Frank critical

They are old friends, these prefaces. You will find one or another of them reprinted in almost every contemporary edition of Henry James’s work, in Penguin or Norton or Oxford World’s Classics, and sometimes even when the book doesn’t reproduce the text of his late-life revisions for the New York Edition (1907–09), the twenty-four-volume set of his fiction for which they were written. The Everyman Wings of the Dove sets its preface at the back, The Portrait of a Lady has it at the front in the Modern Library edition, and different selections of James’s short stories often pluck out the relevant pages from the New York introductions and stick them in an appendix. The famous phrases and judgements show up in one scholarly essay after another. “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million”, though James doesn’t much like the ones that open onto the “large loose baggy monsters” of his nineteenth-century contemporaries. He delights “in the palpable imaginable visitable past” rather than the further distances of the historical novel, and notes that the setting of The Ambassadors risks cliché, for it is “one of the platitudes of the human comedy, that people’s moral scheme does break down in Paris”. Familiar, maybe overfamiliar, yet those lines have kept their snap, and it is still exhilarating to read how James found the germ of a given story – “The Aspern Papers”, say – then complicated it, inventing the narrative difficulties that make it so rewarding.

I can’t count how many times I’ve read some of these essays, usually the ones that go with the works I teach. But before now I had only read them all through twice, and not for almost forty years: once in the Library of America edition of James’s collected literary criticism; and before that in the volume that the critic R. P. Blackmur assembled and introduced as The Art of the Novel (1934). Nor have I read even one of them in what Oliver Herford calls “the immediate context for their conception and composition” – in the actual, elegant, deckle-edged volumes of the New York Edition itself. I have not, for that matter, read any of James’s fiction in that physical form. I don’t know why. The full run sits on the open shelves of my college library, they are handsome things to hold in the hand, yet I have done no more than leaf through them. Still, the fact that I’ve let them lie seems telling, as though it mirrored the complicated, troubled story of the New York Edition as a whole.

James hoped it would stand as his monument, but he wasn’t content with merely assembling the long shelf of his work. Published by Scribner’s, the edition was to be “selective as well as collective”, for the author wanted, as he wrote in a letter, to “quietly disown a few things”, including the early brilliance of Washington Square. He planned as well to revise his work “as to expression, turn of sentence, and the question of surface generally”, hoping to bring his first books in line “with the march of my present intention”. He wanted to spot the possibilities he had missed, to do the things his younger self could not. His later works didn’t call for much adjustment to their “original expression”, but in going over The American or even The Portrait of a Lady he found himself making changes on every page. Not everyone liked, or likes, what he did with those revisions. Some early-twentieth-century readers balked at any alteration to books they had known and loved for years, and couldn’t be persuaded to buy a new copy of something they already had on their shelves. I myself prefer the New York Edition text of the Portrait, with its more intricate account of its heroine’s inner life; but the current Penguin, edited by Philip Horne, doesn’t agree with me and is based on the novel’s initial 1881 version instead. The edition was a financial failure; and, because James saw his royalties as a mark of the value the public placed on his work, the whole thing sent him into a depression.

The study of revision has a rich theoretical importance in any question of textual studies; the making of editions speaks to the process of canon formation. For most readers, though, the “frank critical” prefaces that James added to each novel or volume of stories are what matters about the New York Edition, the reason it has a place in literary history. And they matter, moreover, precisely because they have so often been pulled from their “immediate context”, because they have been used as what James himself called a “comprehensive manual or vade-mecum” to the art of fiction. He never managed to put them into a single volume, though he certainly thought about it, and dreaded the idea of writing a preface to his prefaces. But his description of how to handle a protagonist, his instructions on the shaping of narrative endings or the management of “point of view”, his strictures on the inadequacies of first-person narration: all of it remains quotable, provocative and useful.

