15- ] American Literature
- Henry James 1843 – 1916
Henry James is regarded as one of the key figures of
19th-century literary realism. He is noted for writing from a character’s point
of view’ which allowed him to explore consciousness and perception. His
imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators
brought a new depth to narrative fiction, all of which were influential on the
writing of the novelists who followed him. He was nominated for the Nobel prize
for literature three times.
Henry
James OM (15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was an American-British author. He
is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary
modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the
English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of
philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He
is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay
between émigré Americans, English people, and continental Europeans. Examples
of such novels include The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Wings
of the Dove. His later works were increasingly experimental. In describing the
internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often
wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions
were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For
their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his
late works have been compared to impressionist painting.
His
novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analyzed
and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely
adapted work in other media. He also wrote other highly regarded ghost stories.
James
published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography,
and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a
young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in
1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916.
Life
Early
years, 1843–1883
Henry
James, age 11, with his father, Henry James Sr.—1854 daguerreotype by Mathew
Brady
James
was born at 21 Washington Place in New York City on 15 April 1843. His parents
were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr. His father was intelligent and steadfastly
congenial. He was a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited independent
means from his father, an Albany banker and investor. Mary came from a wealthy family
long settled in New York City. Her sister Katherine lived with her adult family
for an extended period of time. Henry Jr. was one of four boys, the others
being William, who was one year his senior, and younger brothers Wilkinson
(Wilkie) and Robertson. His younger sister was Alice. Both of his parents were
of Irish and Scottish descent.[2]
Before
he was a year old, his father sold the house at Washington Place and took the
family to Europe, where they lived for a time in a cottage in Windsor Great Park
in England. The family returned to New York in 1845, and Henry spent much of
his childhood living between his paternal grandmother's home in Albany, and a
house on 14th Street in Manhattan. His education was calculated by his father
to expose him to many influences, primarily scientific and philosophical; it
was described by Percy Lubbock, the editor of his selected letters, as
"extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous." James did not share the
usual education in Latin and Greek classics. Between 1855 and 1860, the James
household travelled to London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Newport,
Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing
ventures, retreating to the United States when funds were low. Henry studied
primarily with tutors, and briefly attended schools while the family travelled
in Europe. Their longest stays were in France, where Henry began to feel at
home and became fluent in French. He had a stutter, which seems to have
manifested itself only when he spoke English; in French, he did not stutter.
James,
age 16
In
1860, the family returned to Newport. There, Henry became a friend of painter
John La Farge, who introduced him to French literature, and in particular, to
Balzac. James later called Balzac his "greatest master", and said
that he had learned more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone
else.
In
the autumn of 1861, James received an injury, probably to his back, while
fighting a fire. This injury, which resurfaced at times throughout his life,
made him unfit for military service in the American Civil War.
In
1864, the James family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to be near William, who
had enrolled first in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and then in the
medical school. In 1862, Henry attended Harvard Law School, but realized that
he was not interested in studying law. He pursued his interest in literature
and associated with authors and critics William Dean Howells and Charles Eliot
Norton in Boston and Cambridge and formed lifelong friendships with Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, and with James T. Fields
and Annie Adams Fields, his first professional mentors.
His
first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie
Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket", published in 1863. About a year later,
"A Tragedy of Error", his first short story, was published
anonymously. James's first literary payment was for an appreciation of Sir
Walter Scott's novels, written for the North American Review. He wrote fiction
and nonfiction pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, where Fields was
editor. In 1871, he published his first novel, Watch and Ward, in serial form
in the Atlantic Monthly. The novel was later published in book form in 1878.
During
a 14-month trip through Europe in 1869–70, he met John Ruskin, Charles Dickens,
Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and George Eliot. Rome impressed him
profoundly. "Here I am then in the Eternal City", he wrote to his
brother William. "At last—for the first time—I live!" He attempted to
support himself as a freelance writer in Rome and then secured a position as
Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune through the influence of its
editor, John Hay. When these efforts failed, he returned to New York City. During
1874 and 1875, he published Transatlantic Sketches, A Passionate Pilgrim and
Roderick Hudson. During this early period in his career, he was influenced by
Nathaniel Hawthorne .
