Monopolizing the Master

Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship

Michael Anesko

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804782647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Henry James defied posterity to disturb his bones: he was adamant that his legacy be based exclusively on his publications and that his private life and writings remain forever private. Despite this, almost immediately after his death in 1916 an intense struggle began among his family and his literary disciples to control his posthumous reputation, a struggle that was continued by later generations of critics and biographers. Monopolizing the Master gives a blow-by-blow account of this conflict, which aroused intense feelings of jealousy, suspicion, and proprietorship among those who claimed to be the just custodians of James's literary legacy. With an unprecedented amount of new evidence now available, Michael Anesko reveals the remarkable social, political, and sexual intrigue that inspired—and influenced—the deliberate construction of the Legend of the Master.

1 Cornering the Market

Legacies of Mastery

Before he left this world, Henry James took various steps to shape the contours of his posthumous reputation and direct the lines of critical inquiry that would affect it. That James entertained certain anxious intimations of immortality should not come as a surprise. Any reader of his work—especially those wonderfully wry stories about writers and artists—probably could anticipate the principal aims of his paradoxically posthumous authorial agenda. How many times in those taut works of fiction does the higher imperative of personal privacy trump public curiosity about the artist’s life—often accompanied by the ritual destruction of the writer’s manuscripts and letters? How often do we hear the lamentations of creative intellects who neither find genuinely satisfactory rapport with an audience nor receive insightful appreciation from the critical press? How many of James’s artist figures ultimately succumb to the treacheries of the marketplace, whether as victims of misguided celebrity or knowingly complicitous devotees of a mercenary muse? Through all these permutations of an overarching theme—the relation of the artist to society, which James singled out as one of the “great primary motives” available to him¹—a pervasive and telling irony adumbrates their autobiographical origins and implications, even when the author’s notebooks betray more immediate moments of genesis or particular forms of instigation in the private chronicle of his own career. So many traps for the unwary, these stories often have snared readers into treating them as elaborate Jamesian exercises in self-pity, forms of retrospective consolation for the market’s indifference to his work;² but their fuller resonance is best appreciated if instead we consider them as proleptic forms of constructed mastery, anticipations of the strategies that the author, his family, and his disciples would employ to consolidate and enhance the cultural capital of “Henry James.”

James’s yearning to frustrate future biographers is well known, especially since the most preeminent of them (Leon Edel) took pains to remind his readers at every turn how he had triumphed over his subject’s nefarious intention to defy personal inquiry. Adamantly expressing the wish “to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter,” James also ruefully acknowledged that his desire was “but so imperfectly possible”: death, when it came, would work to defeat his tactics of evasion, and postmortem exploiters inevitably would multiply. Jealous of all others, Edel became the postmortem exploiter par excellence, driven by an obsessive zeal that would have been the envy of any of the Master’s fictional prototypes: those frequently foiled publishing parasites who seek to fatten their careers on the literary remains that less fastidious authors have left behind them. James certainly knew that the fabulous conventions he employed to safeguard his fictional authors from prying interlopers—the recriminating scruples that hamper Peter Baron in “Sir Dominick Ferrand” (1892) or the ghostly visitations that discourage George Withermore in “The Real Right Thing” (1899)—would hardly meet the necessities of his own case. “I have long thought of launching,” he told his nephew Harry, “a curse not less explicit than Shakespeare’s own on any such as try to move my bones.” Provoked by this relative’s query about the future disposition of his literary estate, James instantly made up his mind “to advert to the matter in my will—that is to declare my utter and absolute abhorrence of any attempted biography or the giving to the world by ‘the family,’ or by any person for whom my disapproval has any sanctity, of any part or parts of my private correspondence.”³ Such aggressive averments notwithstanding, James made no mention of these restrictions in the codicil that was appended to his will in late August 1915, just six months prior to his death. In fact, that document gives the merest nod to “manuscript or type-copied matter and letters,” which were lumped with all his other copyrights and intellectual property in a bequest to his sister-in-law, Alice Howe Gibbens James.⁴ It was she who moved his bones—or at least his ashes—from wartime London to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for burial in the family plot overlooking Soldiers Field. And it was she and her immediate descendants who gave to the world a substantial part of his private correspondence by allowing Percy Lubbock to publish a generous two-volume selection of The Letters of Henry James in 1920.

Though he never managed fully to effect an interdiction comparable to Shakespeare’s, James already had taken precautions inspired by a like-minded scorn. Throughout his career, whenever “great changes & marked dates & new eras [&] closed chapters” were registered, the novelist unapologetically “committed to the flames a good many documents,” wanting not merely to clean house but also to impede any prospect for subsequent inquiry.⁵ Immortalized in the ritual burning of eponymous love letters in “The Aspern Papers” (1888), James’s tactics of secrecy had become a confirmed law—a law, he told an old friend, “that I have made tolerably absolute these last years as I myself grow older and think more of my latter end: the law of not leaving personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents, or even of my executors!”⁶ Such confirmed habits of privacy only were exacerbated by symptoms of declining health. At particular moments of medical crisis, plumes of smoke would rise from his chimney or waft from the cottage corner of the garden at Lamb House, where the caretaker could keep a watchful eye on the Master’s epistolary bonfires. The onset of deep depression in the summer of 1910 (“the blackness of darkness and the cruellest melancholia”) provoked perhaps his most spectacular conflagration.⁷ “Uncle Henry is burning his ships with a vengeance,” his sister-in-law reported to Harry after she and her ailing husband arrived at Rye on their way to Bad Nauheim in Germany, where they hoped to find successful treatment for William’s acute heart trouble. “Such a clearing of drawers and cupboards,” with the servants “scudding & flying to do his bidding,” she had never before witnessed.⁸ Not surprisingly, then, later scholars and researchers have seldom been able to reconstruct fully reciprocal accounts of James’s correspondence. Whereas those to whom he wrote safeguarded even his most trivial notes (“the mere twaddle of graciousness,” as he freely confessed them), most of their letters to him never survived his periodic blazes. Even family letters sometimes found their way into the flames, resulting in lopsided lacunae amid the formidable accumulation of James papers at Harvard. As the author’s nephew explained to Ralph Barton Perry (the first person granted access to the James archive), “As to the letters from my grandfather that were sent to Uncle Henry, I can only say that I don’t think they were ever returned. His ways with papers were strange. My mother brought home what was found after his death but I know that some things will never be found again—probably don’t exist.”⁹ Perry was just the first scholar who perhaps had reason to mutter a private execration in response to the Shakespearean curse that Henry James chose to hurl at posterity.

