A Mind So Fine: Two Scholars Tackle James

Henry James (ed. Michael Gorra) | On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays | NYRB Classics | April 2025 | 408 Pages

Peter Brooks | Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age | New York Review Books | April 2025 | 248 Pages

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For a writer who left such a massive body of work about novels and novelists behind him, it’s surprisingly difficult to associate Henry James with a discernible critical school. The critical credos and rules of thumb that are easy to recall in writers of his time and stature are, in James’s case, notably thin on the ground. There is no ‘trust the tale not the teller’ (D.H. Lawrence); no ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound); no ‘great artists steal’ (T.S. Eliot); no ‘a poem comes right with a click like a closing box’ (W.B. Yeats). In fact, it’s possible to detect in James’s critical writing a certain hostility to accomplished phrases and varnished aperçus, as though these contributed to the problem which his criticism was intended to rectify. In his famous essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, which opens Michael Gorra’s new selection of James’s critical writing, James is to be found comparing crisp advice about the writing of fiction to the ‘prohibitory inscriptions on the end of sticks’ that are located in public gardens: ‘It is forbidden to walk on the grass; it is forbidden to touch the flowers; it is not allowed to introduce dogs’. The first advantage of the novelist of taste, says James, is that such powers of discrimination will reveal to him ‘the absurdity of the little sticks and tickets’. 

If James connected the making of aphorisms to arbitrary rules and theories, this didn’t stop others from being waspishly aphoristic about him. ‘He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’, observed T.S. Eliot of James in his memorial essay of 1918, two years after James’s death in London, where Eliot himself had made footfall a year earlier. As a piece of criticism, Eliot’s judgement was hardly penetrating: as Mary McCarthy was to note, if James’s fictions have a distinguishing feature, it’s in their over-dependence on ideas, sometimes to the frank neglect of other novelistic necessaries. In The Spoils of Poynton, his anxious masterpiece about the proper custodianship of priceless household items, James managed, as McCarthy put it, to ‘relate a story of a contest for possession of some furniture in immense detail without ever indicating except in the vaguest way what the describable stuff was’. But as a statement of approval, Eliot’s words don’t hold much weight either: though McCarthy still believed Eliot to be paying James a compliment, it can be hard for the reader to share in this verdict. Anxiety of influence appears to define Eliot’s misreading, articulated as it is in a critical idiom that seems cynically deployed to mask its true intentions: from his immense youthful saturation in James’s writing, Eliot would have known how frequently and subtly James deployed the critical quality of ‘fineness’, and his words seem more largely to be a reworking of James’s own early judgement about George Sand: ‘she never allows facts to make her uncomfortable’.

For Eliot, there was a good deal at stake in such manoeuvres, and for him to take James’s critical writing seriously (and not to find it ‘feeble’, as his essay goes on to label it), or to accept James’s attack on category distinctions, would have meant leaving behind much that was important to him. Eliot believed, as he put it in his essay, ‘The Perfect Critic’, in a division of criticism from artistic work which the creative artist was best-placed to police. ‘The artist’, Eliot wrote, ‘is […] oftenest to be depended upon as a critic; his criticism will be criticism, and not the satisfaction of a suppressed creative wish’. For James, thinking in terms of category was what made much speculation about literary production arid in the first place, and in ‘The Art of Fiction’ he lambasted the critical tendency to divide novels into separate genre classifications: ‘People often talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath and being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression’. James wasn’t precious about literary terms, and even a word like ‘art’ could be modified out of special privileges: Gorra’s essays show him talking variously of ‘an art of fiction’ and even, once, ‘an art of keeping together’, as though novel-writing were simply a more exalted form of muddling through. Even his most famous essay’s title embarrassed him, as he was quick to point out at its opening. He would never have chosen ‘so comprehensive a title’ to the subject, he wrote, had it not been originated by a pamphlet written by Sir Walter Besant, to which James’s essay was a sustained riposte: his aim was merely ‘to edge in a few words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited’.

