Chaucer and Henry James: Surprising Bedfellows

Chaucer and Henry James: Surprising Bedfellows by Elizabeth Steele, The University of Toledo The American ... "stimulating in the sense in which olives stimulate the palate. We are interested and absorbed from first to last." —British Quarterly Review Troilus and Criseyde ... "the first novel, in the modern sense, that ever was written in the world, and one of the best." —George Lyman Kittredge Though "Christopher" is as American in its connotations as the surname of James's first expatriate hero, Roderick Hudson, one night a few years ago I found myself drawing surprising parallels between Christopher Newman and a figure totally foreign to him in time and space: the hero of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. I was teaching a special summer course on Henry James, and we were reading The American when one evening I happened to find in my mail a new British edition of Chaucer's romance. As I examined it, the story sounded more than usually familiar—a fact that led eventually to a line-by-line examination of the text of both works with provocative results to be described below. I recognize that readers, even if persuaded by my testimony, may wonder, "Why dissect a rainbow? Does knowing about these parallels help us understand The American better?" Probably not. But it helps us to appreciate it more. As amply demonstrated by Adeline Tintner in her recent classic The Book World of Henry James, source studies can be as much a part of the history of a novel as are studies of textual variants or analyses of plot, rhetoric, and character development—the essentials of authorial talent. To quote Hugh Crimble in James's own The Outcry: "The names and stories and styles of author or subject or school ... Ah, that's a game at which we all can play!" (quoted in Tintner xxi). James himself played it, and he would surely not object if we do so alongside. The Henry James Review 13 (1992): 126-142 © by The Johns Hopkins University Press James and Chaucer 127 I Since the publication of The American in 1877, Balzac has been the foreign influence most often cited.1 Lack of space prevents listing here other sources suggested. While most are French (the novel was begun and nearly completed in Paris), they also include Turgenev and Twain, both of whom James was acquainted with in person. One influential source of The American, though, has up to now evaded the commentators: the legend of Troilus and Criseyde as told by Geoffrey Chaucer. So far as I can discover, only J. I. M. Stewart has even noted one of the many parallels between Christopher Newman's situation and that of Prince Troilus. '"It was too strange and mocking to be real,' we are told of Newman's betrayal [by Claire de Cintré and her family, the Bellegardes]: it was like a page torn out of some superannuated unreadable book, with no context in his own experience." And, Stewart adds, "Just so young Troilus felt as he lingered out the hours on Troy's walls and watched the lights being kindled, one by one, in the tents of the Achaians [where Criseyde now lived, lost to him]" (82). Stewart takes his insight no farther, but I hope to prove that Troilus and Criseyde supplied much of the raw material, if you will, from which James formed his "own romance," as he called it later (AN 30). This influence on The American may have been missed because James hardly mentions Chaucer in his voluminous works, an exemption strange for one so liberal in citing other British authors.2 William Stafford's Index to the Critical Writings lists only two references by James to Chaucer, made fairly near together: 1867, 1868 (81). In 1867 James furnished to the North American Review an unsigned appraisal of The Life and Death of Jason, a book-length poem by William Morris with an introduction by the then controversial poet Algernon Swinburne —"a circumstance we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success," James wrote boldly before reassuring the reader: "If Mr. Morris's poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer...