Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (review)

Announcing his enterprise as “the first book-length work of criticism to explore the subject of Henry James and homosexuality,” John R. Bradley presents what is really a modest reevaluation of James’s life and oeuvre as a radical departure from standard critical practice (xi). Straddling the breach between “extremists” such as Sedgwick, who equate James’s fictional fantasies with the activities of the Tenderloin district, and “reactionaries” such as Leon Edel, who style James a vestal virgin channeling his passion into literary production, Bradley argues for a self-aware, if not sexually active, Henry James (52). Perhaps this is why he champions Sheldon M. Novick, an unlikely muse for a work of literary criticism given his summary acquaintance with the varieties of literary analysis.

Announcing that “reports of the death of the author evidently have been greatly exaggerated” in his introduction to this volume, Novick smugly rejects psychological and literary critical modes of analysis in favor of traditional approaches that allow for authorial intentionality (1). The position Novick adopts here, that James’s letters and tales suggest he was “a man at ease with sexuality in general” (13), reprises the reductive approach to James’s sexuality taken in Novick’s recent biography: “it has seemed most reasonable to assume that when [James] seemed to be having a love affair, he was” (Young Master xiii). Novick would have us believe that he alone truly understands what he calls Henry James’s “emotional reality,” an elastic concept that allows Novick to infer James’s feelings from his writings without reference to his actions, substituting conjecture for evidence gathering (Bradley 12). Armed with his intuition, Novick introduces a graphic anecdote concerning Walt Whitman’s purported tryst with a young man who was experiencing a “throbbing erection” (10) and then, improbably, advances this scenario as a governing metaphor for understanding James’s own passion for men. One is struck by the manifest absurdity of this image in connection with James, whose raciest romantic overtures pale in comparison: “The faint pink incense you exhale goes to my head” (129). In short, the contributors to this volume ought to be grateful for the distance Novick puts between himself and them when he deprecates their salutary tendency to see James as conflicted in his sexuality.

Ironically, the essay that follows Novick’s, a reprint of Richard Ellmann’s “James Among the Aesthetes” of 1983, is arguably the crispest account of James’s homosexual panic on record, documenting James’s horror of Oscar Wilde, sodomite par excellence, to a fare-thee-well. According to Ellmann, James recognized his own “homosexual propensity” and endeavored to cover it up through negative portrayals of aesthetes in his fiction and a “counter-emphasis” on manliness in his art criticism (27). Ellmann’s meticulous elaboration of James’s relation to the aesthetic movement is well worth rereading, both because of good scholarship and as a point of departure for a very different argument, one that construes James’s enthusiasm for the nude male form. Ellmann contrasts Wilde’s and James’s response to the opening exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, remarking: “When they come to the [paintings of] the beautiful boys, Wilde is all atremble, James all aslant” (32). Ellmann attributes James’s diffidence to a marked anxiety about the manliness of Pre-Raphaelite art as well as to Ruskin’s chastening influence. Far from equivocating about the paintings of Edward Burne-Jones, James celebrates the artist’s androgynous figures in a manner worthy of Walter Pater. Although James qualifies his admiration for the “beautiful, rapt dejection of the mysterious young warrior” depicted in Le Chant d’Amour, there is no backlash against effeminacy: “Mr. Burne-Jones does not pretend to paint very manly figures, and we should hardly know where to look for a more delicate rendering of a lovesick swain” (Essays 276–77).

Ellmann belongs to the faction that contends James became more comfortable with his homosexuality as he grew older and as society became more familiar...