One wish Eliot expressed in his essay was that James had more openly criticised Ralph Waldo Emerson, a figure Eliot felt it was James’s responsibility to have ‘carved joint from joint’. Eliot had thrown his lot in with European culture and literature, and was troubled by James’s refusal to denigrate his American heritage. Late in his career, James told his brother William that he had been reading Pragmatism, William’s mammoth work of philosophical scholarship, and been made aware of the fact that ‘all my life I have unconsciously pragmatised’, but the offending essay about Emerson (which Gorra collects) shows that these affiliations were in fact conscious ones. Decades before William’s intellectual contributions, it was Emerson who had suggested, as Henry summarised it in his essay, that when it came to the relationship of the individual to her wider culture, ‘the real prize was within’ – a neat Jamesian shorthand for Emerson’s cherished quality of ‘self-reliance’, the characteristic for which he remains most renowned. The philosophy which Emerson labelled ‘transcendentalism’, and which his godson William developed into ‘pragmatism’, eschewed abstract claims of truth in favour of exchangeable personal verities, whose purchase on wisdom would last only as long as the individual found them useful. In Pragmatism, William had advised that the reader set worn-out philosophical language ‘in the stream of your own experience’, so that no definitions and prescriptions, no matter the seductive authority with which they were issued, could be considered fixed or applicable forever – an echo of some sentiments of Emerson’s, who argued in his essay ‘Circles’: ‘There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile’. 

One reason James seems to have found it impossible to dispense with his American heritage is that he knew how much this philosophy owed to the culture he had left behind. In fact, James was never so protective against attempts to limit meaning than when he felt the term ‘American’ itself was under threat. In 1898, when Theodore Roosevelt sought to drum up support for the Spanish-American War by rallying the populace around the banner of ‘True Americanism’, James had only harsh words for the then-naval secretary’s boosterish efforts. ‘Mr. Roosevelt’, as James put it, ‘makes very free with the “American” name, but it is after all not a symbol revealed once for all in some book of Mormon dug up under a tree. Just as it is not criticism that makes critics, but critics who make criticism, so the national type is the result, not of what we take from it, but of what we give to it, not of our impoverishment, but of our enrichment of it’. By arguing against categorical thinking, James was defending his heritage in spirit as well as letter – even if his own methods of comparison were themselves not free of such limitations: not everyone will be convinced, after all, that the best way to understand patriotism is to compare it to literary criticism. 

One of the ironies of his posthumous reputation is that, to be read and accepted by canonical scholarship, James had to be embraced by scholars whose views ran directly counter to his own. As a result, R.P. Blackmur and F.R. Leavis and other formalist critics of the interwar period – who stressed a literary text’s autonomy from wider cultural forces, and who disparaged attempts to involve historical or theoretical considerations in their analysis – were heavily involved in shaping the official account of James’s writing. Such efforts even included The Art of the Novel, Blackmur’s 1934 edition of James’s prefaces to the 1907-9 New York Edition of his novels, that, coupled with their lapidary title (ironically, a modification of Besant’s original) gave the prefaces the look of standalone utterances about how fiction should work, rather than chancy and contingent documents that often express doubts about the effectiveness of the novels they are introducing. In his introduction to that collection, Blackmur intoned that ‘The prefaces of Henry James were composed at the height of his age as a kind of monument of his life’, and in excluding the prefaces from a selection of James’s critical writing, Gorra regrettably contributes to Blackmur’s monumentalising thesis.

This is troubling, since it means Gorra is not able to capitalise on his sensible editorial decision to order the writing chronologically – had the prefaces been included, these might have shown themselves not to be testamentary documents but a continuation of concerns expressed in James’s writing as early as the 1870s. One example of this continuing conversation comes in an essay on George Sand that appears early in Gorra’s selection. Owing to the efforts of Blackmur and others, the prefaces are often considered a prestige project, inseparable from the expensive editions of James’s novels in which they were originally housed; James’s essay corrects this impression, since it finds him taking note of the formal innovations on display in the prefaces to the ‘cheap edition’ of Sand’s novels. As well as suggesting that the idea for his own prefaces had impeccably democratic origins, James’s analysis foreshadows his later observations about the nature of creative inspiration: it’s hard not to hear in James’s reverence for Sand’s methods for idea-gathering (‘a hint – a mere starting point – was enough for her’) a resonance of his own prefaces’ stories about how to nurture ideas from the merest ‘germ’, which James may have learnt and copied from Sand’s model.

