Written by some of the best known and distinguished Henry James scholars, this innovative text provides up-to-date scholarship on James’s writings. Read together, the chapters of this Companion map the direction of contemporary James studies. Taken separately, each one offers a concise, contemporary reference to the most extensively studied writings and critiques in the field.

This text is organized into two sections. The first part of the volume presents James’s most frequently read fiction and non-fiction. Chapters in the second section outline current approaches to the reading and teaching of James’s writings. Additionally, special attention is given to understanding James in national contexts – American, English, French, and Italian – and to understanding his work in terms of the cultures which informed his life and writing.

Greg W. Zacharias is professor of English and director of the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University. He is Co-general Editor with Pierre A. Walker of The Complete Letters of Henry James (Nebraska).

A Companion to Henry James

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Greg W. Zacharias
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-4042-3

Chapter One

Bad Years in the Matrimonial Market: James’s Shorter Fiction, 1865-1878

Clair Hughes

When Henry James was asked to list an introductory selection of his work for a new reader he advised that his tales, the “little tarts,” should be read “when you have eaten your beef and potatoes” (Krook 1967: 325). After serious effort with the novels, that is, the ideal reader might indulge in something lighter by way of a dessert. To extend the culinary metaphor, we might consider James’s early tales as amuse bouches – introductory savouries, evidence of style and content, challenge and innovation, perhaps, but, most importantly, a promise that staying the course will be rewarding.

Not all readers have been enthusiastic about these early tales. Rebecca West dismisses “those first stories” as “pale dreams as might visit a New England spinster looking out from her snuff-coloured parlour on a grey drizzling day” (West 1916: 24). West, in the year of James’s death, might have been more charitable, given her real admiration for James, but the literary personality she ascribes here to James – female, morose, and sexually thwarted – was already current, and is one that still lingers, particularly amongst those who have not seriously read the novels. Philip Sicker’s description of the heroes of the early stories as “a collection of demented artists, chronic invalids, drunkards, suicides, ineffectual dilettantes and hypochondriacs” (Sicker 1980: 26) adds an edge of excitement to the spinster parlor imagined by West, but not much cheer.

West’s comment is less a considered judgment than a young writer’s urge to be amusingly iconoclastic; but, for all its superficiality, it does at least point us to one important aspect of the early stories: in relation to fiction’s traditional courtship/marriage paradigm, things do not turn out well for the protagonists. James’s “little tarts” were not reassuring confections of the kind familiar to the readership of the magazines in which they first appeared. In “The Art of Fiction” of 1884, James observed that novelistic convention required “a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks”; such an ending was like that of “a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices” (James 1984a: 48). From the first, however, James felt himself bound to frustrate readers of their usual fare. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly, according to James’s biographer, Fred Kaplan, grumbled about his “penchant for ending stories unhappily” (Kaplan 1992: 50). The early work looks forward to the central importance of narrative experiment in the great novels: these “pale dreams” constantly affront and deny narrative expectations, particularly in relation to the possibility of a happy marriage as acceptable closure.

In what follows I look at a selection of James’s early tales and his neglected first novel, Watch and Ward, to focus on how the traditional narrative of courtship is deployed and the ways in which its problems are resolved. These stories fall roughly into four thematic groups: those with a Civil War setting; tales of the ghostly; tales of the early 1870s, exploring James’s “International Theme,” often involving concerns with tradition and the past; and tales which reflect his increasing focus on the problematic situation of women. There are no hard and fast boundaries between the groups: “The Last of the Valerii,” for example, involves the past, the supernatural, and one of James’s first American girls in Europe. Modern readers of the stories cannot avoid, of course, the urge to read back from later work, to find situations similar to those encountered in the novels. There is a certain artificiality in reading in this way, as it places the early fiction constantly at a disadvantage in relation to later achievements, but there are also positive aspects to this inevitable process. As Dorothea Krook says, James’s treatment in the early work, while tentative, is also remarkable for “a degree of explicitness,” providing “valuable corroborative evidence of [his] main preoccupations in the novels” (Krook 1967: 326).

Certain Jamesian obsessions stand out from the start, in particular the ambivalent fascination of strong, independent (often American) women, and the threatening prospect for a man of being closely involved with one of them. If magazine fiction seems to move ineluctably towards satisfying resolutions, the elements within the stories struggle not to accept such a desired pattern. From the start of James’s career, things work out only at great cost. James’s choice of the marriage-plot for the early stories was arrived at through a complex of causes. His early education, for example, had exposed him to the culture and literature of Europe, where the novel had evolved alongside the fortunes of the bourgeoisie, for whom the inheritance of property was of central concern and property problems made the fate of the jeune fille marier crucial. There is no one, as Leslie Fiedler says, “to whom the phrase ‘they lived happily ever after’ is meaningless” (Fiedler 1982: 46), and in Europe that usually means they finally had enough property and money to start a new household. This format, however, was by no means the stuff of the American literary scene. The great works of American fiction, Fiedler points out, “tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman.” If in Europe Flaubert “was dreaming of Madame Bovary,” in America “Melville was finding Moby Dick”(Fiedler 1982: 24, 28), Fenimore Cooper had headed for the wilderness, and Twain’s Huck Finn was fleeing domesticity on the Mississippi.

