If I have felt little urgency to read James, I blame his continual presence in my reading. He rivals anyone but Samuel Johnson as a subject of anecdotes, quips, and opinions. He supplies examples of whatever literary subject is at hand somewhere in his fiction or criticism. Henry James is everywhere.
No, but I do feel that I know a lot about him, given how little of him I have read. I know about the first time he met Virginia Woolf:
Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye – it is like a childs marble – and said “My dear Virginia, they tell me – they tell me – they tell me – that you – as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild – the descendant I may say of a century – of a century – of quill pens and ink – ink – ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me – ahm m m – that you, that you, that you write in short.” This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for the hen to lay an egg – do they? – nervous, polite, and now on this foot now on that.*
I will credit Woolf with some poetic license here, but not much. “In short” is a bit too much like a punchline.
Levi Stahl describes, in a guest-star packed post (Wharton, Spender, Sei Shonagon), a 1948 book of nothing but James anecdotes. “I – I have trifled with the exordia.” It is worth knowing the context of that real-life Jamesian sentence, as good as it is by itself.**
When did I read about Henry James and his odd entanglement with Constance Fenimore Woolson? I have no idea, but I was prepared when, while reading X. J. Kennedy’s The Lords of Misrule: Poems, 1992-2001, I came across “The Ballad of Fenimore Woolson and Henry James.”*** Fenimore may have fallen in love with James:
Now a diffident hat-tilt from Henry
Might fend off her loneliness,
But Henry was wedded already, it seemed,
To his ethical consciousness.
Poor Fenimore perishes by her own hand, but the story has a happy ending:
Henry went back to his writing desk,
Spread paper like an open chart
And he drew dear Fenimore into his arms
And transformed her to a work of art
Sill living,
Transformed her to a work of art.
In a note Kennedy admits that “a subtle history has been crudely simplified,” which is likely also a fine description of my own pieced together scraps of second- and third-hand knowledge of Henry James.
* The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1888-1912, August 25, 1907. The misuse of apostrophes is Woolf’s. Other errors quite likely mine.
** In the comments of Stahl’s post, I am accused of contributing to the decline of civilization, a rare pleasure.
*** The ballad is also included in In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007.
I wonder if James had been modelling his speech patterns on those of Micawber:
ReplyDelete'Under the impression,' said Mr. Micawber, 'that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City Road, - in short,' said Mr. Micawber, in another burst of confidence, 'that you might lose yourself - I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.'
It is possible that Woolf exaggerated the Micawber-like qualities of James's speech. Not by much, though, I'll bet.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the "in short" passage. It is uncanny.
Really nice Woolf note. I like the "grandfathers grandchild" part, along with descendant of a century... the whole thing is pretty great.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that I've ever thought of HJ as so omnipresent, or dominant in the way that Johnson is. Have to think about that, I suppose.
My "James is everywhere" sense may be 90% caused by my longtime reading of Joseph Epstein. I readily admit that.
ReplyDeleteI knew you would enjoy James's sense of Woolf's (at this point still, of course, Stephen's) lineage.