The James Revival

by LEON EDEL

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THE posthumous reputation of Henry James is a curious story such as he might have written himself—such as he did write — about frustrated authors, neglected and unappreciated and then discovered or “revived” under fortuitous circumstances; or writers acclaimed in life but so misunderstood that their reputations arc a chronic mockery of their work. Henry James has been dead for thirty-two years. He had become a legend even before the final moment in Chelsea on February 28, 1916. For decades a resident in England, his portly presence removed and distant from his American public (such as it was), he was merely a dignified textbook name to the generation that came of age shortly after the turn of the century. There is a story that he was referred to as the “late Henry James” at a great public gathering in t he 1890’s and no one protested. Apocryphal or not, this story is symptomatic of his reputation as he neared the end of his long and creative life.

This was due in part to the fact that, after the brief period of his success in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, the gulf between Henry James and his public widened. A complex, fastidious artist who subjected emotion constantly to the rule of reason, a man who delighted in artistic experiment (and therefore a man of the literary laboratory rather than the literary market place), he lived an intense inner life, like some monk, with Lamb House, his English country home, for a cell, and Rye, in Sussex, for his cloisters. He ventured into the world only to enjoy for brief periods its social amenities and bask in the warmth of appreciation offered by a limited circle, but never sufficient to satisfy him. He presented to those who knew him in his final years a ponderous personality weighted with words and memories and isolated from a world that crumbled about him in the early days of the First World War.

To this obscurity, which he did not invite, we must add a certain semi-anonymity which he did. He was intensely secretive by nature. He believed in the “private life (and wrote a story of that name). Some years before his death he built what he described as a “gigantic bonfire” to which he consigned the greater part of his forty-year-old accumulation of letters and papers, preserving only a few copybooks which contained notes still usable in his work, and such letters as could safely be read by eyes other than his own. For his own papers he had a rigid law: not to leave “personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents.”

Yet he must have been aware that a literary personality leaves his signature in many places; in the letters, for instance, which conic from his writing table to remain in others’ custody, Henry James’s letters seem to have been written in constant awareness that they were at the mercy of accidents; they arc often evasive, overloaded with euphemism and irony, painfully discreet, brilliantly wordy. Occasionally he lets go, and the moment he does, he ruefully urges his correspondent to burn the letter, It is interesting to reflect that many who received such letters could not bring themselves to comply with his request; perhaps because even when Henry James did let himself go, it was not very far.

When it came to the posthumous papers of other writers he had no such qualms; he would not encourage excavation into his own past, and certainly would not assist in (he wielding of the pickaxe and spade (as he told his bibliographer, LeRoy Phillips), but he had more than a normal degree of curiosity about his predecessors and contemporaries. He observed, on reading Hawthorne’s notebooks, that “the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible.” He clearly relished an opportunity to examine a sheaf of Byron’s unpublished letters. He wrote two biographies. He wrote reviews of volumes of biography, letters, diaries of other writers, with too evident a pleasure not to have known that some day he too would be exposed to literary excavation.

And yet he obviously feared it. It is implicit in one of his most successful tales (recently translated, almost beyond recognition, to the screen), The Aspern Papers, in which the hero unsuccessfully seeks to obtain the surviving papers of a Shelleyesque figure; and ii is explicitly stated in The Ural Right Thing, in which the biographer is haunted by the ghost of the subject of his biography.

His secretiveness led him to employ what he termed “mystification” not only in alluding to his technical virtuosity in putting his tales together, but in his evocation of the “visitable past of his life. His autobiographical formula was to hint, to evoke, to mystify, to bewilder. He carries this process at moments, particularly in his prefaces, to a point of quite exasperating coyness and, for the modern reader, of bewildering obfuscation. His desire to mystify was carried over into such little autobiographical fables as The Figure in the Carpel, The Death of the Lion, and The Next Time, which treat of writers and their reputations; the first is a challenge to critics to look for i he underlying pattern in his work; the second an ironic comment on society’s incapacity to feel with the artist; and the third on its failure to give him recognition and economic security.

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SINCE 1943, the year of the centenary of his birth, some spark from the preserved flint of his mind (preserved in more than seventy-five published volumes and dozens of articles buried in old periodicals) seems to have set a fire, and we have had a rapid succession of works about him.

The reprinting of some of his novels and tales, long neglected, both here, in England, and in France, has begun in that sporadic and seemingly haphazard manner that is one of the constant and unfathomable mysteries (or perversities) of the publishing world. Quite suddenly lie seems to be like his Jeffrey Aspern, of whom he wrote that “today, after his long comparative obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature for all the world to see.” It has been rather surprising to the James cult, which for so long had taken a comfortable proprietary interest in the novelist and which now pleasantly discovers that he is no longer, as Max Beerbohm described him in a gentle, jesting sonnet, “the marmoreal darling of the few, but the. possession of the many.

We are not yet, however, completely in possession. The facts of Henry James’s life have indeed suffered a “comparative obseuration ” to which he contributed with such assiduity. “Mystification” could only inspire curiosity, and curiosity speculation, much of it fruitless critically. The road to Henry James is cluttered with subjective criticism, like so much dandelion fuzz, to be blown away by the first wind of fact. The James cell further encrusted the man with a coaling of apocryphal anecdote that has only lately been scraped off, with much good humor and critical insight, by Simon Nowell-Smith in a skillfully compiled little volume, The Legend of the Master, published in England.

