James Henry - Henry James at work: with excerpts from her diary and an account of her professional career

Copyright 2006 by Lyall H. Powers
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Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
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2009 2008 2007 2006 4 3 2 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bosanquet, Theodora.

Henry James at work / by Theodora Bosanquet; with excerpts from her diary and an account of her professional career; edited with notes and introductions by Lyall H. Powers,

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11571-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-472-11571-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. James, Henry, 1843 1916. I. Powers, Lyall H. II. Title.

PS2125.B6 2006

813.4dc22

[B]

2006020164

ISBN13 978-0-472-11571-6 (cloth)

ISBN13 978-0-472-02586-2 (electronic)

Theodora Bosanquet is hardly a household name familiar to most educated readers. For that matter, Henry James is now scarcely less unfamiliar; and the book she wrote about him, Henry James at Work, is recognized only by the learned few. But who among them has actually read it? Henry James (18431916) is, of course, arguably the most accomplished author to be produced in the United States of America, a novelist and short story writer, theoretic and practical critic, dramatist and travel writer. Henry James at Work is a slim volume published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press, London, in 1924. The author was a youthful woman of forty-four and, in spite of her rather arresting name, of solid English background

whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of Englands breathing English air

and properly educated in good English schools. She spent the last eight years of Henry Jamess life (called the Major Phase by old Jamesians) as his amanuensis, chiefly at Lamb House, down in Rye (East) Sussex, near the Channel Coast, and finally at 21 Carlyle Mansions on the north bank of the Thames in London.

Jamess need of secretarial assistance arose, early in 1897, with the onset of writers crampnow called carpal tunnel syndrome. He first employed a particularly dour Scot named Macalpine to take his dictation in shorthand and then provide a typed copy; but, finding him too expensive and singularly unresponsive to the material being dictated, James decided he wouldnt do. James was then composing The Turn of the Screw, in which his technique was intended to make his readers think the evil for themselves (and there was an abundance of opportunity for that); Macalpine evidently thought nothing at all. He was replaced at the turn of the century. Mary Weld from the Secretarial Bureau of Miss Mary Petherbridge, in London, moved into the vacancy and served until August 1904, when James left for the United States. Weld married soon after. James tried others, but none really satisfied until the advent of Theodora Bosanquet.

The need was urgent: James had embarked on the exhausting project of reviewing and revising his prose worksnovels and storiesfor a definitive edition to be published by Scribners in twenty-three volumes (December 1907July 1909, it grew to twenty-four), in evident emulation of Balzacs twenty-three-volume Comdie humaine. Into that demanding chore Miss Bosanquet was immediately launchedand gratefully. The experience would urge and foster her own nascent literary career. She soon began contributing items to the Saturday Westminster Gazette, coauthored a novel published before Jamess death (February 1916), and would complete, a few months later, the first of three major essays on Henry James, her own great Man. A year later she completed the second, and at the end of 1920, the third. These formed the basis for her memoir Henry James at Work.

The little book emphasized the spiritual quality of James as an author, his indebtedness to an inspirational force very like the poets muse; James called it my good angel mon bon ange, usually shortened to the familiar mon bon. Bosanquet makes a strong case in favor of the authors revised versions of his fictions as superior to the originals. She recognizes clearly the difficulty of Jamess late styleand sometimes vigorously castigates it (in the privacy of her personal diary)but defends it intelligently in Henry James at Work. The argument she persuasively presents is that the revisions regularly result in a more lifelike depiction of characters, settings, and actions, and therefore a more significant, more meaningful realism. With that, the revised version sharpens the important distinction between telling and showing, presentation and representation: lifelikeness depends on the quality of self-containment in fiction that is able to stand on its own, apparently free of the authors controlling hand. Jamess art (Theodora insists) enabled him to exhibit life dramatically and so to transmit the convincing look of lifethe look that conveys its meaning. A convincing and original critical perception. It is perhaps the originality of Theodora Bosanquets acute critical observations that will most urgently grasp readers of Henry James at Work.

__________

See Diary A, entry for 12 December 1907.

Bosanquet kept a single diary during her years with James and after. I have, however, arranged entries quoted according to topics into three groups here and called them Diary Aon Bosanquets professional relationship with James and his family and a few friends; Diary B on her literary taste and affiliations; and Diary Con her interest in psychic phenomena. The entries in each grouping are given in chronological order. I make a few references to entries not reproduced here. The diary manuscript is in the Houghton Library of Harvard University.

First, my thanks to Leon Edel, who originally proposed the new edition of Henry James at Work to me as a joint venture, rather like our edition of