Towards a canon of Henry James's writer-hero tales

Rerista de Estudios Norteamericanos, n." 5 ( 1997), pp. 9 -19 TOWARDS A CANON OF HENRY ]AMES'S WRITER-HERO TALES JoSÉ ANTONIO ÁLVAREZ AMORÓS Universidad de La Comña Criticism on James's short fiction constantly refers, under one label or an other , to a group of stories whose common feature is the presence of an artist generally cast in a very prominent role within the narrated world. Among many similar denominations, these works have been called «S tories of writers and artists» (Matthíessen), «shorter fiction [ of] writers and artists» (McElderry 120), or «artist tales» (Wirth-Nesher 118); yet, when the artist in question is specifically a man of letters, the narratives in which he appears are more accurately terrned «Writcr-hero [tales]» (Chapman 4) oreven «literary' tales,» if we resort to the expression James himself used in his notebooks.1 Such a wealth of equivalent phrases, however, tends to conceal the unfortunate absence of any reasoned attempt at establishing which of James's stories can be actually considered writer-hero tales and which of them do not belong to a category whose limits and composition appear to be apprehended by critics only in intuitive fas hi on. Anthologies, for instance, seldom ha ve identical contents. Matthiessen 's Stories ofWri ters and Artists includes narratives left out by Kermode 's « The Figure in the Carpet» and Other Stories and viceversa. Even James's own selection of «'literary' tales» for volumes 15 a nd 16 of the New York edition of his narrative works seems flagrantly incomplctc. These discrepancies could be explained by a combination of commercial tact and artistic judgement on the editors' part, but it is difficult to determine the proportion in which these two criteria weighed with Matthiessen, Kermode and James himself as they made their respective choices. The same problem occurs in critica! works such as Sara S. Chapman's otherwise excellent monograph on Jam es's writer-hero tales; to my mind the selection ofthe narratives is somewhat incoherent, since she includes «The Abasement 1. The Complete Notehooks of Henry Jam es 154; he nc efo rth c it ed in the text as CN. 10 José Ant onio Álvare: Amor ós of the Northmores» (1900), whi ch could not eve n count as a border-line case, while omitting « Th c Private Life» (1892) and «The Velvet Glove» (1900 ) both of which are undeniably stories of literary life. Co nsider in g t hi s la ck of precision, it seems pertinent to asce rtain the extent to which t hi s group of naffative works enjoys sorne kind of differential status wi th in James 's production, and th en decide on the inclusion or exclusion of i nd ividual slories. Of course, we could al so put this process in terms of creating a tentative cano n of James's writerhero tales. Th e method 1 wi ll follow has nothing original about it a nd combines inductive and deductive features. First, a general rule will have to be formulated, and then th e critcria derivcd from this rule wi ll be applied to James 's short fiction in order to find out which ofhis works qualify as tales ofliterary life and wlüch of them are located outside, or on the periphery of, this canon. To set up this rule, 1 propose to draw on tw o sources: first, on the authorial statements indicative of James 's intentions, second, on the scrntiny of the stories themselves -a nd particularly of those which h ave been received as undoubted casesin order to abstract their distinctive fca tu res and see if they recur in the r es t of hi s product io n. This procedure will ena ble us to determine whe th er thcse writer-hero narrativ es are a spccific subset of James's short fiction and which of th em really belong here. The two main sources of James 's opinions about his own works are hi s notebooks and his pr efac es , which respective) y car ry observations made hefore the fact and afrer rhe facr of artistic cre ation . In the noteb oo k entry for 13th February, 18 96 , in w hi ch he co ll ecte d material for « Jo hn Del avoy» (1898), Jame s recorded the unpleasant exper ience of having an essay on Alexandre Dumas rejected by an editor beca use it was not sufficiently « per sonal» or «chatty.» But the point of this passage is rather the precise calegorization of this story, which shows that, at the turn of the cent ury, its author was per fectly conscio us of working towards a particular goal: R. U. Johnson 's letter to me the other day, returning my little paper on Dumas as shocking to their prudery, strikes me as yielding the germ of a lovely little ironic, sati ri c tale --of the ser ies of sma ll things on the life and expe ri ences of men of le lt ers, the group ofthe little «literary» tales. Isn 't there an exquisite little s ubj ect in his se ntence about their calc ul ation that my article on A.D. would have been unobjectionable through being merely personal? (CN 154) Even thou gh he is no t