Introduction Greg Zacharias This HJR forum issue, Emotion, Feeling, Sentiment in James: "Sorrow comes in great waves," was motivated by James's valuing of affect and its representation; by both the affective power of James's fiction and also by reader responses to it. Such valuing and representation have been and are important in what we know and how we think and talk about Henry James. That James shaped what we know and contributed to how we think about that knowledge makes the subject all the more significant. In A Small Boy and Others, for example, James famously recalled how, when he was about six years old and having snuck out of bed to listen to adults reading the opening installment of David Copperfield, he felt the emotional power of the novel as he "held [his] breath and listened": "I listened long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. I was this time effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable" (118–19). The ineffaceable quality of Jamesian emotion, feeling, and sentiment contributes to its importance both in James's life and fiction. Consider another memory written into A Small Boy and Others and, having been relatively overlooked in James scholarship in comparison with the one having to do with Dickens and David Copperfield, evidently so much less important. Still, while overlooked by readers, the feelings remembered remain powerful to James. Thus James testifies implicitly to the relation of affect to memory and thus to personal significance when he recalls an incident with "a boy called Simpson": my juxtaposition to whom I recall as uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think, quite immediately Irish—and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly and helpful character. Yet even he reeked, to [End Page 191] my sense, with strange accomplishment—no single show of which but was accompanied in him by a smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that almost crushed me to silence. (224–25) More than the ineffaceable nature of emotion, of feeling itself, and thus of consciousness, was for James the desirable significance of affect, even when the impression it produced was "crush[ing]." R. P. Blackmur recognized some time ago the significance of emotion in James's life and writing. He offered the following unconfirmed anecdote about Henry James, which, nonetheless Blackmur felt "so true and just in spirit": Once, in the nineties, while James was staying in an English country house, the only child of a neighbor died of a sudden illness; and although James had quarreled with the neighbor and they had not been on speaking terms he announced to his host that he would attend the funeral of the little boy. His host argued that, in the small church in the small village, it would be conspicuously unseemly for him to go—the bereaved parents could only take it as an affront; but James was obstinate. When he returned, his host asked him how on earth he could have brought himself to go, and to sit, as he had, in the pew directly behind the mourners. James brushed all argument aside and, with that intensity in his eyes which made his face seem naked, stated firmly: "Where emotion is, there am I!" (92) Blackmur emphasizes the anecdote because it tells a "story of [James's] struggle to realize art as emotion[,] and to create it as art is the abiding story of Henry James, as near as we can come to the Figure in his Carpet." James's touching letter to his longtime friend, Grace Norton, suggests not only how emotion engaged him as a fundamental aspect of life and living but as a binding feature of human relations. James responded this way to Grace Norton's struggle with depression: Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, + though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot + we know that if it is strong, we are stronger...
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Sep 18, 2024
Emily Cole + 1
Open Access