On the Epistolary Art

 

I picked up The Selected Letters of Henry James at BookXcess (where else?) because, although I couldn't bear his books and found him terribly boring (I couldn't even get started with The Ambassadors), wait no, that's not true, I had enjoyed Daisy Miller but I didn't read the book. I watched the movie, starring Cybill Shepherd and found it entertaining and intriguing -- setting us up for certain expectations and then showing us our own prejudices -- fooled by the appearance of things and Turn of the Screw (yes, I liked the whole hysterical melodrama of it), I had read other people talking about him and was given to think that maybe, I'd been a little hasty in my judgements.

Whatever it is, he would write good letters. And since he lived at a more gracious time, full of characters I am inordinately interested in, I thought, let's give it a go. But I bought it early last year and never quite gotten around to it. Until I forced myself to start working my way through all the books cluttering up my shelves unread, and even started this blog, to force myself to do it.

Well, the letters didn't disappoint. He is a good letter writer, the kind that can insult you to your face but cloak his barbs in such honey that you will think you have been complimented, nay honoured. He's very clever (that is a word he hates because to him, it implies a scrappy sort of smartness, nothing in-depth) and once when he was providing criticism for a historical romance, I actually agreed with what he said. In fact, let me quote it here:

The "historic" novel is, for me, condemned even in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the difficulty of the job is inordinate and that a mere escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivete becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints as much as you like -- the real thing is almost impossible to do and in its essence the whole effect as as nought: I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose mind half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent. You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman -- or rather fifty -- whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force -- and even then it's all humbug. 

*****

But there is also a certain cattiness in the letters. And we realise that dear old Henry does not take criticism, even deserved criticism, all too well. There is a grand dinner given for the first man who published his work, William Dean Howell, for his 75th birthday. James doesn't attend but sends a letter, a monster of a letter, which takes up all of 6 pages in the book, which he wants read as a tribute to Howells during the dinner. It is not. In fact, Howells doesn't even mention the letter to a mutual friend he lunches with and James is highly chagrined. He pours contempt on the whole proceedings of the dinner (including the guest list) which he says has him in an "appallment of fascination" and is so very malicious about everything -- I think he should have just attended the damn dinner if he wanted someone to spend a half hour reading his damn letter. He criticises the speeches during the night but nothing could have been more over-the-top than his own letter. But he describes it as "quite beautiful and copious" and a graceful tribute. Personally, I thought he was laying it on rather thick.

From his letters you also get a sense that he does not think very much of women in their capacity as writers, especially young women. He does not rank their intelligence very high and can come across as unnecessarily dismissive. When one biographer applied to him for any materials on a certain Ouida, he was pretty malicious in his reply:

"The only way to treat her would be really, and quite frankly, I think, as a little terrible and finally pathetic grotesque; but even as such she means nothing -- is too without form and void!"

He was so mean about her that I looked her up, and Elizabeth Lee, the author who had applied to him for materials, did publish the book, Ouida, A Memoir, the very next year. And she was not as insignificant as James made her out to be. His bile only made me curious.

But considering his stature, I wondered why he would take the trouble to aim those arrows. He could have simply and politely (he was a beacon of politeness and good breeding, in fact, he carried it around like a proof of caste) said he had nothing suitable that would be of interest.

Well, anyway, the letters made me like the man less than I did before. In fact, they made me remember with glee how he was snubbed by George Eliot, who refused to either meet him or read his books, because she found them too unutterably dull. I read that in a biography of Eliot and it amused me. I didn't feel indignant about the way he had been treated (she had been dying when he was thrusting his books on her -- and you need a clear head and a lot of patience to read them) but now, it made me happy. 

She didn't think him important enough to read, to review or even, to meet.