The Portable Henry James

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THE PORTABLE HENRY JAMES

HENRY JAMES was born in 1843 on Washington Place in New York City, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father was a prominent theologian and philosopher, and his elder brother, William, was also famous as a philosopher. He attended schools in New York and later in London, Paris, and Geneva, entering the law school at Harvard in 1862. In 1865 he began to contribute reviews and short stories to American journals. In 1875, after two prior visits to Europe, he settled for a year in Paris, where he met Flaubert, Turgenev, and other literary figures. The next year he moved to London, where he became so popular in society that in the winter of 1878-79 he confessed to accepting 107 invitations. In 1898 he left London and went to live at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. Henry James became a naturalized British citizen in 1915, was awarded the Order of Merit, and died in 1916.

In addition to many short stories, plays, and books of criticism, autobiography, and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first being
Roderick Hudson
(1875). This was followed by
The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors,
and
The Golden Bowl.

 

JOHN AUCHARD is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has been a Fulbright lecturer at the Università degli Studi di Milano, a visiting professor at the Università di Messina, and has also taught at the University of North Carolina. Among his works on Henry James are
Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence
and the Penguin Classics edition of James’s
Italian Hours.

The Portable Henry James
Edited with an Introduction by
JOHN AUCHARD

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2004

Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004

All rights reserved
Page 620 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
James, Henry, 1843-1916.
[Selections. 2003]
The portable Henry James / edited with an introduction by John Auchard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-0-142-43767-4

Introduction

When H. G. Wells attacked Henry James’s late fiction, he described “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, on picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.” Wells claimed, wickedly, that upon reaching the end of a James tale one generally discovered something terribly reduced, supremely portentous, and certainly peculiar—“on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.” A few years later E. M. Forster must have been happy with himself when he wrote that James’s people recalled “the exquisite deformities who haunted Egyptian art in the reign of Akhenaton—huge heads and tiny legs, but nevertheless charming.” Joseph Conrad revered the work of Henry James, but even he could only “imagine with pain the man in the street trying to read it. . . . One could almost see the globular lobes of his brain painfully revolving, and crushing and mangling the delicate thing.” Even sympathetic magazine reviewers of the day had to admit that although the novels of Henry James might sometimes bleed, generally they did not bleed red.

Such generalizations enraged Ezra Pound: “I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about James’s style. . . . I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life. . . . The outbursts in
The Tragic Muse,
the whole of
The Turn of the Screw,
human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage! The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn’t ‘feel.’ I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn’t raise this cry.” Nor could Virginia Woolf tolerate complaints about a Byzantine syntax or an obsession with the niceties of upholstery: “For to be as subtle as Henry James one must also be as robust; to enjoy his power of exquisite selection one must have ‘lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered,’ and, with the appetite of a giant, have swallowed the whole.” It is as if she would cast Mr. Henry James as Rodin’s great statue of Balzac, looming high above the human comedy.

As the twentieth century kept reading Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges found him darker, more exotic, and heavier than anyone had suspected: “I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James. The writers I have enumerated are, from the first line, amazing; the universe postulated by their pages is almost professionally unreal; James, before revealing what he is, a resigned and ironic inhabitant of Hell, runs the risk of appearing to be no more than a mundane novelist, less colorful than others.” And then it was Graham Greene who said that after “the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel.” Greene’s final tribute is unequivocal: “He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.”

And so even today one begins an introduction to Henry James with some defensiveness, and a mulish desire to gather the troops, for the talk of the fussy, the bloodless, and the absurdly subtle never goes away. There is some truth in such talk, but not much truth.