INDUSTRIOUS CRITICS: Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship. By MICHAEL ANESKO

Abstract

Michael Anesko's book addresses the urbanely industrious ways in which writers, critics, and family members have monopolised the terms by which we consider James and his writings. Its two main strands involve, first, the methods by which critics won the confidence of the James family in order to gain access to his papers after his death, and, second, the rivalries surrounding the critical and popular revival of interest in James's work in the middle of the twentieth century. Anesko employs Pierre Bourdieu's concept of ‘cultural capital’, though he is aware of its limitations. He concedes that historical variations in an author's cultural capital are always readily apparent in retrospect, but targeting exact pivot points in reputation (or assigning their causes to a specific agent) too radically simplifies the interplay – often fortuitous – of literary, social, and economic determinants. But there is another difficulty with the notion of cultural capital. Anesko argues that certain critics – among them R. P. Blackmur – attempted to ‘appropriate the aura’ of James by defining his work through the use of critical terms and concepts which James himself developed. He shows that Blackmur's publication of James's prefaces, together with his own critical preface to the book, were important for the success of his career as an academic. Blackmur was, in Anesko's words, a ‘high-school dropout’, whose elated discovery and appropriation of James's work helped to earn him academic status and power. But where does this manner of thinking about critical endeavour begin and end? When a critic writes an influential reinterpretation of a writer which uses certain critical procedures that are associated with that writer, how may we judge whether or not cultural capital is being exploited? A moment in the first chapter of the book illustrates a related problem. Anesko shows how the revisions that James made to William James's letters for their inclusion in his autobiographical work, Notes of a Son and Brother, incurred the protective anger of William's son, Henry James III (known as Harry). It is persuasively shown that this dispute foreshadows Harry's efforts to control the editing processes involved in the publication of Henry James's letters in the 1920s. Difficulties arise, however, when Anesko discusses James's formal methods of writing. He notes that James's revisions to some of his novels and short stories for the collected New York Edition of his fiction extended the copyright on these writings for a further twenty years, for James had effectively created new works: James could joke that while the laborious process of revision had added ten years to his age, it had also made his ‘poor old books … twenty or thirty years younger,’ but (knowingly or not) he was also affirming an important material fact. By substantially rewriting his earliest novels and tales, James was in effect extending their terms of copyright, since many of these titles otherwise would soon have begun lapsing into the public domain.