Henry James

30:3, Reviews HENRY JAMES Michael Anesko. 'Friction with the Market': Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. $22.95 William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin, eds. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Cloth $45.00 Paper $14.95 Two valuable works about James are under consideration; one, by Anesko, highly original and relevant for a wider audience than James devotees; the other, by Veeder and Griffin, extremely useful. First I tum to the enlightening and interesting 'Friction with the Market'. On 1 November 1986, Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times reviewed James Clavell's Whirlwind, describing it as "unremittingly tedious." But this mediocre novel, which received such bad reviews, was auctioned for $5 million and is now on the best seller list. Henry James worked assiduously on the twenty-four volumes of the New York Edition of his novels, revising them and including some of the most brilliant critical prefaces ever written. It is painful to read what he wrote when Scribner's, his publisher, sent him the documents that contained the bad news that his edition was not selling. These documents have knocked me rather flat—a greater disappointment than I have been prepared for; & after my long and devoted labour a great, I confess, & a bitter grief. . . . There is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing me—of that profit to which I had partly been looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in Bankruptcy—unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any work whatever; which indeed must now begin. (162) The New York Edition proved to be a financial failure. An examination of James's literary income from 1864 to 1915 reveals the deplorable fact that James in a lifetime of writing earned less than the writers of schlock earn in a month in this country. The story of Henry James's friction with the marketplace is fascinating precisely because it describes the paradigmatic experience of the genuine artist's attempt to sustain the integrity of his art, at the same time that he struggles with the duplicities of the publishing world and the vulgar tastes of an illiterate public. The Author's Guild and its 16,000 membership of authors came into existence because they needed and still need to protect themselves against the abuses of publishers who are after all essentially businessmen in a capitalist society. In our age they pay murderers thousands of dollars to tell their stories in best-sellers. Anesko claims that in the nineteenth century "regular trade publishers were among the industry's most scrupulous men rather than its most grasping" (35). But as the story of James's relation with his publishers unfolds, what becomes apparent is that Anesko does not adequately differentiate between the "grasp348 30:3, Reviews ing" that is done in overt, blatant fashion, and the hidden kind of grasping that publishers with a "genteel pedigree" indulged in. It seems to me that the only real difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishers was that the former were smaller and thus their malpractice was inevitably carried out on a more modest scale. It would seem as if there were nothing more to say about Henry James in view of the voluminous James scholarship. However, as Anesko correctly observes, even Leon Edel has not given us the complete story of James's often frenetic efforts to sell his fiction. Anesko's book fills this gap. It is indispensable reading , not only for James's specialists but for anyone who is interested in the drama of an author's friction with the marketplace. Anesko's version of this drama is a very interesting narrative based on impressive research. He has examined heretofore ignored evidence: publishers' records, James's correspondence with his editors and documents that offer specific information about his income. The result of this research has led Anesko to write what he calls "an essay in the sociology of literature," which consists of an attempt to reconstruct the social and economic conditions of the production of...