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Henry James (1843-1916) |
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American-born writer, gifted with talents in literature, psychology, and philosophy. James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of literary criticism. His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne. Henry James once said that he learned more of the craft of writing from Balzac "than from anyone else". A novel is in its broadest sense a personal, a direct impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be ni intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact; then the author's choice has been made, his standard has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of execution. The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that. (from 'The Art of Fiction,' by Henry James, in The Art of Fiction by Walter Besant, Boston: Cupples Upham and Company, 1885, pp. 60-61) Henry James was born in New York City. Mary Robertson Walsh, his mother, came from a weathy New York family; she died in 1882. Henry James Sr., his father, was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne. But his son never made wealthy by his writing: he was a celebrity with a narrow readership. Once Edith Wharton secretly arranged James a royal advance of $8,000 for The Ivory Tower (1917), but the money actually came from Wharton's royalty account with the publisher. When Wharton sent James a letter bemoaning her unhappy marriage, he replied: "Keep making the movements of life." William James (1842-1910) American philosopher and psychologist, the brother of Henry James. William James was privately educated, he had no college degree, but he studied at Harvad College periodically and earned a medical degree from Harvard University in 1869. James is best known for his formulation of the philosophy of pragmatism, according to which truth is relative and best measured by the extent to which it serves human freedom. Truth, James argued, is utility. In Pragmatism (1907) he said: "I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is 'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives." James's doctrine of radical empiricism was first formulated in the essay 'Does Consciousness Exist?' (1904). His Principles of Psychology (1890) is regarded as one of the greatest works in the history of psychology. Other works: The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897); Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). In his youth James traveled back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna and Bonn. At the age of nineteen James briefly attended Harvard Law School, but was more interested in literature than studying law. James published his first short story, 'A Tragedy of Errors' two years later, and then devoted himself to literature. In 1866-69 and 1871-72 he was contributor to the Nation and Atlantic Monthly. From an early age James had read the classics of English, American, French and German literature, and Russian classics in translation. His first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), appeared first serially in the Atlantic. James wrote it while he was traveling through Venice and Paris. Watch and Ward tells a story of a bachelor who adopts a twelve-year-old girl and plans to marry her. After living in Paris, where James was contributor to the New
York Tribune,
he moved to England, living first in London and then in Rye, Sussex.
"It is a real stroke of luck for a particular country that the capital
of the human race happens to be British. Surely every other people
would have it theirs if they could. Whether the English deserve to hold
it any longer might be an interesting field of enquiry; but as they
have not yet let it slip, the writer of these lines professes without
scruple that the arrangement is to his personal taste. For, after all, if
the sense of life is greatest there, it is a sense of the life of
people of our consecrated English speech." (from English Hours by Henry James, with illustration by Joseph Pennell, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905, pp. 13-14) James had a bad back and the physical problem became so severe that in 1880 he told to a friend that a "muscular weakness of his spine" meant that he had to lie dow for several hours each day. During his first years in Europe James wrote novels that portrayed Americans living abroad. James's life in England was mostly uneventful. He dined out, spent his weekends at house parties, and traveled in Scotland and Cornwall. In 1905 he visited America for the first time after two decades, and wrote 'Jolly Corner.' It was based on his observations of New York, but also a nightmare of a man, who is haunted by a doppelgänger. Between 1906 and 1910 James revised many of his tales and
novels for
the so-called New York Edition of his complete works. It was published
by Charles Scribner's Sons. The
American Scene
(1907) was about the new immigrants who came to America after 1890 and
flocked to the industrial cities – Jews from Russia escaping the
pogroms, families from Southern and Eastern Europe. They provoked
more fear and resentment than the "old immigrants." After an absence of
two decades, James was haunted by a sense of dispossession, but the
immigrants seemed to be at home, making the conclusion that native-born
New Yorkers must go "more
than
half-way to meet them." An individualist, who was against the "herd
mentality" of modern mass society," he linked immigrants with
skycrapers, which represented America's "insistence on gregarious
ways." James's writing style is complex and takes thought to read. Some
of his less patient reviewers found him snobbish and dismissed the work
as meaningless to the average American citizen. There has been debate
whether James was a celibate ascetic, or a repressed homosexual. James returned to the United States only once more when his brother was dying. His autobiography, A Small Boy and Others (1913) was continued in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). The third volume The Middle Years, came out posthumously in 1917. The outbreak of World War I was a shock for James and in 1915 he became a British citizen as a loyalty to his adopted country and in protest against the US's refusal to enter the war. James suffered a stroke on December 2, 1915. He expected to
die and
exclaimed: "So this is it at last, the distinguished thing!" As he grew
delirious, he began imagining that he was Napoleon Bonaparte. James
died three months later in Rye on February 28, 1916. His ashes were
smuggled into the United States by Alice James, and buried in Cambridge
(Mass.) Cemetery, in the James family plot. Two novels,
The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past (1917), were
left unfinished at his death. James's last completed novel was The Golden Bowl
(1904), about the relations between the New World and the Old. The
bowl, a wedding present, becomes the symbol of "vanity of vanities,"
moral emptiness of under the polished surface of modern society. Characteristic
for James novels are understanding and
sensitively
drawn lady portraits; James himself was a homosexual, but sensitive to
basic sexual differences and the fact that he was a male. London, with
its male social clubs, was a good place to be a bachelor. When James
and Oscar Wilde, a well-known homosexual, were both in
Washington in 1882, he referred to the Irish writer as an "unclean
beast." James's
lifelong celibary was also a constant source of gossips. In 1894,
Theodore Roosevelt attacked in an essay the "Europeanized" American,
whom he defined as an "the undersized man of letters, who flees his
