Notes Places and dates of publication are those of the editions used. Introduction 1. First, Mrs Monarch adjusts Miss Churm's hairdo to look more stylish; then she and her husband start on the housework which is Oreste's regular job. Both actions are done with a grace and spontaneity which accords with Henry James Sr's idea of the 'aesthetic man or Artist': 'I mean the man of whatsoever function, who in fulfilling it obeys his own inspiration or taste, uncontrolled either by his physical necessi­ ties or social obligations ... Beauty reveals herself to him only as he obeys his spontaneous taste or attraction' (Moralism and Christianity, 1850, quoted in Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The place of style in American literature, London, 1967, p. 23). 2. 'Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life': let­ ter from James to the Deerfield summer school (HF 46; HJL iii. 257); 'the affair of the painter is not the immediate, it is the reflected field of life' (Preface to The Princess Casamassima, AN 65); see also Preface to The Wings of the Dove, AN 306. 3. That James could be, like Major Monarch, 'anecdotically unconscious' of his surroundings is well attested. See e.g. the reminiscences of Stephen Spender, Edward Marsh, A. G. Bradley and F. M. Hueffer in The Legend of the Master, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith (Oxford and New York, 1985), pp. 67-70. 4. e.g. S. Gorley Putt calls 'The Figure in the Carpet' 'almost auto-erotic' (The Fiction of Henry James: A reader's guide, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 205) -an aberration in a critic who usually has a clear sense of what James is about and, clearer still, of what he is not about. 5. Is what the narrator really wants Gwendolen herself? What does she marry for?, etc. See Terence Cave, Recognitions: A study in poetics (Oxford, 1988), pp. 264-9. 6. The plot of 'The Figure in the Carpet' (marry the girl and get the goods) recognisably grows out of 'The Aspem Papers' (1888), in which we are also aware of suppressed elements of sex and violence. But unlike in 'The Aspem Papers', in 'The Figure in the Carpet' the idea of a hidden treasure- the essence of the story- arises virtually accidentally, like a chance mutation. Vereker's almost incidental refer­ ence to a 'little trick' (9.282) burgeons and is elaborated with startling speed, becoming finally 'all gold and gems' (9.300). 7. 'The Figure in the Carpet' deliberately, I am sure, and perhaps counter-productively, gears anxieties about the idea of the 'story' to overdrive: the more excited we are by the promise of a grand design, the more likely we are to be panicked into missing the story alto- 228 Notes 229 gether. This is effectively the theme of James's 'The Beast in the Jungle' (1903). 8. Yvor Winters, 'Maule's Curse', in In Defense of Reason (London, 1960), p. 306. The broad discussion of James that follows it in itself belies Winters's premise. 9. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago, 1976), p. 14; cf. Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1991), p. xi. 10. Introduction to The Golden Bowl, The World's Classics (Oxford, 1983), pp. i-xxxi. 1. Washington Square 1. Even as he completed it and saw it serialised, Washington Square was diminished in James's mind by the excitement of producing a 'larger', 'better' novel, The Portrait of a Lady (see HJL ii. 265, 277, 308, 314-15). It is not clear nonetheless why he left the former out of the New York Edition, a venture undertaken mainly to make money, incorporating most of his fiction, revised and with specially written Prefaces ('I have tried to read over Washington Square and I can't, and I fear it must go!' - HJL iv.37). It may be that, given the close fit between his compact subject and perfected early style of treatment, James could get no pur­ chase on this novel, find no loose ends to play around with. 2. A remarkable parallel to the refuge Catherine finds in silence is reflected in the diary of the more articulate Alice James, who wrote of her young womanhood: 'I had to peg away pretty hard between 12 and 24, "killing myself" as some one calls it- absorbing into the bone that the better part is to clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters and possess one's soul in silence' (The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel, London, 1965, entry of Feb. 1892, p. 95). On Alice's rather different circumstances (her father, who never had a chance to stop her marrying, told her he wouldn't stop her killing herself), see Jean Strouse, Alice James: A biography (London, 1981). James first read his sister's diary in 1894, after her (natural) death. 