James reviews Whitman: a melancholy task

"It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it." Thus opens the review of Walt Whitman's book Drum-Taps written by critic Henry James. The review, published in the November 16, 1865 issue of the Nation, lamented how difficult it was to read Whitman's poetry and James blames it on the poet being too much of "a prosaic mind." In fact, he writes, if not for the capital letters at the beginning of each line, one might not know it was poetry. "But if Mr. Whitman does not write verse," James says, "he does not write ordinary prose" as even prosaically the book is not impressive.

Worse, says the critically-minded James, Whitman, like too many others, assumes that the patriotic sympathy with the recent Civil War is enough to justify poetic inspiration in anyone. No, says James, though we as Americans feel the need to express our strong feelings ("Of course the tumult of a battle is grand, the results of a battle tragic, and the untimely deaths of young men a theme for elegies"), but such a sweeping overview as Whitman offers can only be made after the dust has settled. James also can't help but note that the book seems equally about Whitman's own pretentious grandstanding ("Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own trumpet").

The form of the poetry is a particular concern to the then 22-year old James as it does not rhyme or follow any conceivable pattern. Various simplistic verses on the war have become popular and memorable, even when artless. In the case of Whitman, James concludes his writing is "an offense against art," lacking common sense, and insult to intelligence. Nevertheless, James notes, there are positive aspects to Drum-Taps. The sentiment expressed, even if expressed oddly, is sincere:

Mr. Whitman prides himself especially on the substance—the life—of his poetry. It may be rough, it may be grim, it may be clumsy—such we take to be the author's argument—but it is sincere, it is sublime, it appeals to the soul of man, it is the voice of a people.

But, James warns, this is not enough. "To become adopted as a national poet, it is not enough... to discharge the undigested contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public," he writes. "You must respect the public which you address; for it has taste, if you have not." Whitman had made note in the book, however, that the life of the poem was more important than the form. As James himself quoted, Whitman had written:

Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,
For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed most, I bring;
A book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers,
And for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades;
The words of my book nothing, the life of it everything;
A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the intellect;
But you will feel every word, O Libertad! arm'd Libertad!
It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air,
With joy with you, O soul of man.

Poor entertainment and poor instruction

In his review of Louisa May Alcott's novel Eight Cousins in The Nation for October 14, 1875, Henry James ultimately recommends the book as "an entertaining and healthy story." The book is about a girl named Rose Campbell and her "seven boisterous boy-cousins" and, James says, was likely "written  in every good faith," despite asserting it is "a very ill-chosen sort of entertainment to put before children."

James gives Alcott credit as the novelist of children for her ability to address "the social questions of the child-world." But in Eight Cousins, he says, she has erred in both story and style: "It is unfortunate not only in its details, but in its general tone, in the constant ring of the style." For one, he notes that she has fallen far too deeply into satire. She does not present the adults in the book as role models as he apparently would have expected and, further, the little girl is far too thoughtful for her age, possibly in an attempt at equanimity: "All this is both poor entertainment and poor instruction." Even so, despite calling it "vulgar prose," James admits that Alcott was successful in showing how a good girl can influence bad boys. Thankfully, he adds, Eight Cousins avoids concocting a silly love story.

Not all critics were as harsh as James. A review in The Christian Register called it her greatest work since Little Women and evidence that the author had "returned to her best self." Another poked fun at the publisher of James's review as "a weakly critical journal" (pun intended, presumably). A Boston newspaper noted that a young girl who had read Alcott's book was surprised by James's review and concluded, "I don't want to know the man who wrote that."

*My source for information in this article was Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 2004) edited by Beverly Ryan Clark.

James on Howells: admirably light

The Story of a Play by William Dean Howells received rave reviews from the author's friend Henry James, who called it "admirably light" and infused with "the writer's fundamental optimism." Indeed, James emphasized that optimism in his review of the book, published on July 9, 1898, and noted that Howells created "a world all lubricated with good nature and the tone of pleasantry" in the "short and charming novel."  He went on:

Life, in his pages, is never too hard, too ugly, passions and perversities never too sharp, not to allow, on the part of his people, of such an exercise of friendly wit about each other as may well, when one considers it, minimize shocks and strains. So it muffles and softens, all round, the edges of 'The Story of a Play.'

