The Sacred Fount ed. by T. J. Lustig

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sacred Fount ed. by T. J. Lustig Daniel Hannah Henry James. The Sacred Fount. Ed. T. J. Lustig. Cambridge UP, 2015. cxiii + 218 pp. $100 (Hardback). The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James 16. The Sacred Fount has long teased, frustrated, and even maddened readers of Henry James. By a series of sometimes impenetrable dialogues with a range of often perplexed and perhaps conspiratorial interlocutors, James's obscure narrator leads us through winding theories of recondite vampirism and degeneration behind the surfaces of guests at the fictional country house, Newmarch. The narrator's seemingly endless spinning out of hypotheses resembles closely James's accounts of his own involvement in the novel's composition as his initial germ monstrously exceeded its initial bounds. James once described the completed novel as a "profitless labyrinth," and it is certainly easy for readers seeking to account for it to feel themselves pulled into critical spirals of unclear reward. In his new edition of this maze-like novel, the sixth completed text in The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, T. J. Lustig proves an admirable navigator. Following the general editorial practice of the series, this publication follows the first published book edition of the novel printed by Methuen and Company in [End Page E-14] London in 1901, one of only two editions of the novel published in James's lifetime (aside from the Colonial edition, which follows the British one). Given the novel's relatively limited scope of publication (partially a result of it not being serialized and its pointed omission from James's revised New York Edition), there are fewer editorial quandaries to wrestle with than in some of the other works of the series—Lustig only requires two pages to detail a handful of minor textual variants. Nevertheless, the appearance of a generously annotated, scholarly printing of this perpetual outlier in the Jamesian canon (not to mention in the Cambridge edition's suitably handsome typeface) is a welcome addition to the academic archive and a pleasant reminder of The Sacred Fount's strange and strangely pivotal place in James's oeuvre. Lustig's substantial introduction to the edition is organized into a series of untitled subsections addressing in turn: the novel's genesis, composition, and publication history; its biographical context; the broader social context of its subject matter; its initial reception; and a brief overview of its critical history. In general, the introduction delivers an engaging and detailed assessment of The Sacred Fount, overturning in the process several interesting misconceptions about the text and its significance. For instance, Lustig's exhaustive account of the contract negotiations, promotional materials, and financial performance of James's novel shines a light on the author's surprisingly lucrative advance for what proved to be a somewhat disappointing performance in the literary marketplace. As Lustig notes, James's financial arrangements (made through the canny intercession of his new literary agent, James Brand Pinker) proved consequential, not only to securing the deposit required to purchase Lamb House but also in prompting Methuen to take on The Ambassadors. Leon Edel looms large in Lustig's discussion of the novel's biographical background. As Lustig notes, The Sacred Fount stands, for Edel, as "a defining work," both in his biographies of James and in his introductions to previous editions of the novel, exemplifying his "conception of James's imaginative development" (xli)—the novel proves central to the biographer's account of a shift from "spiritual illness" to "personal healing" in the 1890s (xl). One wonders if Edel's somewhat overdetermined treatment deserves so much of the space it takes in this section, and Lustig does pause to note how it might "benefit from modification" (xli) in terms of how it fits into a larger narrative of crisis and "self-therapy" (xlii). But as the numerous quotations in this section from James's notebooks and letters suggest, there are good grounds for reading the novel as part of a broader pattern in which James imagined both himself and others pulled by "almost tidal flows of energy" (xlviii). The most interesting element of this section is Lustig's sustained elaboration on striking...