The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intertextual Study (review)

Book Reviews 95 Individual pieces in Collected Travel Writings reprise this transformation. In Italian Hours, "Siena Early and Late" moves from a very particular 1873 "impression" to a 1909 revisit that plumbs a "finer sense of things...on the whole" even as it explores the "possibility of having lived into a relation too much to be able to make a statement of it" (C 524). English Hours likewise scores this progression in its latest piece, "Winchelsea, Rye, and 'Denis Duval'" (1901), which reads Thackeray's fragmentary, posthumous manuscript for a novel, Denis Duval, against its setting and gains an "impression...that the chapters we possess might really have been written without the author's having stood on the spot" (GBA 237). Thackeray "conceived" his novel "as a 'picturesque' affair," but that "general poetic" is now "left well behind," alienating the material fact from the modern intellect: "we have never really made out what his subject was to have been" (GBA 236, 240, 241). If scholars exhaust this treasury of tropes and topoi, a future task may be to establish a variorum edition to complement these "last editions revised by [James]." Architecturally he "preferred] in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed, however splendid," but as his own editor James "nowhere scrupled to rewrite a sentence or a passage on judging it susceptible of a better turn" (C 170; GBA 3). For now, the Library of America has compiled an impressive monument to stand alongside the house of fiction. Adeline R. Tintner. The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intertextual Study. Baton Rouge and London : Louisiana State UP, 1991. 328 pp. $ 16.95. By Annick Duperray, Université de Provence The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James is another of Adeline Tintner's volumes devoted to the investigation of Jamesian intertext, to the impact of cultural heritage and contemporary environment on James's fiction. She has already dealt with the influence of graphic and plastic art (The Museum World ) and with the reappropriation of earlier classics (The Book World ); with the Pop World she made it clear, as she recalls in the preface to her last book, that if James "took liberties with the greatest," he also "took them with the least" (xiii), incorporating unexpected material into his work, fairy-tales, for example, and, above all, the popular minor fiction of his own time. The aloof, cerebral master was less impervious to the fashions and passions of his contemporaries than has generally been surmised, and Tintner gives us further evidence with her new study, which provides a stimulating re-evaluation of what is commonly described as Jamesian cosmopolitanism. She does not harp on the hackneyed international theme—Europe as the antidote to American shortcomings—but tries to define a 96 The Henry James Review peculiar blend of continental, end-of-the-century cosmopolitanism, a certain finde -siècle exoticism that came to coincide with the moods and aspirations of the American expatriate. The "virgin territory" Tintner explores consists in an up to now neglected intertext, the fascinating "give-and-take" (xv) that took place between James and the literary Bohemia, not so much the influence James exerted on aesthetes and decadents—this has already been recognized—as the impact those ill-considered writers actually had on the Master's fiction. Critics who have already pointed out the affinities between James and The Yellow Nineties will welcome Tintner's thorough intertextual analysis as a convincing confirmation of their own intuition. And any reader will indeed be fascinated to discover those underground currents, the paradoxical interrelations between transience and permanence, classicism and decadence. James's internationalism evolved in the 1890s; the opposition between Europe and America took more subtle forms, English and American characters became one, they often lived in London and were "part of the dramatis personae of Cosmopolis" (9). The relatively short chapter devoted to English literature is centered on "high society novels" or "house-party literature" (10), particularly Marie-Louise de la Ramée (her pen-name was Ouida), who wrote over forty novels "peopled by fantastic aristocrats and sophisticates" (10). Referring to a paragraph in James's Notebooks where he expresses his desire to invent a female character with...