On Mark Ambient’s Henpeckery in “The Author of Beltraffio ,” or How to Keep Up Narratorial Preconceptions

Abstract

On Mark Ambient’s Henpeckery in “The Author of Beltraffio,” or How to Keep Up Narratorial Preconceptions José Antonio Álvarez Amorós (bio) “Do you call that being perfect as a mother?” Ambient asked. “Yes, from her point of view,” [replied Miss Ambient]. “The Author of Beltraffio” 79 In a telling passage of chapter 1, the young first-person narrator of Henry James’s “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884) notes that the supposedly great writer Mark Ambient fails to react to his wife’s hostile disposition, and begins to wonder if he “were perchance henpecked” (63). Though presented as a question and not as a definite conclusion, such a “shocking surmise” (63) is so abhorrent that the narrator immediately suppresses it as if its mere contemplation were some kind of deadly sin. In this paper I propose to examine the circuitous ways in which the narrator perceives Ambient’s alleged henpeckery and at the same time does his best to defuse such perceptions. The experiential data leading him to regard Ambient’s behaviour as henpecked are quickly reinterpreted in his mind to reinforce his idealized preconception of Ambient as an arrogant, antisocial, aestheticist writer. The sustained hesitation between what he perceives and what he wishes he had perceived is at the root of the cognitive structure of this story, and reveals how James’s fictional and discursive figures acquire knowledge that enables them to present the reader [End Page 317] with a series of images of the narrative world on a varying scale of authoritativeness. I “The Author of Beltraffio” was first published in 1884, at a critical point of Henry James’s career. A Portrait of a Lady (1881) had been acclaimed as the work of a mature, insightful writer; he was much fêted and admired, but his books did not sell. His letters to his publishers during these years were mostly pleas for more money and better terms.1 There seemed to be a conspiracy to idolize him as a public figure and to ignore his work, and this situation is dramatized in some of his tales of literary life. In “The Next Time” (1895), for instance, the narrator comments that the reading public had “a moral objection” to acquiring Ray Limbert’s books “by subscription or purchase,” and that they rather “begged or borrowed or stole, they delegated one of the party perhaps to commit the volumes to memory and repeat them, like the bards of old, to listening multitudes” (330). During the late 1880s, James tried to escape from this impasse by writing a series of novels which, as Marcia Jakobson has shown, are nothing but mediocre imitations of fashionable popular genres—feminist fiction, Civil War romance, working-class drama and so on—which, written as they were in the Jamesian fashion, were destined to be melancholy failures. All this explains why during the same decade James also began a series of tales purporting to be “small things on the life and experiences of men of letters” (Notebooks 154), in which he portrayed the predicament of the literary creator at odds with the philistine, ignorant public on matters of taste, with publishers on matters of policy, and with both on matters of money or the lack of it. However, the central theme of “The Author of Beltraffio” is not this pecuniary and ethical impasse. It is James’s first story about literary life, and a reference point in his canon since much of the story is essay-like in tone, especially the lengthy conversation between the narrator and Mark Ambient on aesthetic issues (86–92). In contrast with most of his tales about the plight of honest artists, “The Author of Beltraffio” is a genuine fictionalized primer on the narrative art and the aestheticist creed. Only a few months later he published a non-fictional version of the same beliefs, “The Art of Fiction,” in which he developed his mature conception of the novel [End Page 318] and a much-celebrated plea for artistic freedom. On December 12, 1884 he wrote to Robert L. Stevenson, “My pages in Longman [Longman’s Magazine] were simply a plea for liberty” (Letters 3: 58), precisely in reference to...