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The Inadequate Vulgarity of Henry James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

On 26 January 1895, still in the grip of the disconsolate mood engendered by the crashing first-night failure of Guy Domville three weeks before, Henry James made the following entry in his Notebooks:

The idea of the poor man, the artist, the man of letters, who all his life is trying— if only to get a living—to do something vulgar, to take the measure of the huge, flat foot of the public: isn t there a little story in it, possibly, if one can animate it with action; a little story that might perhaps be a mate to The Death of the Lion? It is suggested to me really by all the little backward memories of one s own frustrated ambition—in particular by its having Just come back to me how, already 20 years ago, when I was in Paris writing letters to the N. Y. Tribune, Whitelaw Reid wrote to me to ask me virtually that—to make em baser and paltrier, to make them as vulgar as he [sic] could, to make them, as he called it, more ‘personal.’ Twenty years ago, and so it has ever been, till the other night, Jan. 5th, the premiere of Guy Domville. Trace the history of a charming little talent, charming artistic nature, that has been exactly the martyr and victim of that ineffectual effort, that long, vain study to take the measure abovementioned, to ‘meet’ the vulgar need, to violate his intrinsic conditions, to make, as it were, a sow's ear out of a silk purse. He tries and he tries and he does what he thinks his coarsest and crudest. It's all of no use—it's always ‘too subtle,’ always too fine—never, never, vulgar enough. I had to write to Whitelaw Reid that the sort of thing I had already tried hard to do for the Tribune was the very worst I could do. I lost my place—my letters weren't wanted.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 6 , December 1951 , pp. 886 - 910
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 887 F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock, eds. The Notebooks of Henry James (New York, 1947), pp. 180, 200–201 (henceforth referred to as Notebooks).

Note 2 in page 887 These sketches had appeared chiefly in the Nation. The reference to Emerson is made in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, 1936), i, 309.

Note 3 in page 888 Ibid., i, 327. On 10 Oct. William added a further injunction (p. 329) : “In my opinion what you should cultivate is directness of style. Delicacy, subtlety and ingenuity will take care of themselves.”

Note 4 in page 888 Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid (London, 1921), i, 306.

Note 5 in page 889 A Small Boy and Others (New York, 1914), p. 74.

Note 6 in page 889 Austin Warren, The Elder Henry James (New York, 1934), p. 116.

Note 7 in page 889 A Small Boy and Others, pp. 179, 370 f.

Note 8 in page 890 I am indebted to Mrs. Helen Ogden Reid for granting me access to and use of the letters contained in the New York Herald Tribune archives, and to Mr. William James for permission to print the James letters. Reid's letters are exact reproductions made by a process which transferred the original script to a sheet of thin paper. Owing to the small script, the thin paper used for duplicating, and the blurring caused by the duplicating process, Reid's letters are illegible in places. James's letters are in MS. AH the James-Reid correspondence presented in this study comes from the Tribune archives, where it is filed in Letter Books chronologically arranged. John Paul wrote letters for the Tribune from London and later from Paris. William H. Huntington was a staff correspondent stationed in Europe. George W. Smalley was the editor in charge of Tribune reporters working on the Continent. His letters from London, a regular feature, were extremely popular.

Note 9 in page 891 Whereas the letters from foreign correspondents were usually less than a column and a half, James's letters were invariably longer than this, and occasionally filled two columns.

Note 10 in page 891 In 1871, e.g., James had made a special point of writing to the editor of the Qaiaxy to request that in the printing of “Master Eustace” “larger types—undivided pages—of the magazines” be employed, rather than the customary small type and double columns (MS. letter, dated 21 July 1871, . Y. Public Library, MSS. Division, William Conant Church MSS.). James was to eliminate chapter headings in his revision of Roderick Hudson (1879). His dislike of newspaper headings was carried into subsequent fiction. Describing Ralph Touchett's initial impression of Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he wrote: “... she struck him as not at all in the large type, the type of horrid ‘headings,‘ that he had expected.” In categorizing the journalistic brashness of Mr. Morrow, who had come to do an interview of Neil Paraday in “The Death of the Lion” (1894), the narrator watches Morrow's devastating eyes take in everything in a few seconds, and then comments caustically: “I could imagine he had already got his heads.”

Note 11 in page 892 Perry, i, 364.

Note 12 in page 892 Ibid., i, 362.

Note 13 in page 892 Ibid., i, 366.

Note 14 in page 893 Percy Lubbock, ed. The Letters of Henry James (New York, 1920), i, 47 (henceforth referred to as Letters).

Note 15 in page 893 For the dates of the Tribune articles, consult LeRoy Phillips, A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James (New York, 1930). Phillips omits one letter, the 15th, which he may possibly have overlooked because it appeared on Monday 5 June 1876 (p. 1), rather than, as customarily, in the Saturday 4 June edition. Only 3 of the 20 letters were ever reprinted by James. These were collected in Portraits of Places (London, 1883), under the titles, “Chartres,” “Rouen,” and “Etretat.” The theatrical criticism in the Tribune letters has been extracted and reprinted by Allan Wade in his collection of James's dramatic criticism, The Scenic Art (New Brunswick, 1948), pp. 44–65.