This was also somewhat of a criticism; James wondered if there was any tragedy in the comic world of theater which Howells presented. "You know," Howells wrote to James in response, "my experience of the theatre was comic, rather than tragical, and I treated of it lightly because it was light." With that said, however, he revealed a strange dramatic tragedy he had just experienced. An actor suggested that he turn his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham into a play, which he did. With the project finished, however, that actor changed his mind and told Howells he "does not want it. What a race!" Nevertheless, Howells told James: "My heart warmed itself over in the glow of your praise."

James on Calvert: no general attention

On June 3, 1875, the Nation published a review by Henry James of the Baltimore-born editor and author George Henry Calvert. Calvert was particularly known for his biographies of literary figures including Goethe and Shakespeare. By 1875 and the publication of his Essays Aeshetical, however, he had become obscure. "Mr. Calvert occasionally puts forth a modest volume of prose or verse which attracts no general attention," James (pictured at right) began his review, "but which, we imagine, finds adequate appreciation among scattered readers."

In this case, however, James happily recommended this particular book collecting "essays on subjects connected with art and letters."  The author is a perfect scholar, he writes, and his writing has "an aroma of genuine culture." His biggest critique is that Calvert is vague and offers judgments which are "a trifle too ethereal and to a style considerably too florid." The result, however, is a mix of both taste and leisure, James concludes.

Calvert's book also includes a section condemning grammatical and literary "vulgarities" that have crept into the English language. James, however, disagrees: "We share Mr. Calvert's extreme enmity with regard to none of these phrases." Nevertheless, Calvert's essay is interesting today as the language continues to evolve (one wonders what he would think of the internet). As Calvert writes:

Word are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his pupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness.

* This essay is available in the collection Henry James: Literary Criticism (1984) published by the Library of America.

Howells: very slowly and reluctantly

"I am working very hard at my story here, which takes shape very slowly and reluctantly," William Dean Howells wrote to Henry James on October 4, 1882 from France. "I shall never again, I hope, attempt to finish a thing so long thrown aside."

The story in question, A Woman's Reason, would be published the next year, though it was started four years before Howells wrote this note. In another letter around this period, he admitted, "I have had such a good time that I have been unable to do so much even as kill a consumptive girl, or make a lover homesick enough to start home from China and get wrecked on an atoll in the South Pacific." Dining out "four times a week" and traveling through Europe was making him too happy.

Howells, who was hailed then and now as a master of literary realism, took an odd turn in A Woman's Reason — one which critics noticed. In A Woman's Reason, a well-born woman named Helen Harkness loses access to an inheritance when her father dies bankrupt. Helen is saved when her fiancé, long thought dead, returns from a shipwreck. As he references in his letter to James, Howells kept the story at sea for too long. He spends 80 pages describing the character's shipwreck and the adventure which followed.

"After promising to give us sound realistic work," one critic complained, Howells "has descended to the function of producing lollipops." James warned his friend away from "factitious glosses." Howells, in turn, admitted to Mark Twain that A Woman's Reason bore "the fatal marks of haste and distraction." Modern scholar Elsa Nettels noted the shipwreck scene was "the most palpable example in Howells's work of the kind of contrivance he deplored in romantic novels."

*Much of the information from this post comes from Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (1997), edited by Michael Anesko. I also consulted Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America (1988) by Elsa Nettels.

James: an inquiring stranger

It had been 25 years to the month since Henry James had placed his feet on the soil of his native country. Sailing into New York Harbor on August 30, 1904, James, then 61 years old, had made the trip from Southampton in an astounding five days. He immediately disembarked to search for his childhood haunts in Manhattan but found that little remained, including his birthplace, or what was left was substantially altered. He spent his first night back in the United States with the family of his publisher, George Harvey, president of Harper & Bros.

