Oh, Henry

I'm getting ready to write a chapter about the popular reception of James by the folks who lived a generation after his popular heyday--if you could call it that. James was kind of like, oh, Thomas Pynchon is today. He was a highbrow critical darling, but (particularly by the time he was writing his "late phase" novels, like The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl) most people found his writing too obscure. I know it makes me a philistine, but I can certainly see their point.


(Henry James, by John Singer Sargent (1913--just after the Late Phase))

I'm also getting ready to teach a class that talks about Henry and his relationship to Edith Wharton. She spent a long time wishing he would notice her or her writing (there are a couple of funny anecdotes in her autobiography about buying new outfits and hats for dinners to which she knew James had also been invited, only to have him look straight through her. She of course didn't buy the clothes in an attempt to attract him physically, just in hopes that she'd get his attention.), but she ended up being a much more "popular" writer than he ever was, and a wealthier one too. They eventually ended up being great friends, but this difference in their popularity tended to be a sore point. One of my favorite images of all time is this one of Henry and Edith in Edith's car--when Henry heard that Edith had bought a car with her recent royalties (I think from The House of Mirth, he commented that he'd bought a wooden wagon with his--and with the royalties from his next book, he planned to have the wagon painted.


(Henry James (in backseat) joins Edith and Teddy Wharton and their chauffeur for a motoring tour through the Berkshires, Oct. 1904. Wharton mss, Lilly Library, Indiana University.)

I love the period in which James and Wharton did most of their writing (1880s-1910s) because it was a time when people were really trying to get a grip on mass-production of consumer items and widespread availablility of a huge variety of reading materials. In other words, it was a time when our modern consumer society was "quickening" a bit. Lots of people will make lots of arguments that push these tendencies back earlier in history, but I'm with Marx...mass production was a watershed.

This is when huge numbers of people started to use knowledge as a thing to wear to show your status and to perform in the pursuit of filthy lucre (smile). Oh, sure, Ben Franklin did too, but he was a little ahead of his time, in this as in so many other things. In Howard's End, E. M. Forster will immortalize this reader in Leonard Bast...and will kill him by having a shelf of books fall on him. And that's the sticky social situation in the midst of which Henry was writing, and the kind of reader who tried, but hated, to read his books, and the kind of reader he frequently said he hated and yet wanted to attract in the interest of income.

And now, in the headlong pursuit of tenure, I am going to try to write about all of it...with any luck, much more articulately than I just did!