James and Macmillan

Book Reviews James and Macmillan The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan, 1877-1914. Rayburn S. Moore, ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. xxvi + 256 pp. $45.00 THE LONDON FIRM of Macmillan, founded in 1843, published the work of many leading nineteenth-century writers including Tennyson , Hardy, Lewis Carroll and Kipling. James's association with the firm began in 1878, when, without much enthusiasm—"our previous experience of volumes of reprinted Essays has not been such as to make us very sanguine about the success of the venture"—they brought out French Poets and Novelists. The Europeans followed later in the same year, and twenty-five further titles over the next thirty-six years, the list concluding with the two autobiographical volumes, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother. Macmillan also brought out in 1883 the first collected edition of James's work; this was followed in 1908-1909 by the important New York edition and, posthumously, by a further collected edition in thirty-five volumes (1921-1923) as well as by Percy Lubbock's two-volume edition of James's letters (1920). In the volume under review, Professor Moore, who has previously edited James's correspondence with Edmund Gosse, assembles over 300 letters, most of them here printed in full for the first time and many of them drawn from the massive Macmillan archive deposited in the British Library. Unlike most collections of letters, they present both sides of the correspondence, James's principal contact with the publishing house being with Frederick Macmillan, son of the founder. The letters themselves fall broadly into two categories. Some are purely business communications, and often very brief—sometimes, indeed , no more than a single sentence. It has to be said that, while these potentially furnish part of the raw material for a valuable study of James's professional career (on the lines of, say, Robert L. Patten's admirable Dickens and His Publishers), they are not in themselves very interesting. As the editor points out, however, James's business dealings with Frederick Macmillan soon took on a decided informality—as early as 3 December 1878, for instance, we find Macmillan sending a cheque for fifty pounds as an advance against royalties that are not strictly 509 ELT 37:4 1994 due—and it is this informality that becomes the saving grace of the correspondence. Personal contact having been established, the two men rapidly became friends, and James was a frequent visitor to his publisher 's London home, where he also formed a close friendship with Macmillan 's American wife. Even when he was out of the country, he kept in touch with Macmillan on a personal as well as a commercial level, writing to him from Boston in 1883 that "Your London gossip is always like water to a thirsty man." The epistolary result of this is that many of the letters engagingly blend business with personal matters, and treat business in an attractively intimate and even playful manner. James's tact is sometimes put to the test, and triumphantly passes it, when he finds himself compelled to lament the low sales and nugatory profits that were a recurring feature of his professional career. What he calls the "delicious ring of the sovereign" is too rarely heard for comfort, and, friendship or no friendship, he is understandably forced to reconsider his position as a Macmillan author and indeed as one hoping for profits from an English readership. In 1884, for instance, three years after the appearance of The Portrait of a Lady, he writes, after perusing his royalty accounts, that he "expected the said results would be small, but I now perceive them to be virtually nil. The balance owing me is £2.17.6!—for a year's sale of some seven or eight books. The sale is depressingly small. ... I feel that for the future I must make some arrangement that shall be more fruitful...." Six years later, the situation has changed little if at all, and James finds himself constrained to declare to Macmillan that "in spite of what you tell me of the poor success of my...