Henry James: The Indirect Vision (review)

292 The Henry James Review with contemporary descriptions of die physical manifestations of possession, Beidler shows that Miles dies not from the possession itself, "but from the violence of dispossession," which results from the governess's repeated requests for Miles's "confession" during their final interview (198). Beidler grounds this convincing reading of Miles's death in die word "dispossessed," which appears in üie last sentence of The Turn of the Screw. Beidler's final chapter is his most persuasive because his evidence comes from material mat James saw or wrote himself. Passages from James's writings support Beidler's assertion that James knew of die work of the Society for Psychical Research on ghost phenomena and üiat the novelist recognized tiiat relatively benign "modern" ghosts would not allow him to realize his ghost story. James dierefore sought to construct "nontelepathic, nonsubjective ghosts. They are real agents come back from the dead for what James called in the preface 'a second round of badness'" (228). Although it is difficult for Beidler to pin down James once and for all to the "possessed children reading," the circumstantial evidence that he presents in this refreshing, informative and highly readable book, and documents in the useful bibliography, is strong. The leads he teases from die novelist's writings tend to verify tiiat tenaciously bmlt circumstantial case for his reading. Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James should be most welcome by diose who, like Vincent P. Pécora in "Of Games and Governesses" (Perspectives on Contemporary Literature) 11 [1985]: 28-36), are disturbed by the avalanche of metacriticism on The Turn of the Screw, which they may regard as merely a "game" mat carries the implicit message tiiat notiiing "about The Turn of the Screw matters at all" (28). For Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James shows above all that demonic ghosts matter, and tiiat they matter most in terms of James's own "game" to interest the readers of his own day, to sell his work, and to develop the art of fiction. Greg W. Zacharias Creighton University Darshan Singh Maini. Henry James: The Indirect Vision. Second edition, revised and enlarged. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research P. 246 pp. $44.95. In revising and enlarging the 1973 edition of Henry James: The Indirect Vision, Darshan Singh Maini has added three new chapters to the original twelve: one, perhaps the best, on love and sex in James's fiction, a second on James's political attitudes, and a third on his literary criticism. Although they do not take into account die full weight and import of recent James scholarship and do not contribute to the dieme of "indirect vision," die new chapters are written in die rich and arresting style that made the original edition a pleasure to read. A careful line-by-line comparison of four of die essays carried over from the first edition with Üie versions appearing in the present edition reveals diat one, "The Sense of Evil," is virtually unchanged and that three others, "A Theory of the Novel," "The Torment of Form," and "The Progress of the Artist," have been "enlarged" by the addition of one, three, and four paragraphs respectively. Nevertheless, even though the book will not offer many surprises to readers of the earlier text, it still appears fresh, balanced, and responsive to most aspects of James's genius. The James who emerges from Maini's fifteen short but cogent essays is, above aU, a master of language with an almost Shakespearean gift of expressing his ideas and perceptions in varied and vivid images. He is also a dedicated artist who, at his best, invented daring and innovative fictional techniques to convey the ambiguities and endless nuances of his complex view of life. James is seen, too, as a cosmopolite who turned his own personal dilemma as an uprooted and transplanted American into literary capital by Book Reviews 293 making the "international situation" a vehicle for his major epistemológica! concerns. By envisioning Europe as an arena of worldliness and deception Üiat beguiled, educated, and sometimes destroyed Americans attracted by its bright surface, James was able to dramatize his insistent preoccupation with appearance and reality, form and freedom...