The James Country
How can places that speak in general to the imagination not give it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants?
JAMES, The Portrait of a Lady, Preface
These Americans never saw Europe: Abraham Lincoln, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. Whitman, who fascinated the English (Mrs. Anne Gilchrist settled here for a season in the hope of getting him to marry her), might have enjoyed some preposterous celebrity there, as Oscar Wilde did in Western mining camps. It is hard to imagine what Europe would have done for Lincoln or Thoreau. Mark Twain was forever in Europe, and while Europe enjoyed him more than he did Europe, it contributed to his fund of anecdotes, but added nothing to his imagination. Stephen Crane settled in a moldy, drafty English manor house in order to escape his creditors and to live openly with Cora Stewart; he died in Germany.
Margaret Fuller, a restless soul and in intention a revolutionary, escaped her priggish male society (heavy with second-string transcendentalists) in Italy. She participated in some epic days of the Risorgimento, became a friend of Mazzini, married the unlettered young Marchese Ossoli, and had a child. All three perished in a shipwreck off Fire Island as Margaret was returning to America. Emerson, who sent Thoreau to look for her effects, was condescending to her in death; Hawthorne was hostile. Henry James mocked her as “finally Italianised and shipwrecked.” Margaret Fuller, unappeasably critical of male mediocrity in Boston and Concord (there was as yet no other kind to notice), had proved herself unforgivably peculiar. She had gone to Europe on her own terms, the most vivid of our romantic exiles—as a personality, not as a writer. After the Civil War, for the first time in the history of Americans, Europe became not merely an experience but, to use one of Henry James’s essential terms, an “opportunity.” Europe was news, and American writers and artists were still explorers—like Melville from the South Seas—bringing home tales of strange places. Scholars of modern languages from George Ticknor to Longfellow and Lowell prepared themselves in Europe for their Harvard professorships. Longfellow, ambitious to bring back to Cambridge everything he could learn, worshipfully saw Europe as the great world. America, for all its freedom and prosperity, soon had almost as many distinguished exiles as czarist Russia. Most of them were pitifully conventional sculptors and artists from notable families—Henry James was to write their history, with ironic deference, in William Wetmore Story and His Friends.
William Dean Howells had never been abroad before he earned the Venice consulate by writing Abraham Lincoln’s campaign biography in 1860. Sitting out the Civil War in Europe gave the self-educated former printer and reporter the background he needed for the fine travel books he was to produce and the smoothness and poise he brought to his fictional reportage of American society. Europe, Howells’s only university, turned out to be his Harvard Business School, his training in literary management. The tactful, assiduous autodidact was to make it big in Boston by way of Venice. In Howells’s easy, graceful Venetian Life and his essays on Goldoni and Italian comedy, the reader back home is exposed not only to the benefits of foreign travel but to a conscious savor of superiority. He was to decline Longfellow’s and Lowell’s Harvard chair in modern languages.
Europe for Howells was his lucky chance to step up from Ohio. For Henry James it was the familiar repository of tradition, art, manners, civilization. It was equivalent to literature itself, and it made possible his career. And his career was his life. It was of course easier for Henry James, with a father airily dissociated from the usual American concerns with business, a “hotel childhood” in Europe, early schooling in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne, and Bonn, to think of Europe as a second home. It was easy for him, always, to think of America as not being home. (And only an American, then and now, has had purely temperamental reasons for thinking so.) William James said that his brother was an inhabitant of the James family and had no other country.* There was a heightened mental existence to daily life in that country, an abnormal removal from the “vulgar,” that made them strange to others and exceptional to themselves. It radiated all too evidently from Henry James, Senior, a belligerently independent religious philosopher and Swedenborgian, a Utopian socialist with a private income. He had lost one leg as a boy trying to put out a fire and, being the most uxorious of husbands and the most dedicated of fathers, was happy to be in constant supervision of his family from his writing table. He was described by Ellery Channing as “a little fat, rosy Swedenborgian amateur, with the look of a broker, and the brains and heart of a Pascal.”
With his vehement and “vascular” temperament, his contempt for most other American thinkers, his income from an Irish Protestant father who had become rich on Albany and Syracuse real estate after arriving in America a penniless boy wild to see Revolutionary War battlefields, his pride that be and his children were never “guilty” of doing “a stroke of American business,” the father of Henry and William James was known to be independent to the point of eccentricity. He was also generally considered unreadable. William Dean Howells, whose father was a Swedenborgian, wrote that “Mr. Henry James has written a book called The Secret of Swedenborg and has kept it.”
The elder James’s problem, which descended on all five of his children (even the ungifted but equally unstable two youngest boys, Robertson and Garth Wilkinson), was spiritual homelessness, a fervid need not easily understood by others to make attachments to a higher consciousness than his own. He was a natural believer who assured his son William that he had never known a sceptical moment. But his God was in no sense an external spirit; it was the divine principle working itself out in humanity. To know that saved us from being “sick souls,” from falling into the abyss that awaits all unaided human effort, all attempts to escape the “nothingness” of mere self, “the abyss of evil over whom even the best men hover.”
That evil expressed itself as despair. There could be no heaven without a hell, as long as the individual insisted in good American style on regarding himself as self-sufficient. Empirically we know we are creatures with a lack, a destitution, a death in us. Real selfhood comes from God—and God is the redemption of man in society. This is the “divine humanity” in our “natural humanity”; it is founded on the solidarity of the race, the “social rebirth of the individual.” Our seeking perfection will “give ourselves no rest until we put on the lineaments of an infinite or perfect man, in attaining to the proportions of a regenerate society, fellowship, and new brotherhood of all mankind.”
It was typical of the elder James to say that Genesis was too optimistic. The “void” did not vanish when the creation was completed; we feel it still in our aloneness. Bernard Shaw thought the father was the most gifted member of his remarkable family. He was certainly the most influential, for he passed on even his neuroses. The Jameses experienced challenge to their innate beliefs as illness. Their recurrent illnesses seem to have been ideas—in revolt against authority—and the benevolently pervading, all-too-loving father who was always at home was the children’s authority.
