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HENRY JAMES: AUGUST 1914

by Toby Litt

[This lecture was originally given as

the Henry James Lecture in Rye, 16th September 2006,

in the Methodist Church]

In this lecture, I would like to take a look at Henry James as

he was during one pivotal month – pivotal, of course, not just for

him, but for the whole world.

It was a month that brought about a greater change in James

than perhaps any other in his life. The only comparable moment,

I would say, was back in 1861 when, whilst helping to extinguish

a stable-fire in Newport, he sustained what he referred to as ‘an

obscure hurt’.

There are several links between these two dates – not least,

that his injury (probably a back injury) prevented his enlisting to

take active part in the American Civil War, and that it was

through the lens of the Civil War that James viewed the Great

War. It is not too much to say that he, in fact, viewed the Great

War as a Civil War.

The most important change in James, one which I would like

to approach step-by-step, is that he became directly and self-

consciously involved in public events – and, perhaps more

unexpectedly, he became what amounts to an engagé writer,

attempting to intervene in these events. The question which

follows this is perhaps even more intersting: To what extent was

James all along an engaged writer, albeit an engaged writer in

heavy disguise?

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But that is to jump ahead.

Throughout August 1914, Henry James was resident in Lamb

House, here in Rye. He had two house guests, Peggy and Aleck,

his niece and nephew – bringing what he called ‘the very great &

blest mitigation of my solitude’.

Clearly, there’s no need for me to describe for you in any

great detail James’s house or its surroundings. No doubt you will

know them far better than I. But it might be helpful, to begin

with, if I were to give a brief summary of exactly where James

found himself at this pivotal time.

‘Mitigated solitude’ might not be a bad encapsulation of

James’s state.

1913, the year of James’s seventieth birthday, had seen the

completion and exhibition of an official portrait by John Singer

Sargent – and an accompanying raft of tributes from friends and

admirers. But if 1913 had been a time of celebrated

achievements, 1914 had early on shown itself as likely to be more

fraught.

In May 1914, that same official portrait, on display at the

Royal Academy, had been attacked by someone Leon Edel,

James’s best biographer, describes as a ‘peaceable-looking lady…

wielding a meat-cleaver.’ Before being restrained, she managed

to ‘cut three ugly gashes in it, through the left side of the head,

the right side of the mouth and below the right shoulder.’

James’s biographer writes, ‘At the [police] station, the

woman, who gave her name as Mrs. Mary Wood, said she had

never heard of Henry James. A militant suffragette, she had read

that the Sargent picture was valued at £700. A woman painter,

she said, would not have received anywhere near such a sum. She

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had wished “to show the public that they have no security for

their property, nor for their art treasures, until women are given

their political freedom”.’

In the aftermath, James received a vast amount of

commiseratory correspondence. But he could not help but feel

himself to be under attack.

(As my girlfriend pointed out, however, it would be

interesting to know whether James was really more upset about

the damage to the portrait or the fact that Mrs Mary Wood hadn’t

heard of him.)

To look now at James’s more general situation: he had

expected that publication of the New York Edition of his works –

which he worked on from 1905 to 1909 – would provide financial

security for him. This had not happened, sales being

disappointing, and by 1914 income from this source had

dwindled away almost to nothing. He was far from poor, but he

was far from rich. Extra financial assistance was provided to

James, without his knowledge, by Edith Wharton, who in 1912

had asked for royalties from her books to be diverted to James –

in the form of an unusually large advance for his next novel.

Perhaps the best representation of James’s overall state of

mind is the famous letter he wrote to Henry Adams on March 21st

1914. It is worth quoting almost in full, as one of James’s greatest

valedictions forbidding despair.

‘I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, & I know not

how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its

unmitigated blackness. Of course we are lone survivors, of course

the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss – if the

abyss has any bottom; of course too there’s no use talking unless

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one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed

divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still

want to – or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me

therefore so behaving - & apparently capable of continuing to do

so. I still find my consciousness interesting – under cultivation

of the interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry – that’s what I

hoped to make you do; to cultivate yours for all that it has in

common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don’t know

that I can tell you, but I don’t challenge or quarrel with it – I

encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life

(or of what you deny to be such), have reactions – as many as

possible - & the book I sent you [this was Notes of a Son and

Brother] is a proof of them. It’s, I suppose, because I am that

queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible

sensibility. Hence the reactions – appearances, memories, many

things go on playing upon it with consequences that I note &

“enjoy” (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing - & I do. I believe I

shall do yet again – it is still an act of life…’ [Henry James: A Life

in Letters, pg533.]

