B - Extracts from Prefaces to the New York Edition

Summary

Henry James's New York Edition Prefaces are collected in Volume XXXIII of The Complete Fiction of Henry James. The editor of that volume, Oliver Herford, has excerpted and prepared the texts for this Appendix, and has supplied essential annotations; more extensive notes can be found in The Prefaces.

‘The Birthplace’: NYE XVII, xi–xii

Volume XVII of the New York Edition contains ‘The Altar of the Dead’, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Birthplace’, ‘The Private Life’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘The Real Right Thing’, ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘Julia Bride’. In the Preface to this volume James considers the first three tales together, as dramatizing the experiences of characters he calls ‘poor sensitive gentlemen’: respectively, George Stransom, John Marcher and Morris Gedge.

If “The Birthplace” deals with another poor gentleman—of interest as being yet again too fine for his rough fate—here at least I can claim to have gone by book, here once more I lay my hand, for my warrant, on the clue of actuality. It was one of the cases in which I was to say at the first brush of the hint: “How can there possibly not be innumerable things in it?” “It” was the mentioned adventure of a good intelligent man rather recently appointed to the care of a great place of pilgrimage, a shrine sacred to the piety and curiosity of the whole English-speaking race, and haunted by other persons as well; who, coming to his office with infinite zest, had after a while desperately thrown it up—as a climax to his struggle, some time prolonged, with “the awful nonsense he found himself expected and paid, and thence quite obliged, to talk.” It was in these simple terms his predicament was named to me—not that I would have had a word more, not indeed that I hadn't at once to turn my back for very joy of the suppressed details: so unmistakeably, on the spot, was a splendid case all there, so complete, in fine, as it stood, was the appeal to fond fancy; an appeal the more direct, I may add, by reason, as happened, of an acquaintance, lately much confirmed, on my own part, with the particular temple of our poor gentleman's priesthood.