V I .
This introduction has been particularly misleading in one important way. In an attempt to fight the stereotype of a tottering mandarin who was fussy, prissy, prim, and panicked by even one drop of vulgarity, it has dragged Henry James onto the field of battle and has watched him contend with turbulent forces. There has been all of America versus all of Europe, then a deep moral sense confounded by obsessive modern intelligence, and finally art’s chiseled perfection defied by the inconstant pulse of life. Those battlegrounds are in fact there, but such emphasis fails when it describes a writer who was a stranger to joy, for as much as anything else, one remembers the pleasure of the text. And then one recalls that years ago a professor told his students that Henry James was the funniest man who ever lived. Everyone blinked, but it did not take that long to get the joke.
Those who read Henry James—and there are more of them out there than is generally imagined—do so in part for the way he says things. He could do anything with a sentence except butcher it, and his friend A. C. Benson spoke with precision when he said that here was a style that could crack a walnut or pat an egg. James could be long-winded, extravagant, arch, polyglot, allusive, fierce, gentle,
recherché,
exquisite as hell, and then—at those gawky moments when he tried to be one of the boys—oddly slangy, indubitably so. Then he would “hang fire” all over the place, or describe a delicately dying heiress who would “pay a hundred percent—and even to the end, doubtless, through the nose.” His was a hungering, inching, devious style that could trace the dusky path and then roam too far into the woods, and he knew it: “I wander wild,” he notes after a particularly phantasmagoric aside near the end of
Italian Hours.
We read him on Matilde Serao’s depiction of “love, at Naples and in Rome,” and our lips part as we sound the mystic distinction of those two prepositions. He knew he was something called Jamesian, which most of all means that he was luridly loving of the byways of the sentence and scrupulous beyond the demands of any jealous god. Like anyone, he sometimes tired of his own ways, but most of the time he liked them. When a literary friend complained that Mrs. Thomas Carlyle had mastered “the art of mountaining molehills,” James considered and replied, “Ah! but for that, where would
any of us
be?”
When the mature James read Shakespeare, he apparently cared little for the “meaning” of the text. He kept coming back to the words. A “ripe, amused genius,” James’s Shakespeare—and it is telling and daring that he calls Shakespeare by his own given name “the master”—would heap up words in the “incomparable splendor” of a supreme poetic gift. As his style matured—yes, Shakespeare’s—it became “something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure.” Then, perhaps thinking of the mountaining elaborations of his own late works, James claims that such style can go anywhere: “Anything was a subject, always, that offered to sight an aperture of size enough for expression and its train to pass in and deploy themselves. If they filled up all the space, none the worse; they occupied it as nothing else could do.” Less a brooding artist than a supreme virtuoso, James’s Shakespeare is as careless of audience as he finally is of subject, and at the end he is a “divine musician who, alone in his room, preludes or improvises at the close of the day”:
He sits at the harpsichord, by the open window, in the summer dusk; his hands wander over the keys. They stray far, for his motive, but at last he finds and holds it; then lets himself go, embroidering and refining: it is the thing for the hour and his mood. The neighbors may gather in the garden, the nightingale be hushed on the bough; it is none the less a private occasion, a concert of one, both performer and auditor, who plays for his own ear, his own hand, his own innermost sense, and for the bliss and capacity of his instrument.
Style is different from the sacred rage of perfect art. It is more easy, self-indulgent, general, more generally happy and more promiscuous, and finally it is inescapable. For James it was the essential process by which the individual engages the universe—the very membrane of individual consciousness. It defines and “inevitably provides for Character”—“Every inch of it is personal tone, or in other words brooding expression raised to the highest energy.” Shakespeare’s powers of expression—“the greatest ever laid upon man”—could meet any part of that universe and work any subject, flicker, or
donnée.
Whatever Shakespeare touched with “the lucid stillness of his style,” he changed and made it his, as his style achieved “some copious equivalent of thought for every grain of the grossness of reality.” Here unconcerned with the question of any significant “truth,” the modernist Henry James has no complaint that “the subjects of the Comedies are, without exception, old wives’ tales,” and that the “subjects of the Histories are no subjects at all.” It is sufficient that “each is but a row of pegs for the hanging of the cloth of gold that is to muffle them.”
When James affirmed the “absolute value of Style,” he recognized that no matter what it addresses or describes, brilliant language can be irresistible. And his contemplation also suggests what Shakespeare surely knew, that poetic language is sly, and that it rides a conundrum. An agonized king stares into the void and comprehends that life is a petty, dusty, miserable tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And yet it is an undeniable fact that as unknown generations chant his searing empty lines until the end of time, they will do so, always, with helpless happy smiles upon their lips.
One admits a similar puzzle concerning the idiosyncratic language of Henry James, and that his language gives great pleasure, and that such pleasure is important—even in the postmodern world. Although as a young man James had produced confident works of art, over time his language evolved more than the language of most writers. He got, as Huck Finn might put it, more and more style. Colette spoke of the plays of Shakespeare as those before—and after—he knew he was Shakespeare, and that happened to Henry James. In 1873 a regular guy—“Harry,” his family called him in their letters—rode a horse through the Italian
campagna.