James’ household in Rye remained much the same as it had

been for years. It was comparatively modest, consisting of an

indoor staff of four: manservant, cook, parlour-maid and house-

maid, plus a gardener. The manservant, Burgess Noakes, had

been working for James since 1901. He once described James’

daily routine:

‘I used to call him every morning regular at eight o’clock.

After that he’d have his breakfast. He’d come down about nine

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o’clock, and about ten o’clock would start and work with his

secretary. He was very regular in his habits, and he’d work on till

about one o’clock; in the summer, of course, he’d work in the

Garden Room. He’d have his lunch, and after lunch, he’d take his

walk. He was a stout, heavily built man, but he was very active,

right to the last, too. Off he’d go with his little dog, and many a

time I watched him out of the door.’

[Henry James at Home, pg 136]

James’s secretary in 1914, Theodora Bosanquet, had begun

taking his dictations in 1907. She left a vivid description of what

went on when James was out of Burgess Noakes’ sight, writing.

‘On summer days Henry James liked better to work in the

large “garden room” which gave him a longer stretch for

perambulation and a window overlooking the cobbled street that

curved up the hill past his door. He liked to be able to relieve the

tension of a difficult sentence by a glance down the street; he

enjoyed hailing a passing friend of watching a motor-car pant up

the sharp little slope.’

(I’d like to point out, in passing, that this – as far as working

conditions go – is hardly the ‘Ivory Tower’. In fact, it is more like

being on permanent public display – in a gazebo. James’s

success was of a nature, though, that I doubt he ever attracted

anything like a crowd. His books tended to sell around one or

two thousand copies. But I think it is interesting that James

didn’t wish to be entirely hidden away whilst working – and that

he welcomed interruption. In this, as in many other things, the

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popular image of James is mistaken. James’s working method of

dictation was highly performative; ever since the return to

fiction, after the failure of his play Guy Domville, James had

been concerned with developing his ‘scenic method’ of

construction; and it seems almost as if he wished to be up on

stage whilst writing. Only now, with the development of voice-

recognition software, are we coming to a point where writers

might choose to dictate rather than handwrite or type their

words. James, in this, may have been well ahead of his time.)

As a writer, James was slowing down – at least where fiction

was concerned. He had not completed a short story since ‘A

Round of Visits’ in 1910. These last tales were collected together

that same year as The Finer Grain. His most recent novel, The

Outcry, had been published in 1911. But that had been an

adaptation of an unproduced play rather than an original story.

Perhaps the main reason I was asked to give this lecture,

apart from having the reputation of a James devotee, was that I

edited The Outcry for Penguin classics in 2001. One of the

difficulties I found in writing an introduction to the book –

which, amazingly, had been out of print since 1909 – was that

James himself almost always referred to it in very disparaging

terms. However, his attitude is laid out at its fullest in a letter to

Edith Wharton:

‘You speak at your ease, chère Madame, of the interminable

and formidable job of producing, à mon age [at my age] another

Golden Bowl - the most arduous and thankless task I ever set

myself. However, on all that il y aurait bien des choses a dire

[there are many things to be said]; and meanwhile, I blush to say,

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the Outcry is on its way to a fifth Edition (in these few weeks)

whereas it has taken the poor old G.B. [Golden Bowl] eight or

nine years to get even into a third. And I should have to go back

and live for two continuous years at Lamb House to write it

(living on dried herbs and cold water - for “staying power” -

meanwhile); and that would be very bad for me, would probably

indeed put an end to me altogether. My own sense is that I don’t

want, and oughtn’t to try, to attack ever again anything longer

(save for about seventy or eighty pages more) than The Outcry.

That is déjà assez difficile [still difficult enough] - the “artistic

economy” of that inferior little product being a much more

calculated and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your

sweet expression) crafty one than that of five G.B.s [Golden

Bowls].’ [Henry James Letters, ed. Edel, pg591-2, Nov 19th 1911]

This also gives a good idea of James’s attitude to the work he

still felt himself able to achieve.

