James's Writer at the Sacred Fount

James's Writer at the Sacred Fount by E. C. Curtsinger, University of Dallas Henry James's The Sacred Fount may be read as a creative examination of the puzzle and the mystery of the act of writing. It may be other things as well, but, as Dorothea Krook remarks, "the curious fable" dramatizes "the irreducible, insoluble mystery in the heart of the creative process itself." Leo Levy reads The Sacred Fount as "a kind of novel in reverse that investigates the matrix from which novels emerge." Naomi Lebowitz says that the narrator is "the novelist in the act of composition." Tony Tanner has the narrator looking for "the laws which govern the act of artistic creation," and "risking madness in his efforts to turn the fruits of his wondering into art." Patricia Merivale notes that the narrator is interested in "turning . . . others into the characters of his own fiction; he is, as it were, writing a novel about them." Sergio Perosa agrees that the narrator is trying "to create ... an artistic reality."! Does the narrator succeed? Where, then, is it, the work of art he is so keen on constructing? Can it be identified among the pictures, books, and characters of Newmarch? Is there a muse? Is she objective, dwelling "out there" like the girls of Parnassus, or must the narrator look in his heart? If he wants to write, why does he go to such a place as Newmarch? My reading suggests that James takes up these questions in The Sacred Fount and, in dramatizing them, provides us with a whole and beautiful parable of the writer at work. In the mysterious isolation of the ideal realm of Newmarch, the narrator , tracking the sources and processes of his own creative act, discovers his muse and, eventually, produces a completed and identifiable work of art. A valuable habit of the poetic mind is its tendency, when given an abstraction, to move it in the direction of concreteness, character, and life. The motion is not foreign to James's manner. In his Preface to The Reverberator , for example, James divides his intelligence into "parts" that, almost immediately, are seen as separate persons mysteriously allied: nothing more complicates and overloads the act of retrospect than to let one's imagination itself work backward as part of the business . Some art of preventing this by keeping that interference out would be here of a useful application; and would include the question of providing conveniently for the officious faculty in the 1. Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 167-68; Leo B. Levy, "What Does The Sacred Fount Mean?" College English, 23 (1962), 381; Naomi Lebowitz, The Imagination of Loving: Henry James's Legacy to the Novel (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 122; Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 325, 334; Patricia Merivale, "The Esthetics of Perversion: Gothic Artifice in Henry James and Witold Gombrowicz," PMLA, 93 (1978), 994; Sergio Perosa, Henry James and the Experimental Novel (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 78. THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 117 WINTER, 1982 absence of its natural caretakers, the judgement, the memory, the conscience, occupied, as it were, elsewhere. These truants, the other faculties of the mind without exception, I surmise, would then be free to remount the stream of time (as an earnest and inquiring band) with the flower of the flock, the hope of the family, left at home or "boarded out," say, for the time of the excursion. I have been unable, I confess, to make such an arrangement; the consequence of which failure is that everything I "find," as I look back, lives for me again in the light of all the parts, such as they are, of my intelligence.2 If these parts, these persons of the mind, come so easily alive in a Preface, they may well put on faces for a fiction. Abstraction, motion, ploy, event, a work of art: these speak with their own voices if the artist so conceives. My recent study of The Turn of the Screw presents it as, among...