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Introduction copyright © 2014 by Philip Rahv
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62873-786-8
eISBN: 978-1-62914-158-9
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION
MADAME DE MAUVES
DAISY MILLER
AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
THE SIEGE OF LONDON
LADY BARBERINA
THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO
THE ASPERN PAPERS
THE PUPIL
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
A Biographical Introduction
THE REPUTATION of Henry James has grown immeasurably since his death in 1916, and he is now generally regarded by discriminating readers as America’s greatest novelist and a master of modern prose belonging to the company of Proust and Joyce. He is among the two or three American writers of the nineteenth century who were able to invent and put to creative use the imaginative methods of the twentieth century. And it is precisely because of the modernity of his gifts that his contemporaries failed to appraise him at his true worth.
The fact that James lived most of his adult life in England has made for a certain prejudice against him in his own country. The majority of critics, however, have long recognized the connection between his literary art and his quality as an archetypal American, a personality of historic rank and classic temper. Edmund Wilson has said that it is America which really gets the better of it in Henry James; and T. S. Eliot has observed that the soil of James’s origin imparted a flavor which, paradoxically enough, was “improved and given its chance, not worked off” by his expatriation. The truth is that his quarrel with his native land was a lover’s quarrel, as he himself defined it in one of his earliest writings.
In the Jamesian fiction you find a large group of American characters who stand in a vital and crucial relation to the national life. Very few figures created by our novelists are as significant from a national point of view as James’s “passionate pilgrim,” who enters the deep and dark and rich hive of Europe, driven by the desire to appropriate the fruits of civilization. It is at once the tragedy and humor of his case that he wants to be cut in on European experience without paying the price of sacrificing his new-world innocence. This drama has many variations, particularly as relating to the career of the “international” American girl—a type James invented and made real in a series of narratives and whom he elevated from her early modest beginnings in characters like Daisy Miller and Mary Garland to the golden display of such later heroines as Milly Theale and Maggie Verver. In the last great novels this heroine is endowed with the prerogatives of a princess and pictured as “the heiress of all the ages.” A pure American product, she is filled with the wonderful belief that the world belongs to her and she is the best there is. She exists in no other literature and it is inconceivable that she should. But it is only by projecting her against a foreign background, by placing her in the center of “Europe’s lighted and decorated stage,” that James was able to bring out her latent “greatness.”
The sense of Europe as a spiritual resource and as a literary theme was acquired by James in early childhood. Born in New York City on April 15, 1843, he was taken abroad at the age of two and again at the age of twelve, when for nearly five years the family traveled and the children attended schools in Paris, London, Bonn and Geneva. William, the elder brother by fifteen months, was vexed by the irregularities of their education; whereas Henry, an indifferent scholar, his faculties being all of the imagination and sensibility, was supremely content. From the very first the charm and color of history constituted an obsessive interest. Those formative years are depicted in the autobiographical volume A Small Boy and Others as shaping the pattern of all he was ever to want from life—“just to be somewhere . . . and somehow to receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration.” Everywhere he saw “so much,” his eye making out “arrangements of things hanging together with the romantic rightness that had the force of a revelation.” The picture composed itself into the characteristic Jamesian vision—the vision of Europe as a “sublime synthesis.”
Yet it was impossible for James to identify himself wholly with the Old World, and through all the years he remained the spectator from across the sea. Identification would have meant missing the thousand and one ironies of the transatlantic relation and giving up his role as the “fond analyst” of the American psyche in its exposure to European conditions. It was on the perception of differences that his genius was nourished; and at the age of twenty-nine, when well on his way to discovering his major theme, he wrote: “It’s a complex fate being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”
The James family was remarkable for its intellectual vitality, inwardness and good faith. The father, Henry James, Sr., was a friend of the men of letters and philosophers of his age and himself a brilliant though somewhat eccentric writer on moral and theological subjects, a cosmic optimist, a disciple of Swedenborg and a radical democrat; and the elder son, William, displayed his dialectical prowess at an early age. The paternal grandfather had made a fortune in Albany, enabling his heirs to cast aside all neat practicalities in favor of the cultivation of individuality and the arts of life. In two generations they were never known “to be guilty of a stroke of business.” It was difficult, however, to adjust a life of moneyed leisure to the demands of a society in which as yet “business alone was respectable.” Thus the James children often came home in a state of acute embarrassment because of their inability to appease their inquiring schoolmates with a “presentable account” of their parent. Their constant appeal to him was, “What shall we tell them you are?”—an appeal to which he patiently replied: “Say I’m a philosopher, say I’m a seeker of truth, say I’m a lover of my kind, say I’m an author of books if you like; or, best of all, say I’m a student.” Then there was the sad and mystifying example of a whole set of uncles and cousins who appeared to find no other use for inherited ease except to go to the bad with it. Under the circumstances Europe inevitably figured for the James family as a prime resource, for it seemed that leisure could be made to “pay” only where a social order existed which permitted people not to be “hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store.”