James later admitted that he had "the freshness of eye, outward and inward" which left him "an inquiring stranger" and a "pilgrim with the longest list of questions." This perspective was advantageous for an author, and James began contributing essays for Harper's Weekly, which later made up the bulk of his book The American Scene. That book collected his impressions of New England — including Boston, Concord, and Salem — as well as several chapters on New York. His visits to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Charleston, and Florida were also recounted.

During his return to the United States, James visited with friends including Mark Twain and Edith Wharton. In fact, he kept a demanding schedule. "I am bearing up a little bewilderedly," he admitted to a friend. The excitement left "a chasm of immeasurable width" that almost made him "forget the old world." It certainly did not allow him to forget his own old life in the United States. One of the most important stops in his journey was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he visited the grave of his parents and his sister Alice James for the first time. As he wrote:

It was the moment, it was the hour, it was the blessed flood of emotion that broke out... and carried me away. I seemed then to know why I had done this; I seemed to know why I had come... Everything was there... the recognition, stillness, the strangeness, the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion and the divine relief of tears.

James spent less than a year in the United States before returning to Europe. About a decade later, he became a British subject. It was as a British national that he died in 1916; his ashes were brought back to Cambridge and laid to rest beside his family.

*Information in this post comes from Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (1999) by Fred Kaplan.

Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard: I like devils

She was born Elizabeth Drew Barstow in Massachusetts on May 6, 1823, but she later became Mrs. Richard Henry Stoddard in 1852 and thereafter lived in New York. Her husband was a well-known and respected critic, but Mrs. Stoddard held her own as a poet and novelist (coincidentally, her father's shipyard built the Acushnet). Mrs. Stoddard published her first story in the Atlantic in 1861; her novel, The Morgesons, was published a year later.

The novel follows Cassandra, a young woman from New England, as she searches for her place in the world. Oppressed by family and society, she attempts to break free from the expectations of domesticity and her role as a woman. "Cassandra, that man is a devil," a friend warns in one scene. "I like devils," she responds.

Recent scholars have tried to reclaim The Morgesons as an important step in women's literature. At the time of publication, it was unnoticed or dismissed. It did, however, elicit from Henry James what Alfred Habegger called "the most ferocious, in fact vicious, review Henry James is known to have written":

[The Morgesons] possessed not even the slightest mechanical coherency. It was a long tedious record of incoherent dialogue between persons irresponsible in their sayings and doings even to the verge of insanity. Of narrative, of exposition, of statement, there was not a page in the book... [The reader] arose with his head full of impressions as lively as they were disagreeable.

*Information from this post was gleaned in part from Henry James and the 'Woman Business' (2004) by Alfred Habegger.

Birth of Henry James

Though, for the majority of his life, he was a British subject, it was in New York City that Henry James was born on April 15, 1843. He spent the last 53 of his 72 years in England but, even as a child, he frequently went back and forth between his native United States and Europe. Two of his early novels were The American and The Europeans.

James is considered a major figure in the literary realism movement. His contemporary and friend William Dean Howells noted that James tried to do something entirely new in literature: "A novelist he is not, after the old fashion," said Howells, "or after any fashion but his own."

One of James's most well-known works is The Turn of the Screw, a novella published in 1898. The book's narrator has become the teacher to two orphaned children whose caretaker, their wealthy uncle, did not want to take care of them. Instead, he allows them to live in a second home he owns among servants. The two well-behaved children, however, seem to be harboring a secret after the narrator discovers two ghosts in the home — ghosts of prior employees. She becomes quite suspicious of the children's well-mannered ways, assuming they are somehow corrupted by the ghosts and refuse to admit it. She becomes obsessed with proving both that the ghosts exist and that the children know them:

How can I retrace to-day the strange steps of my obsession? There were times of our being together [with the children] when I would have been ready to swear that, literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove greater than the injury to be averted, my exaltation would have broken out, 'They're here, they're here, you little wretches,' I would have cried, 'and you can't deny it now!'