Henry James and the Morality of Fiction (review)

Abstract

104 The Henry James Review As a Jamesian, I knew enough to catch Tanner's inaccuracy in this section, but how many equally glaring errors did I miss in other sections? If Tanner could not get an important name right or spell the possessive of "it" correctly, how could I trust his characterization of writings by authors such as Ruskin and Hofmannsthal , with whom I am largely unfamiliar? Certainly I could brush up on my Ruskin and my Hofmannsthal to find out, but Venice Desired did little for any desire I might have had to pursue all of Ruskin—or any of the other authors Tanner discusses—on Venice. If we take Venice Desired as an introduction to Venice in modern, nonItalian , European literature—and in all fairness, it makes no pretensions that it is anything else—we would want to say that the book is successful on these grounds. An introduction, however, implies that the introducer knows something and initiates his or her reader into at least some of that knowledge, but when the introduction cannot get Fenimore Woolson's name straight or concludes that The Princess Casamassima subverts its own political designs, one has to wonder how reliable or useful an introduction we have before us. Greg W. Zacharias. Henry James and the Morality of Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. xxi + 181 pp. $39.95. By Tony Sharpe, Lancaster University, England Commenting on Henry James in 1879, Thomas Wentworth Higginson approved those of his works "written with distinct purpose and [which] convey lessons" (similar criteria governed Higginson's response to the poems Emily Dickinson sent him): more than a century on, here is Greg Zacharias to make that purpose more distinct and convey those lessons more directly. He is aware that doing so runs counter to prevailing orthodoxies. "Today it is not fashionable to discuss issues having to do with conduct and ethics or the author's intentions," he concedes, and offers this defence: "Yet ethical positions in James are present... .In fact, there is evidence everyday (sic) in the news and on the street that suggests an important place for ethical readings" (xxi). "Important" to whom, one wonders —crack dealers or professors of literature? Attributions of a moral dimension to James's fiction are hardly new, and have proceeded from fellow-practitioners as well as literary critics. William Dean Howells in 1903 discerned in him "the conscience of an impeccable moralist" (enumerating this alongside James's qualities as "poet" and "humorist"), and reviewing the oeuvre in 1936 Graham Greene asserted that "no writer has left a series of novels more of one moral piece." Zacharias claims for his approach the distinction that it is "based in (sic) a study of figures of speech which recur Book Reviews 105 throughout James's writing at moments when moral issues come sharply into focus"; the "moral meaning" of these "key figures" is then established "by placing them in the context of analogous tropes from James's nonfiction, where James's own voice is clearer." The nonfictional writing is used, then, as an "interpretive matrix" helping to define the author's "moral intentions" (xi). This method is applied, a chapter at a time, to Roderick Hudson, Washington Square, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Awkward Age, and The Golden Bowl—representing the evolution of James's mode of combining "hot" morality with "icy" art. The sequence also represents James's move away from his concern with "the dynamics of social forces" toward "a new interest in the importance of individual behavior as a way to ameliorate social problems" (28). Significant in this are the figures of "mentor" and "novice" in James's fiction—defined by Zacharias as "the tutorial issue" (111)—which evolve through various imperfect forms to reach their highest types in Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie: the former exerting a secretly beneficent power over the lives of those around him, which enables her to grow by and grow beyond it. Although personally I am pleased that a book with this title can still be written and published, I have to say that I do not think it succeeds. There is less effective rhetorical analysis than the introduction...