The Year of Henry James Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by David Lodge

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface

  PART ONE

  The Year of Henry James or, Timing Is All: the Story of a Novel

  PART TWO

  Henry James: Daisy Miller

  H. G. Wells: Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul

  The Making of ‘George Eliot’: Scenes of Clerical Life

  Graham Greene and the Anxiety of Influence

  Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin

  Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

  The Best of Young American Novelists, 1996

  J. M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello

  Index

  Copyright

  ALSO BY

  David Lodge

  Fiction

  The Picturegoers

  Ginger, You’re Barmy

  The British Museum is Falling Down

  Out of the Shelter

  Changing Places

  How Far Can You Go?

  Small World

  Nice Work

  Paradise News

  Therapy

  Home Truths

  Thinks . . .

  Author, Author

  Criticism

  Language of Fiction

  The Novelist at the Crossroads

  The Modes of Modern Writing

  Working with Structuralism

  After Bakhtin

  Essays

  Write On

  The Art of Fiction

  The Practice of Writing

  Consciousness and the Novel

  Drama

  The Writing Game

  Home Truths

  To Tom Rosenthal

  The Year of Henry James

  or, Timing Is All:

  the Story of a Novel

  With other essays on the

  genesis, composition

  and reception of literary fiction

  David Lodge

  preface

  The genesis, composition and reception of a novel may be loosely likened to three stages in the life of a human being (very loosely, because literary genesis is usually parthenogenetic). There is a moment of conception, when one of the myriad thoughts that continually stream through the consciousness of a writer penetrates his or her imagination and fertilises it.fn1 This is usually described as ‘getting an idea for a novel’. Many such ideas quickly die, or miscarry, and are forgotten. Even if they survive to full term, the writer may be unable to recall the precise moment of conception, but sometimes – as with several novels discussed in this book – we have reliable accounts of when and how it happened. The initial idea, however, always has a pre-history in the writer’s life, in his experience and in his reading, which it is interesting to try and trace. That is also part of the work’s genesis, as is the process by which the idea is developed, brooded on and modified, in the writer’s mind or notebook, before the actual writing begins.

  In this analogy, the composition of a novel corresponds to parents’ nurturing and education of their offspring from birth until the time when the child ‘leaves home’ and becomes independent of parental control. Much of this compositional work also goes on in the writer’s head, or in memos to himself in a notebook, as well as in the actual production of the text in a growing pile of numbered pages. One tries to make one’s novel as strong, as satisfying, as immune to criticism as one can, a task that usually involves a great deal of rereading and rewriting; but when the novel is published and passes into the hands of other readers it has an independent life which the writer can never fully anticipate or control (though he may of course seek to influence it by commenting publicly on the work or taking issue with his critics). In some, rather rare cases – Henry James’s Daisy Miller being an example – a writer may significantly revise and reissue a work of fiction after its first publication, but in that case he has written another work, which will then have its own reception, distinct from the reception of the original.

  ‘Reception’ is a term that covers several different phenomena. It can mean the process by which an individual reader negotiates a text, from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, ‘making sense’ of it, or ‘producing’ it, as a fashionable academic jargon says. All descriptive and analytical criticism is this kind of reception in action, and there is a good deal of it in the essays in this volume. Such criticism also, by implication, throws light on the process of composition, since it describes effects of which the author is the conscious or unconscious cause. But ‘reception’ can also have a more institutional meaning, i.e., the evaluative response of the literary community, the media, and the reading public to a particular book, as measured by reviews, sales, prizes and other evidence. Reception in that sense is a recurrent topic in this book.

  The person best qualified to give an account of a novel’s genesis and composition is the author. He or she is also the person most affected by its reception. In the first part of this book I describe in some detail all three stages in the life of one of my own novels, Author, Author. Such an undertaking obviously risks seeming narcissistic or presumptuous – all the more because the novel is about Henry James, whose Prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels and tales probably constitute the most impressive feat of authorial self-examination in the English language. It seemed to me, however, a story worth telling because it had several curious and unusual features, notably the nearly simultaneous publication of several other novels about or inspired by Henry James, a phenomenon which stirred up considerable interest and speculation in the literary world, and had for me personally some painfully ironic consequences. I have called this piece ‘the story of a novel’, but it is also the story of a novelist, over a few years of his professional life, and much of it is written in an anecdotal autobiographical mode. I hope that ‘The Year of Henry James’ may have some general interest and value for the light it throws on the psychology, sociology and economics of authorship in the early twenty-first century, as well as on the creative process itself.