But in the long run the father always came back to the idea that America was superior to “those countries” after all, and in 1860 the family returned from abroad to settle in Newport. It was there that the Civil War broke upon them; the two younger brothers—Wilky and Bob—joined the struggle, but Henry was incapacitated by an accident suffered while helpi
ng to put out a fire. In later years he referred to it as “a horrid even if obscure hurt . . . the effects of which were to draw themselves out incalculably and intolerably.” It became for him an “inexhaustible interest”; and as a psychoanalytic writer has recently attempted to prove, there can be little doubt that this accident, in all its psychic ramifications, is the essential clue to certain obscure tendencies in the private and literary experience of Henry James about which his biographers and critics have occasionally speculated but never cleared up in a satisfactory manner. Perhaps it is this “obscure hurt” which chiefly accounts for the fact that he never married.
At that time his brother William was already engaged in scientific work at Harvard, and Henry joined him there in 1862 to attend lectures at the Law School. The study of law petered out soon enough, but in the atmosphere of Boston and Cambridge it became possible to develop literary plans. He formed a lifelong friendship with W. D. Howells, with whom he discussed endlessly the craft of fiction; other friends were C. E. Norton and J. R. Lowell. As the latter was on the staff of The North American Review and Howells was assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, it was in those periodicals, as well as in The Nation and the Galaxy, that James’s first stories and reviews appeared. The impressions of New England absorbed during the sixties he later put to good use in several narratives, the best of which is The Bostonians (1886), a novel that signally failed to please the residents of Back Bay. Europe he had not visited since boyhood, and he went to England in the spring of 1869, the famous springtime celebrated in the autobiographical volumes, when he was taken by the Nortons to see George Eliot, Ruskin, Rossetti, Tennyson and other distinguished persons—a series of meetings remembered as “a positive fairytale of privilege.” The honorific language is characteristic of James, and the unwary reader may well miss the note of irony it conceals—the irony of “the brooding monster . . . born to discriminate à tout propos,” who enjoyed dissecting the great no less than the small. In Notes of a Son and Brother there is a richly humorous account of the visit to Tennyson. The bard presented a shaggy and disconcertingly non-Tennysonian appearance and recited Locksley Hall in a manner that “took even more out of his verse than he had put in.”
In his fiction of the early seventies James had come close to defining his theme of the American in Europe, particularly in such stories as Madame de Mauves, The Madonna of the Future and The Passionate Pilgrim. The latter is the title story of his first book, published in 1875, the year he went to live permanently in Europe. Making his home in Paris, he was soon admitted into the brilliant circle of Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Daudet and Turgenev. Their combined example served to reinforce his own conviction that the art of literature was the most rigorous discipline conceivable and a complete fate in itself. Those writers, however, were in the main concerned with their own tradition, holding the opinions of a vague lonely American to be of little account; and James was generally indisposed to like French fashions in living. In July 1876 he was writing to William that he was done with the French forever: “Easy and smooth-flowing as life is in Paris, I would throw it over tomorrow for an even very small chance to plant myself for a while in England.” A few months later, having taken up his post of observation in “the place where there is most in the world to observe,” he was settled in London for good.
