The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (review)

Henry James has attracted a number of essay anthologies over the years: Leon Edel, F. W. Dupee, Tony Tanner, John Goode, Ian Bell, Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, and Gert Buelens, to name but a few, have all presided over diverse collections. The Cambridge Companion differs from some of its predecessors in that all the contributions were specially commissioned. The book is also part of a series with a clearly announced agenda: each volume “is intended to provide a critical introduction” to the writer concerned and is “written at a level free from technical jargon” (iii). The strategy is that of targeting the student reader; its corollary is the imperative of accessibility. There is also an obligation, within these parameters, to strive for representativeness.

The writers of these essays have reacted in contrasting ways to these potentially stifling requirements. The irony of James being subjected to such market forces, as a recuperation of his own predicament in the mass market (a predicament, even more ironically, which preoccupies much of the book), is not lost on these quarriers. James’s “difficulty,” especially in the “Major Phase,” is cringed over in rhetoric that comes close, odious as the phrase is, to “dumbing down.” Freedman is wholly unconvincing given the power of his own work on James, and his otherwise incisive situating of “The Moment of Henry James” here when recounting his occasional vows “never to read” some paragraphs again (19). Even less coherently, Margery Sabin (on The Golden Bowl) condemns James’s “maddening flight from specificity” in one sentence only to follow it immediately with an acknowledgment of Maggie’s “ecstasy” as “a horror fully evoked but beyond exact articulation” (220). Philip Horne’s “Henry James at Work: The Question of Our Texts,” hovers in the analytical hinterland of textual problems and makes only occasional forages in the direction of their critical consequences. Beyond that, it seems that Horne has construed “accessibility” as entailing expressions such as “a compact six-pack” for Jane Austen’s novels (74). There is no doubt that Horne has a sense of his audience. The puzzled, and even feeble, “our student” (70) he invokes as part of the dramatic framework of his essay is attended by a range of homiletic exhortations and patronizing characterizations. All will be clarified, it appears, if there is “mature reflection” (69), “a striving for truth,” or a “serious student, critic or scholar” who can “go to a good library” (74). While some essayists, in pursuit of the introductory, err on the side of plot exposition (Millicent Bell’s “The Unmentionable Subject in ‘The Pupil’”), Dorothy J. Hale disregards an injunction against “theory,” but thinly veiled by that “jargon,” and pitches into James, Lubbock, Bakhtin, Wayne C. Booth, and Dorrit Cohn with telling energy.

Freedman’s “Preface” concedes the unrepresentative nature of the book’s representativeness. Such a concession, however, still leaves the reader pondering over exclusions and inclusions. James’s tales, of which there are 112, are barely mentioned; his critical output is more or less ignored; and despite the editor’s asserting that “the reader will find virtually all of James’s major fictions discussed here, and from virtually every angle current in the last fifty years,” The Golden Bowl and The American Scene dominate in approaches mostly anchored in gender, nation, and the market (admittedly, clear correlatives of T. S. Eliot’s designation of life as, entirely, “birth, copulation, and death”). There are, unusually for the Cambridge University Press, signs of casual editing: Robert Weisbuch’s stunning re-examination of Isabel Archer’s Miltonic trajectory in The Portrait of a Lady departs from the “Notes” and “Works Cited” format elsewhere adopted; also, there are scattered proofreading problems (Freedman’s overworked “pestiferous” in his introduction, “nteresting” on page 88, “crate” for “create” on page 90, and the omission of two publication dates in notes 24 and 25 (223).

Then there are the straightforward mistakes. The Golden Bowl was not “published in 1905” (21) but in 1904 (New York) and...