The Portable Henry James

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  I - FICTION

  Daisy Miller: A Study

  Brooksmith

  The Real Thing

  The Middle Years

  The Turn of the Screw

  The Beast in the Jungle

  The Jolly Corner

  II - REVISIONS

  Daisy Miller

  The Portrait of a Lady

  III - TRAVEL

  From English Hours

  From Italian Hours

  From The American Scene

  France

  IV - CRITICISM

  On Whitman “brute sublimity”

  On Baudelaire - “This is not Evil . . . it is simply the nasty!”

  From Hawthorne - “No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, ...

  On Emerson - “salt is wanting”

  The Art of Fiction - “the chamber of consciousness” “Try to be one . . . on ...

  From The Question of Our Speech - “Our national use of vocal sound, in men and ...

  From The Lesson of Balzac - “plated and burnished and bright”

  On Shakespeare - the “absolute value of Style”

  From the Preface to Roderick Hudson - “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere”

  From the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady - “The house of fiction has in short ...

  From the Preface to The Tragic Muse - “large loose baggy monsters”

  V - AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  The peaches d’antan

  The dancing teacher Madame Dubreil

  A daguerreotype taken by Mathew Brady

  The Galerie d’Apollon

  An obscure hurt

  The death of Minnie Temple

  At the grave of Alice James

  VI - CORRESPONDENCE

  A thirteen-year-old in Paris writes to a young friend

  On the Grand Tour

  Henry James, expatriate

  The literary scene in Paris

  Growing fame

  The friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson

  The death of Alice James

  The friendship with Hendrik C. Andersen

  The death of William James

  The publication of Boon, and the break with H. G. Wells

  VII - DEFINITION AND DESCRIPTION

  An American encounters some aristocrats

  An ambitious young Frenchwoman

  Sarah Bernhardt, the muse of the newspaper

  An American education

  An American is corrected on what constitutes “the self”

  An absolutely unmarried woman

  Philistine decor

  The really rich

  New York identity

  A Venetian majordomo

  Like a scene from a Maeterlinck play

  A private thought

  The seduction of Europe

  A femme du monde

  An intimate recollection of a beautiful woman

  Colossal immodesty

  The individual Jew

  New York City Hall

  The absence of penetralia

  New York power

  American teeth

  A young priest apart from the Roman carnival

  VIII - NAMES

  FROM THE FICTION

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS

  IX - PARODY

  Frank Moore Colby - from IN DARKEST JAMES

  Max Beerbohm - THE MOTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE BY H*NRY J*MES

  X - LEGACY

  W. H. Auden - AT THE GRAVE OF HENRY JAMES 1941

  Joseph Conrad - from HENRY JAMES: AN APPRECIATION

  T. S. Eliot - from IN MEMORY

  Graham Greene - from HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

  Ezra Pound - from HENRY JAMES

  Edith Wharton - from A BACKWARD GLANCE 1934

  Virginia Woolf - from REVIEW OF THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1920

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Selected Bibliography

  Permissions

  THE PORTABLE HENRY JAMES

  HENRY JAMES was born in 1843 on Washington Place in New York City, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father was a prominent theologian and philosopher, and his elder brother, William, was also famous as a philosopher. He attended schools in New York and later in London, Paris, and Geneva, entering the law school at Harvard in 1862. In 1865 he began to contribute reviews and short stories to American journals. In 1875, after two prior visits to Europe, he settled for a year in Paris, where he met Flaubert, Turgenev, and other literary figures. The next year he moved to London, where he became so popular in society that in the winter of 1878-79 he confessed to accepting 107 invitations. In 1898 he left London and went to live at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. Henry James became a naturalized British citizen in 1915, was awarded the Order of Merit, and died in 1916.

  In addition to many short stories, plays, and books of criticism, autobiography, and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first being Roderick Hudson (1875). This was followed by The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

  JOHN AUCHARD is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has been a Fulbright lecturer at the Università degli Studi di Milano, a visiting professor at the Università di Messina, and has also taught at the University of North Carolina. Among his works on Henry James are Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence and the Penguin Classics edition of James’s Italian Hours.

