The Form of American Romance (review)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

90 The Henry James Review If James's subject is the failure of Western civilization, what is his message? James advocates nothing; he moralizes not at all. He educates you by showing you precisely how life is lived: "He, more than anybody, has observed human society as it now is, and more than anybody has faithfully rendered his observations for us." And Ford's James rarely oversteps his limits: James is so masterly a writer because he has almost always "limited himself to writing about what he knows intimately and within himself." It is undoubtedly true that Ford Madox Ford was a trying individual who annoyed many people, James among them. Hemingway satirized him in Braddocks in The Sun Also Rises and skewered him mercilessly in A Moveable Feast; H. G. Wells made him the eponymous hero of The Bulpington of Blup; Jean Rhys, aware of Ford's admiration for James, presents him as H. J. Heidler, a womanizer, in Quartet; Violet Hunt, having become his castoff lover, does Ford to a turn in The Flurried Years and presents him as Alfred Pleydell in The House of Many Mirrors; and Richard Aldington, whom Ford promoted in The English Review, picks him apart as Mr. Schobbe, an editor, in Death of a Hero. It is difficult to make that many people angry at you without accepting some responsibility for their anger. But as difficult as he was, Ford was a dedicated and, at times, a brilliant novelist. That he began writing The Good Soldier right after he finished writing Henry James: A Critical Study and that he saw What Maisie Knew as key to formulating a narrative method in Parade's End tells us something of Ford the novelist's understanding of James the novelist. This understanding of writer by writer is, finally, of much more lasting importance than anything else in their troubled relationship. Joseph Wiesenfarth University of Wisconsin-Madison Edgar A. Dryden. The Form of American Romance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1988. 221 pp. $27.00 The title and advertisements for Edgar Dryden's The Form of American Romance invoke not only a litarary genre but also this book's own critical genre of theories of an American national literature. Dryden acknowledges that such theories may tend to exclude otherwise important American writers. And he is duly skeptical of American exceptionalism, noting with Joseph Riddell that "the historical moment that the American critical fable identifies as marking the beginning of a distinctive native voice coincides with the one the French see announcing the advent of modernism" (xii). But Dryden leaves these and other social and historical concerns largely implicit or perhaps outside his "story" (his romance) of the American romance as a self-conscious genre or theme, in which "the author's place or situation as an American becomes a metaphor for his artistic concerns" (x). Dryden's own concern here is with certain figures of reading and textuality, and he focuses on five American writers—Hawthorne, Melville, James, Faulkner, and Barth—who "by figuring themselves as readers [and Americans],. .. seek to maintain their priority and authority by absorbing and interpreting the fragments that have been broken off from a prior and more complete utterance" (212). Dryden's story is that of five distinct variations on this idea of reading and writing. Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, along with its Preface, is marked by a nostalgia for the "Gentle Reader" who might have once made Hawthorne's own utterance complete. The Gentle Reader was always a self-consciously charming fiction of Hawthorne's, but the setting of The Marble Faun in Rome overwhelms its American characters and author with enchanting and then disenchanting "pictures, sketches, statues, and words that [eventually] 'phantomize' presence by pointing to the absence of the persons and objects that they may [merely] signify" (36). Less retrospective, more prospective than Hawthorne's characters, Melville's Pierre also seeks an original connection to things, a literal name for himself Book Reviews 91 and a spiritual genealogy, only to find himself similarly entangled in a wearying textuality of allusion, belatedness, imposture, and ambiguity. Henry James could be read as the pivotal figure of Dryden's study. Through...