If he had lived we might have known something."
W.K. Clifford still managed to make valuable contributions to non-Euclidean geometry, and his 1870 monograph, On the Space-Theory of Matter, anticipated Einstein's general theory of relativity. Bell quotes this paper, which is quite accessible to non-mathematicians and proves that math geeks can sometimes write English. Clifford was a particular disciple of Riemann, and even if he didn't prove the Riemann Hypothesis, his name still crops up in historical discussions of Riemann surfaces.
Left with two young children and a lot of bills to pay, Lucy Clifford embarked on a career as a journalist, novelist and playwright. She enjoyed at least a fair measure of success; Edel's biography describes her as "a hearty, energetic, mothering, enveloping woman, direct in her conversation and formidable in her ability to get things done." She ran a literary salon in London that always attracted James, and their friendship steadily ripened over the years, as the increasingly affectionate letters demonstrate. By 1912 James was gushing after a night of dinner and play-going: "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much and see you for nine times that I see Others? Therefore I think that - if you want it made plain to the meanest intelligence - I love you more than I love Others."
There's some more of this treacle in the June 5, 1912 letter, but I'll spare the list. James would start his letters to Clifford with "Beloved girl" or some such, and once even signed off as "Ever your Lambkin." This is probably just fanciful wordplay on Lamb House, but it still sets some kind of record for Jamesian epistolary sugariness. Even in the midst of the murkiest mushiness, though, James shows that he is "damned critical - for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned humbug," as he grouses in a July 19, 1909 missive. That syrupy 1912 letter continued with blistering criticism of the play (Beerbohm Tree's version of Othello) HJ attended with Clifford: "It was indeed an utterly contemptible and even ignoble exhibition from beginning to end and in every particular."
James could wax almost as harshly critical of his dearest Lucy C.'s own productions. In fact, the James-Clifford correspondence reminds me strongly of HJ's letters to Hugh Walpole, with the same mixture of deep affection and occasionally tough criticism. James got particularly blunt about Clifford's plays. He complained in an October 2, 1901 letter that Lucy's play, A Supreme Moment, exhibited "a kind of inwardness that doesn't become an outwardness - effectively - theatrically." He makes similar comments later about Clifford's play, The Long Duel: "...it deals with a STATE, a position, a situation (of the 'static' kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a progression; which fact, highly favorable for a tale, a psychological picture, is detrimental to its TENSENESS - to its being matter for a play."
It's hard not to recognize this as the standard explanation of HJ's own failure as a playwright. Armchair psychologists can rejoice over a classic case of projection. Besides literary questions the letters range over subjects from James' search for a housekeeper to gossip about various London acquaintances to sympathy for Clifford's occasional family troubles. Particularly affecting are HJ's letters during World War I; he shared Lucy C.'s appalled revulsion from the slaughter and thorough contempt for Germany.
The editors generally do the kind of job I like on James' letters: light on the footnotes, terse in the introduction, skimpy on academic apparatus. But I'll risk a couple quibbles. For less than clear reasons the editors show some animus towards Percy Lubbock, who assembled the first general collection of James' letters. In fact, Lubbock gave a fair amount of space to the Clifford letters, using eight of them in his two volumes. But the editors still slam him for not acknowledging Theodora Bosanquet's supposedly crucial role in his edition. To my knowledge Bosanquet herself never claimed any such importance in the edition, so it's rather hard to see why the editors go out of their way to bash the put-upon Percy.
Another odd note occurs when the editors detect an "intense distaste for the suffragette movement" on HJ's part. Previously published letters to William Dean Howells (March 27, 1912) and Thomas Sergeant Perry (March 21, 1912) make it clear that James was, in fact, blissfully indifferent to the suffrage issue. He did get a little upset when a loony suffragette slashed his portrait by Sargent, but you can't blame him for that.
These quibbles should not detract from anybody's enjoyment of the book. It's not the easiest volume to get hold of, but the correspondence is worth the search.
Not content with their major contributions in the Internet calendar of James' correspondence, Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe recently released an important collection of James' letters to Hendrik Andersen, Jocelyn Persse, Howard Sturgis and Hugh Walpole. A little over half the letters were previously unpublished. A dust-jacket blurb teasingly promises that some of the missives are "love letters in every sense." I'll be generous and just say that dust-jacket blurbs aren't always absolutely accurate. The editors much more modestly confess in their foreword: "In short, the reader who seeks herein the single sustained note of ardor will be disappointed." You might call this massive understatement. The letters actually turn bitterly critical on many occasions - but those occasions may just be the most valuable passages in the correspondence.
Ever since the fourth volume of Edel's biography appeared in 1969, sculptor Hendrik Andersen has been the hot candidate as a possible violator of James' self-proclaimed "celibate" status. Alas, James' letters to Andersen don't settle the issue one way or the other. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Master would be quite satisfied with that tantalizing inconclusiveness. After all, the dispute gets people talking about James in highly charged language, as seen in the Great Slate Debate. (For a link to this, er, spirited discussion of James' sexuality, see www.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway.)
James certainly expresses deep affection for Andersen, particularly in the earlier letters before nasty disillusionment (artistic and personal) sets in. But there are never any explicit, unmistakable references to sexual activity. James gets downright Rabelaisian at times concerning Andersen's statues, with their "myriads of penises & bottoms & other private ornaments", but there's never any talk of Andersen's own privates.
So was the affection in the letters ever "acted out"? Edel hems and haws and backpedals and forward-pedals for a painfully long paragraph in the biography, then finally sighs: "...technically, the inquiry would be inconclusive." With all due respect to the Slate debaters, this shrug of the biographer's shoulders may be as close as we ever get to the truth.
Edel pretty well picked over the Andersen letters in collections dating back to 1955. He even quoted one letter (without mentioning Andersen by name) in the foreword to his HJ bibliography. Rosella Zorzi published the complete correspondence in 2000, but at least a number of the letters deserve republication. Certainly, the letters of April 14, 1912, November 28, 1912, and September 14, 1913, with their brilliant arguments for moderation, proportion, and judgment in art and in life, can't be reprinted often enough. Edel printed the April 14, 1912 letter in all three of his general collections, and he was right to do so. One of my very few quibbles with Philip Horne's masterful epistolary biography is that he omitted these great statements of James' most sincerely held beliefs.
Remember Johnny Carson's line about "peaks and valleys"? From these summits of HJ's epistolary art, we tumble to the frankly trivial correspondence with Jocelyn Persse. Not that the Persse letters aren't entertaining and cheery examples of the "mere twaddle of graciousness" James could manufacture by the metric ton. Hugh Walpole assures us that James was "madly in love" with the dilettantish socialite Persse. We may have to take Sir Hugh's word for this, because the letters certainly reveal no mad depths of passion. Chatty and superficial, they clearly cost James little effort, and they demand little attention from the reader.
There's virtually no discussion of artistic issues because, as James himself admitted in an October 14, 1913 letter to Walpole, Persse was thoroughly uninterested in such quibbles. James did address a rather rambling missive to Persse after William James' death, but there are much more significant letters to other correspondents about the sad event. Even the wartime letters to Persse pale in comparison to many others dispatched by James during the conflict. All in all, it's hard to understand why the editors bothered with the Persse correspondence. At least they didn't give it much space in the book.
The editors faced a different problem with the Howard Sturgis and Hugh Walpole letters. There's certainly significant material in these letters, but it's already been pretty well ventilated by the general editors, Lubbock, Edel and Horne. The trio has published nearly fifty letters to these two correspondents, and the bits and pieces added by Ms. Gunter and Mr. Jobe don't really contribute a great deal more to our understanding of these relationships. How many times do we need to listen to James dump on Tolstoy (with the famous solecism, "Peace and War") for Walpole's benefit?
