The Princess Casamassima; The Reverberator; The Tragic Muse
By Henry James
Library of America, 1,296 pages, $35
A Ring of Conspirators
Henry James and His Literary Circle, 1895-1915
By Miranda Seymour
Houghton Mifflin, 327 pages, $19.95
When a fiction writer with a distinctive style and well-defined areas of interest goes off his regular beat for subject matter, he runs the risk of unintentional self-parody, which is what we suspect when we open Henry James` novel about a cockney revolutionary of the 1880s and find that he is named Hyacinth.
But if we are deflected by this into assuming, with most critics, that
”The Princess Casamassima” is a negligible aberration in the canon, not the James for which we still read James, then we soon see that there is something very wrong with the way we read him. This fifth volume of the Library of America`s James series reminds us of how James can surprise us by speaking directly to our present concerns with such accuracy that he identifies radical chic a century before Tom Wolfe: ”Why shouldn`t I have my little bookbinder after all?” the Princess asks the young artisan Hyacinth.
”In attendance, you know, it would be awfully chic. . . . I expect you to take me into the slums-into very bad places.”
James` sole attempt at a panoramic, social, political novel was inspired first by his long daily walks through London, ”the assault directly made by the great city upon an imagination quick to react,” he tells us in ”The Art of the Novel.” And the seethe and grumble of the metropolis itself makes it a palpable, almost Dickensian presence in the book.
James naturalizes his unfamiliar topical material, taken from the nascent proletarian unrest of the time (the book was published a year before the Haymarket bombing in Chicago), by giving his young rebel artistic ability and making him an illegitimate offshoot of the nobility who secretly aspires to the aristocratic world that his politics would destroy. To complete the irony, Hyacinth`s means of access to that world is a noblewoman attracted to him by his radicalism: each aspires to the other`s role.
Imagine Gatsby succeeding with Daisy precisely because he was plotting to burn down her mansion on East Egg and you`ll see how richly James has imagined the conflict that amplifies his themes. In fact, Hyacinth`s intriguing resemblance to a Fitzgerald character leads to a point made by the critic Terry Comito: ”James is not concerned so much with society as with civilization,” which he sees ”not as a complex of institutions . . . but as something achieved, the elusive radiance of a certain style.”
So James, writing the first major novel about modern terrorism, undercuts the major premise of the revolutionary ideologies that would bedevil the coming century-the belief that a leveling-down would create a better society- with Hyacinth`s conclusion that life, even at the bottom of the heap, is made ”less impracticable and more tolerable” by ”the monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilization as we know it. . . . I have a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution.”
”The Reverberator” began to take shape in James` mind after he met a young woman who could have stepped from the pages of ”Daisy Miller” or ”The Siege of London” (he was always meeting people he had invented, said his biographer, Leon Edel). May Marcy McClellan, daughter of the Civil War general, had outraged Venetian society in November, 1886, by writing a long gossipy letter to the New York World disparaging the style of her hosts, describing, among other things, the ”lurching walk and excessively British garments of these Italian dudes.” When James ran into her six months later, she was still puzzled and resentful over the fuss she`d caused, that degree of scurrility being mild by American press standards.
”One sketches one`s age but imperfectly if one doesn`t touch on that particular matter,” he wrote in his notebooks, ”the invasion, the impudence, the shamelessness of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private,”
while at the same time noting the ”perfect good faith” of Miss McClellan herself. He raises the stakes for his fictional heroine, Francie Dosson, by having her engaged to marry into an insanely and comically stuffy family of gallicized Americans long resident in France.
The villain of the piece is George Flack (talk about perfect names!), Paris correspondent of an American gossip sheet, whom it is easy to imagine working for People magazine or ”Good Morning, America.” ”The society news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves . . . and served up at every breakfast-table in the United States-that`s what the American people want and that`s what the American people are going to have,” he declares-and is he ever right about that.
James sees his Americans so clearly-neither idealizing nor patronizing them-and depicts them with such evident zest that one wishes he had spent more time looking directly at ”the American scene.”
By contrast, ”The Tragic Muse” is the most English of his novels, more so even than the ”Princess,” despite the fact that its capital city is ”the bright immensity of Paris,” the city of light that James more and more comes to equate with art and the personal fulfillment of civilized people.
James` growing obsession with the theater is apparent in the book, which is full of witty, entertaining talk and brilliant monologues by vivid characters. For the first time James uses the dramatic method he perfected at the pinnacle of his art, in ”The Ambassadors”: the unexplained allusions in dialogue to absent people and their relationships that bring into the situation the reader who is attempting to work it out, almost as though he or she were another character in the book.
The symmetry of the two main artist-characters recalls the interplay of influences in ”Princess”: Miriam Rooth, the hand-to-mouth actress enslaved by her ambition, is balanced by Nick Dormer, an aristocratic Member of Parliament whose status and wealth work against his wish to be a painter.
Miranda Seymour`s ”A Ring of Conspirators” is a prismatic portrait of the artist far more ambitious technically than anything James himself tried in his books, an experiment in point of view that remains interesting and informative even when it`s least successful in telling us about the Master`s last years. Seymour, a novelist, adapts a fictional method to nonfiction by enlisting as co-authors the novelists who lived near James in Sussex around the turn of the century-H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton, plus William James and many secondary figures-and reconstructing from memoirs and biographies their relations with James and one another.
Seymour, who has mastered a huge mass of material, here and there succeeds where some distinguished scholars have stumbled. She shows that Edel, out of impatience with Ford`s fabrications, discounted the real friendship between the two men in his magisterial five-volume life of James; and she rescues Crane, one of America`s most interesting writers, from R. W. Stallman`s atrociously written biography.
But the portrait of James splinters from the sheer number of facets. Inadvertently Seymour reminds us that, as critic Hugh Kenner says, to write narrative is to write fiction, even in a biography; and that the best place to find the writer is in his work.