country because he, with his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness, finds
the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw; in
other words, because he finds that he cannot play a man’s part among
men, and so goes where he will be sheltered from the winds that harden
stouter souls." ('True Americanism' by Theodore Roosevelt, The Forum Magazine, April, 1894) James's main
themes were the innocence of the New World in
conflict with corruption and wisdom of the Old. Among his masterpieces
is Daisy Miller (1879), where the young and innocent
American Daisy finds her values in conflict with European
sophistication. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) again
a young American woman is fooled during her travels in Europe. James
started to write the work in Florence in 1879 and continued with it in
Venice. The definitive version appeared in 1908. "I had rooms on Riva
Sciavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San
Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and
the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I
seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget
of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship
of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy
twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn't come
into sight." When James set out to explore the origins of the novel in
1906, he defined it as "a square and spacious house." A house of
fiction has "not one window, but a million," from which one may peer
out at the "spreading field, the human scene." An anonymous 1881
reviewer for the New York Sun
wrote that the sophistication of James's
social world required a sophistication of style that betrayed "no mark
of graving tool or burnisher." The protagonist is Isabel Archer, a penniless orphan. She goes to England to stay with her aunt and uncle, and their tubercular son, Ralph. Isabel inherits money and goes to Continent with Mrs Touchett and Madame Merle. She turns down proposals of marriage from Casper Goodwood, and marries Gilbert Osmond, a middle-aged snobbish widower with a young daughter, Pansy. "He had a light, lean, rather languid-looking figure, and was apparently neither tall nor short. He was dressed as a man who takes little other trouble about it than to have no vulgar thing." Isabel discovers that Pansy is Madame Merle's daughter, it was Madame Merle's plot to marry Isabel to Osmond so that he, and Pansy can enjoy Isabel's wealth. Caspar Goodwood makes a last attempt to gain her, but she returns to Osmond and Pansy. The Bostonians (1886), set in the era of the rising feminist movement, was based on Alphonse Daudet's novel L'Évangéliste. What Maisie Knew (1897) depicted a preadolescent young girl, who must chose between her parents and a motherly old governess. In The Wings of the Dove (1902) a heritage destroys the love of a young couple. The character of the scheming Kate Croy is ambiguous; she is neither good or bad and her motivations are open to wide interpretation. It has been argued that Kate Croy is one of the first protagonists in American fiction whom an author suggest the interplay of conscious and unconscious mind. James considered The Ambassadors (1903) his most "perfect" work of art. The novel depicts Lambert Strether's attempts to persuade Mrs Newsome' son Chad to return from Paris back to the United States. Strether's possibility to marry Mrs Newsome is dropped and he remains content in his role as a widower and observer. "The beauty that suffuses The Ambassadors is the reward due to a fine artist for hard work. James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the narrow path of aesthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself, with modulation and reservations Anatole France will never attain. But at what sacrifice!" (from Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, 1927, p. 159) Although James is best-known for his novels, his essays are
now
attracting audience outside scholarly connoisseurs. In his early
critics James considered British and American novels dull and formless
and French fiction "intolerably unclean." "M. Zola is magnificent, but
he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in
the dark; if he had as much light as energy, his results would be of
the highest value." (from The
Art of Fiction) In Partial
Portraits (1888)
James paid tribute to his elders, and Emerson, George Eliot, and
Turgenev. His advice to aspiring writers avoided all theorizing: "Oh, do something from your point of view." Only a few of James's dramas ever reached the stage and after
the humiliating opening night of Guy
Domville
at London’s St. James’s Theater on January 5, 1895, James he gave up
writing plays. Later he said in a letter to his brother William: "All
the forces of civilization in the house waged a battle of the most
gallant, prolonged and sustained applaude with the hoots and jeers and
catcalls of the roughs, whose roars (like those of a cage of beasts at
some infernal zoo) were only exacerbated by the conflict". (The
Turn of the Screw: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and
Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five
Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Peter G. Beidler,
1995, p. 12) H.G. Wells used James as the model for George Boon in his satirical novel Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump; : Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times (1915). Wells published the book under the pseudonym Reginald Bliss, and sent it as a present to James, thinking that he would be pleased. James was upset. In the fourth chapter, entitled "Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James," Wells said, "James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn’t find things out. He doesn’t even seem to want to find things out." Referring to Boon's discussion of art and what a novel should be, James replied to Wells: "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretense of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully, Henry James." James's most famous tales include 'The Turn of the Screw,'
written mostly in the form of a journal, was first published serially
in Collier's Weekly, and then with another story in The Two
Magics (1898).
The protagonist is a governess, who works on a lonely estate in
England. She tries to save her two young charges, Flora and Miles, two
both innocent and corrupted children, from the demonic influence of the
apparitions of two former servants in the household, steward Peter
Quint and the previous governess Miss Jessel. Her employer, the
children's uncle, has given strict orders not to bother him with any of
the details of their education. Although the children evade the
questions about the ghosts but she certain is that the children see
them. When she tries to exorcize their influence, Miles dies in her
arms. The story inspired later a debate over the question of the "reality" of the ghosts, were her visions only hallucinations. In the beginning of his career James had rejected "spirit-rappings and ghost-raising," but in the 1880s he become interested in the unconscious and the supernatural. James wrote in 1908 that "Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not "ghosts" at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon." Virginia Woolf thought that Henry James's beings have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts - "the blood-stained captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons." Edmund Wilson was convinced that the story was "primarily intended as a characterization of the governess."
Selected works:
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