Wanting to forestall the more traditional modes of biographical inquiry, James insisted that his work, not his life, should be the proper focus of serious criticism. How little of that he had received in his lifetime was a perennial sore spot. His notebooks and correspondence bristle with contempt for the slovenly substitutes he found in the Anglo-American literary press—mostly a hodgepodge of puffing and publicity. A complaint he made to Robert Louis Stevenson in 1888 could have been lifted from almost any of his letters, early or late. “Criticism,” he reported, “is of an abject density and puerility—it doesn’t exist—it writes the intellect of our race too low.”¹⁰ Compared to the intelligent discussions of literary issues he heard during his brief stint in Paris (1875–76)—when he frequented the salons of Flaubert, Turgenev, the Goncourts, Daudet, and Zola—the chatter that filled the columns of newspapers and periodicals in London, New York, and Boston was worse than trifling. “There is almost no care for literary discussion here,” he wrote from the British capital to his old American chum Thomas Sergeant Perry; “questions of form, of principle, the ‘serious’ idea of the novel appeals apparently to no one, & they don’t understand you when you speak of them.”¹¹ Even his deliberately provocative essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884) aroused not an echo: it simply fell into a void. On the one occasion when he chose to address the subject of “criticism” proper, James used the word ironically, since in contemporary practice it had become synonymous with the “platitude and irrelevance” of promotional journalism.¹² Sometime later, when the editor of the Atlantic rather tactlessly called James’s attention to a vituperative review essay in the journal’s pages that dismissed The Wings of the Dove for its “clouds of refined and enigmatical verbiage,”¹³ a by now hard-shelled author simply shrugged. The article, James wrote back, “seems to me, certainly, as stupid as it is sprightly” (returning the favor); “but the stupid we have always with us,” he continued, “& they are a very old story.”¹⁴ Certainly a very old story to him.

Critics have long recognized that the author intended his heroic labor in preparing the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907–9) as a kind of bulwark against such stupidity. The Prefaces he composed for that series, in particular, were “a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantine lines—as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart.”¹⁵ All the same, it is worth remembering that those were not the words—decidedly—the author used when he first proposed doing the Prefaces for Scribner’s as a special feature for the Edition. When James B. Pinker, his agent, was in early negotiations with the firm, the Prefaces, he teasingly suggested, would be “of a rather intimate, personal character,” hinting that for the first time in his life this notoriously reclusive author would share himself more freely with his public.¹⁶ As plans for the Edition were firming up, James himself promised to write “a freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential preface or introduction” for each of its volumes, underscoring the fact that “I have never committed myself in print in any way, even so much as by three lines to a newspaper, on the subject of anything I have written, and I feel as if I should come to this part of the business with a certain freshness of appetite and effect.”¹⁷ This was bait no publisher, ever eager for publicity, could resist—as James had testified in “John Delavoy” (1898), a tale in which a market-minded magazine editor rejects a serious critical essay about that author’s work in favor of something more vividly biographical. Despite their final distinction as writerly texts (as Barthes might have said), the Prefaces were hawked on the basis of their readerly appeal and certainly envisioned as a major selling point for the whole venture.

When the time came to write them, however, the author felt compelled to subordinate popular expectation to a larger imperative for his own distinctive kind of critical formalism. Although many of the Prefaces give a brief nod to the particular circumstances of a given work’s point of origin—the “germ” that had planted the seed in the author’s imagination, the specific locale where he composed it—James announced from the first that, as he reread and revised his oeuvre, he found himself “in presence of some such recording scroll or engraved commemorative table—from which the ‘private’ character, moreover, quite insist[ed] on dropping out.”¹⁸ By the time he would write his final Preface, almost any vestige of “private” disclosure had been effaced altogether. As he continued to compose them, James would instead increasingly challenge his audience to appreciate the writerly demands, even more strenuous now by virtue of his textual revisions, that his fiction deliberately made. Acknowledging that the vast majority of what passes for “literature” makes no such demands, James anticipated Barthes’s famous distinction without apology. “We may traverse acres of pretended exhibitory prose,” he admitted, “from which the touch that directly evokes and finely presents, the touch that operates for closeness and for charm, for conviction and illusion, for communication, in a word, is unsurpassably absent. All of which but means of course that the reader is, in the common phrase, ‘sold’—even when, poor passive spirit, systematically bewildered and bamboozled on the article of his dues, he may be but dimly aware of it.” Preferring to engage the reader as an active spirit, James solicits his attention through forms “whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art. The essential property of such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure—which is of course the pressure of the attention articulately sounded.”¹⁹ James’s aim, then, in this and every other Preface, is (as Paul Armstrong suggests) “to direct and even discipline the reader’s attention without coercing or constraining it.”²⁰ Precisely because each of the Prefaces was occasioned by a rereading of the work (or works) it addressed, their ultimate function is s...