2. The Portrait of a Lady 1. See Graham Greene, Introduction to The Portrait of a Lady, The World's Classics (Oxford, 1981), p. vii. 2. Unsigned review, Blackwood's Magazine, March 1882, repr. in Henry James: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (London, 1968), p. 101. 3. On the relation of The Portrait of a Lady to other nineteenth-century (American) fictions see William Veeder, Henry James: The lessons of the Master (Chicago and London, 1975); and Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the 'Woman Business' (Cambridge, 1989), especially Chs 3, 4 and 5. For The Portrait's thematic links with James's earlier fictions, see Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision (Oxford, 1990), pp. 197-205. 230 Notes 4. A tremendous 'ado' has been made about Minny's place in James's life and work, much of it presupposing too simple a relationship between the writer's source and his end-product; in other cases, that the relationship was unutterably devious. For a view that restores the balance, see Home, ]ames and Revision, pp. 184-91. 5. The Prefaces, essentially, show how what James called the 'wind­ blown germ' of the story (its starting-point, or donnee) is converted into a strenuous doing, a struggle to impose control, 'economy', 'neat­ ness' on the energy, the elasticity, the 'explosive principle', of the writ­ er's raw material. In the Prefaces, the protagonist tends to become a relatively pale shade of the character the reader remembers; the self­ effacing author, on the contrary, is vividly present, whether as the hunter stalking his subject, the writer suffering 'the cold editorial shoulder', or as 'the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world'. But the real hero of the Prefaces is 'the inveterate romance of the labour' (see AN 43, 172,278, 254-7, 314-15, 286, 326, 311, 288-9, 295, 228, 287). 6. Cf. James's response to criticism of the figure of Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians, which he claimed wasn't a portrait of a real person, but 'If I have made my old woman live it is my misfortune .. .': the irony of his tone indicating he appreciated the unintended compliment (HJL iii. 69). 7. On Isabel's Emersonian attitudes, see Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James: A study of the early novels (London, 1960), especially pp. 219-21 and 246; also Joel Porte, Introduction to New Essays on 'The Portrait of a Lady' (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 2-3 and pp. 27-8, n. 1, where there is a useful summary of critical comment. 8. Poirier, Comic Sense, pp. 187-9. 9. See William Veeder, 'The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master: self-realization in Henry James' (Henry James Review 12:1, Winter 1991), p. 29.lt is Isabel who, as I will suggest, encourages Osmond to see her as an art-object. Ralph's remarks, cited by Veeder, about this or that person 'doing' things to Isabel are jocular (and his mother's objection to them is a joke against Mrs Touchett, who is not responsive to other people's jokes). 10. For two extended and valuable discussions of Isabel's relation to tra­ ditional plots and to the role of the heroine, see Rachel Brownstein, 'The Portrait of a Lady' in Becoming a Heroine (Harmondsworth, 1984), especially pp. 239-50; and Millicent Bell, 'Isabel Archer and the Affronting of Plot' in Meaning in Henry ]ames, pp. 80-122. 11. Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge, 1967), p. 58. 12. In The Golden Bowl, Charlotte Stant comes to London for the marriage of her friend Maggie Verver. She goes shopping with Maggie's fiance, Prince Amerigo, for a wedding present. The antiquario (dealer) who tries to sell her the golden bowl, understanding what they say to each other in Italian, picks up that they have had and may still have a clandestine relationship. Charlotte intuits that 'he was pleased with us, he was struck, he had ideas about us ... we're beautiful, aren't we? -and he knows' (The Golden Bowl, p. 80). That is the hidden story that Notes 231 Maggie must discover. She does so when the antiquario later sells her the bowl, and tells her what he knows. 13. Poirier, Comic Sense, p. 224. 14. Poirier, Comic Sense, p. 243. 15. In letters written in the late 1870s and early 1880s to a bereaved and lonely friend, Grace Norton, James strikes precisely the note of Ralph's farewell and the novel's ending: the belief in endurance, the sense of life going on, the consolations that are not religious. On 28 July 1883 he wrote: 'Sorrow comes in great waves ..