3 - The Cult of Henry James, 1918–1960

Summary

The air of reality … seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel — the merit on which all its other merits … helplessly and submissively depend.

— Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

FOR NEARLY THIRTY YEARS after James died, critical articles about him usually numbered fewer than two dozen each year. This response would not have surprised T. S. Eliot, who, in 1918, predicted that James always would be “regarded as the extraordinarily clever but negligible curiosity” understood by only “a few intelligent people” (854). After Percy Lubbock's two-volume edition of James's letters was published in 1920, the number of articles rose to thirty-two; even the publication of Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921), which closely considered James's The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Awkward Age, failed to generate renewed interest. Only sixteen articles appeared in 1922, and the number continued at nearly that level, with few exceptions, until 1943, the centenary of James's birth. “When I went to college in the thirties,” writer Hortense Calisher recalled, “we were scarcely taught James, in favor of his genteel shadow, Howells” (58). André Gide, writing in the Yale Review in 1930, suggests why: “Undoubtedly these novels of James are marvels of composition … We can marvel at the delicacy, at the subtlety of the gear wheels, but all his characters are like the figures of a clock, and the story is finished when they have struck the curfew; of themselves they return to the clockcase and to the night of our forgetting” (643).