On Henry James: The Best from "American Literature." (review)

Abstract

224 The Henry James Review set in other cities like New York or Rome. These absences seriously weaken what he does have to say about the role of the city in individual texts. In short, then, Kimmey's work largely disappoints die expectation that it will iUuminate James's lifelong, intimate connections to London and die social Ufe of the city. Yet if Henry James and London calls scholarly attention to this central focus of James's work, it still wiU have provided valuable service to James criticism. F. S. Schwarzbach Washington State University Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Henry James: The Best from "American Literature." Durham and London: Duke U P, 1990.309 pp. (no price listed). This volume is the latest in a series of "best" essays on individual authors—e.g., Whitman, Melville, Faulkner—that the editors have culled from articles previously published in American Literature (1949-1989). In their introduction, Cady and Budd note that while American Literature has never been an official organ of any professional organization, its editorial board interlocks witii the American Literature Section of the MLA, and "die movers and shakers of the profession have since the beginning joined in cooperating to create and sustain the journal" (viii). Given this platform, the volume in question is a happily modest representation of the institution of Jamesian criticism in American academe. The essays are inteUigentiy conceived and concretely developed, and because they are quite light on abstract theory, almost aU are mercifully jargon-free. Though relatively few of James's works are represented (tiiose most often taught?), there are competing views of some of the best known among them, and the editors have made good use of chronology in their choice of varied critical voices and styles of argument. We move from sketches of James as critic and lecturer through more extensive formalist searches for thematic and epistomological coherence, to feminist challenges to conventional readings and/or social judgments, onward to the current faith in psychological and Unguistic indeterminacy. The format draws the reader into a mental dialogue across time, as earlier perspectives are implicidy challenged by later ones, or vice-versa. Indeed, the format points up the essential, dialogic nature of critical practice. While some articles evoke an immediate response, none is so singular that it could not be (or has not been) modified, ampUfied, or subverted by another, in the endless chain of critical discourse that James's figure in the carpet incites. Taken together, then, these articles afford a fair, if inevitably limited, sense of die critical dialogue evoked by James's work as a whole. Undergraduates as well as graduate students and their teachers should find the book useful in formulating questions for classroom discussion and further research. James's concerns with form, with the relations between moral and aesthetic realms of being, and between internal and external experience provide common ground upon which individual scholars and critics question the poetics of his narratives, the psychology of his characters, and James's own moral aUegiances and social values. Because of their chronological framework, the essays should be of particular interest to those concerned with historical and cultural influences on aesthetic judgment. There are both blatant and subtle examples of the way political and social concerns shape and control not only a critic's literary interpretations, but also the critic's judgment of an author's character and values as well. For instance, there is the subtext of Marie P. Harris's "Henry James, Lecturer," which insists that though James Uved abroad he was a loyal, patriotic, and misunderstood Book Reviews 225 American. Written in 1951, in the heyday of McCarthyism, Harris's essay should be required reading for all critics. The pathos of its effort to fashion a respectable bourgeois identity for the complex and aloof James provides a timely example of die protean effects of ideology on the critical imagination. Working from contradictory newspaper reports and journals, Harris is concerned to present James as "modest, agreeable and . . . removed from pomposity" (29). She emphasizies how abused he was "for what he had not said and disliked for what he had not been" as a lecturer (29...