 James’s prefaces describe the battles their author makes in shutting himself off from the outside world – a particular difficulty when that world so often consisted of extended sojourns at his friends’ palazzi, whose delightful trappings ran the risk of diverting his attentions away from literary creation. An essay on Anthony Trollope – not a name usually associated with James’s – flips this association on its head, by showing James remembering the prodigious older author conquering diversions of an opposite kind. When the two writers were aboard a ‘detestable’ transatlantic Cunard together, the author of The Way We Live Now and the ‘Palliser’ novels had a makeshift cabin-desk made up for him, from where he was able to conjure his dramas of light parish intrigue unruffled by the journey’s turbulence. Again and again, Gorra’s selection registers the appearance of tropes and figures which receive their full flowering only in the prefaces, and whose extended measure might have been taken with only the slightest of critical adjustments. 

There is only a certain amount a chronological approach can explain, however, and any editor of James’s writing will have to contend with the fact that at a certain moment in his career his style changed dramatically. Though explanations differ as to why this happened, there is a consensus that sees the dates pertaining to what is usually referred to as James’s ‘late style’ fall roughly between 1895 and 1897. That first date commemorates the disaster of James’s stage-play, Guy Domville, whose chaotic West-End opening is the stuff of theatrical notoriety: mistaking the mood of the audience at play’s end, the theatrical manager summoned James on to the stage to bow for what he hoped to be a receptive curtain call, only for James to be greeted by a round of boos. That two of Oscar Wilde’s stage-plays were then enjoying sell-out runs in neighbouring theatres must have magnified James’s sense of defeat – James deplored Wilde’s theatre-making – but according to scholar David Lodge, himself a fiction-writer who rendered that opening night in his novel, Author, Author, the disaster made an indelible and ultimately positive impression on James’s craft. As a result of thinking through theatrical questions, argued Lodge, James was forced to reckon with how theatrical technique could enhance novel-writing. The result – his famous ‘scenic method’ – entailed, as Lodge put it, a plot ‘unfolded in a series of scenes or dramatic encounters between the main characters, in which the issues of the plot are discussed or alluded to in dialogue’, a technique whose most notable example occurs in the opening to The Wings of the Dove, where Kate Croy’s reckoning with her father about his profligate spending habits outlines the necessity of her finding financial stability by other means.

The second date – arguably more significant for its effect on how James formulated sentences – refers to the cramping injury that made it impossible for him to type for sustained periods, forcing him to dictate his novels to a series of amanuenses. James first composed fiction in this manner halfway through his writing of What Maisie Knew, and it’s tempting to see the later moments of that novel, in which the young Maisie finally gets to decide for herself which of her immature parents and step-parents she wants for her life guardian, as a moment that indicates James’s own authorial self-assertion breaking through, having weathered a series of personal and professional crises that are comparable in their way to Maisie’s: like her, he may have thought, he had been trapped for so long in other people’s systems of values, and his new writing represented an attempt to approach his literary practice on his own terms. But it would not be until ‘The Turn of the Screw’ – that 1898 novella about another imperfect guardian of childhood innocence – that James started to experiment with the kinds of innovations in fiction-writing which perhaps only an enhanced oral sense could have rendered possible. In his tale about a governess who believes that the children under her care are visited by malign spectral forces, James created one of the archetypal unreliable narrators of literary history, and a vexed scholarly debate about the correct interpretation of the narrator’s account that continues unresolved into the present era. 