In
the fall of 1875, he moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris. Aside from two trips to
America, he spent the next three decades—the rest of his life—in Europe. In
Paris, he met Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, Turgenev and others. He stayed in Paris
only a year before settling in London, where he established relationships with
Macmillan and other publishers, who paid for serial installments that they
published in book form. The audience for these serialized novels was largely
made up of middle-class women, and James struggled to fashion serious literary
work within the strictures imposed by editors' and publishers' notions of what
was suitable for young women to read. He lived in rented rooms, but was able to
join gentlemen's clubs that had libraries and where he could entertain male
friends. He was introduced to English society by Henry Adams and Charles Milnes
Gaskell, the latter introducing him to the Travellers' and the Reform Clubs. He
was also an honorary member of the Savile Club, St James's Club and, in 1882,
the Athenaeum Club.
In
England, he met the leading figures of politics and culture. He continued to be
a prolific writer, producing The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), a
revision of Watch and Ward (1878), French Poets and Novelists (1878), Hawthorne
(1879), and several shorter works of fiction. In 1878, Daisy Miller established
his fame on both sides of the Atlantic. It drew notice perhaps mostly because
it depicted a woman whose behavior is outside the social norms of Europe. He
also began his first masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady, which appeared in
1881.
In
1877, he first visited Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, home of his friend Charles
Milnes Gaskell, whom he had met through Henry Adams. He was much inspired by
the darkly romantic abbey and the surrounding countryside, which feature in his
essay "Abbeys and Castles". In particular, the gloomy monastic
fishponds behind the abbey are said to have inspired the lake in The Turn of
the Screw.
While
living in London, James continued to follow the careers of the French realists,
Émile Zola in particular. Their stylistic methods influenced his own work in
the years to come. Hawthorne's influence on him faded during this period,
replaced by George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev. The period from 1878 to 1881 had
the publication of The Europeans, Washington Square, Confidence and The
Portrait of a Lady.
The
period from 1882 to 1883 was marked by several losses. His mother died in
January 1882, while James was in Washington, D.C., on an extended visit to
America . He returned to his parents' home in Cambridge, where he was together
with all four of his siblings for the first time in 15 years. He returned to
Europe in mid-1882, but was back in America by the end of the year following
the death of his father. Emerson, an old family friend, died in 1882. His
brother Wilkie and friend Turgenev both died in 1883.
Middle
years, 1884–1897
In
1884, James made another visit to Paris, where he met again with Zola, Daudet,
and Goncourt. He had been following the careers of the French
"realist" or "naturalist" writers, and was increasingly
influenced by them. In 1886, he published The Bostonians and The Princess
Casamassima, both influenced by the French writers that he had studied
assiduously. Critical reaction and sales were poor. He wrote to Howells that
the books had hurt his career rather than helped because they had "reduced
the desire, and demand, for my productions to zero.” During this time, he
became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, John Singer Sargent, Edmund Gosse,
George du Maurier, Paul Bourget, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. His third novel
from the 1880s was The Tragic Muse. Although he was following the precepts of
Zola in his novels of the '80s, their tone and attitude are closer to the
fiction of Alphonse Daudet. The lack of critical and financial success for his
novels during this period led him to try writing for the theatre; His dramatic
works and his experiences with theatre are discussed below.
In
the last quarter of 1889, "for pure and copious lucre," he started
translating Port Tarascon, the third volume of Daudet's adventures of Tartarin
de Tarascon. Serialized in Harper's Monthly from June 1890, this translation –
praised as "clever" by The Spectator
was published in January 1891 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle &
Rivington.
After
the stage failure of Guy Domville in 1895, James was near despair and thoughts
of death plagued him. His depression was compounded by the deaths of those
closest to him, including his sister Alice in 1892; his friend Wolcott
Balestier in 1891; and Stevenson and Fenimore Woolson in 1894. The sudden death
of Fenimore Woolson in January 1894, and the speculations of suicide
surrounding her death, were particularly painful for him. Leon Edel wrote that
the reverberations from Fenimore Woolson's death were such that "we can
read a strong element of guilt and bewilderment in his letters, and, even more,
in those extraordinary tales of the next half-dozen years, "The Altar of
the Dead" and "The Beast in the Jungle".
The
years spent on dramatic works were not entirely a loss. As he moved into the
last phase of his career, he found ways to adapt dramatic techniques into the
novel form. In the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s, James made several
trips through Europe. He spent a long stay in Italy in 1887. In that year, he
published the short novel The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator.