But I said that many of the Andersen letters deserve reprinting, so I shouldn't whine about the Sturgis and Walpole correspondence. The Sturgis missives most significantly concern James' criticism of his correspondent's novel Belchamber, and his friendly worries over the marital misadventures of Edith Wharton. This is familiar material to anybody who's read the general editions, but there's no harm in reviewing it. The most memorable Walpole letter for me has always been the notorious lecture of May 13, 1910, previously published by Edel (twice) and Horne, where James shreds Sir Hugh's novel Maradick at Forty in unbelievably harsh terms. Frankly, I'm surprised that Walpole didn't tell HJ to take a flying leap after that thermonuclear drubbing. Edel quotes Walpole's biographer, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis: "Many young writers would have quailed before such devastating strictures, but for Hugh they were spurs to fresh endeavour." Good for Walpole.
The editors do a fine job in minimizing scholarly apparatus and avoiding overly speculative introductions. I particularly like their immediate translations of James' frequent French and Italian. Not everybody is "demoralised falsified polyglot," as James described Charlotte Stant.
Wed, 15 Jan 2002
Three slender but interesting books round out this series of comments on HJ letter collections. The first published was Leon Edel and Lyall Powers' 1957 collection of letters from James to Harper's Bazar editor Elizabeth Jordan. From 1906 through 1910 James found what might seem an odd market for his wares in the fashion magazine. But fashionable or not, the magazine paid well and James contributed four substantial items to its pages: the 1906-07 essays on the speech and manners of American women, the Married Son chapter of the collaborative novel The Whole Family, and the uncharacteristic but fascinating discussion of immortality, Is There a Life After Death?
BTW, the three nonfiction pieces recently appeared in Pierre Walker's Henry James on Culture, an interesting roundup of fugitive items, most of which somehow escaped the Library of America's lit crit and travel volumes. That collection deserves a review of its own. Certainly, the essay on immortality merits far more discussion than it has received, though the final words of Edel's biography echo its conclusion.
By and large James' letters to Elizabeth Jordan concern rather mundane publishing matters connected with his Bazar contributions. But as Edel and Powers point out in the introduction, HJ's business correspondence was virtually unknown in 1957 because it had been omitted entirely from Percy Lubbock's 1920 collection. Indeed, Lubbock prefaces one of James' letters to Sidney Colvin with a harsh remark about HJ's "complete inexperience in matters of business." It's somewhat remarkable that Lubbock used only three of the more than five hundred letters James wrote to his literary agent, J.B. Pinker. And one of those letters bemoaned the financial results of the New York Edition, again contributing to Lubbock's portrait of a fussy, cloistered, rather impractical Master.
Lubbock might have been mildly surprised at how hard James bargained in his letters to Jordan. In a November 14, 1909 missive HJ discusses a possible essay on the turning-point of his life, and makes some no-nonsense financial demands: "But I am obliged to make the Proviso that my Fee be $300 - I find it, commercially speaking, impossible to get under way & turn round, in an article, for less. I work very expensively, artistically speaking, to myself - to begin with. But I shall ALWAYS be glad to do a gentle paper for the Bazaar for the sum I name."
After a century of inflation and with today's far higher tax rates, that fee would be the equivalent of at least $7,500 in current pretax money. James didn't work cheap. In the event the essay wasn't written, though James did make a start that was eventually published in the later collaboration by Edel and Powers, the Complete Notebooks. HJ also talked in the letters about his lecture fees during his 1904-05 visit to America. He didn't mind collecting pleasant stipends for public appearances; a February 17, 1905 letter reveals: "I have just received the offer, fantastically, of '$400 or $500' to read something - in preference, by implication, some rare morsel from one of my own fictions - at Indianapolis - bloated Indianapolis!"
When he wasn't talking money, James was often pleading for more space for his essays and fiction. A July 27, 1906 letter apologizes: "I mail to you today, in the same manner as before, the Fourth & last part of my 'Speech' papers. I am very sorry to say that it transcends a little the 3,000 words. But read it, like it & forgive me." James also argued against Jordan's suggested cuts in his Married Son chapter of The Whole Family. A January 25, 1907 letter concludes: "Let me say that if you prefer to terminate my part at Charles Edward's simply speeding from Mrs. Chataway's door you are quite welcome. Only I do love, I confess, some of the appreciative, interpretative part about Mrs. Chataway that follows."
The cut wasn't made, so Mrs. Chataway's ample bulk remained undisturbed. That proved wise because she is one of the minor comic triumphs of the novel. James, by the way, pocketed $400 for The Married Son - very good money in 1907. He expressed "perfect satisfaction" with the compensation. He expressed less than perfect satisfaction with some of the other contributors' efforts, but Jordan was getting complaints from everybody about everybody in the troubled project. HJ particularly didn't like how subsequent contributors handled the novel's conclusion, though they actually adopted his chapter's suggested resolution and packed the put-upon daughter off to Europe with her brother and sister-in-law for a reasonably happy ending.
Edel and Powers edit the letters with grace. A chatty introduction recalls Edel's meetings with Elizabeth Jordan late in her life, and how he enjoyed her recollections of James' courtly manners and deliberate conversation. (She first met James during a trip to London.) The reminiscences unintentionally but unfortunately remind me of how time always wins. Henry James died in 1916, Elizabeth Jordan in 1947, Leon Edel in 1997.
On New Year's Eve, 1907 three friends - Charles Sayle, Theodore Bartholomew and Geoffrey Keynes - met at Cambridge University and decided to mail greetings to three celebrities. Two of the trio never responded to the posts, but Bartholomew's choice, Henry James, sent an appreciative reply. Eventually, James visited Cambridge for the weekend of June 11-14, 1909 as a guest of his three correspondents. On Christmas Day, 1958 the BBC broadcast Keynes' recollection of the visit, and in 1967 a revised version of the broadcast was printed in a limited edition called Henry James in Cambridge, with eleven of James' letters to the "Cambridge Three" included.
It would be silly to read any great significance into these missives, because James hardly knew his correspondents. Keynes' account of the visit never fails to entertain, though. He recounts how Sayle couldn't resist hurrying HJ's conversation along with suggested words and phrases, and how he conked James on his "large, shiny, yellowish dome" with a pole on a boat ride. Keynes also takes a roundhouse swipe at Desmond MacCarthy for a supposedly misleading account of the visit. At this distance it's impossible to say if the swipe was justified.
The most significant result of the visit was James' introduction to poet Rupert Brooke. A preface to Brooke's Letters From America would be the last piece of writing James would publish in his lifetime, and there exist memorable letters from James mourning Brooke's death in World War I. The most significant letter in Keynes' book, dated June 16, 1909 and previously published in Lubbock's collection, mentions "the Rupert - with whose name I take this liberty because I don't know whether one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) e or not." Lubbock may have deleted HJ's "darlingest Hugh" salutations to Hugh Walpole, but he let this line stand as written.
Otherwise the letters are mere twaddling graciousness, with the possible exception of a February 8, 1910 missive that declines an invitation to the Charles Lamb dinner at Cambridge. Readers of HJ's letters know how he usually begged off from public celebratory feasts, and he was particularly emphatic this time: "I have, alone, the very RELIGION of being vastly unamenable to dinners that have about them even the very faintest tinge of publicity or oratory. Such is my obstinate & impracticable & utterly consistent habit..." James, to state the obvious yet again, loathed publicity and zealously guarded his private life. That's why we have arguments in Slate about his private life.
An odd footnote in the Gunter/Jobe edition of James' letters to four younger men quotes an obscure source's allegation that two of the "Cambridge Three," Sayle and Bartholomew, were "playmates." We may safely assume that this is not a reference to the porn magazine.
In 1994 distinguished James scholar Philip Horne published ten of HJ's letters to Times Literary Supplement editor Bruce Richmond. Perhaps the best way to consider this slim, handsomely printed volume is as a practice run for Horne's later and very successful epistolary biography of James. In fact, that biography refers to a couple of the Richmond letters.