Note 16 in page 894 Not only had James already written on most of these subjects—George Sand, Taine, Sainte-Beuve, the Parisian stage and its playwrights, contemporary painting, and numerous other aspects of the cultural scene—but he repeated specific observations made in earlier criticism, often drawing similar comparisons or utilizing the same phraseology. Only when one sees the Tribune letters in their proper chronological relationship to his earlier essays can it be realized how extensively James called upon his own reserves. Cornelia Kelley, in The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana, 1930), pp. 203–232, is correct in concluding that the reviews and criticism written in 1875 and shortly thereafter are of negligible importance in his intellectual development, since he was now merely applying an already-acquired facility for quick financial return.

Note 17 in page 895 By editorial order, Houssaye's contributions, which had been more or less weekly, were gradually diminished to once a month by the spring of 1876.

Note 18 in page 895 Evidently James never realized how temporary was his status as a correspondent. As early as 15 Jan. 1876 Reid had written to Smalley: “Probably your inquiry about Paris correspondence may need a word of explanation. My understanding was that you were to undertake to furnish a good weekly letter from Paris, securing some correspondent who was satisfactory both to you and ourselves, and any arrangement we might make with Henry James would be wholly outside of that. The regular Paris correspondent [would?] deal with politics, news, [whatsoever?] may be appropriate. James' letters would be, like Houssaye's, things apart. The same with Trollope. We may or may not continue him, but he is, of course, outside the arrangement made with you.” In the Tribune itself James's letters were published under the heading, “from a regular correspondent of the Tribune,” but this heading merely signified that the letters were a special feature.

Note 19 in page 896 Letters, i, 46 f.

Note 20 in page 896 On the back of James's letter appears the following memorandum in pencil to Reid: “The letter of April 1, being a very long one, Mr. Ford put crossheads in it. We have not used them since, and will not unless you say so especially. O'Dwyer.”

Note 21 in page 897 Cortissoz, op. cit., i, 150–314 passim, indicates the multiplicity of factors determining the various contracts; e.g., Clarence Cooke, Paris correspondent in 1870, was paid $1000 a year for a weekly letter, or $20 a letter, but Hay was offered the assignment at half again as much. When Charles Reade sent his contributions to the Tribune in 1875, he proposed no payment at all until their popularity could be proved. Reid clearly acted upon the principle that value in material of this kind depended upon widespread interest.

Note 22 in page 897 In March he had cancelled his arrangements to have The American published serially in the Galaxy because it could not appear beginning with the May issue, claiming that commencement of publication by that date was “an absolute necessity, on pecuniary grounds” (Church MSS.). In July he wrote to William of devising “some frugal scheme for keeping out of Paris till as late as possible in the autumn” (Letters, i, 50 f.).

Note 28 in page 899 A search through the issues of the Tribune during that year brings to light letters in praise of most correspondents, but none for James. After Houssaye reappeared in the spring of 1876, a group of readers wrote in, commending his columns and expressing the the hope that they would appear more often. John Paul's letters had been proclaimed “the delights of our hearts” by another group. A review of American paintings by a staff correspondent who signed himself “C.C.” had brought the recommendation that he be urged to prepare a history of American painting because his art criticism was so apt. The only response to James's letters discoverable in the paper is a querulous letter published on 22 Jan. 1876 (p. 4), from an admirer of the popular Antoine-Louis Barye (1796–1875), protesting the harsh judgment James had passed on that sculptor of animal miniatures, and correcting the facts upon which it had been based.

Note 24 in page 900 This letter is also reproduced in Cortissoz, op. cit., i, 309.

Note 25 in page 901 Terminations (New York, 1895), p. 6.

Note 26 in page 903 The following inconsequential letters relate to this social engagement: (1) letter from 115 East 25th Street, New York, Sunday, P.M., 1881 [declines an invitation to dine, since he is going to Cambridge to spend Christmas with his family]; (2) letter from Cambridge, Mass., 26 Dec. 1881 [explains that he will be in New York the following Saturday and Sunday and will be happy to dine with the Reids]; (3) formal note from 115 East 25th Street, 29 Dec. 1881 [accepts a dinner engagement for the following Saturday at seven].

Note 27 in page 903 The Tribune Letter Books contain the following three letters relating to this transaction: (1) letter from 131 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston, 22 July 1883 [reminds Reid of the series of letters he wrote, the original MSS. of which are not accessible to him, and asks if the back numbers of the Tribune containing them might all be forwarded, as he does not know which letters he wishes to select for a volume]; (2) letter from Mt. Vernon Street, 27 July 1883 [requests that copies of the letters of 29 April, 12 Aug. and 26 Aug. be made at his expense]; (3) letter from Newport, R.I., 8 Aug. 1883 [encloses $5 for the copyist and thanks Reid for his helpfulness].

Note 28 in page 904 Letters, i, 229.

Note 29 in page 904 All quotations from “The Next Time” have been taken from the text as printed in Embarrassments (New York, 1897), pp. 183–262.

Note 30 in page 905 Pat Moyle echoes the name of John Paul, who became the Tribune Paris reporter of political events in June 1876.

Note 31 in page 908 On 1 May 1896 James moved to a cottage near Rye, where he stayed until the end of July. See Leon Edel's introd. to The Other Bouse (London, 1948), p. xii.

Note 32 in page 910 Edel (p. xii) in sketching James's activities during the summer of 1896, quotes Edmund Gosse's testimony: “Never had I known Henry James so radiant, so cheerful, or so self-assured. The summer .. . rests in my reflection as made more exquisite by his serene and even playful uniformity of temper.”