The Portable Henry James (87 page)

Suggestions for Further Reading

FICTION

In 1913 Mrs. G. W. Prothero asked James which five of his novels he would recommend to an uninitiated reader. He supplied two lists, the second being the “more ‘advanced.’ ” The first named
Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove,
and
The Golden Bowl.
The second named
The American, The Tragic Muse, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors,
and
The Golden Bowl.
Perhaps James was being playful (he promised to suggest shorter works at a later time, but “you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes”). Today
The Portrait of a Lady
would rank at the top of many lists.
The American
might be the novel to read next (or perhaps first, for some readers find it is less challenging than
Portrait,
and, with its emphatic “international theme,” it provides a good introduction to representative concerns). Then, if the reader is still willing,
The Bostonians,
with its strange sexual tension, generally stirs excitement. The revolutionaries and anarchists in
The Princess Casamassima
today strike many false notes, and
Roderick Hudson
has sometimes been judged a heavy-handed story of a troubled young artist. Although James himself recognized structural flaws in
The Tragic Muse,
it has many admirers. The short novel
Washington Square
continues to draw interest; it has been the subject of over a dozen film or television productions (see Susan M. Griffin, ed.,
Henry James Goes to the Movies
).
The Spoils of Poynton
is witty, fast, and engaging; the great James biographer Leon Edel once noted that
What Maisie Knew
was his favorite James novel.

Those who would enter into deep James will arrive at the great novels of “the major phase,” even if good people sometimes admit to being baffled by the extraordinary exercise of consciousness that marks these masterpieces. Even that defender Ezra Pound judged them as “cobwebby,” and in
A Backward Glance,
Edith Wharton would concede that the late novels, “for all their profound moral beauty, seemed to me more and more lacking in atmosphere, more and more severed from that thick nourishing air in which we all live and move.” With its brilliant fin-de-siècle setting in Paris,
The Ambassadors,
“quite the best, ‘all around,’ of my productions,” is often judged the most accessible. With its aesthetic pitch, high moral ambiguity, and Venetian climax,
The Wings of the Dove
is a favorite of many readers. The magnificent
The Golden Bowl
is the only novel James included on both lists for Mrs. Prothero.

James’s twenty-two novels are listed here. Of his 114 tales—some of considerable length and some categorized as “nouvelles”—the sixteen listed here are of particular interest. (Those marked with an asterisk [*] are included in this edition.)

Watch and Ward
(serially published, 1871
;
book publication, 1878)
Roderick Hudson
(1875)
The American
(1877)
The Europeans
(1878)
Confidence
(1879)
Washington Square
(1881)
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881)
The Bostonians
(1886)
The Princess Casamassima
(1886)
The Reverberator
(1888)
The Other House
(1896
;
first written as a play and then turned into
a novel)
The Spoils of Poynton
(1897)
What Maisie Knew
(1897)
The Awkward Age
(1899)
The Tragic Muse
(1900)
The Sacred Fount
(1901)
The Wings of the Dove
(1902)
The Ambassadors
(1903)
The Golden Bowl
(1904)
The Outcry
(1911
;
first written as a play and then turned into a
novel)
The IvoryTower
(1917
;
posthumous and incomplete)
The Sense of the Past
(1917
;
posthumous and incomplete)
Selected Tales
*
Daisy Miller: A Study (
1879)
“Pandora”
(
1884)
“The Aspern Papers” (1888)
“The Pupil” (1891)
*“Brooksmith” (1891)
*“The Real Thing” (1892)
*“The Middle Years” (1893)
“The Altar of the Dead” (1895)
“The Figure in the Carpet” (1896)
“In the Cage” (1898)
*
The Turn of the Screw
(1898)
“The Great Good Place” (1900)
“Maud Evelyn” (1900)
*“The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)
*“The Jolly Corner” (1908)
“The Bench of Desolation” (1910)

James’s finest travel book, the 1907
The American Scene,
provides brilliant impressions of his American tour of 1904-1905. Although
Italian Hours
was published two years after
The American Scene,
it collects essays written from 1872 to 1909; a comparison of the early and late essays on Venice, Rome, and Naples is particularly rewarding. Neither
English Hours
(published 1905 but with most essays from the 1870s), nor
A Little Tour in France
(1884) is as richly analytical as the American and the Italian travel books.

As noted in the introduction to the Autobiography section of this book (and fully cited in the Selected Bibliography), a one-volume edition collects James’s work in this genre. James’s 1903 biography,
William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections,
was a commissioned work that holds interest mainly for its evocation of life in the Anglo-American community in Rome.

In a fine two-volume edition, the Library of America publishes over 3,000 pages of literary criticism by James; there are helpful notes and an extensive index (edited by Leon Edel, with the assistance of Mark Wilson,
Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the
New York Edition; and
Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers,
New York: Library of America, 1984); the edition offers 120 pages on Balzac alone, 100 on George Sand (“As a man Madame Sand was admirable. . . .”), and, reprinting James’s entire 1879
Hawthorne
volume as well as some additional later commentary, over 150 pages on Nathaniel Hawthorne. In all, James discusses several hundred writers. Among its many features, the edition also reprints the complete prefaces to the
New York Edition.
Judiciously selected and well edited is Roger Gard, ed.,
Henry James: The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism,
London and New York: Penguin, 1984.

