HENRY JAMES: THE THEATER YEARS

Abstract

1 9 R H E N R Y J A M E S T H E T H E A T E R Y E A R S L O U I S A U C H I N C L O S S Henry James wrote his first full-length play, Daisy Miller, in 1882, when he was thirty-nine, and his last, The Outcry, in 1909, when he was sixty-six. In this period of more than a quarter of a century he wrote ten plays, three of which were produced, one with a mild successs, but none of which could be put on today except as the literary curiosities of a great master of fiction. During his so-called theater years, lasting from 1891 to the disastrous first night of Guy Domville in 1895, James devoted his primary energies to playwriting in a vain e√ort to reap what such best sellers of the novel as Marion Crawford, William Dean Howells, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward had garnered, but which had unhappily not been the case with his own great novels of manners. Was his venture into a field whose basic rules he never fathomed really motivated solely by his desire for monetary gain? Not quite. He had been, particularly during his residence in Paris, a devotee of the French theater. Indeed, he had boasted that he had it ‘‘in his pocket,’’ and certainly there was nothing in the art of Émile Augier or Dumas fils that he had failed to appreciate. The first volume of his autobiography, A Small Boy and Others, is filled 2 0 A U C H I N C L O S S Y with his enthusiastic childhood memories of the theater in New York. And the last novel that he brought out before his selfdedication to the stage, The Tragic Muse, is concerned with the career of a great actress. What is most peculiar about James’s failure to grasp the essentials of the art that he so passionately yearned to assimilate is that he had already shown in his fiction the hand of a master scene writer. One has only to strip the dialogue in some of his dramatic confrontations of all descriptive prose to produce action that would glow before the footlights. Take the chapter in The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel, who has finally realized that her ‘‘sterile dilettante’’ of a husband, Gilbert Osmond, has married her only for her money and now hates her for not being the puppet he had expected, learns in Rome that her beloved cousin Ralph Touchett is dying in England. She goes to her husband’s study to tell him she must go to Ralph’s bedside. Isabel speaks first. – Excuse me for disturbing you. – When I come to your room, I always knock. – I forgot. I had something else to think of. My cousin’s dying. – Ah, I don’t believe that. He was dying when we married; he’ll outlive us all. – My aunt has telegraphed me. I must go to Gardencourt. – Why must you go to Gardencourt? – To see Ralph before he dies. – I don’t see the need of it. He came to see you here. I didn’t like that. I thought his being in Rome a great mistake. But I tolerated it because it was to be the last time you should see him. Now you tell me it’s not to be the last. Ah, you’re not grateful! – What am I to be grateful for? – For my not having interfered when he was here. – Oh, yes I am. I remember how distinctly you let me know you didn’t like it. I was very glad when he went away. – Let him alone then. Don’t run after him. – I must go to England. – I shall not like it if you do. H E N R Y J A M E S : T H E T H E A T E R Y E A R S 2 1 R – Why should I mind that? You won’t like it if I don’t. You like nothing I do or don’t do. You pretend...