Gazette of the Grolier Club

Volume 11, No. 7 February, 1947 GAZETTE OF THE GROLIER CLUB CONTENTS Address on Henry James by W. H. Auden. Address on James by Clifton Fadiman.—The Henry James Exhibition. The first Club exhibition of the autumn of 1946 was in honor of Henry James. It included first edi- tions, manuscripts and typescripts of his novels and other books, and also a number of portraits of the novelist and a collection of interesting letters. The exhibition was opened on the evening of October 34, 1946, with an address by the poet, Mr. W. H. Auden, who, born a British subject, is now a citizen of the United States. At the regular monthly meeting of the Club on November 21, Mr. Clifton Fadiman, 208 who has recently edited a volume of James’s short stories, made an address on James. Both meetings were attended by large and enthusiastic audiences. A check-list of the items in the exhibition follows the addresses. ADDRESS ON HENRY JAMES W. H. Auden Chairman Wheeler: Fellow members of The Gro- lier Club and guests; The matter of the nationality of writers is not, in my opinion, of great interest. Cer- tainly the issue has been exaggerated in regard to Henry James. Van Wyck Brooks maintains that Henry James would have been a greater man if he had remained in America, but it seems to me that he was a better writer than any of those who stayed home during that same period. Howells did stay in America, and Henry James wrote rings around him. It is touching to consider how James’s reputation entered into the vicissitudes of nations, and was affected by war and peace. As you know, he suffered the anguish of the damned during America’s long isolation and procrastination before entering the First World War. Apparently, as a personal gesture of solidarity with England, he became a British subject. 209 R. B. Cunninghame Graham told me a story, when I was a boy in England, about how Edmund Gosse was sent to confer the Order of Merit upon Henry James, upon his death-bed. According to this story, after the presentation had been made and the medal had been laid upon him, James turned to his nurse and whispered, “Put out the candle to hide my blushes.” Whether or not James’s romantic devotion to the British during their ordeal inclined them kindly toward him, he appears today a greater influence upon British writers than upon our own. Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Wolf, and E. M. Forster, among others, have all acknowledged the greatness of his example in the art of fiction; and this is certainly a more distinguished group than any of America’s Jamesians I can think of. Today, there is a James revival, almost a James boom. I think we may admit it was the English who proclaimed, promoted, and expounded him to us. Certainly, the interest of their country in reading him is great; and the recent preface to James’s American Scene by Mr. W. H. Auden is one of the finest essays ever written on the work of this man. Although The American Scene is one of James’s best books, it was never widely read. It is an account of his return after years of absence, and a re-exami- nation of his native land in his old age. 210 Wystan Auden, who has become an American citizen, writes of America with the freshest possible eye. It is the meeting of these two fine eyes gazing, as it were, across the Atlantic and meeting eye to eye, which gives this essay savor. I cannot promise you that he will speak of this book tonight, but I can recom- mend your reading his preface as a real treat. At dinner tonight, Mr. Auden told me a story which he said he was not going to include in his own re- marks, which I am going to tell you now, about James’s visit to America in 1906, when Miss Thomas of Bryn Mawr wrote and asked him to lecture there. Jamesreplied with a very, very long letter explaining that he couldn’t do it, that he only had prepared a lecture on Balzac. Finally, at the end of the letter, he said, “To be lucid, the honorarium offered is in- sufficient.” I am going to tell you another story about James, which I think is extremely touching, which was told one night here at The Grolier Club at a meeting of the Bowsers, of a letter which Edith Wharton sent to her publishers, who were also James’s publishers here, explaining that Mr. James was distressed because his books had been selling very badly in the United States, and authorizing the publishers to pay royalties received upon her. Miss Wharton’s books, to Mr. James, as if they were the royalties on his books. Mr. Auden is, if not the most famous, certainly the 211 second most famous poet writing in English today, and it is a great privilege to have him talk to us about the man whose work is the subject of the exhibition which is being opened here tonight. W. H. Auden: Gentlemen: What the economic and psychological climates of earlier ages were, whether they were more favorable to the artist than ours, we can only surmise, but it is certainly difficult for us to believe that any were less, for no artist today can observe either his colleagues or consult his own heart without admitting how multiple and how grave are the contemporary threats to his artistic integrity and his personal honor alike. In all such situations of trial and danger, pious exhortations are of little help. The aid and comfort we seek is to be found, if at all, in personal example; it is the knowledge that others before us have suc- cessfully endured similar tribulations and triumphed over similar temptations, which alone can convince us that it is possible for us, too, to endure and to triumph over our own. Among that luminous cloud of witnesses—how bless- edly great it is—who have, throughout their lives, kept unfaltering faith with their calling, few shine with more lucid felicity than he whose long life of sustained production we are gathered here this evening to honor. Much has been written, and written well, concern- 212 ing the aesthetic value of his work—many have placed his status in the literary hierarchy too low; a few, perhaps, have placed it too high—but to such criti- cism, even were I capable of making a significant contribution, I have no wish at this time to add. Rather, I shall confine myself to that aspect of Henry James over which there can be no controversy what- soever, namely, the consistent integrity displayed both in the work and in the man. It must be highly embarrassing—at least I hope it is—for living American novelists to be told, as they have recently been by distinguished foreigners, that they have produced the only significant literature between the two great wars. It is worth while asking, I think, why, just at this time, Europe should have de- veloped such an intense interest in them. I wonder if most of you, who have grown up in this country, realize just how odd to a new arrival like myself, American literature appears. Coming from Europe, my first, my strongest, my most abiding impression is that no body of literature, written at any time or in any place, is so uniformly depressing. It is a source of continual astonishment to me, that the nation which has the world-wide reputation of being the most optimistic, the most gregar- ious, and the freest on earth, should see itself through the eyes of its most sensitive members as a society of helpless victims, shady characters and displaced per- 213 sons, and I cannot escape the conclusion that the sudden popularity of American literature in Europe is a function of the latter’s disintegration. “I am helpless, I am shady, I am displaced," she says, “and here is a literature which describes my condition in a way that my own authors have not.” The opening words of the greatest American novel, Call me Ishmael, would serve as a motto for the heroes of so many. The criminal characters in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe have continued to pop- ulate the stories of his successors. But it is not of homelessness or of crime that I wish to speak—in these respects, I believe American literature to have given a uniquely accurate picture—- but of the denial of free will and moral responsibility, because this is a recent feature; it is not conspicuous in the great classical American writers, but has become so in the work of the last thirty years. It is only lately that in novel after novel one encounters heroes without honor or history; heroes who succumb so monotonously to temptation that they cannot truly be said to be tempted at all; heroes who, even if they are successful in a worldly sense, remain nevertheless but the passive recipients of good fortune; heroes whose sole moral virtue is a stoic endurance of pain and disaster. That a novelist should depict human life in this way is, in the strictest sense, comic, for since writing 214 a book, like playing baseball, is a totally unnecessary act, it could not be undertaken by a man who was lacking in free will. So that a novelist who describes man as the absolute victim of circumstance and in- capable of choice, contradicts his assertion by the mere fact that he has written a novel.

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