The novella’s central narrative, though it forms the bulk of the text encountered by the reader, is heavily framed, adding complexity to the already thorny problem of narrative credibility. The tale is first told after an English country dinner party, as part of a bid to recount the most frightening ghost story imaginable. Unlike the other stories, this one is putatively true, but its claims to verifiability aren’t enhanced by the fact that the events described seem to have happened decades in the past; that the account exists in physical form in a document dictated, typed up, and locked away at the London home of the would-be storyteller, and that to retrieve the narrative will require patience from the other dinner guests, as they wait for the package to make its way from London. Finally, it doesn’t help the account’s claims to credibility that the storyteller seems to have been in love with the governess at the centre of the narrative, nor that the story is related to us by a fellow guest who is himself only remembering the contents of the dictated document.

James’s narrative mischief introduced a serious mode of intent regarding the nature of his own novel-writing: like his contemporary, Joseph Conrad, James was burying his central narrative strand in layers of transmission that increased the reader’s sensitivity to the mechanics of storytelling – fulfilling the mission expressed in ‘The Art of Fiction’ that the form of the novel itself should be ‘discutable’. The first essay Gorra collects that exhibits tokens of the new style does so in triumphant and uncompromising fashion; since the subject is self-consciousness itself, its exuberant stylistic flourishing can be considered a bravura management of the encounter between form and function. 

‘It arrived, in truth, the novel, late at self-consciousness’ begins an early sentence in James’s essay ‘The Future of the Novel’, a kind of temperature test for the validity of his earlier prescriptions. Arriving at the abstract noun in its own belated fashion – and only after the wavelike series of clausal oscillations have been navigated – the progress of the sentence doesn’t need to be labelled as self-conscious to be felt as such. The sense that James is sorting through a series of potential (and unsatisfactory) lexical combinations, correcting himself as he proceeds, is instigated by the expletive beginning (‘It arrived’) – a classic weapon in James’s late-stylistic armoury, which pushes the clarification of the image as far along as possible to create the feeling of an immersive search, whose discovery may surprise its author as much as its reader. 

At least, that’s the feint. In reality, even James’s most serendipitous-seeming lexical hesitancies are loaded with intention and meaning. When he began The Wings of the Dove with one of the most famous (and bizarre) of literary openings – ‘She waited, Kate Croy’ – James was building a sense of narrative hesitancy into the the syntax: from the ordering of the clauses the reader knows to associate Kate Croy with waiting, to think of this waiting as an unnatural trap from which her own brazen schemes are a defensible reaction, and so to think of consciousness as embedded in the relationship of words. Self-conscious and even self-reflexive moments such as this lend James’s texts their air of deserving more than the ordinary scholarly attentiveness: taken together, they suggest why even his more superficial language-choices have attracted the sorts of academic scrutiny that are usually the exclusive reserve of poets. 

Any selection of James’s essays must run up against the unnatural impositions indicated by constraints of space, as well as the requirement to give some of the very late pieces their due. Gorra’s decision to group the two last pieces gathered here into a category labelled ‘Valedictions’ makes sense considering their subject-matter: variously, The Tempest (one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and often considered his formal farewell to the stage) and an obituary of an old Bostonian literary matriarch, ‘Mrs. James T. Fields’, to whom James is seen issuing a fond remembrance. Doing so runs the risk, however, of giving a false impression about the tendency of late style itself, at least as theorised by Edward Said, who noticed in the late plays of Henrik Ibsen, for instance, ‘an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before’. If there was nothing valedictory about Ibsen – who embodied instead ‘a deliberately unproductive productiveness, a going against’ – then the same was true of the later compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose ‘Art of the Fugue’ demands more, in the proliferation of new melodic lines, than any single instrument would be capable of playing. These two pieces date from 1907 and 1915 respectively: a period which, as far as James’s non-fictional and critical career was concerned, wasn’t a productive winding down but rather a massive uptick that bore witness not only to the publication of the prefaces, James’s weighty autobiographical works (A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother) and the occasional critical piece, but also The American Scene: that extended exercise in literary reportage that can be read as its own dissatisfaction with the novel as a functional instrument.