Late
years, 1898–1916
James
in 1890
Grave
marker in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts
In
1897–1898, he moved to Rye, Sussex and wrote The Turn of the Screw; 1899–1900
had the publication of The Awkward Age and The Sacred Fount. During 1902–1904,
he wrote The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.
In
1904, he revisited America and lectured on Balzac. In 1906–1910, he published
The American Scene and edited the "New York Edition", a 24-volume
collection of his works. In 1910, his brother William died; Henry had just
joined William from an unsuccessful search for relief in Europe, on what turned
out to be Henry's last visit to the United States (summer 1910 to July 1911)
and was near him when he died.
In
1913, he wrote his autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others, and Notes of a Son
and Brother. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he did war
work. In 1915, he became a British citizen and was awarded the Order of Merit
the following year. He died on 28 February 1916, in Chelsea, London, and was
cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. As he requested, his ashes were buried
in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts .
Sexuality
James
regularly rejected suggestions that he should marry, and after settling in
London, proclaimed himself "a bachelor". F. W. Dupee, in several
volumes on the James family, originated the theory that he had been in love
with his cousin, Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of
sex kept him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism ... was
itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part."
Dupee used an episode from James's memoir, A Small Boy and Others, recounting a
dream of a Napoleonic image in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism
about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled.
Between
1953 and 1972, Leon Edel wrote a major five-volume biography of James, which
used unpublished letters and documents after Edel gained the permission of
James's family. Edel's portrayal of James included the suggestion he was
celibate, a view first propounded by critic Saul Rosenzweig in 1943.[31] In 1996,
Sheldon M. Novick published Henry James: The Young Master, followed by Henry
James: The Mature Master (2007). The first book "caused something of an
uproar in Jamesian circles" as it challenged the previous received notion
of celibacy, a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct
evidence was nonexistent. Novick also criticized Edel for following the
discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of
failure." The difference of opinion erupted in a series of exchanges
between Edel (and later Fred Kaplan filling in for Edel) and Novick, which were
published by the online magazine Slate, with Novick arguing that even the
suggestion of celibacy went against James's own injunction
"live!"—not "fantasize!"
A
letter James wrote in old age to Hugh Walpole has been cited as an explicit
statement of this. Walpole confessed to him of indulging in "high
jinks", and James wrote a reply endorsing it: "We must know, as much
as possible, in our beautiful art, yours & mine, what we are talking about
— & the only way to know it is to have lived & loved & cursed &
floundered & enjoyed & suffered — I don't think I regret a single
‘excess’ of my responsive youth".
The
interpretation of James as living a less austere emotional life has been subsequently
explored by other scholars . The often intense politics of Jamesian scholarship
has also been the subject of studies . Author Colm Tóibín has said that Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet made a landmark difference to
Jamesian scholarship by arguing that he be read as a homosexual writer whose
desire to keep his sexuality a secret shaped his layered style and dramatic
artistry. According to Tóibín, such a reading "removed James from the
realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people. He became our
contemporary."
James's
letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have
attracted particular attention. James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in
1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely
emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on
your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter of 6 May 1904,
to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your
hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry". How accurate that
description might have been is the subject of contention among James's
biographers,[40] but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasi-erotic:
"I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby,
as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment."
His
numerous letters to the many young homosexual men among his close male friends
are more forthcoming. To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis, James could
write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you.
Meanwhile, I can only try to live without you." In another letter Sturgis,
following a long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little
congress of two". In letters to Hugh Walpole, he pursues convoluted jokes
and puns about their relationship, referring to himself as an elephant who
"paws you oh so benevolently" and winds about Walpole his
"well-meaning old trunk". His letters to Walter Berry printed by the
Black Sun Press have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism .
However,
James corresponded in equally extravagant language with his many female
friends, writing, for example, to fellow novelist Lucy Clifford: "Dearest
Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine
times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that — if you want it made
clear to the meanest intelligence — I love you more than I love Others."
To his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones: "Dearest Mary
Cadwalader. I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain; & your long silence
really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point
even of making me wonder if poor unconscious & doting old Célimare [Jones's
pet name for James] has 'done' anything, in some dark somnambulism of the
spirit, which has ... given you a bad moment, or a wrong impression, or a
'colourable pretext' ... However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly
as ever; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he
remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic
matinées, as the most romantic of his life ..." His long friendship with
American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, in whose house he lived for a
number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in
1894, are discussed in detail in Edel's biography and play a central role in a
study by Lyndall Gordon. Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James
and killed herself in part because of his coldness, but Woolson's biographers
have objected to Edel's account.
