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Signs and signatures HENRY JAMES, the great American novelist who finally settled in England, was even in his life-time considered a genius. His complex techniques and the use of constitutive metaphors to echo the themes of his novels and tales left even his admirers baffled. But even then, he remained largely unread by the American and British readers and critics. In fact, he vanished into obscurity soon after his death till his revival in the United States in the early 1940s. And once the top critics and involved readers brought him back, there was a flood of books on James, and the Jamesiana expanded year after year to become a fabulist’s paradise. When James published his first novel, Roderick Hadson (1875), he was fully posted with the traditional English novel. Among others were Dickens, and Theckeray, his earlier contemporaries who wrote novels according to a set formula. Of course, Dickens’ later novels such as Bleak House and Hard Times revealed profound changes in his outlook, and provided insights into the Victorian ethos and the Victorian Establishment. James noticed all these departures, and understood how the English novel had started taking a new turn. Only Joseph Conrad and Ford Meclox Ford really understood James’ revolutionary new techniques, and exchanged long letters with him. While in American, earlier novelists like Cooper and Hawthrone, were really romancers, not novelists, as such. James, then, changed the literary scene, and some later American novelist began to echo his techniques. Here too novelists like Edith, Wharton, Howells became his admirers. For, he had changed the very character of the American novel also. Shakespearian in reach and insight, in expression and ambience, James’ novels and symbolic tales with multiple meanings, were recognised as masterpieces which with all one’s labour remained mysterious, hard to decipher. James was, in short, a period wine like proust and yielded his full flavour in measured and protracted sips. James’ criticism has loosely divided his "imperium of letters" into — the romantic (Roderick Hudson, The American, Daisy Miller etc.), the realistic or the naturalistic. (The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse) and the existential or the mataphysical The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl. The great themes of James’ fiction include some of the world’s most teasing novels, nouvelles and tales such as What Maisie knew, The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount. He explores deeply the drama of disturbed consciences through the exertion of the human spirit, affirming the holiness of experience. It is for this reason that Conrad called James "a historian of fine consciences". No account of James is meaningful without a view of his complex technique, modes of narration and style. His "search for form" is, at bottom, and ontological quest. As for his prose style, with its grand rolling periods, multiplying metaphors, obsessive images, interlocking phrases, involved parentheses and the like, it has more than anything else, exasperated the common James reader. The ambassadorial prose with its high tone is really a question of style and stance in life. On his tryst with
"the Great thing", as he termed death in 1916, he dictates two
letters as though he were Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s something that
needs a Freudian analysis. However, the image that finally stays in one’s
memory is the one captured in Seargent’s classical portrait of the
novelist presented to him on his 70th birthday along with "a golden
bowl" by his admirers. Now preserved in the National Portrait
Gallery, London, it reveals the painters impression of James’ genius.
While the "Roman" face suggests at once a packed power and an
egg-shell delicacy, the penetrating eyes, slightly clouded by a
masterful dream, seem to be piercing the void behind. |