For James’s initially successful but eventually disastrous excursion into the theater, see Leon Edel, ed.,
The Complete Plays of Henry James,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949.

For James’s reviews of the theater, see Allan Wade, ed.,
Henry James: The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and Drama, 1872-1901,
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1948.

A fine selection of his art criticism is presented in Susan M. Griffin and John L. Sweeney, eds.,
Henry James: The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994 (revised from Sweeney’s 1956 edition).

Selected Bibliography

In 1930 Vernon Louis Parrington’s
Main Currents in American Thought
promised a comprehensive “interpretation of American literature.” The influential study dedicated six pages to Peter Cooper, eight to John Fiske, twelve to William Dean Howells, thirteen to Edward Bellamy, and fourteen to Edwin Lawrence Godkin. Henry James was summed up in less than two pages. Today there are more than 220 critical studies listed among the almost one thousand Henry James entries in the catalog of the Library of Congress.

American Literary Scholarship,
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963-present. An annual review of the year’s publications in James studies; indispensable for serious research.

Nicola Bradbury,
An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James,
New York: St. Martin’s, 1987.

Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, with James Rambeau,
A Bibliography of Henry James,
3rd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

Leon Edel and Adeline R. Tintner, eds.,
The Library of Henry James,
Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987. The catalog of James’s own library.

Daniel Mark Fogel, ed.,
A Companion to Henry James Studies,
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. The most comprehensive handbook, on the fiction, the nonfiction, and the criticism; with an excellent annotated bibliography.

Jonathan Freedman, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Henry James,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Collects twelve fine essays.

Robert Gale,
A Henry James Encyclopedia,
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1989. An invaluable reference tool.

S. Gorley Putt,
Henry James: A Reader’s Guide,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966. Ignores the nonfiction, the criticism, and the work for the theater, but provides a basic discussion of every novel and tale.

The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites:
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/
. An excellent website, conceived and maintained by Richard Hathaway at SUNY-New Paltz. E-texts, links to other Henry James items, an e-journal, concordances, articles and reviews, a discussion group.

(See also Jobe and Gunter, under
Correspondence.
)

The Henry James Review,
1979-present. A distinguished journal founded by Daniel Mark Fogel.

Leon Edel,
Henry James: The Untried Years 1843-1870: Vol. I; The Conquest of London 1870-1881: Vol. II; The Middle Years 1882-1895: Vol. III; The Treacherous Years 1895-1901: Vol. IV; The Master 1901-1916: Vol. V;
Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953-72. The standard biography.

———. Henry James: A Life,
1985. The one-volume abridgment of the five-volume biography offers more frank treatment of the issue of homoeroticism and homosexuality.

Philip Horne,
Henry James: A Life in Letters,
New York: Viking, 1999. Choice correspondence linked by shrewd editorial commentary.

Henry James,
A Small Boy and Others,
1913;
Notes of a Son and Brother,
1914;
The Middle Years,
1917. Republished in one volume under the title
Autobiography;
edited with an introduction by Frederick Dupee, New York: Criterion Books, 1956.

Fred Kaplan,
Henry James: The Imagination of Genius,
New York: William Morrow, 1992. The first full biography since Edel; a worthy addition.

R. W. B. Lewis,
The Jameses: A Family Narrative,
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.

Sheldon Novick,
Henry James: The Young Master,
New York: Random House, 1996. Controversial in its assertion of an active homosexual life.

The first volume of
The Complete Letters of Henry James,
edited by Greg W. Zacharias and Pierre Walker, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003. The edition is planned for at least thirty print volumes, and it will also be accessible on the web and in DVD format. The first volume will publish approximately 100 of the over 10,000 letters that have been catalogued.

 

Leon Edel, ed.,
Henry James Letters,
4 vols., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974-84.

Stephen H. Jobe and Susan Elizabeth Gunter, eds.,
A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James & Biographical Register of Henry James’s Correspondents.
“This website provides access to a database of all known letters written by Henry James, and brief biographical information on the recipients of these letters.”
http://jamescalendar.unl.edu/

(See also Philip Horne, under
Biography.
)

Percy Lubbock, ed.,
The Letters of Henry James,
2 vols., New York: Scribner’s, 1920.

Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, with the assistance of Bernice Grohskopf and Wilma Bradbeer, eds.,
The Correspondence of William James: William and Henry,
3 vols., Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992-94. An essential supplement to Edel and Lubbock.

Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, eds.,
The Complete Notebooks of Henry James,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

This highly selective list includes some groundbreaking works, some works of unusually sustained influence, and for the general student some especially helpful titles. A few studies are included because of their relevance to decisions made for the present edition.

 

Michael Anesko,
“Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

John Auchard,
Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence,
University Park: Penn State Press, 1986.

Millicent Bell,
Meaning in Henry James,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Sara Blair,
Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Peter Buithenhuis,
The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970.

Oscar Cargill,
The Novels of Henry James,
New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Sarah B. Daugherty,
The Literary Criticism of Henry James,
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981.

Jonathan Freedman,
Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.