Works
Style
and themes
James
is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently
juxtapose characters from the Old World (Europe), embodying a feudal civilization
that is beautiful, often corrupt, and alluring, and from the New World (United
States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive, and embody the
virtues of the new American society — particularly personal freedom and a more
exacting moral character. James explores this clash of personalities and
cultures, in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well
or badly.
His
protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse, and as
his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work:
Portrait
of Henry James, charcoal drawing by John Singer Sargent (1912)
When
he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around
him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their
claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light ... His
novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate
plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperiled by reckless and
barbarous stupidity.
Philip
Guedalla jokingly described three phases in the development of James's prose:
"James I, James II, and The Old Pretender," and observers do often
group his works of fiction into three periods. In his apprentice years,
culminating with the masterwork The Portrait of a Lady, his style was simple
and direct (by the standards of Victorian magazine writing) and he experimented
widely with forms and methods, generally narrating from a conventionally
omniscient point of view. Plots generally concern romance, except for the three
big novels of social commentary that conclude this period. In the second
period, as noted above, he abandoned the serialized novel and from 1890 to
about 1897, he wrote short stories and plays. Finally, in his third and last
period he returned to the long, serialized novel. Beginning in the second
period, but most noticeably in the third, he increasingly abandoned direct
statement in favor of frequent double negatives, and complex descriptive
imagery. Single paragraphs began to run for page after page, in which an
initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives
and prepositional clauses, far from their original referents, and verbs would
be deferred and then preceded by a series of adverbs. The overall effect could
be a vivid evocation of a scene as perceived by a sensitive observer. It has
been debated whether this change of style was engendered by James's shifting
from writing to dictating to a typist, a change made during the composition of
What Maisie Knew.
In
its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters, James's later
work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th-century fiction. Indeed, he
might have influenced stream-of-consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf,
who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them. Both
contemporary and modern readers have found the late style difficult and
unnecessary; his friend Edith Wharton, who admired him greatly, said that some
passages in his work were all but incomprehensible James was harshly portrayed
by H. G. Wells as a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that
had got into a corner of its cage. The "late James" style was ably
parodied by Max Beerbohm in "The Mote in the Middle Distance".
More
important for his work overall may have been his position as an expatriate, and
in other ways an outsider, living in Europe. While he came from middle-class
and provincial beginnings (seen from the perspective of European polite
society), he worked very hard to gain access to all levels of society, and the
settings of his fiction range from working-class to aristocratic, and often
describe the efforts of middle-class Americans to make their way in European
capitals. He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the
dinner table or at country house weekends. He worked for a living, however, and
lacked the experiences of select schools, university, and army service, the
common bonds of masculine society. He was furthermore a man whose tastes and
interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era
Anglo-American culture, rather feminine, and who was shadowed by the cloud of
prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality.
Edmund Wilson compared James's objectivity to Shakespeare's:
One
would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the
dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in
form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are
made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are not,
like Dickens and Hardy, writers of melodrama—either humorous or pessimistic,
nor secretaries of society like Balzac, nor prophets like Tolstoy: they are
occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which
they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict
society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable.
They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the
conditions of life.
Many
of James's stories may also be seen as psychological thought experiments about
selection. In his preface to the New York edition of The American, James
describes the development of the story in his mind as exactly such: the
"situation" of an American, "some robust but insidiously
beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot..." with the focus
of the story being on the response of this wronged man.[59] The Portrait of a
Lady may be an experiment to see what happens when an idealistic young woman
suddenly becomes very rich. In many of his tales, characters seem to exemplify
alternative futures and possibilities, as most markedly in "The Jolly
Corner", in which the protagonist and a ghost-doppelganger live
alternative American and European lives; and in others, like The Ambassadors,
an older James seems fondly to regard his own younger self facing a crucial
moment .
Major
novels
The
first period of James's fiction, usually considered to have culminated in The
Portrait of a Lady, concentrated on the contrast between Europe and America.
