Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Greg Zacharias When we began to plan this special issue of the Henry James Review, the world was more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a constant subject of deep concern, disruption, anxiety, and conflict. Colleagues at almost all levels of teaching and learning were preparing and modifying courses to incorporate the pandemic. In-person and virtual discussions were held to plan conference panels and even full conferences having to do with the pandemic. I wanted to do something different for the Henry James Review that might, even for a short time, offer a counterstatement to what was then and still is now all that comes from trying to live with and around the COVID-19 pandemic. That counterstatement is "Health, Happiness, Henry James." This isn't the first time the HJR has taken up the general subject of health—or its complement. The 2016 Henry James Review forum issue (37.3) on "Illness, Age, and Death" brought into sharp focus, as Susan M. Griffin wrote in her introduction, that "Illness, age, and death preoccupy Henry James from the beginning to the end of his writing life." At the same time, the prevalence of illness, age, and death shows that health and happiness held an important place in James's life and imagination too. His father's theology framed human existence as "naturally bound to the pursuit of happiness," as James Sr. wrote in Society the Redeemed Form of Man. Henry James's physical ailments motivated him to seek healthy living habits, from horseback riding and spa treatments, to walking and bicycling, for example. His desire for a healthy economic and personal life shaped his long residence in England. He rationalized his bachelorhood to his mother by implying that despite one friend's insistence that he "should be 'so much happier' if [he] would only marry" (October 31, 1880), his happiness would be maintained more readily by avoiding it. He recalled in the opening of A Small Boy and Others that the process of writing the book "meant that aspects [of his past] began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values." In James's fiction, characters who meet an unhealthy and unhappy end often do so with the intention of achieving happiness and/or health. Roderick Hudson's end is both unhappy and unhealthy. But "[t]rue happiness" is a consistent subject of [End Page 209] the novel, and James introduced it in the first chapter. Likewise, when James leaves Isabel Archer at the conclusion of The Portrait of a Lady she is neither happy nor healthy. But her approach to achieving health and happiness—as well as her need to help others achieve them—is important in understanding her character. Isabel tells her cousin, Ralph Touchett, "that's what I came to Europe for, to be as happy as possible." James shows explicitly Hyacinth Robinson's quest for "happiness" at Medley. Strether and Mme de Vionnet discuss the course of their lives in terms of "happiness" during their meeting just following the Cheval Blanc episode, as The Ambassadors begins to wind down. The articles in this issue of the Henry James Review work in a wide variety of ways to develop approaches to health and happiness in James's tales and novels. Reading the work of Eli Zuzovsky, Sarah Kimmet, Vinayak Dewan, Thomas Meaney, Phyllis van Slyck, Yuki Miyazawa, and Timothy P. Jackson teaches us about some of the ways representations of health and happiness function in James's fiction, at least. [End Page 210] Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press