They were all exceedingly mental beings, sometimes so far removed from actual society that certain of Henry James’s final works, like the unfinished The Sense of the Past, take place in an England that is nothing but a mental elaboration. William James, actually less worldly than his brother for all his “pragmatism,” innocently equated pragmatism with the “cash-value” of an idea. What he was really after was correlation, the human action and effect that should follow from having an idea. They lived in words. For all of them there was an emotional necessity to every particle of expression. It is seen first in the father’s amazing projection of temperament into his wordy pursuit of the divine. He managed to sound excited even when he was most ponderous.
Dr. William James’s recorded oscillations, depressions, physical uncertainties (he was his only patient) were to prove almost suicidal until the Personnalisme of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier gave him the confidence to assert his natural belief in moral liberty and freedom of choice. He was like a character in a Dostoevsky novel—his psyche staged violent ups and downs as he looked to new ideas for his salvation.† Alice James, the youngest child and the only girl, was all her life a prodigal sufferer and medical mystery; her diary and letters show her struggling against ideas not her own. The youngest brothers, otherwise undistinguished, were self-sacrificing pro-black idealists in the South after hard service in the Civil War.
In William and Henry James every particle of intellectual faith became a living and, happily, a restorative experience. Their mental life—so intense that it became in truth a spiritual world—was the root of their being. This was their self, not like anyone else’s; so much inner life was their despair and their vocation. “Self” isolated them. It became their main subject matter. William James, taking a medical degree between nervous collapses, was to work his way through psychology and academic philosophy to achieve his own doctrine and message—as if, while airily competent in both science and philosophy, he was all the while thinking of curing his own “sick soul.” Henry gave his life to the novel because, above all other forms of literature, it appropriated the endless subtlety of human relationships.
“We work in the dark,” the dying writer was to say in Henry James’s story “The Middle Years,” “we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
Henry James never wrote a story around this theme that was not a story about lonely, fundamentally unrewarded devotion to art, the craving to reach “perfection,” the contempt for the novel-devouring public content with the usual commodities.
The “passion” of Henry James—and how consistently he insisted on it in stories, criticism, notebooks, letters—was to bring the modern novel into a literature whose founding sage, Emerson, could not read fiction. Eventually, with growing isolation even in England, James’s “passion” was to achieve the novel as the form most suited to his consciousness. Unlike the novelists he admired most—George Eliot, Balzac, Turgenev—he certainly lacked “saturation” in the life of his native society. He just wanted to be a novelist and read other people’s novels, not only with oversharp eyes but as his main intellectual diet. Even poetry soon bored him. With the precocious sophistication acquired through a childhood in Europe, and his detachment from the commercial cares and interests that dominated his generation after the Civil War, his early work dramatized the tritest love story from the outside, easily worked up a “situation.” Brother William the physician and psychologist emphasized the individual case; brother Henry, the drama, the plot. In some mysterious way which he came to equate with accomplishment in the novel, Henry James was intellectually disengaged, free of “ideas,” forever on his own and left to his own devices.‡
He turned out to have a great many. From early childhood, absorbed in the bound volumes of Punch and every possible “story book” when the family still lived on Fourteenth Street in New York, James collected images of England, social chronicles and memoirs of the country that most represented a “high civilization.” He practiced his future trade by writing brilliant travel sketches about Saratoga and Newport. Even Emerson was properly impressed by the vividness of his “pictures.” (James’s extraordinary capacity for images was to exfoliate in his “major” novels of the early 1900s until they resembled the superplush, madly overdecorated hotel parlors of the period he satirized in The American Scene.) The young man began at twenty-one, in the midst of the Civil War, a smooth professional before he had anything very pressing to write about.
The “magazine era” after the war gave James his great opportunity as a reporter and practitioner of the new European-style fiction of manners. Old or new, magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, the Century, now had a distinct middle-class audience whose moral standards and literary tastes editors busily anticipated. Never before had native periodicals been able to count on a body of readers so contained, so full of prosperous self-satisfaction, and so receptive to social fiction—which brought this class news of itself. The feminine component was described as an “Iron Madonna” chaining writers to women in “society,” their snobberies and inhibitions. James was to lose much of his original popularity when Daisy Miller offended the proprieties; no “decent” American girl would go about Rome unchaperoned, with a mere Italian. Daisy had betrayed her class, not her sex. But the magazines had early welcomed James’s unique knowledge of “foreign parts,” his special ability to write “transatlantic sketches.”
When James died in the midst of the Great War, leaving two novels and a third volume of autobiography incomplete, he had published twenty-two novels, one hundred twelve “tales,” volume on volume of travel, biography, criticism. No other novelist in the great age of the novel wrote so much about his own fiction and was so mindful of everyone else’s fiction. He was clamorously to describe his aims for the novel as the great form, to confide secrets of the workshop. The archbishop of Canterbury himself, at a dinner party, had given him the anecdote that became the “germ” of “The Turn of the Screw”! For the New York edition (1907–09) of his collected works, James rewrote his earlier novels in his elaborate later style (itself a form of critical commentary) and composed prefaces to each of his principal works and to many of his best stories. With his overflowing articulateness and the flutteriness of his last period, he recounted how the “situation” came to him, where he walked thinking it out, where he sat down to write it, and how this specific work fitted into his master strategy of the high art of fiction. In the end, he confided to Grace Norton, he even thought of writing a preface to his prefaces. His collected letters are as full of his professional avidity as his notebooks, where in his “sacred struggles” he often addressed his writing self, his “genius,” as his only recourse in life. “Without thee, for me, the world would be, indeed, a howling desert.”
Late in life James confessed in a letter: “The port from which I set out was … that of the essential loneliness of my life, and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course again finally directs itself. This loneliness [is] deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.”
The reader has an instinct of this in the familyness of James’s protagonists. As late as the “major” novels, Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors is a widower who has lost his only son; Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove is an orphan; and Maggie Verver, marrying an Italian prince with all too many relatives, has to explain that “they hadn’t natural relations, she and her father.” Why not? Obviously James identified his better characters, especially his favorite ones, with his own solitariness. Hence their mental precautions (sometimes it is positive fright) before other people, their frustrated interchanges, the desperate conjectures which the “witty” dialogue brushes over. The voyeur is prominent among James’s characters as outsider, gossiper, prurient innocent. A tribute to James’s power, his underground conduit of feeling, is that he was able to get so much interest and even suspense out of characters shut up in their own minds.
