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Henry James's Cultural Office
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
Both for scholars and for the wider public Henry James began to come into his own after the centennial of his birth in 1943. If, as I believe, James has had a cultural function, we can tell approximately when he assumed it. The writer who is discussed in Frederick Dupee's collection of the critical essays written before 1945 had, generally speaking, been regarded as one interesting novelist among others. It was in the decade following the mid-1940s that he enjoyed a distinct position that set him apart and attracted a wider audience. He was often spoken of as the artist prized by other artists, although this did not, of course, explain the vogue that led to the reprinting of so many of his works, and the absorbed reading they frequently got from those who had no interest in the character of James's innovations in fictional technique. Did James answer a need felt by his readers at the time, and if so, what was it? Assuming that the novels, as Lionel Trilling once put it, read us—assuming, that is, that James supplied something we badly wanted—what clues about us does this offer?
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References
NOTES
1. James, Henry, Selected Short Stories, Introduction by Anderson, Quentin (New York: Rinehart, 1950), pp. xvii–xviii.Google Scholar
2. The use of ostensibly political ideas to bolster one's own identity is treated at greater length in three essays by the present writer: “Practical and Visionary Americans,” American Scholar, 45, Summer 1976, 405–18Google Scholar; “John Dewey's American Democrat,” Daedalus, 108, Summer 1979, 145–59Google Scholar; and “On The Middle of the Journey,” in Art, Politics and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling, ed. Anderson, Quentin, Donadio, Stephen, and Marcus, Steven (New York: BasicBooks, 1977)Google Scholar. I find the use of public ideas for private purposes perennial in the United States from the Jacksonian period forward. C. Vann Woodward's recent speech before the American Academy, printed in The New Republic, “Myths of Innocence and Guilt, The Fall of the American Adam” (12 2, 1981, pp. 13–16)Google Scholar, notes a curiously wholesale shift from a total endorsement of America to a total condemnation, although he limits his account to an instance following the Vietnam War. As I see it, these universalized attitudes have a necessary connection with the impulse of the individual to treat his world as a whole, an object.
3. I comment on this passage from James, 's The Middle YearsGoogle Scholar at greater length in “The Emergence of Henry James,” Times Literary Supplement, 05 9, 1975, pp. 498–500.Google Scholar
4. For my sense of the primary importance of speech in James, see my essay “Property and Vision in Nineteenth Century America,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 54, Summer 1978, esp. pp. 406–8Google Scholar. This essay gives a fuller account of Henry James's connection with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman than I can offer here.
5. I use “money network” here as a pointer to a complex of cultural pressures I hope to describe more fully in future work. These include positivism, forexample; but the money realm is the most important of them. The failed drama of Marxist class warfare has obscured both the weight and the character of the way such pressures have borne and now bear on American individuals.
6. See the essay cited in n. 3, above.
7. Holland, Laurence, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Bersani, Leo, A Future for Astyanax, Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976)Google Scholar; Donadio, Stephen, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978).Google Scholar
8. Anderson, Quentin, The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1957).Google Scholar
9. As this essay was going to press I found that this point had been fully and persuasively made in Moore, Susan Reibel, The Drama of Discrimination in Henry James (St. Lucia: Univ. of Queensland Press, 1982), pp. 110–13Google Scholar. Moore says (p. 111), “That the most important kind of happiness in James depends, not on material gain but—as in Plato and Dante—on the attainment of the wisdom which is virtue, is a notion that has found little favor with the majority of James's critics.”
10. See, in essay cited in n. 4, above, pp. 403–6, which detail James's use of a turning screw in the seventh and eighth chapters of The Golden Bowl to figure his father's most inclusive account of Providence as the descent of the divinity into us, which results in our perception of reality, and of the simultaneous ascent of man, which is an ascent only in appearance. The screw turned counterclockwise appears to rise, while in reality it falls. The Golden Bowl consummates the marriage of appearance and reality. Or, in the terms the novelist found mostavailable, creative love in Maggie replaces Charlotte's desire for everything.
11. Whitman, Walt, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Blodgett, Harold W. and Bradley, Sculley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 66.Google Scholar
12. Stories about artists parallel the sacrifice described by Laurence Holland as James's own. In such stories James can dispense with the feminine figure whose capacity for love supplants the protagonist's selfishness. Morris Gedge of “The Birthplace” discovers that the best way to celebrate Shakespeare is not to make him a possession but to become in a humble way an artist; Dencombe of The Middle Years represents the awareness that it is not one's claims on the world that matter but the informing desire to render that world, his “passion,” that is one's job. Even Adam Verver, who is not a creator but has a taste akin to genius, realizes that his “years of [acquisitive] darkness” had been required to “render possible the years of light.” Artists alone can be seen to move from selfishness to the ultimate generosity of giving themselves away in form. Yet what I have referred to as “visionary capitalism” seems in the end a claim for power that excludes the dramatically realized presence of others.
13. Troy, William, Selected Essays (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1967) p. 64.Google Scholar