When he spotted a tavern, he decided to “rein up and demand a bottle of their best.” In 1907—and by then ferociously Jamesian—the Master records that while traveling at dusk through the same Italian countryside, he and his friends had “wished, stomachically, we had rather addressed ourselves of a tea basket.” Hardly anything has changed—except the words. We smile at the inimitable locution and we shake our heads with fond delight. But although James is talking about nothing important, the change is monumental. For as he finally rides on into the night, he is moving about on a different planet.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
xi
“a magnificent but painful hippopotamus”:
Leon Edel and Gordon Ray, eds.,
Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959), 248.
xi
“the exquisite deformities”:
E. M. Forster,
Aspects of the Novel
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927), 161.
xi
“imagine with pain”:
Roger Gard, ed.,
Henry James: The Critical Heritage
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 268.
xi
“I am tired of hearing pettiness”:
Ezra Pound, “Henry James,” in
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound,
ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 296.
xii
“For to be as subtle as Henry James”:
Virginia Woolf,
Collected Essays,
vol. I (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 284 (first published in 1920).
xii
“I have visited some literatures”:
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Abasement of the Northmores,” in
Selected Non-Fictions,
ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), 247-48 (first published in 1945).
xii
“the death of Henry James”:
Graham Greene, “François Mauriac,” in
Collected Essays
(New York: Penguin, 1951), 91 (first published in 1968).
xii
“He is as solitary”:
Graham Greene, “Henry James: the Private Universe,” in
Collected Essays
(New York: Penguin, 1951), 34 (first published in 1936).
xii
“a great writer”:
André Maurois, preface to Georges Markow-Totevy,
Henry James,
trans. John Cumming (New York: Minerva Press, 1969), vii.
xiii
a “botched civilization”:
Ezra Pound,
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,
V.
xiv
the “fault of Venice”:
“Venice” [1882], in
Italian Hours.
xv
“Decay is in this extraordinary place”:
“The Grand Canal” [1892], in
Italian Hours.
xv
“the power of the most extravagant of cities”:
“New York Revisited,” in
The American Scene.
xvi
“vieille sagesse”:
The Ambassadors,
Book Ninth, I.
xvi
communities of will, and communities of faith and obedience:
H. G. Wells,
The Outline of History
(Garden City, New York: Garden City Books, 1940), 735.
xix
it was only “Elementary”:
Although iconic in film adaptations, “Elementary, my dear Watson” was never said, exactly, by Holmes in the Conan Doyle tales. But the following passage appears at the end of “The Crooked Man,” and he is speaking to Dr. Watson: “ ‘Elementary,’ said he. ‘It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. . . .’ ”
xx
“murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown”:
“The Art of Fiction.”
xxi
“Four Hundred Large Pages”:
“James’s
The Ambassadors:
Four Hundred Large Pages in Which Little Happens,”
Chicago Tribune,
21 (November 1903): 13; reprinted in Kevin J. Hayes, ed.,
Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 404.
xxi
Graham Greene:
In the essay “François Mauriac,” noted earlier; see also Greene’s essay, “Henry James: The Religious Aspect,” in
Collected Essays.
xxi
“I forgot that every little action”:
Oscar Wilde,
De Profundis.
xxii
“We are all under sentence of death”:
The 1873 conclusion to Pater’s
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.
xxii
“near-infinite Irishman”:
“Flaubert and His Exemplary Destiny,” in Jorge Luis Borges,
Selected Non-Fictions,
ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), 393.
xxii
“unrelenting examination”:
“Joyce’s
Ulysses,
” In Weinberger, ed.,
Selected Non-Fictions,
13.
xxiii
“the threshold of the drawing room”:
The Portrait of a Lady,
chapter XL.
xxiv
“Like some microscopist”:
Claude Bragdon, review of
The Golden Bowl, Critic
(January 1905), xlvi, 20.
xxiv
seven hundred tense words:
See
The Golden Bowl,
Book Second, XXXVII; the passage begins with Adam Verver’s question, “But to what in the world?”
xxv
“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere”:
New York Edition
preface,
Roderick Hudson.
xxv
“the whole conduct of life”:
New York Edition
preface,
The Golden Bowl.
xxv
“He smoked a minute”:
The Golden Bowl,
Book First, IV.
xxvii
Blackmur . . . “pure intelligence”:
R. P. Blackmur, “Henry James,” in Robert E. Spiller, et al.,
Literary History of the United States: History,
third revision (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 1048, 1063.
xxvii
“our father, caring for our spiritual decency”:
Henry James,
A Small Boy and Others
(1913), in
Autobiography
(New York: Criterion Books, 1956), 126.
xxvii
“the most intelligent man of his generation”:
T. S. Eliot, “In Memory” and “The Hawthorne Aspect,”
Little Review
5 (August 1918): 44-53.
xxx
homosexuality as the figure in the carpet:
The most comprehensive treatment of this issue is found in Hugh Stevens,
Henry James and Sexuality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), with an extensive bibliography.
xxx
“In trying to form”:
J. P. Mowbray, “The Apotheosis of Henry James,”
Critic
41 (November 1902); reprinted in Kevin J. Hayes, ed.,
Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 381-82.
xxx
“Jammed into the acute angle”:
Notes of a Son and Brother,
chapter IX.
xxxi
“Like Abélard”:
Blackmur, Op. cit, 1040.
xxxi
“If we suppose—which is to suppose the improbable”:
Allen Tate, “Emily Dickinson,”
Essays of Four Decades
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), 287 (first published in 1936).
xxxii
“I feel as if a great cathedral”:
Edwin Tribble, ed.,
A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith
(New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984), 46.
xxxiii
“I wish I could help you”:
Leon Edel, ed.,
Henry James Letters: 1895-1916,
IV (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 169-70.