James and Non-Fiction

ELT 39:4 1996 James and Non-Fiction Tony Tanner. Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. ix + 92 pp. $22.50 ANY NEW BOOK by Tony Tanner is an event in James criticism. In fact, James's description of what the critic's job consists of is admirably exemplified in the person of Professor Tanner. James wrote that the best kind of critic, "the only kind worth speaking of," is the kind that "springs from the liveliest experience." He is "a valuable instrument" just in proportion "as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates." Certainly, in this age of theoretical criticism, Tanner is one of the few critics who could pass James's test. "The critic, in literature, is connected doubly [with life], for he deals with life at second hand as well as at first"; continues James, "that is, he deals with the experience of others, which he resolves back into his own" (Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, Library of America, 98-99). One first encountered the particular quality of Tanner's work in his masterly book The Reign of Wonder (1965) in which he passionately and skillfully showed the "wonder," a strain of work that inhabits a group of American writers, among them James. Tanner experiences the writer's work through his own mentality as well as his own personality. He convinces us by an art of analysis which makes use of certain repetitive words, in this case "wonder." Doing this again twenty-five years later, in his book Venice Desired, he contrasts and compares the effect of Venice on Byron, Ruskin and James, and, after James, on Von Hofmannstal, Proust and Pound. Thus James is a kind of fulcrum between romanticism and modernism and in the midst of these is Tanner himself reacting, reciprocating and penetrating. But in contrast to the two "Super Bowl" demonstrations of Tanner's genius for being saturated with his subject and sensitive to the intentions of the writer, there are two small books. The first, a printing of three pamphlets originally commissioned by the British Council in 1979 and 1981 and reprinted in 1985, was designed for a readership of intelligent and educated people not too familiar with James and, therefore, not for the James specialists, although even they can learn a lot from it. In Henry James: The Writer and His Work (1985), Tanner attributes James's failure in his writing for the stage to his having of necessity to inhibit his very original metaphors, "often developed at great length, usually to depict elusive or 518 book Reviews crucial dramas or thought processes." They cannot "be translated onto the stage." In this book, Tanner had something original to say about James's fiction as always. The second small book, Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction, a printing of three lectures given by Tanner in 1993 at Georgia Southern University, is a sequel but even more rewarding. The title of this book is a play on James's superb essay, "The Art of Fiction." Tanner proposes again in three parts to show how James's travel writing, his criticism and his autobiography all are "art," if not fiction. Again, Tanner's methodology resides in picking up key words to put his finger on the art of each of these genres of essay writing. The travel writing has, as its base, the passionate examination of James's impressions of Venice, for which Tanner was prepared from having written the James chapter in his larger book, Venice Desired. However here, in a book under ninety pages, we get the feeling that the critic has been experiencing James through and through. The work of James is not the object of dispassionate study, but of passionate saturation . Instead of becoming blasé through his long career of reader and teacher of James's work at Kings College, Cambridge, Tanner has become more and more enriched in terms of his enjoyment and understanding of James and in terms of his own development as a gifted writer about literature. In this small volume, he has ingeniously and beautifully put his finger...