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.
xxxiii “inhumanity of Method”: Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913), in Autobiography (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), 124.
xxxiii “virtually in motion”: Ibid., 122.
xxxiii “our rootless & accidental childhood”: Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 148.
xxxiii “a native of the James family”: Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of William James: 1885-1889, vol. 6 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 517 (letter to his sister).
xxxiv “woof of time is every instant broken”: “Of Individualism in Democratic Countries,” in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Knopf, 1989), 99.
xxxv “sacred rage of his art”: Blackmur, Op. cit., 1040.
xxxv “Nothing could be allowed”: Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work (London: The Hogarth Press, 1924), 265.
xxxv “that the Novel remains still”: The New York Edition preface, The Ambassado
rs; subsequent citations from the preface to Roderick Hudson.
xxxvi “I live, live intensely”: Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters: 1895-1916, IV, 769-70.
xxxvii “Life being all inclusion”: New York Edition preface, The Spoils of Poynton.
xxxix crack a walnut: A. C. Benson, Memories and Friends (London: John Murray, 1924), 197.
xxxix “the art of mountaining molehills”: Desmond MacCarthy, Portraits: I (London and New York: Putnam, 1931), 152.
xl “He sits at the harpsichord”: Leon Edel, ed., Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1210-11.
Chronology
1843 Henry James Jr. (the “Jr.” retained until after the death of his father) is born April 15 just off Washington Square in New York City to father Henry James Sr. (1811-1882), a religious thinker with strong Swedenborgian interests and a substantial income from an inheritance, and mother Mary Robertson Walsh James (1810-1882). Brother William James, born the previous year (1842-1910), would become a distinguished philosopher and psychologist (The Principles of Psychology, 1890; Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902; Pragmatism, 1907). Thoreau visits the James home, and the two very young sons are taken to Europe.
1844 In England, life-changing “vastation” of Henry James Sr. takes place, caused by a “damnèd shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room.” Family travels to Paris.
1845-57 Returns to New York City, then spends two years in Albany. Three more siblings—Garth Wilkinson “Wilky” James (1845-1883), Robertson James (1846-1903), and Alice James (1848-1891)—are born. (Robertson’s later life is plagued by alcoholism, and Alice is diagnosed in youth as a “neurasthenic.”) Home is on 14th Street in New York, where Bronson Alcott, Horace Greeley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—a good friend of Henry James Sr.—are frequent visitors. Family travels to Europe, with extended stays in Geneva, London, and Paris.
1858-62 Family returns to America and settles in Newport, Rhode Island. After trips to Geneva and Bonn, they return to Newport. Henry briefly studies art. Extinguishing a fire in 1861, he receives an “obscure hurt”; when drafted into the Civil War, he is excused for what is probably a related back injury. Spends a term at Harvard Law School. Brother “Wilky” is gravely wounded in battle.
1864 The unsigned “A Tragedy of Error,” James’s first published story, appears in the February Continental Monthly. Unsigned review of Nassau W. Senior’s Essays on Fiction appears in the October North American Review (James’s payment: $12.00).
1865 First signed publication, “The Story of a Year,” appears in the Atlantic; first signed review appears in the Nation.
1866 Strong friendships develop with Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Dean Howells, and with acquaintances of his youth Thomas Sergeant Perry and painter John LaFarge. Meets Charles Dickens on his American tour. Travels to England; meets George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Charles Darwin; dines with John Ruskin. Visits France, Switzerland, and Italy.
1870 Cousin Minnie Temple dies at age twenty-four (“radiant and rare, extinguished in her first youth”); years later dedicates lengthy section of autobiographical Notes of a Son and Brother to her and asserts that her death marked “the end of our youth.”
1871 First novel, Watch and Ward, published (serialized in periodicals but not reprinted in book form until 1878). Visits Emerson at Concord.
1872-74 Accompanies aunt and sister Alice on European tour; writes regular travel essays for the Nation. Escorts Emerson through the Louvre (“His perception of art is not, I think, naturally keen”); meets Matthew Arnold in Rome. Revisits the United States.
1875-76 Publishes three books in three genres in one year—his first books: A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (short stories), Transatlantic Sketches (travel essays), and Roderick Hudson (first novel in book form). Returns to Europe, where, except for visits to the United States, he will reside for the rest of his life. In Paris, develops close friendship with Ivan Turgenev (“the divine Turgénieff”), and an acquaintance with Gustave Flaubert. Meets Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, Gustave Doré, and Émile Zola. Takes up residence in London on Bolton Street.
1877-78 Writes The American. Daisy Miller appears in Cornhill Magazine—a popular success (the greatest of his career) and soon pirated. Publishes first volume of critical essays, French Poets and Novelists, and The Europeans.
