The Seeds of James's Grand Monument, or When Growing Becomes Building

The Seeds of James's Grand Monument, or When Growing Becomes Building by O. Alan Weltzien, Western Montana College ι A few years back Northeastern University Press, by arrangement with the original publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, brought out the "Fiftieth Anniversary Edition" of Henry James's The Art of the Novel. Now golden anniversaries celebrate relationships, most often marital, of unusual longevity and felicity. This newest edition reaffirms R. P. Blackmur's monument to James and the monumental place occupied by the New York Edition prefaces themselves in novel criticism. Of course, the past generation of novel criticism has discarded the notion that The Art of the Novel, as supposedly an evolutionary end product, belongs by itself on the high altar dedicated to the novel. Post-structural accounts such as David Carroll's and John Carlos Rowe's devote themselves to articulating the cracks within James's monument and acknowledging James's complex maneuvers in creating an apparently unified facade. Autobiographical theory helps us assess James's reconciliation of the centrifugal and centripetal forces at work. Above all it affords a rich system of explanation of James's arbitration in the prefaces between the organic metaphor of seeds and growth and the inorganic metaphor of buildings and architecture. Seeds grow into a Grand Monument, a collected, published oeuvre; the builder, creating a totalizing definition of career, displaces, but does not replace, the grower of seeds. In the introduction to The Complete Notebooks, Leon Edel follows James's own cues (see .AiV 76, 258) in describing the notebooks as James's seedbed for all his writing. When describing James's note-taking, Edel, imitating The Art of the Novel, aligns the two essential metaphors: "We are taken from the germ of a story, some odd little fact or remark at a dinner table, some brief incident or anecdote, into human behavior and human motivation. We watch James in his workshop building narratives brick by brick with a kind of Olympian mastery" (xi). The terms are familiar. The question is, how does the grower become a builder? Or, with what effects does this Master Builder "revise" and therefore "reread" (AN 339-40) his seasons of cultivation? In his seventh preface, that to The Spoils ofPoynton, "A London Life," and "The Chaperone," James begins by discussing the "germ" as "a mere floating particle in the stream The Henry James Review 12 (1991) 255-70: © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 256 The Henry James Review of talk" that "communicates the virus of suggestion" (AN 119). He concludes his long opening paragraph with the same figure of the wind-dropped seed: "Let him hold himself perhaps supremely fortunate if he can meet half the questions with which the air alone may swarm" (AN 121). Yet within two paragraphs, James has shifted his allegiance to his inorganic metaphor: "[the artist] has to borrow his motive, which is certainly half the battle; and this motive is his ground, his site and his foundation. But after that he only lends and gives, only builds and piles high, lays together the blocks quarried in the deeps of his imagination and on his personal premises" (AN 122). Such shifting stamps The Art of the Novel. Neither Edel nor R. P. Blackmur, first editor of The Art of the Novel, questions the metaphorical shifting, which dramatizes a bind inherent in autobiography. As autobiography the prefaces simultaneously unsettle and profess a myth of origins and authority. Edward Said has remarked that novelistic authority is relative, as the fathered text results from a conceptual rather than organic relation to reality (84). James as autobiographer fathers his life as a Collected Works text, and the builder superimposes himself on the grower without effacing him. In his lengthy introduction (1934), Blackmur gives little attention to autobiography, calling it a "feature ... as a rule held to a minimum" (xviii). His final section summarizes James's method of choosing and developing a subject that, "If it was felt intensely and intelligently enough ... would reach, almost of itself, towards adequate form" (xlvi, emphasis added). There is a tension between the celebrated demands of form and the quasi-autonomy of the developing subject, a tension Blackmur glosses...