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Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2010) The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 34 Number 1 Spring 2010 Special Issue Wallace Stevens and Henry James Guest Editor: Glen MacLeod Contents Wallace Stevens and Henry James: The New York Connection —Glen MacLeod 3 Reading the Alien in American Scenes: Henry James and Wallace Stevens —Charles Berger 15 Always a Potent and an Impotent Romantic: Stylistic Enactments of Desire in Henry James’s The Ambassadors and Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” —Gert Buelens and Bart Eeckhout 37 Ambulatory Poetics in Wallace Stevens and Henry James —Eric Leuschner 64 Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and the Way to Look at Madame Merle —George Monteiro 77 Wallace Stevens and Henry James: Responses to a Questionnaire by Glen MacLeod —Joan Richardson 86 Notes Toward a Comparison of Henry James and Wallace Stevens —Eleanor Cook 95 “Convert, convert, convert”: A Note on the Shared Aesthetic Imperative of Henry James and Wallace Stevens —Ross Posnock 100 Poems 102 Reviews 110 Current Bibliography 116 Cover Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Park, Hartford, Conn., Spring 1922 Henry James, Lamb House, Rye, East Sussex (U.K.), c. 1900 The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORI A L BO A RD Milton J. Bates Jacqueline V. Brogan Robert Buttel Eleanor Cook Bart Eeckhout Alan Filreis George S. Lensing B. J. Leggett James Longenbach Glen MacLeod Marjorie Perloff Joan Richardson Melita Schaum Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society PRESIDENT ADVISORY BO A RD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Owen E. Brady Robert Buttel Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing Glen MacLeod EDITORI A L ASSIST A NT TECHNIC A L ASSIST A NT Maureen Kravec Jeff Rhoades Illustration Credits: Wallace Stevens; detail (reversed); by permission of the Huntington Library (WAS Box 67 [2:2]). Henry James; detail; by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Am 1094, box 2, #31). The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wal- lace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam, NY 13699. Phone: (315) 268-6410; Fax: (315) 268-3983; E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $30 for one year or $50 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $40 per year domestic and $50 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Also available are volumes 1–25 on text-searchable CD-ROM. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be submitted in duplicate and in Works Cited format. Word-processed manuscripts will not be returned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish an electronic file of the article as well as photocopies of all secondary quotations. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, Hu- manities International Complete, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature), MHRA Annual Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 2010 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Wallace Stevens and Henry James: The New York Connection GLEN MACLEOD N January OF 1909, when he was living in New York City, Wallace Stevens bought a copy of Henry James’s novel Washington Square (1880). IAs he was about to start reading it, he wrote to his fiancée Elsie: I think I’ll send it to you if it is good. It was written almost thirty years ago, when Henry James was still H. J. Jr. and had tales to tell. (L 121) He probably hoped that Washington Square’s New York setting might help her develop an interest in living in the City once they married. But three days later he had changed his mind: The “Washington Square” was not specially good: altogether an exhibition of merely conflicting characters. It is such an old story that the neighborhood was once suburban but that with the growth of the City has come to be very much “down- town”—the very last place, in fact, in which people live, all below it being exclusively business, except for the tenement intermissions.—Yet it was balm to me to read and to read quickly. (L 122) Most readers, I think, have taken these passages to mean that Stevens had little interest in Henry James. In describing the novel as primarily a dull treatment of how the population of New York spread progressively Northward during the nineteenth century, Stevens seems to have missed the entire plot of the book, which he characterizes vaguely as “altogether an exhibition of merely conflicting characters.” But this apparent dislike of the book and distaste for James need to be understood in context. At the time he wrote these letters, Stevens’ engagement to Elsie had just caused a serious rift with his family. A few months before, in the fall of 1908, Stevens had fought with his father over it. Garrett Stevens prob- ably opposed the marriage because, as Peter Brazeau puts it, “he felt his son had misplaced his affection on a stenographer from across the tracks” THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 34.1 (SPRING 2010): 3–14. 3 © 2010 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. (257). The conflict between father and son was so bitter that they nev- er spoke again. This situation closely resembles the plot of Washington Square. In that novel, the young Catherine Sloper clashes with her father, Dr. Sloper, over the man she wishes to marry. Father and daughter be- ing equally stubborn, their sharp disagreement causes a permanent and painful breach between them. Catherine refuses to renounce her lover— although he turns out to be just as disreputable as her father believes— and Dr. Sloper never forgives her, disinheriting her in his will. Stevens tells Elsie that Washington Square is “not specially good,” there- fore, not because he thinks the book is bad, but because he is afraid that reading it would upset her. Its “conflicting characters” would be too close for comfort.1 In a similar way, he steered her away from the gloomier and more pessimistic novels of Thomas Hardy: If you should come to regard [Thomas Hardy] as not as inter- esting as he might be, read his “Under the Greenwood Tree” before you give him the sack. It is pleasantness itself. (L 85) Stevens had already brought enough “conflicting characters” into Elsie’s life; in the realm of fiction, at least, he wanted to be able to assure her of a happy ending. As for himself, his concluding remarks about Washington Square seem to indicate that he actually enjoyed reading the book: “it was balm to me to read and to read quickly.” And yet why, if it was “balm . to read,” does he add that phrase, “and to read quickly”? We might take this to mean that, although he enjoyed any chance to spend time reading, he simply skimmed James’s book because he found it so slight. Such an attitude hardly bespeaks an interest in Henry James. But there is another way of reading this phrase. If there was one thing every literate person knew about Henry James in the early twentieth cen- tury, it was that his latest novels were not quick to read. The Golden Bowl, for instance, was published in the United States in 1904 and got a lot of coverage because James himself was revisiting his native country at the time. Responses were decidedly mixed. Some readers praised James’s high artistic achievement, but many more complained that the book was too hard to understand. A reviewer for The New York Times criticized James as “prolix,” “inconsequent,” “incoherent,” and “indecisive.”2 One popular novelist commented that “He thinks in and out and all around an idea, till you get dizzy and a headache by following it. .”3 Another reader wished that we might have back the “Henry James, Jr.” who knew how to write proper books.4 This situation explains Stevens’ original comment to Elsie that Washington Square “was written almost thirty years go when Henry James was still H. J. Jr. and had tales to tell.” It was commonplace in the early twentieth century to remark that the later James, however eminent, was no longer a straightforward teller of tales. His own brother, William 4 THE wallace STEVENS JOURNAL James, complained after reading The Wings of the Dove in 1902: “You’ve re- versed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid)” (qtd. in Gard 37). Any well-educated person knew that reading the later James required a large investment of time and concentration. An essay on James’s late style in the New Republic in 1916—a journal Stevens was reading regularly at the time—began as follows: When you speak admiringly of Henry James, the later Henry James, it is the platitude among a large class to say: “Life is too short. I loved the early Henry James. ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ was wonderful, and I could follow him to ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ but never again.”5 It is understandable that the harried young Stevens, working hard to es- tablish himself in some kind of career, would be grateful to be able “to read and to read quickly” an early work by Henry James, Jr. Whatever Stevens thought of James’s late style, his comment to Elsie in 1909 shows that he was aware of the shape of James’s long career.
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