My Sculptor/My Self: A Story of Reading

A forum on Jamesian arts invites a reconsideration not only of James's manifest interest in the visual arts but also of his profound and continuing concern with problems of form, aesthetics, and representation. An indispensable text for any extended consideration of James and the arts on both of these scores is William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, James's 1903 biography of the American sculptor (1819-1895). This astonishing and largely neglected text stages a complex psychodrama that is at once familial, intertextual, and historical. ¹ William Wetmore Story and His Friends is less a conventional biography than a cultural fiction that powerfully synthesizes James's lifelong preoccupation with a nexus of issues that Story suggestively embodies: the relation between expatriation and artistic identity, the international theme that had been revived in the late novels contemporary with the Story biography, and certain autobiographical resonances brought into play by prominent parallels between Story's life and James's own—the Cambridge brahmin background, the law career (brief on James's part) abandoned in favor of a life in art, the Italian travels, and the ultimate European expatriation. As John Carlos Rowe puts it, James's narrative "ends up revealing his own psycho-poetic and cultural roots" (108). Story plays an overdetermined role in the Jamesian imaginary: he is at once a figure for the nineteenth-century American artist abroad, a place-holder for authorial anxieties associated in particular with Hawthorne, and the occasion for James's reflection on questions of representation synecdochically figured here, as in his early novel Roderick Hudson, by the genre of sculpture—especially as explored in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. Richard Brodhead argued some fifteen years ago that the "supersignified style James formulates for his late works is clearly derived from Hawthornesque precedents" (175), but the implications of this insight have yet to be carried beyond the late fictions explored by Brodhead (especially "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Golden Bowl) and to be fully applied to what has come to be known as James's fourth phase. In what follows, I will suggest that William Wetmore Story develops an ambivalent intertextual conversation with Hawthorne as well as with Story, one that is mediated explicitly by The Marble Faun and implicitly by Roderick Hudson.

Although James is interested throughout the biography to assess the character of Story's achievement as a sculptor, his fullest and most explicit treatment of Story's aesthetic principles appears in a chapter on Cleopatra (1858) and The Libyan Sibyl (1861), the works whose enormously successful appearance in the London Exhibition of 1862 established Story's reputation. ² The chapter opens with a consideration of what James views as the comparatively naive aesthetic sensibility of Story's generation—what he terms "a critical attitude easier, simpler and less 'evolved' than our own" (2: 76). He elaborates: "'Critical' attitude is doubtless even too much to say; the sense to which, for the most part, the work of art or of imagination, the picture, the statue, the novel, the play, appealed was not, in any strictness, the aesthetic sense in general or the plastic in particular, but the sense of the romantic, the anecdotic, the supposedly historic, the explicitly pathetic." On this view, Story and his contemporaries valorized narrative over form, expressionism over formalism: his "was still the age in which an image had, before anything else, to tell a story, and that had much to do with the immense welcome offered to the Sibyl and the Cleopatra of the new American sculptor." Story's aesthetic is at once reductively and redundantly that of story itself, and the biography recurrently judges his work to have been excessively plotted or "romantic" and insufficiently formal or "pictorial." The insensitivity to form that James imputes to Story's generation goes some distance, he implies, toward explaining Story's popular success. Nevertheless, Cleopatra and The...