James on Art & Drama

ELT 41 : 4 1998 Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, where Joyce saw opera, then "the most popular art form in Trieste." At the Teatro Verdi Joyce attended performances of operas by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Wagner, Strauss, and others. "Opera never ceased to absorb Joyce," Hartshorn observes; and Trieste afforded the writer easy access to top-notch performances for more than a decade. Joyce left Trieste for Zurich in 1915, after the political situation in Trieste followed by the start of World War I made departure a necessity. And yet, according to Hartshorn, "Despite all of the wartime problems in Trieste, Joyce abandoned the city with some regret." Indeed, Joyce "looked at Trieste as a kind of safe haven, a place in which he would always be accepted even after having deserted it repeatedly. For various reasons, Joyce was destined to depart Trieste no less than seven times over sixteen years.... Yet in each case he made his way back before finally leaving Trieste permanently...." In a letter to Nora, Joyce asks, "Why is it I am destined to look so many times in my life with eyes of longing on Trieste?" Hartshorn's answer, in effect, is his entire book, though he sums up his conclusion with the idea that "Joyce chose exile largely to assert his independence from Ireland and to establish himself as a writer." "He was able to meet those goals in Trieste: it was there that his artistic genius reached its mature expression ." Well-written, weU-documented, including a map and pictures of Joyce's Trieste as well as an exhaustive bibliography of relevant reference works, Hartshorn's study is a solid work of scholarship that completes our picture of a key modernist during his formative years. Brian W. Shaffer ________________ Rhodes College James on Art & Drama Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama. Peter Rawlings, ed. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997; Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. ix + 537 pp. $99.95 PETER RAWLINGS'S Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama is a facsimile edition of Henry James's occasional pieces written largely for American newspapers and magazines between 1872-1901. Lacking the obligatory scholarly machinery of an index and endnotes, the edition will fail to recommend itself to its intended purchasers, James scholars and their affiliated institutions, as an essential text. The economies of scale practiced by Scolar Press, reflected in the high cost of the book, rebound on the reader in the form of minuscule type, downsized from the 488 BOOK REVIEWS nine-point of the Atlantic Monthly and its ilk. To be sure, the majority of selections can be read without the aid of a magnifying glass. Bereft of annotation , the book fails to situate James and his subjects in their historical context or to identify figures whose reputations have dimmed with the passage of time. One of the pleasures of reading Henry James on Ellen Terry, a theatrical celebrity whom he tartly dismissed in 1877—"she is simply not an actress"—is the knowledge that James would later revere her as the doyenne of the English stage who came to his rescue after the Guy Domville debacle in 1895. Although the editor makes good his claim to have reprinted essays and reviews that have been unavailable for a long while, I suspect many university and college libraries own a copy of The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and Drama: 1872-1901, edited by Allan Wade (Rutgers, 1948). Wade's edition is equally comprehensive and better appointed than that of Rawlings. A word to the wise: the reader who hopes to learn what Henry James thought of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw had best consult Leon Edel's edition of James's letters. Although James complains about the "poverty of the [English] repertory," which consists largely of "coarse adaptations of French comedies," he makes no mention of his brilliant contemporaries with the exception of Henrik Ibsen and Edmond Rostand. As for James's pretensions as a dramatist, Rawlings's introduction is helpful here, glossing James's unactable stage instructions , such as the injunction to make an "ironic movement." Would that James had followed his own advice and realized the impossibility of creating an "effective play" out...