The Portrait of a Lady: The Second Hundred Years

The Portrait of a Lady: The Second Hundred Years by William T. Stafford, Purdue University Henry James does not peer through experience to the future, through this future to the future futures, endlessly down the infinite tube. He does not find in today only what is needful for tomorrow. His aim is rather to appreciate and to respect the things of his experience and to set them, finally, free. —"The High Brutality of Good Intentions," by William H. Gass I once wrote that no critical, scholarly, historical, biographical, bibliographical, exegetical, textual, linguistic, structural, or hermeneutic method yet invented or discovered by man or by computer has failed to find In one aspect or another of Henry James and his world appropriate fodder off which to feed. No single aspect of that Jamesian world, moreover, has been given more comprehensive attention than that given to his splendid novel of 1881, The Portrait of a Lady. I am thus tempted to describe as ample, by which I do not necessarily mean excessive, that vast library of critical attention to the novel that has developed around the world since it first appeared in book form one hundred years ago. Just how ample that attention has been is nowhere better illustrated, moreover, than in a volume of centenary essays on the novel, edited by Leon Edel and Marion Richmond, that Is to be published in 1982. After some attention to the contents of the volume as a centenary celebration of the literary history of the novel and as a sampling of current attitudes toward it, I would like to switch roles from that of literary historian of sorts to that of literary prophet. That is to say, I want to conjecture, to speculate, on ways The Portrait of a Lady is likely to be read during its second hundred years rather than simply to recount again (as so many others, including myself, have done so often before) the wide variety of ways the novel has already been read.^ All of the essays in the Edel/Richmond centenary project were written expressly for their collection, although at one stage in its conception consideration was given also to including Graham Greene's "Henry James: The Private Universe," which originally appeared in 1936, because the editors felt that it is "representative of the best criticism in the earlier years of James's reputation" and that it would have given "the volume a retrospective quality in the midst of so much contemporaneity." (The Greene essay, I understand, was later dropped from the volume, and other changes in the content might well be made before the collection is published). Even so, "contemporaneity" is indeed aptly descriptive of the essays planned for the volume at the time I originally saw them, although I would be 1. In "James's 'The Birthplace': A Fable for Critics?" In my Books Speaking to Books: A Conceptúa I Approach to American Fiction, to be published by the University of North Carolina Press later this year. 2. Through the kind intercession of its editors, Leon Edel and Marion Richmond, I was allowed to read in manuscript form that forthcoming collection. I am deeply grateful to them and wish hereby publicly to express my appreciation. 3. In my Introduction, for example, to Perspectives on James's "The Portrait of a Lady" (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1967), pp. ix-xx; or in Roger Gard's Henry James: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); or LyalI Power's Introduction in his Merrill Studies in "The Portrait of a Lady" (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co., 1970); or Peter Buitenhuis's Introduction in his Twentieth Century Interpretations of "The Portrait of A Lady" (Englewood Cl iffs : Prentice-Hall, 1968); or, indeed, Marion Richmond's "The Early Critical Reception of The Portrait of a Lady" in the already mentioned forthcoming centenary volume. 91 quick to add that it is a richly varied contemporaneity that marks them, one that uniformly eschews narrow dogmatism or self-righteous myopia. None of the contributors to this volume writes as If his or her approach to this complex novel were the only appropriate approach or as If his or her...