James published two of his final lit crit essays in the Supplement, and the letters often concern the daunting difficulties of getting his "late late" style into print. As the title of the book, Pardon My Delay, might indicate, James had trouble boiling down his comments to TLS-friendly size. In a June 13, 1913 letter he sighs: "I am sadly afraid you will find it [the 1913 Balzac essay] sins by quantity - but I can't NOW more slash into it: I have already slashed so much. My stuff has so devilish a way of causing its parts to be interlocked and interlaced with each other that taking out & leaving are a problem insoluble in a hurry."
Similar troubles dogged James' 1914 TLS essay, The Younger Generation, which eventually got pruned as part of what James called "a bloody trade." When published this essay set off public and private howls of protest from writers included and excluded. Hugh Walpole, for one, thought James' comments were "all wrong."
Philip Horne prefaces the collection with an elegant and amusing essay on delay as a characteristic feature of James' fiction and criticism, "refusing quick conclusions and embracing provisionality." He also sketches James' victim of delay in the Supplement articles, Bruce Richmond, with an affectionate and practiced hand. Finally, he discusses previous appearances of three of the letters in the general collections edited by Lubbock and Edel. He disagrees with Edel's assessment of the brief "bloody trade" letter as referring to the Balzac article. Horne argues convincingly that James was talking about cuts imposed on The Younger Generation.
He also notes that Percy Lubbock suppressed a reference to Richmond's superiors as the "fell proprietors" of the Times. I've been a little rough on Lubbock for his occasional deletions, but he faced a problem that today's editors don't have to worry about: many personalities mentioned in HJ's letters were very much alive in 1920 and highly sensitive to perceived slights. Just how nasty the reactions could get can be gauged by a case where Lubbock DIDN'T suppress controversial material. He let HJ's less than flattering comments to Robert Louis Stevenson about Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles stand as written. Sure enough, Hardy read the remarks and exploded: "How indecent of those two virtuous females to expose their mental nakedness in such a manner." Percy had to be careful.
Although JAMESF-L can fall quiet for long stretches, it often perks up with debate and discussion. In November, 2002 the list got busy with all sorts of Jamesian topics. Below I reprint my own contributions to that month's conversation. Among many other things, I get accused of "homophobia" and "facetious vulgarity." Note: the >> and << marks indicate quotes from other listmembers.
Fri, 1 Nov 2002: Those Pesky Flesch Scores Again
A little while ago I posted the results of computer readability tests on The Wings of the Dove and The Varieties of Religious Experience. I was rummaging through Google's recent news stories about Henry James, and I came across another irresistible opportunity for a readability comparison. I can't resist irresistible opportunities.
The Village Voice just published a book review called "Gods and Monsters" by Paul LaFarge. You can read it at:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0244/lafarge.php
The review discusses a collection of stories involving the supernatural. I've never heard of the review's author, but apparently he doesn't have much use for Henry James' The Jolly Corner, a story included in the collection. Sniffs Mr. LaFarge:
"The Jolly Corner is not the least pompous or prolix of James's works. The horror of the story lies in its syntax: Will this sentence ever end? Why does the narrator gibber so?"
Hm, I didn't remember the sentences of The Jolly Corner as particularly endless or gibbering. So I downloaded the Gutenberg text version of Spencer Brydon's adventure and let Microsoft Word run its grammar and spelling checks. The results:
Sentences per paragraph: 4.3
Words per sentence: 27.0
Characters per word: 4.3
Flesch readability score: 68.9
The words-per-sentence is a little high for HJ's fiction, but hardly horrifying. And a Flesch score of 68.9 is quite good. (Again, 100 is perfect, 0 is unendurable.) James' fiction usually scores in the seventies on the Flesch test, which might come as a surprise to critics who have derided HJ as, well, pompous and prolix.
The real fun, of course, was checking Mr. LaFarge's own review to see if he could beat the Master. The results:
Sentences per paragraph: 5.0
Words per sentence: 31.3
Characters per word: 4.8
Flesch readability score: 46.6
Oh, dear. Looks like a certain reviewer has gotten pompous and prolix. Will his sentences ever end? Why does he gibber so?
To give Mr. LaFarge his due, he does include a bit of rather inscrutable praise for The Jolly Corner: "But the careful reader discerns in James's compound clauses a spectral presence that is the mature counterpart of Lovecraft's teenager-friendly terrors: a grasping at the-almost-unspeakable gulfs not of the Beyond, but of the self." I'm not quite sure what this 34-word monster means, and it scores a richly deserved 20.5 on the Flesch test. But Mr. LaFarge seems to be trying to say something nice.
This post scored 57.4 on the Flesch test. Better than LaFarge, worse than James.
Mon, 4 Nov 2002: Literary Crime?
The Google cache of recent news stories continues to produce intriguing items. A new novel is set to appear that fictionalizes a critically fashionable deconstruction of The Aspern Papers. The URL:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,824015,00.html
The theory behind this "felony" is an old one, dating back at least to Edel's biography. The Guardian story, though, only traces it as far back as Lyndall Gordon's rather obsessive Minnie-and-Fenimore-meant-everything biography of James. I believe the theory is supposed to be clinched by the fact that Tita was the name of Fenimore's dog. Or was it her cat? Her niece? Her niece's dog?
In fact, Fenimore and HJ seem to have continued to enjoy at least a cordial relationship long after The Aspern Papers was published. So the novel's suicidal run by Fenimore around Lake Geneva seems over the top - or under the waves, as may be.
As for the theory itself (Miss Tita was based on poor li'l ole Fenimore, who suffered horribly as a result) I'll plead a "not convinced." It's not out of the realm of possibility that Fenimore contributed to the portrait of Miss Tita. But the differences between supposed model and finished character are striking. After all, the lady novelist made a decent living by her own pen and was hardly the naive slave of a greedy old witch. My guess is that Fenimore was worldly-wise enough to deal in a non-panicky manner with whatever similarities may have existed. Her sad death probably had much more to do with long-standing psychological problems than with a horrified reaction to The Aspern Papers.
But that explanation would likely make for a duller novel.
An odd note from the review is that the novel seems to follow predictable feminist lines, but the author looks a little ashamed of such unrelenting p.c. So Fenimore comes off as "a figure of slightly ridiculous middle-aged pathos." At my time of life, middle-aged pathos is looking more pathetic all the time.
I know I'm getting obsessive about this (Lyndall-Gordon-level obsessive?) but the review contains a swipe at HJ's "elaborate middle style." Yes, I ran the Flesch tests on The Aspern Papers and the Guardian review. And yes, James' prose proved much more readable than the reviewer's: 74.8 vs. 48.8.
You'd think that critics could take a few minutes and run the Flesch tests on James' prose before they dismiss it as "elaborate" or "pompous" or "prolix." Most of the texts are freely available on the Internet. It doesn't take very long to download them, straighten out the formatting with a few find-and-replace commands, and run the spelling and grammar checks.
Sat, 9 Nov 2002: more money matters
>>The inflation calculator at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ indicates that 10,000 in 1880 would be 182,000 in 2001.<<
This web page only calculates consumer price inflation and doesn't allow for tax considerations. James' own notebooks show that he managed to keep ninety-plus percent of his money. Nowadays, somebody in this tax bracket would be lucky to keep fifty-sixty percent in this country, and probably a lower percentage in the U.K.
OTOH, there are quality considerations. The range of goods and services available to today's consumer is considerably wider and richer than what nineteenth-century money could buy at any price.
It's obviously difficult to compare purchasing power over centuries. Some economic historians have used factors as high as fifty to convert mid-nineteenth century dollars to today's pre-tax currency. This seems high to me. In previous posts to the list I've used a factor of twenty-five. That number may be a little low for James' earlier years.
Catherine Sloper's ten grand would easily be a quarter-million today. Not Oprah money, but not bad, either. It's easy to see why Morris Townsend was interested.