Henry’s “loneliness” and William’s unstable psyche were to lead them to pursue the mystery of personality to every hiding place. And long before James confessed it, it was out of “essential loneliness” that he sprang into furious productivity with such nervous force and cultivated “relationships” as his prime interest in life and art. If he worried that his experience even of New York life was “downtown” with the “pastry cooks,” never uptown in the business world, it was because he wanted to succeed in a “big” American way. His dogged industry and constant anxiety about his career remind one of the tireless American entrepreneurs of his generation. He was always conscious of the public for whom his fiction was serialized on both sides of the Atlantic, and he certainly meant to satisfy it. He had nothing of Flaubert’s horror of the modern audience and gladly tried to educate up to his own standards readers who asked him to explain what he was up to. To flourish in his chosen field, never to give up in the face of mockery and failure, was his manliness.
Henry Adams was proud of not being known to the general public. Mark Twain courted the public endlessly. William James, shifting from field to field before finding himself in middle age, drove himself to document his mature philosophy in one great book but died feeling that he had not fully justified his faith in his own originality.
Henry usually justified himself. He had poor digestion and in his early letters from Europe sounds bereft as he moves from one hotel room to another. But he escaped the unsettling illnesses and the even more unsettling political idealism that was marked in his father, his sister, all his brothers. He wrote, he wrote, he wrote. Even when he was dying, he kept chanting sentences aloud, like the dying Emerson. We do not know what Emerson was saying; James’s secretary did take down those amazing “letters” from James in which he thinks himself Napoleon. They are mysterious, but they throb with the familiar sonorousness of James’s sentences.
Napoleon, Leon Edel has shown in the five-volume biography whose total sympathy reveals James’s fascination for our generation, was a model for James, as he was for many unsoldierly pen pushers. Napoleon was France and France was James’s Olympus, his classical world. James, too, was a “colonial” drawn to the mother country, another ambitious provincial with a great design. His career was one long deliberation of his art and a determination to show himself sui generis; he meant to be such a novelist as his own country had never conceived, as even “old England” in his time could not match for total devotion, accomplishment, form.
James was to become a great original, a powerful critic, the unique portraitist of society on two continents. This was conceded even when, at the height of his powers, he was a problem to such brilliant writers and intimates as Edith Wharton (“Don’t ask me what I think of The Wings of the Dove!” she said to a Scribner’s editor), H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, André Gide. When James died in 1916, T. S. Eliot admitted that James had been dead for some time. In his last years the “Master” was something of a joke, so isolated that he scorned every popular fiction and “fictionalist.” He became the great dissenter from the disorderly tradition of the English novel, invoked “form” and “composition” at every turn, found Tolstoy and Dostoevsky “loose baggy monsters,” referred to some of his own productions as “almost perfect.”
James certainly did not begin with this self-magnification and haughtiness toward other novelists. Like his always obliging friend Howells, with whom he was at first allied in producing the new fiction of manners for the magazines, James adopted a deliberate strategy. His early fiction duplicates Howells’s studied equanimity, his easy irony and delightfully slow pace, everything deliberated as if he were preparing clever remarks at a dinner party. Howells’s gift was for impersonating social tone. He leaves you slightly anxious, of course; each sentence is such a conscious preparation for the next. He lacks James’s edge. James understood and (for a time) even relished his need to please the audience on whom he drew for his material. If “there is something voluptuous in meaning well,” as Henry Adams said, that was certainly Henry James’s voluptuousness. His collected letters wear the reader down with what James admitted was the “twaddle of mere graciousness.”
James at the beginning was identified with the new market for fiction, and as he came into his maturity he took it on himself to defend fiction from the suspicion of not having a clear moral purpose. His 1884 essay, “The Art of Fiction,” resonantly invoked freedom for the novelist: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.… Enjoy [the novelist’s freedom] as it deserves; take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, publish it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you.”
James called fiction the most human form of art—it caught “the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the color, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.” The rising market as well as a more professional aptitude for fiction helped to mute the standard objection that fiction had no clear purpose. The modern system of royalty payments took hold about 1880. The cost of printing fell with the introduction of machine-made pulp paper, the rotary press, steam power, and the linotype machine. National magazines bid eagerly for the rights to new fiction when James was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Even in Russia the fiction vogue forced novelists to start serializing their novels before they had thought them all out. Dostoevsky complained that he had to write with the copyboy at his shoulder. James T. Fields, owner of the Atlantic Monthly, told contributors that they were tied to the pace of industrial production.
James could afford to give up a share of the family income to his invalid sister, Alice. But he could never hope to make such a business of letters as Howells did. Howells, forever grinding away (of course he had an invalid wife), ran his own fiction in the Atlantic when he was editor. By 1885 he was able to make this arrangement with Harper’s: “For a yearly 300-page novel he was to receive $10,000 in salary for the serial rights, and a 12½ percent royalty on the finished book. Whatever he wrote for Harper’s Monthly would bring $50 per thousand words, and for Harper’s Weekly, $30 per thousand.” Howells also conducted for six years the “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s Monthly. He was a steady producer of fiction, essays, travel books, and reviews who complained to his mother and sister back in Columbus that he could not afford to leave his desk. During his prime years Howells made the current equivalent of $150,000 a year. His literary tone of voice satisfied—though a shade of irony proclaimed his intellectual independence—the conscious propriety of Beacon Hill. Always working up social topics§ (the businessman, the police station, divorce), Howells managed to retain the benevolence of the Brahmins, to inform and edify the largely feminine reading audience, to earn the plaudits of Mark Twain, who obviously found him harmless (“you are my only novelist”), and the polite interest of Henry James. (Howells was James’s loyal admirer. His admission that he had “never lived” led to the character of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors.) Howells, though he soon bored the elite like Henry Adams and exasperated the socially pretentious by his insistence on the ordinary (“that is the right American stuff”), managed dangerous topics as he managed his relations with publishers, the reading audience, and society in Boston. He was a friend to both Mark Twain and Henry James, and who else could have managed that?
In the early nineties Howells, outraged by the legal lynching of some immigrant anarchists in the Haymarket affair and the increasingly brutal influence of American business, rebelled against the self-satisfaction of Boston, moved to New York, and for a time regarded himself as a socialist and wrote with more bite. But “the question of the opportunities,” as Henry James liked to put it, was always on Howells’s mind. One feels about Howells that he trained himself to become a novelist at a time when the novel had become synonymous with magazines as a way of disseminating to the new middle class information about itself. If Howells had been brought up in the eighteenth century, he would have been a party pamphleteer in America, in Europe a librettist for Mozart’s operas. He was a literary jack-of-all-trades who before the Civil War wrote imitations of Heine and after it social novels based on reportage—he had come to Boston in 1860 as a reporter investigating the shoe trade. He was a literary factotum who knew he could pass muster at every kind of writing. Thanks to his being in Europe during the Civil War, he was able to launch the novel of manners in America.
Howells’s concern with the strategy of success would not have been possible without his “literary passions.” He was crazy about writers as well as about books. James always buttered Howells up with faint praise. He appreciated what Howells had done for this newfangled business of describing “society” for itself alone, what Howells’s vogue had opened up for James himself, and how much and in the end how little all this had done for Howells himself. With his head always turned to Europe, James of course thought Howells suburban. As he said in reviewing a routine Howells production, A Foregone Conclusion (1875), “Civilization with us is monotonous, and in the way of contrasts, of salient points, of chiaroscuro, we have to take what we can get.”
Howells’s characters come out of the same American pot. They are essentially mild civil beings, even genuinely resemble one another in their American good faith—a recipe not likely to make for excitement. What was monotonous about “my dear native land,” as even Hawthorne had grumbled, was its atmosphere of “commonplace prosperity.” James when twenty-four, lamenting that America was not sufficiently available to fiction, patriotically added: “We must of course have something of our own—something distinctive and homogeneous—and I take it that we shall find it in our moral consciousness, our unprecedented moral vigor.”
The domestic kind of moral consciousness soon added to James’s vexation about America. As he showed in The Bostonians (1886), it could turn cranky, sterile, hard. What James needed were contrasts that could enliven the tame scene and fill up a certain emptiness. In his early biography of Hawthorne, James took up and developed with a flourish what he thought was Hawthorne’s failure to develop. It was proof “that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.”
Why did James not see a subject in the aggressiveness of American society? Why, fourteen years after the federal government crushed the most massive “rebellion” in history, could James write in his Hawthorne study that there was “no State, in the European sense of the word”? Why, in the midst of a society already feared by James’s adored Britain as its imminent rival, did James suffer for the “very lack of air to breathe”?
James never had to say this, he did not even have to think this until he satirized in The Bostonians the cranks who now represented New England’s religious idealism. He himself had no more respect for church religion than his father did and far less belief in a spiritual world detached from human society. His only faith was in the private consciousness—not Emerson’s correlation of this with some shadow divinity but consciousness pushed steadily back on the individual himself, as in brother William—consciousness seeking an outlet and finding it in the inner world of other personalities. The “soul” was now a synonym for the individual, not an organ of perception receiving flashes of the divine. There was in fact a great blank where Emerson’s “soul” had so confidently labored. But many Americans were very sure of what James had called their “spiritual lightness and vigor.” “Genuine belief,” Whitman had said in Democratic Vistas, “has left us”; religion had become sterile, small-minded, and was often faked in the travesty of Emersonianism that became Mary Baker Eddy’s “spirit world.” But Americans, precisely because they were humdrum, middle-middle in the tame bourgeois style that gave James no stimulus to imagination, and socially innocent, were purer than other peoples. This was a drawback to such a “grasping imagination” as James early declared himself to be, by contrast with Howells. The England lacking to poor Hawthorne was a fantasy that would never quite wear out for James even when he lived there:
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors; nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great universities nor public schools—no Oxford, no Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political activity, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!
V. S. Naipaul, another brilliant novelist from the Western hemisphere to settle in England, says that the novel is the product of “highly organized societies.” James’s England was even more “organized” than Naipaul’s is today. When James revisited his native land in the early 1900s to write The American Scene, he found it not only rather too unorganized for his comfort but resoundingly vulgar. Victorian society made possible this crucial dialogue from The Portrait of a Lady (1881)—impossible to imagine in any country but James’s dreamland, upper-class England, yet true to American virtuousness, it is spoken by an American to his father and unwittingly prepares the American heroine’s doom:
“I want to make her rich.”
“What do you mean by rich?”
“I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
What James’s first judges among the Brahmins would not have credited in such a pleasing young man was his secret avidity. To have “perception at the pitch of passion,” to be “saturated,” to “conquer,” “appropriate,” “triumph”—the intensity of his personal vocabulary becomes as routine in his writing as his hieratic settings. The settings were bestowed on him by tradition, were capable of “transmission,” radiated the “tone of time.” The ever more eloquent and echoing pressure James put into his renderings of Europe reflect an intoxication that even the refrain in his early letters—“At last I live”—does not fully convey. “The great thing is to be saturated with something, and I choose the form of my saturation.”
What James demanded for himself, and eventually thought he had found in England, was a class, a style of life, the presentation of which would produce its effect. Its complexity, he assured himself, would answer to his deepest need as an artist: to bring out the hiddenness of personality. A leisured, upper-class society provided not only the surface that made for contrast with the secret soul but the intrigue that exposed it. James was a snob with a great purpose. Only superior society made possible what he thought of as the necessity and difficulty of discernment. Only the formal routine of “high civilization” made possible the arduousness (to do a work that would show “the most doing”) that became his essence of art. So he narrowed himself. Not that he had a choice. In one of the late prefaces he wrote for his New York edition (of Lady Barberina), he admitted that
nothing appeals to me more, I confess, as a “critic of life” in any sense worthy of the name, than the conquests of civilization, the multiplied symptoms among educated people, from wherever drawn, of a common intelligence and a social fusion tending to abridge old rigors of separation.… Behind all the small comedies and tragedies of the international, in a word, has exquisitely lurked for me the idea of some eventual sublime consensus of the educated.… There … in the dauntless fusions to come—is the personal drama of the future.
James’s “discovery of Europe” was that its virtù, its preciousness, was enough to frame a character, to release a story. By contrast, the bareness of American settings had been a special irritant to him. In The Europeans (1878) the Baroness Munster looks around her Boston hotel room with a grimace at its “vulgar nudity.” In The Bostonians James emphasized “the general hard, cold void of the prospect” overlooking Back Bay. “There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles.” The “glare” of gaslight is prominent in James’s America but oddly missing in Europe. Like the lone tourist in so many nineteenth-century photographs of Italy, James seems to have had Europe all to himself. No wonder he was to fix on a character’s “point of view” as the structure of a novel, and that what had begun as a limitation of experience he was to turn into a base of operations.
This was a Europe of imagination indeed, all tradition and background for the starved American senses that could now find in the touch of history, in any street, long-sought opulence for the mind. James’s style grew prodigal whenever he drew a European setting. It shows a mind perfectly pleased, Virgilian in its silky pietas toward the cherished object. There is a purring effect to the opening of The Portrait of a Lady—James describing the great lawn at Gardencourt at tea time, that most delectable of ceremonies—that certainly contrasts with Newport before the Vanderbilts built their marble summer palaces: “The plain gray nudity of these little warped and shingled boxes seems to make it a hopeless task on their part to present any positive appearance at all.”
A particularly happy example of how Europe will make possible “composition as positive beauty” occurs in part six of The Ambassadors. The puritan Strether, duly forewarned against the European temptress, calls on Mme. de Vionnet only to find himself charmed by her against the background of the old house in the Rue de Bellechasse. The “spell of transmission” is in full force. Strether warms to the lady under the spell of what is really a picture. As in an Italian Renaissance painting where the landscape positively hovers over the sitter, her house becomes the vibration of Mme. de Vionnet herself.
The house, the court “large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals,” “the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase”—these, with so many more exquisitely right and revealing details, cause Strether “at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary, cherished, charming.” (The anxious good taste of this in a novelist who adored Balzac would have amused Balzac, who loved to emphasize possessions vulgarly numerous.) Strether has his first “revelation” because of this delicately beautiful woman. Mme. de Vionnet and her house are so beautifully fused that Strether is soon released from his suspicions.
What wins us, too, is the typical Jamesian idyll of Europe as feminine, passive, unmoving, a picture:
By a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter a relation. And the relation profited by a mass of things that were not, strictly, in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the high, cold, delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the court, by the first Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most natural when her eyes were most fixed.
Mme. de Vionnet will be sacrificed by her lover, Chad Newsome. As early as The American (1877) Claire de Cintre was finished off for life by her feudal family. James returning to The American for the New York edition was surprised to see how “romantic” it was, how arbitrary and unsupported he had made the tragedy of his American hero and French heroine. “Europe” as setting had been enough to supply him with motivation. By contrast, James’s American heroines, though they could be as high-mindedly duped as Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, as sweetly victimized as Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, as patiently long-suffering as Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, all showed an edge, an American strength, because they prevailed “morally.” The American girl, his “princess,” the “heiress of all ages,” was always a more dominating figure in James’s fiction than his pale, indecisive males.
She makes her triumphant and still most memorable entry striding into The Portrait of a Lady as bouncy American independence in all things—a Katharine Hepburn in her prime. Nothing so illustrates the roles of America and Europe in James’s mind as the contrast between Isabel’s health, her innocent self-assurance, and the Europeanized Americans around her. Withered Mr. Touchett, sickly Ralph Touchett, corrupted Madame Merle, and daemonically selfish Gilbert Osmond, all enlivened by her, virtually seduce her by their subtlety and their conscious charm. It was to be caught up like this that Isabel waited through dark lonely days in Albany. Although her attachment to her American-born “Europeans” almost destroys her, Isabel conveys all the “spell” of Americans entering upon Europe that was James’s own.
Isabel embodies the note of “relation” that made society real. Women—certainly James’s women—do not stand outside society. What James would have made of the tragedy of his friend Mrs. Henry Adams is fascinating to imagine. He would not have isolated her as a psychological case, in effect dropped her as everyone else did; he was a novelist. But of course Isabel, who shares with Marian Adams the famous spiritedness of the upper-class “American girl,” really had spirit, and this was her eventual triumph. Marian went under.
Daisy Miller was no more than a type for a magazine story, “the innocently adventuring, unconsciously periculant American maiden,” as Howells put it.? “Never was any civilization offered a more precious tribute than that which a great artist paid ours in the character of Daisy Miller.… But the American woman would have none of Daisy Miller … because she was too jealous of her own perfection to allow that innocence might be reckless.” Was this idealization sincere, or was it just flattery of the “Iron Madonna” by the man who once said that “the man of letters must make up his mind that in the United States the fate of a book is in the hands of the women”? In James’s “Pandora,” another early study of an American girl who is startlingly direct and uncomplicated, a married woman modelled on Marian Adams the Washington hostess reflects: “The type’s new and the case under consideration. We haven’t had time yet for complete consideration.”
To “consider” other people is the morality of manners; to keep someone unrelentingly under consideration is the chief occupation of James’s characters; finally to reflect and “consider,” endlessly, is what the moral life comes to. Isabel’s rashness in marrying Gilbert (precisely because his considerateness seems to ask nothing for himself) is the one act in the book—an act that requires her to spend the rest of her time considering its folly. So the whole book asks us to join in consideration of Isabel’s case.
Reflectiveness becomes the norm in this world. But the betrayal it considers, terrible enough in view of the aching good faith with which Isabel entered upon it, is enlarged by the attentiveness, molding, shaping, that James brings to our unrelieved consideration of Isabel’s plight.
