Henry James's Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915 by Oliver Herford, and: Henry James' andere Szene: Zum Dramatismus des modernen Romans by Sophie Witt (review)

In A Small Boy and Others Henry James casts the famous "Marie" episode from his childhood as an unforgettable scene in the making as if in belated defiance of an adult's injunction. He recalled his cousin Marie protesting against being sent to bed and noted in particular how her mother, Aunt Elizabeth, had done her best to nip the tantrum in the bud by saying "I insist on your not making a scene" (152). What had been prevented back then became an embryonic scene (a scene in spe) in James's memoir, and, as such, it surfaces in both books reviewed in this essay. Sophie Witt, who builds much of her argument around James's idea of the scenic method, was clearly inspired by this proto-scene to trace interrelations of the dramatic and the familial (325). Oliver Herford refers to it in his discussion of James's memoirs and vocal performance (206–07). Retrospection, relevance, relationality, dramatism, and performativity are some of the concepts that recur in both books but in different ways and to different aims. The two scholars may share the givens, such as the "Marie" episode, but their takes on issues diverge.

Oliver Herford seeks to fill a gap in James studies and, in fact, in Henry James's own methodological reflection on the art of writing: the manifestations of James's "retrospective and commemorative impulse" (2) in the last twenty-five years of his artistic activity. These "late personal writings" represent a wide range of "literary forms: biographical sketches, public addresses, cultural and literary criticism, travel writing, Life-and-Letters biography, autobiography, and family memoir." Despite the investment of time and energy in non-fiction writing that stretched over the final decades of his life, James—who is credited with the first major attempt at theorizing the novel—did not offer a comparable exposition of the method and principle of non-fiction writing. Although "contingency and occasionality" make James's late personal writings "heterogeneous and hard to categorize" (4), their style is, according to Herford, "what most holds them together" (5). The two continuities he points to are "a continuity of practice" and "a continuity of reference." Rather than relying on current theoretical approaches, Herford uses "a deliberately simple criterion of fictionality" and admits that he has borrowed both the concept of "fiction" and the idea of the "personal" directly from Henry James (15). Witt's heavily theorized book is a stark contrast in this respect.

Herford begins by taking stock of the commemorative biographical and literary essays James began to produce as he turned sixty. James's personal retrospect is "essentially sociable, occasional, and collaborative" (14). Herford points to three linked rubrics under which he surveys James's late biographical and critical writing: sociability, a "vanished society," and critical rereading (24). The examples provoke digressions, but the reader knows that the author has a firm grip on his material. Powerful metaphors come in handy when a difficult issue is addressed: from physical presence to usurpation and detachment.

Herford focuses on James's late non-fiction, defining exactly the temporal boundaries (1890–1915), but he also looks for comparable motifs in James's fiction from this period and before. Using "The Altar of the Dead" and "The Diary of a Man of Fifty," he demonstrates the differences between James's practice of commemoration and that of his fictional proxies (25). Such analyses help corroborate his general claim that James's late non-fiction stands apart and deserves not only appreciation but also theorization of its own. James's attempts at representation of the past are exposed as the "real romance" of retrospection: the relations among people and the possibility of bringing the vanished world into relation with...