The style of these novels is generally straightforward and, though personally
characteristic, well within the norms of 19th-century fiction. Roderick Hudson
(1875) is a Künstlerroman that traces the development of the title character,
an extremely talented sculptor. Although the book shows some signs of
immaturity—this was James's first serious attempt at a full-length novel—it has
attracted favourable comment due to the vivid realisation of the three major
characters: Roderick Hudson, superbly gifted but unstable and unreliable;
Rowland Mallet, Roderick's limited but much more mature friend and patron; and
Christina Light, one of James's most enchanting and maddening femmes fatales.
The pair of Hudson and Mallet has been seen as representing the two sides of
James's own nature: the wildly imaginative artist and the brooding
conscientious mentor.[60]
In
The Portrait of a Lady (1881), James concluded the first phase of his career
with a novel that remains his most popular piece of long fiction. The story is
of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who "affronts her
destiny" and finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money
and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American
expatriates. The narrative is set mainly in Europe, especially in England and
Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase, The Portrait
of a Lady is described as a psychological novel, exploring the minds of his
characters, and almost a work of social science, exploring the differences
between Europeans and Americans, the old and the new worlds.
The
second period of James's career, which extends from the publication of The
Portrait of a Lady through the end of the 19th century, features less popular
novels, including The Princess Casamassima, published serially in The Atlantic
Monthly in 1885–1886, and The Bostonians, published serially in The Century
during the same period. This period also featured James's celebrated Gothic
novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898).
The
third period of James's career reached its most significant achievement in
three novels published just around the start of the 20th century: The Wings of
the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Critic F.
O. Matthiessen called this "trilogy" James's major phase, and these
novels have certainly received intense critical study. The second-written of
the books, The Wings of the Dove, was the first published because it was not
serialized. This novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress
stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some
of these people befriend Milly with honourable motives, while others are more
self-interested. James stated in his autobiographical books that Milly was
based on Minny Temple, his beloved cousin, who died at an early age of
tuberculosis. He said that he attempted in the novel to wrap her memory in the
"beauty and dignity of art".
Shorter narratives
Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex, where James lived
from 1897 to 1914
James was particularly interested in what he called
the "beautiful and blest nouvelle", or the longer form of short
narrative. Still, he produced a number of very short stories in which he
achieved notable compression of sometimes complex subjects. The following
narratives are representative of James's achievement in the shorter forms of
fiction.
"A Tragedy of Error" (1864), short story
"The Story of a Year" (1865), short story
A Passionate Pilgrim (1871), novella
Madame de Mauves (1874), novella
Daisy Miller (1878), novella
The Aspern Papers (1888), novella
The Lesson of the Master (1888), novella
The Pupil (1891), short story
"The Figure in the Carpet" (1896), short
story
The Beast in the Jungle (1903), novella
An International Episode (1878)
Picture and Text
Four Meetings (1885)
A London Life, and Other Tales (1889)
The Spoils of Poynton (1896)
Embarrassments (1896)
The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End
(1898)
In the Cage (1898), novella
A Little Tour of France (1900)
The Sacred Fount (1901)
The Birthplace (1903)
Views and Reviews (1908)
The Finer Grain (1910)
The Outcry (1911)
Lady Barbarina: The Siege of London, An International
Episode and Other Tales (1922)
Plays
At
several points in his career, James wrote plays, beginning with one-act plays
written for periodicals in 1869 and 1871 and a dramatisation of his popular
novella Daisy Miller in 1882. From 1890 to 1892, having received a bequest that
freed him from magazine publication, he made a strenuous effort to succeed on
the London stage, writing a half-dozen plays, of which only one, a dramatization
of his novel The American, was produced. This play was performed for several
years by a touring repertory company, and had a respectable run in London, but
did not earn very much money for James. His other plays written at this time
were not produced.
In
1893, however, he responded to a request from actor-manager George Alexander
for a serious play for the opening of his renovated St. James's Theatre, and
wrote a long drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander produced. A noisy uproar
arose on the opening night, 5 January 1895, with hissing from the gallery when
James took his bow after the final curtain, and the author was upset. The play
received moderately good reviews and had a modest run of four weeks before
being taken off to make way for Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest,
which Alexander thought would have better prospects for the coming season.
After
the stresses and disappointment of these efforts, James insisted that he would
write no more for the theatre, but within weeks had agreed to write a
curtain-raiser for Ellen Terry. This became the one-act "Summersoft",
which he later rewrote into a short story, "Covering End", and then
expanded into a full-length play, The High Bid, which had a brief run in London
in 1907, when James made another concerted effort to write for the stage. He
wrote three new plays, two of which were in production when the death of Edward
VII on 6 May 1910 plunged London into mourning and theatres closed. Discouraged
by failing health and the stresses of theatrical work, James did not renew his
efforts in the theatre, but recycled his plays as successful novels. The Outcry
was a best-seller in the United States when it was published in 1911. During
1890–1893, when he was most engaged with the theatre, James wrote a good deal
of theatrical criticism, and assisted Elizabeth Robins and others in
translating and producing Henrik Ibsen for the first time in London.
Leon
Edel argued in his psychoanalytic biography that James was traumatised by the
opening-night uproar that greeted Guy Domville, and that it plunged him into a
prolonged depression. The successful later novels, in Edel's view, were the
result of a kind of self-analysis, expressed in fiction, which partly freed him
from his fears. Other biographers and scholars have not accepted this account,
with the more common view being that of F.O. Matthiessen, who wrote: "Instead
of being crushed by the collapse of his hopes [for the theatre]... he felt a
resurgence of new energy."
Nonfiction
Beyond
his fiction, James was one of the more important literary critics in the
history of the novel. In his classic essay The Art of Fiction (1884), he argued
against rigid prescriptions on the novelist's choice of subject and method of
treatment. He maintained that the widest possible freedom in content and
approach would help ensure narrative fiction's continued vitality. James wrote
many critical articles on other novelists; typical is his book-length study of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, which has been the subject of critical debate. Richard
Brodhead has suggested that the study was emblematic of James's struggle with
Hawthorne's influence, and constituted an effort to place the elder writer
"at a disadvantage." Gordon Fraser, meanwhile, has suggested that the
study was part of a more commercial effort by James to introduce himself to
British readers as Hawthorne's natural successor.
When
James assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in his final years, he
wrote a series of prefaces that subjected his own work to searching,
occasionally harsh criticism.[citation needed]
At
22, James wrote The Noble School of Fiction for The Nation's first issue in
1865. He wrote, in all, over 200 essays and book, art, and theatre reviews for
the magazine.
For
most of his life, James harboured ambitions for success as a playwright. He
converted his novel The American into a play that enjoyed modest returns in the
early 1890s. In all, he wrote about a dozen plays, most of which went
unproduced. His costume drama Guy Domville failed disastrously on its opening
night in 1895. James then largely abandoned his efforts to conquer the stage
and returned to his fiction. In his Notebooks, he maintained that his
theatrical experiment benefited his novels and tales by helping him dramatise
his characters' thoughts and emotions. James produced a small amount of
theatrical criticism, including appreciations of Henrik Ibsen.
With
his wide-ranging artistic interests, James occasionally wrote on the visual
arts. He wrote a favourable assessment of fellow expatriate John Singer
Sargent, a painter whose critical status has improved markedly since the mid
twentieth century. James also wrote sometimes charming, sometimes brooding
articles about various places where he visited and lived. His books of travel
writing include Italian Hours (an example of the charming approach) and The
American Scene (on the brooding side).
James
was one of the great letter-writers of any era. More than 10,000 of his
personal letters are extant, and over 3,000 have been published in a large
number of collections. A complete edition of James's letters began publication
in 2006, edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias. As of 2014, eight volumes
have been published, covering from 1855 to 1880. James's correspondents
included contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, and
Joseph Conrad, along with many others in his wide circle of friends and
acquaintances. The content of the letters range from trivialities to serious
discussions of artistic, social, and personal issues.
Very
late in life, James began a series of autobiographical works: A Small Boy and
Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and the unfinished The Middle Years. These
books portray the development of a classic observer who was passionately
interested in artistic creation but was somewhat reticent about participating
fully in the life around him.
Reception
Criticism,
biographies and fictional treatments
Interior
view of Lamb House, James's residence from 1897 until 1914 (1898)
James's
work has remained steadily popular with the limited audience of educated
readers to whom he spoke during his lifetime, and has remained firmly in the canon,
but after his death, some American critics, such as Van Wyck Brooks, expressed
hostility towards James for his long expatriation and eventual naturalization
as a British subject. Other critics such as E. M. Forster complained about what
they saw as James's squeamishness in the treatment of sex and other possibly
controversial material, or dismissed his late style as difficult and obscure,
relying heavily on extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language.
