The Sinuosities of Jamesian Criticism
AARON, DANIEL
The Sinuosities of Jamesian Criticism THE NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES By Oscar Cargill Macmillan. 505 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by DANIEL AARON Professor of English, Smith College; author, "Writers...
...How can they read James' fiction as personal history, he asks, when James offers such a feast of narrative and character...
...Like all great artists, James steals like a conqueror and transmutes what he takes into something infinitely rarer...
...The casual reader, unfamiliar with the sinuosities of Jamesian criticism, may find this method a little hard to take...
...The result is at once a compilation of sources, familiar and unfamiliar, and a kind of variorum critique of the best that has been thought and said about the subject...
...Each chapter is followed by a section of notes, often half the length of the chapter itself, in which Cargill elucidates certain points, cites corroborative evidence, or politely but vigorously dissents from the views of fellow critics...
...He shows how an unmemorable novel like William Dean Howells' Dr...
...Breen's Practice contributed to an immeasurably better one of James', The Bostonians, or how a Wagnerian motif served as a "precipitant" or "catalyzer" of The Wings of the Dove...
...Each of the separate discussions are stuccoed with references and allusions that assume a familiarity with the novels themselves and with the opinions of such well-known James authorities as Leon Edel (with whom the author is in general agreement) and F. W. Dupee (at whom he shoots a good many unpoisoned shafts...
...Those novels of James which have received sparse or inadequate treatment are likely to be the ones that he deals with the least interestingly...
...he has also read practically everything written about James...
...The great novels of the "Major Phase" inspire him more deeply than the works of the early and middle period...
...In his notebooks and prefaces, James brilliantly described the process of fictive germination, how a tale or a novel might begin with "the virus of suggestion," an anecdote, a figment of gossip, and how it would then exfoliate in the gentle heat of his imagination...
...To remedy this deficiency, he has tried to synthesize the accumulation and to bring his findings to bear on 22 novels of Henry James...
...His most derivative book, Cargill justly observes, "is more original than the utterly free invention of another man...
...Sometimes Cargill outlines a full scenario of the plot and characters, but only students of James will know enough to fill in the gaps and to savor the considerable scholarship that has gone into the writing of this book...
...Working through the very great mass of commentary on James' fiction," he declares, "I have been struck by a curious deficiency —nobody apparently reads anybody else—there is no accumulated wisdom, no 'body' of appreciation...
...Critics of all ages and species find the great master a congenial subject not only because he wrote so much that was splendid (he remains that rare phenomenon, the American writer who did not fizzle out) but also because he was a priest of literature, consecrated to the art of fiction, who expected his devotees to read his stories as carefully as he had composed them...
...Professor Cargill, who has studied "the lesson of the master" as assiduously as the most dedicated Jamesian, has little patience with the academic detectives more concerned with the concealments of the furtive author than with his work...
...One wishes at times that he had abandoned the device of writing what in effect are extended bibliographical essays...
...He is happier with The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, for example, than he is with The Tragic Muse...
...As might be expected, Cargill's discussions of the separate novels are not of equal quality...
...Above anything else, the book demonstrates how James' novels were fertilized by the writing, fictional and otherwise, of both notable and commonplace authors...
...Today, with the possible exceptions of Melville and Faulkner, no other American writer is so frequently examined...
...It has the merit of engaging the reader even when he feels that the critics whom Cargill "refutes" have the best of the argument, and of encouraging him to speculate on his own...
...For them, especially teachers of American literature and members of their seminars, The Novels of Henry James will be an invaluable aid...
...Not only has he read all of James' books...
...It is the plenteous and teeming James that Cargill relishes in this fat volume...
...James was not given in these private and public confidences, however, to acknowledging his indebtedness to particular novels or plays by writers as varied as Daudet, Ibsen, Augier, Eliot, Holmes, Howells, Sand, Austen, Dumas, Thackeray, Hawthorne, du Maurier, Wilde and others...
...Cargill relentlessly traces these conscious and unconscious borrowings...
...author, "Writers on the Left" For the past 25 years or more, critical writing on Henry James has piled up at an astonishing rate...
...Could it be that his method of basing his comments on the interpretations of others prevents him from striking out boldly on his own tack...
...Yet his fair-minded book, despite its crotchets and occasional pomposities, is pervasively suggestive...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 40
