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· 109 ·· CHAPTER 3 · Hover, Torment, Waste: Late Writings and the Great War Why does poetry matter to us? The ways in which answers to this question are offered testify to its absolute importance. For the field of possible respondents is clearly divided between those who affirm the significance of poetry only on the condition of altogether confusing it with life and those for whom the significance of poetry is instead exclusively a function of its isolation from life. . . . Opposed to these two positions is the experience of the poet, who affirms that if poetry and life remain infinitely divergent on the level of the biography and psychology of the individual, they nevertheless become absolutely indistinct at the point of their reciprocal desubjectification. And—at that point—they are united not immediately but in a medium. This medium is language. The poet is he who, in the word, produces life. Life, which the poet produces in the poem, withdrawals from both the lived experience of the psychosomatic individual and the biological unsayability of the species. —Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem (translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen) The last essay that Henry James prepared for publication was an introduction to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America. This remarkable tribute to a beautiful dead young poet, killed by blood poisoning while serving in the British Army, offers various enticements to biographical reading. It joins a series of James’s essays written during World War I—many of them collected in Pierre Walker’s important collection Henry James on Culture1 —which tempts one to read them as radically distinct from, if not opposed to, the other late fictional and critical writings. Here, at last, so a reader might think, is the writer in his own voice, bereft of a narrator’s ironical remove, speaking about the real world without the subtleties (or evasions) of fiction—a revelation that might inspire, depending 110 HOVER, TORMENT, WASTE on one’s attitude toward the late style, regret or vindication, disappointment or relief, embarrassment or gratification. At last we are allowed behind the curtain. Often implicit in accounts of this period of James’s work is an assumption that his writing here turns both referential and autobiographical—pointing to the war and to a life—and these strange essays are assimilated to the larger oeuvre by referring them to the author’s biography. In Leon Edel’s account of James’s life, for instance, these essays often appear—quoted or summarized—as statements of James’s attitude toward the war. So conscious, before the war, that his American birth made him an outsider in England, James, Edel writes, “began to speak of ‘we’ and ‘us’”; James’s taking of British citizenship in July 1915 and the energy he devoted to various humanitarian activities during the war suggest that this claim of (for Edel, valorized) identification and community might be to a certain extent justified, biographically speaking.2 To Edel and other biographers, the psychobiographical interest of the essays— and what further links them to the coherent story of a life—lies in the mystery of James and the Civil War.3 The castration thematics that have to a large extent oriented discussion of James’s “obscure hurt” has allowed critics to unite unexamined understandings of the relation of “art” to “life” with unexamined attitudes about masculinity (the contempt, vicarious shame, or the restraint of queasy delicacy about treating another’s evasion of the “choice” to fight manfully in war, for instance, that implicitly cast deviations from conventional masculinity in terms of lack or failure). The desire of scholars to vindicate James’s not serving in the Civil War attests to a felt, if also a more or less disguised, need to vindicate his style from a lack of direct “engagement,” thereby tied, through the pull of the particular thematics about which one might or might not be direct, to an implied effeminacy, even sexual deviance. Redemptive understandings of James’s later “war record,” therefore, give readers reason to cringe, even apart from the grotesque puffery through which a certain kind of writing inevitably seeks to overcome its distance from the war (or even sporting event) it would celebrate through the blind adulation of the writer’s asserted identification with it. Hence the hidden pity, contempt, and the vindication of vicarious pride asserted in Fred Kaplan’s summary of James’s World War I activities are not the less striking for their being implicitly attributed to James himself...

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