The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in His Work After 1900 (review)

This book is the fifth in Adeline Tintner's "World Series" books on Henry James. Earlier came The Museum World of Henry James (1986), James'sBook World (1987), his Pop World (1989) and his Cosmopolitan World (1991). Tintner also wrote Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes (1993), and co-authored The Library of Henry James (1987) with the late Leon Edel. All of these books she uses and cites in The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James. This work also includes twelve essays by Tintner, published between 1973 and 1996. Each essay is expanded here and is attached to new material. On the verso, she cites these essays and indicates their original locations. They provide the framework for the present work and more than half of its contents in one solid, convenient book.

Tintner's well-known, wide-ranging source-and-analogue approach, used here again, is a welcome relief from too many juiceless studies of James based on newfangled critical theories. Two pillar-like assumptions support Tintner's overarching insights here: (1) James's fiction is partly factual; and (2) his autobiographical volumes, as well as The American Scene, are partly fictional.

Tintner reasons that as the world slouched into the twentieth century and took James along, he began "loosening up" (her brilliant phrase) as he confronted, or confronted anew, eight topics (167). With a chapter devoted to each, they are: (1) urban life (hotels, new money, art collectors, museums, photographers); (2) James's converting traits of friends and other notables into fiction; (3) his seeing his previous writings with revisionary eyes; (4) new theories about time; (5) his more liberal attitudes toward sexuality (including autoeroticism, homosexuality); (6) George Gissing's view of the grubby underclass; (7 [the only totally new chapter]) crime and heroic criminals; and (8) war.

It is impossible to discuss everything Tintner thinks James saw after 1899, creatively and ahead of most other writers. Representative commentary must suffice. Arresting is her dogmatic belief that Spencer Brydon (from "The Jolly Corner"), far from being permanently frightened by his New York stay-busy-at-home alter ego, "is going to become his alter ego" (17). She deftly analyzes James's creative responses to Impressionistic French paintings seen in a private Connecticut home in 1904, and again in 1910 (detailed in The American Scene). She strenuously pleads her contention that James, because of his valuable late-life "visual experiences" (101), revised Roderick Hudson into "a different book" and that he converted Isabel Archer's views into those of "the sixty-five-year-old James" (114). His "usurping consciousness" (100) caused him to alter family memories and even the wording of their letters for his autobiography; Isabel's "expanded consciousness" (104) made her see life and art differently too. When Tintner contends that the secret in "The Figure in the Carpet" is Hugh Vereker's playing with his own "organ of amativeness" (169) (a once-hip phrenological term), she is delightfully persuasive. James found George Gissing's grubby books to be ill-proportioned but his information about "the underclass" insightful. Tintner's book is also ill-proportioned. Her first chapter is sixty pages, while her sixth and seventh chapters together total only twenty-four. Her "Gay Reading of The Sacred Fount" is fascinating: the narrator cannot detect what Tintner's subtly appealed-to re-readers should, namely that the two hidden sexual pairings are not each male-female but male-male and female-female, respectively. But her twenty-page explication hammers at us too relentlessly. Tintner interprets James's hint in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward that The Sacred Fount was a joke to mean that he "did not want . . . too many people to dig out his secret" (183). It seems unreasonable to think that any...