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Henry James: The Mature Master ReviewThe Road to Understanding Henry James
Here is a book for those of you have struggled, as I have, to understand what Henry James was up to in his novels. Sheldon Novick, in this deeply penetrating, beautifully written biography takes us behind the scenes to walk with, and think with, one of literature's most imaginative, most innovative, and most complex artists. In fact, Novick skillfully builds on the images of theatrical and pictorial artistry to take us on a revealing tour of James's subtle craftsmanship, of his keenly felt power of individual consciousness in our perception of reality, of his sense of responsibility toward his siblings and friends, and of his far-reaching relationships with an international circle of artists, political leaders, and social thinkers in America and Europe. We are observers at a play, watching James micromanage everything -- as he did in London during his years as a playwright. In a sense we are part of the drama in James's books, since the action, and its psychological revelations, come to life only when our imagination fuses with that of the novelist. His novels portray conflicts, innuendos, deceits, bravery, contradictions, and compulsions in an intricate, cohesive dialogue rather than in a vivid, straightforward description. Novick introduces us to the novelist's studio, and to the novelist's mind, in this way: "James is seated with his back toward us, at an easel," Novick tells us. "The model lounges on her couch, on a little platform, facing us, and we see that the painter has sketched the outlines of her figure on the canvas . . . . We imagine ourselves sitting where the painter sits, the remarkable beauty of the model's nude flesh mysteriously illuminating the experience."
In this striking image, Novick highlights the projection of James' imagination, which resonates with our own imagination. "The cumulative effect is not exactly visual," Novick advises us. "It is the picture of a living mind feeling its way into simplest and greatest truths, which the reader is led to discover or recall for herself. . . . James prompts us to use a sense that combines intelligence and emotion, that allows us to imagine each other's experience and to enact in imagination the bare descriptions that we read, as if they were stage directions; he is the artist of empathy."
For the reader, James also can be the artist of confusion and frustration as he tampers with language to transfer, to our minds, the germ of what he himself imagines, but chooses to convey obliquely, in part to address our emotions as well as our intellect, and perhaps to spur our own powers of self-discovery. This technique, maturing in his late novels and stories, can be effective, but it also can be downright addling to readers who spin out on the slippery surface of Jamesian grammar. "Over the years," Novick relates, "ordinary nouns and verbs would slowly drop from his writing. . . . A cloud of descriptive nouns, adverbs, and adjectives would surround the pronoun like a skein of metaphors -- coalescing in the reader's eye. The scene itself then seemed to appear magically, as if illuminated and framed by a proscenium."
Not even Novick's considerable eloquence and persuasion can make readers, like me, experience this magic every time, or even enjoy merging with James's imagination when we do. As a reader, I suspect that James is quite aware of how we are affected -- and disaffected -- as we trace the luxuriant, indirect trail that he lays out for us, pushing our way through luscious, ingenious, fantastic groves of unpruned words. To sympathize with us -- as he seems to in The Bostonians, for example -- James occasionally lightens the heavy going with sprigs of ironic humor. But the real satisfaction is understanding James's imaginative, intellectual intent -- which I finally did, with some pleasure, when reading The Bostonians, but only after taking Novick's well-cultured tour of the Jamesian mind.
Novick's memorable tour leads us seamlessly through the literary, social, sociological, political, and historical setting in which James lived, and by which he was profoundly influenced in his outlook and professional work. We enter the scenery hearing muffled, offstage drumbeats -- the calls to Civil War in America, a wrenching conflict of wills in which two of James's brothers fought and were wounded. At the tour's end, we leave the scenery hearing the drums of World War I, a ghastly fulfillment of misguided political will during which, living in London, James died of congestive heart failure. He was honored in England by the Order of Merit, but alienated toward his own country by its resistance to entering into muddy, bloody trench warfare in the name of Anglo-American solidarity, a condition of mutual regard for which James, although "not intimate with political men," vigorously and unfalteringly promoted as a private ambassador.
Novick's fine new biography (which was preceded by The Young Master, about James's earlier life) has an intriguing history of its own. Before Novick's two books, the dominant account of James's life, completed in 1972, was Leon Edel's five-volume biography. In that work, James emerges as a somewhat bloodless man of little passion or courage. In The Mature Master, Novick, in the light of extensive new scholarship, frees James from the constraints of outdated analysis, and brings him to life as "the active, passionate, engaged man his contemporaries knew."
Julian McCaull
Henry James: The Mature Master OverviewThe New York Times compared Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James: The Young Master to "a movie of James's life, as it unfolds, moment to moment, lending the book a powerful immediacy." Now, in Henry James: The Mature Master, Novick completes his super, revelatory two-volume account of one of the world's most gifted and least understood authors, and of a vanished world of aristocrats and commoners.Using hundreds of letters only recently made available and taking a fresh look at primary materials, Novick reveals a man utterly unlike the passive, repressed, and privileged observer painted by other biographers. Henry James is seen anew, as a passionate and engaged man of his times, driven to achieve greatness and fame, drawn to the company of other men, able to write with sensitivity about women as he shared their experiences of love and family responsibility.James, age thirty-eight as the volume begins, basking in the success of his first major novel, The Portrait of a Lady, is a literary lion in danger of being submerged by celebrity. As his finances ebb and flow he turns to the more lucrative world of the stage–with far more success than he has generally been credited with. Ironically, while struggling to excel in the theatre, James writes such prose masterpieces as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl.Through an astonishingly prolific life, James still finds time for profound friendships and intense rivalries. Henry James: The Mature Master features vivid new portraits of James's famous peers, including Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson; his close and loving siblings Alice and William; and the many compelling young men, among them Hugh Walpole and Howard Sturgis, with whom James exchanges professions of love and among whom he thrives. We see a master converting the materials of an active life into great art.Here, too, as one century ends and another begins, is James's participation in the public events of his native America and adopted England. As the still-feudal European world is shaken by democracy and as America sees itself endangered by a wave of Jewish and Italian immigrants, a troubled James wrestles with his own racial prejudices and his desire for justice. With the coming of world war all other considerations are set aside, and James enlists in the cause of civilization, leaving his greatest final works unwritten.Hailed as a genius and a warm and charitable man–and derided by enemies as false, effeminate, and self-infatuated–Henry James emerges here as a major and complex figure, a determined and ambitious artist who was planning a new novel even on his deathbed. In Henry James: The Mature Master, he is at last seen in full; along with its predecessor volume, this book is bound to become the definitive biography.
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