Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act, and: Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (review)

Book Reviews Anne T. Margolis. Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI P, 1985. 249 pp. $39.95. Jennifer A. Wicke. Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading. New York: Columbia U P, 1988. 193 pp. $32.50. As the titles (and dates) of these two recent books suggest, the historical recovery of Henry James continues at almost breakneck speed. At the same time, the significant differences between Margolis's author-centered work and Wicke's more elastic survey of a peculiarly capitalist phenomenon help us to recognize diverging—and not altogether compatible—tendencies within "New Historicist" criticism. Margolis discusses Henry James's "problem of audience" in historically specific terms. Her analysis begins with a useful survey of James's early reviews of popular literature and the influence (largely negative) such work had upon his evolving selfdefinition as a professional writer. We tend to forget that James began his career as a kind of glorified hack, churning out book review after book review (admittedly for the better sort of periodicals), only infrequently turning his hand to fiction or more serious essays. Far from despairing of "success," however, James simultaneously deprecated and internalized the common denominator of popularity. Margolis readily acknowledges her debt to William Veeder's Henry James—The Lessons of the Master (1975), which traces this process up through The Portrait of a Lady; but she goes beyond Veeder by insisting that James did not ultimately surrender his desire to reach a popular audience. "Extremely ambitious and highly cosmopolitan by temperament, Henry James sought an equally cosmopolitan audience which would combine size and taste, democratic quantity and aristocratic quality" (23). His first answer to the "problem of audience," then, was to invent the international novel, to open a trans-Atlantic dialogue, to expand his readership geographically into a foreign market instead of vertically within a domestic one. Recognizing a problem and finding a solution are different things, however, as James's checkered career in the 1880s makes painfully clear. In two subsequent chapters Margolis demonstrates how James attempted to educate the public and extend its tolerance—not just in the genre of narrative fiction but also in drama (with famously disastrous results). Once again his response to "failure" is not one of surrender or regression but creative recuperation. "One must be wary of the assumption, fostered by Edel, that the traumatic events" on the night of Guy Domville's ill-fated premiere "virtually crushed James and caused him to regress into a childlike passivity" (94). Neither should we fall into the trap (carefully baited by James himself) of reading his 1890s tales of writers and artists as parables of inescapable frustration. That was Henry Nash Smith's mistake in Democracy and the Novel (1978), and Margolis has no intention of repeating it. "Although James's ironic tales of the literary life have usually been viewed as his hostile portrait of (and, to a large extent, his reaction against) the rise of mass culture and its effects upon his potential audience, James's career as a whole can still be seen as a valiant attempt to resist the increasingly seductive logic which these tales embody, the logic of an incipient literary modernism" (xiii). Margolis effectively shows that James could not be satisfied with a merely avant-garde success (hence his privately voiced discomfort in publishing among such low company in the Yellow Book) and that he "refused to give up a lingering faith, however shaken, in the possibility that he could capture the attention and educate the imagination of the uninitiated, the public at large" (106). Margolis's readings of the late novels treat this "problem of audience" almost allegorically. In The Ambassadors, Mrs. Newsome embodies dull Victorian convention The Henry James Review 12 (1991): 84-91 ©1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Book Reviews 85 while Maria Gostrey and Marie de Vionnet appreciate the "larger latitude" of avant-garde narrative possibilities. Strether's impossible fate is to reconcile the two—a reconciliation which, for James, is possible through his "willingness to resume a more or less traditional narrative presence and voice" in the book (157). With respect to The Ambassadors Margolis...