'Even in his lifetime,' explains scholar Hazel Hutchinson, 'James had a
reputation as a difficult writer for clever readers.' Oscar Wilde criticized
him for writing "fiction as if it were a painful duty". Vernon
Parrington, composing a canon of American literature, condemned James for
having cut himself off from America. Jorge Luis Borges wrote about him,
"Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers
from a major defect: the absence of life." And Virginia Woolf, writing to
Lytton Strachey, asked, "Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ...
we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged
rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there
really any sense in it?" Novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote, "He did
not know the English as an Englishman instinctively knows them and so his
English characters never to my mind quite ring true," and argued,
"The great novelists, even in seclusion, have lived life passionately.
Henry James was content to observe it from a window." Maugham nevertheless
wrote, "The fact remains that those last novels of his, notwithstanding
their unreality, make all other novels, except the very best, unreadable."
Colm Tóibín observed that James "never really wrote about the English very
well. His English characters don't work for me."
Despite
these criticisms, James is now valued for his psychological and moral realism,
his masterful creation of character, his low-key but playful humour, and his
assured command of the language. In his 1983 book, The Novels of Henry James,
Edward Wagenknecht offers an assessment that echoes Theodora Bosanquet's:
"To
be completely great," Henry James wrote in an early review, "a work
of art must lift up the heart," and his own novels do this to an
outstanding degree ... More than sixty years after his death, the great
novelist who sometimes professed to have no opinions stands foursquare in the
great Christian humanistic and democratic tradition. The men and women who, at
the height of World War II, raided the secondhand shops for his out-of-print
books knew what they were about. For no writer ever raised a braver banner to
which all who love freedom might adhere.
William
Dean Howells saw James as a representative of a new realist school of literary
art, which broke with the English romantic tradition epitomized by the works of
Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. Howells wrote that realism found
"its chief exemplar in Mr. James ... A novelist he is not, after the old
fashion, or after any fashion but his own." F. R. Leavis championed Henry
James as a novelist of "established pre-eminence" in The Great
Tradition (1948), asserting that The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians were
"the two most brilliant novels in the language." James is now prized
as a master of point of view who moved literary fiction forward by insisting in
showing, not telling, his stories to the reader.
Portrayals
in fiction
Henry
James has been the subject of a number of novels and stories, including:
Boon
by H.G. Wells
Author,
Author by David Lodge
Youth
by J.M. Coetzee
The
Master by Colm Tóibín
Hotel
de Dream by Edmund White
Lions
at Lamb House by Edwin M. Yoder
Felony
by Emma Tennant
Dictation
by Cynthia Ozick
The
James Boys by Richard Liebmann-Smith
The
Open Door, by Elizabeth Maguire
The
Great Divide by Rex Hunter[89]
The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 1914–1916,
by Joyce Carol Oates
The Typewriter's Tale, by Michael Heyns
Henry James' Midnight Song, by Carol de Chellis Hill
The Fifth Heart, by Dan Simmons
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Empire, by Gore Vidal
The Maze at Windermere, by Gregory Blake Smith
Ringrose The Pirate, by Don Nigro
David
Lodge also wrote a long essay about writing about Henry James in his collection
The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel.
Adaptations
Henry
James stories and novels have been adapted to film, television, and music video
over 150 times (some TV shows did upwards of a dozen stories) from 1933 to
2018.[90] The majority of these are in English, but with adaptations in French
(13), Spanish (7), Italian (6), German (5), Portuguese (1), Yugoslavian (1),
and Swedish (1).[90] Those most frequently adapted include:
The
Turn of the Screw (28 times)
The
Aspern Papers (17 times)
Washington
Square (8 times), as The Heiress (6 times), as Victoria (once)
The
Wings of the Dove (9 times)
The
Beast in the Jungle (5 times)[91][92][93][94][95]
The
Bostonians (4 times)
Daisy
Miller (4 times)
The
Sense of the Past (4 times)
The
Ambassadors (3 times)
The
Portrait of a Lady (3 times)
The
American (3 times)
What
Maisie Knew (3 times)
The
Golden Bowl (2 times)
The
Ghostly Rental (once)
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