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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
In 2004 two novels by distinguished authors had, as their protagonist, Henry James; and James has in recent years appeared in other novels too, either as a character or as a subject of study by the principal character. This article inquires why it should be now, in our own time, when tastes and styles are so radically different, that Henry James should have come to represent, to so great an extent, Literature. The question is intricate, involving not merely literary 'mastery' but also, to some degree, the personal--and sexual--enigma of James's life.
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A return--a recuperation--of Henry James is under way. 2004 seemed positively to be the Year of James. It was perhaps a coincidence that two novels of that year had for their protagonist James himself, and specifically the mature James, James at his most Jamesian. David Lodge, in Author, Author, worked towards (and beyond) the painful day when James failed in the theatre, when his play Guy Domville was booed on its first night; while Colm Toibin took that day, in 1895, as the starting point for his novel The Master. (1) The two books do not overlap exactly, but the coincidence still is striking--who, in a year of Sundays, could have guessed it would happen? Contemporary reviews of these novels drew few comparisons, presumably because the writing of the reviews, like that of the novels, overlapped. But the concurrence deserves consideration, especially since it involved more than these two books. The novel that won the Booker Prize in that year, 2004--The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst--had a hero who was researching Henry James. (2) Two years earlier, in 2002, Emma Tennant had brought out her novel Felony, in which again Henry James appears, though not as the protagonist. (3) It is unlikely that there will be more novels, at least for a few years, with Henry James for their lead character; but the convergence of interest on James will presumably continue, and does seem worth attending to.
The three novels in which James appears in person are all emphatically literary, concerning his interest in drama and poetry, as well as in fiction. They may represent the latest turn in a preoccupation that the 'literary' novel has had for many decades: the desire to figure within itself its own literariness, to discuss writing books within the act of writing them. In recent years especially, the figure of the Novelist has appeared in several novels. This Novelist may be an alter ego of the actual author writing, as in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. (4) Or he may pretend to be, in person, that same author, as when 'Paul Auster' and 'Martin Amis' appear in novels by Paul Auster and Martin Amis. (5) In this context the novels-about-Henry-James are an attractive variation on the self-referential theme. They have a friendly respect for the novel's basic realism, as they examine the cost, in 'real' life, of a passion for writing. And in inviting a major novelist to appear, they clear a bigger space than the space of alter egos, in which we can wander round two different writers, noticing differences and affinities.
But why James, one might ask, who even for a novelist led a quiet and bookish life? Here we touch a larger question, which appears to be cultural as well as literary: the late, slow, steady rise to ever greater prominence of the novelist Henry James--James himself, the real James. With his leisured, patrician characters and his oblique idiom, which even in his own time seemed precious to many, James looks strangely at odds with the age of the soundbite, the demotic age. Yet it is precisely the late James, of the 'difficult' novels, who has come to the fore, and in mainstream film as well as in paperback. Not only The Portrait of a Lady but even The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove have succeeded in the cinema on a scale impossible for James's works in their original media. It is in our time, when no one speaks or writes remotely like him, that he has become what he could not be in his lifetime, at once serious and seriously bankable. So when Julia Roberts, playing an actress like herself, comes to make a 'period' film in London, in the frankly popular film Notting Hill, that film is based on 'a novel by Henry James'. We are not told which novel, although it is implied that both Julia Roberts, and her lover Hugh Grant, dote on Henry James. But then the novel would not need to be named, because the point simply is that in the years 2000 the name 'Henry James' is synonymous with Literature--high literature, the genuine difficult article, to be read with furrowed brow, and to be revered, maybe, even more than read. For it is not clear yet that James himself, in his books, is a popular taste, for all the respect he is given.
It is a curious phenomenon of cultural reaction, of an age erecting an altar to the antithesis of itself; but that may be how cultural pieties work, and James's fastidious way with words has perhaps come to seem at once daunting, awesome, and exotic. He has gained too, as he could not in his lifetime, from the premium that modernism has placed upon difficulty, and on the division between 'serious' and 'popular'. More recently, his elaborate style and the way in which his meanings seem to hover beyond his syntax have invited deconstructive readings: Mary Cross has found in him an 'uncanny' anticipation of Derrida. (6) Perhaps he has gained too from another cultural turn--from the new admissibility, in fiction and in society, of gay relationships. The academic world of Henry James studies has attended in recent years to James's tender attachment to a line of good-looking young men friends. Colm Toibin, the author of The Master, came to James by way of The Story of the Night, a frank gay novel set in Argentina, followed by the more poignant Blackwater Lightship, in which gay love is displaced into the past of the heroine's brother, now painfully dying of Aids. (7) His 'Master', his Henry James, offers a further displacement, as gay relations between men become a 'susceptibility', of which James is guardedly aware. He allows himself to hold the hands of young men, and in a manner to love them, while knowing also that he should not, or cannot, go further. In this way gay relations, like straight relations in earlier periods, become subtle, elusive, and in some degree tragic, as we see James deny for life the flicker of true desire that he has. Thus James becomes the subtle victim of a homophobic culture, whose constraints he has in part absorbed.
But even to say this of James may be...
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