James had no intention to attempt anything in this robustly American style, but his return to America from Europe with his family in 1860 coincided with the start of the Civil War, a topic that a hopeful writer for the magazine market might well have been expected to address.

Furthermore, the younger Jameses, Wilky and Bob, went on to enlist in the Union army in 1862, Wilky returning wounded in 1863. The question of James’s “obscure hurt” of 1860, his non-participation in the war, and the relation of these events (or non-events) to his work has been the subject of discussion; most recently in Peter Rawlings’s Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Rawlings suggests that “[w]hether James was either unable or unwilling to take up arms is less significant than the use to which he put his negative experience of the Civil War in terms of the discourse of fiction-compelling obscurity” (Rawlings 2005: xi, xii) – which sensibly frees us from worrying at unanswerable biographical questions and directs our attention to the work. James himself in his autobiographical writings saw in the “hurrying troops, the transfigured scene … a cover for every sort of intensity” (Dupee 1956: 415-16).

The war, then, is less a background to stories such as “The Story of a Year” (1865), “Poor Richard” (1867), and “A Most Extraordinary Case” (1868) than an off-stage element, a testing, threatening obscurity, “a cover for every sort of intensity.” As Rawlings says, war became for James “subservient to a campaign in which popular fiction, common assumptions about the unproblematic nature of representation, and the torrid zones of gender come under a reviling scrutiny” (Rawlings 2005: 46).

The start of “The Story of a Year” at once questions the assumptions of popular fiction: “when the hero is despatched does not the romance come to a stop?” John Ford and Lizzie Crowe – the “romance” – are introduced within an idyllic if damp landscape setting, and so besotted with one another that the young lieutenant disregards damage to his uniform and Lizzie is “reckless of her stockings.” Ford marches off to war on clouds of imagined glory – “columns charging … standards floating” – clasping a vision of Lizzie as “Catholics keep little pictures of their adored Lady in their prayer-books” (James 1999a: 26, 27). His romantic illusions are early instances of the trap that unexamined imagery lays for the unwary, a theme that will occupy James to the end of his life.

James’s narrator declines to follow his hero into battle, but the language of war is transferred to the domestic front: waiting for her soldier’s return, “Lizzie became a veteran at home.” The year’s seasonal changes suggest “another silent transition” (James 1999a: 39) as she grows bored with Ford’s battlefield letters and a life of suspended activity. Christmas brings invitations and Lizzie arms herself for a party in “voluminous white, puffed and trimmed in wondrous sort,” puts on “her bracelet, her gloves, her handkerchief and her fan, and then – her smile” and conquers Mr. Bruce, who is not young, but, as her friend says, “beautifully educated” (James 1999a: 41, 42). Romance stops no more than do the seasons.

Ford is gravely wounded in battle and in Lizzie’s muddled mind the two men now stand “like opposing knights” (James 1999a: 49). Her emotional confusion makes her ill, and on accepting Bruce’s proposal of marriage, she collapses. News arrives that Ford has improved and is on his way home, although on arrival he worsens. Lizzie fulfils her role of loving sweetheart and falls weeping at his bedside. But Ford, having been told of Mr. Bruce, gives up, like “an old wounded Greek who … has crawled into a temple to die,” adoring his “sculptured Artemis” (James 1999a: 65).

So much for all the complications of the narrative: James’s conclusion must, however, have perplexed readers of the Atlantic. Lizzie first appears to do the “right” romantic thing in breaking her engagement to Bruce after Ford’s death, and angrily protests when he refuses to leave: “But for all that, he went in” (James 1999a: 66). Wedding bells are clearly imminent. Is this really a “happy ending”? The war hero has been defeated by the country lawyer, a denial of readerly expectations, but also of common ideas of war and the performance of masculinity. But it is Lizzie’s happy ending: she has opted for the more viable mate. Rawlings puts Lizzie among James’s “predatory women” (Rawlings 2005: 51), though she is hardly calculating enough for that. She wants to be – we want her to be – a sentimental heroine. But when James replaces the Madonna icon that starts the story, and which is central to the Christian family-ideal, with the virgin huntress, the “sculptured Artemis,” at the end, he is evoking a natural force to whom issues of sentiment and morality are immaterial.

