In Memoriam, J. A. Ward

THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW Volume 11, Number 1 Winter, 1990 Table of Contents A Calendar of the Published Letters of Henry James: Part I. By Stephen H. Jobe................................................1 Henry James's Gentle Heretics and the Old Persuasion: Roman Catholicity in The Golden Bowl. By Edwin Fussell................30 Jamesian Gleanings. By Arthur Sherbo.......................................42 Levels of Knowing: Development of Consciousness in The Wings of the Dove. By Linda Raphael....................................58 Review of Michael Anesko, "Friction With the Market" : Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. By Marcia Jacobson.................72 Review of Margaret D. Setz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1880's: Old Guard and Avant Garde. By Adeline Tintner.........74 In Memoriam, J. A. Ward With great sadness we record the death at age fifty-eight of J. A. Ward, a distinguished scholar and critic of Henry James and, more generally, of American literature and culture. Joseph Anthony Ward, Jr.—Jack Ward to family and friends—was born in Baltimore in February, 1931. He did undergraduate work at Notre Dame, earned his master's and doctorate at Tulane, taught at the University of Southwestern Louisiana for ten years, and then went on to Rice University, where he spent the rest of his career, chairing the department there from 1968 through 1973. In 1960-61, he was a Guggenheim Fellow. Jamesians will of course remember J. A. Ward best for his two books on Henry James. The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in the Fiction of Henry James was published in 1961. The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction, published in 1967, remains one of the most frequently cited works of James scholarship. In my view, it is—along with Dorothea Krook's The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James and Laurence Bedwell Holland's The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James—one of the three finest critical studies of James of the 1960s, a classic of James criticism. Among Ward's major essays on James were "The Ambassadors as a Conversion Experience" (the Southern Review, 1969), "The Ambiguities of Henry James" (the Sewanee Review, 1975), "Henry James and Graham Greene" (which Robert L. Gale, writing in ALS, called "the gem" of the 1979 inaugural issue of the HJR), and "The Portraits of Henry James" (HJR, 1989). Jack was on the editorial board of this journal from its inception, serving generously as a prompt and trenchant evaluator of manuscripts. As a contributor, he occupied a place of honor, kicking off the first issue (preceded only by an editorial and Leon Edel's "Westminster Abbey Address") and opening the first issue of the tenth-anniversary volume. His interests, however, were by no means limited to Henry James. When he was twenty-five, in 1956, his essay "The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick" was published in American Literature. Among the other essays he published, exemplifying the range of his interests, were pieces on John Updike (in Critique), on James Agee (in Modern Fiction Studies), on "Emerson and the Educated Will: Notes on the Process of Conversion" (in ELH), and on "The Hollywood Metaphor: The Marx Brothers, S. J. Perelman, and Nathaniel West" (in the Southern Review). In 1985, he published an original and ambitious book, American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper. I consider myself very fortunate to have known Jack Ward. Although he almost never attended professional conferences, he came to a meeting of the South Central Modern Language Association in New Orleans some ten years ago. He telephoned beforehand to say that he was coming to meet me, though I protested then—and still do—that the honor and privilege were mine. I drove down to New Orleans to see him, and we had a grand time. Later, shortly before American Silences came out, I was able to bring Jack to LSU for a brief visit; he gave a very well received, slide-illustrated lecture on Edward Hopper, and he stayed with my family, charming my eight-year-old son and five-year-old daughter with his warmth and humor. A devoted father, Jack is survived by two daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth. It...