Books: With Two Countries

THE GREAT SHORT NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES—edited by Philip Rahv—Dial Press ($4).

In his brilliant youth, the one English novelist that young Henry James of New York, Albany, Newport and Boston admired was George Eliot. He studied her works, wrote essays about her, sent her autographed copies of his first two books. When, at 26, he went to England to live, in 1869, he was taken to visit her as solemnly as a promising recruit led into the presence of the general. It was a doleful experience. George Eliot sat glum and uncommunicative, old, cold, heavy and slow. The only sign of life she showed was when James was leaving. Then she said he must have something to read on the long journey back to London, and handed him the two books he had sent to her.

Reputation Regained. James remained for most of his life an American citizen. Born in 1843, the second son of the sprightly old Swedenborgian philosopher Henry James, he was kept out of the Civil War by an injury—he had hurt his back putting out a fire in Newport. His younger brothers Wilky and Bob served in the Union Army; his philosopher brother William was already doing scientific research at Harvard. Henry James went to Harvard Law School, was a book reviewer at 22. Repelled by the intense nationalism of Reconstruction days, he deliberately turned his back on the U.S., to test with his own life and talent whether it was possible to live between two cultures, to interpret Americans to the English and the English to Americans, to be in effect a citizen of both countries without being disloyal to either.

Fifty years ago young ladies all over the U.S., reading James’s best-selling Daisy Miller, his frightening Turn of the Screw, his slow-paced, beautifully constructed longer novels, knew that Henry James was the greatest American writer of fiction. Thirty years ago, he could scarcely get his work published. Twenty years ago he was damned as an expatriate whose talent had withered and died because he left his native land. Ten years ago Marxist critics condemned him as the arch apologist of the ruling class. Now some critics are again saying that James is the greatest of modern novelists.

Fool’s Paradise? James never wrote out his theory. He lived it. The closest he came to putting it into words was in his famed dispute with H. G. Wells. In 1915, when feeling in England was bitter against he U.S. because of American policy in World War I, Wells suddenly launched on the unsuspecting James his devastating attack: George Boon, The Mind of the Race. This volume contained a parody of James’s style, with this deadly description: “His novel … is like a church lit, but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a piece of string.”

Profoundly bewildered, aging and weak (he was then 72), miserable about the war (he regretted that he had not died in 1913), James answered this last attack with dignity. Denying that he was a public menace, he said he did not, as far as he knew, have any following at all. “I live,” he said, “live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that.”

But he was beaten, and he knew it. He lived briefly with the tragic fear that, just as prewar Europe had been building up only for war, he had been working in a fool’s paradise, creating books that no one could enjoy. He renounced his American citizenship, became a British subject, died soon after.

Slow Stories. Last week readers could get in a handy package some fine examples of Henry James’s genius.* The Great Short Novels of Henry James runs to 799 pages, includes ten stories, plus Philip Rahv’s succinct biographical note and appraisal of James. The best introduction to James yet produced, it contains the bright Daisy Miller that gave a generation of American girls a sense of their own vivacity, and the horror story The Turn of the Screw, “the most terrifying story in the language.”

Typical of James’s humor and his appreciation of international dilemmas is The Siege of London, in which the audacious, much-divorced American Mrs. Headway, well-known in San Diego and snubbed by New York, crashes London society, marries a baronet much younger than herself, frustrates her dowager mother-in-law, becomes an enormous success.

James’s stories are meant for slow reading. A little of them goes a long way. Condensed, mellow, with their felicitous phrases and generous perceptions woven unobtrusively into the slow, deliberate prose, they have a flavor that no other fiction possesses.

*Also newly published are two books by and about James. Stories of Writers and Artists (New Directions, $3.50) contains eleven of James’s short stories, with an informative essay (including a discussion of Wells and James) by Professor F. O. Matthiessen. Henry James: The Major Phase (Oxford, $2.50), is Professor Matthiessen’s careful, full-length analysis of four of James’s novels, with a fund of new biographical findings worked into the text. Balanced and penetrating, a postgraduate study rather than an introduction, The Major Phase stamps Professor Matthiessen as the ablest contemporary critic of James.