| teen finished novels as well as trying to give some sense of his other writings, all in a book shorter than many of James's novellas, I necessarily have been forced to an extreme of compression. My hope is that there may be at least one compensating advantage, namely a conveyed sense of the unique imagination and intelligence of James as he explored, developed, defined, discovered and rediscovered, and expressed himself throughout all his work. It is that lifelong undertaking, adventure, and enterprisethe parabola of James's ever self-renewing creativitythat I have tried to describe as a single story. It need hardly be stressed what abbreviations, foreshortenings, and omissions such an undertaking entails. I can only hope that the story as I have told it will be of some interest to those who, perhaps, know one or two installments of it and would like to know some more. In James's The Bostonians, Olive Chancellor cries out at one point: "A voice, a human voice, is what we want." It is a perennial need and in that particular novel it is arguable that, truly speaking, there is finally no "human voice" to be heard. Except for the sympathizing, supervising voice of the author. Arguably, too, it is mainly our great writers who can remind us what a truly ''human voice" can be. And that is another way of saying what I have attempted to do in this book: to listen to James's "voice'' as it articulates itself throughout his life's work and to try to transcribe and define some of its rare "humanness" and irreplaceable, unmistakable, singularity. Such an attempt is doomed to abrupt inadequacy and simplifying approximations. But it seemed an attempt worth making given the intention of the series for which it was initially written. If our civilization still has any kind of a "human voice" then Henry James is indisputably part of it. |
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