A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle 1895-1915 (review)

Book Reviews 211 Only if the problematic of consciousness is seen as linguistic would we have a truly interrelational process wherein the struggle would be die interlinguistic process of reading. In other words, Cameron's failure to contest the phenomenalism of language results in a romantic reading of James's novels and of consciousness. Joseph G. Kronick Louisiana State University Miranda Seymour. A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle 1895-1915. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. 327 pp. $19.95. This account of the remarkable constellation of writers who lived within visiting distance of Lamb House around the turn of the century takes its place in a series of volumes beginning with the memoirs of the writers diemselves (including Ford Madox Ford's Return to Yesterday, Edith Wharton's A Backward Glance, and H. G. Wells's Experiment in Autobiography) and continuing with biographical studies by H. Montgomery Hyde, Nicholas Delbanco, and Iain Finlayson. Seymour's version of the familiar anecdotes is vivid and engaging; aldiough specialists will find little here that is new (except for some details about Howard Sturgis, Seymour's great-great-uncle), students will find tiiis survey a lively and stimulating introduction to James's friendships and literary connections. The volume is provided with maps, photographs, chronologies and bibliographies tiiat evoke the dates and places at issue in each of its chapters in an original and suggestive manner. Unfortunately, its casual documentation, togedier witii a number of overstatements or errors in matters of detail, diminish its value as a scholarly reference work. Seymour's title is taken from an allusion by Wells to the "ring of foreign conspirators" who had settled in the south of England, which inspired Ford to draw a "Sketch Map of the Attempted Invasion of G' Britain MDCCCXCV et seq." (Neither the date nor die addressee of Wells's letter is given, nor die source of the map reproduced as an illustration.) Seymour is the first to acknowledge that her title is an exaggeration: "in the strictest sense .. . there was no group, no conspiracy." But there was indeed a loose collection of neighboring artists who met socially, collaborated variously, and ultimately found reason to disapprove of one another's prose styles or lifestyles. James's twenty-year villeggiatura in Rye is the natural focal point for such an undertaking, and the Christmas revels at Brede Place in 1899 (which James did not attend, although he contributed to "The Ghost") provide an occasion for introducing the main dramatis personne. Separate chapters are devoted to James's relations with Crane, Wells, William James, and Edith Wharton, and also to Conrad's complex connection with Ford. The nature of the overstatements and inaccuracies to be found here can perhaps best be illustrated with tiie example of Conrad. The entiiusiastic pace of Seymour's narrative apparently prevents her from entering deeply into tiie quagmires of literary evidence, which she prefers to bridge with simple assertions: she claims, for instance, that "The Black Mate was not his first work"; but we cannot be certain that Conrad did not write a version of this story as early as 1886 for submission to a writing contest sponsored by the magazine Tit-Bits. A more obvious mistake is Seymour's assertion that an introduction to Thomas Beer's biography of Stephen Crane was "Conrad's last piece of writing"; it was written in March 1923, more than a year before his death, and earlier dian several of the pieces published in Last Essays. (Zdzislaw Najder describes "Geography and Some Explorers," written in November, as "his last substantial piece of work.") Moreover, Conrad was not "buried in the Roman Catholic Church of St. 212 The Henry James Review Thomas's" (where his funeral service was held), but outdoors in die Canterbury Cemetery. The vexed question of Ford's putative authorship of a dozen pages of Nostromo is reduced to the announcement that "he had contributed a couple of reasonably Conradian paragraphs." And if Ford can write Conradian, Conrad can apparendy also write Fordian: the fact that Ford served as Conrad's amanuensis leads Seymour to the amazing allegation that in both of Conrad's memoirs, The Mirror of the...