  The essays collected in Part Two are more conventional literary criticism. They were written for different occasions (although three of them are published here for the first time), as introductions to reprints, as reviews, and in one case as a lecture, and they do not apply a common or systematic method to the texts they examine. The degree of emphasis on genesis, composition and reception, respectively, varies from one essay to another, though most of them deal with all three aspects of a single novel. Two essays discuss a wider range of texts. The one on Graham Greene focuses on the sources of a writer’s work in his reading, and also on the way he may use his criticism of other writers to try and influence the reception of his own. ‘The Best of Young American Novelists, 1996’ examines a very recent development in the reception of literary fiction, the public listing of meritorious books or authors, usually attached to the award of a prize, which in this case began as a marketing wheeze and then acquired institutional status.

  In arranging the order of the contents, it seemed appropriate to follow ‘The Year of Henry James’ with an essay about one of James’s own tales, and that with an essay on Wells’s Kipps, the reception of which included a notable appreciation by James. After backtracking in time to take in George Eliot, the essays are ordered historically, according to topic. ‘Henry James: Daisy Miller’ is closely based on the introduction to my forthcoming edition of the novella for Penguin Classics. ‘H. G. Wells: Kipps’ is substantially the same as my introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of that novel, edited by Simon J. James, published in 2005. ‘The Making of “George Eliot”: Scenes of Clerical Life’ is a substantially revised version of the introduction to my edition of the t
hree tales for Penguin Classics, originally published in 1973. ‘Graham Greene and the Anxiety of Influence’ is the text of a lecture delivered at the Graham Greene Festival at Berkhamstead, October 2004. ‘Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin’ was written as an introduction to the Everyman Library edition, published in 2004. ‘Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose’ will be the introduction to the Everyman Library edition of that novel to be published in 2006. ‘The Best of Young American Novelists, 1996’ was originally published in The New York Review of Books, 8 August 1996, and ‘J. M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello’ in the same journal, 20 November 2003. I am grateful to the editors and publishers concerned for the original stimulus to write these pieces, and to Colm Tóibín for permission to quote passages from his book The Sign of the Cross (1994), and from his article ‘The Haunting’, published in the Daily Telegraph, 13 March 2004. I am indebted to Professor Michael Caesar of the University of Birmingham for advice and information regarding The Name of the Rose. Bernard Bergonzi, Tony Lacey, Geoff Mulligan, Jonathan Pegg, Tom Rosenthal, Mike Shaw and my wife Mary read various parts of this book when it was in preparation and made useful comments, for which I am very grateful.

  D.L.

  * * *

  fn1 Henceforward in this preface, and throughout the book, for the sake of stylistic economy and smoothness I use the masculine pronoun alone to refer to ‘the writer’, ‘the author’, ‘the novelist’, ‘the biographer’, and ‘the reader’, but all such generalisations are meant to apply equally to male and female writers and readers unless otherwise indicated or implied.

  * * *

  PART ONE

  * * *

  * * *

  THE YEAR OF

  HENRY JAMES

  or, Timing Is All:

  the Story of a Novel

  * * *

  I

  If anyone deserves to win this year’s Man Booker Prize, it’s Henry James. During 2004, he has been the originator of no fewer than three outstanding novels.

  Thus began Peter Kemp’s review of my novel, Author, Author, in the Sunday Times of 29 August 2004, a few days before its official publication date. The other two novels to which he referred were Colm Tóibín’s The Master, published in March of that year, and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, published in April. Henry James is the central character of both The Master and Author, Author. The central character of The Line of Beauty, which is set in the 1980s, is a young man who is writing a postgraduate thesis on Henry James, and Hollinghurst’s novel was seen by several critics as a stylistic hommage to him. In due course The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize, and The Master was shortlisted for it.