Lizzie is thinly drawn, but Gertrude Whittaker of “Poor Richard,” the object of the eponymous Richard’s love, is recognizably a Jamesian girl rather than a standard magazine heroine, being large, plain, rich, and clear-eyed. Richard – “an ill-natured fool, dull, disobliging, brooding, lowering” (James 1999a: 156) – makes a wretched hero in comparison with two other suitors, both soldiers. Leon Edel, in his introduction to Watch and Ward, sorts Jamesian suitors into three types: the Loyal, the Strong, and the Cunning (James 1979: 15). Here, Richard is loyal, Captain Severn, strong and Major Luttrell, cunning. Gertrude, though kind to the doggedly devoted Richard, falls in love with the scholarly Captain Severn, but through the deceit of Richard and Luttrell, Severn returns to battle without seeing Gertrude, and is killed. Richard confesses his lie, and in finding the courage to do so, finds his male identity, and – here is the shock – falls out of love. With Richard’s retrieval of self-respect, Gertrude recognizes that he is “abundantly a man and she loved him … if he had opened his arms, Gertrude would have come to them.” Instead, he goes off to war, and the narrator rather brutally declares, “with their separation our story properly ends” (James 1999a: 159, 208).

James’s “appended paragraph,” filling in future events, is extraordinarily disconcerting. Richard has a good war, returns, but heads for a new life in the West; Gertrude becomes the woman found so often in James’s life and work – rich, independent, and living in Italy, for whom “a little romance is occasionally invoked to account for her continued celibacy.” Richard’s discovery of a male identity has directed him to physical effort, to male society, away from female zones, and James does not suggest he is any the better for this. Both are thus given reasonable but separate outcomes: “This is not romance,” as Gertrude observes of Richard, “it’s reality” (James 1999a: 208, 178). Reality, then, unusually for the world of magazine fiction, need not include getting married.

Romance of a kind does conclude “A Day of Days,” written just before “Poor Richard,” but not romance and marriage. For the space of a fine September day Adela Moore and Thomas Ludlow enjoy one another’s company. Ludlow is due to leave for Europe and admits it would be “very heroic, very poetic, very chivalric to lose his steamer” – but for an idea, a fancy? “Why spoil it?” (James 1999a: 104) he thinks, and leaves. It is a perfectly inconclusive conclusion, in which both characters keep an ideal image of one another in perpetuity, foreshadowing by nearly forty years James’s darker, sadder ending in “Altar of the Dead.” The story is one of the most satisfying of this period in its representation of ideal companionship, in which sexual complications and possibilities remain forever suspended in an autumnal glow. It is also as defiant of literary convention, as devoid of plot and comfort as a Beckett play.

We can look at the failure to find good marriages in another way, and argue, as Philip Sicker does, that the quest for love in James’s fiction “is a continued quest for identity” (Sicker 1980: 10). Even if the quest is inconclusive – if it ends in marriage bad or indifferent, in separation or in death – identity, James seems to be saying, is nevertheless forged by way of the “great relation between men and women.” It was this relation which James accused nineteenth-century Anglo-American novelists of evading, of keeping “so desperately, so nervously clear of,” preferring to deal in wildlife adventure, mystery and murder, “tortured childhood and purified sin” (James 1984a: 107, 1402). And because so much of the “great relation” passes unseen, within the consciousness of characters, elements of the supernatural, which is always, for James, a matter of consciousness, can also be woven into his fiction. In “A Most Extraordinary Case,” for example, we see the supernatural at work in the effect Caroline Hoffman has on Ferdinand Mason.

Mason, a wounded war hero, returns to be nursed by his aunt, Caroline’s guardian. Caroline is one of James’s big healthy girls, sumptuously beautiful this time, and Mason duly falls in love. Although Dr. Knight declares Mason is recovering, every contact with the girl unaccountably weakens him, though she is attentive and kind. She, on the other hand, blooms: “she has the inviolable strength of a goddess,” Knight says, “it’s the sound of Diana on the forest leaves.” When Caroline becomes engaged to Knight, Mason admits defeat: “to have broken down in his country’s defence will avail her nothing”; she needs “a being complete, intact, well-seasoned, invulnerable” (James 1999a: 296, 284). Resolved “to purchase one short hour of enjoyment” with Caroline, the sickly Mason enters the ballroom, as if it were a battlefield, and conducts himself “with unprecedented gallantry.” His aunt, alarmed, remarks how “these dreadful girls … like a man to look as if he were going to die.” The “battle” indeed ends in his death, but James concludes – almost mockingly – with marriage: “Miss Hoffman’s wedding was not deferred” (James 1999a: 289, 301, 303). In “A Most Extraordinary Case” the supernatural is internalized; over-excitement could almost have accounted for Mason’s relapses. It is “the revealed effect” (James 1987: 191), as James says in his notes on The Sense of the Past, that is significant and alarming: Freud’s “uncanny,” in other words, where events are susceptible to neither rational nor supernatural explanation.

(Continues…)

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