A Conversation with Louis Auchincloss on Henry James

A Conversation with Louis Auchincloss on Henry James by David Adams Leeming, University of Connecticut I first met Louis Auchincloss in the early 1950s. It was he who first encouraged me to read Henry James. The following conversation took place in New York on Febmary 18th, 1988. It is part of a series of interviews with writers on James. DL: As you know, Louis, Henry James was very much a theoretician of the novel, one of whose major concerns was the "fellowship of the guild." And you have always been closely associated witii James. In fact, in Reflections of a Jacobite you speak of "reading over Henry James's shoulder." I wonder whether you, as a fellow novelist, as one of James's guild, continue to read over his shoulder. How has he affected the way you read contemporary fiction, for example? LA: I don't think he has. Although my admiration of James as a novehst increases to a point where it really can't increase any more, my admiration of James as a critic or as a model to follow is correspondingly, to a certain extent, diminished. When you imply that he developed the craft of the novel so that people after him could follow him, I don't really see him doing that. It is tme that Percy Lubbock, his greatest admirer and I think the best interpreter of his craft and technique, felt that James had really reached a kind of ultimate in the form of a novel and that there wasn't really that much further to go. In other words, altiiough it sounds absurd to say it, there was a sort of belief present in both James and Lubbock that the Jamesian novel was the perfect novel and that people thereafter could do it that way or not do it at all. I don't say that they actually articulated such a thing, but I believe it was implicit in the way they felt about the novel. But I don't feel that Henry James's craft is very helpful for novelists to follow. E.M. Forster puts it well in Aspects of the Novel when he says a lot of James's concerns with the craft of fiction are much more important to James than to other novelists. For example, some of the rules are very simple. James believed in concentrating the novel to a very few points of view or to one alone, as in The Ambassadors. And that's very fine. And you get a particular kind of effect. But it's not necessary for an excellent novel. I mean, Emma and Pride and Prejudice are wonderful novels, and the form is changed all over the place. A Conversation with Louis Auchincloss on Henry James 61 Of course, James can be right. For instance, he criticizes Mrs. Humphry Ward for jumping in and out of characters. And if you read Mrs. Humphry Ward, which nobody does today, but if you do, you will find that indeed she jumps very clumsily from one character to another, so it's rather jolting at times to read some of her scenes. On the other hand, Jane Austen violates all James's rules, but she does it smoothly and well, and it doesn't bother you for a minute, really. It doesn't bother me, anyway. Another example: James gave up the narrative style, the narrative character, the "I" character. He made the obvious point that when you limit yourself to that, you obviously are limiting yourself to what the narrator can see. But the narrator can see an awful lot. It seems to me that the firstperson narration can be a very effective form of novel writing, one not to be abandoned lightly. In the age of psychoanalysis that has followed James, people are a lot more aware of their own inhibitions and subconscious motives and hatreds and so on. Therefore, an "I" character writing about himself can know a lot more about himself than an "I" character, say, in the 185Os. And to avoid what the "I" character doesn't see—well, there isn't any reason, actually, that you can't have...