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The Henry James Review 22.1 (2001) 81-92



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Three Interviews of Henry James: Mastering the Language of Publicity

Olga Antsyferova, Ivanovo State University


Henry James was an intensely private person. This was one of the reasons why he felt somewhat alienated from certain trends in contemporary life and culture. One of these was the publicity aggressively attacking personal privacy, of which he remarks in his Notebooks in 1887:

Mania for publicity [. . .] is one of the most striking signs of our times. One sketches one's age but imperfectly if one doesn't touch on that particular matter: the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all senses between public and private. (CN 40)

Many of his fictions deal with this side of modern cultural situations (The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator [both 1888], and "The Papers" [1903] among them), exploring the ethics of publicity and expressing James's sarcastic attitude to it. Regarding contemporary mass media, in 1891 James would publicly claim:

Periodical literature is a huge, open mouth which has to be fed--a vessel of immense capacity which has to be filled. It's like a regular train which starts at an advertised hour, but which is free to start only if every seat be occupied. The seats are many, the train is ponderously long, and hence the manufacture of dummies for the seasons when there are not passengers enough. (EL 95) 1

Unwilling to find himself in a position of a "dumm[y] for the season," only three times in his life did James consent to give interviews. In this essay I would like to [End Page 81] show that, without ever betraying his antagonistic stance towards the public press, James of the early twentieth century learned how to manipulate interviews and use them for his own purposes.

Some of the recent research on Henry James revises the standard notion of his relation to the mass press, finding examples of his "dalliance with the newspaper world." Studying the 1884 publication of two James stories ("Pandora" and "Georgina's Reasons") in American newspapers and focusing on the expectations of historical readers and the paratextual effect of the printed materials surrounding the stories, Charles Johanningsmeier comes to the conclusion that these stories "actually exhibit James's inability to tap into the psyche of the common newspaper reader" (49). Yet the direct encounters of Henry James with journalism and publicity as exemplified in the genre of interview give evidence of James's "willingness to experiment with different publishing media," as Stuart Culver puts it, as well as examples of his attempt to reach a wider reading audience in the late 1890s (42). James gradually learned in the years 1904-15 to control this journalistic genre to his own ends.

The first interview took place during Henry James's visit to the United States in 1904-05. One of his American publishers, George Harvey, the president of Harper and Brothers, persuaded James to give an interview in order to generate publicity from his first return to his native land in more than twenty years. The interview with Florence Brooks was published in October 1904 in the New York Herald under the title "Henry James in the Serene Sixties" with a characteristic subtitle "A chat with the American novelist" (HJC 35-41).

James's reluctance to talk is quite evident even from the narrative texture of this article. The main body is comprised of the interviewer's impressionistic reflections on James's laconic statements. Very few phrases are quoted verbatim; the rest is a mixture of comments, hypotheses, portraiture, and sketches of landscape and houses. None of James's pronouncements from this interview had been authorized, but many of them were evidently intended to express his attitude towards publicity. Nonetheless, I would argue that the message of this interview differs, in a sense, from James's own stance.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, James seems to express his repudiation of publicity in a form...

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