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Monopolizing the Master

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Figures.........................................ixPreface.................................................xiAcknowledgments.........................................xv1 Cornering the Market..................................1Legacies of Mastery.....................................1Sovereign Immunities....................................17Notes of a Son and Nephew...............................342 Custodial Conflicts...................................46Remains of the Day......................................46From Keyboard to Ouija Board............................61The Queer Case of Percy Lubbock.........................733 Modernist Ventriloquism...............................109In Memoriam.............................................109Passionate Pilgrim—or Pariah?.....................120The Art of the Novel....................................1274 The James Revival.....................................134Documentary Monumentalism...............................134Partisan (Re)views......................................144From Archive to Industry................................1535 The Legend of the Bastard.............................158Policing the Archive....................................158Dr. Edel and Mr. Hyde...................................170Chairman of the Board...................................182Afterword...............................................193Sources and Abbreviations...............................197Notes...................................................201Index...................................................241

Chapter One

Legacies of Mastery

Before he left this world, Henry James took various steps to shape the contours of his posthumous reputation and direct the lines of critical inquiry that would affect it. That James entertained certain anxious intimations of immortality should not come as a surprise. Any reader of his work—especially those wonderfully wry stories about writers and artists—probably could anticipate the principal aims of his paradoxically posthumous authorial agenda. How many times in those taut works of fiction does the higher imperative of personal privacy trump public curiosity about the artist's life—often accompanied by the ritual destruction of the writer's manuscripts and letters? How often do we hear the lamentations of creative intellects who neither find genuinely satisfactory rapport with an audience nor receive insightful appreciation from the critical press? How many of James's artist figures ultimately succumb to the treacheries of the marketplace, whether as victims of misguided celebrity or knowingly complicitous devotees of a mercenary muse? Through all these permutations of an overarching theme—the relation of the artist to society, which James singled out as one of the "great primary motives" available to him—a pervasive and telling irony adumbrates their autobiographical origins and implications, even when the author's notebooks betray more immediate moments of genesis or particular forms of instigation in the private chronicle of his own career. So many traps for the unwary, these stories often have snared readers into treating them as elaborate Jamesian exercises in self-pity, forms of retrospective consolation for the market's indifference to his work; but their fuller resonance is best appreciated if instead we consider them as proleptic forms of constructed mastery, anticipations of the strategies that the author, his family, and his disciples would employ to consolidate and enhance the cultural capital of "Henry James."

James's yearning to frustrate future biographers is well known, especially since the most preeminent of them (Leon Edel) took pains to remind his readers at every turn how he had triumphed over his subject's nefarious intention to defy personal inquiry. Adamantly expressing the wish "to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter," James also ruefully acknowledged that his desire was "but so imperfectly possible": death, when it came, would work to defeat his tactics of evasion, and postmortem exploiters inevitably would multiply. Jealous of all others, Edel became the postmortem exploiter par excellence, driven by an obsessive zeal that would have been the envy of any of the Master's fictional prototypes: those frequently foiled publishing parasites who seek to fatten their careers on the literary remains that less fastidious authors have left behind them. James certainly knew that the fabulous conventions he employed to safeguard his fictional authors from prying interlopers—the recriminating scruples that hamper Peter Baron in "Sir Dominick Ferrand" (1892) or the ghostly visitations that discourage George Withermore in "The Real Right Thing" (1899)—would hardly meet the necessities of his own case. "I have long thought of launching," he told his nephew Harry, "a curse not less explicit than Shakespeare's own on any such as try to move my bones." Provoked by this relative's query about the future disposition of his literary estate, James instantly made up his mind "to advert to the matter in my will—that is to declare my utter and absolute abhorrence of any attempted biography or the giving to the world by 'the family,' or by any person for whom my disapproval has any sanctity, of any part or parts of my private correspondence." Such aggressive averments notwithstanding, James made no mention of these restrictions in the codicil that was appended to his will in late August 1915, just six months prior to his death. In fact, that document gives the merest nod to "manuscript or type-copied matter and letters," which were lumped with all his other copyrights and intellectual property in a bequest to his sister-in-law, Alice Howe Gibbens James. It was she who moved his bones—or at least his ashes—from wartime London to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for burial in the family plot overlooking Soldiers Field. And it was she and her immediate descendants who gave to the world a substantial part of his private correspondence by allowing Percy Lubbock to publish a generous two-volume selection of The Letters of Henry James in 1920.

Though he never managed fully to effect an interdiction comparable to Shakespeare's, James already had taken precautions inspired by a like-minded scorn. Throughout his career, whenever "great changes & marked dates & new eras [&] closed chapters" were registered, the novelist unapologetically "committed to the flames a good many documents," wanting not merely to clean house but also to impede any prospect for subsequent inquiry. Immortalized in the ritual burning of eponymous love letters in "The Aspern Papers" (1888), James's tactics of secrecy had become a confirmed law—a law, he told an old friend, "that I have made tolerably absolute these last years as I myself grow older and think more of my latter end: the law of not leaving personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents, or even of my executors!" Such confirmed habits of privacy only were exacerbated by symptoms of declining health. At particular moments of medical crisis, plumes of smoke would rise from his chimney or waft from the cottage corner of the garden at Lamb House, where the caretaker...