Sun, 10 Nov 2002: HJ's real passion
Even in a letter of January 12, 1901 to "My dear Boy Hans [Andersen]" we find James praising the "pure & independent passions of the mind & the imagination." Such talk must be discouraging to those who want to gift HJ with some kind of physical sex life - especially when it occurs in a letter to the most fashionable candidate for a violator of James' self-proclaimed "celibate" status.
The key word in the letter is "independent." James seems to have believed throughout his life that sexual relationships with other people involved some surrender of selfhood, some compromise with the objectivity needed by the artist. This belief may conflict with the spirit of our age and is at least highly debatable. But it appears to explain as well as any other theory why James was so jealous of his privacy and independence.
Would it rock my world if it could somehow be proved that James was all the while rolling around on the carpet with Hendrik or Constance or his dachshund? Not really. (Well, maybe the dog would bother me a little.) I don't see how the issue is truly central to understanding his writings, despite the modern insistence that a writer's sex life explains most everything worth explaining about his work. Lord knows I've gotten into trouble on the list for this opinion, but I can't view the quest for Henry James' sex life as anything more than an odd sideshow in James criticism.
Not that the quest is likely to end any time soon. The book I used to quote that Andersen letter also contains a March 4, 1900 letter to Howard Sturgis. The Sturgis missive uses the word "congress" in passing. The editors rather desperately note that "one dictionary definition of this word is coitus."
Yeah, we just had an election for coitus, er, Congress.
Tue, 12 Nov 2002: Jamesian medicine
>>Does anyone know if William James ever commented on the plausibility of Milly's disease in The Wings of the Dove?<<
I'm afraid that WJ's comments on The Wings went in quite a different direction. A rather famous sample from a letter of October 25, 1902:
"I have read the Wings of the Dove (for which all thanks!) but what shall I say of a book constructed on a method which so belies everything that I acknowledge as law? You've reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, wh. you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre litteraire which I can't help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean) and all with unflagging curiosity to know what the upshot might become."
The average sentence-length of The Wings is significantly shorter than that of WJ's Varieties of Religious Experience, but William seldom let the facts get in the way of a good rant at his little brother. The snide remark about Henry not telling the story seems to indicate little interest in the novels' plot details, such as the nature of Milly's fatal illness. WJ did add a little heavily qualified praise to his harsh blast of captious criticism, but he never seems to have discussed the book in anything but almost completely negative generalities.
Tuberculosis is often considered the most likely suspect, but HJ's lack of weak specifications really helps here. After all, Milly loses the will to live because of Kate and Densher's betrayal in addition to her actual disease. So the clinical details don't matter that much, though James has caught predictable heat from unfriendly critics for not offering all the medical trivia.
By the way, Sir Luke Strett is one of the most favorably portrayed medicos in James' fiction. He forms an almost too pat opposition to Doctor Sloper, though Catherine's father was right about her suitor, after all.
Tue, 12 Nov 2002: James' emotional life
>>I would beg Casey Abell not to go on making jokey comments on James's sexuality -- they are not in good taste.<<
Actually, I was making jokey comments about the endless speculation over James' sexuality - and I happen to think that joking about that speculation is in the best taste possible. But de gustibus...
>>He also reached out in demonstrative affection to many friends, and especially to the young men by whom he was hugged and kissed so abundantly in later life.<<
I could say something like "define abundantly," but you might find that in poor taste. I don't have the foggiest how often James was hugged and kissed by anybody, and I doubt that any kind of convincing evidence could be offered on the matter. Again, we're getting into vague speculations that invite, shall we say, some humor. James might also have been hugged and kissed to death by women such as Constance Fenimore Woolson, Mary Cadwalader Jones, and Lucy Clifford. I don't have even an approximate hug-and-kiss count, and nobody else seems to have one, either. The entire speculation, as I said in my previous post, looks like little more than an odd sideshow in James criticism.
Still, we're mere humans, hopelessly inclined to endless fascination with other people's love lives. So I might as well get used to the quest. But that doesn't mean I can't find some humor in it.
To me the biographical fallacy seems a very short road to ruin. Whenever I read Hemingway, I *hate* the fact that I know Papa got all depressed one night and blew his brains out. That one fact undercuts his fiction in a thoroughly dispiriting fashion, robbing me of much of the enjoyment I should take in his work. Maybe the less we know about the writer, the more we can appreciate the writing. At least we wouldn't have to view the writing through a thick and perhaps distorting fog of biographical detail and speculation.
Wed, 13 Nov 2002: James' emotional life
>>However, as much as I like to think I am in the same camp, I cannot help but read biographies of my favorite authors. Is it like watching a train wreck while being on the train? Or is it my version of People Magazine?<<
I don't quite see HJ as one of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People. "Gee, Mr. James, tell us about your cozy little home in that quaint English village."
It's not that hard for me to forget about James' bio when I'm reading his stuff. Knowing Milly Theale was based on Minnie Temple doesn't make that much difference in my enjoyment of the book.
It's a little harder to forget critical disputes, especially when I look over that pet rock of the critics, The Turn of the Screw. I'm just too aware of the critical battles that have raged over every detail of the governess' saga. But like you, I can't help reading biographies and criticism about James and other writers.
From another listmember...
>>I thought I was offering well-known biographical fact -- my impression is certainly based on documents, such as remarks by people who knew James that what made him happy was to be kissed and hugged...<<
Edel told the story about how HJ once publicly kissed George Bernard Shaw on both cheeks. I'll leave it to others to speculate on how abundant hugging and kissing was in James' life. H's and K's certainly don't figure heavily in his fiction, as critics have noted for decades. The ancient gibe that there's one kiss in The Portrait and the heroine doesn't like it has gotten a severe workout. Was James all the while a mad smoocher himself? Damned if I know.
BTW, I wasn't accusing anybody except moi of the biographical fallacy. The case with Hemingway is particularly irritating. When we read The Sun Also Rises in high school, the teacher went into a rant that Hemingway's talk about courage and endurance was a joke because he eventually took the coward's way out and killed himself. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica article concludes with a Thumping Reminder:
"...he was himself a personification of the courage - which in a famous phrase he defined as grace under pressure - that mercilessly deserted him in the end."
Okay, guys, we get the point.
There's a moving passage in one of Hemingway's letters about how he wanted to be calm and steady, like Henry James. I think the letter was written in 1955 or so, when the shades of depression were getting thicker. Earlier in his life Hemingway had shown a lot cockier (hm...) attitude towards James, though he always had a sneaking respect for the Master.
Wed, 13 Nov 2002: James' emotional life
>>A charming Anglo-Irish man-about-town, Persse was not at all literary...<<
You can read a generous selection of James' letters to Persse in Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe's collection, Dearly Beloved Friends. Frankly, I think the Persse correspondence is mostly trivial, not very revealing of James or interesting for literary reasons. Edel also published a number of the letters in his various collections. The phrase "mere twaddle of graciousness" comes to mind.
Also, I didn't like Vidal's introduction to the Penguin edition of The Golden Bowl. It's short to the point of laziness and hardly says anything except Vidal likes the Prince and Charlotte and doesn't like Maggie and Adam. Those likes and dislikes are hardly surprising for Gore Vidal, and he can't be bothered to write the kind of thorough, helpful introduction that a Penguin edition usually offers. Shows what happens when you spend money for a name writer, I guess.
Thu, 14 Nov 2002: James' emotional life
>>After Joseph O'Leary's eloquent and judicious reproof, I would have thought the most graceful thing Casey Abell could do would be to pause and re-consider his homophobia and the facetious vulgarity of the language in which it is couched.<<
As I said, I've taken my lumps on the list for my irreverent view of the effort to gift James with some kind of physical sex life. This latest squib will have as much effect as the others.
If "facetious vulgarity" offends, there's an obvious alternative: delete my posts unread. I would also recommend that you avoid The Golden Bowl. There's this character named Fanny Assingham. How facetiously vulgar can you get? (It's probably silly, but right now I get the feeling that James is winking somewhere. Sort of like what George Withermore felt in The Real Right Thing.)
