The Larger Success

Abstract

Abstract While a Chance Acquaintance was running through the Atlantic, James remarked to his sister that he was relishing every installment. “But what a pity,” he added, “that with such pretty art, [Howells] can’t embrace a larger piece of the world.”1 By now James’s complaint was a familiar one. Suburban Sketches, Their Wedding Journey, A Chance Acquaintance: all had suffered from the same want of largeness and scope. An impoverished cultural landscape–which had been, as James viewed it, the debilitating curse of Hawthorne–continued to plague the American artist. And yet Howells had managed to publish three sizable books in as many years, and a fourth was on the way.2 (At this rate he was outproducing, if not outperforming, Hawthorne himself.) For all his copious magazine scribbling, James had not yet brought out a single volume, although his editor had generously encouraged him to gather some short stories together and promised to intercede with a publisher on behalf of the venture. The elder Henry James also volunteered to perform a similar office for his son. While he appreciated the sincerity of their offers, the ambitious younger James preferred to wait. He wanted, in particular, to grapple with the marketplace firsthand, to dispense with (even friendly) intermediaries, and to start himself, as he put it, “on a remunerative and perfectly practical literary basis.”3 James wanted to profit by the example of Howells’s early career as editor and author, at the same time that he intended to escape what he viewed as the inherent limitations of his friend’s literary situation.