Henry James: Critical Assessments (review)

Book Reviews Graham Clarke, ed. Henry James: Critical Assessments. Vol. I: Memories , Views and Writers. 425 + xxi pp. Vol. II: The Critical Response: Reviews and Early Essays. 497 + xii pp. Vol. Ill: A Twentieth-Century Overview. 408 + vi pp. Vol. IV: Reading the Writing: Novels, Novellas and Stories. 671 + viii pp. The Banks, Mountfield, New Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1991. $500.00. By Robert L. Gale, University of Pittsburgh Graham Clarke's Henry James: Critical Assessments is part of the Helm Information series of "Critical Assessments of Writers in English," which already includes multivolume sets concerning T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Virginia Woolf, and which in time will include volumes on Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and perhaps other major figures. Unique indeed is this four-volume, 2,048-page collection of 234 critical and biographical pieces concerning Henry James. It spans an amazing 119 years, from 1868 (with a letter from William James to Henry James) to 1986 (a chapter from Michael Anesko's "Friction in the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship). The items range in length from six lines (John Bailey on the death of Henry James) to ninety-seven pages (the entire Henry James section from C. Hartley Grattan's The Three Jameses: A Family of Minds). Clarke begins his monumental work with a long introductory section. This includes a careful little introduction in which he comments on James's enigmatic nature, his transitional position as a writer reaching from "early Victorianism" to "high modernism," his artistically combining social moralism with the challenges of form and style, his being both loyal American expatriate and exile in England, and his function as a writer's writer. Clarke candidly touches on his The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 329-336. © 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press 330 The Henry James Review editorial omissions, aware as he is, for example, that he has slighted James's plays and neglected certain other items. Clarke feels—and rightly—that his selections both gauge evolving responses to James over the decades and demonstrate the consistency of his towering stature as both an equivocal personality and a preeminent , versatile man of letters. Then follows a chronology of James's life, often year by year. Next comes a bibliography of James's writings—collections, autobiographical volumes, selected editions of his essays and criticism, prose fiction in book form, plays, and "Other" (mainly travel writings and early assemblies of letters). Clarke then offers an enormous bibliography of criticism of James—divided into bibliographical and biographical works, general studies long and short, special issues of periodicals devoted to James, a list of Scrutiny pieces (1937-1950), information on locations of manuscript collections, and a short list of books dealing with the topic of American writers and expatriation, mainly in James's time. Next comes a list of serializations of James's novels (including the gratuitous information that The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove were not serialized); and a list of James's stories long and short, including details of revisions thereof. Of vital help is a chronological list of criticism included in Clarke's four volumes, with, for each item, the exact date, author (when known), title (if given), reference, and location in the present collection by volume and item number. For some reason, Clarke concludes his introductory pages with a skimpy tabulation of estimated sales of some fourteen of James's books in Britain and America during his lifetime (with Daisy Miller winning and The Awkward Age doing badly). This information proves the cliché that James, though critically acclaimed before he died, was not truly popular until later. Clarke's obligatory acknowledgments pages are both most impressive and very difficult to make quick sense of. A few housekeeping facts should be added here. Each volume is graced with a picture of James. Together they march in chronological order: James in 1882, James in 1894, Max Beerbohm's caricature showing James nonplussed by the gyrations of some of his contemporaries, and James with piercing eyes under his silly 1904 top hat. The volumes are beautifully printed on semislick paper, with edges...