American Memory in Henry James: Void and Value (review)

This gracefully written, sensitive appreciation of James's later work is based on a manuscript largely completed just before the author's death. It has been edited and brought to completion by his widow, Rosemary Righter. Somewhat surprisingly, the book deals less with the International Theme apparently announced in the title than with the moral and historical questions implied in the subtitle. An interesting case is made for the "inseparability" of the ideals or mythic meanings suggested by the figures of America and Europe in James's treatment, a case that often leads into a further, sustained reflection on the absence of available resolution, synthesis, or even clear-cut choices for or against "America" or "Europe" in the historical world embodied with such psychological intensity in the main protagonists. There are very fine treatments here of The American Scene, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl; hardly ever a false note in the analysis (there is at least one: Charlotte Stant can hardly be called so clumsily an "international tramp"). And there is a deep, very helpful reflection on Jamesian tragedy, which was a new sort—not a result of what one did or what was done to one but a result of what does not happen, a tragedy of absence or of "value" in a disturbing "void." This literary and existential form was carried almost to parodic excess in "The Beast in the Jungle" and embodied beautifully in Lambert Strether.