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The Sound of James. the Aural Dimension in Henry James's Work

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The Sound of James. the Aural Dimension in Henry James's Work Henry James: “In the Minor Key” * REBEKAH SCOTT University of Nottingham In the spring of 1909 Henry James invited his feminist friend Violet Hunt to “think of [him] as henceforth in the pleasing & unaggressive minor key,” having just announced to her: “my pitch of life is lowered—which on the whole, at my advanced age, is an excellent thing” (qtd. in Secor 24-25).1 What James meant to convey by this musical term “the minor key” (or indeed “the lower pitch”), beyond a humorous sense of chivalry2 or else his exhaustion after a series of illnesses following the monumental task of preparing the New York Edition, is worth pursuing in the context of James’s * I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Jamesian colleagues Sarah Wadsworth and Larry Gray, whose attentiveness and insight helped me to extend the range and sharpen the focus of this essay. I also wish to thank my sister-in-law Anna Dougherty and my husband Alex Dougherty for their penetrating commentaries on earlier drafts. 1 James was almost 66 years old when he wrote this letter to Hunt, who herself was 46. 2 What I mean by this is his “unaggressive” to her generally more aggressive stance in life. The year before, in 1908, the not-so-shrinking Violet had helped to form the Women Writers’ Suffrage League; Hunt’s dalliance with (some would say “dominance” of) various men of James’s acquaintance (Wells, Ford Madox Hueffer) may have been known to him. See Hardwick’s Life of Violet Hunt (1990) for further details. 18 R. SCOTT auditory imagination. In its entry for the figurative sense of the musical term “minor” (defined as “the sombre, plaintive, or subdued effect associated with minor chords and keys”) the Oxford English Dictionary reaches for James’s Watch and Ward (1871; 1878) to furnish its literary example: the climactic scene in which Roger Lawrence proposes to his ward Nora (whose “ear was still closed,” we are told, “to his uttermost meaning”). Here one finds Roger, as quoted by the OED, “pleading for very tenderness, in this pitiful minor key.”3 Over the course of his career, James’s notations of (and in) “the minor key” went from sounding the plaintive note in relationships—Roger and his ward, say, or Madame de Mauves and her husband (“it was not a man’s fault if his wife’s love of life had pitched itself once for all in the minor key” [MMN 253]) —to subduing his own unwieldy materials into a more manageable, or more minimal, form. As his Prefaces attest, James would typically “strain the minor key … almost to breaking” (a result, in part, of his “own appointed and incurable deafness to the major key”) in evocations of heroines such as Julia Bride and Pandora Day (AN 264, 273).4 In this essay I follow James’s fascination with this suggestive term at both ends of his career, from the tale “Madame de Mauves” (1874; 1878) and the contemporaneous French literary criticism, to the late Prefaces, touristic pieces and letters, demonstrating what I think it means to write, and finally to exist, “in the minor key” for a typically exuberant writer such as James. While he seems, in these earlier pieces, to associate “the minor key” with negative qualities such as “pitiful” and “melancholy,” taking his cue from the emotional range attaching to this musical key, and in the later texts with more positive values such as “pleasing” and “tender,” James often drops the musical sense of “minor key” altogether in favour of another set of associations, involving either “minority” (as small-scale or miniaturising) or else “keys” themselves, in an idiosyncratic process of what could be termed metaphorical drift. It is equally difficult to pin down James’s orientation towards this ambiguous phrase: his early handling of it would suggest that he is initially dismissive of characters 3 “Minor, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford UP, June 2019, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/118931. The OED quotes from Ch. 8 of the single-volume first book edition (1878) of Watch and Ward (168). Alongside James’s “pitiful,” further dictionary examples under the subheading “minor-key” include the nouns “pathos” and “sentiment” and the adjectives “pitiful” and “sad.” 4 From the 1909 Prefaces to vol. 17 and 18 of the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, in which James treats “Julia Bride” and “Pandora,” respectively. HENRY JAMES: “IN THE MINOR KEY” 19 who operate “in the minor key”; however, reading his literary criticism of the same period alongside these remarks about his minor characters raises the possibility that the term is in fact laudatory (in a poet such as Gautier, for example), expressive of subtlety, complexity, and nuance. By the end of his career, James can be shown to take