James hadn’t visited America in almost two decades when, in 1904, he decided to return to the land of his birth for what would end up being a ten-month trip. From his short preface to The American Scene, James was clear about the very literary motives that had brought the expedition into being: ‘I would take my stand’, he wrote, ‘on my gathered impressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned; I would in fact go to the stake for them’. The exaggerated imbalance of James’s striking imagery with the text set before the reader is to the point, and the comparison draws a certain humour from the unlikeliness of a Torquemada-like situation happening, especially when what is at stake is a series of impressions that assert no underlying principle, still less a methodology, that could unite them into an actionable credo. To talk in these terms, in fact, suggests there is still a good deal of writerly energy left over in the business of ‘receiv[ing] straight impressions’ – that quality which in ‘The Art of Fiction’ he had emphasised as of utmost importance to any novelist. The flitting quality that characterises The American Scene, however, would be unimaginable without James’s performed shedding of the integument of the novel form: in its place is a text structured only around James’s physical movements, to which the motion of his mind responds with such memorable flair and dazzle.

Peter Brooks, a renowned scholar whose seminal theoretical study, Reading for the Plot, did much to assert narrative-form as a worthwhile concern in literary studies, is also an experienced Jamesian whose Henry James Goes to Paris was a book-length attempt to study the main early influences on James’s fiction – forces which, Brooks claimed, came to a head in a year-long move to Paris in the 1870s, when James was on the cusp of publishing his first great novels. His new study, Henry James Comes Home, takes a similar approach to James’s American expedition, but the critical equipment that worked well in that earlier study seems less suited for such a conceptually slippery text, particularly one so fluent about its own procedures and so monitory about outside attempts to explain its workings: ‘The following pages’, as James began his preface, in words that might strike fear into the heart of any critic, ‘duly explain themselves’. This isn’t a conclusive judgement – many texts that seem impervious to criticism are discovered, in the presence of a subtle thinker, to be enriched by it, and James’s critical contributions point to his own implicit conviction of the additive worth of such efforts. Brooks’s conceptual problem lies in his framing of James’s text as an ‘anthropological’ and sometimes even a ‘sociological’ work – claims that are a far cry both from the stated claims made by the preface, and from the experience of reading The American Scene itself.

James’s text seems to respond to external data with an interest in getting the maximum amount of conscious play out of them. One way to make sense out of the project is to look at it as the great James scholar Sharon Cameron once did: as a vocal or perspectival exercise, a means of occupying many, often disembodied or inanimate perspectives at once (as Cameron notes drily in examining one section, the very air itself is ‘still talking after two pages’). This on its own isn’t enough to discount the validity of Brooks’s study. If anything, Henry James Comes Home draws its sense of purpose from those moments that make it most unlike James’s text, and interventions of a scholarly sort that document the preparations needed for travel, James’s thorny relationship with his brother, the composition and delivery of a lecture on Balzac, as well as the differences in English and American dentistry (then as now an awkward point of contention in the International Theme) all add texture to the experience of the main text by supplying us with information we couldn’t have come by on a straightforward reading alone.