1879 Confidence, his weakest novel, earns popular approval and good royalties (one of several novels later excluded from the New York Edition). Has social success in London; meets Robert Browning, Tennyson, George Meredith, George du Maurier, Trollope, Edmund Gosse, T. H. Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson, James McNeill Whistler, Holman Hunt, and Frederick Leighton.
1880-81 Writes Washington Square. In Italy, develops close friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson; works on The Portrait of a Lady in Venice and Florence (published in 1881). Visits the United States.
1882 Mother dies during James’s American visit (“She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity”). Returns to London and travels to France (A Little Tour in France, 1884); returns to United States on notice of father’s illness, but father dies while James is in transit (“The house is so empty—I scarcely know myself”). Reinstates younger brother’s inheritance (“Wilky” had been disinherited by James Sr. after he drained the family’s resources).
1883-84 Wilky dies; Turgenev dies. James turns over income from his own inheritance to sister Alice. With her companion Katharine Loring, Alice moves to England and eventually settles in London near her brother. James publishes “The Art of Fiction” (“the chamber of consciousness”) several months after brother William publishes on “consciousness a continuous stream.” Publishes Portraits of Places (collection of previously published travel essays).
1886-89 Moves to London’s De Vere Gardens. The Bostonians is criticized for satirizing reformer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; brother William himself judges it “a pretty bad business.” Writes The Princess Casamassima, “The Aspern Papers,” and The Reverberator; essay collection, Partial Portraits. Alice James begins keeping diary.
1890-91 Publishes The Tragic Muse. Disappointed with fiction sales, turns attention to dramatic stage and rewrites The American as a play with a happy ending. The American: A Comedy in Four Acts opens to critical and popular success.
1892-94 Grieved by death of sister Alice (“I shall feel very lonely in England”) and by Constance Fenimore Woolson’s apparent suicide in Venice (“Before the horror and pity of it I have utterly collapsed”). Robert Louis Stevenson also dies (“that beautiful, bountiful being”). Katharine Loring publishes four copies of Alice James’s diary; Henry eventually destroys his copy.
1895 Disastrous first night of Guy Domville ends excursion into the theater.
1896-98 Develops powerful friendship with Joseph Conrad (“a beautiful and generous mind”). Publishes The Other House, The Spoils of Poynton, and What Maisie Knew. Takes a twenty-one-year lease on Lamb House, Rye, East Sussex, where he writes The Awkward Age and subsequent novels. Begins dictating his work. Writes The Turn of the Screw. Begins friendships with H. G. Wells and Stephen Crane.
1899 Publishes The Awkward Age. In Rome, meets young Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik C. Andersen and begins an emotionally charged friendship (“I wish I could go to Rome and put my hands on you”). Purchases Lamb House.
1900-1901 Begins work on The Sense of the Past, which experiments with time travel (it remains unfinished at his death and is published posthumously). Publishes The Sacred Fount. William James writes parts of Varieties of Religious Experience while staying at Lamb House.
1902 Publishes The Wings of the Dove, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Travel essays are collected in English Hours.
1903 Publishes The Ambassadors and the commissioned biography William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Important friendship develops with Edith Wharton.<
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1904 Publishes The Golden Bowl. Returns to the United States, in spite of discouragement of brother William (“You are very dissuasive—even more than I expected”), after a twenty-year absence. Tours as far south as Florida, as far west as California; lectures on “The Lesson of Balzac” and “The Question of Our Speech”; American press notes the visit and publishes caricatures of his supposed stupefaction at American customs.
1905 Returns to England; begins work on The Novels and Tales of Henry James; publishes edition generally known as the New York Edition.
1906-9 Continues exhausting work on revisions and prefaces for the New York Edition. Publishes two travel volumes, The American Scene (1907), on his recent American tour, and Italian Hours (1909), collecting Italian essays written over thirty-five years. Writes “The Jolly Corner.” Initial New York Edition royalties amount to just over £40. Friendship with young Hugh Walpole. Begins work on The Ivory Tower (published incomplete and posthumously). Experiences bouts of depression; burns most letters he has received over the years.
1910 James has a nervous breakdown (“My nervous condition—trepidation, agitation, general dreadfulness”); alcoholic younger brother Robertson dies alone in Concord; James revisits the United States, where brother William soon dies (“my best & wisest of friends”). Henry James is the last alive of the five siblings (“I feel stricken & old & ended”).
1911 “Revises” The Outcry, written as a play in 1909, as a minor novel. Health improves; begins work on first autobiographical volume. Awarded honorary degree from Harvard. Wharton, Gosse, and Howells lobby unsuccessfully to have Nobel Prize awarded to him.
1912 Receives honorary doctorate from Oxford (“fecundissimum et facundissimum scriptorem”). Judging James’s finances as precarious, Wharton secretly arranges to have $8,000 of her Scribner’s royalties offered him as an “advance”; his spirits improved, returns to work on The Ivory Tower.