  The Portable Henry James Edited with an Introduction by JOHN AUCHARD

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  First published in Penguin Books 2004

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004

  All rights reserved

  Page 620 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  James, Henry, 1843-1916.

  [Selections. 2003]

  The portable Henry James / edited with an introduction by John Auchard.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-0-142-43767-4

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Introduction

  I .

  When H. G. Wells attacked Henry James’s late fiction, he described “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, on picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.” Wells claimed, wickedly, that upon reaching the end of a James tale one generally discovered something terribly reduced, supremely portentous, and certainly peculiar—“on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.” A few years later E. M. Forster must have been happy with himself
when he wrote that James’s people recalled “the exquisite deformities who haunted Egyptian art in the reign of Akhenaton—huge heads and tiny legs, but nevertheless charming.” Joseph Conrad revered the work of Henry James, but even he could only “imagine with pain the man in the street trying to read it. . . . One could almost see the globular lobes of his brain painfully revolving, and crushing and mangling the delicate thing.” Even sympathetic magazine reviewers of the day had to admit that although the novels of Henry James might sometimes bleed, generally they did not bleed red.

  Such generalizations enraged Ezra Pound: “I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about James’s style. . . . I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life. . . . The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw, human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage! The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn’t ‘feel.’ I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn’t raise this cry.” Nor could Virginia Woolf tolerate complaints about a Byzantine syntax or an obsession with the niceties of upholstery: “For to be as subtle as Henry James one must also be as robust; to enjoy his power of exquisite selection one must have ‘lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered,’ and, with the appetite of a giant, have swallowed the whole.” It is as if she would cast Mr. Henry James as Rodin’s great statue of Balzac, looming high above the human comedy.

  As the twentieth century kept reading Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges found him darker, more exotic, and heavier than anyone had suspected: “I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James. The writers I have enumerated are, from the first line, amazing; the universe postulated by their pages is almost professionally unreal; James, before revealing what he is, a resigned and ironic inhabitant of Hell, runs the risk of appearing to be no more than a mundane novelist, less colorful than others.” And then it was Graham Greene who said that after “the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel.” Greene’s final tribute is unequivocal: “He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.”

  And so even today one begins an introduction to Henry James with some defensiveness, and a mulish desire to gather the troops, for the talk of the fussy, the bloodless, and the absurdly subtle never goes away. There is some truth in such talk, but not much truth.

  II.

  For example, André Maurois was mostly wrong when he called James “a great writer who spent his whole life wandering in a literary limbo between the paradise of European culture and the hell that was the Golden Age of America.” The fact is that, even in the earliest tales, signs of stagnation trouble that European seduction. Rare lives may unfold on wonderfully manicured English lawns or they may shift about behind beautiful Left Bank façades, but for the most part in Henry James, Europe waits and waits for new blood. Although it was in 1920, four years after James’s death, that Ezra Pound called Europe “an old bitch gone in the teeth,” Pound had long judged it a “botched civilization” for which so many young would soon die. Back in 1907, when Picasso had sensed that European vitality was dying out after a 2,000-year run, his visionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon thrust slashing African masks beside the languishing graces of Western high culture. For Picasso at least, if renewal was to come, it would have to come from the boundlessly raw.

  Although admittedly milder than Picasso’s explosion onto the European scene, the cheerfully barbaric American vitality of Henry James’s fiction—“she’s not, after all, a Comanche savage,” someone says in defense of Daisy Miller—had been unsettling European culture for decades, and it had been offering its disruption in even the most casual gestures. When at the start of The Portrait of a Lady the American Isabel Archer walks out onto the lawn of a splendid English estate, a dog, “looking up and barking hard,” runs straight at her “with great rapidity.” Rather than cry out, as any young lady might do, she grabs up the quivering thing “without hesitation” and holds him up “face to face while he continued his quick chatter.” The American energy concentrated in her outstretched hands is characteristic—bracing, fearless, somewhat thoughtless. The listless men look up from their teacups and they stare—“The ladies will save us,” one of them has just said—and only then do they begin to move. When a Europeanized aunt soon reprimands the young woman from Albany that “Young girls here—in decent houses—don’t sit alone with gentlemen late at night,” Isabel asks to be told about all the things one should not do. “So as to do them?” asks her aunt. “So as to choose,” says Isabel. Choice. It was to become a tremendous American word, and it still has power to make the world tremble.

