Henry and Edith: "The Velvet Glove" as an "In" Joke

Henry and Edith: "The Velvet Glove" as an "In" Joke by Jean Frantz Blackall, Cornell University Henry James's "The Velvet Glove" (1909) was originally titled "The Top of the Tree," which is an unsubtle allusion to Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree (1907) (HJL 504-505).' The publication of Wharton's novel in effect provided the thematic material for James's short story, because a magazine editor had unsuccessfully attempted to induce James to write a "puff for her novel (Edel 35354 ). In "The Velvet Glove" a lesser novelist (a Continental Princess writing under the pseudonym of Amy Evans) asks a more celebrated author, John Berridge, to write an '"irresistible log-rolling Preface'" for her latest book, The Velvet Glove (VG 259). But Berridge repudiates her overture and enjoins her to be a Princess, not a novelist. As a beautiful and distinguished woman, she is Romance; why should she attempt to write romances? Of James's attitude Leon Edel remarks, "James seems to have written the tale in an open spirit of mockery [of Edith Wharton], for his first title was 'The Top of the Tree.' In the end he decided to be more cautious. The story was given a mysterious title, 'The Velvet Glove'" (354). The present article has two interrelated objectives : to approach James's story with particular regard for its title and for other book titles that occur within it, and to consider the implications of this mode of approach for a response to Leon Edel's and Adeline R. Tintner's respective readings of "The Velvet Glove" as a literary reflection of the relationship between James and Wharton. In a letter written in 1902, James misremembered the title of Edith Wharton's "The Moving Finger," referring to it as the "Vanished Hand" (HJL 237-38). His slip suggests how he perceived Wharton's story and its emphasis. Wharton's own title alludes to the moving finger of time, a variation on a more commonplace phrase she uses elsewhere , "the hand of time."2 In her story Ralph Grancy wants the presence of his late wife to remain with him. He therefore coerces the artist, Claydon, to retouch his masterful portrait of Mrs. Grancy so as to age it as Grancy himself grows older. The title is most explicitly glossed in an explanatory remark Grancy makes to the friend who subsequently narrates the story: "Three years of it [happy marriage]—and then she died. It was so sudden that there was no change, no diminution. It was as if she had suddenly become fixed, immovable, like her own portrait: as if Time had ceased at its happiest hour, just as Claydon had thrown down his brush one day and said, Ί can't do better than that'" (MF 166-67). Hence Claydon must assume Time's moving finger and age the portrait, so that the dead lady will not be left behind, fixed in the past. James's title, "The Vanished Hand," suggests a different emphasis, on the deceased lady rather than on the passage of time. Mrs. Grancy is absent but yet remains a felt presence for her widowed husband, for the artist who painted her portrait, and for the narrator character who contemplates her effects on the other two. She is the central imaginative object for the male characters. In this emphasis James's misnaming of Wharton's story anticipates his naming of his own story, "The Velvet Glove," for both titles point toward the central lady. As a pivotal figure she exerts an imaginative influence over the principal male characters, Grancy and Claydon in "The Moving Finger," John Berridge in "The Velvet Glove." Moreover, in both of James's titles this felt presence is identified with the figure of a hand whose influence is concealed, either "vanished" or an iron hand in a velvet glove. This figure of a hand brings us closer to The Fruit of the Tree (1907), which was Wharton's most recent novel at the time James wrote "The Velvet Glove" (completed by December 4, 1908) (HJL 504), and apparently the one which instigated his own theme. For The Fruit of the Tree opens with a vivid description...