Henry James in France

Peter Brooks
HENRY JAMES GOES TO PARIS
288pp. Princeton University Press. £15.95.
9780691129549
 
In 1875, Henry James moved from New York into an expensive flat in the rue de Luxembourg in Paris. He was glad to have escaped what he saw as the unrewarding, thin social texture of American life. A year later, preparing to move to London, where he lived for the next twenty years, he wrote to his brother William of his boredom and disenchantment with Paris, saying that he had “got nothing important out of [it]”. In 1881, however, in an entry in his notebooks, James saw the year rather differently: it was, he wrote, “time by no means misspent”. Peter Brooks’s engaging and perceptive book sets out to explain why James’s year in Paris was not only time not misspent, but crucial for later developments in his fiction. Surveying James’s equivocal and occasionally hostile responses to the Parisian cultural scene of 1875 and 1876, Brooks contends that James’s exposure to French Impressionist painting and realist and naturalist fiction contributed to the development of what Brooks calls the “radical perspectivalism” and narrative experimentation of his fiction of the 1890s and beyond.

In an interview published in 1994, Brooks spoke of the “temptation” of writing a biography of a literary figure. Biography, he believed, was “one of the few forms that a literary critic can use, in our culture, to reach a large audience”. Henry James Goes to Paris is far from a biography of James. (Only its first chapter is devoted to telling the story of his year in Paris.) Yet its biographical element is clearly designed to win a larger audience than a book of criticism on James might expect to find. The events of James’s year in Paris are of great interest, and Brooks’s account includes the customary gems: the glacial response accorded to James by Flaubert and his circle after James committed the aesthetic sin of expressing admiration for Gustave Droz’s fiction (“we think nothing of him: you mustn’t talk of him here”); James’s unlikely and rather depressing friendship with the tenaciously uncolourful figure of C. S. Peirce (whom James dropped as soon as he made more friends in Paris); his watchful consternation at the sight of Ivan Turgenev – whom James revered as a man and as a novelist – crawling on all fours in a game of charades. James admitted to William that it was unlikely that he would ever become “intimate” with the French literary scene; but he also wrote to him of his intimate friendship with the Russian artist Paul Zhukovsky – a friendship Brooks examines in some detail here. James’s attachment to Zhukovsky was powerful but almost certainly chaste, and Brooks writes sympathetically of the gradual cooling of James’s regard for him.

The real value of this book, however, lies in Brooks’s assessment of what he sees as the delayed impact of French experimental culture on James’s fiction. Brooks writes with the clarity and confidence that characterize his earlier, greatly influential works of criticism, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Reading for the Plot (1984). Central to his arguments in his extended readings of such novels as The Tragic Muse, What Maisie Knew and The Golden Bowl is that James always retained a belief in the value of representation, in spite of the proto-modernist experimentation with narrative methods in his late fiction.

Brooks contrasts the concentration on surfaces and impressions of Flaubertian narrative techniques with James’s commitment to a Balzacian form of representation, which was “less concerned with the details of the real than with what it signifies and connotes, less attached to the surface of things than to what may be suggested and concealed, behind and beneath”. Brooks argues that, valuable as these French experimental techniques were to James’s own narrative methods, he should be considered a novelist not of impressionism but of “expressionism” – a term to which Brooks gives the specialized and suggestive definition: “the effort to make surface yield something that is not purely of surface”; a “drama of ethical substance”. Flaubert, accordingly, was an intensely provoking and problematic figure for James.

Brooks’s treatment of James’s attitude towards Flaubert’s work is acute and compelling. James’s mingled respect for and hostility towards Flaubert has attracted some exceptionally insightful critical commentary over the years: one thinks immediately of Edmund Wilson’s comments in his essay on James in The Triple Thinkers (1938). At the same time James has always been unfairly charged with failing to understand Flaubert’s methods. Brooks rightly admits that in one sense James was frustrated with Flaubert simply for his refusal to write Jamesian novels of consciousness. James had a high regard for Flaubert as a stylist and as an artist devoted to his craft; but he also believed that his fiction was flawed by what he called a “defect” of his mind – namely, his belief that characters of limited intelligence and superficial emotions, such as Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau, were adequate to sustain the burden of narratives of ethical value. What is original about Brooks’s account is that it does not claim that James failed to comprehend Flaubert’s methods. Drawing on his work on James and Flaubert in his previous book Realist Vision (2005), Brooks successfully reverses this critical commonplace by suggesting that James’s aversion was justified by the way he understood Flaubert’s methods only too well – understood, that is, how the motiveless narrative of such a novel as Bouvard et Pécuchet, and the “process of designification” entailed in Flaubert’s descriptive methods, were “profoundly subversive for his own enterprise for the novel”.

