Portrait of A Novel (30 page)

Together, Stevenson and Howells inaugurated a period of competing manifestoes of a kind more familiar in France than in Britain. But the energy of that debate depended on the fact that the English novel had reached a moment of generational change. Both George Eliot and Trollope had just died, the last great novelists of the century’s middle years. Their chairs were empty, while the newcomer Thomas Hardy was still on the cusp of his own major work. The English critics wrote in fear that the best things lay behind them, while the Americans were bouncingly confident, in everything from what Jennings called the
“Boston Mutual Admiration Society”
to the vigorous regionalism of Bret Harte. “Henry James, Jr” stood as a tribute both to its subject and to Howells himself. He had been James’s editor, he had a stake in his success, and the essay played a major role in his own career as a maker of taste, marking the start of what have been called the “Realism Wars” of the 1880s. The
Atlantic
had made Howells a powerful figure in American culture. But he became even more influential in the second half of the decade, when he used a new column in
Harper’s
to map the connections between fiction and the social realities of a sprawling, diverse, and increasingly urban nation; a debate that would shape the work and reception of Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane among others.

James kept his distance from those wars; or rather he entered them through his interest in such French writers of the period as Zola and Maupassant. Still, he did respond to the furor Howells’s essay had created, and did so in the one piece from the battle that continues to be read on its own merits. In April 1884 the journeyman novelist Walter Besant gave a lecture called “The Art of Fiction” in which he argued that fiction was indeed a fine art, something comparable to and as worthy of respect as music or poetry or sculpture. The claim is uncontroversial now and even at the time was less remarkable than most writers pretended; though Trollope, it’s true, had compared the novelist to a shoemaker, a skilled craftsman, and nothing more. Besant offered younger writers some advice of the kind that’s still given about keeping a notebook and writing from experience, and the piece as a whole is both inoffensive and dull. It would be entirely forgotten if James hadn’t taken it as the occasion for the playfully magisterial essay he published under the same title later that year. I’ve drawn on his own “Art of Fiction” throughout this book, using it for the light it casts on his career as a whole. But we also need to consider it as the product of a particular moment in that career.

James begins with disarming modesty. He wants merely
“to edge in a few words under cover”
of Besant’s “encouraging” work, encouraging because until recently he had had no idea that the English novel was

. . . what the French call
discutable
. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it—of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that: it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however,
naïf
(if I may help myself out with another French word); and . . . . there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation—the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened.

James never mentions Howells, but he chooses his examples deliberately, his use of French looks mischievous, and he knows but does not allude to the reasons for that “returning animation.” What he
does
say is that the discussion looks worth having. British criticism will be better for having to define and defend its tastes, for having to say what the pudding is made of. James admits that nothing will ever take the place of “liking” a book, though he still wonders why so many of them have to end with the fictional equivalent of a
“course of dessert and ices,”
a doling out of the appropriate rewards and punishments. He acknowledges that readers like a good ending, and yet argues that in some cases the truer course might “render any ending at all impossible.” And as for those books in which nothing seems to happen—well, doesn’t a “
psychological
” motivation stand as an adventure in itself?

At point after point James offers a tacit reply both to Howells’s critics and his own, and it’s possible to read the piece as an elaborate series of coded references, in-jokes accessible only to those who sit at a groaning board of the period’s magazines. The essay offers far more than that, however, and what has made it last is its sense of joy. James’s prose here is as buoyant as a Mozart serenade, sly and generous and, above all, confident, the voice of a writer who knows the worth of his own achievement. If he writes for those dining off the magazines, he also writes with a zest and a clarity that endures today, and one that doesn’t need the benefit of footnotes. What he offers—what “The Art of Fiction” gave me as a student and what it gives still—is a sense of the exhilarating complexity of form itself. Usually we talk about books in pieces: plot and character, language and theme. We pull them apart because it’s easier that way, and if we’re lucky, we manage to put them back together again. James won’t let us do that. He insists that we take it whole. The critics of his day usually distinguished between a work’s “subject” and its “treatment,” but to him a novel was “
a living thing
, all one and continuous . . . and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.”

One aspect of that claim seems worth an extra degree of consideration, and worth it precisely because it points to the limits of James’s own assumptions. He praises
Treasure Island
, but he also has Stevenson’s essay on his mind, and as I noted in an earlier chapter, he rejects the period’s customary distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident. The only distinction he recognizes is that between good novels and bad. For “
What is character
but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” It’s an incident, James writes, for a woman to give you a particular look. At the same time, the way in which she looks will also provide a glimpse of her character. Plot and character in this economy are interchangeable and transitive, an equation that will forever balance. A closer examination suggests, however, that for James character always takes precedence. Character creates incident; incident merely illustrates some already-existing way of being. Events reveal character, but they do not make or mold it, and the force of circumstance alone is never determinative. Most of the novelists James admired would have agreed with him, Turgenev in particular. Start with a character—with a girl in a doorway—and then look for the incidents that will best display her essence. Yet James claims too much. This method may work for his own kind of fiction, but he won’t allow that there might be other kinds, that under certain circumstances one could begin and begin better with incident instead.

Stevenson offered what he called “
A Humble Remonstrance
” to James’s argument, but he would lose the debate, and forty years later E. M. Forster started his
Aspects of the Novel
by worrying over the fact that the novel tells a story. “
That is the highest
factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different—melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavastic form.” The modernist suspicion of story itself—Woolf had it too—dates to James, and to “The Art of Fiction” in particular. His aesthetic is predicated on the belief that we have the freedom to act and to choose, that character in the nonliterary sense makes fate. Other writers would develop a different model of the relation between character and incident; Hardy’s people, for example, often seem pursued by some external fate, by circumstances against which they are helpless. James did, however, recognize one particular challenge to his own ideas. He ended “The Art of Fiction” with the briefest of bows toward France in general and Zola in particular. James could not quite get himself to walk in the naturalist’s path, and thought that his peer’s great effort suffered from its overriding pessimism. He nevertheless preferred it to the “
shallow optimism
” of the English, and in the winter of 1884 he found in Paris what he told Howells was the only kind of new work he could respect.

T
hat February, James gave himself a working vacation, crossing over to the French capital “
on the principle
that anything is quieter than London,” and taking a room for the month at the Hôtel de Hollande near the Palais Royal. It was the easiest of strolls to both the Louvre and his beloved Comédie Française, but on this trip he was concerned above all with his memories. Turgenev had died at the end of the previous summer, and Flaubert in 1880; James couldn’t walk the city’s streets without remembering them, and without recalling as well that earlier self who had come there almost a decade before. The young man had stayed on the edge of Flaubert’s group, listening more than talking, but he now decided to renew his acquaintance with its survivors. He had just written for the
Century
about Alphonse Daudet, the Provençal author of
Lettres de mon Moulin
, and he now asked a mutual friend, a journalist named Theodore Child, to arrange a meeting. Daudet invited the two of them for tea at his apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and asked Zola and Edmond de Goncourt among others to meet the now-famous American.
Child wrote
about the meeting for the
Atlantic
’s Contributors’ Club, referring to James as “Mr X,” and in the telling describes these remnants of Flaubert’s
cenacle
as surprised to discover just who their guest was. “‘Why, I have known you a hundred and fifty years!’ exclaimed Daudet.” But while the French writers all remembered his face from those long-ago Sundays, they had none of them connected the face and the name.

Even in 1884, James’s books remained little-known in France. Few of his colleagues there read English, and though
The American
came out in French in 1880 and
Daisy Miller
in 1883, James later discouraged the translation of his work. He thought the process would make his very style “
evaporate
,” and in fact the
Portrait
would not have a French edition until 1933. But it was of style that he spoke with Daudet and the others, of the toil and torment with which they fought their way to the one right word. They thought everything that could be said in French had been said already, and Daudet talked enviously of Turgenev, working in a language that “
had as yet
so few foot-prints.” James thought they looked exhausted by it all, like “
galley-slaves
”; though Daudet’s own beautifully wasted face was also the product of syphilis. He himself had never struggled for a word—his difficulty lay in choosing from among the many that so readily came to him. Still, he respected their effort. They too saw the act of writing as one guided by conscious intention, and he admired the passion they brought to their job; most English fiction was a vomit of “
tepid soap
and water” in comparison.

That intelligence must have seemed especially appealing in the months after his immolation in the British magazines. None of the French writers believed that books should be as edible as puddings, and James drew on their sense of vocation in writing “The Art of Fiction” later that year. What he got from French fiction is a quality that
Mario Vargas Llosa
has defined as the double legacy of
Madame Bovary
. The Peruvian novelist argues that two distinct schools of fiction trace their descent from Flaubert. One finds its inspiration in such things as Flaubert’s account of the little drops of sweat on Emma Bovary’s shoulders. It dedicates itself to an almost photographic realism, trying always to extend the range of material with which the novel can deal. Zola worked in this spirit, and Maupassant in his stories of prostitutes, and most writers about war: an unflinching look at the represented subject. The other limb of Flaubert’s tree takes on his obsession with form, his hostility to cliché, and his awareness of the sounds and the colors of the language itself. Vargas Llosa links that to Proust and then to the
nouveau roman
, and also indeed to James. But I am not so sure, and for the American the two appear almost as inseparable as they were for Flaubert himself. Certainly, James saw the naturalists as engaged by questions of form; and certainly he too worried over the question of what could and could not be represented on the page. “The Art of Fiction” may speak of the novel as a finely balanced and organic whole; but it also bemoans the reticence of English fiction, its substitution of a moral qualm for a “
moral passion
.”

James told Howells that he saw him as “
the great American
naturalist.” The words must have made Howells shudder, and yet his 1882
A Modern Instance
had offered a vision of marital dissolution that, physical questions aside, was very nearly as bleak as that of his Gallic contemporaries. Of course, James added, he still had “a tendency to fictitious glosses; but you are in the right path.” Howells would always pull himself up short, and two years later, in writing about Dostoevsky, he tried to say why. He admired
Crime and Punishment
, which he read in French translation, but thought it would be a mistake to imitate its relentlessness. Any novelist who wanted to give a true picture of American society would have to acknowledge what he called “the more smiling aspects of life.” Realism itself required him to register the possibility of happiness, and while Howells did recognize the Dostoevskian tragedy of American slavery, he also believed that in the 1880s his countrymen could hardly draw upon it in fiction. Someday they might; but in the Gilded Age the troubles most readily available to the American writer seemed to him those of private life, not public wrong.