The Critical Reception of Henry James: Creating a Master (review)

Scholars of Henry James need no persuasion that James criticism has been vibrant and lively since the novelist’s lifetime; the pages of this journal alone confirm that, as James himself put it, “There is really too much to say” (FW 1085). But how to navigate all these discussions? Linda Simon’s new book offers a welcome tour through the history of critical debates surrounding this major author, pointing out not only the topography that helps one find one’s way but also the value of these exchanges, which James himself, she maintains, would have appreciated. Simon wisely concludes her study by reminding readers of James’s own contention that “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” and that when we give our “reason[s] . . . for practice or preference” we ensure the continued development of literature (132).

Anyone who has tried to write about James knows how easily one can get lost in these critical debates, particularly those of the last twenty-five years, since debate itself sometimes seems less apparent than the mere accretion of views. This circumstance might lead students of James to wonder about the point of such voluminous criticism and about whether what Simon calls the “flourishing James industry” (6) isn’t just meant to further the professional lives of scholars. The strength of this book is the path that Simon charts, from James’s earliest reviews—the sort of thing one is apt to encounter when beginning to think seriously about any particular work of James’s—to what Simon calls “The Cult of Henry James,” those deeply partisan scholars writing from the time of the novelist’s death until 1960. These critics, epitomized on one side by Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington and on the other by Yvor Winters and Lionel Trilling, wished either to prove James’s irrelevance to contemporary American life or to establish James as an intensely moral, even political writer. Beyond this point, Simon takes us through the (also deeply partisan) work of James’s first major biographer, Leon Edel, and the critical revisions jockeying for position as Edel’s influence waned. This story allows us to make sense of what might otherwise seem a mystifying series of battles in more recent criticism and to recognize how strongly felt these positions are to the writers who propose them.

To take one example, the Foucauldian readings of James—best exemplified by Mark Seltzer’s controversial book, Henry James and the Art of Power (1984)—do not come out of a void; nor does the oft-repeated (if by now largely discredited) charge that James evaded his own difficult world in his fiction. Simon summarizes this position in her discussion of Alfred Habegger’s 1982 book, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in the American Novel, which advances the view, in her words, “that James encountered the world with eyes shut, that he retreated into his own consciousness and created characters who withdrew into themselves as well” (86). Simon points out that these pressing questions of James’s relative engagement emerged as early as the 1940s, when Hitler was being forced into retreat and his defeat looked inevitable but “the war effort . . . seemed hopelessly muddled and uncoordinated” (47). In 1943 The New Republic published a section “In Honor of William and Henry James” alongside essays about the war and its imagined aftermath. The inevitable question of James’s relevance was addressed by some of his “most ardent champions,” for whom the question was not just academic. As Simon points out, Trilling, Philip Rahv, F. O. Matthiessen and F. R. Leavis all shared a “frustration about their role in a society that asks for active participation to solve problems. In the midst of war, there seemed to be no role for men who did not go into combat; and even before the war, intellectuals wondered how they could contribute to urgently needed reform if...