By August 1914, however, James was midway through two

novels. One, The Sense of the Past, he had ‘laid aside a dozen

years before’, and would only take up again in the final months of

his life. The other, The Ivory Tower, had begun with a short note

on February the 10th, 1909. Work continued with an outline later

in 1909, and was the project upon which James was most

seriously engaged during the summer of 1914. In his notes, he

talks of it in similar terms to The Outcry – requiring, as it does,

‘the absolute exclusive economic existence and situation of every

sentence and every letter; but again what is that but the most

desirable of beauties in itself?’ I will speak more about The Ivory

Tower a little later on.

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Also existing as work-in-progress was The Middle Years, the

third part of James’s autobiography. The previous volumes, A

Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother had been

published, to wonderfully admiring reviews, in 1913 and 1914

respectively. Lyndall Gorden, in The Private Life of Henry

James, says that Notes of a Son and Brother received ‘an acclaim

in England such as he’d never had before’.

All of these works-in-progress were to remain unfinished at

James’s death, eighteen months later – dedicated attention on

them effectively ceasing the moment that the Great War began.

By August 1914, James was in better health than for several

years. The winter of 1912-13 had seen him lain up with two

concurrent illnesses. As he wrote to his sister-in-law Mrs William

James, ‘a horrible gastric and stomachic crisis grafted upon my

poor ravaged herpetic tract (herpetic being the right, the medical

name for what pertains to Shingles…).’ [Letters Henry James,

ed. Edel, pg647-8, 5th Jan 1913]

Yet even in his debilitated state, he had continued daily

dictation, when possible, of his autobiography. By August 1914,

James was able to work much as he had done before. But, as I

said at the beginning, this month marked a radical break in

James’s life.

I would like to illustrate this by reference to a couple of

things. The first is James’s bibliography.

In 1913 and 1914, apart from the two volumes of memoirs,

James published reviews of books about Balzac and George

Sand, and also his long essay, ‘The Younger Generation’.

In 1915 and 1916, by contrast, we find articles with titles such

as, ‘Famous Novelist Describes Deeds of U.S. Motor Corps’, ‘The

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Mind of England at War’, ‘Henry James Writes of Refugees in

England’ and ‘The Long Wards’, which was included in Edith

Wharton’s The Book of the Homeless.

Perhaps even more graphic an illustration than this is

James’s Appointment book. For July 1914 there are twenty-six

entries – among them, lunch with Hugh Walpole on the 3rd and,

most poignantly and pertinently, Rupert Brooke on the 10th.

(Almost exactly one year later, James was to write an elegiac

introduction Brooke’s Letters from America.) On the 13th, James

‘came down to Rye with Burgess [Noakes] by [the] 4.30’. The

following day, he noted, ‘Great heat. Blessed impression again of

Lamb House and of escape from the torrid, horrid town.’ Yet the

lunches and dinners continue with little abatement. On the 17th,

he wrote of ‘the comparative ease and freedom’ of his ‘better

condition’.

But in August, the mood is completely different. Of the 3rd

and 4th, James said, ‘Everything blackened over and for the time

being blighted by the hideous Public situation. This is (Monday)

the Aug[ust] Bank Holiday – but with horrible suspense and the

worst possibilities in the air.’

The next sentence to appear is not James’s own, but that of

his Notebooks’ editors, Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers:

‘There are no entries for the next three months.’

The events leading up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war are

almost too well known to bear repeating. But it might be worth

sketching them out now in skeletal form:

On June 28th, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated. On

the 28th of July, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

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August 1st, Germany declares war on Russia

August 3rd, Germany declares war on France

August 4th, Germany invades Belgium

Also on August 4th, Britian declares war on Germany

Also on August 4th, the United States declares its neutrality.

The early battles of August 1914 take place in Belgium – the

German army laying siege to Liège and Namur. On August 14th,

the assault begins upon Alsace-Lorraine. By the latter half of the

month, German forces are into Northern France, attempting to

reach Paris. They face opposition from the British Expeditionary

Force, notably at the Battle of Mons on August 23rd. For the most

part, the Allied army on the Western Front is in retreat.

The war, in other words, became a vast affair almost

immediately.

It’s not very often that a person is able to quote their own

grandmother as a historical witness, but in this case I might as

well take the opportunity.

In August 1914, my paternal grandmother, Muriel Furness,

was being schooled in a Dutch convent near Limbourg, close to

the Belgian border. In 2004, when she was 104 years-old, I

interviewed her about her memories of that time.

Of that summer, ninety years previous, she said, ‘I remember

there was a wonderful sunset, and people said, ‘That means war.’

We never heard much about it, you see, in that convent of mine.

Then suddenly all the German girls were asked to return home.

Reverend Mother thought there was something funny about this.

So, of course, the war did break out. The first bridge that was

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blown up over the River Meuse, where my convent was, nearly

blew me out of bed. Terrific noise. And that was the beginning of

the 1914 war.’

Her diary, which came to be published in the Blackpool

Gazette, and then extracted in The New York Post, continues the

story: ‘After this explosion, we heard repeated artillery duels, and

were very, very frightened. A German officer came to Visé. He

commenced to read a proclamation, but before he finished doing

so was shot dead. This the nuns told us. About 3 o’clock in the

afternoon, refugees came rushing into the convent from Visé

with the news that they had escaped from German cavalry, who

were attacking civilians and were firing on the houses…’

As the Blackpool Gazette noted, when it printed the extracts,

the diary ‘is perhaps as vivid as any of the accounts transmitted

by any of the war correspondents in the field, some of them the

most accomplished in the world’.

The change in James’s state of mind over this period is clear

from this jocular P.S. to Edmund Gosse on July 17th:

‘What an extraordinary & portentously multitudinous

moment! One can’t find sufficiently sesquipedalian designations

for it.’ (Sesquipedalian here meaning ‘of many syllables’.)

And this one of 6th August to Edith Wharton:

‘If I could only reach out more brilliantly – but I feel all but

unbearably overdarkened by this crash of our civilization. The

only gleam in the blackness, to me, is the action of the absolute

unanimity of this country.’

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It is in his letters that James gave his first reaction to the

outbreak of war. The full aria of his despair was shared with

novelist Rhoda Broughton four days later:

‘Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m

sick beyond cure to have lived to see it. You and I, the ornaments

of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our

belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow

and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along

was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara – yet

what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo

everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible

retroactive way – ’ [Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, Vol IV,

pg 713]

However, from a letter to Edith Wharton of August 19th, it is

clear that James at first intended to continue work on The Ivory

Tower as before, but soon found it impossible:

‘I manage myself to try to “work” – even if I had, after

experiment, to give up trying to make certain little fantouches

[spectres] and their private adventure tenir debout [stand on

their feet]. They are laid by on the shelf; but I have got hold of

something else, & I find the effort of concentration to some

extent an antidote.’ [Henry James and Edith Wharton; Letters

1900-1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers]

Just as an aside, the weather for August 1914 was

exceptionally fine. To one correspondent, James wrote, ‘The

country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and

loveliness of light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable

that just across the Channel, blue as paint today, the fields of

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France and Belgium are being, or are about to be, given up to

unthinkable massacre and misery.’

I’d like to return now to what James called ‘this crash of our

civilization’. I think this is important because, in letter after

letter, James referred specifically to ‘civilisation’ as being what

had suffered a crash or plunge. To Mrs Alfred Sutro, he even

called it ‘our murdered civilisation’.

The metaphor in his letter to Rhoda Broughton, of the tide

and the Niagara, is mixed – perhaps deliberately so (it runs: ‘The

tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its

grand Niagara – yet what a blessing we didn’t know it.’) Here, an

inflowing-outflowing sea turns into a river going over a waterfall;

something vast and but subservient to pattern becomes

something more neatly circumscribed, but leading to a

catastrophic drop. The element is the same, its nature has

changed.

In this letter, James seems to be subscribing to the

commonplace view of Progress with a capital P, of history as an

onwards struggle towards more and more total civilization –

civilization that would, incidentally, render European war

impossible. But James’s sense of things was far more complex

than this allows.

For him, I think it is fair to say, civilisation meant Europe

and Europe meant civilisation. Very early in James’s life, his

father brought the whole James family over and toured the

continent with them. Henry and his brother William were

educated by private tutors and in private academies, and it was

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this period which James had recently been revisiting in Notes of

a Son and Brother.

James’s later decision to make his life in Europe was

certainly in large part due to his wish to be where civilisation – as

he perceived it – was at its highest. This, as it turned out, would

be his central subject; and when his subject was gone, his writing

inevitably followed after.

America, for James, was something quite different. He had

been there in recent years, firstly in 1906, for the visit that

resulted in the travel book, American Notes, and secondly in

1910, following the death of his brother. James’s vision of

America, by this time, was one of blatant capitalistic vulgarity –

and it was partly this he was writing of in The Ivory Tower.

Leon Edel notes that, ‘What James intended to bring into

this novel was the “money-passion,” the spirit of “ferocious

acquisition”… it would have denounced, with all the delicacy and

subtlety of his style, the world he had see, at Biltmore, at Lenox,

in the great houses of New York, and at Newport… “You seem all

here so hideously rich,” says his hero.’

It could be said that James’s understanding of European

civilisation was partly in harmony with the dictionary definition

of the verb ‘to civilise’, i.e., as the Concise Oxford Dictionary has

it, ‘to bring out of barbarism, enlighten; refine and educate’.

Civilisation, therefore, would be the achievement of these aims.

James believed, along with many others, that peace had been

long-established in Europe, and war avoided, because civilized

men representing civilized nations had engaged sensibly in

diplomacy. But there is also a sense, in James’s view, that those

who shared the assumptions of a common European culture – or

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civilization – would have no reason to go to war with one

another. European civilization, in this sense, overarched and

crushed petty nationalisms. This is the point at which, as I

mentioned earlier, it becomes clear that James sees the Great

War as a Civil War. The wound of it was self-inflicted, there

being no essentially foreign or barbarous element – except that

within individual statesmen, who had proven themselves

atrociously uncivilised. To Henry James Junior, James wrote,

that the war as ‘(…is now clearly visible, had been brewing in the

councils of the two awful Kaisers from a good while back.) The

entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely

inevitable –never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short

days ago she was still multiplying herself over Europe, in the

magnificent energy and pertinacity of Edward Grey, for peace,

and nothing but peace, in any way in which he could by any effort

or any service help to preserve it; and has now only been beaten

by what one can only call the huge immorality, the deep

conspiracy for violence, for violence and wrong, of the Austrain

and the German Emperors.’ [Letters of Henry James, pg399]

It’s worth noting the emergence here, and in other of James’s

more frankly patriotic letters, of a rhetoric that, in retrospect, is

unmistakably Churchillian. (‘The entrance of this country into

the fray has been supremely inevitable –never doubt for an

instant of that.’)

James’s Europe, despite his years of travel, was a fairly

limited place – at least in his fiction. England, France and Italy

made up most of it. Spain and Portugal much less so. Greece,

mainly as a historical ideal. Russia, only through its books and

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their authors. Most notably, it did not stretch as far as the

Balkans.

But then there is the question of Germany. In terms of a

balanced portrait of the continent, James’s fiction leaves a very

large gap where Germany should be. There is no Berlin

equivalent to the Parisian plot of The American or the Roman

plot of Portrait of a Lady or the Venetian plot of The Wings of

the Dove.

It might be speculation to put this down to James’s feeling

that Germanic culture, particularly philosophical culture, was the

domain of his brother William.

One book has been written on this subject, by Evelyn A.

Hovanec. Called, simply enough, Henry James and Germany, it

catalogues the points at which James visited and wrote about the

country.

Hovanec’s conclusion is this: ‘It would be unfair to say that

James hated Germany, the German populus, and all things

German. More than unfair, it would be untrue. Actually, it was

not hate but more distaste and discomfort that James seemed to

feel in the presence of the German mind, art, and domestic life.

He often, though not always, seems to be oppressed with it or by

it.’

In fact, as early as 1872, after a brief summer tour, James

was being pretty direct in his dismissal. ‘To me this hasty and

most partial glimpse of Germany has been most satisfactory; it

has cleared from my mind the last mists of uncertainty and

assured me that I can never hope to become an unworthiest

adoptive grandchild of the fatherland. It is well to listen to the

voice of the spirit, to cease hair-splitting and treat one’s self to a

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good square antipathy – when it is so very sympathetic.’ [The

Letters of Henry James, I, pg 33]

As a generalisation, it might be said that always, to

understand modern Europe, one must examine Germano-French

political relations and Germano-Italian aesthetic ones.

These are where the faultlines of European civilization are to

be found – and, by indulging in his antipathy, James blinded

himself to the stresses that would eventually rip Europe apart.

James’s Europe was, to put it simply, slightly wishful and very

idealised. Not only did James fail to foresee the coming war,

there were few people less likely than him to have foreseen it.

What I’ve just examined is the more obvious, public

definition of civilization – the civilisation that James saw as

having been wrecked. But I think he had his own implicit,

consciously worked-towards definition, and this is manifested in

his later works.

To explain, I will have to go a few years back from August

1914, to 1901 and to James’s story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’.

Here we have what you might almost call a pacifism of

metaphor. The title suggests a nerve-shredding tale of tiger-

hunting in the barbarous colonies. Yet if you were to film the

story without putting much effort into adapting it, you would see

that nothing happens but that a pair of not extraordinary people,

occasionally, and over a long period of time, take tea together in

front of a fireplace in a parlour.

It isn’t hard to imagine the disappointment of certain readers

in finding that there isn’t a real beast and it isn’t lurking, bright-

eyed and bloodthirsty, in a real-fictional jungle. But there is a

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beast and there is a jungle, only they exist in the realm of

metaphor – they exist in an internalised, pacified form. The

jungle is not one of fuzzy trees and dangling vines, but is,

instead, a dangerous wilderness of a different sort – that of

loneliness, that of vicious society. And the beast, harder still to

define, is the avatar or emanation of this jungle – it is a moment

of recognition so forceful that it can stop a heart. And thus,

despite civilisation, there remains extremity, peril, savagery even

– these exist even when two people sit in a parlour taking tea.

They do not kill one another, at least not with weapons. James’s

works are largely devoid of outright murder, though characters

frequently could be said to assassinate one another socially. And

there is, notably, very little by way of physical violence. It has

been said that the high-point of action in Jane Austen’s novels is

Louisa Musgrove’s leap from Lyme Regis’ Cobb in Persuasion.

James is comparably peaceable – the climaxes of his plots

tending more and more to be where characters decisively

hesitate or refrain from action, rather than actually say or do

something.

However, in James’s novels and stories, there is incessant

wrestling for power and control, only it happens on the level of

comment and innuendo, words spoken and unspoken. There are

countless victims and, now and again, there are brave warriors

on the side of right. One of these, Graham (or Gray) Fielder, was

to have been the hero of The Ivory Tower.

He would have made his stand by rejecting the vicious

society in which he found himself, having returned from Europe

to America. He would passively have allowed himself to be

swindled out of his due inheritance because he would find this

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abdication the only moral course. The swindler, though that is to

put it a little too crudely, Horton Vint, is portrayed in James’s

existing notes for the novel as making this plea to Gray Fielder:

‘You mind in your extraordinary way, how this money was

accumulated and hanky-pankied, you suffer, and cultivate a

suffering, from the perpetrated wrong of which you feel it the

embodied evidence, and with which the possession of it is

thereby poisoned for you. But I don’t mind one little scrap – and

there is a great deal more to be said than you seem so much as

able to understand, or so much as able to want to, about the

whole question of how money comes to those who know how to

make it. Here you are then, if it’s so disagreeable to you… there

are ways of relieving you which, upon my honour, I should

perfectly undertake to work…’

Or in other words, ‘Show me the money.’

Perhaps one of the things that Gray Fielder doesn’t wish to

say about the getting of money is put to him, also in James’s

notes, by Rosanna Gaw – where she says that she herself has

‘come in for resources that should enable her to do immense

things, but that are so dishonoured and stained and blackened at

their very roots, that it seems to her that they carry their curse

with them, and that she asks herself what application to

“benevolence” as commonly understood, can purge them, can

make them anything but continuators, somehow or other, of the

wrongs in which they had their origin.’

There are two things I’d like to say of this. First, the

‘blackened…roots’ seem, to me, just as likely to be black roots –

and that the unmentioned here, as you would expect in polite

East Coast society, is the establishment of the American economy

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on the profits of slavery. Second, that the question asked by

Rosanna remains just as pertinent today, in reference to the G8

nations and the developing world: Can any action of charity be

benevolent if it depends ultimately upon previous violence?

This, I would say, is James’s ultimate vision of civilization:

that which is structurally against the ‘deep conspiracy for

violence’.

And, in working out the consequences of this vision, James

chose to write about the centres of existing civilisation. He leaves

Africa and the outside-civilisation, the real jungle and the true

barbarism, to other writers, to Rider Haggard, to Conrad, to

Stevenson; India, he leaves to Kipling; the future to Wells. He is

glad, in a way, that he doesn’t have to deal with it himself; isn’t at

all expected to.

In fact, few other major writers have been quite so keen to

delegate work to others. Most have some idea either of the

universality of their work (that though local to one area, it is

univerally applicable by transference) or the universality of their

competence (that they were quite capable of writing what

another has written, if only they could be bothered to, had time,

or saw the point).

James’s attitude is more, I would if I could but I can’t. Partly

this is flattery of the other writer, of Kipling or Wells, partly self-

knowledge, but largely it comes from a sense of literary empire:

Leave me the centre, he seems to say, you can divide up the

outposts among yourselves. In this guise, he appears as not only

the Master but also as the Chairman of the Board.

It is here that James’s comprehension falls short of being

global. He has a superfine sense of the interconnections of

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Europe (his Europe) and America. But as for the rest of the

world, South America, China, Australasia – they hardly exist.

It is a fascinating addendum to this, that in his deathbed

dictation James assumed the persona of Napoleon, the modern

imperialist par excellence. Perhaps James’s only alternative

would have been to become Queen Victoria. The European

resonance of that, though, would have been all the less.

I seem to have strayed a long way from backing up my

assertions with specific references. If James did believe

something such as I’ve described, then you might expect him to

be the equivalent of a verbal pacifist. And here is James’s

amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, writing about him personally:

‘He was himself most scrupulously careful not to exercise any

tyrannical power over other people. The only advice he ever

permitted himself to offer a friend was a recommendation “to let

your soul live”.’

And more explicitly, she writes, ‘His Utopia was an anarchy

where nobody would be responsible for any other human being

but only for his own civilized character.’

Which brings me back to one of my hidden starting points,

Ezra Pound’s essay of 1918, ‘A Brief Note’. In this Pound makes

the argument for James as – beneath it all – a political writer:

‘I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about Henry James’s

style. The subject has been discussed enough in all conscience,

along with the minor James. What I have not heard is any word

of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book

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against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing

oppression, the domination of modern life,…’

Pound’s portrait of James is that of an engagé writer – and

this, undeniably, is what James became in August 1914. To

return for a second to his bibliography. The works he published

in 1913 were literary aesthetic in focus – were essays on novels

and novelists; what he wrote after August 1914 had far more

direct aims. He wanted to move people, specifically Americans,

to action. Although an opponent of violence, he wanted to bring

America quickly into the war so as the sooner to end it.

I’d like to look more closely at just one of these engagé

writings. It is an article James was to write on November 25th,

1914. The title is ‘The American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance

Corps in France’.

In this piece, James appeals directly for money and

volunteers to continue the work being done – particularly in

bringing the injured and dying rapidly away from the front. If the

war cannot be stopped, then the sufferings of the participants

can at least be minimized.

There are several details of expression which at first appear

puzzling, if not comic.

‘I find it difficult to express to you the sense of practical

human pity, as well as the image of general helpful energy,

applied in innumerable chance ways, that we get from the report

of what the Corps has done, and holds itself in readiness to do,

thanks to the admirable spirit of devotion without stint, of really

passionate work, animating its individual members. These have

been found beneficently and inexhaustibly active, it is interesting

to be able to note, in proportion as they possess the general

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educated intelligence, the cultivated tradition of tact, and I may

perhaps be allowed to confess that, for myself, I find a positive

added beauty in the fact that the unpaid chauffeur, the wise

amateur driver and ready lifter, helper, healer, and, so far as may

be, consoler, is apt to be an University man and acquainted with

other pursuits.’

But, taken within the overall view of James’s vision of

civilization, this is exactly apposite. What use is what went

before? What is there that can prove it hasn’t entirely been

undone?

If Theodora Bosanquet described the negative qualities of

James’s ethic – non-violence, non-involvement – then James

himself later in this article comes out and states the positive

civilized qualities:

‘I have doubtless said enough, however, in illustration of the

interest attaching to all this service, a service in which not one of

the forces of social energy and devotion, not one of the true social

qualities, sympathy, ingenuity, tact and taste, fail to come into

play.’

You might ask, ‘What place have tact and taste on a

battlefield?’ But to continue to assert their value is to take up

quite a radical position.

In the still-dangerous ground behind the trenches, the

representatives of civilization were, of course, ‘university men’. If

they could prove themselves in such barbarous circumstances,

then – in a sense – they had also proved the worth of civilized

values.

As an argument, this is the obverse of that which states that

if a concentration camp guard can go about his job, and also take

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pleasure in the music of Beethoven, then civilized values cannot

be said to exist. Or, as Theodor Adorno put it, ‘writing poetry

after Auschwitz is barbaric’.

Pound describes, with a little characteristic exaggeration, the

period between August 1914 and the end of James’s life:

‘After a year of ceaseless labor, of letter writing, of argument,

of striving in every way to bring in America on the side of

civilization, he died of apoplexy. On the side of civilization –

civilization against barbarism, civilization, not Utopia, not a

country or countries where the right always prevails in six

weeks!’

Percy Lubbock, in The Letters of Henry James, gives a more

moderate description of James’s occupations. After the outbreak

of war, ‘he very soon found the peace of the country intolerable.

He came to London, to be within the current of events, and

remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. His days

were filled with many interest, chief of which was the

opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers – in hospital, at the

houses of friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met

them the sight irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and

understanding and admiration.’

James’s practicality is touchingly displayed in his letters to

his manservant, Burgess Noakes, who had enlisted, with his

master’s blessing. It is unexpected to hear James so direct and

domestically solicitous. ‘I shall pack off to you some more Food

and Chocolate as soon as I can get to the Stores – I just that that

is more “comforting” to you, under your wear and tear, than

anything else. But remember that if there is any particular thing

you want and will mention it to us even by a simple post card you

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shall have it at once.’ [Henry James Letters, ed. Edel, pg 737,

Mar 22nd 1915]

The crucial moment came in July 1915, when James became

naturalized as a British citizen. Since August 1914, he had

tended, in his letters, to speak of ‘we’ – meaning the British

nation, and including himself as a loyal citizen.

Ezra Pound points out the wider meaning of this gesture.

‘America has not yet realised that never in history has one of her

great men abandoned his citizenship out of shame. It was the last

act – the last thing left. He had worked all his life for the nation

and for a year he had labored for the national honor. No other

American was of sufficient importance for his change of

allegiance to have constituted an international act…’ This may

seem hyperbolic but it is, I think, true.

The difficulty in making the case for James as, secretly, a

political, an engagé, writer before August 1914 is that, until this

crisis, he was wary of stating his positive values. Perhaps

because, when laid out in a line – ‘sympathy, ingenuity, tact and

taste’ – they seem to amount to almost nothing at all. But when

one thinks back over James’s novels, and the horrors which a

lack of these values perpetrate, then one begins to realise their

human importance. And like all truly civilised values, they only

appear radical when maintained consistently – like tact on a

battlefield – in the face of an extreme context; for example, the

value of free speech maintained amid the hysteria the War on

Terror.

The most positive of James’s values is also the most elusive.

To Henry Adams, he wrote of his art that ‘it is still an act of life…’

Theodora Bosanquet has him advising a friend ‘to let [his] soul

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live]. This is very close to Lambert Strether’s plea at the end of

The Ambassadors, ‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.’ Each

reader has to expand upon this for themselves. But, it seems to

me, that James’s ‘live’ is, in the midst of all his European

establishment, given a deeply American inflection. It is a ‘live’

part-shared with Emerson and Walt Whitman.

To ‘live’, for James, is to vividly express the values of

civilisation, to oppose – in one’s everyday relations – the ‘deep

conspiracy for violence’; it is to be generously.

[And as we’re in a Methodist Chapel, I might as well

conclude by saying it is very close to Jesus’ commandment in

Matthew 22:35, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’]

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