The Private Life of Peter Quin[t]: Origins of "The Turn of the Screw"

The Private Life of Peter Quin[t]: Origins of "The Turn of the Screw" by Leon Edel and Adeline R. Tintner Editor's note: In his recently published Henry James, A Life (the one-volume version of his five-volume biography), Leon Edel offered a new and major source for "The Turn of the Screw." In his examination of this material, Professor Edel was aided by Adeline Tintner. At our request, Edel and Tintner have written the following extended account of the significance of this discovery.—DMF Henry James's Peter Quint, the sinister apparition of "The Turn of the Screw," has been haunting criticism for the better part of a century. Quint has taken many shapes since he was created in 1898—along with the former governess , Miss Jessel, her frightened successor, who is never named, and the innocent children, little Miles, aged ten, and his sister Flora, eight. They have moved, we might say, like a road show through Benjamin Britten's operatic version of the story, two film versions, William Archibald's dramatization called The Innocents and a much publicized video performance with the late Ingrid Bergman as the distraught governess-narrator of the spooky tale. The story has been analyzed by celebrated writers and been the subject of academic polemic between Edmund Wilson and the opponents of his idea that the ghosts reside exclusively in the governess's fancy. The machinery of the higher criticism has been invoked in all its "trendy" forms in spite of James's consistent declaration that too much was being read into his "wanton httle tale." His words on the subject echo a single theme—that the tale was a mere pot-boiler, indeed, "a down-on-all fours pot-boiler"—"I can only rather blush to see real substance read into it"—"a potboiler and λ jeu d'esprit"—" an inferior, a merely pictorial subject"—"this perfectly independent and irresponsible little fiction"—"a piece of ingenuity, pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation , an amusette to catch those not easily caught." Many were caught; for a great deal of artistry shone through the potboiling, and James's depreciation of such artistry properly seemed to many an excessive shrug of the shoulders. But it is now clear that he was telling the truth— his truth—about the story. One part of that truth lies in the young governess's saying, very early in "The Turn of the Screw," after seeing Peter Quint on the tower and outside the dining room, that she felt "as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always." We now have evidence mat Henry James met Peter Quin when he was going on eleven—in January 1855—and he preserved his memory in the deepest part of his mind for the next fortythree years. When he revived him, finally, he did so by the addition of a single letter of the alphabet: turned him from the Irish Peter Quin into the Gallic Peter Quint. Peter Quin's sordid history may be read in an old magazine, Frank Leslie 's New York Journal of Romance, General Literature, Science and Art. The portentous title was emphasized by an ornate masthead, showing the Muses with sundry additional decorations—scrolls, lyres, palettes, and stout vellum -bound volumes. The novelist once described the childhood comfort of the tea-hour in the large James family home at 58 West 14th Street in Manhattan, when he read popular literature and Punch "in the fading light of the winter dusk with the red fire and the red curtains in the background." Extended on the hearthrug, he passed memorable hours—those hours of childhood when every story is real to the young imagination and every illustration has the vividness of life itself. James seems quite definitely to have remembered a story entitled Temptation, by an anonymous writer, serialized from January to June in 1855—that fateful summer when the entire James family went abroad and the great panorama of Europe was opened up for the quiet and alert little boy. What strikes us as we turn the still-crisp pages of Temptation in Frank Leslie's is not only the conjunction...