  Peter Kemp did not mention another novel about Henry James which had been published in November 2002 and was reissued as a paperback in the spring of 2004, Emma Tennant’s Felony, which spliced together an account of James’s relationship with the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and a speculative retelling of the source story of his novella, The Aspern Papers. Nor did Kemp mention – probably he was not aware of its existence – yet another novel about James, by the South African writer Michiel Heyns, which was being offered to London publishers in 2004. Entitled The Typewriter’s Tale, and narrated from the point of view of James’s secretary, it concerned James’s involvement, in the years 1907–10, in a love affair between two of his closest friends, the novelist Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton, bisexual journalist and man of letters. We know all this about a book which is still unpublished because Michiel Heyns wrote an eloquent and poignant article in the magazine Prospect in September 2004 about coming last in the procession of James-inspired novelists. These were its opening words:

  My agent forwards to me another polite letter of rejection: ‘I am so sorry but timing is all – and there has been a spate of fiction based on the life of Henry James published here. I don’t know how such coincidences happen . . . something in the atmosphere? So regretfully I must say no.’

  Henry James was unkindly portrayed, thinly disguised as ‘Jervase Marion’, by Vernon Lee in her story ‘Lady Tal’ in 1893, and there may have been other fictionalised portraits in his lifetime, or after his death in 1916, but as far as I am aware he never appeared as a character in a novel under his own name prior to Emma Tennant’s novel in 2002. Yet within two years of the appearance of Felony two more novels about him were published and a third was looking for a publisher.fn1 It can be inferred from the available evidence that the preparation and composition of all these books overlapped chronologically and that none of the authors was aware of the projects of the others until their own was under way or actually completed. On the face of it, this convergence of novelistic attention is a remarkable phenomenon, and the anonymous publisher who regretfully declined Michiel Heyns’s novel is not the only person to have wondered what could explain it. Something in the atmosphere – or, to use a more philosophical term, the Zeitgeist? Needless to say I have given the question some thought myself, and have come to the conclusion that it was a coincidence waiting to happen.

  Although Henry James’s reputation suffered a certain eclipse in the decades immediately following his death, he has been firmly established as a major modern writer for at least the last sixty years, required reading for any serious student of the English and American novel, and the subject of a steady stream of scholarly books and articles. He has always been a writer’s writer because of his technical skill and dedication to his art, a critic’s writer because of the challenge his work presents to interpretation, and a biographer’s writer because of the intriguing enigmas of his character and personal relationships. The facts of his private and professional life have been available in rich detail since the completion of Leon Edel’s massive five-volume biography, published between 1953 and 1972. So what’s new that would explain the appearance of a clutch of novels about him in quick succession between 2002 and 2004?

  There have been two fairly recent developments in the academic study of literature which have some bearing on this question: feminism and so-called Queer Theory. Probably no male novelist of the period created so many memorable women characters as Henry James, from Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer at the beginning of his career to Milly Theale and Maggie Verver in his late, ‘major phase’. Feminist critics, or critics influenced by feminism, have taken a keen interest in this aspect of his work, and they have also been intrigued by his intimate personal relationships with women, notably his cousin Minny Temple, who died young of consumption in 1870, his sister Alice, who died of cancer in 1892 after years of neurasthenic illness, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, who took her own life in 1894. Although James was attracted to Minny, and enjoyed close companionship with Fenimore (as he called her), he never committed himself emotionally to either of them, and there is evidence that he felt some guilt on this account after their deaths (he had less with which to reproach himself in his treatment of Alice). The most thorough and persuasive investigation of this aspect of James’s life and character is Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James, published in 1998, which may have inspired Emma Tennant to write Felony. She states that she is ‘deeply indebted’ to it in a prefatory note to her novel. I too am deeply indebted to this remarkable book, but I read it fairly late in my preparatory research for Author, Author. It convinced me that I would have to find room in my novel for extensive treatment of James’s relationship with Fenimore, but it was not one of the original stimuli of my project.

