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The Editor as Hero: Henry James and the New York Edition by Thomas M. Leitch, Yale University An author's personality can help or hurt the attention readers give to his books, and it is sometimes fatal to one's talent not to have a public with a clear public recognition of one's size. The way to save your work and reach more readers is to advertise yourself, steal your own favorite page out of Hemingway's unwritten Notes from Papa On How The Working Novelist Can Get Ahead. Even without the reference to Hemingway, few critics would mistake the prose of Norman Mailer's "First Advertisement for Myself" for the work of Henry James. The author who wrote of The Awkward Age that "my first care had to be the covering of my tracks" (IX.xiv) was not the most self-advertising of artists or of men.2 /\s n(s career progresses, however, James inclines to advertise, not his personality, but the authority of his imaginative vision, a vision radically critical in a double sense: the tendency of so many of his heroes and heroines, from Isabel Archer to Maggie Verver, to possess an Imaginative consciousness that makes them Interpreters, analysts, critics of life; and the status of James himself as a literary critic, a commentator on fictional works. The intimate connection between these two senses, implicit throughout his work, became explicit in James's late work, most pointedly in the New York Edition of his novels and tales, James regarded the New York Edition of his novels and tales as both an act and a monument. The acts of writing and revising, he wrote in concluding the last of his critical prefaces to the New York Edition, 'belong as nearly to our conduct and our life as every other feature of our freedom" (XXI I l.xxi v). At the same time, James intended by "this Infinitely interesting and amusing act of re-appropriation" (XXIII.xiv) to leave behind an authorized and definitive version of his work assembled and judged from the viewpoint of his ripest maturity. In the preface to Roderick Hudson (1876), the first of the series, James suggests a common subject and narrative method for all his major fiction: •The centre of interest throughout 'Roderick' is in Rowland Mallet's consciousness, and the drama is the very drama of that consciousness" (l.xvii)—a formula that could be applied mutat i s mutand i s to Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Hyacinth Robinson, Fieda Vetch, Mai sie Farange, the governess in "The Turn of the Screw," Vanderbank, Merton Densher, Lambert Strether, and the Princess and Prince Amerigo. In a passage that might serve as a gloss on the phrase 'tirama of consciousness," James describes these characters as "intense perceivers, all, of their respective predicaments," whose '^adventures and their history" are 'tÃ-etermined by their feelings and the nature of their minds" (V.xvi). All of these characters have an intelligence, a sensibility, an imaginative value pointedly in excess of their ability to shape or to influence events In their world. Often they are powerless to act effectively in a world they understand all too well; when they do act—when Isabel marries Gilbert Osmond, when Hyacinth allies himself with Paul Muniment's revolutionary friends—they act without understanding the Implications of their actions. The movement of the major novels is to educate or perfect a given consciousness 1. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959), p. 21. 2. The Novels and Tales of Henry James (24 volumes; New York: Scrlbner's, 1907-09). Parenthetical references to the prefaces and texts of the New York Edition are by chapter (if applicable) and then— as in the sentence footnoted here—by volume and page. Leon Edel notes in Henry James: The Master, 19011916 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972) that James had originally intended the number of volumes to be twenty-three (pp. 321-23). The I vory Tower and The Sense of the Past were added to the edition after James's death, bringing the total number of volumes to twenty-six. THEHENRY JAMES REVIEW 24 FALL, 1981 In the ways of the world (or, in...

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