up “the minor key” as authentic to his own lived experience as someone physically beleaguered and depleted but at the height of his creative powers, and as someone poised at a fulcrum in time: occupying precisely the point where, as a cultural commentator and participant, he could look both forwards to the glaring publicity and supreme confidence of modern modes of communication (“the major key”) and backwards to the delicacy and modesty of past forms of expression (“the minor key”). “A word of manifold signification”: so begins the entry for “key” in Grove’s original edition of A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1879-1883), which now bears his name.5 Other popular dictionaries of James’s day show that “the minor key” was similarly manifold, as in this entry from Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1865): “that key, or arrangement of tones and semitones, which is chiefly used for solemn and mournful subjects” (841). The modern-day Merriam-Webster is even more discriminating on this topic, splitting the head sense of the term “minor-key” into its technical sense (“a musical key or tonality in the minor mode”) and its figurative sense (“a mood of melancholy or pathos”). Such definitions take much of their suggestive force from the modifier “minor,” which is to say “the lesser” of two things: that which is, comparatively speaking, on “a small or limited scale,” or else executed in “a restrained manner.”6 This may partly explain why melancholy, modesty and restraint have come to be associated with musical works composed in “the minor key.” “There is a very common opinion,” Grove’s Dictionary continues in its entry for “key,” “that the tone and effect of different keys is characteristic…” (52; my emphasis). Despite the reluctance of the author of 5 “Key.” A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 2, 51. James owned two English language dictionaries, one British and one American: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1866-70) in 4 vols. and Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1893-95) in 2 vols. Neither has an entry for “the minor key.” See Leon Edel and Adeline R. Tintner, “The Library ofHenry James, From Inventory, Catalogue, and Library Lists” (1982). 6 “Minor key, n.” Merriam-Webster Online, Merriam-Webster, Inc., June 2019, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minor%20key. 20 R. SCOTT this entry to commit to such an “opinion” himself, it seems right to suggest that the sound of, and impression produced by, music written in the minor key is distinctive: Bach’s Cello Suite no. 2 in D Minor (BWV 1008); Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Minor (D784); Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor (Op. 16); Albinoni’s (technically Remo Giazotto’s) Adagio in G Minor; the opening strains (in C# minor) of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Each of these compositions is characteristically plaintive or melancholy, but to group them together in the category of works “in the minor key” would reduce them, since it would not allow for their complexity and variety, their many small departures from the minor key, nor would it allow for their distinctiveness from each other. Were this argument to be transposed to the field of literary composition, would the same objections be raised? This provokes further questions: how would a piece of fiction (or an essay, or a letter) written in “the minor key” strike the inner ear? Would its key signature, as it were, be as immediately communicable? The vocal instrument The nascent field of “auditory” Henry James Studies has produced at least two critics who consider James’s musical rhetoric: Daniel Hannah, in his account of James’s unembarrassed admission (to composer Georg Henschel) to “a certain lack of musicality” which lends “the rhetoric of music in his works its peculiar charge” (130); and Christopher Voigt, whose work on intonation in James takes some account (via Victorian classicist E.M. Cope’s commentaries on Aristotle) of the rhetorical concept of “tonality” (10). Of course, “tone,” as many others have pointed out, is one of James’s key terms, and with its applications in music and painting it has an important place in James’s conception of writing as continuous with these other artforms.7 Unlike “tone”, however, “key” has gone largely unremarked, despite its implications for the question of our sense of Jamesian musicality versus, say, his unmusicality, his tone-deafness. One of the first instances of the phrase “the minor key” in James’s writing occurs in his 1873 essay “Théophile Gautier,” revised and collected 7 In addition to the work of Daniel Hannah and Christopher Voigt, see the work of Sarah Campbell: in particular, her PhD dissertation “The Turn of the Ear: Reading for Speech in Henry James” (2008) and her essay “The Man Who Talked Like a Book, Wrote Like He Spoke” (2009).
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