Vindication Against Misreading in The Golden Bowl, The American Scene, and the New York Edition

VINDICATION AGAINST MISREADING IN THE GOLDEN BOWL, THE AMERICAN SCENE, AND THE NEW YORK EDITION Molly Vaux The City University of New York In the letter he wrote to Scribner's in 1905 proposing that he "furnish " each volume of his forthcoming deluxe edition with a preface, Henry James portrayed his novels and stories as disenfranchised beings patiently awaiting a "chance" for their cause to be righted. James would be their advocate and the prefaces the texts with which he would demonstrate his novels' worth.1 In this essay I will argue that the writing of The Golden Bowland The American Scene were essential precedents and complements to this project of self-vindication. Reading The Golden Bowl through its preface shows that beneath the narratives of familial and marital relations in the novel run stories of a writer's contention with a misapprehending audience—the same struggles out ofwhich James spun creative autobiography and a theory of fiction in the prefaces to the New York Edition. Through his indirect critique ofhis readership in The Golden Bowland the fierce challenges he delivered to his compatriots in The American Scene James laid essential groundwork for the lessons in reading and creative production he would later offer in the New York Edition. Paul Armstrong has argued that James's prefaces require the same "doubled reading" his novels require, that while the reader is absorbing James's account of his writing experience and his theory of writing , the reader is also responding to James as a centering consciousness whose "interpretive attitudes . . . are as much on display and as much an object forthe reader's scrutiny as the impressions ofa Lambert Strether or a Maggie Verver."2 As comparable centering consciousnesses, James the preface-writer and his heroine Maggie Verver do make common assertions. Both figures demonstrate the power of the creative deed. Paralleling James's affirmations about "doing" in the preface to The Golden Bowl is Maggie's discovery in the novel of her own brilliant capacity for action. After the assignation ofthe Prince with Charlotte in Gloucester, Maggie begins "to doubt of her wonderful little judgement of her wonderful little world."3 She begins to "put" things both to herselfand the people around her. She contrives gestures to effect a change in her "practically unattackable" situation (327). The terms James uses to describe Maggie's campaign to rebalance familial and marital relations are the same terms he uses in his notebooks and pref- 50Molly Vaux aces when he celebrates the capacity to let oneself go with writing: "Ah, just to let oneselfgo—at least," he writes in his notebook in 1895, "to surrender one's self to what through all the long years one has (quite heroically, I think) hoped for and waited for—the mere potential , and relative, increase of quantity in the material act—act of application and production."4 Likewise, in the preface to Roderick Hudson, James celebrates the tendency of the writer's canvas "to lead on and on."5 In her lively interrogations about the Matcham houseparty and the Gloucester sightseeing Maggie lets herself go in a similar way: Maggie went, she went—she felt herself going; she reminded herselfofan actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. . . . Preparation and practice had come but a short way; her part opened out and she invented from moment to moment what to say and to do. She had but one rule of art—to keep within bounds and not lose her head; certainly she might see for a week how far that would take her. (348) In this passage Maggie becomes James, inventing her role as she goes, while also inventing the rules for invention. The labor is hard but exhilarating. It works invisibly, by a charm, "touch by touch" (348) without her audience suspecting how much she understands. She is a reservoir of "ideas" and she rejoices in her sudden capacity to translate them into action (348). Maggie's creative exhilaration builds during the dinner party with the Matcham group: "Oh she was going, she was going...