  James’s ambivalence towards women is inevitably associated with the belief of most of his biographers, including Edel, that he was a repressed homosexual who probably never admitted this orientation explicitly to himself or acted it out in a physical relationship. Not surprisingly James has been the object of intense interest from exponents of Queer Theory, which asserts the centrality to literature and the human condition of forms of sexuality traditionally regarded as deviant or transgressive. They have combed his work for rhetorical clues to suppressed homoeroticism (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s claim to have dis
covered imagery of anal fisting in the Prefaces to the New York Edition of James’s Novels and Tales being a notable example),1 and are sympathetic to the view that he may not have suppressed it after all. In his biography, Henry James: the Young Master (2000), Sheldon M. Novick argued that James was initiated into sexual love in the spring of 1865 by the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.2 Both Colm Tóibín and Alan Hollinghurst are identified as gay writers and are interested in this aspect of James’s life and work. Tóibín has a scene in which the young James is affected by sharing a bed with Holmes, both being naked (though nothing happens between them), and deals with James’s much later and better documented attraction to the sculptor Hendrick Andersen (an episode in his life which falls just outside the chronological scope of my own novel). But comments and asides of both novelists in articles and reviews suggest a certain scepticism about the efforts of Queer theorists to co-opt James into their cultural mission, and Tóibín has stated that for him the initial stimulus to write a novel about James came from reading Edel’s biography, which he picked up at a writers’ colony where he was working on a quite different subject.3

  In short, although these currents in the stream of critical and biographical commentary on Henry James may have contributed something to the almost simultaneous composition of several novels about him, they do not wholly explain the phenomenon. Each of the novelists had their own ‘take’ on the subject, and their own starting point. A more important factor, in my view, is that the biographical novel – the novel which takes a real person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration, using the novel’s techniques for representing subjectivity rather than the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography – has become a very fashionable form of literary fiction in the last decade or so, especially as applied to the lives of writers. It is not of course a totally new phenomenon. Anthony Burgess wrote a novel about Shakespeare, Nothing Like The Sun, in 1964, and later published Abba, Abba (1977) and A Dead Man in Deptford (1995) about Keats and Marlowe, respectively; Peter Ackroyd’s second novel was The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1986) and he subsequently produced Chatterton (1987), Milton in America (1996) and The Lambs of London (2004), a novel about Charles and Mary Lamb. But both these novelists are, among their contemporaries, distinguished by a consistent interest in historical and biographical subjects of all kinds as sources for fiction. What is notable about the last decade or so is the number of novelists who have taken up the biographical novel at a relatively late stage of their careers, and their focus on writers as subjects. Emma Tennant published such a novel about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001), before she turned her attention to James and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Other examples which come to mind include J. M. Coetzee’s Master of Petersburg (1994), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (1996), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage (2000), Beryl Bainbridge’s According to Queeney (2001), Edmund White’s Fanny: a fiction (2003), Kate Moses’s Wintering (2003), Alberto Manguel’s Stevenson under the Palm Trees (2004), C. K. Stead’s Mansfield (2004), Andrew Motion’s The Invention of Doctor Cake (2004) and Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George (2005), novels about Dostoevsky, Novalis, Virginia Woolf, Diderot, Dr Johnson, Mrs Frances Trollope, Sylvia Plath, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Keats, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, respectively. It is important to distinguish the biographical novel from the romantic biography, a once popular but now somewhat discredited genre which purports to be history but insinuates a good deal of authorial invention and speculation into the narrative. The biographical novel makes no attempt to disguise its hybrid nature, though each writer sets himself or herself different rules about the relationship of fact to fiction. Some keep very closely to the historical record, as I did in Author, Author, and others invent freely, sometimes to the point of travesty – for example, Lynn Truss’s amusing Tennyson’s Gift (1996), which brings together on the Isle of Wight in July 1884 the poet laureate and his wife, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), the painter G. F. Watts and his sixteen-year-old wife, Ellen (née Terry), and the pioneering photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, with farcical consequences that are entirely fictitious.