But we still have a Henry James of shreds and patches. Parts of letters have gone into the making of a book on William; other parts are fitted into the recently published family mosaic; still others are in the original Letters published almost thirty years ago by Percy Lubbock and revealing to us Henry James the social lion rather than the creative artist. So that while our vision of the man has constantly been enlarged, it remains still out of focus since wo lack those primary materials which would answer certain questions and clarify certain judgments that at present can only be regarded as tentative.

During the past year we have had three substantial volumes in America to testify to the renewed interest not only in the novelist but in the other remarkable members of the James family. We owe these volumes largely to F. O. Matthiessen of Harvard, whose enthusiasm and productive energy have in a large measure contributed to the James “revival.” Mr. Matthiessen’s Jamesian labors have grown larger and more extensive with time. In the past six months his name has figured on a stout anthology of James’s “American” novels and tales — a selection from such fiction as was set in the American scene as distinct from the European— and tin even stouter anthology of writings of the James family; and finally he has edited, together with his Harvard colleague, Kenneth B. Murdock, the surviving notebooks, which take their place on that small shelf of abiding American volumes of selfrevelation where stand The Education of Henry Adams, the journals of Emerson, the notebooks of Hawthorne, and Henry James’s own A Small Hog and Others and Sates of a Son and Brother.

In The James Family, of course, Mr. Matthiessen is not treating of Henry alone, but of his extraordinary father, who with the years has been overshadowed by the brightness of his sons’ achievement; his older brother, who was our most famous philosopher; his sister, who kept a remarkable journal; his mother, who is always spoken of as “self-effacing” but who exercised an unusual influence on her sons, and in particular, Henry: and Ids younger brothers, who also possessed a fund of creative energy that seems to have been burned out by the Civil War, in which they fought, and the frustrations they experienced in its aftermath.

Mr. Matthiessen’s family portrait is revealed to us through the writings of the father and his children, for they were all highly articulate, and brilliantly so, whether in formal utterance or in the informality of their correspondence. Introspective, “psychological,”they matched their wits, merged their feelings, argued, and looked upon all life with a sharp humor, a fierce passion, that found different expression according to the individual but flowed from the same fount.

The greatest success of this book is the skill with which Mr. Matthiessen has selected his material, reprinting much that has been long out of print, and drawing judiciously upon the family papers generously bestowed upon Harvard (and now in the Houghton Library) by the third Henry James, who died only recently. The third Henry— the oldest son of William and nephew of the novelist — not only bore his illustrious name with great dignity but was a skillful biographer in his own right. Knowing the value of the document to the scholar and critic, he assembled the family papers over many years, obtained the cooperation of other owners of Jamesiana, and thus made available to posterity a great collection of which Mr. Matthiessen gives us a fine, rich sampling.

The James Family thus enlarges, incidentally, our picture of the novelist, since we see him in the family circle. The Notebooks take us into his study, and here we can observe him, at last, in the very act of creation at his writing table, fingering his subjects, contriving his plots, building his characters, pouncing upon the “air-blown particles” around which he weaves his fantasies, drawing for his tales not so much upon his acute observation of the limited social world he chose as his field, as upon the deeper substance of the consciousness — his consciousness.

He is revealed to us also struggling with his material. harassed by fears and uncertainties, telling himself to “ keep cool and not to worry,” and finally, in illuminating passages that have in them the quality of passionate prayer, calling upon all the “powers and forces and divinities to whom I’ve ever been loyal and who haven’t failed me yet — after all: never, never yet!”

The epic poets invoked their Muse with formal prayer and eloquence; but in Henry James’s notebooks we are confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of a novelist, in our century, wooing his Muse with a mystic fervor, addressing it with a show of emotion and passion and endearing terms in French and Italian, mon bon and caro mio. “. . . my poor blest old Genius pats me so admirably and lovingly on the back that I turn, I screw round, and bend my lips to passionately in my gratitude, kiss its hand.” It is in such passages, charged with fever and the glow of creation, that we come closer to Henry James than at any time in the past.

But Henry James the man, and the artist, still remains, as Edmund Wilson observed recently, a “singular and specialized person” for all that we now know about him — one of the most complex figures in our literature. His father and brother gave concrete expression to their ideas in their writings and they are there for all of us to see. Henry James dressed his ideas, and his view of the world, in the garments of art, in the form of rather elaborate and sometimes fantastic fables. The sources of his creativity, the direction it took, the strange compulsions which drove him from fiction to his abortive experiments on the stage, the use to which he put the knowledge thus acquired, his hunger for appreciation in a world that was not really hostile to him, his “psychologizing” and exploration of the fringes of consciousness, his constant sense of frustration, his role as an American in the world —these and many other questions remain to be fruitfully explored.

We will need more documents; remembering the “gigantic bonfire” we may not find them. Perhaps the answer lies in Hugh Vereker’s (The Figure in the Carpet) advice to l he young critic to look into the work itself “the particular thing I’ve written my books most for . . . there’s an idea in my work without winch I wouldn’t have given a straw for the whole job. . . . The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it.” The order, the form, the texture — close readers of Henry James will know the meaning of this.