explicit as to the pr oper membcrs of this «gro up of the little 'literary' tales,» he identifies them qu ite accurately when he states that their s ubj ect is «the life and experiences of men of letters,» emp hasizing, from a formal point of view, his mo st che ri shed condition ofbre vity, i.e. that they all sh ou ld be «small things.» This definition is considerably elaborated on in his critica! pr efaces, especia ll y in his prcface to vol um e 15 where he states that Towards a Canon of Henry James 's Writer-Hero Tales 11 [t]hese pieces have this in common: that they deal all with literary life, gathering their motive, in each case, from sorne noted adventure, sorne felt embarrassment, sorne extreme predicament, of the artist cnamoured of perfection, ridden by his idea or paying for his sincerity.2 Here, however, perhaps as a consequence of working after the fact and not before it, James offers information about specific tales. Far him, «The Death of the Lion» (1894), «The Coxon Fund» (1894) and «The Next Time» (1895)-i.e. what he refers to as [t]hese pieces» in the above passageare ali writer-hero narratives, the list being so sho11 and restricted because, in the particular preface from which I quote, James is recalling the invitation he received to contribute to a literary magazine entitled The Yellow Book and lays special emphasis on those narratives published herein. After dealing at Jength with th e circumstances of his contribution, he also discusses «The Lesson of the Master» (1888) and «The Figure in the Carpet» (1896), calling these five stories «my homogeneous group» (AN 225) in what I hold to be a very clarifying gesture. This is a firm starting-point, anyway, and it receives support from the fact that James co llected most of his tales of li terary life in volumes 15 and 16 of the New York edition of his selected works, with the exception of «The Real Right Thing» ( 1899) and «The Story in It» (c. 1900) to be found, respectively, in volumes 17 and 18, and «The Private Life,» «John Delavoy,» and «The Velvet Glove,» which were altogether dropped from this edition. In volume 16 , however, apart from unmistakable instances of writer-hero tales, there are severa! narratives -« The Tree of Knowledge» (1900) ami «The Abasement of the Northmores,» among othersthat do not seem to qualify as such according to the criteria set up below. The second source to be tapped is that of the stories themselves and, by focusing on both their thernatic and formal aspects, one can refine and amplify James's own comments and make them serve as a discriminating grid to fix a canon. Thematically, we can distinguish two levels of abstraction in analyzing the subject matter of James's tales. One of these leve Is is tackled by Tzvetan Todorov in his celebrated essay on this topic, where he makes bold to state that ali of James 's tales dcvelop «the quest for an absolute and absent cause» (74), which, in the particular circumstance of his wr iterhero tales, is the literary work itself. This absence sets the characters on a search that, characteristically enough, is never fully resolved either for themselves or for the readcr, the paradigm of this indetermination being, of course, «The Figure in the Carpet.» Todorov's thematic reduction of the Jamesian tales is reminiscent of the attempts at a universal «narrativc grammar» he carried out in the late sixties within thc framework of li tcrary structuralism in order to devise his Grammaire du Décaméron. The problem 2. The Art ofthe Novel: Critica/ Prefaces by Henry lam es 220-21; henceforth ci t ed in the text as AN. 12 José Amonio Álvarez Amorós with this method is obviously it s high leve! of abstraction which very rnuch hinders my purposc here, i.e. to find out ways of dijferentiating Jarnes's writer-hcro tales from the rest of his tales, not to see in what respects they are alike or, sti ll less, to propose a thcmatic cover capable of comprising them al i. There have been several atLernpts to narne the basic thematic components of James 's literary production ata more specific leve! than that of Todorov's description, and, apart frorn the intemational theme and thc theme ofthe pil grim in search of society, it is generally agreed that the theme of the artist in conflict with society features in a large proportion of his works. James 's writer-hero ta les are characterized precisely by the presence of the literary artist in a prorninent position, a fact which imrnediately invokes metaliterary topics, as well as a potential confusi on of realms between the work in hand and the work or works that, almost inevitably, are talked about with in the fictional world. ·1 But the presence of the lilerary artist in these tales is not jubilant; rather, it seems beset by difficulties -mainly , though not exclusively, financial and of public appreciationthat lead James to allude to «the troubled artistic consciousness» (AN 221) and to confront