For all the psychoanalytic tendencies of Brooks’s criticism (he writes that James’s aversion to French realism was “merely conscious”), his account of James’s reading of Flaubert evokes quite different forms of criticism. First, his distinction between the “process of designification” found in Flaubert’s descriptive methods, and James’s “hypersignificant” techniques, invites a comparison with James Wood’s concept of “hysterical realism” in modern-day fiction. Wood finds a lack of ethical value and significance in the bloated information and curious learning offered by such a novelist as Thomas Pynchon. Wood’s attitude towards Pynchon is strikingly similar to that which, Brooks convincingly argues, James held towards Bouvard et Pécuchet. Second, Brooks’s notion that James believed Flaubert’s fiction revealed “a lack of respect for life, and for the capacities of fiction to represent life” seems to envisage James as a proto-Leavisite. Brooks’s assessment is accurate. James’s abiding concern in his literary criticism with the way in which experience is mediated through the novel, and his relative lack of regard for stylistic artistry alone, were clearly a great influence on Leavis. Indeed, Brooks’s argument, in his discussion of What Maisie Knew, that this work offers “a kind of moral and psychological pathos that Flaubert never approached” elevates James on grounds that the Leavis of The Great Tradition would surely have approved: James was able to “combine the perspectival lessons of Flaubert with a moral vision that evokes a wholly different tradition of the novel – that of George Eliot perhaps”.

In his writing on Maisie Brooks comes to the conclusion that, for all the radical perspectivalism of James’s late writing, he remained committed to the representation of acquired knowledge and derived meaning. We might question this vision of James’s commitment to knowledge, however. The very distinctive conditions of that novel – those brought on by the representation of what James calls the “infant mind” – should not distract us from the way in which they highlight something of wider importance to James’s use of the reflecting consciousness in his fiction: that receptiveness and perception are valued more highly than knowledge and understanding. In his preface to Maisie, James wrote that Maisie “sees”; in a later preface James described such figures as Rowland Mallet, Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer and Merton Densher as “perceivers”; the dramatic centre of The Portrait of a Lady, James wrote, was “a representation simply of [Isabel Archer] motionlessly seeing”; Lambert Strether’s fate, similarly, is that he “at all events sees”. An essential quality of the reflective consciousness, then, is that the capacity for seeing is quite distinct from, and indeed, supersedes any requirement to “understand” or to “know”. It entails, rather, a sensitivity to complex experience, whose value is to be found not in its transformation into knowledge or understanding but rather in its receptiveness to the experience itself, which issues in the vivid demonstration of some intensely emotional effect on the reflective consciousness. Brooks’s account therefore surprisingly muffles what is most experimental and progressive in James’s fiction. James was an even more radical novelist than Brooks allows him to be.

Brooks is far less severe than many earlier commentators on James’s discomfort at what he called on more than one occasion the “unclean” elements of French fiction. Even so, James’s attitude is still presented here as something of an embarrassment. But if we are disappointed by James’s preference for Droz over Daudet in 1876 we might also admire his tenacity in holding this belief in the face of the contempt it received from the Flaubert circle. James’s intransigence was more interesting than Brooks’s notion that he was “missing things on the spot” suggests. And more important than the preference for Droz was his recognition in 1876 that, as he wrote to William James, he was “turning English all over”. James’s faith in the culture that produced George Eliot was more than a reaction against Flaubert and company. It was surely deep-rooted and even vital to James’s sense of himself as a novelist in that Anglo-American tradition. Brooks concludes rightly, I think, that James remained committed to ethical significance and value in his late fiction; but his notion of James’s “missing things on the spot” undervalues the importance to James of that commitment in 1876.

More generally, however, Brooks’s detailed readings of James’s fiction are highly convincing. His assessments of the melodramatic “turn” of The American (which James wrote during his year in Paris) and the “melodrama of consciousness” he sees at work in The Golden Bowl are rewarding and successful refinements of his writing on James in The Melodramatic Imagination. Throughout Henry James Goes to Paris, Peter Brooks shows the command of and saturation in his subject that have made him one of the most valuable commentators on nineteenth-century realist fiction, and he has produced here an exceptionally clear-sighted account of Henry James’s boldness and importance as a novelist.
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Matthew Peters is writing a PhD on Henry James at the University of Cambridge.