The concentration is wonderful, giving us point by point knowledge of the heroine as well as sympathy for her. We do not know so much of the poor, ill, palely loitering Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove. We would not want to know this much of the relatively unsympathetic Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl; Maggie is altogether too practical and too spoiled, her father’s little princess even before she gets herself a real “prince.” Isabel’s plight engages us because she is not ambiguous like Maggie and is no wraith like Milly. She is altogether healthy in life, alone only because of her natural independence and honesty. There are no secrets to her—and this in a world where those who betray her have nothing to them but dirty little secrets. Ralph Touchett, who loves her but exposes her to evil by making her rich, is too sickly, and therefore complicated. The Jamesian male, usually a wallflower, gets Isabel’s compassion but not ours.
Isabel, launched on her perilous European career by millionaire Americans, open to exploitation by corrupt Americans, is led and misled every inch of the way by considerations that depend on European beauty, European ritual. The great lawn at Gardencourt dazzles her; Lord Warburton courts her by walking her past his family portraits; though the English nobleman attracts her, the false Gilbert Osmond wins her by seeming to speak for the esthetic soul of Europe itself—all consideration of the right art, the right values, the right setting. Isabel is the fairy-tale princess in the dark wood, out of her depth; but this being Europe, it is the sacred wood. Rich, picturesquely rich, tradition-rich Europe shines like a portrait indeed as the reflection of all the worshipful glances directed at it. And Gilbert thinks he represents it better than anyone else. He is the “first gentleman of Europe.” After Isabel’s honest American soul, Europe is virtually the main feature of the novel.
Isabel is vaguely unsettled by the sight of Madame Merle standing while Gilbert is all too comfortably seated. She has no reason to suspect that they are anything but “friends.” Between friends, this would have been a breach of manners in Boston. In Boston the sight would not have weighed so heavily on our heroine’s mind. The intrigue, the unsuspected intimacy that the scene imparts, helps to build up the increasing suspicion that the surface of “consideration” (a term Gilbert applies equally to social standards and esthetic matters) is false. We sense in this world something contrived and wrong, not just narrow and snobbish. We are beset by the dominating image of a “portrait,” both as virtù and as the deception inherent in social appearance.
Wickedness in James is duplicity, usually sexual. An eye is always at the peephole, and being nothing but an eye, it sees the worst. Lambert Strether will recognize quite late in The Ambassadors that Chad and Mme. de Vionnet, who are always in each other’s company, are in fact lovers. Maggie Verver will get the point about her prince and Charlotte Stant as a kind of triumphal crisis, the richest experience yet of her already distinguished life. Milly Theale, for all her pressing mortality, seems to have understood about Merton Densher and Kate Croy, and in death she exerts this knowledge around them as the supreme act of her life. The “criminal,” and James uses the word, is a conspirator. There was nothing in James’s world to conspire about but the secret love to which money is attached.
The bystanders, the onlookers, are mainly virtuous; action and sin are synonymous. James’s central fixation on the “ruminant,” the observer in all things (like Strether in The Ambassadors, he will want nothing for himself), helps to explain why coupling is arranged in bad faith and is vaguely dirty. Madame Merle wickedly gets Isabel married to Osmond; Kate Croy and Merton Densher get Milly Theale to love Densher; Charlotte Stant, Prince Amerigo’s mistress, gets Maggie Verver married to the prince. What moral inflexibility it took on the part of Henry James to overlook the cynical mores of English country weekends in favor of standards acceptable to—Henry James. What genius it took on his part to carry this off, to make it all acceptable now as well as then. So Milly Theale’s legacy to her would-be betrayers shames them into not being able to add it to any satisfactory life together. So Maggie wins back her husband by her “character.” Naturally, this makes possible endless interpretation of Maggie’s “real” character, though James would seem to have had no doubt—in his more innocent time—that she was a real American girl (and the daughter of a billionaire) and able to get her husband back if she wanted to.
James’s unredeemed characters, like Gilbert Osmond, are villains through inflexibility. They are addicts of the wholly mental life, which is secrecy. Gilbert Osmond is one of his great creations because Gilbert (who forces Madame Merle to do the same) never stops thinking and planning. By nature they are spies. Not only does Madame Merle get Isabel married to Osmond as stealthily as she conceals her past relations with Osmond; we also feel, as the book begins to heat up after the long, languorous opening, that Madame Merle and Osmond are never thinking of anything but Isabel. It is true that everyone in the book has an eye on Isabel and that this steady focus draws us into James’s own fascination with her. Lord Warburton, whom she rejected, seriously considers marrying Gilbert’s infantile daughter—so that he can remain in the company of Isabel? The dying Ralph Touchett comes to Rome so that he can hover over her. Caspar Goodwood seems to have nothing to do but to run over periodically to Europe to persuade a married woman that she is beauty in distress. Henrietta Stackpole functions only as the comic maid in attendance on the queen.
But Madame Merle and Gilbert are obsessed with Isabel. They seem to have no interest in life apart from her. Madame Merle claims to be forever dashing about Europe, but she has not been travelling at all; she has been watching at the keyhole, waiting to get at poor Isabel again. All this watching and waiting works on us because we recognize a compulsion. Isabel’s marriage to Osmond has become a conspiracy against her. Even the staple of Victorian melodrama—Madame Merle’s inability to declare herself to her own daughter (who dislikes her anyway)—becomes intrinsic to Madame Merle’s stealthy nature.
James’s scene-drama succeeds because he, too, is unrelenting in his attention. Everything must point, point all the time. James bears down hard on a scene. We feel his excitement. The book leads us from scene to scene as if it were a play. James never discovered how characters should talk in a play, for his dialogues are founded on mistrustful people who are always picking each other up on words, as in a quarrel. But the drama is in the disclosure of the evil in those closest to us. The nearness of Osmond to Isabel is stifling, while she is surrounded by great English country houses, Tuscan villas, Roman streets. In the great dark palazzo this girl, so surrounded by things, will sit alone by the fire, recognizing at last that she has been violated to the very soul.