the «beautiful talents the exercisc of which yet isn 't lucrative» with «Other talents that leave any fine appreciation mys tified and gaping» being, n eve11he less, «a source of vast pecuniary profit» (AN 226). The maladjustrnent of the Jamesian writer to the modes of production of a philistine capitalist socie ty or, in other words, the «power of wea lth and th e pow erlessness of the writer-artist ... characteristically impotent before successful materialists» is doubtlessly the central subject of these writer-hero tales (Chapman 5). It is not surprising, however, that this central subject, being about writers and their predicaments, s hould be deeply rooted in a particular stage of James 's life. The autobiographical import of these tales is not universally accepted. There are cr itics such as Brooke K. Horvath who believes that no aspect of James 's life bore any likcness to that ofhis fictional writers -Ambi en t, St. George, Saltram, Paraday, Limbert, Yereker, etc .- and, although «James's life and príva te confcssions . .. amply attest to periods of failure, self-doubt, and frustration ... James is unlike his fictive colleagues, a nd the presurnptions underlying their failure are not his.»4 No proof, however, is adduced to support this claim, and, in its absence, I would rather tum to a crucial fragment co ntained in James's preface to vol ume 15 ofthe New York edition, in which hediscusses the origin of the données of the writer-hero tales composed for The Yellow Book: ... whereas any anecdo te about life pure and simple, as it were, proceeds almos! as a matler of course from sorne good jog of fond fancy's elbow, sorne pencill ed 3. For a discussion of the metaliterary issue in « The Aurhor of Be/rraffio» (1884), see Lawrence R. Schehr, «' The Author of Beltraffio' as Theory.» 4. Horvath 106. Other critics do not share Horvath 's assumptions and support the autobiographical weight of James 's writer-hero tales; see, for instance, Vaid 62 and Wegelin 639-40. Towards a Canon of Henry Jamcs's Writer-Hero Tales 13 note on somebody clse 's case, so the material for any picture of personal states so specifically complicated as those of my hapless friends in the present volume will ha ve been drawn preponderantly ji-om tlze depths of the designer's own mind. ( AN 221, my italics) Two different aspects of the creative process are touched upon here. On the o ne hand, James throws in to relief the role of fancy in the discovery of a suitable «anecdotc about life pure and simple»; on thc other, he draws attention to the fact that t he «Cornplication» of picturing adequately thc plight of his fic tional writers rcquircs his drawing on «the depths of the designer's own mind,» that is, sorne support frorn personal expericnce that fancy alone seems incapable of providing. This is quite a weighty statement in settling the question of autobiography, but, in addition to this, James is not at ali reluctant to tell us in his notebooks which character takes his own part in a spccific narrative and what traits of his personality are attributed to this character. When commenting on the initial plan for «The Figure in thc Carpel,» he writes: The young man, the 2d [sic] young man (my friend), does too -a nd it is his torment, his wony, his study of the pretty books, that l perhaps mainly rcprescnt. I have given them up -the game isn 't worth the candle. lt's ali abad joke anda mystification: that's the ground I take .. . Say I take the ground of our hero's madness, or me re persistent pleasantry amounting almost to madness -a nd that it is he who take[s] the side of the outright beauty and sanity of the work ... I'm not, I don't care, I cling to my vulgar explanation ... (CN 137-38) Passages of this kind do not prove, of course, the existence of autobiography in James's writer-hero tales, since the first person pronoun might well be a mere device used by the author to adopt the charact er perspective momentarily and check if his developmcnt of the story's initial idea is consisten!. But, taken in combination with James's statement about the role played by «the depths ofthe designer's mind» in the conception of the données for these tales and with sorne concrete facts from his life at the end of the nineteenth ccntury, the autobiograp hi ca l hypothesis gains considerable strcngth. According to Leon Edel, in or about 1889 James «was seriously re-examining his professional and financia! careen> ([363]). In the previous five years he had worked at a frantic pace, but had obtained no proportional success in terms of royalties. James, like other novelists such as James Joyce, turned to the dramatic career as a possibility of leaving behind his inveterate financia! difficulties. At th e end of the eighties, James enjoyed a remarkable reputation as a novelist, essayist and reviewer among critics and the enlightened reading public, but his income was comparatively low, because he was