At other moments the approach is less than penetrating. One of the ways Brooks stays true to his conviction of the inherent anthropological worth of James’s text is by pulling away from it at key moments: usually as a means of sharpening a point about James’s prescience in political and cultural matters, or to underscore how the world has changed in ways that have escaped the remit of James’s eye. When James writes of some of New York’s handsome new building constructions, Brooks adds: ‘One can’t help but think proleptically of the destruction of Penn Station after the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company asked: “Does it make any sense to preserve a building merely as a “monument”?’ When Brooks quotes James’s famous words on the thin veneer of glamour offered by America’s ‘hotel civilization’, he claims ‘It’s as if James saw, delineated in the grand hotels of his time, the coming of Walt Disney World and the like: an all-encompassing “hospitality industry” that would substitute for the efforts of real tourism the simulacrum world re-created in plastic.’ Edith Wharton, whose historical novel, The Age of Innocence, specialised in just such dramatic cutaways from the 1870s New York of her childhood, is quoted here employing the same method: reminding the reader of the construction of the Metropolitan Opera some ten years into the future, at a moment where narrative perspective has otherwise been trained on Christine Nilsson’s singing at the Academy of Music. These moments and others like them suggest the radical difference in approach between Wharton and her mentor: Wharton’s, to make a larger point about the stultifying constraints of outdated social pressure (in the face of modernity such rarefied conditions will be rendered obsolete); James’s, to explore facets of the conscious minds of his characters which can then be generalised into other situations. Of the two approaches, it’s Wharton’s that seems most dated, not least because her deep reading in the anthropology of the time helped in her creation of the racist portrayal of the novel’s few black characters, and because her implicit conviction about the stability of the period 1920, when she published her novel and was awarded the Pulitzer prize for it, has itself been subject to time’s ravages.

Brooks makes much of James’s frequent description of himself as a ‘restless analyst’, though it would be fair to say he spends more time teasing out the latter part of that designation than the former. Sometimes he suggests a restlessness of his own, or at least an impatience with James’s refusal to yield to the interpretative plan Brooks has for him. James gets a ticking off for not attempting ‘an analysis of the cultural elites of the cities where he lectured’, a deficit Brooks uses to veer, with impressive brazenness, away from the data which the prompt suggests: ‘Had he done so’, explains Brooks, ‘he would have been obliged to pay more attention to the bankers who financed city building projects, and also to the legal profession and its predominance in both politics and culture’. Later, when James writes of riding a Pullman carriage for the first time, Brooks goes into great detail on a labour-rights controversy involving the Pullman company that took place in Illinois ten years previously, in which several striking auto-workers were imprisoned. James, as Brooks concedes, ‘might not have known much detail about the Pullman Strike’ (the reader will want to know if there is evidence of James’s knowing any detail, since Brooks supplies none here) ‘but he surely was aware that the name Pullman had come to represent American capitalism at its most rapacious’. Undeterred by the possibility of sliding into wild conjecture, Brooks’s confidence is instead renewed by this rhetorical throat-clearing, even if the facts have been unconvincingly dispatched by it: ‘it was’, as he puts it on the next page, ‘inevitable given the notoriety of the strike – that one might feel some guilt by association when riding in a Pullman’. James’s only word on the policies of the Pullman company itself, as Brooks mufflingly concedes, is that the carriages are not particularly comfortable.

James’s guilt is of another sort. Rather than finding fault with the company’s historic collective bargaining policies, he is interested in the larger evil which such ravages of the land entail – particularly if that land is the proper preserve of displaced indigenous peoples, whose erasure he wishes to correct. The impressive empathy James summons for the dispossessed comes through when he inhabits the perspective of some Native American people he sees outside his carriage window towards the end of The American Scene. In an extraordinary moment of ventriloquism, he imagines such dispossessed people railing against the Pullman carriage and other such monstrosities of European-descended settlers. Chief amongst the crimes levelled in this impassioned apostrophe is white America’s construction of an ‘ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own’. 

James’s text occupies the perspectives of people whose backgrounds are as dissimilar as it is possible to conceive from his own. In a memorable moment on a train at Jacksonville, he sees a group of newly-wealthy women whose relationship to their status and their family he wants to map at rather humorous length, never quite letting up his own uninvited position within their consciousness (‘what do I know, helpless chit as I can but be’, he has his fellow-passenger ask herself, ‘about manners or tone, about proportion or perspective, about modesty or mystery’). In such cases, James is a restless actor as much as a restless analyst: more than twenty years after Guy Domville, as the text’s title seems to hint at, he is still thinking in theatrical terms, still imagining the ways a dramatic or scenic understanding of character might push at the established limits of literary form.

