Henry James: The Legend of the Master

Simon Nowell-Smith: The Legend of the Master (1947)


At the Grave of Henry James

The snow, less intransigeant than their marble,
Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs;
For all the pools at my feet
Accommodate blue, now, and echo such clouds as occur
To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing
Moment remarks they repeat.

"A great and talkative man," W. H. Auden called him in this magnificent elegy, first published in Horizon in 1941. I too - to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous - have already written a short post on Henry James, some years ago, but solely in connection with his prowess as a writer of ghost stories.

His importance to Auden appears to have been as a kind of final court of literary appeal:

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

Others, too (Graham Greene among them), found his example strangely inspiring in the 1940s, as the brute beasts trampled the earth, and utter darkness threatened to swallow up the exquisite niceties of perception for which James stood for, both as man and writer.

Do I find him easy to read? Not really, no - with the exception of such fine early works as "Daisy Miller" or The American. I've never undertaken the task of reading a James novel without a certain trepidation. And there are still great gaps in my knowledge of his œuvre.

Paradoxically, though, I find him very easy to read about. I've worked my way through Leon Edel's magisterial, multi-volumed biography a couple of times now, and find it, alas, more enthralling than any of the Master's own books.

Of course it's only one among many biographies. And - just to make things simpler - it exists in a number of diverse forms. There's the original, five-volume edition, in which it first appeared between 1953 and 1972:

Leon Edel: Henry James (1978)

1. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Untried Years: 1843-1870. 1953. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


2. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Conquest of London: 1870-1881. 1962. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


3. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Middle Years: 1882-1895. 1962. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


4. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901. 1969. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


5. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Master: 1901-1916. 1972. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

Then there's the unabridged, but slightly reorganised British paperback edition:

Leon Edel: The Life of Henry James (1977)

1. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 1: 1843-89. 1953, 1962, 1963. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.


2. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 2. 1963, 1969, 1972. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

And then, finally, there's the one-volume abridgement of 1985, which unfortunately contains some extra material, and therefore needs to be acquired by the fastidious collector (though it turned out to consist mostly of some rather tenuous speculations about some possible new sources for "The Turn of the Screw"):

Leon Edel: Henry James: A Life (1978)

1. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. 1953, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972 & 1977. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985.

That really is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Jamesiana, though. There's the disreputably entertaining work by Simon Nowell-Smith pictured at the head of this post. And, if it's the Master's domestic arrangements that preoccupy you, there's the almost equally interesting work below by H. Montgomery Hyde:

H. Montgomery Hyde: Henry James at Home (1978)

1. Nowell-Smith, Simon. The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him. 1947. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.


2. Hyde, H. Montgomery. Henry James at Home. London: Methuen, 1969.

Then there are the curious events of the so-called 'Year of Henry James' - 2004 - when a whole series of novelists seem to have decided simultaneously to make him the star of their books. David Lodge and Colm Tóibín are the most prominent among them, but Lodge lists a number of others in his book of essays on the subject:

David Lodge: Author, Author (2004)

1. Lodge, David. Author, Author: A Novel. Secker & Warburg. London: Random House, 2004.


2. Lodge, David. The Year of Henry James or, Timing is All: The Story of a Novel. With Other Essays on the Genesis, Composition and Reception of Literary Fiction. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2006.


3. Tóibín, Colm. The Master: A Novel. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Colm Tóibín: The Master (2004)

What other ways are there to fritter away your time in the beguiling province of Henry-Jamesia without venturing to scale the daunting mountain ranges of his late prose? I can think of a few answers.

First of all, there are a number of other books by Leon Edel to sample - not to mention an intriguing book on 'The Turn of the Screw' by Auckland University lecturer Dr Elizabeth Sheppard. But the real motherlode lies in the books by and about the rest of the family: not just his polymathic elder brother William, but also his fiercely intelligent 'professional invalid' of a sister, Alice:

Leon Edel, ed.: The Diary of Alice James (1964)

1. Edel, Leon. The Psychological Novel, 1900-1950. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955.


2. Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.


3. Edel, Leon, ed. The Diary of Alice James. 1964. Introduction by Linda Simon. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.


4. Hardwick, Elizabeth, ed. The Selected Letters of William James. The Great Letters Series. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961.


5. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Great Books of the Western World, 53. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.


6. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1901-2. Introduction by Arthur Darby Nock. 1955. The Fontana Library: Theology & Philosophy. London: Collins, 1968.


7. Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. 1991. An Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1993.


8. Sheppard, E. A. Henry James and The Turn of the Screw. Auckland: Auckland University Press / Oxford University Press, 1974.


9. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. The Death and Letters of Alice James. 1981. Boston: Exact Change Books, 1997.

Sooner or later, of course, you'll have to bite the bullet and just start reading The Portrait of a Lady, or some other reasonably approachable early or mid-period novel, but even that can be put off for some considerable time if you choose to go via the distinctly less daunting letters-and-notebooks route:

Lyall H. Powers, ed.: Henry James and Edith Wharton (1990)

1. Matthiessen, F. O., & Kenneth B. Murdock, ed. The Notebooks of Henry James. 1947. A Galaxy Book GB 61. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1961.


2. Edel, Leon, ed. The Selected Letters of Henry James. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955.


3. James, Henry. Letters I: 1843-1875. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1974.


4. James, Henry. Letters II: 1875-1883. Ed. Leon Edel. 1975. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1978.


5. James, Henry. Letters III: 1883-1895. Ed. Leon Edel. 1980. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.


6. James, Henry. Letters IV: 1895-1916. Ed. Leon Edel. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1984.


7. James, Henry. Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1987.


8. Edel, Leon, & Lyall H. Powers, ed. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1987.


9. Horne, Philip, ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters. Viking Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.


10. Powers, Lyall H, ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton. Letters: 1900-1915. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited, 1990.


11. Smith, Janet Adam, ed. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.

Once again (as usual), it's Leon Edel who leads the charge, with his four-volume edition of the Letters, as well as a couple of one-volume selected editions. But, as you can see from the list above, there are also number of correspondences with particular friends and fellow authors to be savoured - not to mention one of those 'Life in Letters' compilations which offer such a good way of selling essentially the same material twice.

All of which brings me to what is (ostensibly, at least) the actual subject of this post: the decision to complete my set of the Henry James volumes included in the Library of America. If you've read my recent piece on the subject, you'll know more than enough already about my obsession with this black-backed series of classics.

Their Henry James collection includes the complete novels (in six volumes), the complete stories (in five volumes), the collected travel writings (in two volumes), the collected literary criticism (in two volumes), and the complete autobiographical writings (in one volume): 16 volumes in all. When I receive the last couple of volumes of novels, I'll be proud to say that I have them all:

Henry James

1. James, Henry. Novels 1871-1880: Watch and Ward / Roderick Hudson / The American / The Europeans / Confidence. Ed. William T. Stafford. The Library of America, 13. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983.


2. James, Henry. Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square / The Portrait of a Lady / The Bostonians. Ed. William T. Stafford. The Library of America, 29. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985.


3. James, Henry. Novels 1886-1890: The Princess Casamassima / The Reverberator / The Tragic Muse. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. The Library of America, 43. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1989.


4. James, Henry. Novels 1896-1899: The Other House / The Spoils of Poynton / What Maisie Knew / The Awkward Age. Ed. Myra Jehlen. The Library of America, 139. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2003.


5. James, Henry. Novels 1901-1902: The Sacred Fount / The Wings of the Dove. Ed. Leo Bersani. The Library of America, 162. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2006.


6. James, Henry. Novels 1903-1911: The Ambassadors / The Golden Bowl / The Outcry / Appendix: “The Married Son.” Ed. Ross Posnock. The Library of America, 215. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2011.


7. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 1: 1864-1874. Ed. Jean Strouse. The Library of America, 111. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.


8. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 2: 1874-1884. Ed. William L. Vance. The Library of America, 106. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.


9. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 3: 1884-1891. Ed. Edward Said. The Library of America, 107. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.


10. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 4: 1892-1898. Ed. David Bromwich and John Hollander. The Library of America, 82. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.


11. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 5: 1898-1910. Ed. Denis Donoghue. The Library of America, 83. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.


12. James, Henry. Collected Travel Writings. Great Britain and America: English Hours; the American Scene; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 64. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.


13. James, Henry. Collected Travel Writings. The Continent: A Little Tour in France; Italian Hours; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 65. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.


14. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. The Library of America, 22. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.


15. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. The Library of America, 23. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.


16. James, Henry. Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others / Notes of a Son and Brother / The Middle Years / Other Writings. 1913, 1914, 1917. Ed. Philip Horne. The Library of America, 274. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2016.

•

Henry James: Autobiographies LOA N°274

Henry James: Novels 1903-1911 LOA N°215

Henry James: Novels 1901–1902 LOA N°162

Henry James: Novels 1896–1899 LOA N°139

 

Henry James: Complete Stories 1864–1874 LOA N°111

Henry James: Complete Stories 1884–1891 LOA N°107

Henry James: Complete Stories 1874–1884 LOA N°106

Henry James: Complete Stories 1898–1910 LOA N°83

Henry James: Complete Stories 1892–1898 LOA N°82

Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent LOA N°65

Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America LOA N°64

Henry James: Novels 1886–1890 LOA N°43

Henry James: Novels 1881–1886 LOA N°29

Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition LOA N°23

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers LOA N°22 

 

  

Henry James: Novels 1871–1880 LOA N°13

•

James (according to Leon Edel, at any rate) had an obsession with collected editions. His aspiration, from the very beginning, was to create a kind of American Comédie humaine in the spirit of Balzac's monumentally comprehensive portrait of nineteenth-century France. The set of Balzac he himself read was in 23 volumes. Hence the 23 volumes he attempted to compress his works into for the late New York edition (1907-9) of his works.

Unfortunately it sprawled into 24 volumes instead, and eventually included two posthumous volumes as well, so it's safe to say that his long-meditated enterprise didn't go quite as planned.

What's more, it was a financial disaster. He'd rewritten, revised, and radically pruned his early fiction to fit the aesthetic dictates of his late style, and the result was hardly pleasing to fans of the works in their earlier form. The elaborate prefaces he wrote for each volume, though subsequently collected as a kind of treatise on the art of fiction, were also seen as somewhat excessive.

This - as he perceived it - ruin of his life's work drove him into a depression, and it wasn't really until the pressure of war work in 1914 awoke him from lethargy that he was able to recover the will to live, let alone to write.

When he died in 1916, he accordingly left an immense but disordered legacy. Above all, there's the problem of which texts to read: the original versions or the revised ones? Leon Edel, by and large, preferred the novels and stories as they first appeared, and he attempted to restore them to popular attention in the many, many collections of James's works he edited or oversaw.

The most prominent of these was probably his 12-volume set of the Master's complete short stories:

Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James (1962-64)

1. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 1: 1864-1868. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


2. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 2: 1868-1872. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


3. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 3: 1873-1875. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


4. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 4: 1876-1882. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


5. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 5: 1883-1884. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


6. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 6: 1884-1888. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


7. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 7: 1888-1891. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


8. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 8: 1891-1892. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


9. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 9: 1892-1898. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.


10. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 10: 1898-1899. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.


11. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 11: 1900-1903. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.


12. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 12: 1903-1910. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.

Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James (Vol 10: 1898-1899)

I wouldn't want you to walk away with the impression that the Library of America edition of James is in any way complete, however. Perish the thought! Conspicuous among the absences are James's last two novels, unfinished and posthumously published: The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past (consituting, respectively, the last two volumes of the New York edition).

Then there are the plays (available in another fine edition by Leon Edel).

Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Plays of Henry James (1949)

Then there's his one, full-length biography, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903):

Henry James: William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)

Of course, there are reasons for allowing at least some of these to sink into oblivion. The biography was a duty job: forced upon him as an obligation to some friends, and not written from the heart (he didn't even like the sculptor Story very much).

The plays, too, were a kind of slow-motion disaster which had occupied much of his time in the 1890s, and came very near to breaking his heart:

"I'm the last, My Lord, of the Domvilles," as the eponymous hero of his play Guy Domville intoned in its one, abortive production.

"And it's a bloody good thing y'are!" a rough voice shouted from the stalls.

What else? There are facsimile editions of his annotated copies of early novels intended as guides for his later revisions - there are reprints, selections, re-editions, in basically every series of modern classics known to man. Truly, once you start, there's no obvious end to the number of books you need to collect to see this strangest of beings, this - in many ways - most loveable of writers, whole.