not at ali popular. His first attempt to make a dramatic reputation far himself was the adaptation of his novel The American ( 18 77) far th e stage. With the resulting pl ay, he 14 José Antonio Álvarez Amor ós achieved a moderate success in Southport n ea r Liverpool on 3 rd January, 1889. But, to his horror, he was soon to rea lize «how a provincial su ccess is confined to the provinces.» ~ After struggling for four yea rs against a public who did not enjoy his inte ll ectual sub tl eties, James suffcred a great disappointment that brought hi s dramatic career toan end, when his play Cuy Domville was booed and hissed by an unappreciative London audience on 5th January, 1895. It is not difficult to realize that «James 's discouragement might have contributed to his broader syrnpathies with the plight of his writer colleagues» (Chapman 21), and this interpretation scems even more plausible if we consider the publication date of his writer-hero narratives concemed with the depiction of the ca r efu l and conscientious artist in conflict with the lowbrow public. His three tales publis hed in The Yellow Book -«The Death of the Lion ,» «The Coxon Fund,» and «The Next Time»- <leal with different modulations of this theme, dating, as we already know, from his theatrical years. Ap are from these, one could also point out «Greville Fane» (1892) and « The Middle Years» ( 1893), as well as the later «John Dela voy» a nd «Broken Wings» (1900). The theme of the i so lation of the literary artist from the general public features in ali his tales, but it is particularly noticeable in those just mentioned. From a formal perspective, there are two criteria that can contribute to setting limits to James 's tales of literary life: first, the physical dimensions of the works; second, what Seymour Chatman ca lls the structure of narrative transmission, i.e. the presence of interna] narrators and/or focalizers who, in one way or another, condition the meaningmaking process. The first of these criteria obviously disqualifies the novels (e.g. The Ambassadors or The Sacred Foun f) a nd the novellas (e.g. The Aspern Papers) as members of this class. But this is notan otiose distinction, since we very well know the importance James attached to the size of a narrative work in correspondence with the kind of theme it contained. In the preface to «The Author of Beltraffio,» he discusses - with reference to the organic growth of the literary workthe problems of artistic compression encountered by writers when editors se t stringent word limits under the pressure of production costs. In the course of this discussion, he establishes a dichot omy between the concepts of anecdotal theme and dei•elopmental theme (AN 232-35) and, with their aid, he reviews sorne ofhis works, analyzing the correspondence between the ki nd of theme he adopts and the resulting length. For instan ce , when dealing with «Greville Fane,» he explains that «the subject ... is 'developmental' enough, while the forrn has to make the anecdotic concession» (AN 234). Nevertheless, instead of rueing this inadequacy, he is satisfied with it and finds reasons to boast abo ut the perfect hannony of the finished product.6 ln this case, his source of pride lies in the fact that «Greville 5. Letter to his brother William, qtd. in Edel 367. 6. In spite of his organicist protestations, Jam es was a mechanist by his method of composition. Instead of abhorring any circumstance that could prevent the full growth of a Towards a Canon of Henry James's Wríter-Hero Tales 15 Fane» is a relatively short tale, in which he manages to squeeze, by a consistent foreshortening of the subject, the biography of a pleasant popular novelist and her children 's unbelievable callousness towards her. More important than the mere physical dimensions ofthese works is the subtlety of their narrative structurc. The standard writer-hero tale is endowed with a first-person marginal narrator-witness placed on the edge of the represented world and enjoying various degrees of plot significance according to different critica! opinions. For Yaid, these narrators «are primarily variations of a narrative method, not fully develop ed characters in their own right» (61 ), whereas for Macnaughton they are crucial elements of the fictional world an d bear decisively on its representation. Fulfilling the double role of speakers and observers, they contribute to the generation of a Bakhtinian surplus of seeing th at relativizes reality by bridging the gap between the inner self and the outer world (Craige 19-20, 30), which causes most of James 's wríter-hero narratives to exhibit a faltering, insecure tone.7 In consonance with the «literary» setting of these tales, the role of the marginal narrator is embodied by writers or critics and, although this fact should accord them increased powers of discrimination and perception, they are usually gullible and unreliable. The foregoing