Henry James Goes to Paris (review)

In Henry James Goes to Paris, an engaging and learned study of James' encounter with French culture in the mid-1870s, Peter Brooks describes James' belated adaptation of the "nascent modernism" of Paris to his late novels. Brooks' command of French fiction and culture, and his appreciative but dispassionate analysis of James' works, sensibility, and values, make this an authoritative contribution to our understanding of James' artistic development.

James' move to Paris in 1875 was a self-conscious apprenticeship to the cosmopolitan city of art and literature, and to the writer who best exemplified his artistic and professional aspirations, Balzac. In a revealing assessment some three decades later, James praised Balzac for his love of his characters and his desire to let their essential natures play themselves out. Such free play in character development, what James termed a commitment to the "liberty of the subject," was for him an artistic and an ethical ideal. Through the novelist's capability to represent the growth of character, with its moments of crisis and of insight, the novel gained an ethical bearing, and the novelist a high calling. Brooks observantly reminds us of the cultural and familial restraints under which James pursued his artistic aspirations, including a father intensely engaged with inward and spiritual experience, an amicable but somewhat judgmental older brother, and a devoted but concerned mother, ever alert to frugality and responsible stewardship of the family's considerable, but not unlimited, financial resources. Under subtle but relentless pressure to show that writing stories could be a serious and constructive calling, James saw Balzac's faithfulness to the representation of character as the most essential justification of his own work.

Little wonder then that James was apprehensive about proto-modernist gestures toward destabilizing the structure of narrative and subverting the unitary concept of character. Brooks personifies those gestures in the figure of Flaubert, who was, when James encountered him in Paris, at work on what he called his "encyclopaedia of modern Stupidity," Bouvard et Pécuchet, a bizarre experiment in novelistic satire. Flaubert pursues there a form of realist description so detailed, Brooks argues, that it finally loses its claim to reality, suggesting that "the world described in detail begins to cease to convey meaning." James was not alone in his dislike of Flaubert's novel when it was published in 1881, but his reaction epitomizes his "his reservations about all Flaubert's work, with the single, and qualified, exception of Madame Bovary." For James, Bouvard et Pécuchet was "too inhuman, too abstract, virtually didactic." He remained aligned with Balzac and his devotion "to character and dramatic action, to plots that arrive at theatrical enactments where moral and intellectual confrontations are played out in the verbal clash of persons."

This allegiance remained permanent, but James' strategies for fulfilling it changed in his late fiction. James' taste for the melodramatic eventually prepared the way for his dramatic public failure as a playwright—a painful experience, but one from which he was eventually able to benefit artistically. Writing for the stage forced James to consider more deeply "how we see and know a story, with the bases of our knowledge of what is going on around us." James became more skeptical about the epistemological grounding of narrative in the mid-1890s, after recognizing the perspectival limits of dramatic form, a recognition that was reinforced by his exposure to Parisian modernity two decades earlier.

With illuminating readings of What Maisie Knew and The Golden Bowl, Brooks describes an "experimental fiction" based on "limitations of the narrative point of view [that] are radical, challenging, even taxing for the reader; disorienting, even debilitating for characters within the fiction." Brooks also describes a newly found, or perhaps newly liberated, interest in sexuality in the late works, a capacity "to make peace with, or at least to make allowance for, the carnal side," which coheres with the somewhat more relaxed, though still guarded, acceptance of sexuality and bodily experience that one finds in James...