A few examples must stand for many. Take that question of endings. They’re hard to pull off because “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, as by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so”. Life goes on, but books have to stop; so he wrote in the preface to Roderick Hudson, his first and underrated long novel. Then he glossed those words in introducing the Portrait, suggesting that a novel will “appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould”.

The same preface describes how minor characters can help to define major ones, and he expands on that issue in writing about The Ambassadors. What Maisie Knew began, like many of his shorter novels, with a dramatic situation for which he had to find the characters. The Portrait was just the other way around – he had the character, then needed something for her to do. Which is to say that these prefaces talk to or echo each other – yet it is too much to argue, as critics once did, that they add up to a consistent statement about what fiction should do. Something like that can be pulled from them, usually in terms of James’s preference for seeing an action through the eyes of a perceiving character, what we now call a close (extremely close) third person. He refuses omniscience, and the reader doesn’t get an account of the action itself, but rather of that character’s impression of it, the impression of “some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness”. James’s protégé Percy Lubbock built on that in The Craft of Fiction (1921), and so did Blackmur in his own introduction, which breaks the collected prefaces down into a series of headings and cross-references. But that simplifies James’s fiction and his criticism alike. A necessary correction came in an essay by Hershel Parker, published in 1993, that sees the prefaces as a series of occasional essays, marked by a mixture of memoir and criticism, and in which the pieces set themselves different tasks.

For me they are at their best when most circumstantial, most forthcoming. Still, Jamesian frankness isn’t the same as most people’s, and he attaches few names to the stories he tells about the genesis of this work or that. He never refers to his cousin Minny Temple, dead in her twenties of tuberculosis and widely recognized as the “original” of both Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Isabel Archer in the Portrait. Ivan Turgenev figures in the preface to the latter, with James remembering what the Russian had told him about how to create a character; but he relates the little nugget of narrative that gave rise to The Ambassadors without mentioning that it concerned his friend William Dean Howells. He admits to the historical personages behind “The Aspern Papers”, while also showing how he bent away from the factual record, but doesn’t tell us at whose dinner table or fireside he heard the oddments of anecdote that became tales such as The Spoils of Poynton or “The Turn of the Screw”. The names are almost all recoverable, however, and Herford’s wonderfully detailed notes to this edition give us the details. James got that great ghost story from the Archbishop of Canterbury, but kept such private communications from public attribution.

A few of the prefaces record his biographical circumstances: his endless walks around London, where the “general grimness” gave him the idea for The Princess Casamassima; or the room in the Louvre where the stream of imagination “gushed, full and clear”, and Christopher Newman, the hero of The American, suddenly “rose before me”. These moments are temptingly brief, however, and the biographer always wants more. My favourite comes in the preface to Roderick Hudson. The book begins with a character whom James presents as suffering from a triple misfortune: she has lost her money and her husband, and she lives “at Northampton, Massachusetts”. That’s where I live myself, and I like to imagine the novel as beginning a street or two away, near the spot where, in 1864, the twenty-one-year-old James underwent a course of hydrotherapy. In the preface, however, he writes that he should never have named an actual town. He wanted a “peaceful, rural New England community”. This was one of the few such places he knew, yet it remains generic, unparticularized. The town on the page “was under no necessity of being Northampton, Massachusetts”, and he admits to being misled by his admiration for Honoré de Balzac, who always used real settings, but depicted them with a “systematic closeness” that the young writer could not yet emulate.

In some ways that bit of “self-criticism” sets the tone for these essays as a whole. Graham Greene was one of James’s most assiduous students, and in an essay from 1935 wrote that any novelist’s “individual technique” stood as a way of “evading the personally impossible, of disguising a deficiency”. Lesser writers never recognize their limitations; some great ones stumble over things a hack might do with ease. In that sense, he added, “the whole magnificent achievement of James’ prefaces is … like a confession of failure. He is telling us how he hid the traces of the botched line”. “Botched” is putting it strongly. The preface to Roderick Hudson is far from the only one in which James marks his mistakes, but he much more often defines the consequences of the technical choices he made, and therefore of the ones he didn’t.