The moral crisis Isabel comes to in chapter 42 is James’s classical moment, his tie with the virtuous tradition he left in America. Isabel recognizes that “the first gentleman of Europe,” as he believes himself to be, the man with inhumanly perfect taste, is outraged by her freedom of mind and is trying to destroy it. Since the Portrait in its beauty of surface and scene, its investiture of old Europe as civilization, is in great part a “consecration” of the esthetic ideal, James’s association of spiritual wickedness with a total esthete shows how “native” his sense of good and evil remained.
The sharpest portrait in James’s international gallery is Gilbert Osmond. Gilbert illustrates James’s ability to “do” Americans who have been set free in Europe to think of nothing but their good taste. Only minor, comic characters like Henrietta Stackpole have jobs (and James had a particular aversion to the woman writer as journalist). Business hardly comes into his world; the Newsome family in The Ambassadors manufacture “an object of domestic utility,” no doubt because James could not think of an actual object. In The Golden Bowl the superrich Adam Verver from “American City” is entirely free to saunter about his great English estate, “Fawns,” reviewing his relation to his daughter. But how many fine consciences there are, how many quivering sensibilities, how many people anxious only to keep each other under review! James’s world is truly imagined—a world in which people keep imagining each other, in which (usually) every possible allowance is made for the merely sensitive, in which the merely sensitive have come to think of themselves as the “fine.” “O Gilbert!” Isabel cries out when he has broken her heart, “you who were so fine!”
James adored the “educated class” but did not idealize it. The connoisseur, the dilettante, the well-bred man who seemed to have been bred to no purpose but the savoring of his own distinction, could be the end product of so much leisure and civilization. Gilbert Osmond as the epitome of this type provoked all his horror of the evil hiding in the house of art. That prodigal artist Henry James could not have been more scornful of the type—especially where it represented the passive side of so much “civilization” and hence something of himself.
Osmond is one of James’s finest creations. This decadent and shallow-hearted man lives only for what he is pleased to call culture, has equated society entirely with culture, yet wants the world to notice his every effect. James in a passionate aside notes that no man is more the slave of conventional opinion. Osmond’s cultivated powerlessness makes him conformist, and his conformity is wickedness. His exaggerated respect for society makes him destructive in his relations with other people. Osmond carries out to its final logic, by trying to destroy all independence in his wife, that weakness of being a mere spectator that James illustrated in the character of Ralph Touchett, who protects himself against women by being constantly ill. The elder Touchett’s own early withdrawal from love may be responsible for the eccentricity of his wife. James knew enough of fastidious withdrawal and anxious self-protection to see an alter ego in a type which even in its generosity does harm, as Ralph Touchett does by making Isabel rich.
Gilbert is the ultimate refinement beyond which James did not care to go. Ralph Touchett, dangling from the tree of his father’s millions like a withered apple about to fall, can fulfill himself only in misguided fantasy. Wanting to make Isabel “rich,” he gets his father to leave her three hundred fifty thousand pounds. People who meet the requirements of their imagination can be called rich. This double use of the word “rich” is unbearable; Ralph knows nothing of how riches are acquired. But Gilbert is not so removed. His haughty estheticism, his obsessive fastidiousness in all things, are soon turned against his wife, whom he hates for her independence, as he hates everything and everyone he cannot control.
In this gallery hung with so many gleaming surfaces and fine portraits, Gilbert is the dilettante who would kill. He betrays the society of fine surfaces by showing the black heart beneath. Everything that prides itself on “taste” as a social task, on the epicurean and the epicene, is incarnated in Gilbert Osmond’s lethal conformism—what surprises and shocks his wife most about him. Despite so much adoration of the fine surface, Gilbert wants just to know what the powerful think. The real threat to the soul—to Isabel’s, for Gilbert is past saving—arises from an excessive worship of the fine surface.
Yet in The Golden Bowl, the greatest, richest novel of his triumphant last period, in the twentieth century, James showed that it was indeed the world of fine surfaces, civilization in excelsis, that inspired him to transcend himself as the great novelist of manners. He positively shone in the reflection of the “great world” given him by imperial England, the second Roman Empire—and with a Roman “prince” at the center of the action!
The Wings of the Dove depends for its dominant image of “mortal” beauty on the figure of a dying girl, the intended dupe of a plot to acquire her fortune conceived by the man she loves and his mistress. Milly Theale’s thoughts and actions are not seen directly; her effect on others, especially after her death, makes the book. So her pale, merely outlined self needs the contrast with resplendent, moneyed London, with the hard-pressed Kate Croy and her “devouring” Aunt Maud—with the Swiss mountaintop on which we see the dying Milly ironically perched as the “heiress of all the ages,” with Lord Mark dreaming of fortune in the Piazza San Marco, “the drawing room of Europe.” In The Ambassadors the virtuous and self-denying figure of Lambert Strether becomes vivid against the Paris setting, the “Babylon, bright and hard.” Lunching along the Seine with the supposed femme fatale, Mme. de Vionnet, whom he has come to Europe to separate from the son of his patroness, he cannot tell the perfection of the lady from the perfection of the moment. The most famous scene in The Ambassadors has Strether, the yearning, life-impoverished puritan in the garden of the great sculptor Gloriani, crying out that he has never “lived.” The Ambassadors ends on Strether’s denying himself the love offered by Maria Gostrey; The Wings of the Dove, on Milly’s power after death to “elevate” those who planned to use her in the most shameless way.
All this privation and nobility impresses us less than the power that Europe had to make people shine. In The Golden Bowl, the last novel James completed, all his dreams of the great world, the favorite landscape of his imagination, were fulfilled by a set of characters who are made to seem perfectly matched to James’s enduring love of Europe itself. Nowhere else in James are such greedy and crooked people so constantly ennobled in conversation with people who are distrustful and distrusted but regularly come out with “You’re wonderful”—because of a social status that on all sides compels respect, especially from Henry James. Even William James, disliking “the method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference (I don’t know what to call it, but you know what I mean),” admitted that “in spite of it all, there is a brilliancy and cleanness of effect, and in this book especially a high-toned social atmosphere that are unique and extraordinary.”