That James made a success of his life in England is established by the one test that really counts—the test of creative achievement. Thus during his initial five years in London, besides a large number of shorter pieces and the critical biography of Hawthorne, he wrote Daisy Miller, An International Episode, The Europeans, Confidence, Washington Square, and The Portrait of a Lady, the novel with which the fiction of his early manner is brought to a masterly close. James believed that it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion, that it takes manners, customs, usages, habits, forms of a settled and realized character. Now whatever the measure of general truth in his idea, the fact is that it reflected his own intense need, which if frustrated would surely have resulted in the warping of his genius. He was a man given to moods of depression and anxiety, and omens of disaster always had the advantage of his imagination; yet in all matters relating to his work he was a tower of strength. Above all he knew how to take care of his genius, and this knowledge made of him the one salient example in our literature of a novelist who, not exhausted by the youthful assertion of power, learned how to sustain his gifts and grow to full maturity. He understood that for the artist there can be no second chance. It was truly his own case that he described in the short story The Middle Years, in which the artist-hero cries out at the end: “It is glory—to have been tested, to have had our little quality, and cast our little spell. . .. A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
As James progressed in his work toward the ever more complex effects of his later period, he found that the public would not stay with him and that the popular success of Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady was not to be repeated. It is generally thought that this is what induced him, in the early nineties, to try his hand as a playwright. After several years he gave up the attempt as a failure, but from his theatrical experience he brought back to his novels a sharper sense of economy in writing and an extraordinary aptitude for framing fictional situations in a scenic and dramatic manner. In 1897, as he left London to set up a permanent residence at Lamb House, near Rye, Sussex, he was in the midst of his greatest and most productive period; and between 1898 and 1904 he brought out several volumes of stories as well as the consummate novels of his late maturity—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Toward the end of 1904, when he was more than sixty years old, he undertook a visit to America which lasted ten months—months crowded with observations and impressions. The American Scene (1907) is the record of that visit.
It was in late middle age and afterward that he developed that strong and portentous personality of which his friends have written at such great length in their memoirs. Ford Madox Ford remembered him as the most masterful man he had ever met, in whose presence he not infrequently felt “something like awe.”—“His skin was dark, his eyes very clear cut, his brow domed and bare. His eyes were singularly penetrating, dark and a little prominent. On their account he was regarded by the neighborhood poor as having the qualities of a Wise Man—a sorcerer.” Edith Wharton describes him in her autobiography as having lost in those years the look of a “bearded Penseroso” conveyed by Sargent’s well-known drawing; the beardless face revealed in all its sculptural beauty the “noble Roman mask and big dramatic mouth.” And all who knew him remembered his talk—highly ceremonious, proceeding by elaborate pauses and Ciceronian periods, and full of fantastically subtle jesting—the kind of talk that at once astounded and hugely amused his interlocutors. It was personal relations rather than ideas that he mostly liked to discuss. He took a great interest in the young writers of his time, and among them he was on particularly good terms with Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane and Rupert Brooke.
The outbreak of the First World War was a prodigious experience to James. His feeling was that the stakes were enormous, and, laying aside his work, he threw himself into various activities bearing on the war effort. It was largely because of his impatience with America’s dilatory policy in adopting the cause of the Allies, and also as a means of declaring his solidarity with the people in whose midst he had lived for so long, that he became a naturalized British subject in 1915. Edith Wharton thought that the war was his death-blow. After two years of it he could no longer endure to watch the slaughter.—“It was the gesture of Agamemnon, covering his face with his cloak before the unbearable.” He died on February 28, 1916. “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!” he is reported to have exclaimed as he suffered his first stroke.
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nbsp; PHILIP RAHV
Madame
de Mauves
Madame de Mauves
MADAME DE Mauves, written in the summer of 1873, is the story of the ruinous marriage of an American girl, Euphemia Cleve, to a French aristocrat of low morals. James was living in an old inn at Homburg in the Taunus hills when he was “visited,” as he recalled in a later preface, by the “gentle Euphemia,” a type “experimentally international” who muffled her charming head in the lightest, finest, vaguest tissue of romance. . . .” In accounting for her the young James made great progress in tracing out the complex design of the theme so peculiarly his own—the theme of the “international situation.” In point of technique as well this tale stands out as James’s best work of the early seventies. It differs from his other stories of that period (A Passionate Pilgrim, Eugene Pickering, etc.) in being told mostly through the impressions of the hero, thus doing away both with the loose approach of the “omniscient author” and the equally loose approach of a narrator somewhat awkwardly situated outside the action. The change is all in the direction of greater dramatic effect, of maintaining the reader and the character whose function it is “to find things out” on the same plane of gradual revelation.
Since the early months of 1872 James had been living in Europe, and, to judge by a letter to W. D. Howells dated at the time of the composition of Madame de Mauves, he had once again fallen into a mood of anxious uncertainty as to the fate of the American who takes Europe as “hard” as he had been taking it. Perhaps it was a mistake, after all, to put so much stock in the Old World, which persisted in keeping one at arm’s length despite all one’s best efforts. To Howells he wrote of the desolation of exile and of the sacrifices exacted by “this arrogant old Europe which so little befriends us.” And a few months later he was writing in the same vein to Grace Norton, remarking that one stood to America in a much less “factitious and artificial relation” than to Europe.—“It would seem that in our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained and unentertaining continent, where we all sit sniffing, as it were, the very earth of our foundations, we ought to have leisure to turn out something from the very heart of simple human nature.”