discussion of thematic and formal criteria leads me to formula te a rule whose application will yield a set of tales in th e form of a structured canon, i.e. with works placed at its core, on its periphery and, finally, outside the canon, though perhaps closely related to it by formal or thematic aspects. The first criterion to be applied will be the presence in the tale of a literary artist in conflict with society due to the general misunderstanding of his artistry or to the financia! difficulties that arise from such misunderstanding. This is obviously a thematic criterion and one which can be derived from authorial statements (signally AN 220-21) or authorial experienc es outside the re alm of fiction. Technical in nature, the second criterion lies in the presence of what I have called a first-person marginal narrator-witness, i.e. a narrator whose participation in the development of the plot is generally restricted to the role of observer or transitive centre, with the possibility of his mind becoming gradually the object of the narra ti on ( for the concept of trans itive centre see Al v arez Amorós, «James, Lubbock, a nd Beyond» 50-51 ). Other minar cr iteria are, for instance, the role of autobiography in developmental theme, he cherishes the imposition of obstacles that may allow him to show offhis mastery: « Th e merit of the thing is in the feat, once more, of the trans fus ion; the receptacle (of form) being so exiguous, the brevity imposed so great. I undertook the brevity, so often undertaken on a like scale before, and again arrived at ir by the innumerable repeated chemical reductions and condensations that tend to make of th e very short stor y, as I risk again noting, one of the costliest, even if, like the hard, shining sonnet, one of the most indestructible, forms of composition in general use» (AN 239-40). For a ful! discussion of this question, see my essay «Henry James's 'Organic Form' and Classical Rhetoric.» 7. «Greville Fane» is an obvious ex ception to this rule. 18 José Am onio Á/\'{/re: A morós on the formalistic theme of «The Death ofthe Lion» and «John Delavoy,» according to which what really mattcrs is an author's work and not thc purely human side of his personality. The fourteen tales named and discussed above fonn, in my view, the canon of Henry James 's writer-hero narratives; yet, one could also mention other stories situated outside this canon but dearly related to it. «The Abasement of the No1thmores» presents two habitual letter-writers, John Northmore and Warren Hope. But none ofthem appcars asan author offictional works, and the reference to the fact that Northmore «had madc literature» ( «The Abasement of the Northmorcs» Complete Tales 11: 111) just takes on ironic overtones when read in the context of the rest of his achievements: «He had made politics, he had made literature, he had made land, he had made abad manner and a great many mistakes, he had made a gaunt, foolish wife, two extravagant sons and four awkward daughters -he had made evcrything ... » («The Abasement of lhe Northmores» Complete Tales 11: 111 ). Besides, the word «literature» seems to be used here in the traditional sense of «written works» of whatever type, and this is confirmed by Northmore 's description-from his wife 's perspectiveas a genius «in economics, in the highcr politics, in philosophic history» ( «The Abasement of the Northmores» Complete Tales 11:116). Further evidence that this is nota writer-hero tale lies in its radical departure from the stipulated conditions, such as the presence of a literary artist in conflict with society and of a first-person narrator-witness: on the one hand, it is difficult to refer to Nonhmore and Hope as literary artists, Jet alone to see them in any kind of conflict with society; on the other, the tale is related by an authoritative thirdpcrson narrator leaving no room for uncertainty or relativism. «The Story in lt,» for its part, is a curious case, since il could be depicted as a tale of literary life, but not as a writer-hero tale. Hitherto, both expressions have been considered synonymous, for all stories of literary life turn round the figure of a great writer who plays the more or less clear role of hero or protagonist. But in this tale characters simply pose as amateur critics and discuss Frcnch novels in comparison with Anglo-American ones without the least reference to any particular author located in the fictional world. Other Jamesian stories deal with non-literary artists such as sculptors ( «The Trce of Knowledge») or painters ( «T he Real Thing» [1892] and «The Tone of Time» [ 1903]). For this reason, they have not been analyscd herc, but it should be noted that many of them -«The Real Thing» being a case in point-display, and elaboratc on, the same themes as those treat ed by James in the stories presented and examined in this essay. 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