How I Came to Henry James

How I Came to Henry James by Leon Edel Sooner or later people ask me: "How did you first come to Henry James?" The only truthful reply I can give is that I came to Henry James through James Joyce. It sounds enigmatic, and thereby hangs my tale. I have to go back to my junior year at McGiIl University, an old university with gray Victorian buildings, in Montreal. I was in that time of life when adolescence begins to shed some of its lively and mercurial trappings, and behind them one finds the first glimmer of maturity. In 1926, when I was eighteeen, I began to come across the name of James Joyce. He appeared to be a fantastic Irishman who had written a book called Ulysses that had promptly been banned because he used four-letter words and had insulted British royalty. The Canadians were and remain royalists of sorts and, along with Britain, they condemned the turbulent book. In the United States it was the obscene language rather than the antiroyalism that brought down the law on it. Young and literary, I was excited by the mystery of this unobtainable work and its curious history. In time, I found a book about it: this was Herbert Gorman's James Joyce: His First Forty Years. Since Ulysses was unavailable, it was useful to have a kind of surrogate volume that quoted publishable portions and made Joyce out to be a hero—a defiant revolutionary of literature against whom the world seemed to conspire. I swallowed this myth and allowed my imagination to be fired by Joyce's central idea, that of reproducing an entire day in Dublin's life. I lived for the time when I could read a book that had made its author immortal simply by its reputation , before it had been generally read. Then, one day that winter, a friend who had heard me expatiate on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, Joyce's brilliant unbanned works, brought me the news that he had found a copy of Ulysses smuggled into Montreal from Paris. It was owned by some rich man, and my friend had been promised a look at it; and in a short time he was able to borrow it, and let me have it for three days—not an hour more. The sacred volume had acquired an elegant binding. I must say I turned its pages with a sense of disappointment. I was amused by Bloom's matutinal ablutions, I romped through the unpunctuated monologue of Marion Bloom, but I wallowed and got mired in the long passages of parody, the endless headlines in the "cave of the winds" section, and the night-town prolixities, many of them very funny, but the tedium of others bringing on a sense of irritation. I remember my precocious judgment—a book, I told my friend, to be studied rather than read. We didn't have the phrase about a book being a "page-turner" in those days. Ulysses decidedly wasn't a page turner. But I admired its intentions and was dazzled by such sentences (since constantly quoted) as "ineluctuable modality of the visible." I stirred to its music; and I cherished the book's novelty—this, I recognized, was what we meant when we used the words avant-garde. For" Tn the last and lingering trappings of adolescence, I felt myself to be an "avant-guardian." What excited me most was Joyce's attempt to enter into the thoughts of his characters—impossible, I said, but he had at least created an illusion of our monitoring "the stream of consciousness." That phrase was new to me, and it would be some time before I discovered who had first used it. I shared my borrowed copy with my professor who taught modern English fiction, Harold THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 160 SPRING, 1982 Files, a Harvard man with sharp blue eyes and a low-keyed way of making his class enthusiastic about Middlemarch or Emma. I pledged him to secrecy and rationed my shared time: he had it for six hours. My satisfied curiosity did not diminish my interest. The brief...