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Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Literary Relation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Millicent Bell
Millicent Bell*
Affiliation:
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh 19, Penn
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Extract

In the landscape of Edith Wharton's life the figure of Henry James is of almost too-distracting importance. He was the greatest man she knew. James himself had many friends and acquaintances such as Howells and Stevenson who stood equal beside him—he moved accustomedly among his peers from youth to old age—tout Edith Wharton had few intimates who were her creative equals, and none who towered into that eminence where James stood. Consequently, no discussion of her work can avoid contemplating the effect of his example and association; the danger, really, is that we will assume more effect than is there.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 5 , December 1959 , pp. 619 - 637
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959

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References

1 The phrase, “Henry James's Heiress,” is by Q. D. Leavis, who so titled her essay in Scrutiny, vii (1939), 261–276. But this excellent appreciation does little to demonstrate—or disprove—inheritance. And underlying most serious criticism as well as more casual comment upon Edith Wharton's work has been the same unexamined assumption. Edward J. O'Brien wrote in The Advance of the American Short Story (New York, 1923), for example, that she was James's “most representative disciple,” and added, without demonstrating, “She has assimilated every lesson that her master can teach except tenderness and ease, and in sheer craftsmanship it may even be held that she occasionally surpassed him” (pp. 202–203). And so again at her death Wilson Follett flatly stated that her fiction done prior to the War “made it difficult to describe her without invoking the influence” of James, and Henry Seidel Canby declared that her craftsmanship “is emphatically the craftsmanship of Henry James, less subtle, less original, less rhetorical,” adding with the now customary vagueness, “The woman had the less power, but also the sure feminine grip upon that slippery verge beyond which life dissolves into a milky way of slrimmering worlds” (If. Y. Times Book Review, Sept. S, 1937, p. 2; SRL, xvi, 17, Aug. 21, 1937, 6). Among the more important studies of Edith Wharton's writing have been those of Joseph Warren Beach (The Twentieth Century Novel, New York, 1932); E. K. Brown (Edith Wharton: Etude Critique, Paris, 1935); and Blake Nevius (Edith Wharton, a study of her fiction, Berkeley, 1953). Beach, curiously, failed to take note of the James influence where it is most marked—in her early works —and called The Age of Innocence (1920) “her first striking use of the later James technique” (p. 291), ignoring as well the incontrovertible Jamesianism of The Reef (1912); his discussion of The Age of Innocence is nevertheless valuable for its scrutiny of the prime Jamesian consideration, point of view. Brown observed certain resemblances of subject between James's fiction and her early short stories and novels, but was still content to declare without amplification, “Mrs. Wharton a une dette immense envers Henry James. C'est à sa théorie et à sa pratique de l'art du roman qu'elle doit les éléments les plus subtils et les plus vrais de sa méthode” (p. 169). Nevius, in the most comprehensive study of Mrs. Wharton yet published, is on this point more suggestive than definitive, generalizing, “roughly speaking, they started by the same position, proceeded by the same path, and—somewhere around 1900 they separated—with James taking a high road where the atmosphere, for Edith Wharton, proved too rare” (p. 30), but failing to trace more than cursorily the particulars of this journey.

2 Janet Flanner has stated that Edith Wharton hoped that her final epitaph would be, “She was a friend of Henry James” (An American in Paris, New York, 1940, p. 196)—even if true, a quite different aspiration.

3 Manuscript James letters to be quoted have been made available to me through copies originally assembled by Percy Lubbock and now on file in the Harvard University Library. For their use I am grateful to the Library and the trustees of the James estate. Edith Wharton's own letters to various persons have been consulted in the files of Charles Scribner's Sons and a few other letters of hers to W. C. Brownell have been studied in the Amherst College Library. My use of them has been made possible through the courtesy of the publishers and library officials, and of Mrs. Elisina Royall Tyler, legatee of the Wharton estate. Quotations from these collections will be followed by the date preceded by either “H,” “S,” or “A,” in parentheses.

4 A Backward Glance (New York, 1934), pp. 171–173.

5 Philadelphia Telegraph, April 1, 1889; New York Commercial Advertiser, May 20, 1889; New York Musical Courier May, 1889.

6 A Backward Glance, p. 114: “At length I came on a notice which suddenly stiffened my limp spine. 'When Mrs. Wharton,' the condescending critic wrote, 'has learned the rudiments of her art, she will know that a short story should always begin with dialogue.' ” She does not name her critic but the quotation, which is almost exact, can be identified in Barry's review in the Literary World of April 1, 1889.

7 Boston Literary World, April 1, 1889.

8 “Henry James,” The Atlantic Monthly, xcv (April, 1905), 496–519. Reprinted in American Prose Masters (New York, 1909), and printed again in the “Modern Student's Library” edition of American Prose Masters (New York, 1923).

9 American Prose Masters (New York, 1923), pp. 331–332.

10 The Writing of Fiction (New York, 1925), pp. 43, 48.

11 “It [”clever“] is a word of limitation; it fences in its own domain, and excludes other regions beyond,” Henry Dwight Sedgwick, The New American Type and Other Essays (Boston, 1908), p. 56.

12 Letter of Jan. 25, 1902, quoted by F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York, 1947), p. 512.

13 Letter of Aug. 20, 1902, Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), i, 395–396.

14 Letter of July 26, 1899, and undated previous one, Letters of Henry James, I, 320–327.

15 Quoted by Mrs. Ward in A Writer's Recollections (New York and London, 1908), ii, 223.

16 Letter of Nov. 17, 1906, Letters of Henry James, ii, 57.

17 See my “A James ‘Gift’ to Edith Wharton,” MLN, LXXH (1957), 182–185.

18 “The Writing of Ethan Frome,” The Colophon, xi (Sept. 1932); reprinted in Breaking into Print (New York, 1937), ed. Elmer Adler, p. 190.

19 Introd. Ethan Frome, Modern Student's Library ed. (New York, 1922), p. vi.

20 See John Crowe Ransom, “Character and Characters,” American Review, vi (1935-36), 271 ff.

21 Percy Lubbock, A Portrait of Edith Wharton (London, 1947), p. 68.

22 Ethan Frome, Modern Student's Library ed., p. ix.

23 “Character and Characters,” p. 275.

24 A Backward Glance, p. 209.

25 A Backward Glance, pp. 190, 191.

26 A Backward Glance, p. 190.

27 Quarterly Review, cxii (1910), 405.

28 A Backward Glance, p. 183.

29 Letter of Dec. 4 and 9, 1912, Letters of Henry James, ii, 283–285.

30 Reprinted in Notes on Novelists (London, 1914), pp. 282–283.

31 The Twentieth Century Novel, p. 302.