  Elegant, smart, universally admired, and far better adjusted to the European ways than was Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer nonetheless betrays a fierce disposition when she describes a vision of happiness that may seem shocking even today: “A swift carriage of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see—that’s my idea of happiness.” Even more reckless and unattached than Whitman on the open road—at least he dreams of a camerado moving along vaguely beside him—this superior nineteenth-century woman suggests a self-reliant resistance that will make her hard to hold: by society, by family, by husband, children, friends, tradition, by any demands from the outside whatever, by anyone or anything.

  With his so-called “International Theme,” James takes what is best in the American character—and his Americans can have remarkable vigor and freshness—and he attempts to merge it with the great European achievement. It is with such an ambition that James sweeps his generally appealing Americans over the sea, and then makes them—amiable people who love their liberty—squint hard into the complicating mists of history. That history generally reveals itself in a social aspect marked by manners, for an infinite past has taught James’s Europeans that there is a good way of doing almost everything—a good way to begin an acquaintance or end one, a good way to speak or remain silent or prepare an omelette soufflée, or raise your daughter or accommodate an exigent parent or express thanks or sympathy or grief, or properly hide that grief, or end an affair or begin one, or enter a room or a box at the opera or prepare to die, or perhaps even to pick up an apricot.

  If you agree to conform, European life can be good, for that life will be more artful, polished, layered, subtle, skilled, practiced, ordered, serene, thoughtful, graceful, cultivated, and, sometimes, intelligent. But Europe makes powerful demands, and it takes things away, and what it takes away can make you restless and bored, and it can make you stand oddly still. James’s Venice, for example, may represent the ultimate European polis as social art, and yet in Italian Hours she is a stern mistress—the “fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is not easy to live with”—for such beauty does not come without sacrifice. If you wish to live with her or recline in her shadow, you must study and learn to conform, for every inch of the city must look and act as Venice always has—or almost. So keep your raucous invention to yourself, and your tonic wildness too, and a good deal of your self-expression—at least as long as you linger in the lagoon where James suggests that something may have gone wrong, that the long bewitching, accumulated heaped-up beauty can sometimes feel like splendid dying: “Decay is in this extraordinary place golden in tint and misery couleur de rose.”

  Then there are the Americans in their prototypical “terrible town” of New York, where, in 1907 in The American Scene, James already recognized “the power of the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing, as with the voice of the morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions.” Although breathing in a “thinner air” than in any European capital, James is non
etheless stirred by “the universal will to move—to move, move, move as an end in itself, an appetite at any price.” His American city “grows and grows, flinging abroad its loose limbs even as some unmannered young giant at his ‘larks,’ and that the binding stitches must for ever fly further and faster and draw harder; the future complexity of the web, all under the sky and over the sea, becoming thus that of some colossal set of clockworks, some steel-souled machine room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws.” The wondrous, monstrous, rejoicing New World capital amazes and astounds Henry James, and it seethes with life, but the truth is that it never really works as a place for him.

  And yet, still, he never forgets that magnificent Europe is a subtly damaged culture—or perhaps he merely discovers inevitable features of a mature one. In The American, Christopher Newman goes to Paris and in all innocence first mistakes a marquis for a butler, and then mistakes an aristocratic family’s ruthlessness for merely stubborn manners. Yet it is unwise to make too much of Americans deceived by weary Europeans who have steeped so long in experience that their every move has become cautious, calculated, shrewd, and manipulative. James’s Europeans have learned over time what his Americans do not yet know, that survival is never secure, that great care must always be taken, that bad air blankets the town every night, that a swift carriage of a dark night can smash into a wall, that it is not so easy to discover a mountain of gold, that one can never be sure of a lover, or in fact sure of anything. In The Ambassadors the charming Marie de Vionnet does not explain to Lambert Strether why she has decided to marry off her daughter in a loveless but advantageous—in her terms, surely, a suitable—match. She merely invokes an inflexible old wisdom, a “vieille sagesse,” as the foundation of her actions, and she leaves it at that. The shaken American stares into her exquisitely delivered revelation, suddenly aware that he is glimpsing something “ancient and cold in it—what he would have called the real thing.”