That it’s a distinctly literary form James is interested in doesn’t prevent moral clarity emerging in the face of injustice, however: it enriches it, by showing what the potential anthropologist or sociologist – or even the student of cultural studies and literary theory – never could. When James visits Charleston and recalls that, forty years previously, confederate forces had fired at Fort Sumter, he feels he cannot ‘look out to the old betrayed Forts without feeling [his] heart harden again to steel’. At issue is the studied beauty and placidity of the landscape,  which makes such a stark contrast to the past evil of James’s remembrance: so that ‘the whole picture, at this hour, exhaled an innocence. It was as blank as the face of a child under mention of his naughtiness and his punishment of a week before last. The Forts, faintly blue on the twinkling sea, looked like vague marine flowers…’ Brooks quotes this latter portion of James’s text, which he introduces with a confession: ‘I sense that James does not have much to say about Charleston’. Glossing that reading, he is keen himself to make littler of the matter than the text suggests, offering no verdict on the image of the naughtiness of the child but instead stating drily: ‘“Blank” is always a significant word for James. Here it seems to figure the difficulty of achieving any sure relation to a past that clearly lives on, as in the Richmond Confederate Museum, yet in uncertain meanings’.

Though untrammelled by plot or story, James is using the descriptive resources available to the novelist to make a series of snapshot impressions about human hypocrisy that draw out the continued agency of the wrongdoers. What James is describing isn’t the ‘blank’ of the modernist novel – beloved of academics because it provides the opportunity to offload pet theories in defiance of any textual evidence – nor is James’s description conducive to an interpretation of ‘uncertain meanings’. Instead, James implicates the South, framing its posture of innocence as a childish one, its ‘blank’ repellent and unrepentant, similar in its way to James Baldwin’s later indictment of mid-century America’s disingenuous cultural icons, which represented another period’s attempt to sell a consoling myth to itself: the screen personae of Gary Cooper and Doris Day, said Baldwin, represented ‘the most grotesque appeal to innocence the world has ever seen’. In making use of storytelling’s empathetic rudiments, James makes the South’s deficits of memory seem elemental, and therefore inexcusable: his description is its own effort at ripping away that placid camouflage; of ensuring there can be nowhere for it to hide.

Brooks’s skirting analysis suggests the limits of his approach. Dependent on extended quotation, his critical voice intervenes un-comprehensively, even haltingly – a tacit admission that to serve as a proper companion-volume his book would need to run perhaps to twice its length. The critical sallies themselves exert a drag on the forward motion of James’s text, to which they present an unwitting and sometimes witless contrast: often arriving when James has explained himself lucidly enough already, Brooks’s commentary sometimes gives the impression that he has no ambition greater than rendering the Jamesian original in contemporary English. Occasionally, the bewildering motion of James’s writing means that summary itself becomes garbled. Of the relationship of motherhood to learnt social custom, Brooks notes: ‘Again, a society where males fail to participate, and no one understands the necessity of manners as an economy’ – a gloss that pitches text and commentary at different speeds, as though Brooks were trying to apprehend James’s Pullman with a horse and cart. The restless dynamism of James’s language has Brooks struggling to establish a coherent responding idiom: the results are either inappropriately demotic (‘his anxiety came to the fore’, ‘He would work it out’), or pretentiously academic (‘We seem to hear an allusion to the insulted Achilles retiring to his tent at the outset of the Iliad’).

 If nothing else, the success of James’s bid for formal freedom is borne out in the difficulty which otherwise able scholars have in writing about him – a fact which alone should cause us to reconsider our preconceptions about literary complexity, particularly in the form in which that quality would come to be elevated in Eliot’s era. Louis Menand says that Eliot’s seminal essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘assigns […] the whole of the Western tradition as homework’ but it isn’t hard to picture how a willing student, possessed of sufficient scholarly vim, would acquit herself admirably in such an assignment. Eliot’s own poetry, in fact, supplies one model for how this could be done: often, it gives the sense that if the reader were only able to unscramble some of the buried allusions and correct some of the half-formed literary fragments, a composite poetic text would consequently emerge, contributing to the formation of a complete whole. 