So, in introducing The Ambassadors, he notes that he could have made Lambert Strether “at once hero and historian” by writing in the first person. Doing so would have allowed him to smuggle in all kinds of curious things, yet the first person is also “a form foredoomed to looseness” and touched by the “terrible fluency of self-revelation”. None of James’s longer works is in the first person, and he wanted to avoid that here as well, while also “sticking” close to Strether’s ever-changing consciousness.

The solution lay in making the reader watch Strether as he watches himself; a solution that created problems of its own, and gave the novelist other things to fix. For Strether now needed someone, or several someones, to help him watch; he needed people to talk to, people to tell about the changes he felt. Hence his friend Waymarsh, who meets him when he first arrives in England from America; hence, above all, poor, put-upon Maria Gostrey, the “reader’s friend” and the most charming of James’s minor characters. She is but a narrative convenience, what James calls a ficelle, admitting as he does so that half the novelist’s art lies in knowing how to use such figures, “by which I mean … a deep dissimulation of his dependence on them”. That’s a ruse, not a botch. And there was, I think, another benefit to keeping the book in the third person, in making us look at Strether from just a little bit outside, as if we were squatting on his shoulder instead of behind his eyes. It makes it easier both to believe and to sympathize with his self-deceptions, his unwillingness to look at the facts of the life around him.

Not everything here succeeds. James had a terrible fluency of his own and, as always with his late prose, there are moments when it all turns to vapour, when a given word’s antecedent lies three sentences back and he seems to be talking to himself alone. And there are problems with his prefaces to the New York Edition’s collections of short fiction. They all have good things in them, memorable accounts of how the individual pieces came to be written: the anecdote from George du Maurier that led to “The Real Thing”; a visit from Aubrey Beardsley and the founding of The Yellow Book. Nevertheless they are gatherings of bits and pieces, and don’t hang together as do the essays devoted to individual novels. Some of that comes from the fact that James had to shift a few stories from one volume to another, in order to keep them of an approximately equal size, and in consequence shuffled his treatment of those tales around. Rather more of it grows from a limitation in his own conception, with the tales grouped in part by theme and in part by chronology, and never entirely by either. That’s a missed opportunity. I can only imagine the essay on ghost stories James might have written if he had decided to keep the supernatural works together. He’d have needed a couple of volumes for them all, but it would have given them a coherence now lacking.

Herford’s edition is part of a continuing thirty-four-volume project, with a large editorial team, that will provide scholarly versions of James’s complete fiction, along with these prefaces and his notebooks. The textual apparatus here is small compared to that produced by some of Herford’s colleagues; the prefaces were never reprinted in James’s lifetime and only one of them survives in manuscript, the lightly revised typed pages that introduce The Portrait of a Lady. Herford’s explanatory notes are, however, as long and very nearly as intricate as the prefaces themselves. They track allusions and references, provide bits of biography, along with a great deal of history and even some late-Victorian gossip, and above all catch the way a given phrase echoes off other moments in James’s work. They showed me things about these old friends that I did not know and represent not only an enormous amount of research, but also a feel for the novelist’s prose and sensibility that goes deeper than bone. Another 100 pages provide an exemplary introductory account of the conception and composition of the prefaces and indeed of the edition itself, a book-by-book record of James’s progress.

Work of this kind is necessarily expensive, both to do and to publish, let alone to purchase; and a book this size cannot easily rest in one’s hand. R. P. Blackmur’s volume remains in print, now from the University of Chicago Press with an additional preface by Colm Tóibín. For most readers that will, for the moment, be enough. But Oliver Herford’s edition is too rich – too detailed and useful – to remain restricted to a scholarly audience, by which I mean those with ready access to a university library. Might we not hope, a few years hence, for an affordable paperback?

Michael Gorra’s books include Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American masterpiece, 2012, and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, 2020. He teaches at Smith College

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post Frank critical appeared first on TLS.