Reading Henry James: A Critical Perspective on Selected Works by George Monteiro (review)

This is a little gem of a volume for Henry James scholars, who are clearly its intended audience. It amounts, in a sense, to a series of footnotes (with footnotes) on issues large and small ranging from back stories to literary influences to interpretive conundrums in major and minor works by the Master. George Monteiro brings to this miscellany a lifetime of substantial scholarly work on Henry James and his circle. Many of these twenty-two short essays are in fact excerpted from his numerous publications. This is no critical reassessment or theoretically determined reading of James’ work. Instead, confessing to a “scholar’s weakness for letters,” Monteiro reconstructs the genesis of selected novels and tales by James from his notebooks, letters, and other documents, and places them in fresh and illuminating contexts. And what a delightful journey he takes us on, as we accompany him through the archive of James’ writings! The wide range of his scholarship is his primary asset, as he quarries “the reservoir of images and impressions [of] James’s fictionalizing mind.” What Monteiro brings to the surface is often substantial (the influence of Browning, Hawthorne, and Henry Adams, for example) and sometimes deliberately whimsical. (Was Daisy Miller named for a spirited filly entered in race at a track in Pittsburgh? Were Strether’s given and middle names derived from Balzac’s “Louis Lambert,” as generally assumed, or from the pseudonym for Irish-born Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, famous for writing the song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”?) Monteiro spends a lot of critical capital on the search for possible sources for character names in James’ fiction. The obscure notes and gumshoe queries approach may appear, at times, to miss the forest for the trees, but there are sustained and fully developed readings as well which benefit greatly from this kind of scholarly detective work, from bringing to light ghosts of Sephardic Jews in “The Liar” to finding in “The Beast in the Jungle” an Ariadne’s thread that leads to Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?” If at times it seems that we are trapped in Plato’s Cave marveling at correspondences between shadows on the wall, we must remind ourselves that the cave is in fact the brilliant and richly associative mind of Henry James.