From another listmember...
>>I don't think James's letter to the young men he doted on were mere social twaddle.<<
I think social twaddle is a quite accurate term for almost all of the Persse correspondence. Many letters to Hendrik Andersen and Hugh Walpole, on the other hand, discuss significant artistic issues. It's impossible to generalize.
The correspondence with Lucy Clifford is a typical combination of sometimes oversweet twaddle and often insightful criticism. To be honest, occasional twaddle makes James' letters more readable for me. But when a correspondence is almost all twaddle, it's like reading nothing but People Magazine for a week.
And from yet another listmember...
>>I enjoy Casey Abell's contributions--wish he would just ignore his critics.<<
Thanks for the kind note. But I enjoy discussions with my critics, even (or especially) when they resort to accusations like "homophobia" and "facetious vulgarity." It livens up the list and helps me sharpen my own thinking and argumentation. And besides, I've been called a lot worse on the alt newsgroups I used to participate in. For that matter, I've been called a lot worse on JAMESF-L.
Thu, 14 Nov 2002: Aspern Papers play
>>Christopher Reeve!<<
He also played Basil Ransom in the Merchant-Ivory film version of The Bostonians. Seems like odd casting, and the movie sank like a stone, I'm afraid.
Vanessa Redgrave played Olive. Now that seems more appropriate.
Fri, 15 Nov 2002: James' emotional life
>>The same play of affection and humour, yes, but not the note of "yearning" that Clair Hughes rightly detects in the letters to young men. James loved women, but he desired the love of men. I suppose Casey Abell will dismiss this judgement as more wild speculation.<<
Leave out the "wild," and you've got my attitude exactly. Feel free to speculate all you want, but always keep sight of the difference between speculation and established fact. Many critics have offered the same advice to James' biographers, and my opinion is that the biographies would have been the better for it.
One quibble: I not sure if, in practical terms, there's much difference between loving and desiring love. In our humdrum existences the two usually seem to go together. But we're really getting into Oprah territory here.
And since you appear to mostly agree with my opinion of the Persse correspondence, I doubt that there's much more to say on the matter.
Moving on to a different subject...
>>This novel [The Golden Bowl] was the logical consummation of his striving after form, the one that fully realized his law of form, giving him his definitive identity as an artist. Unsurprisingly, he wrote no major novel after this...<<
James was sixty-one when The Golden Bowl was published, so simple age might have had a lot to do with his failure to complete another long novel. Very late in late he tried to complete both The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, but just couldn't find the energy. He did manage to finish lengthy nonfiction works (The American Scene, the autobiographies), but it can be argued that nonfiction doesn't drain imaginative energy as much as long-form fiction does.
There's a bittersweet passage in a November 19, 1911 James letter to Edith Wharton:
"You speak at your ease, chere Madame, of the interminable & formidable job of my producing a mon age another Golden Bowl - the most arduous & thankless task I ever set myself...I shld. have to go back & live for 2 continuous years at Lamb House to write it (living on dried herbs & cold water - for 'staying power' meanwhile); and that would be very bad for me, wd. probably indeed put an end to me altogether. My own sense is that I don't want, & oughtn't to try, to attack ever again anything longer (save for about 70 or 80 pages more) than The Outcry."
When James did try to attack the long form, the somewhat sad results can be seen in the rambling, unfocused later sections of The Sense of the Past. It's not that James had lost his imaginative powers completely. There's vivid and interesting material in those final chapters. It's just that he no longer had the energy to impose order on his material, which tended to slop out of the bucket in endless scenes.
Fri, 15 Nov 2002: HJ's Real Passion
>>As to what sex life, if any, HJ had, this question seems to me to be of slight interest, but of interest nonetheless.<<
Let me assure you that the subject is of great interest in some quarters. Whenever I make the smallest joke about the inquiries into HJ's sex life (something we don't even know existed in completed physical form), I get abrupt reminders on the list. But what the hey, it keeps people reading.
I could quote some more HJ treacle to various correspondents. He gets really saccharine to Lucy Clifford and Mary Cadwalader Jones. Later in life he seems to have gotten sugary as all get out to both men and women. I once kidded that James lived his love life in his letters much as Gibbon is supposed to have lived his love life in his footnotes.
Oops. Did it again. Facetious vulgarity. Or is it vulgar facetiousness?
By the way, is digest mode on the way for JAMESF-L? I like when the list is busy, but individual messages tend to clog the in-box. Also, I mentioned The Real Right Thing a few messages back. This is one of James' least known ghost stories, but a quick re-reading impressed me more than I expected. I'll post something soon on a story that may deserve a little more attention than it usually receives.
Fri, 15 Nov 2002: The Real Right Thing
This tiny story was published in 1899 when James was paying off Lamb House by writing up a storm. He especially tried to produce the very short stories that were most saleable to the magazines. As Adrian Dover notes on his superb web site, the tale somewhat ironically appeared in Collier's Magazine, the same periodical that had earlier published a rather more famous ghost (?) story about a governess and two children.
Michael Anesko cites an HJ letter to James Pinker that the story fetched 175 dollars, a pretty good price tag in those days. But if you listened to some critics, you would conclude that the magazine overpaid. Leon Edel shrugs off "this quiet little story" as reflecting not much more than James' sour attitude towards the William Wetmore Story biography that he was under contract to write. Edward Wagenknecht sniffs that the tale is "...a ghost story but a rather pale one in which indeed no ghost appears to the reader," and he wonders why James found space for it in the New York Edition. Robert Gale finds the story "...rather wispy, though in keeping with James' dislike of meddling biographers."
Wipsy, pale and quiet. These gentlemen sound thoroughly disappointed that there's no blood and thunder in the story's five thousand words. Truth to tell, readers looking for frantic happenings similar to the unusual events at Bly will not find much to enjoy. This admittedly understated tale may suffer from being labeled a ghost story in the first place, when after all there's no evidence that a "real" ghost is involved. James' itsy-bitsy notebook entry for the story makes no reference to a bona fide goblin:
May 7, 1898: 1. The thing suggested by what Aug. Birrell mentioned to me the other night, at Rosebery's, of Frank Lockwood - that is, of his writing so soon after his death and amid all his things, F.L.'s Life - past tense - and "feeling as if he might come in."
From the first, then, the emphasis fell on the perceptions of the biographer, not the supposed ghost of the biography's subject. Considered in this light, the fiction falls into an honorable enough place as the clever account of a change of mind and heart. James further enriches the story with a hint of sexual tension between the biographer and the great man's widow, who is wittily described as displaying "her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves." By the end of the story the eyes and the wig seem to have become more attractive, as the biographer and the widow "for a minute, in silence, held each other clasped." There's at least a suggestion that they may collaborate in other matters if not in the meddling biography.
Technically, the story is a masterpiece of compression. The change in attitude on the part of the two protagonists never seems rushed or forced, though the story moves along briskly. James stops his supposed ghost from looking silly or contrived by keeping him off-stage - even if this stratagem incurs Edward Wagenknecht's displeasure. Few will cite this tale as one of James' finest, but its ambivalent couple and their unsettling problem should hold most readers' interest.
Sat, 16 Nov 2002: The Soul of Wit
The notable brevity of The Real Right Thing got me to look at many other short stories James published at about the same time. During 1899 and 1900 eleven HJ stories appeared in eight different magazines. The variety of themes and tones is striking: otherworldly fantasy in The Great Good Place, knowing comedy in Paste, bittersweet resignation in Broken Wings, almost gothic drama in Europe. But all the stories share a notable tendency to brevity: nine of the eleven fall between five and ten thousand words, the limits James complained about so often. The other two don't exceed ten thousand words by much.
To some extent this contradicts the image of James the Old Pretender, the "multiplier of words." The common impression is that James got steadily more long-winded as he aged, possibly due to his use of secretaries for dictation. Theodora Bosanquet quotes James as admitting that he knew he was too "diffuse" when he dictated. But the practice of dictation doesn't seem to have strung out this group of stories to unreasonable lengths.
