Henry James's Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction (review)

Adeline R. Tintner. Henry James's Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998. 468 pp. $45.

The first thing that must be said of this book, the sixth of Adeline Tintner's surveys of everything that went into a James text and everything that has come out of them, is that it is bound somewhere to contain the essential piece of information that a James scholar is looking for, so that, used encyclopedically, it is very useful and full of unexpected details. The title conveys Adeline Tintner's intention, though the word "figure" in it may need glossing: Tintner is as interested in James's influence as a literary figure and as a personality as she is in the influence of his texts. She runs through a range of writers who have used James, some only familiar because of James, and further looks at James in films and in art, including book-illustration. A chapter on Leon Edel's biography of James, which she calls the "Baedeker" for people wishing to visit James (437), reminds us of Tintner's comparable aim to be similarly complete and more than suggests where her own allegiances lie.

Even encyclopedias, however, have their omissions. In dealing with so much (and much of it material that goes way beyond a reviewer's range) she takes up an attitude to the material she discusses. So on operatic treatments of James, she has virtually nothing to say about Britten's The Turn of the Screw or Owen Wingrave, but spends her time exclusively on Argento's The Aspern Papers. She says that Britten in The Turn of the Screw "follows James's plots and characters faithfully" (247), but, considering that Britten unequivocally literalizes the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw and even makes them sing in duet the Yeatsian line "the ceremony of innocence is drowned," this is disputatious, like many of her judgements in which it becomes clear that her intention is not to offer something objectively encyclopedic. Omissions nonetheless become a little surprising. I regret that she finds no room to say anything about what is Jamesian in The Good Soldier (118). Nor does Tintner mention L. P. Hartley, whose The Go-Between seems a very interesting appropriation of Jamesian motifs, together with Jamesian indirection, while the novel's older, passive male figure, whose life has been spoiled by the childhood incident, seems straight out of The Turn of the Screw. Tintner makes excellent use of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (384-86), which she compares to "Brooksmith." She is right, and the appropriations could go much further, since James on the English country house is as foreign to the subject as the Japanese Ishiguro and both writers look at the British class system from the outside. But Tintner overly narrows the concept of influence: she could have taken not simply "Brooksmith" as her model, but all James's writings as an expatriate and as a commentator on British politics. And this leads me to two critiques.

The first: the range of authors she chooses seems to me to be on the genteel side. I feel this with her relating of James to Noel Coward, Agatha Christie, and J. I. M. Stewart particularly and with what looks like a bias towards English appropriations of James (e.g., Anita Brookner), and, especially, with her attention to gay uses of James, where genteel traditions ride high and are very bourgeois indeed. There is insufficient attention to those authors where you would not expect to find James--what of Faulkner, for instance? Or Toni Morrison? Or the Latin American novel, starting with Borges? The writers she uses often confirm the high bourgeois English sense of James, and they occasion little reading against the grain of "accepted," and often dismissive, views of James.

Second, in her writing, no discussion of...