Preface

Summary

The Catholic side of Henry James is of course only one of many sides. At a venture, it affects perhaps one-quarter of his literary production, quantitatively considered. It is an unusually important quarter, however, because this “side” looms large at significant points in James' career (for example, its fictional beginnings in the “conversion narrative”), because it touches major documents (for example, The Golden Bowl), and because it sheds light on works difficult or virtually impossible to fathom (perhaps most notably The Turn of the Screw and The Wings of the Dove). I once called this book The Literary Catholicizing of Henry James but gave the title up for its want of euphony. Certain implications of that lost title are well worth preserving and keeping in mind, however. Literary Catholicizing means the representation in narrative, dramatic, or poetic form, of identifiably Roman Catholic rites, sacraments, beliefs, practices, and fictive personages, for aesthetic reasons additional to or instead of religious reasons. Clearly it will make some difference whether the writer in question is or is not Catholic. It is one thing when people in a novel by Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh dubiously receive communion or cross themselves while dying, Greene and Waugh being such notorious Catholics, but it is quite another thing when a writer ostensibly not Catholic, such as Willa Cather, devotes so much of her late fictional œuvre to Catholic matters.