The motive was partly economic. In his letters and notebooks HJ often wrote that 5,000-to-10,000-word stories were much more salable to the magazines, which he relied on for so much of his literary income. With his move to Lamb House in the late 1890s, James was more conscious than ever of the need for a steady stream of income from periodicals, particularly because his increasingly experimental novels were not earning big advances or enjoying massive sales. But there were artistic considerations as well. Readers of the notebooks know how James would invoke the spirit of Maupassant in an effort to keep his fictions compact. Sometimes the effort failed, as James ruefully confessed in his letters. But more often than perhaps HJ himself realized, he could turn round in a reasonably tight space.
The lesson may be that generalizations about so prolific a writer as James are even more dangerous than usual. Certainly in this group of very short stories, which formed the backbone of The Soft Side, one of his best collections of tales, James proved that he could handle complex, difficult subjects in a minimum of words. The idea of Henry James using few words seems a little odd, but the word counts don't lie.
Tue, 19 Nov 2002: A Very Old Motive
Recent comments on the list have called attention to what might be the most controversial of HJ's New York Edition prefaces. While The Wings of the Dove has assumed one of the strongest critical positions of any novel in the James canon (with notable dissenters, of course), the author's own preface is notorious for badmouthing the tangled saga of Milly and Kate and Densher. At the very close of the last of all the prefaces, James pronounces: "...the proved error is the base apologetic deed, the helpless regret is the barren commentary, and 'connexions' are employable for finer purposes than mere gaping contrition."
The hobgoblin of little minds fails again. HJ's preface to The Wings is littered with "proved" errors, apologies, regrets helpless or otherwise, and contrition that may not be gaping but is at least noticeable. However, as I reread the preface for the umpteenth time, it struck me that many of James' proved errors look to have what mathematicians call holes in their proofs, based on both the text of the novel and other statements in the preface itself.
To some extent this may only be my prejudices yapping. It's a little unsettling to have one of your favorite novels trashed by its own author, and there's a natural desire to prove the author wrong - or at least prove that he contradicts himself. Even allowing for this subjective tendency, though, serious questions attach to virtually every objection James raises in the preface.
Fifteen long paragraphs make up the preface, and it's a curious fact that the first seven are nothing but positive about the novel. Later in the preface James complains about the "false and deformed" second half of the novel compared to the "positively close and felicitous application of method" in the first half. I might make something of the same comment about the two halves of the preface.
Throughout the downright celebratory first half of his essay, HJ pleasantly recounts how he had long contemplated the central subject of the novel. He details with apparent enthusiasm how he surrounded that center with developments necessary to realize its full value. Even someone completely unaware of the book's biographical resonance can sense how much the theme meant to James personally. There's a cautionary note about "treacheries and traps" in the subject, but this only leads to reassurances that the best subjects often pose the most difficulties.
James finally brushes off the failure of the novel to be serialized. He offers brave talk about how the "cold editorial shoulder" left him greater freedom to construct the novel along esthetic rather than commercial lines.
At this point James must have got out of bed in a grumpy mood for his next dictation session. The eighth paragraph sounds the first gloomy notes about "the absent values, the missing links, the mocking shadows" which supposedly render the book a poor realization of HJ's original plan. Even here he remains cheerful enough to assert that the book still triumphs to some extent despite the alleged failures of execution.
The first specific complaint occurs in the ninth paragraph, and it most strangely concerns a minor but vivid character who is almost universally accounted as one of the book's great successes. For some reason James thinks that he failed to show Kate's father as a "poor beautiful dazzling, damning apparition," despite decades of critical acclaim that Mr. Croy is exactly as dazzling and self-damning as James could have hoped. HJ never really explains why his portrait of Lionel Croy fails, except he seems to have wanted to give the Bad Dad more space and thus show his influence on his daughter more heavily.
Which I can only say would have been a major mistake. A splashy negative character like Mr. Croy can turn sour very quickly with over-exposure. The first chapter offers a superb 6,000-word "portrait of total perversity," as one critic dubbed the wayward father. His final off-stage appearance in the closing book - along with some more talk about him in-between - reminds us all we need of his baleful influence on his family. It's hard to see how we could do with more of him, since he has no real plot function. And it's easy to see how we could have gotten tired of his incessant excuses and whimpers.
James goes on to complain about many of his other characters in similar terms. The general tenor is that we don't get enough of everybody. This seems particularly weird because in the thirteenth paragraph James prides himself on the previously quoted "felicitous application of method" throughout the first half of the novel. Part of this felicitous application is to establish each character solidly, but not to let any of them hog the reader's attention.
Do we really not get enough of "the who and the what, the how and the why, the whence and the whither of Merton Densher"? In fact, the initial presentation of the ambivalent journalist is complete and effective. What more would James have told us? The preface doesn't say, though it amusingly dances ("nymphs and fauns circling around a bland Hermes") about the question.
The complaint about Mrs. Lowder seems even more bizarre, in a fashion similar to the baffling contrition over Lionel Croy. Like Kate's perverse parent, Aunt Maud has been almost universally acclaimed as a powerful, finely chiseled image. Few readers seem not to have been "saturated with her presence, her 'personality', and felt all her weight in the scale." Exactly how would James have made her more vivid or telling? The preface is again silent.
James goes on to regret that somehow Mrs. Stringham doesn't provide "an extended and animated reflection of Milly Theale's experience of English society." Really? Maybe James forgot all that witty and revealing talk in the fourth book between Milly and Susan Shepherd about the heiress' experience in the mother country. Again, it's hard to square this complaint with HJ's expressed satisfaction over the novel's first half.
The final dissing in the ninth paragraph at least shows consistency with later remarks in the preface. James grumps that the Venice denouement is not given enough space to be effective. I happen to think he's wrong; the nearly 50,000-word Venice section of the novel allows plenty of room for one brilliant scene after another. James again doesn't specify how he would have redone the Venice chapters. He contents himself with cute and (to me, anyway) unconvincing images: "...the strength and sense of the situation in Venice, for our gathered friends, was to have come to us in a deeper draught out of a larger cup...just as the pattern of Densher's final position and fullest consciousness there was to have been marked in fine stitches, all silk and gold, all pink and silver, that have had to remain, alas, but entwined upon the reel."
This cup-and-stitch hand-waving conveniently leaves out any details on how the Venice chapters could have been improved. The ancient cry of hostile critics has been that James chickened out of the final scene between Densher and Milly. Is this what James is sorrowing over? If so, why doesn't he discuss the omission more specifically? The fact is that HJ seems to think we have all of Milly we can take during the Venice section. In the twelfth paragraph he thanks Heaven that we don't know any more about Milly in Venice than what we get in the finished novel. So what exactly is the problem with those chapters?
The tenth and eleventh paragraphs brighten up considerably as James congratulates himself on the presentation of Kate, Densher and Milly in the novel's first half. He does make a silly remark that Mrs. Stringham's scene at Densher's rooms in Venice forms the "sole brief futility" that her part in the novel is reduced to. This is nonsense; Mrs. Stringham is an active, memorable participant in the story from the third book through the ninth. James himself, in the last paragraph of the preface, praises Susan Shepherd's role in the initial presentation of Milly.
The twelfth paragraph forms the heart of James' quarrel with his work. It's the famous whine over the novel's "misplaced middle," the complaint that the second half of the book doesn't have enough room to complete the action in a satisfying and finished manner.
The second half of The Wings comprises over one hundred thousand words, with about half of those devoted to the Venice section that seems to incur James' particular ire. He rants about the "patches" and "dodges" and "reduced scale of exhibition" and "foreshortening at any cost" and "quarters so cramped" that supposedly compromise the second half. It really does appear to be an issue of mere quantity; James' overriding complaint is that the second half simply isn't long enough to get its business done.
