The Melodramatic Modernist

I confess that I began Henry James Goes to Paris under the misapprehension that it would be a partial biography tracing the fourteen months Henry James spent in Paris from October 1875, when he embarked at the age of thirty-two in an effort to leave provincial Cambridge behind and to find a career for himself as a professional novelist, to December 1876, when he left Paris for London. Indeed it is this story Brooks offers in his opening chapter, and biographical detail continues to figure in passing throughout subsequent chapters, although their primary focus is elsewhere: on James's efforts to assimilate the lessons learned in Paris—some unnoted or unappreciated at the time—as he worked his way toward his novelistic masterpiece, The Golden Bowl.

I confess, too, to feeling modest initial disappointment when Brooks leaves the life for literary analysis, for his sketch of James's Paris year is engaging: James's thoughts on French politics, Ivan Turgenev on hands and knees playing charades, Sunday afternoons with Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola, and the insufficiently gossipy "letters" James contracted to write for the New York Tribune; when Whitelaw Reid asked for less frequent and more "newsy" copy, James replied, "If my letters have been 'too good' I am honestly afraid that they are the poorest I can do." This chapter—like the rest of the book—is of a kind only full immersion in one's subject permits, yet an entire book comprised of such anecdotal material would risk at the very least being frivolous. As readers of Peter Brooks's earlier work (Reading for the Plot and Realist Vision) know, his work is anything but mere diversion.

Consequently the remainder of Henry James Goes to Paris soon turns to the book's principal task: to chart how the examples of Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant—together with the French Impressionists, of whose paintings James never truly approved—influenced the kind of novel James painstakingly taught himself to write. Objecting, on the one hand, to the "mere muffled majesty of irresponsible 'authorship'" informing George Eliot's fiction (in which didactic moralizing overwhelms the intense participation in the lives of characters to be found in the best of Balzac), and, on the other hand, to Flaubert's unwillingness to "go behind" characters of sufficient moral and intellectual refinement, James sought to combine realism and romance, moral rectitude and modernist experimentation, in work that plumbs the limits placed on anyone's ability accurately and objectively to read the world and those who populate it—life's radical uncertainty that does not void the need for living intensely or striving for "moral clarity." The result was the technical development of "scenic presentation" (perhaps learned from the theater), the radical "perspectivalism" of shifting "centers of consciousness," and the transformation of romance into "the melodrama of the moral consciousness."

Drawing upon James's reactions to French literature (as recorded in essays, prefaces, reviews, notebooks, and letters), Brooks covers what may seem familiar ground: James's undying affection for Balzac, his conviction that Flaubert possessed a limited sensibility, his need to see fiction as art rather than as concoctions "instinctive and charming," his belief that the French in general gave sex too prominent a role in their stories. His growing awareness that sure knowledge is uncertain, that human motives resist authoritative interpretation, and that we are all captives in "the prisonhouse of language"—more "spoken by our language and its clichés" than speaking—led James to conclude, à la Flaubert, that, as Brooks puts it, "our very 'conduct and moeurs' are kinds of behavioral clichés" and that the novel, properly conceived, is essentially about (and forces the reader participate in) the arts of "decipherment, discovery, [and] learning to read the signs." As Brooks reads James's fiction of the 1890s and afterward, James anticipates the modernism of Proust, Woolf, and Joyce while never, as Brooks carefully explains, eschewing the desire to follow Balzac in the creation of novels that act ethically in the world into which they...