As a teacher of creative writing, I often find myself quoting his precept for young writers: "Dramatise!"

Even more often, though, I think of his three rules for civilised conduct:

1. Be kind
2. Be kind
3. Be kind

John Singer Sargent: Henry James (1913)

Henry James
(1843-1916)

Novels:


1. James, Henry. Watch and Ward. 1871 & 1878. Introduction by Leon Edel. 1959. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960.


2. James, Henry. The American: The Version of 1877 Revised in Autograph and Typescript for the New York Edition of 1907. Reproduced in Facsimile from the Original in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Introduction by Rodney G. Dennis. Houghton Library Manuscript Facsimiles, 1. 1976. London: Scolar Press, 1978.


3. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady: An Authoritative Text / Henry James and the Novel / Reviews and Criticism. 1881. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.


4. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Ed. Geoffrey Moore. 1984. Notes by Patricia Crick. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.


5. James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima. 1886. London: Heron Books / Macmillan & Co., n.d.


6. James, Henry. A London Life and The Reverberator. 1888 & 1908. Ed. Philip Horne. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.


7. James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. 1890. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


8. James, Henry. The Other House. 1896. Introduction by Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.


9. James, Henry. The Spoils of Poynton. 1897. Penguin Modern Classics, 1922. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.


10. James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. 1897 & 1908. Ed. Douglas Jefferson & Douglas Grant. 1966. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.


11. James, Henry. The Awkward Age. 1899. With the Author’s Preface. New York Edition, 1908. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.


12. James, Henry. The Sacred Fount. 1901. With an Introductory Essay by Leon Edel. 1953. A Black Cat Book. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1979.


13. James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove: An Authoritative Text / The Author and the Novel / Criticism. 1902 & 1909. Ed. J. Donald Crowley & Richard A. Hocks. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.


14. James, Henry. The Ambassadors: An Authoritative Text / The Author on the Novel / Criticism. 1903. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964.


15. James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. 1904. With the Author’s Preface. Penguin Modern Classics, 2449. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.


16. James, Henry, with William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jordan, John Kendrick Bangs, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown & Henry Van Dyke. The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors. 1908. Introduction by Alfred Bendixen. New York: the Ungar Publishing Company, 1986.


17. James, Henry. The Outcry. Methuen's Colonial Library. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1911.


18. James, Henry. The Outcry. 1911. Introduction by Jean Strouse. New York Review Books Classics. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2002.


19. James, Henry. The Ivory Tower. Preface by Percy Lubbock. 1917. With an Essay by Ezra Pound. 1954. Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. New York Review Books Classics. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2004.


20. James, Henry. The Sense of the Past. The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition, Volume XXVI. Preface by Percy Lubbock. 1917. Classic Reprint Series. N.p.: Forgotten Books [www.forgottenbooks.org], 2010.

Stories:


21. Aziz, Maqbool, ed. The Tales of Henry James. Volume One, 1864-1869. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.


22. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories. 1879-1910. Introduction by Michael Swan. Collins Classics. London: Collins, 1956.


23. James, Henry. Ghost Stories. Ed. Martin Scofield. Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001.

Plays:


24. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Plays of Henry James. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.


25. James, Henry. Guy Domville: A Play in Three Acts. With Comments by Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett. Preceded by Biographical Chapters, Henry James: The Dramatic Years. Ed. Leon Edel. 1960. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961.


26. James, Henry. The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872-1910. Ed. Allan Wade. Foreword by Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.

Travel:


27. Kaplan, Fred, ed. Travelling in Italy with Henry James: Essays. A John Curtis Book. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1994.

Literary Criticism:


28. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Introduction by Richard P. Blackmur. 1934. New York & London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.


29. James, Henry. The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel. Ed. Leon Edel. 1957. Mercury Books, 24. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1962.


30. James, Henry. Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Morris Shapira. Preface by F. R. Leavis. 1963. A Peregrine Book Y73. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Biography & Autobiography:


31. James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. In Two Volumes (Combined). 1903. London: Thames & Hudson, n.d.


32. James, Henry. Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others; Notes of a Son and Brother; The Middle Years. 1913, 1914, 1917. Ed. Frederick W. Dupree. London: W. H. Allen, 1956.

John Singer Sargent: Henry James (detail)