Only James would have thought up an impoverished Roman “prince” who is always ceremoniously referred to as “the Prince.” He enters the book, on the eve of his marriage to the daughter of an American billionaire, in an understandably somber mood; even a prince in need of a fortune, and mildly in love with an American billionaire’s daughter, must have some conflict within himself about laying his head on the marriage block. He could not afford to marry his real love, Charlotte Stant; she could not afford to marry him. So she returns from a hurried, distasteful sojourn in her native America to help celebrate the marriage of her lover to her dearest friend, Maggie Verver. The duplicity, the many second thoughts felt like the famous flaw in the flawed and gilded crystal bowl that Maggie eventually buys herself as a wedding present, do not keep the prince from enjoying both Charlotte and his wife’s money. Status in The Golden Bowl is everything, it resolves with magic force an existence that consists entirely of the most measured affections and reflections.
Adam Verver, the American billionaire whose only tie to his origins and presumable enterprise in “American City” is the planned donation of a museum, spends all his time on his English estate looking after his daughter—when he is not depositing art as if it were bullion. “There are things,” Maggie tells her prince on the eve of their marriage, “that father puts away—the bigger and more cumbrous, of course, which he stores, has already stored in masses, here and in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in warehouses, vaults, banks, safes, wonderful secret places.… But there’s nothing, however tiny, that we’ve missed.” Still, Adam is so far removed from the usual earthiness of the American superrich that “it was all, at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold, still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind.”
“The surfaces ring.” Of course this world is “flawed” by adultery, secret and dishonest because of sex. Sex has nothing to do with the way Adam Verver, that good man if all-too-loving father, made his money. (Like his namesake in Eden, Adam is troubled only by the trouble that women get him into.) It would be sentimental to suppose that James’s great fairy tale turns not on his adoration of these highly placed and privileged characters but on the moral imperative (or a natural sense of possession) that leads Maggie to reclaim her prince and her father to take his wife, Charlotte, in self-sacrificing exile back to their native land. Nowhere else does one feel that James has at last met up with the ideal personages of his English dream world. James was right to call The Golden Bowl the best and richest of his novels. Nowhere else does he seem so totally at ease in the happy spilling over of his images for mental states; nowhere else does he so obviously luxuriate in the duration of his characters’ endless fascination with their own status and with each other.
James’s great achievement in this last novel was to make “personality” triumph over the accumulation of experience. With this he demonstrated a distinctness of and fascination for personality that became increasingly dim in twentieth-century fiction after him, as a clinical psychology replaced every traditional sense of uniqueness. For James the individual soul is still the product of the most finespun relationships, can be put into motion only by a civilization that values persons in the most delicate assortments and combinations. Adultery, though “criminal,” was fundamental to James’s novelistic sense of drama. The Golden Bowl really has only four characters spinning each other out over almost eight hundred pages. Without the total involvement of each member of the quadrille with all the others, there would be no joy to the book at all. Given the involvement in all its suspense, we get such a feast of implications and recognitions as James most wanted to write—and finally achieved.
What if all this was not “civilization” as the wisest Europeans knew it? What if it was so perfectly composed, every nuance linked, that the very perfection declared its necessary fragility? James would not have tolerated the objection, much less have understood it. This was his country, his only country. No other novelist of the new century—not Proust, not Kafka, not Joyce—would in his country have been so secure as Henry James was when he completed The Golden Bowl. He exultantly told Scribner’s that it was “the most done of my productions … a shaft sunk to the real basis of the subject—a real feat of engineering.”
It was his supreme moment. The terror of August 1914 was still inconceivable. His own proficiency in technique, in the logic of art, in nuance, he felt to be tribute to the civilization that had made him less of an exile. He even felt the book to be an accomplishment of that civilization. It was “rich” in every suggestion, able to meet the requirements of Henry James’s imagination. And it was secure, a book like an imperium of sorts, and one that would surely last. One of the high moments of The Golden Bowl is a ball at which royalty makes an appearance. There is even a field marshal. The lovers, intoxicated by their nearness at the ball, are borne up by a passion greater than their passion for each other. It was James’s finest hour. There are societies, he gravely tells us in The Golden Bowl, “subject to the greatest personages possible.”
* Henry James kept a certain fondness for his birthplace, or at least for his early associations with it. He named the collected edition of his works the New York edition. He remembered “his” New York in his first volume of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others, with special fervor; in The American Scene with disdain at what it had become. But even his first fifteen years in New York were punctuated by visits to Europe. He did not think of New York as “home.”
†Only William James among modern philosophers was to use the “passional” as a positive direction for the human mind. His theory of the emotions in his Psychology (1890):
“… bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact … our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.
“… the entire organism may be called a sounding board, which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate.…
“Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs.”
This pioneer text of modern laboratory psychology reverberates with the personal charm (and dilemma) of being William James. No one but James, at the height of positivism, could have counselled “the Will to Believe” as a guide to the perplexed. And only James, lecturing to future professors of philosophy, would have granted religion the status of a “hypothesis” and have then gone on to clinch it with, “deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveliness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.”
‡Grimly as James came to admire Zola, for example, he could not understand Zola’s leaving his desk to take up the cause of Dreyfus. George Eliot’s evangelical youth he saw as a stage she had to outgrow. The political (as well as personal) instincts that made Turgenev flee Russia escaped Turgenev’s admirer.
§Ford to Egeria Boynton in The Undiscovered Country (1880):
“ ‘I’m serious enough, but I don’t respect my writing as it goes on. It’s as good as most; but it ought to be as good as the least.’
“ ‘What are social topics?’ she asked presently.
“ ‘I suppose I’m treating a social topic now. I’m writing about some traits of New England country life.… I couldn’t help noticing some things on the way; my ten years in town had made me a sort of foreigner in the country, and I noticed the people and their way of living; and after I got here I sent a letter to the newspaper about it. You might think that would end it; but you don’t know the economies of a hack-writer, I’ve taken my letter for a text, and I’m working it over into an article for a magazine. If I were a real literary man I should turn it into a lecture afterwards, and then expand it into a little book.’ ”
?Even in the rough commercial Chicago that Dreiser described in Sister Carrie (1900) a “Daisy Miller” was a term of reproach for a girl too forward for her own good.