James, The Audience of the Nineties, and The Spoils of Poynton

In 1867 the Atlantic’s junior editor, William Dean Howells, appraised the appeal of a story submitted by a twenty-four-year-old contributor: “Henry James has written us another story, which I think admirable, but I do not feel sure of the public any longer. . . . I cannot doubt that James has every element of success in fiction. But I suspect that he must in a great degree create his own audience” (283). And, indeed, James’s early “international” fiction soon gave him a following. He became almost popular after the scandal-success of Daisy Miller in 1878. But few readers understood, probably, what James was saying—how he held up to ironic view not only a pretty, ignorant American Girl from a wealthy family, but her observer, the detached flaneur and intellectual snob whom he named, so suitably, Winterbourne. None would have suspected that in his portrait of that sophisticate James may have expressed his guarded, self-critical view of himself. He may have seen himself becoming, as he grew older, not merely a man whose response to pretty young women was conflicted, but a writer who could not sufficiently appreciate simplicity. He knew he was too likely to call it vulgar.

The puerility of the female audience that offered itself to the writer who wanted to be popular turned him off. He had not even begun to write fiction when, at twenty-one, reviewing someone else’s critical essays, he declared with youthful effrontery that he would rather write for “weary lawyers and schoolmasters” than for women “who stay at home all day to practice listless sonatas and read magazines” (EL 1196). In reviews of successful female novelists who pleased these readers, he soon was sounding like his predecessor Hawthorne in his contempt for “scribbling women” (as Hawthorne called his own rivals). They wrote books, James said, aimed at those who read “nothing but novels and yet [read] neither George Eliot, George Sand, Thackeray nor Hawthorne” (744). Yet these were the readers whom even Howells, for all his own aspirations to be a serious novelist, was resolved to serve in the Atlantic. Howells objected to the unhappy ending of The American which he ran in the magazine in 1877. James had responded that to alter his novel so that Newman wins the marital prize would be throwing “a rather vulgar sop to readers who don’t really know the world. . . . Such readers assuredly have a right to their entertainment, but I don’t believe it is in me to give them, in a satisfactory way, what they require” (HJL 2: 105). He had just returned from Paris where he had met Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, Daudet, Maupassant—writers whose art depicted a darker side of experience. Reviewing Nana, he contrasted it with the Anglo-American novel “almost always addressed to young unmarried ladies, or [which] at least always assumes them to be a large part of the novelist’s public.” To meet the undeveloped taste of such an audience, he said, “may be a good thing for virgins and boys, and a bad thing for the novel itself” (FW 868, 869). And yet he promised to comply with Howells’s desires in his next offering to the magazine. In The Europeans, the morally dubious Eugenia is denied the marriage she wants but the innocent American Girl is awarded her happily-ever-after—though, as he admitted, “mechanically in the closing paragraphs” (HJL 2: 189).

But the trouble with James’s writing was not, really, that it was too realistic after the fashion of the French naturalists or those who would soon imitate them in England, like Gissing or Moore. It was thought too refined. In 1872 his travel letters for the Nation were so judged, and he wrote his brother William, “The multitude, I am more and more convinced, has absolutely no taste. . . . To write for the few who have is doubtless to lose money—but I am not afraid of starving” (HJL 1: 301). He continued to write pieces that Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune, judged...