Did he have the same complaint about his most famous work, which is about half as long as the second half of The Wings? Again, with any detail absent as to just what and how HJ would have added to the book, it's impossible to say where the allegedly awful "deformity" begins - if anywhere. This clearly gets into subjective judgments, but for me the ample space of the second half allows a most complete and moving presentation of Milly's illness, death, and lasting influence among those she leaves behind.
The thirteenth and fourteenth paragraphs return to celebration mode, with more happy talk about the novel's first half. The final paragraph concludes with the famous description of the indirect method James mostly adopts for the presentation of Milly. Is this an equally indirect acknowledgment of the criticism over the omission of the final scene between Milly and Densher? Maybe, but James doesn't seem particularly contrite over this technique in the novel.
So why does James apologize so much when there is, quite arguably, so little to apologize for? Perhaps this novel fell close to his heart in a way that no other did. Does anybody's most heartfelt utterance ever sound as moving and convincing as they would wish? A conjecture, to be sure, but one to think about.
Fri, 22 Nov 2002: A Very Old Motive
A few more notes on That Preface...
Not many critics have viewed Lionel Croy as flat or melodramatic. In fact, it's the Bad Dad's offbeat (if mostly unintentional) humor that has made him a critical fave. When he announces that "the family sentiment, in our vulgarised brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot," it's hard for even the most confirmed anti-Jamesian not to smile. Especially when he delivers his hilariously hypocritical lecture with "a charming air of sudden spiritual heat."
That's why I called the perverse parent a "splashy" character. He makes a vivid first impression on the reader. Millicent Henning is another example from James' work. Characters like these are tricky for a novelist. They help capture the reader's attention, but they can easily turn irritating and stale if given too much room. James is careful to space Millicent's appearances pretty widely in The Princess Casamassima. Similarly, James makes sure that Gabriel Nash doesn't run riot in The Tragic Muse.
Things get even dicier when a splashy type doesn't have any real plot function, as Mr. Croy conspicuously lacks in The Wings. Then too much attention to the character makes the novelist look like he's wasting time on a favored puppet instead of getting on with his story. That's why James' complaint that we only get a "beggarly scene or two" from Mr. Croy seems so off-base to me. A scene or two is all I want. More might spoil the impression.
I also think that Mrs. Stringham's amused and intelligent reactions help make Milly's encounter with English society anything but pallidly presented. I particularly like the long conversations in book four, when "Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was what New England heroines did..." I still can't understand why James thought he failed with Mrs. Stringham.
The issue of how much we should see of Milly in Venice is, of course, a long-standing preoccupation of Wings criticism. The debate gets particularly acute over the omission of the final scene between Densher and Milly.
Again, this is only my prejudice yapping, but I've never been bothered by James' mostly indirect presentation of Milly throughout these chapters. After all, we're skating dangerously close to cloying sentimentality in this part of the novel. The first two chapters of the Venice section, which memorably present Milly in a direct and moving manner, may be all the novel can stand without lapsing into tear-jerkiness. I have to agree with this statement from the preface:
"Heaven forbid, we say to ourselves during almost the whole Venetian climax, heaven forbid we should 'know' anything more of our ravaged sister than what Densher darkly pieces together, or than what Kate Croy pays, heroically, it must be owned, at the hour of her visit alone to Densher's lodging, for her superior handling and her dire profanation of."
This is not HJ's most elegantly constructed sentence, but the substance looks about right to me. And James, though too apologetic about many other things in the book, doesn't seem to mind the indirect treatment he often accords his "princess." I don't mind it, either, because too direct a view of Milly might have lessened rather than intensified the reader's sympathy.
Speaking of that final paragraph, I've always gotten a sly smile from the very last comment. James sighs that he's left "with a burden of residuary comment of which I yet boldly hope elsewhere to discharge myself." Hm, could this be a naughty bit of facetious vulgarity? I'll only make the suggestion...he said with a wink.
Fri, 22 Nov 2002: More Facetious Vulgarity
There is an odd article on the Web about that famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. The article quotes Henry James as reminiscing that the painting was "a revelation to my young sight of the capacity of accessories to 'stand out.'"
The accessory in question appears to have been a watch fob. But some apparently think the accessory might look like...well, you'll have to read the story:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2002-11-22/pols_feature5.html
Was James making a little joke? We really can't be sure. But the quote is authentic, from chapter 19 of A Small Boy and Others.
Mon, 25 Nov 2002: Crawford's Consistency
F.W. Dupee's 1956 edition of James' autobiographies was their first reprinting since their original appearance in 1913-17. There haven't been many reprints since, probably due to the Proustian complexity of HJ's "late late" style. The autobiographies are often quoted; I've seen many references to that account of James' "obscure hurt" in Notes of a Son and Brother. But even among Jamesians, few seem willing to trudge through what amounts in the Dupee edition to six hundred closely printed pages of mostly very long sentences.
So I decided to discipline myself to a steady march through the tangled thickets of James' final style. Once you get accustomed to sentences turning and twisting a little more than mere sentences should, it's surprisingly easy to enjoy the humor and pathos of HJ's remembrance of things past. (Okay, that's my last Proust reference.) Many phrases and scenes linger in the memory; that's how I was able to track down James' perhaps risque comment on the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware.
One of my odder recognitions occurred when James quoted a long letter from Henry James, Sr. to his aspiring novelist son. The excerpt takes up considerable space in chapter 8 of Notes of a Son and Brother. James makes amused remarks about how his father was only too eager to help his fiction-scribbling offspring with a detailed story idea.
At first glance the idea seemed ridiculously remote from Henry, Jr.'s customary manner. James, Sr. told a long and (he says) true tale of a much-suffering soul who endured a broken engagement, a hellish marriage, physical abuse and financial disaster. It sounded more like Days of Our Lives than anything you would expect in the HJ canon. Was this what the father really thought his son would be interested in?
Then it slowly dawned on me that HJ, almost incredibly, had converted the idea into a finished fiction. It must have been the bit about smallpox that finally jogged my memory. I checked the LOA edition of all James' stories to make sure. An almost forgotten tale called Crawford's Consistency, published in Scribner's Monthly in 1876 and never collected by James, followed the father's anecdote almost exactly - right down to the broken leg and the disfiguring disease.
The dates also fitted. James said his father's letter dated from the spring of 1870. So there was plenty of time for the idea to sit unused before HJ transformed it into a salable bit of story-spinning for a magazine he didn't much respect. (He didn't mind the good prices that Scribner's paid, though.)
The few critical comments I found on the story all used the standard term of abuse, "melodramatic." And it's hard to disagree with that assessment of a weepy saga which lurches from one disaster to another. The fact that the melodrama apparently occurred in some poor sap's real life doesn't make the dose any easier to swallow.
So is there any redeeming fictional value in this tale that HJ never reprinted but hinted at in his autobiography? Well, some readers might appreciate the narrator's disgust with the priggish reaction of respectable society to the protagonist's impossible wife. And there's a bit of Jamesian complexity when the narrator admits that, by her lights at least, the impossible wife has a legitimate quarrel with the marital bargain offered by her harmless but wimpy spouse.
In fact, it's the narrator himself who makes the best claim for the reader's attention. A transparent stand-in for his creator, his balanced and witty account of the tale's sorry doings makes the sob saga a little more endurable. James even gets in a few touches about how the narrator, a physician by trade, dreams of opulent clients to fill his office hours. James had a few dreams of opulence himself.
At least the story demonstrates James' range, though some may argue that this part of the fictional forest isn't worth a visit. The charge of squeamishness often leveled against James is certainly hard to sustain from this blunt tale of domestic violence, alcoholism, and physical disfigurement. The narrator's suave, unruffled tone can't completely redeem this material, but he keeps things from tumbling into total worthlessness.