The homework James sets is vaguer, its assessment criteria more prone to trial and error. Frustratingly, this doesn’t seem to entail a corresponding laxity about grading– if his brutal letters to Howard Sturgis about Sturgis’s novel Belchamber are anything to go by, James can be most exacting when he doesn’t have a core set of principles in mind (he knows he doesn’t like your writing, even if you have to go to the length of writing a bad novel to find out why). What’s more, Professor James can get bogged down at times: his many misfires – Guy Domville, most dramatically, but also The Sacred Fount – cause momentary losses to his authority, and it isn’t always easy to respect an instructor with such a reliable hit-rate for flops. This doesn’t affect his confidence for long (at times, you think it should), and he seems to have a robust internal mechanism for understanding these failures as teachable moments, proof of his depressing theory that the writer must spend his life learning and relearning lessons. (Is he an avoidant personality, or perhaps a positive thinking enthusiast? Whatever the answer, it’s hard not to suspect pathologies).

As his student, you’re not above a bit of spoon feeding – you know how this can lend shape to pedagogy by the appropriate employment of a concrete set of learning aides. Given these convictions, you’re disappointed to find such critical tools in short supply: if they show up at all, it’s only by accident, and even then, they’re subject to such calculated revisions thereafter (you’re reminded of how the professor’s brother William compared James’s descriptions to ‘sighing and breathing all round and round’) that it’s difficult to contrive a real use for them anyway. The professor doesn’t have winning catchphrases – no objective correlative or poetics of impersonality – which might have carried the requisite quick fixes, and he lacks what Eliot, at the end of his life, called his early writing’s ‘appeal of the advocate’, that tone of stentorian certainty which served as such a reliable failsafe in filling lecture halls. If anything, you want your professor to do a bit more advocacy: as a diligent student of writing who approaches the assignment specifications in good faith, you probably sympathise with the complaint James’s father made to Emerson: he was, as Henry James Senior put it, a ‘man without a handle’. 

Yet perhaps after a week of such questionable instruction, and though no wiser about the core tenets of writing or responding to fiction (your doubts have if anything enlarged), you suspect you may finally be getting the hang of things. Perhaps the professor is not so bone-headed after all, and for all his emphasis on trying things out, there was really an underlying pattern to his pronouncements: a figure in the carpet connecting his seemingly scattered advice to a single structure, even if that structure depends on frequent adjustments to its assumptions. You’ve often heard the professor referred to as a writer’s writer, and originally this was inimical to your sensibilities: you find such formulas smug and self-satisfied, if not outright elitist (the audience for such fiction is bound to be a pretty small one, and part of why you got involved in literature was for the noble aim of broadening out such self-selecting coteries). Now you’re not so sure: after a few classes where you put up boundaries, you have to admit that it’s better to be a writer’s writer than a scholar’s writer – the fate meted out to Eliot and countless of the other modernists, whose work has been consequently entombed. As you contemplate James’s father’s complaint, a bizarre image occurs to you, one that merges the territory of The American Scene with the vast sum of critical opinions made subsequently about James and his associates. You see a field of scholarly handles – sad doorless mechanisms obscurely peppering the Midwest plains – that have only multiplied since the appearance of James’s early novels, yet which the experience of reading your professor’s difficult writing is enough to see off conclusively. Turning to one of those volumes – perhaps a well-thumbed but still somehow unfamiliar edition from the Penguin Modern Classics – you find that a renewed energy has taken hold of you: one that little recalls the weariness with which you sat through those seemingly interminable early classes. As you breeze past the apologetic introductory notes concerning James’s putative array of inhibiting stylistic difficulties – which is not to mention the, to you, not particularly relevant author-biographical detail about the invitations James received to many dinner parties – you take care to remove your earlier post-it note advising you to ‘get it right this time’: such post-its are a part of the problem, you think, as perhaps post-its always are. Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences – with their style that, though often parodied, is almost impossible to imitate (you don’t try) – it occurs to you that in the matter of the Master’s voice, his readers are still catching up.