Henry James's Apprenticeship-the Hawthorne Aspect

Abstract

AWTHORNE 'S INFLUENCE on James's early career has usually been seriously questioned; but neither has its nature, or way in which it operates, been very fully clarified. In her early study, Henry James (I9I6), Rebecca West describes Hawthorne's influence on young James as not altogether happy. It is due to him, she remarks, Mr. James' characters have 'almost wailed' their way from Passionate Pilgrim [sic] to Golden Bowl-but he certainly shepherded Mr. James into European environment and lent him a framework on which to drape his emotions until he had discovered his own power to build an imaginative structure.'' Miss West does examine any of early stories in particular; her remarks are confined to a number of generalizations about them which are shrewd but very much oversimplified. In Great Tradition (1948), published during James revival after World War II, F. R. Leavis regards Hawthorne's influence on early James as both formative and constructive. He believes that Hawthorne led James away from English tradition, represented by Thackeray, into an American tradition of poetic fiction which probes moral and psychological. The more we consider James's early work, he says, the more important does Hawthorne's influence appear. Leavis's reading of James is more informed than Miss West's, but as regards early stories, it lacks what James called solidity of specification. He does demonstrate where and how Hawthorne's influence may be seen. More recently, in Grasping Imagination (1970), Peter Buitenhuis has discussed a number of James's early stories and attempted to be specific about Hawthorne's effect on some of them. In a chapter of seven pages, devoted to Hawthorne-James relationship, he deals with three stories which he believes reveal Hawthorne's influence, and elsewhere he touches lightly on three others. question of Hawthorne's influence on James's early work needs to be considered more