Tue, 26 Nov 2002: Crawford's Consistency
Finally dawned on me to check HJ's letters to see if he ever specifically acknowledged his father's suggestion for Crawford's Consistency. Turns out James did give his father credit in an April 11, 1876 missive:
"I have lately sent two short tales to Scribner [Crawford's Consistency and The Ghostly Rental], which you will see when they are printed, and I trust judge according to their pretensions, which are small. One by the way (much the best) is on the history of your friend Webster in Albany, according to the account of it that you gave me three years ago. I had had it in mind ever since, and had thoughts of using it for a longer story; but then decided it was too lugubrious to be spun out. As it is, however, you will probably think that I have been brutally curt."
In Notes of a Son and Brother James dates his father's idea to 1870 instead of 1873, as implied in this letter. Either way the son spent a long time thinking about the suggestion before writing the grim tale. HJ was undoubtedly right to keep the story brief, and not too many will care if it's "much the best" when compared to The Ghostly Rental. James never reprinted either story in his lifetime.
Wed, 27 Nov 2002: Crawford's Consistency
Maybe I have too much time on my hands. But for the sheer joy of it, I decided to track down as much information as possible from the web about Henry James, Sr.'s "friend Webster in Albany," the long-suffering original of Henry Jr.'s fictional Crawford. In his father's letter that novelist Henry quotes in Notes of a Son and Brother, the put-upon gentleman is identified as "Matthew Henry W." (In his April 11, 1876 letter to his father, James used the last name he would publicly suppress four decades later.)
So I checked Google for "Webster Albany" and found an interesting account of George Webster, 1762-1826. He was a prominent printer and publisher in Albany. Henry Sr.'s letter refers to Matthew Henry Webster as belonging "to a highly respectable family of booksellers and publishers." A further Google search revealed that one of George Webster's sons was named Matthew H. Webster and was born on the Fourth of July in 1816, which would make him roughly contemporaneous with Henry James, Sr.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything more on the web about the elusive Matthew H. Webster. But I suspect that it was his life story that lent itself to "lugubrious" fictionalization in Crawford's Consistency.
Another odd note about the story is that, in his 1920 edition of novelist Henry's correspondence, Percy Lubbock printed the April 11, 1876 letter with the comments about Henry Sr.'s "friend Webster." This was one of the rare letters from early in Henry Jr.'s life that found its way into Lubbock's chronologically unbalanced edition. But Percy scrupulously suppressed the part of the letter which revealed that Webster was the original of the fictional Crawford - just as James had suppressed the name in Notes of a Son and Brother. Many decades later Edel printed the full letter, names and all, in his four-volume collection.
I'll include one more swatch of prose about James. It's an e-mail I sent to Orrin Judd, a blogger who offers an unflattering opinion of James on his web site...
Mr. Judd:
My conscience has bothered me ever since I posted harsh comments about your views on the Anglo-American novelist Henry James to the JAMESF-L mailing list. I've decided to send you a copy, so you can respond if you like. I'll be glad to post your comments, unedited and uncut, to the list.
The original post is below, but a few other comments first. I was frankly surprised by the venom in your remarks on James' work - except for The Turn of the Screw. My unvarnished opinion is that you're simply unacquainted with almost all of James' writings. With your interest in political terrorism, it's hard for me to understand how you could denigrate the author of The Princess Casamassima. More than a hundred years before 9/11, James saw it coming.
You also make a strange remark on your site that James was a big fan of Jane Austen. This proves how little you've read James' critical articles and reviews. Henry James was by no means a Janeite. In fact, he gently (James was always a gentleman) mocked Jane Austen's narrow emotional range in an essay on George Sand. In The Lesson of Balzac, James complained that commercial interests had inflated Jane Austen's reputation beyond her intrinsic merit. James never bothered to write a single essay or review devoted entirely to Jane Austen, but his passing comments in other articles were tepid at best.
My original post:
A Blog Takes On Henry James
If you don't know what a blog is, you haven't been spending much time on the web lately. Short for "web log," the term refers to a site that references tons of other current material on the web, often with smartass comments about how the other material is wretchedly bad or unimaginably good or something in between. At times the blogs can seem like a self-contained universe, with bloggers referring readers back and forth and around and about to the same sites in ceaseless cycles. Not for nothing do they call it the blogosphere.
As you might expect, these news-driven sites don't usually make much room for Henry James discussions, with the occasional exception of www.aldaily.com, the Arts and Letters Daily. But I happened to have landed on a blog called The Brothers Judd when I followed a link on some political topic. This site (www.brothersjudd.com) offers a rather conventional blog, but it also features something interestingly titled "Book Reviews."
Hm, did HJ land among the reviews? I clicked the Book Reviews link and found The Turn of the Screw among the list of recommended books. The Judd Brothers (who after a very short while seemed to consist only of Orrin Judd) gave the book a B rating on an A to F scale. That's really pretty good by his exacting standards, as I discovered when I clicked on The Turn's link. Seems that Mr. Judd doesn't have much good to say about a whole lot of books. Joyce's Ulysses receives an "F times googolplex" rating, and a lot of other works with imposing reputations get trashed almost as badly.
And it seems that Mr. Judd isn't bothered by the hobgoblin of little minds. Despite his recommendation of The Turn as "just a good creepy little tale," he also thunders: "This revival of Henry James has to stop. I can not put this any more plainly: his books are not good." HJ's most famous and best-selling book must be a glaring exception to this anathema.
Even within his review of The Wings of the Dove, Mr. Judd can't seem to remember what he wrote a few paragraphs ago. He praises The Wings for "a terrific plot set up," which he describes in enthusiastic detail. But just a couple paragraphs later, he calls the book worthless from page four on. Maybe he thought the entire plot was set up in the first three pages. Maybe he just watched the movie.
Mr. Judd's objection to James looks to be mostly political. His harsh words on the novelist: "What is there that a repressed (or closeted) homosexual, who loathed his own country, has to tell us, that we need to hear?" I thought that the ancient bigotry against James for his expatriation and eventual naturalization in Britain had died off in the 1930s. But some folks cling to old prejudices. As for the homosexuality charge, it continues to amaze me that some people judge authors on what they are supposed to have done (or not done) with their genitalia. Judging writers on what they wrote rather than on who they fucked (or didn't fuck) appears to be a more reasonable approach.
Mr. Judd also refers to James's works as suffering from "twisted emotional dementia." But somehow the author of such demented works received seventieth birthday greetings and handsome testimonials (a golden bowl, Sargent's portrait, Derwent Wood's sculpture) from some 270 friends. Maybe they were all demented, too. I wonder how many will celebrate Mr. Judd's seventienth.
It's plain that Mr. Judd has read, at the most, three books by James: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Turn of the Screw. I doubt that he's even aware of the enormous range of HJ's fiction, criticism, travel writings and social essays. But that doesn't stop him from pronouncing all of HJ's books bad - except for the book Mr. Judd likes, which happens to be the one book most casual readers know Henry James by.
A final thought: Mr. Judd once again demonstrates what an interesting psychological test The Turn is. A glance at his blog shows that Mr. Judd lands far to the right on sociopolitical issues. Sure enough, his interpretation of The Turn follows what I have called Option One: the ghosts are real and are corrupting the "potentially wicked" children. That's exactly the interpretation you would expect from an arch-conservative secure in his ideology. It's the mirror image of Option Five (the governess is evil, the ghosts don't exist, the kids are blameless) which was presented a few years ago in the Henry James Review by a high-school teacher with an ideology as far left as Mr. Judd's is far right.
Sure, it's not a perfect correlation. But a critic's reaction to The Turn often tells us more about the critic than about the story. Edmund Wilson was the most famous example, but countless others have followed.
On my hobbies page I give a link to Richard Hathaway's superb Henry James site. A professor at the State University of New York, Mr. Hathaway has assembled a wonderful selection of HJ e-texts, top-flight criticism by James scholars, and much other interesting material. I've submitted three batches of links to Mr. Hathaway from my scrounges through the Google search engine. The links to those collections:
If you want to see any more pages at THIS sprawling locale, take your choice.